Toshiyuki Sakuragi, Judith W. Fuller
What kinds of linguistic resources do people utilize when they try to translate
metaphors into a foreign language? This investigation of the perception of translatability
of body-part metaphors examined the effects of the following factors: the similarity
between the human body part and the metaphorical expression (e.g., “eye”
in “electric eye”) in appearance and function; the frequency of
the use of the metaphor in the native language; and the perceived distance between
the first language and the target language. The results of a survey of American
(n = 151) and Japanese (n = 116) university students showed that both Similarity
in Appearance and Similarity in Function correlated positively with Translatability,
while the effect of the former was stronger than the latter. Frequency correlated
positively with Translatability for the Americans, although the correlation
was weaker when the target language is “distant” (Japanese or Chinese)
than when the target language is “close” (Spanish). Among the Japanese,
Frequency did not correlate with translatability regardless of the target language.
[Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 32 (4): 381-395, July 2003]