Studying Scientific Metaphor in Translation

Mark Shuttleworth

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138934313
• eBook ISBN: 9781317390114
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Studying Scientific Metaphor in Translation presents a multilingual examination of the translation of metaphors. Mark Shuttleworth explores this facet of translation and develops a theoretically nuanced description of the procedures that translators have recourse to when translating metaphorical language. Drawing on a core corpus consisting of six Scientific American articles in the fields of neurobiology and biotechnology dating from 2004, along with their translations into Chinese, French, German, Italian, Polish and Russian, Shuttleworth provides a data-driven and theoretically informed picture of the processes that underpin metaphor translation. The book builds interdisciplinary bridges between translation scholars and metaphor researchers, proposes a new set of procedures for metaphor translation conceived within the context of descriptive translation studies, and puts forward a possible resolution to the debate on metaphor translatability.

1
Metaphor in Scientific Thought and Writing

Nonscientists tend to think that science works by deduction, […] but actually science works mainly by metaphor.

(Brian Arthur, quoted in Waldrop 1994:327)

[…] more metaphorical analyses should be conducted on actual scientific texts.

(Johnson-Sheehan 1998:177)

1.1 A Brief Introduction to Scientific Metaphor

It is by no means universally accepted that metaphor and science are inextricably linked. Many simply incorrectly believe that scientific discourse contains no metaphors—which in a sense is hardly surprising, given what we hear about the scientific method and science’s commitment to transparent objectivity. More significantly, perhaps, there are some voices, both past and present, that may have acknowledged the existence of metaphor in scientific discourse, but have nonetheless advocated a careful avoidance of all metaphorical modes of expression. These positions will be considered briefly before we go on to discuss less inimical views on the function of metaphor in communicating scientific ideas. Finally, and building on the striking claim of the first epigraph to this chapter that metaphor does not simply exist in scientific texts but is the main mechanism that enables science to work at all, this section will consider the strong likelihood that metaphor serves the vital function of channelling scientific thought in particular directions and thus exercises a definite influence on the ways in which progress occurs.

1.1.1 Attempts to Dispense with Metaphor

As Ortony observes, science is ‘supposed to be characterized by precision and the absence of ambiguity, and the language of science is assumed to be correspondingly precise and unambiguous—in short, literal’ (1993b:1). Scientific texts are thought by some to be characterised by the use of clear, precise, unambiguous language suitable for reflecting the unembellished truth of science, with metaphors occurring rarely, if at all.

This notion at least partly takes its roots from the seventeenth century. The rise of science during this period coincided with a great interest on the part of many philosophers in the concept of an ‘ideal’ or ‘perfect’ language, which was conceived as a tool for representing concepts in an idealised manner without the interference of an intervening natural language. It was in 1678 that Leibniz produced a long fragment in which he proposed his Lingua generalis, one of a number of projects that emerged in the seventeenth century whose aim was the creation of an artificial linguistic apparatus, designed on purely logical terms, that would make this kind of direct representation of reality possible (Eco 1995: 269–88).

While these experiments were abandoned as impracticable, the thought that they engendered, that a precise representation of the real world through the use of language but unobscured by ambiguity, fuzziness and figurative expression, has persisted in some quarters. The requirement for scientific texts to be characterised by the use of precise and unambiguous language was a distinctive quality of logical positivism, for example, which held that reality could only be exactly described through the medium of language ‘in a manner that was clear, unambiguous, and, in principle, testable’ (Ortony 1993b:1). The opposing view to this contends that the objective world ‘is not directly accessible but is constructed on the basis of the constraining influences of human knowledge and language’ (1993b:2). Ortony distinguishes two separate approaches to metaphor in line with these different ways of understanding how scientific language should function. The logical positivist view described earlier would be associated with an understanding of metaphor as something that is ‘deviant and parasitic upon normal usage’, and characteristic of rhetoric rather than science, while the contrary standpoint would be that metaphor was ‘an essential characteristic of the creativity of language’ (1993b:2; see also Leane 2007: 83–4). In each case, my research aligns itself with the latter view—a position that is in line with modern research into language, cognition and the ability of human beings to process information.

1.2 Metaphor in Science Today

The last few hundred years have seen an abundance of scientific metaphors—including the medieval concept of the Book of Nature, Darwin’s natural selection and the curved space of Einsteinian physics—and this is a tendency that continues until this day, in spite of the efforts of the logical positivists and others. This section provides an overview of metaphorical use in scientific discourse, focusing in particular on the question of how metaphorical language can perhaps influence the direction taken by scientific researchers and on how metaphor lies behind much scientific terminology.

1.2.1 Metaphor in Scientific Discourse

Interestingly, nowadays, the important role of figurative language and thinking in science is for the most part even acknowledged by writers from whom a highly cautious attitude to such matters would be expected:

Metaphors and analogies are essential to science and theory. Complex and more abstract areas of science rely particularly on metaphor and analogy to add clarity to knowledge and to communicate that knowledge. This is perfectly legitimate and indeed, to some extent, unavoidable. In science, analogies and metaphors may emerge as useful ways to think about, describe, and explain objective facts and evidence. For example, psychologists have employed the metaphor of visual selective attention being like a ‘spotlight’ illuminating the relevant information out there in the world from the surrounding darkness of all that we ignore. In many respects this has proved a very fruitful metaphor guiding thinking in this area of study. The problem here is not the use of analogies or metaphor in scientific thinking, but the clear abuse of them.

The problem with pseudoscience is its use and over-reliance on metaphor as an argument in and of itself. Rather than employ metaphors and analogies as illustrations of scientific knowledge, pseudoscience employs analogies to deduce new conclusions and propose alternative truths. At this point it no longer becomes a mere illustration; it becomes an argument by analogy (or metaphor …).

(Braithwaite 2006)

It should be noted that Braithwaite argues that metaphor and analogy are sometimes needed in order to add clarity. Of interest here too is the distinction that he draws between science and pseudoscience in terms of their use of metaphor and analogy. The fact that this article was originally published by an organisation called UK-Skeptics means that the appraisal that it offers is likely to be a relatively sober one.

Mithen similarly identifies the use of metaphor and analogy as one of three critical properties of science (1996:245). However, it seems highly probable that the level of metaphoricity varies from one area of science to another. Dunbar, for example, argues that metaphors occur most frequently in texts about physics and evolutionary biology, with the reason being that the subject matter of these disciplines concerns phenomena ‘that everyday experience does not equip us to talk about’, unlike that of chemistry or anatomy, for example, for which the ‘conventional mechanistic terminology’ of everyday language is totally appropriate (1995:142). Dunbar also argues that such metaphors tend to use the social human world as their source domain (1995:142; see also Mithen 1996:308). Some brief comments will be made in Section 1.2.4 regarding how popular science texts differ from specialist ones in this respect.

Finally, it should be pointed out that some metaphors become very central to our way of thinking and speaking about certain subjects, which means that, if the time ever arrives when these metaphors come to be considered obsolete, a certain realignment of concepts and means of expression will become necessary. This is the case with evolutionary biology, very central to which has always been a metaphor originally suggested by Darwin himself in The Origin of Species: ‘The affinities of all the beings of the same class have sometimes been represented by a great tree. I believe this simile largely speaks the truth’ (Darwin 1872:129). Darwin’s original vision was of the totality of life on earth represented by a tree, each branch of which was a single species, some of which reach an eventual dead end but others—today’s surviving species—extend until the very top. This image has supplied several generations of scientists with not only a fundamental ‘unifying principle for understanding the history of life on Earth’ (Lawton 2009:34) but also with an ultimate aim in the form of the eventual faithful reconstruction of the tree itself.

However, this view has been gradually dismantled as we have improved our ability to read genetic material and, ultimately, entire genomes. In 1999, Doolittle made the provocative claim that ‘the history of life cannot properly be represented as a tree’ (1999:2124). Clearly, the Tree of Life does not exist in nature, but it is rather imposed on nature as a framework for classification (see Lawton 2009:37). If species do not simply pass on traits but also regularly exchange genetic material or hybridise with other species (as it appears that they do), then what emerges is not a ‘neat branching pattern’ so much as an ‘impenetrable thicket of interrelatedness’ (2009:36). While the model that it represents has probably not yet outlived its usefulness when applied to animals and plants, in all likelihood it no longer provides an adequate description of the workings of evolution in general; like Newton’s mechanics, it has proved to be revolutionary and highly fruitful in its time but probably can no longer account for the highly complex data that is now being observed and discovered in the real world (see Lawton 2009: 38–9).

In addition, notwithstanding these assertions by writers such as Doolittle and Lawton, the concept of the Tree of Life is still very much alive in micr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figure
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Metaphor in Scientific Thought and Writing
• 2 Translating Scientific American
• 3 Metaphor and Translation
• 4 Macro-Level Metaphors
• 5 Intuitive Classifications of Metaphor
• 6 Lakoff and Johnson’s Metaphor Types
• 7 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index