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Metaphors of art in the English translations of Giorgio Vasari’s Le vite: a software-assisted enquiry

  • Antonella Luporini

This chapter focuses on the conceptual/linguistic metaphorical representations of the notion of ‘art’ in Vasari’s Le Vite. It presents a case study of select concordances for «arte» extracted from the Italian LBC corpus, and a cross-linguistic comparison with the same segments taken from two English translations (de Vere 1912-1915 and Bondanella, Bondanella 1991). Firstly, six main metaphor categories are identified in the concordances from Le Vite. Two small parallel corpora are subsequently built, collecting the ‘metaphorical’ concordances from Le Vite and their corresponding translations, and analysed to assess if and how the original metaphors were transferred to the English texts. While both English translations maintain more than half of the original metaphorical occurrences, results also highlight interesting differences between the translators’ approaches. Patterns from quantitative and qualitative investigation are discussed through select examples, considering both the functions of the original metaphorical categories and the effects of the translators’ choices on their rendition. Finally, remarks are made about the contribution of (parallel) corpus techniques to metaphor translation analysis, as emerging from this case study.

  • Keywords:
  • translation,
  • metaphor,
  • parallel corpus,
  • English language,
  • Vasari,
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Antonella Luporini

University of Bologna, Italy - ORCID: 0000-0003-3312-394X

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  • Publication Year: 2023
  • Pages: 65-92
  • Content License: CC BY 4.0
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  • Publication Year: 2023
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Chapter Information

Chapter Title

Metaphors of art in the English translations of Giorgio Vasari’s Le vite: a software-assisted enquiry

Authors

Antonella Luporini

Language

English

DOI

10.36253/979-12-215-0061-5.06

Peer Reviewed

Publication Year

2023

Copyright Information

© 2023 Author(s)

Content License

CC BY 4.0

Metadata License

CC0 1.0

Bibliographic Information

Book Title

Nuove strategie per la traduzione del lessico artistico

Book Subtitle

Da Giorgio Vasari a un corpus plurilingue dei beni culturali

Editors

Valeria Zotti, Monica Turci

Peer Reviewed

Number of Pages

232

Publication Year

2023

Copyright Information

© 2023 Author(s)

Content License

CC BY 4.0

Metadata License

CC0 1.0

Publisher Name

Firenze University Press

DOI

10.36253/979-12-215-0061-5

ISBN Print

979-12-215-0060-8

eISBN (pdf)

979-12-215-0061-5

Series Title

Lessico multilingue dei Beni Culturali

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