Metaphorical Expressions in Thomas Hardy’s “Tess of the d’Urbervilles” and their Translation into Albanian

Abstract

Problems posed by the translation of metaphors have often been attributed to linguistic and cultural differences. Those that
have argued that metaphors cannot be translated have pointed to their linguistic and cultural specificity. A different view is that according
to which metaphors can be translated due to the universality of the perceptual processes underlying metaphorical processes. We found
that half of all the metaphorical expressions in our corpus of data have been translated by non-metaphorical expressions. While this may
seem as strong support for the argument that metaphors are untranslatable, an analysis of their conceptual structure as well as their
implications reveals that in some of the metaphorical expressions differences between the ST expressions and the TT translations may
not be accounted for by systemic differences between English and Albanian. Instead, their explanation has to be sought in the influence
of factors other than linguistic or cultural.