Translatability of Metaphors

This book contrastively analyses metaphorical expressions in the English and German versions of Things Fall Apart (TFA), das Alte sturzt (dAs) by Chinua Achebe and The Famished Road (TFR), die hungrige Strasse (dhS) by Ben Okri with a view to explicating the untranslatability features in the selected texts. The study employs Skopos and Black’s interaction theories to account for the adequacy or otherwise of the translations and the metaphoric imagery in the texts respectively. Then, Critical Discourse Analysis and Conceptual theory of meaning account for ideological underpinnings and meanings of texts respectively. Forty six socioculturally grounded metaphors (30 from TFA; 16 from TFR), which have untranslatability slants have been purposively sampled from the two texts, and subjected to contrastive analysis using the Hallidayan systemic functional grammar as a linguistic framework. Findings show that metaphorical and semantic use variations together with inexactitude of lexical replacements are the causes of untranslatabilities in both dAs and dhS.