Metaphors in Newspapers Business Articales: A Study of the Degree of Magister in Linguistics and Didactics

Abstract

This study deals with worldwide coverage of business news in English and Arabic newspapers. It investigates metaphorical use of language in New York Times and Wall Street Journal, and then compares these expressions to homologous or equivalent expressions used in excerpts and translations from English to Arabic in newspapers. A corpus-based approach has been used within the framework of cognitive linguistics and critical discourse analysis to investigate ideology in metaphorical use of language. Reflecting upon metaphor and ideology within the context of discourse about economic crisis, the research questions shed light on the values of liberal capitalism embodied in metaphors. Three main conclusions are drawn from the analysis of the data. First, market policies are understood by projecting onto them the image schema of movement along a path towards destinations. Second, bad market is described metaphorically by reference to human body. Third, talk about growth in market as struggle to survive under free trade is drawn from war experience. With regard to practical implications on translation, we argue that if the metaphorical language reflects ideologies, then language change in translation of metaphors reflects different ideological perspectives.