Business Metaphors in a Bilingual Business Lexicon

Abstract

General purpose dictionaries benefit users at large in many ways, but the definitions and examples might not satisfy the diverse needs of different professional users. This is especially true of metaphors. The article discusses the treatment of business metaphors in the PolyU Business Lexicon derived from the trilingual PolyU Business Corpus (PUBC). During the process the concordances are grouped by senses, and then separated according to their literal and metaphorical meanings, which in turn lead to the decisions of sense order, word meaning and translation equivalents. Since different cultures have different 'bags' of metaphors, and metaphorical meanings also vary in different registers, the focus is primarily on the differences between Chinese and English in terms of culture, psychology, language and how such differences can be translated and presented in a corpus-based business lexicon with a minimum loss of their original connotations. Cultural transformations, such as direct translation, image substitution, explanatory notes and abandonment of the figure of speech, are suggested to bridge interlanguage metaphorical gaps.

Keywords: metaphor, definition, translation, cultural difference