The Lion, the Star and the Helix: A Descriptive Analysis of Metaphor in French Technical Texts on Automotion and of Their Translation into Spanish

Abstract

Technical texts are usually characterized by the use of terminology, and they are said to be clear, concise, precise and objective. It is terminology which is normally considered one of the most important difficulties to understand specialized concepts because they are expressed by means of this terminology. Nevertheless, there are other linguistic and cognitive elements which are frequently used to express specialized concepts, for instance, metaphors. In this paper we aim to analyze the use of cognitive metaphors in a corpus of French semi-specialized technical texts and to consider whether the use of these metaphors could be a problem should these metaphors have to be translated into Spanish