Happiness and Sadness Metaphor Translation in Daneshvar's Savushun: A Corpus-Based Comparison of Conceptual Mapping Strategies across Two English Versions

Abstract

This study investigates the translation of happiness and sadness metaphors in Simin Daneshvar’s Savushun by comparing two English translations: Mohammad Reza Ghanoonparvar’s Savushun and Roxane Zand’s a Persian Requiem. Translating metaphor is among the most demanding problems in literary translation because figurative meaning is constituted not by wording alone but by the interaction of embodied cognition and cultural context. These pressures intensify when the metaphors encode emotion; happiness and sadness are expressed through imagery that varies substantially across cultures in ways that resist lexical equivalence. This study examines how metaphorical expressions belonging to these two domains in Simin Daneshvar's Savushun were rendered in two English translations: Mohammad Reza Ghanoonparvar's 1990 version and Roxane Zand's 1991 A Persian Requiem. A parallel corpus was assembled from the Persian source text and both target versions. Metaphorical expressions were identified using Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980) and the Metaphor Identification Procedure (Pragglejazz Group, 2007), then classified into six categories: (1) similar conceptual mapping with similar metaphorical expression, (2) similar mapping with different expression, (3) different mapping with similar expression, (4) different mapping with different expression, (5) non-metaphorical rendering, and (6) omission. Frequency counts and proportional comparisons were run across all categories for both translators. Sadness metaphors appeared at nearly twice the rate of happiness metaphors in the source text. Both translators neutralized metaphors more often than they preserved them; non-metaphorical rendering (Category 5) was the dominant strategy in both versions. The translators' preferences diverged: Ghanoonparvar held closer to source-domain imagery; Zand applied paraphrase and omission more frequently. Conceptual equivalence proved more recoverable than lexical equivalence. The findings show that sadness metaphors occurred substantially more often than happiness metaphors in the source text. Both translators preserved many source metaphors but differed in strategic preference: one retained metaphorical imagery more consistently, while the other more frequently employed neutralization and paraphrase as target-oriented strategies. The most common strategy in both translations was preservation of conceptual meaning with altered lexical form. The findings suggest that metaphor translation from Persian into English is shaped by conceptual compatibility and translator decision-making alongside linguistic equivalence. These results are discussed in relation to domestication and foreignization as broader orientations in literary translation. The study's scope and generalizability are limited by corpus size, domain selection, and single-analyst coding, and these constraints are addressed in the limitations section.