Book Review: Metaphor Translation in Popular Science

Abstract

Metaphors play a crucial role in bridging complex scientific concepts into everyday language and profoundly impact human thinking, cognition, and communication. However, the translation of the scientific metaphor represents significant and multifaceted challenges. Given this situation, a book entitled “Metaphor Translation in Popular Science: From Minds to Languages” by Sui He offers a comprehensive insight into how scientific metaphors are translated in practice and explores the potential implications of these translated metaphors in a broader social and cultural context (p.6). This timely and insightful book not only delves into the theoretical basis of metaphor translation research but also introduces a new analytical framework that integrates the cognitive and linguistic dimensions of metaphor translation, making it the first large-scale publication that examines metaphor translation through both conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) and conceptual blending theory (CBT). Sui He further develops a dual-parameter approach: “provenance” and “projection” to analyze popular cosmological articles published in Scientific American and its two Chinese translations. A key contribution of this book lies in its methodological approach, which combines CMT and CBT to analyze shifts in metaphor translation. However, the limited scope of only using two translated editions of Scientific American in Chinese becomes the weakness of this book.