The workings and translatability of metaphors in eleven “Hadith”

Resumen

A penetrative analysis of the workings and translatability of metaphors in prophet Mohamed’s accounts (henceforth al- Hadith) may reveal important insights into the way metaphors are construed. For the employment of metaphor in al- Hadith is of a great merit and simply cannot be sidestepped. In this spirit, the present paper is steeped in three frames of reference, namely (1) Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980), Fauconnier and Turner’s (2002), Coulson and Oakley’s (2005) and Sperber and Wilson’s (1995); (2) Jones and Estes’s (2006), and (3) Newmark’s (1981) and Schaffner (2004). Relevant to this, among the strong aims of this paper is to outline the application of the patterns underlying metaphor production, comprehension and eventually translation to eleven Hadith. Thus, the forthcoming analysis bears a two-folded aim as it unfolds triggers that allow us to see how metaphor production and comprehension might be computed and, accordingly, offers insights into the practicalities of translating metaphor in al- Hadith when conceptual entrenchment becomes one significant trait of the processing of those metaphors. Within the confinement of this idea, we come to conclude that translatability is likely to obtain when these metaphorical expressions are underlain by similar conceptual or experiential domains or are bound up by a sort of correlation that renders relevance, and that the reasons behind metaphor use in al- Hadith transcend rhetorical considerations by constitutively (re)shaping and (re)defining many of the values and beliefs operating in the individual and social-making enterprise, allowing, thereby, for metaphor in al- Hadith to fall roughly under the banner of conceptual, even more, constructive metaphor.