As idioms are often expressions of national identities through the reflection of traditions and specific social economic and psychological features of linguistic communities, making them adaptable to other cultures is generally a difficult and debatable issue for translators, writers and linguists. The traditional view on transferring idioms from the source text to the target text is based on the dichotomy of the word for word translation versus free adaptation, a dichotomy which may be facilitated by the cognitive linguistics and semantics. One major difficulty in understanding and subsequently, in translating idioms is that they are not viewed in their conceptual complexity. Most idioms are not just fixed linguistic expressions whose meanings are independent from the meanings of their constituent parts, but they emerge from our universal understanding and general knowledge of the world which are framed in conceptual systems and cultural patterns. Idioms reflect coherent systems of conceptual metaphors and the figurative meanings of their components are determined by the conceptual knowledge of the world. Exploring the connection between the conceptual metaphors and idioms and researching the cognitive mechanisms which motivate idioms in a source language may help the translator find the right solution for adapting the source text in a target text and culture. When, in most cases, the speakers in the source language perceive reality differently from the target language users, the translator’s role is to restructure reality through the selection of the most significant conceptual metaphors for both categories of community members. Regarded from the perspective of cognitive linguistics, the activity of translating idiomatic patterns represents a complex effort in adapting the specific cultural models of the target language to the expressive and comprehensible requirements of the source language.
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Journal “Diacronia” ISSN: 2393-1140 Frequency: 2 issues / year