Dressing for Spiritual Battle and Other Challenges: Translating Passages with Underlying Conceptual Metaphors

Traditionally, the approach to translating metaphor in Scripture assumed metaphors are descriptive literary devices with an underlying “literal meaning.” Research in cognitive linguistics has challenged this idea, and a new field of study, conceptual metaphor theory (CMT), has emerged. CMT draws a distinction between image metaphors, where a target is described in comparison to a source, and conceptual metaphors, where an abstract or complex conceptual domain is actually understood in terms of a more concrete or familiar conceptual domain drawn from embodied human experience. This paper examines the importance of identifying conceptual metaphors and analyzing their accessibility when translating Scripture. Translators who encounter figurative language derived from underlying conceptual metaphors that are not culturally accessible may try to convert the mapped elements of the source domain into a series of descriptive image metaphors. This skewing of meaning could be mitigated if translators were trained to identify conceptual metaphors in figurative language and consider making them explicit. As a case study, a translation of Eph. 6:13-17 in Tlacoapa Me’phaa produced by a translator guided by Paratext notes and trained in the traditional approach to the translation of metaphors (Larson 1984) is compared with a second translation produced after encouragement to make the underlying conceptual metaphor “PREPARATION IS GETTING DRESSED” explicit at the beginning of the passage.