Abstract
The present study falls within a line of research projects in Translation Studies,
which draws upon cognitive semantics and whose aim is to determine the modes of
metaphorical conceptualisation in specialized fields, namely in the biomedical sciences.
Our study focuses on the modes of metaphorical conceptualization used in neuroanatomy in
French, English and German from a translation perspective. Specifically, we concentrate on
the anatomical description of two structures of the central nervous system: the spinal cord
and the cerebellum.
Our objective is to identify and characterize the Metaphorical Conceptualization
Indices (MCI). The method relies on a trilingual corpus composed of reference texts
dealing with these structures and on a semantic annotation of MCIs using the XML
language, which allows a downstream interrogation of the corpus with the XQuery
language.
We demonstrate that MCIs play a central role in shaping the phraseology and
denominations typical to the anatomical description of the central nervous system. Previous
works had shown that it was also the case in cellular biology and anatomy of muscles,
peripheral nerves, and blood vessels. From a lexical perspective, MCIs can fall into one of
three categories, namely predicates, non-predicates or quasi predicates.
Among the modes of metaphorical conceptualization previously identified in
cellular biology and anatomy, the majority are also found in the narrower field of
neuroanatomy. However, some MCIs and modes of metaphorical conceptualisation are
specific to certain elements of the anatomical regions under investigation. Moreover, the
modes of metaphorical conceptualization found in French, English, and German are similar,
but they are expressed by lexical networks of varying richness. Furthermore, as nominal
composition is characteristic of German, the linguistic form of German MCIs presents
certain features that must be taken into account.