“Eye” Metaphors Across English, Chinese, and Japanese and Their Implications to Translation Practices

This paper provides a detailed analysis of “eye” metaphors in English, Chinese, and Japanese, exploring their universalities and variations, and their implications for translation practices. This paper combines the cognitive and corpus-based approaches, as the former reveals the underlying conceptual systems of people from different cultural backgrounds and the latter addresses the issues of circularity of reasoning, researcher subjectivity, and meaning ambiguity commonly identified in the cognitive approach. The findings suggest that there are shared meanings across the three languages, with Chinese and Japanese exhibiting more similarities. Importantly, cross-linguistic comparisons suggest variations in conceptual metaphors across socio-cultural contexts. The differences in meanings can be attributed to syntactic and cultural preferences. Consequently, effective translation of “eye” metaphors requires considering contextual preferences in meaning and usage to achieve the desired communicative effect. It is suggested that metaphors can be used as an effective instrument in preparing and training prospective translators.