TRANSLATION TECHNIQUES AND TRANSFORMATIONS IN THE RECREATION OF AESTHETIC METAPHORS

Abstract

This section examines the translation techniques and transformations employed in rendering the aesthetic metaphors of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray in translated versions of the novel. Drawing on the classical typologies of metaphor translation proposed by Newmark, Dagut, van den Broeck, and Toury, the study identifies and classifies the strategies applied in reconstructing Wilde's ornate, sensory, and philosophically charged imagery in the target language. Particular attention is paid to the distinction between conventional and aesthetic metaphor, and to the specific transformations — lexical, grammatical, and stylistic — that translators apply when the source and target languages do not share equivalent figurative systems. The analysis demonstrates that literal transfer, substitution, paraphrase, omission, and compensation are not used interchangeably but are selected according to the degree of cultural and linguistic correspondence between the metaphorical systems of the two languages. The section concludes that the successful recreation of aesthetic metaphor requires an eclectic, context-sensitive strategy that balances semantic precision with stylistic and emotive equivalence, rather than reliance on any single translation procedure.