ABSTRACT
The metaphors for textual translation became dominant in the late middle Ages, associated with pressures to translate the Bible into vernacular languages and encoding orientations related to beginnings of the European age of imperialism. The chapter demonstrates that the ascendancy of dominant contemporary Eurocentric conceptual metaphors for 'translation' inverted Cicero's valorization of sense-for-sense over word-for-word translation, resulting in a pervasive orientation toward literalism in modern Eurocentric expectations about textual translation. This metaphorical conceptualization persists in vernacular translations of the Bible into Western European languages to the present, contributing to the view of words themselves as numinous and the valorization of literalism in translation and other domains. The Latin term has a much more restricted semantic field than does logos, and the Latin meanings are much simpler conceptually than the Greek, in part because verbum was less central as a signifier in pre-Christian philosophical and religious discourses.
