ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the different theoretical approaches developed with regard to the functioning of metaphor in an attempt to investigate the workings of translation and some of the stages translation studies has gone through. It also focuses on the meta-communicative potential of metaphor as a metaphor for translation. Metaphor and translation share a series of structural similarities and their history within the Western tradition has been interlinked from the very beginning. Translations, question the representational identity and unity of languages, disclosing the arbitrariness of the relationship between words, things and ideas: translational transactions show that words are finally only metaphors for things. There are three major points of contact between translation studies and metaphor theory: the use of specific metaphors to describe the functioning of translation, the use of translation as a metaphor for exchange and transformation within different forms of discourse, and the question of the translatability of metaphors.
