ABSTRACT
This article reports on part of a larger study that involves a multi-parameter analysis of a corpus of English popular science texts and their translations into a number of European languages. The investigation takes place on two levels of generality – those of the individual metaphorical expression and the metaphorical mapping – and seeks evidence as to whether modifications to a higher-level metaphorical structure all tend in a particular direction (‘shifting’) rather than pointing in conflicting directions (‘scattering’). This should in turn provide a provisional answer to the question of whether metaphor translation poses a problem in popular scientific texts.
