HUMAN TRAITS THROUGH BOTANICAL METAPHORS: BOTANOMORPHS IN AMERICAN ENGLISH AND BRAZILIAN PORTUGUESE FOR TRANSLATION PURPOSES

Abstract

In this manuscript, I intend to replicate, in Brazilian Portuguese, part of a study that Sommer (1988) conducted about botanomorphs in American English. For that, I discuss the concept of botanomorphs — fruits and vegetables used as metaphors for human characteristics —, analyze the main connotations involved in such metaphors, and compare the produce items in American English with their counterparts in Brazilian Portuguese searching for person descriptors in dictionaries. Then, I discuss the concept of metaphor following the classical view of metaphor (or the comparison view). As the use of fruits and vegetables with metaphorical or euphemistic connotations is not only lexically but also culturally motivated, rarely do corresponding items have identical connotations in two languages, posing, thus, an interesting challenge to translators. Finally, I discuss ways to transpose botanomorphs from one language into another, considering that, as my results have indicated, fruits and vegetables are, metaphorically or euphemistically, related to human characteristics in different fashions, and that the connotation of the same fruit or vegetable in two languages may be coincidental, approximate, or far-off. So, depending on the type of text, context, and communication channel, translators must decide on the most suitable strategy to transpose produce items and their respective connotations into another language.