Metaphor Across Languages and Cultures

A shared image can support different ways of describing a situation. This imagined landscape represents no particular language or culture. Original AI-generated artwork from the Metaphor Atlas.

Metaphor across languages and cultures concerns how an expression's wording, imagery and use relate to its setting. A familiar image may travel between languages while its meaning changes. A translation may also communicate a similar meaning through a completely different image.

Comparison becomes more useful when it asks precise questions: what is moving, where is the observer, what does the expression conventionally mean, and what does this particular speaker or text do with it? The examples below bring together dictionary entries, research on time and gesture, and a story-based expression. They provide starting points for reading and discussion, rather than a dictionary of what whole cultures think.

For a quick route through the page, begin with the expression table, then read the studies of spatial time. Readers preparing their own entries can use the comparison record.

What are we comparing?

Several related features can occur in one expression:

• Metaphor allows one kind of experience to be understood through another. In the illustrative sentence “The discussion reached a dead end”, a discussion is described through movement along a route.
• Idiom concerns a conventional expression whose established meaning needs to be learnt as a whole. A striking literal gloss does not, by itself, explain that meaning.
• Metonymy uses a closely associated thing to stand for something else. In “We need more hands”, a body part stands for people or their labour. This can combine with other figurative features.
• Allusion depends on recognising another story or text. A short phrase can carry a longer narrative without retelling it.

These are useful distinctions, not mutually exclusive boxes. In particular, an idiom is not automatically a fresh metaphor, and a figurative phrase need not be metaphorical in every respect. The examples in this opening section are constructed illustrations.

The Pragglejaz Group's Metaphor Identification Procedure offers a more formal approach. It compares a word's contextual meaning with a more basic contemporary meaning, asking whether the former can be understood through comparison with the latter. The procedure identifies metaphorical use in discourse; it does not establish what a speaker consciously imagines or intends.

See also Idiomatic, Literal and Figurative Communication, Metaphor Categories and Semiotics.

Separate wording, image and use

Layer	What to record	Why it matters
Original wording	The expression as written or spoken, with its language and variety where known	An English paraphrase can hide the original image.
Literal gloss	A close rendering of the words, labelled as a gloss	This shows the construction without pretending it is natural English.
Conventional meaning	The sense documented by a dictionary or other source	An established idiom can mean more than its component words suggest.
Context and register	The surrounding passage, speaker, audience and degree of formality	A complaint, joke, quotation and affectionate remark may use similar wording differently.
Translation choice	The wording selected for this audience and purpose	Fluency, imagery, rhythm and explanatory clarity may call for different choices.

A literal gloss is an aid to comparison. It is not automatically the speaker's intended meaning or evidence that the speaker consciously pictures the literal scene. Nor does an appealing story about an expression's origin establish its etymology. Historical explanations need their own sources.

A language is not a single cultural viewpoint

Language, nationality, region and cultural affiliation are not interchangeable labels. An entry headed “French” identifies the language of an expression; it does not describe every French-speaking person's experience. A dictionary's inclusion of a phrase also does not tell us how often a particular age group, profession or community uses it.

Zoltán Kövecses's account of variation within cultures discusses social, regional, professional, situational and individual differences in metaphor. This gives comparison more dimensions than a simple contrast between nations.

For example, a project might be described as a race, a journey or a building. Those constructed alternatives foreground competition, progress or structure, respectively. Which description appears in an actual workplace is a question for evidence, not something that can be read off the participants' passports.

A useful entry therefore identifies the relevant community and setting as closely as its source allows. Where the source gives only a general dictionary definition, keep the claim at that level. Where it studies particular participants, retain that information when describing its findings.

What exactly varies?

Two communities can share a broad image while differing in the part of it they use. Conversely, similar communicative meanings can be expressed through different images. Kövecses's Metaphor in Culture distinguishes variation in source and target concepts, mappings, implications and linguistic expression.

Level of comparison	A question to investigate	What an apparent match may conceal
Source concept	What version of a family, journey or building is relevant?	Different expectations about authority, travellers or support.
Mapping	Which relationships are carried into the target?	A journey may organise duration in one passage and personal choice in another.
Implication	What follows within this account?	Shared movement imagery need not give the same answer about who chooses the destination.
Wording	Which expressions are conventional?	A shared conceptual pattern does not make a literal translation idiomatic.
Situation	Who uses the expression, with whom and for what purpose?	A joke, institutional slogan and personal complaint can use similar words differently.

For a documented case of the wording distinction, Kövecses compares English talk of “spending” time with Hungarian tölteni, associated with filling. In the example he analyses, similar questions about time use draw on different lexical imagery. He also distinguishes the literal meaning of the words from the figurative meaning and the conceptual pattern proposed by the analyst. This is a specified comparison from his analysis, not a claim that either language uses only one metaphor for time.

A shared source can have different internal structure

Kövecses uses the family source to show why a broad label can be insufficient. A family understood through authority and punishment differs from one foregrounding care and mutual support. If those relationships are projected onto a social institution, the shared label “family” does not guarantee a shared account of how the institution should work.

For an original comparison, therefore, describe the relationships rather than merely listing recurring objects. Record who makes decisions, who moves, who supplies support and what counts as a successful outcome. These questions make a claim of similarity more precise and can reveal differences within a single community as well as between communities.

Context can help generate an image

In Where Metaphors Come From, Kövecses argues that metaphorical meaning draws on the situation as well as on familiar conceptual patterns. He discusses physical and social surroundings, shared history, concerns and the immediate communication setting.

As a constructed illustration, a group repairing a bridge might use bridge imagery when discussing a damaged working relationship. The nearby activity makes the comparison locally relevant. An isolated quotation would not justify presenting it as the characteristic worldview of that group's nationality. A stronger entry would retain the occasion, speaker, surrounding conversation and evidence of how others responded.

These distinctions complement Primary and Complex Metaphors and Metaphor and Idioms: Motivation, Meaning and Use. They also give the comparison record below a more exact purpose: to preserve the evidence needed to tell which kind of similarity or difference has actually been found.

Documented expressions in comparison

The glosses below are deliberately close to the wording. The meaning column paraphrases the cited sources. These are selected examples, not representative samples of their languages.

Language and expression	Literal gloss	Documented meaning and comparison point
French: avoir le cafard	“to have the cockroach”	To feel low or despondent. Cambridge supplies an English equivalent involving “the blues”. Similar communicative purposes can be served by different images.
Spanish: perder la cabeza	“to lose the head”	The RAE and ASALE describe reason or judgement becoming impaired or clouded. Compare English “lose your head”, whose Cambridge entry emphasises losing calm or control. Similar wording still needs a contextual sense check.
German: Tomaten auf den Augen haben	“to have tomatoes on the eyes”	To fail to notice something obvious or be inattentive. Deutsche Welle's teaching material presents it as a reproach about something overlooked.
Japanese: 猫の手も借りたい (neko no te mo karitai)	“want to borrow even a cat's hand/paw”	To be so busy and short of help that any assistance would be welcome. The animal and exaggeration are part of what a plain English paraphrase leaves out.
French: tomber dans les pommes	“to fall into the apples”	To faint. The Académie française marks the expression as familiar usage. Knowing the individual words does not supply the conventional meaning.

What changes when an image is translated?

For avoir le cafard, “feeling low” introduces a spatial description, while “having the blues” introduces a colour expression. A literal cockroach gloss retains the wording's object but loses ordinary English idiomatic meaning. Each version preserves something different.

The Japanese example permits another comparison. “I could use another pair of hands” would retain bodily imagery in an English adaptation, but omit the cat and reduce the original expression's exaggeration. “I desperately need some help” would prioritise the request. These are explanatory alternatives for comparison, not prescribed translations for every occurrence.

Matching an image is therefore only one part of matching an expression. Also consider intensity, humour, formality and the relationship between speaker and listener. A dictionary pair is a starting point; the surrounding sentence determines whether the proposed equivalent works.

Space, time and the observer

Words such as “ahead”, “behind”, “before” and “after” invite a further question: relative to what? A body's orientation, the order of events and a geographical direction provide different reference points. Research on time is especially useful here because it examines language alongside other forms of evidence.

Aymara: the past in front

Rafael Núñez and Eve Sweetser's 2006 study examined Aymara temporal language together with accompanying gestures. They documented a model placing the past in front of the speaker and the future behind. Their analysis distinguishes the speaker's position from the ordering of one event relative to another.

The study reports variation associated with participants' language proficiency and age. Its linguistic and gestural findings should not be reduced to a rule about every Aymara speaker. For readers, the central distinction is between an event being in front of a person and one event coming before another. Both concern ordering, but their reference points differ.

Pormpuraaw: time oriented east to west

Lera Boroditsky and Alice Gaby's 2010 study reported east-to-west arrangements of time among participants in Pormpuraaw, an Australian Aboriginal community. The direction remained geographical: its relation to the participant's body changed with the direction the participant faced. Facing south, east-to-west runs left to right; facing north, it runs right to left.

This provides a comparison between bodily and geographical reference frames. The claim concerns the reported participants and tasks; Pormpuraaw is a community, not the name of a single universal “Aboriginal worldview”. The result also does not mean that every conversation about time must contain a compass direction.

Language, gesture and tasks answer different questions

The Time in space field manual separates tasks involving the spatial arrangement of time from an inventory of temporal language and associated cultural knowledge. This distinction helps readers assess what a study actually demonstrates.

Evidence	What it can help establish	What needs further evidence
An expression in a text or dictionary	A documented wording and sense	How frequent it is, or whether every speaker uses it
Gesture accompanying speech	How participants position or enact something in that interaction	Whether the same pattern occurs across other tasks and settings
A spatial arrangement task	How participants respond under the study's conditions	How they reason in all ordinary situations, or what caused the pattern

The table is a reading aid, not a substitute for examining a study's methods. Shared patterns across several kinds of evidence can strengthen an interpretation, while differences can reveal the importance of the task or context.

Related pages include Clocks, Seasons and Waiting Rooms, Maps, Compasses and Lost Bearings, Embodied Cognition and Situational Relational Positioning.

When an expression carries a story

The Chinese expression 刻舟求劍 (kè zhōu qiú jiàn) can be glossed as “mark the boat to seek the sword”. Taiwan's Ministry of Education dictionary connects it with a story in the Lüshi Chunqiu, chapter Cha jin. A traveller drops a sword into the water and marks the boat at the point where it fell. Later, he looks beneath that mark, although the boat has moved. The dictionary records the expression as criticism of inflexibility when circumstances change.

For comparison, the crucial relationship is between a moving marker and what it is supposed to locate. A paraphrase such as “failing to adapt” communicates the criticism but loses the boat, the water and the mistaken reference point. The story explains why those particular objects belong together.

Compare named versions

For a longer story, record the author or teller, language, edition, translator and relevant passage. Separate the events stated in that version from the interpretation being proposed. A motif may recur without having an identical function.

A forest, a river crossing or a locked room can be compared through specific relationships:

• Who can enter or leave, and who controls that access?
• Does the place shelter, conceal, obstruct or expose someone in this telling?
• What changes between the beginning and the end?
• Does the translation preserve who acts, who waits and who is carried along?

These questions keep the comparison close to the text. Bluebeard, Hansel and Gretel and The Hermit, Lanterns and Solitude offer starting points. For the boat example's spatial relationships, see Ships, Currents, Tides and Undertows and Maps, Compasses and Lost Bearings.

Colour, objects and the limits of symbol lists

A colour or object can acquire significance through a particular text, ritual, genre or shared convention. To identify that significance, look for evidence in the setting where it occurs. A table assigning one permanent meaning to each colour or animal can conceal the very variation a comparison needs to explain.

Research on colour and emotion illustrates the distinction between patterns and fixed meanings. Domicele Jonauskaite and colleagues studied 4,598 participants from 30 nations using associations between colour terms and emotion concepts. They found broad similarities alongside differences associated with linguistic and geographical proximity. Such association data do not establish a compulsory meaning for a colour in a particular poem, picture or person's description.

The same editorial principle applies to the wiki's recurring images. A wall described as protection and a wall described as confinement share an object while differing in the relationship being described. Those are constructed contrasts, not cultural diagnoses. Record the surrounding wording before assigning a meaning. See Fences, Boundaries and Borders, Containers and Metaphors of Emotion.

A translation workshop: preserve which features?

The following English sentence is invented for this page:

After months of circling the issue, the meeting finally opened a door.

It combines circular movement with an opening. Before translating it into another language, a reader can distinguish several editorial aims. The English alternatives below demonstrate the choices; they are not translations attested in another language.

Aim	Possible English rendering	What changes
Retain the imagery	“After months of circling the issue, the meeting finally opened a door.”	Keeps the two images. A translator must still check whether they work together in the target language.
Explain the intended situation	“After months without resolving the issue, the meeting created a new opportunity.”	Makes an interpretation explicit and removes the circular route and doorway. “Opportunity” is a contextual interpretation of the opening.
Retain one image	“After months without progress, the meeting finally opened a door.”	Keeps the doorway while reducing the density of imagery.
Provide a gloss with commentary	Quote the original wording, then explain the proposed reading separately.	Helps a reader examine the source image, at the cost of brevity and conversational fluency.

A translation for a literary discussion may preserve an unusual image because the wording is under examination. A short informational summary may explain the situation more directly. Neither purpose removes the need to check context.

When comparing versions, attend to details that a fluent paraphrase can easily change:

• Agency: does someone open the door, does it open by itself, or is an opening merely noticed?
• Position: is the observer inside, outside, above or below?
• Movement: is someone approaching a boundary, crossing it or moving along it?
• Possibility: does the expression say “cannot”, “has not yet” or “does not want to”?
• Evaluation: is the image welcoming, threatening, comic or uncertain in this passage?

For a wiki entry, preserve those distinctions in the comparison even when the final translation cannot reproduce every feature. Doors, Gates and Thresholds, Paths and Trails and Beyond Simple Metaphor provide related reading.

A comparison record for the wiki

A useful contribution keeps its evidence and interpretation together. The following record can be reused for an idiom, a short passage or a comparison between translations.

Field	What to include
Expression or passage	Original wording, script and enough surrounding text to identify the use
Language and setting	Language variety, place, date, genre and speaker or author where the source supplies them
Source	Dictionary entry, edition and page, recording reference, or research publication
Literal gloss	A close rendering explicitly labelled as a gloss; identify who supplied it
Contextual meaning	A sourced definition or an interpretation tied to the surrounding passage
Natural rendering	A proposed translation for a stated audience and purpose
Image and relationships	What stays, changes or disappears, including position, movement and agency
Limits and alternatives	Uncertain register, competing senses, missing context, or limits of a study's sample

For example, an entry for Tomaten auf den Augen haben could cite the Deutsche Welle material, record the tomatoes-and-eyes gloss, and explain the expression's use for overlooking something. A proposed English rendering such as “How did you miss that?” could then be labelled as an adaptation. It retains a possible reproach but drops the food image. An isolated dictionary or teaching entry cannot establish that this wording fits every social situation.

Where several speakers offer different readings, record the difference with its context. Where a source supplies no regional or historical information, say that it is unspecified. A modest, checkable claim is more useful than an elaborate origin story without evidence.

Learning an expression in another language

Elisabetta Materassi's Metaphor and L2 Learning separates understanding an expression from remembering and producing its wording. Her experiment involved native Italian speakers and advanced learners of Italian from Dutch universities and institutions, working with 60 metaphorical expressions. Similarity to the first language helped comprehension in the reported tasks, but did not show the same advantage in subsequent recall and recognition. Intentional learning activities improved learning across the transferability conditions.

This gives a concrete reason to distinguish a shared conceptual pattern from an established expression. Recognising the general image does not guarantee knowing the words that a language conventionally uses for it. Conversely, an understandable literal gloss is not evidence that the corresponding phrase is idiomatic in the other language.

For further reading, chapter 1 of Creative Multilingualism explores how metaphorical creativity depends on the interaction of language, culture and cognition. Both works are linked in the Metaphor Research Library.

Questions for reading and discussion

1. Choose one example from the table. Which information disappears if only the natural English meaning is given?
2. Compare two translations of a named passage. Do they preserve the same objects, movements and positions, or only a similar overall effect?
3. In an expression about time, identify the reference point. Is it the speaker, another event or a geographical direction?
4. For a claimed cultural pattern, identify the evidence: a dictionary, a text, an observation or a study. How far does that evidence support the claim?
5. Find two uses of a shared image within one language. What in their context makes the image work differently?

These are prompts for textual comparison and source evaluation. Contributions can link their examples to the relevant subject page or to a discussion in the Presentation Companion Library.

Related reading

• Language and interpretation: Idiomatic, Literal and Figurative Communication, Metaphor Categories, Semiotics and Linguistic References.
• Space, body and time: Embodied Cognition, Situational Relational Positioning, Clocks, Seasons and Waiting Rooms, Head and Neck and Hands.
• Voice and feeling: Echoes, Silence and Unheard Voices and Metaphors of Emotion.
• Stories and recurring imagery: Stories and literature and the Metaphor Atlas.

Browse the library

Concepts and language | Metaphor Atlas | Stories and literature | Idioms A-Z | Presentation Companion Library