APPLICATION OF THE THEORY OF CONCEPTUAL METAPHOR TO TEACHING TRANSLATION
The vocabulary of any language does not build up chaotically. Language is a cemetery of dead metaphors, but cognitive linguistics posits that the presumably dead metaphors are still alive and are instantiated in language on a regular basis. A single conceptual metaphor, which is “a cross-domain mapping from a source domain to a target domain” [1, c. 58] spins off metaphorical expressions, which are easy to commit to memory if learners organize them around several generic source domains of metaphors. If we look for a conceptual metaphor behind a group of thematically interrelated and metaphorically used lexemes we may make teaching and learning easy. This knowledge spares a student mechanical learning of otherwise unrelated words. Conceptual metaphors work as a unifying principle for some stratum of lexemes. Being aware of what metaphor is in mind and language a student may organize the vocabulary in a system and understand the mechanisms of word combinability. I illustrate the application of the theory of conceptual metaphor to teaching translation to EFL majors with an example of verbаl collocations of a word “problem” and discuss why identical in form expressions may differ semantically. Besides, in so doing I resort to a formalized model of interaction between source and target conceptual domains, which allows me to show how changes in the frame of a particular structural metaphor may transform it into orientational metaphor.