A Comparative Study of Conceptual Metaphors in Persian and American Economics Journals Articles

The study aims to compare the employment of English and Persian economics metaphors by English and Iranian business writers. A corpus of 160 economics journal articles of English and Persian were selected according to their popularity and availability and then economics metaphors in there were identified and classified based on the model proposed by Charteris-Black (2004). This study aimed to discover, this whether Iranian and English business writer use of economics metaphors is the same and whether there is any significant differences in their use of economics metaphors categories. The study made use of textual analysis and results of the study revealed parallels and divergences in Persian and English metaphorical use. Further the results of the analysis showed significant differences in type and frequency of business metaphors used by English and Persian writers. Data gathering and analysis techniques metaphor identification process (MIP) was done in three steps. The results of study revealed interesting insights into the conceptualization and processing of non-literal language between Iranian and English business writers. This study showed a statically meaningful differences in use of economics metaphors based on their types and tokens in Persian and English research articles texts. These differences might be due to different culture, nature and context of economic system and level of metaphorical competence of authors. Taking these differences into account can be useful for ESP instructors, journalists, and economics translators.

Keywords:

metaphor , economics , MIP process , ESP