The ‘Carbon Capture’ MetaphorAn English-Arabic Terminological Case Study

Resumen

The study of metaphorization processes in scientific texts is essential in terminologicalstudies and the conceptual representation of specialized knowledge. It is considered to be a prolifictool in the creation of neologisms. Many cognitive models tried to study metaphorisation processesby drawing on metaphor and metonymy based on linguistic evidence. However, recent studies havehighlighted the necessity of carrying out empirical tests in order to provide refined results that gobeyond the traditional theories of conceptual metaphor and metonymy. This paper analyzes theunderlying metaphor in the ‘carbon capture and sequestration’ event in both English and Arabic. Italso discusses the influence of English, the lingua franca, in the transfer of the neologism ‘carbon captureand sequestration’, via translation processes, and its role in the so-called domain loss in the targetlanguage. Results were obtained through a corpus-based contrastive terminological analysis, extractedfrom specialized texts in English and Arabic in the subdomain of climate change. Data analysis wasapproached from the perspective of Frame-Based Terminology and Conceptual Complexes.