Methodological Analysis of Evidence Types and Comparability in Cognitive Metaphor Translation Research from 1980 to 2025
Year: 2026
Type: article
Study design: Systematic Review
Abstract: This study analyzes the methodological development of cognitive metaphor translation research from 1980 to 2025, with particular attention to evidence types, analytical units and comparability conditions. International studies were retrieved from the Web of Science Core Collection, and Chinese studies were retrieved from CNKI, with Chinese sources limited to Peking University Core and CSSCI journals. After title and abstract screening, removal of irrelevant uses of the term translation, de-duplication and manual verification, the Web of Science dataset contained 478 records and the Chinese candidate set contained 75 records. The analysis combined annual publication counts with close methodological reading of research questions, material boundaries, identification procedures, process indicators and cross evidence correspondence. The results identify two relatively formed stages and one emerging trend. From 1980 to 2005, the field was shaped by conceptual metaphor theory and debates on translatability, with evidence mainly drawn from product comparison and small textual samples. From 2006 to 2019, discourse conditions, contextual variables, metaphor identification procedures and early process data entered the explanatory frame. From 2020 to 2025, corpus evidence, translation products and process data were more often placed within the same research design, increasing the need for explicit reporting of sampling rules, task settings, metric windows and correspondence rules. This study proposes a checklist for assessing whether findings from different studies can be compared. Its contribution lies in transforming a stage account of the field into a research tool for evaluating methodological alignment and inference scope. The checklist helps researchers assess whether findings from different studies address the same phenomenon under comparable conditions, thereby preventing inappropriate cross study comparison.
Author: Shiqi Zhang
Institution: Wuhan University
Language: English
Subfield: Language and Linguistics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W7164649362