mgr Zuzanna Hap

ORCID: 0009-0001-3175-0037
The topic of my dissertation is: “The Use of Conceptual Metaphors in Educational Texts as a Problem in Specialised Translation: Analysis of Translation of Educational Materials from EU-Funded Projects Promoting Business Activity”

My doctoral research lies at the intersection of cognitive linguistics and specialised translation studies. It focuses on conceptual metaphors in English-language educational materials promoting entrepreneurship that were developed within EU-funded projects (such as Erasmus+, COSME and Horizon Europe), and on the ways in which these metaphors are rendered in the official Polish translations. Following Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Lakoff and Johnson 1980), I approach metaphor not merely as a stylistic device but as a mechanism of thought that structures knowledge about business activity through mappings such as BUSINESS IS A JOURNEY, BUSINESS IS WAR / A GAME or A COMPANY IS AN ORGANISM.
While business metaphors have been widely described in press and economic texts, educational and training materials remain largely unexplored, and few studies combine systematic metaphor identification with an analysis of conceptual frame shifts in English-Polish translation. My project seeks to fill this gap. Its main hypothesis is that conceptual metaphors in these texts perform both a cognitive function, organising knowledge about entrepreneurship, and a persuasive one, motivating readers to take action, and that in translation they may be shifted, transformed or simplified in ways that alter the structure of the knowledge conveyed and the persuasive force of the text.
The study is corpus-based and combines qualitative and quantitative analysis. I am compiling a sentence-aligned English-Polish parallel corpus of handbooks, brochures, online courses, toolkits and training packages. Metaphors in the source texts are identified using the MIPVU procedure (Steen et al. 2010), supported by corpus tools (AntConc, Sketch Engine), and classified according to their conceptual mappings and functions (cognitive, persuasive and educational). I then examine the translation strategies applied – retaining the metaphor, replacing it with a different or a native one, paraphrase or neutralisation, omission and addition – and, drawing on Frame-Based Terminology (Faber 2012), compare the conceptual frames and terminological relations activated in the source and target texts.
The project aims to contribute to research on metaphor in specialised texts and its translation, and to offer practical guidelines for translators and editors of business-related educational materials, for translator training, and for teams preparing multilingual content in EU projects.

Publications:
1.    Hap, Z. (2024). Audiovisual Translation: Culture-Bound Elements in “Asterix and Obelix: Mission Cleopatra”. In M. Dick-Bursztyn & M. Hałys (Eds.), Galicia Studies in Linguistics, Literature and Culture: The Students’ Voices 12 (pp. 19-28). Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Rzeszowskiego.
2.    Hap, Z. (2024). Ethical Concerns in AI Translation: Ensuring Transparency and Accuracy in Various Text Types. In A. Pietluch & M. Warchał-Leśniakowska (Eds.), Galicia Studies in Linguistics, Literature and Culture: The Students’ Voices 13 (pp. 18-27). Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Rzeszowskiego.