Metaphor, Figurative Language and Translation

This article deals with figurative language as the manifestation of a more general cognitive competence. We have access to a kind of reality that would otherwise be indeterminate. In other words, we can say that human beings have the cognitive ability to organize the world in figurative terms. This ability allows them to categorize reality, providing it with structure. In this sense figurative activity is the ability to construct world images employed in reality. The new cognitivist approaches, as the perspectives of Textual Rethoric, can offer new possibilities to the broad area of studies on translation. In this article it is discussed the cognitive paradigm is used to go beyond some of the limits of the discipline.