Contrastive Analysis of Metonymy in Persian and French Journalistic Texts

Journalistic texts are decorated with metonymy in all the fields especially in the political texts. Understanding this figure of speech and its translation in the target language is a challenge with which interpreters usually encounter. In this study, we attempt to explore the role of metonymy in some samples of journalistic texts of Persian and French with the aim of detecting the similarities and differences of the use of this figure of speech in these two languages.
The findings indicate that metonymy is not exclusively used to adorn journalistic texts; rather, it can have various functions such as language enrichment, avoidance of repetition, implication, etc. Besides, in French and Iranian rhetoric, there are disagreements among experts about this figure of speech, which makes the contrastive analysis of metonymy more difficult. It should be noted that definitions put forward by both French and Iranian rhetoricians suffer from some shortcomings. French and Persian rhetoricians classify metonymy in terms of contiguity and similarity respectively. There are disagreements about certain means of expression such as epanodos among French and Iranian rhetoricians. On the other hand, according to cognitive linguists, metonymy is linked to cultural patterns. Different syntactic structures and semantic fields and above all cultural differences between French and Persian make the translation of metonymy complicated. In addition, translation and its study which belong to the field of comparative linguistics can be crucial to detect cultural similarities and differences between the two languages. The results of translation suggest that metonymies linked to the different cultural patterns may not have metonymic equivalents in the target language and the translator is thus obliged to appeal to direct referents. But concerning metonymies linked to the different cultural patterns which have metonymic equivalents of the same class or another class with the same implied value in the target language, using cultural metonymic equivalents may lead to misunderstanding among the speakers of the target language. Thus, it is better to appeal to semantic substitution.