Auge, Anais & Liu, Yuxin. (2024). Visual metaphoricity across languages: The greenhouse effect and the carbon footprint in educational videos. https://www.cultusjournal.com/files/Archives/04_Anais_Liu_17.pdf
Résumé
This paper proposes a comparative approach to visual metaphors in Chinese-Mandarin and British-English educational videos about the climate crisis. In the English language, many theoretical concepts are described metaphorically: this is especially true for the “greenhouse” effect and the carbon “footprint”. However, in Chinese-Mandarin, the metaphor ical meaning of these two expressions seems to differ (“the amount of emitted carbon”). The existing literature has shown that metaphors are prevalent in educational discourse about the climate crisis (Manca and Spinzi 2022) as they can fulfil a pedagogical function (Augé, 2022a; Deignan, et al., 2019). We therefore ask how different degrees of metaphoricity are realised visually, in educational videos aimed at children. To address this question, we compiled a dataset of 43 educational videos explaining the concepts of the “greenhouse effect” and the “carbon footprint” in English and Mandarin languages. Our analysis sheds light on the different educational uses of visual metaphors in both languages. This paper aims to illustrate such differences through the qualitative analysis of 9 visual occurrences extracted from our dataset, which all use metaphors following different educational strategies. For instance, English videos transform the verbal source concepts of the “greenhouse effect” and “carbon footprint” metaphors into visual source concepts (visual representations of a literal “greenhouse” and a literal “footprint”). In contrast, Chinese -Mandarin videos rely on a plura lity of different source concepts to represent and explain different features of the “greenhouse effect” and “carbon footprint”. We conclude that the visual source concepts represented in Chinese videos not only explain climate science to children (like in English videos), but they also alert children to the danger of environmental inaction