The Rhetoric of Leave and Remain

This June, it will be 10 years since the Brexit referendum: arguably one of the most important events in contemporary British politics. The UK had been a member of the European Union since 1973, following a referendum on joining what was then known as the Common Market. The EU referendum campaign began in April 2016 with two cross-party campaigns: Leave and Remain. The referendum took place on 23 June 2016 and the Leave campaign won by 51.9 per cent to 48.1 per cent.

Translating metaphors, (re)shaping narratives

The polarising debates before, during and after Brexit still continue, as do the diverse and competing ideological narratives surrounding this event, and metaphors have been a key discourse strategy to depict both campaigns due to their strong power of persuasion. My doctoral project delves into the intricate and interdisciplinary examination of how Brexit-related metaphors have shaped different ideological narratives in media discourse – and how these metaphors have been translated. The research draws on a bilingual corpus of 240 news article pairs (so 480 news articles in total) published in six media outlets in English and Spanish between 2016 and 2022: BBC News and BBC News Mundo; The Guardian and elDiario.es; and El País and El País English Edition. My selection of this topic stems from the belief that Brexit is one of the best scenarios for examining the intersection between news translation, metaphor studies and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA).

To set the basis of my project, ‘metaphor’ is a noun of Greek origin derived from meta – change (of place, order, condition or nature) and pherein – to bear or carry. From this definition, metaphor can be understood as the transfer of certain characteristics of one concept to another by making analogical comparisons. For example, the meaning of the metaphorical linguistic expression ‘Brexit divorce bill’ will be understood by recognising the characteristics of ‘divorce’ that have been transferred to ‘Brexit’. Building on this definition, my project studies metaphor from a linguistic, conceptual and discursive perspectives to explore how it can contribute to conceptualising ideas about this event, as well as its persuasive function in discourse to offer different arguments and convey different moral perspectives.

From a cognitive linguistic perspective, my theoretical framework was informed by Conceptual Metaphor Theory. This theory argues that metaphors are part of our everyday language because thought itself is fundamentally metaphorical in nature, and we use them effortlessly and unconsciously to understand and describe the world around us. A common example of conceptual metaphor is argument is war. In this case, war is the source domain, as its characteristics are used to describe argument, which is the target domain. The conceptual metaphor argument is war allows to develop different conceptual mappings or correspondences, such as disputed parties are warriors, agreement is ceasefire, and so on. Conceptual metaphors like disputed parties are warriors can activate metaphorical linguistic expressions such as the following example that I found: ‘Britain would be 'killed' in trade talks if it left EU, says French minister’.  

In discourse, metaphors can hold significant persuasive power, generating empathy and framing socially shared perspectives. Within the realm of media discourse on Brexit, various metaphorical expressions have been used to depict both the Leave and Remain campaigns. For example, a news article from The Guardian quoted Boris Johnson describing the EU referendum as if ‘the jailer has accidentally left the door of the jail open and people can see the sunlit land beyond’. The same article also reflected the pro-Remain perspective in its headline: ‘British exit would be “poison”’.   

The originals 

The articles from my corpus span from 2016, marking the onset of the Brexit referendum campaign, to 2022, coinciding with the implementation of full customs controls. Through data analysis, the research aims to identify how Brexit-related metaphors appeal to emotions in media discourse. Additionally, a process of data triangulation identified the main translation techniques used for each type of Brexit-related conceptual metaphor. See Table 1 for the number of metaphorical linguistic expressions identified in the corpus:

Table 1. Content of the corpus.

A total of 516 metaphorical linguistic expressions were identified in the corpus (81 in BBC News and BBC News Mundo, 278 in The Guardian and elDiario.es, and 157 in El País and El País English Edition). In BBC News and BBC News Mundo, the most frequently used metaphors presented Brexit as a person (22), object (15) and war (14), and the most frequent translation technique was simply deleting those metaphors.

Breaking this down further, the most popular metaphors in The Guardian and elDiario.es were war metaphors (134), object metaphors (33) and journey metaphors (30), and the main translation technique was keeping the same metaphor in the Target Text. Finally, in El País and El País English Edition, the most frequent metaphors were divorce metaphors (37), object metaphors (31) and journey metaphors (22), and the main translation technique was also to keep the same metaphor in the target text, followed by deleting it.

A closer look

Looking closer still, here’s one example from my corpus that highlights the linguistic, conceptual and discursive characteristics of metaphor, illustrating the power that it can hold to shape our thinking about Brexit. It comes from a news article entitled ‘A chance to defeat bigotry: that’s how to engage young people with the EU’ by Owen Jones, published in The Guardian in May 2016.

The Guardian: ‘The [Leave] campaign believes its only chance of victory lies in voters, their pencils hovering over their ballot papers in the privacy of their polling booth, having fear of foreigners at the forefront of their minds’. The translation in elDiario.es: ‘La campaña [a favor del Brexit] cree que su única oportunidad de victoria radica en que los votantes, cuando su bolígrafo vacile sobre las papeletas en la intimidad de la cabina de votación, tengan el miedo a los extranjeros en el centro de sus pensamientos.’

In this case, the keywords ‘defeat’ and ‘victory’, activated by the conceptual metaphor Brexit is war, correspond to a ‘war frame’ that the author uses to depict and criticise the Leave campaign’s narratives potentially fuelling xenophobia and racism. The fear that the author refers to originates from the circulation of such narratives by pro-Brexit groups.

Introducing new metaphors

Finally, it is worth noting those cases where there are metaphors in the target texts that do not appear in the source texts. For example, the following headline from BBC News Mundo uses a divorce metaphor: ‘Brexit: las 5 preguntas básicas sobre el “acuerdo de divorcio’” entre Reino Unido y la Unión Europea que más se consultan en Google’. The original BBC News is in fact ‘Brexit: The five questions everyone's asking Google’.

An active choice for the reader