War, tool, race or building? A comparison of vaccine metaphors between (translated) media and scientific reports in the age of COVID-19

Abstract

News reportage is one of the major means of scientific communication to the public, but science information can be misrepresented in news. In this study, we used a corpus-assisted discourse analysis approach to examine the use of COVID-19 vaccine metaphors across news, translated news and scientific articles and how metaphorical frames may have differed based on genre and translation. Results reveal that there are shared (HUMAN, RACE and WAR) and unique (BUILDING, PASSPORT and TOOL) source domains between news articles (original and translated) and scientific reports. Interestingly, the study reveals that translation plays a role in the discursive construction of news values, such as Proximity and Negativity, which engenders frame shifts in news production for different target readers. The study concludes by advocating the use of a BUILDING metaphor to map COVID-19 vaccine/vaccination for the benefits of health communication. It has further revealed the complicated nature of scientific communication through (translated) news and calls attention to the political intention of news translation.