Metaphorical and Interlingual Translation in Moving Organizational Practices Across Languages
探讨组织实践在跨语言迁移时，翻译不仅是隐喻，更是意义的重新表达，并分析语际翻译与隐喻翻译的互动关系，对研究多语言组织的学者有参考价值。
Organizational scholars refer to translation as a metaphor in order to describe the transformation and movement of organizational practices across institutional contexts. However, they have paid relatively little attention to the challenges of moving organizational practices across language boundaries. In this conceptual paper, we theorize that when organizational practices move across contexts that differ not only in terms of institutions and cultures but also in terms of languages, translation becomes more than a metaphor; it turns into reverbalization of meaning in another language. We argue that the meeting of languages opens up a whole new arena for translator agency to unfold. Interlingual and metaphorical translation are two distinct but interrelated forms of translation that are mutually constitutive. We identify possible constellations between interlingual and metaphorical translation and illustrate agentic translation with published case examples. We also propose that interlingual translation is a key resource in the discursive constitution of multilingual organizations. This paper contributes to the stream of research in organization studies that has made translation a core aspect of its inquiry.