Metaphors as Cognitive, Discursive and Cultural Phenomena: Why here, why now

This special issue of CULTUS: The Journal of Intercultural Mediation and Communication brings together six original studies that investigate the cognitive, discursive, and cultural dimensions of metaphor in specialized domains. They collectively map the ways in which figurative language structures expert and lay communication across health, political, media, and scientific domains, while simultaneously functioning as a site of intercultural negotiation when specialized texts move across linguistic boundaries. The issue is organized in two thematic parts. Part I examines metaphor as a communicative and framing device within specialized discourses. Part II shifts the lens to metaphor in translation and cross-linguistic transfer. Taken together, the contributions advance the understanding of how metaphor operates not merely as a rhetorical ornament but as a culturally embedded cognitive instrument whose stabilization, transformation, or loss in specialized and translated discourse has concrete consequences for knowledge construction and communication.