Lithuanisation of Software Metaphors

Abstract

The majority of software that is localised, i.e., adapted or Lithuanised as a product to the Lithuanian market, language, culture, social norms and values, is originally engineered and designed in the United States of America. Despite the fact that internationalisation has to be carried out as a process of neutralising and standardising the software for further localisation of the product, it is usually carried out incompletely or in some cases might be unperformed at all, if companies have not considered the product to be sold globally. Thus, the software contains attributes, for example, writing conventions, legal norms and rules, culture-specific items, metaphors and other that reflect the source culture and language of the software. Software related texts, online help documents, resource files, messages and other contain various metaphors that are related to applications, malfunctioning, software components and menu items and hardware. At the same time, conceptual metaphors represent the worldview, and its perception is pertinent only to some specific language users. The idea of localisation is both to adapt products to target users in terms of their culture and language and make them feel that the product was designed and created for them. Thus, taking in mind that conceptual metaphors represent the perception of the worldview, the crucial question arises, if it is possible to adapt, i.e., Lithuanise, conceptual metaphors to such an extent that they would reflect the worldview and perception of the target language and culture the tropes are used to represent, categorise and depict. At the same time, it becomes interesting to examine how the trope is being changed in the target language as well as analyse the capacities of the language to change, adapt to and embrace new things it has to name.