Abstract
The Syrian Civil War has precipitated one of the most severe humanitarian crises of the twenty-first century, generating vast corpora of survivor narratives that articulate profound psychological dislocation. This study investigates the psycholinguistic mechanisms through which displaced Syrian individuals encode, restructure, and translate traumatic autobiographical memories via conceptual metaphor. Grounded in Conceptual Metaphor Theory and cognitive models of trauma processing, we analyze a bilingual corpus of forty in-depth oral testimonies collected from Syrian refugees residing in Jordan, Germany, and the United Kingdom. Using a mixed-methods framework combining qualitative Critical Metaphor Analysis with quantitative semantic domain tagging, we examine how primary source domains—specifically somatic fragmentation, spatial confinement, and meteorological violence—are deployed to express ineffable experiences of loss, torture, and forced migration. Furthermore, the study evaluates how these metaphorical mappings shift during the process of linguistic and cultural translation into host-country idioms. Findings indicate that conventionalized metaphors of war often disintegrate under acute trauma, giving rise to idiosyncratic somatic and spatial mappings that reflect altered mnemonic retrieval pathways. Translating these metaphors across socio-cultural borders frequently results in semantic attenuation or cultural realignment, which significantly affects the clinical and legal reception of refugee narratives. By bridging cognitive linguistics, translation studies, and psychological trauma theory, this article elucidates the intricate relationship between figurative language, mnemonic reconstruction, and cross-cultural hermeneutics in post-conflict discourse.
