Metaphors and cancer: a trilingual exploration of patient narratives in Spanish, English and Italian

In recent years, patients have experienced the many digital platforms as a safe space to construct their narratives, give voice to their illness experience and connect with other patients in similar situations. To describe their unique experience of illness, they often use metaphors that vary according to each patient's worldview, which, in turn, is influenced by their cultural and linguistic contexts. This study presents a corpus-based analysis of the metaphors used by patients diagnosed with haematological cancer in patient narratives shared online. To this end, the article draws on a corpus of digital narratives written in Spanish, English and Italian and uses corpus analysis methods and tools to identify the metaphors used by patients to describe their experience of illness and to compare the results in the three languages. The results of our study suggest that most of the metaphors used by patients are common in all three languages, although some types were only identified in one of our corpora.