'Coral bleaching': Lexical-conceptual projection in English and Arabic

The use of conceptual metaphor is a prolific method in the creation of new terms in scientific language. Very frequently, the translation and conceptual transfer of these metaphors from English, the lingua franca, are used in order to create new terms in many languages, Arabic amongst them. In this research, principles of the Frame-based Terminology (Faber, 2012) have been applied in order to study the conceptual metaphor of 'coral bleaching', and to analyze the transfer from English into Arabic of this term, together with the corresponding frame elements. This has allowed to observe the so-called domain loss phenomenon (Bordet, 2016) in the target culture and language. Results were obtained through contrastive terminological analysis based on a corpus extracted from specialized texts in the subdomain of climate change.