Two floors of a metaphor: meaning and structure

One image can be taken apart in two quite different ways. You can ask what it means to the person who said it. Or you can ask how it is technically made: what shape it has, where its edges are, how its parts relate to each other.

People who work with language tend to treat these as two competing schools, and to pick one. That is a mistake. They are two floors of the same building. Each on its own gives half the picture, and the building does not stand unless both are there.

For a company that sells into Russia from somewhere else, the distinction is more than academic. The first floor survives translation reasonably well. The second floor is where most of the loss happens, and it is also where most foreign research never looks.

Metaphor in thinking and metaphor as a system

The first line of inquiry is metaphor in thinking. This is the view from the cognitive sciences: a person builds an understanding of themselves, of other people, of time, of cause and effect, through images. What matters here is what a metaphor means and what picture of the world it imposes on whoever thinks with it. If someone calls a market “a battlefield”, the image already tells them there are enemies, losses and a front line.

The second line is metaphor as a system. This view is closer to engineering. A metaphor has a structure, properties, a composition, an orientation and a purpose, much like a signal travelling down a communication channel. At this stage it does not matter yet what the metaphor means to a particular person. What matters is how it is put together: from which elements, following which laws of aesthetics, with what proportion between the parts.

Next to these two runs a third, supporting line: the linguistics of metaphor. How a metaphor differs from metonymy, what types and classifications exist. This line is there for precision rather than theoretical completeness. Once you have a working vocabulary for the different kinds of figurative speech, you can say exactly how a given image carries values, attitudes, roles and patterns of behaviour, instead of gesturing vaguely at “the imagery”.

What the cramped room shows

Imagine someone describing their job as a cramped room.

The view from metaphor in thinking immediately asks what the crampedness means to this person. A shortage of resources? No room to manoeuvre? That is a question about content, and about how the image shapes what they expect from the situation.

The view from metaphor as a system asks different questions. What shape is this crampedness? Does it press evenly from all sides, or harder from one side? Is there movement in the image, or is it a still picture? What is the contrast between the crampedness and what came before, or what could have been? These are questions about the structure of the signal: its form, its edges, its composition. They matter as much as the question about meaning.

The difference is easy to feel in practice. Ask “what does this crampedness mean to you” and you get an answer on the level of meaning. Ask “does it press evenly, or harder from one side” and you get a precise structural detail. That detail often says more than a direct explanation of meaning, because the structure of an image takes shape before the person has time to think it through and wrap it in a ready-made phrase.

The order of work follows naturally from this. First the frame and the tools: what a metaphor means in thinking, how it is built as a system, how it differs from metonymy, and how it hardens into an attitude, a belief or a value. Then the analysis of a specific image, where both lines work together.

Two kinds of question: about meaning and about form

In an ordinary conversation it is worth keeping the two floors apart as well, even if only in your own head. When someone describes a state through an image, the temptation is to ask straight away “what do you mean by that?” and collect a ready interpretation. That works, but it gives you one floor: meaning that the speaker’s mind has already processed.

The second floor needs another kind of question. Leave “what does it mean” aside and ask “what does it look like”. What shape, what size, what happens at the edges, is anything moving. Answers to these questions pass through fewer filters. The person has not yet had time to tidy the image into a socially acceptable explanation, and in the raw structure something shows through that a finished interpretation would have smoothed away.

The practical rule: if you want to understand someone through their own image, ask on both floors. Meaning first and then structure, or the other way round. One floor without the other gives half the picture. Either an attractive interpretation with nothing underneath it, or precise details with no idea what they are for.

Where a company entering Russia loses the second floor

Now move this from a single conversation to a company that sells into Russia from abroad. There are three places where the second floor usually disappears, and each of them is built into the standard way foreign brands localise.

The first is the brand image itself. A tagline or a central brand metaphor gets translated, and the check that follows is almost always a meaning check. Someone back-translates the Russian line into English, sees that the sense came through, and signs it off. That is a first-floor test. It does not ask whether the image kept its shape. Russian grammar handles direction, motion and completeness differently from English. Verbs of motion distinguish going on foot from going by transport and a single trip from a habitual one, and verb aspect marks whether an action is finished or still in progress. An image that in English moves forward can arrive in Russian as a completed state, or the other way round, while the dictionary meaning stays intact. The Russian reader meets that structure before they register the meaning, for the same reason the person in the cramped room does.

The second place is research. Foreign companies often run customer interviews for Russia in English, through an interpreter, or they commission local fieldwork and receive an English summary. Both routes deliver the first floor and cut off the second. An interpreter passes on what the respondent meant. The shape, the edges and the direction of the images live in the respondent’s own words, and those are the first casualties of a fluent translation. By the time the summary lands on a marketing director’s desk in another country, “it presses harder from one side” has become “respondents feel constrained”.

The third place is advertising copy. On Google, a Western team is used to testing headlines mostly on meaning and offer. In Yandex Direct the text fields are short, and a Russian ad often has room for one image and not much else. If that image was chosen for its meaning in English and then rendered into Russian, its structure is left to chance. A short ad has no second sentence to repair it.

What local practice asks for

None of this means a foreign company needs a separate theory of metaphor for Russia. The two floors are the same everywhere. What differs is where the second floor tends to get lost, and so what the working routine has to protect.

Keep images in the original language until they have been analysed. Record customer interviews in Russian, transcribe them in Russian, and do the structural reading on the Russian text. Translate afterwards, and translate the findings rather than the raw quotes.

Ask second-floor questions in the interview guide itself. A guide written in English and translated tends to contain only “why” and “what does it mean” questions. Add the other kind on purpose: what shape, which side, is it moving, what was it like before.

Check brand language on both floors. A back-translation confirms the meaning. A native speaker then needs to read the line as an image and describe its structure: is it static or moving, open or closed, pressing or releasing. If that description does not match the structure of the original, the line has changed even though its meaning survived. This is the kind of check that belongs in brand strategy for the Russian market before the line goes onto a site or into an account.

Treat short ad formats as a structural test. When the text field has room for one image, pick the image for its structure in Russian, not for how well it translates.

A short routine for this week

1. Collect the images you already use. Tagline, key headlines, the central metaphor of the brand, in their Russian versions.
2. Read each one twice. Once for meaning: what picture of the world does it give the buyer. Once for structure: shape, edges, movement, contrast.
3. Compare the structure with the original. Where the meaning matches and the structure does not, you have found a line that was checked on one floor only.
4. Look at your research inputs. If the Russian customer voice reaches you only as English summaries, you are working on the first floor by design.
5. Add structural questions to the next round of interviews, and keep the transcripts in Russian until the images are analysed.

What working on one floor costs

The order of the two lines works as a model for handling any metaphor you meet: first ask what it means, then ask how it is made. Theory without structure stays a set of fine words. Structure without theory stays a technical breakdown with no use.

The building stands on two floors. Whoever tries to live on only one of them sooner or later notices that something is missing: they either drown in meanings with nothing to stand on, or sink into details without understanding why those details matter. For a company reading Russian buyers through translation, the missing floor is almost always the second one, and it is the one that was formed first.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• Russian version of this article on belokrylovo.ru: У метафоры два этажа: смысл и структура