I am translating a sentence to English that literally means:
The world seems to be pregnant with an environmental crisis.
By looking up pregnant in dictionaries like Cambridge and Merriam Webster, I found no example usage similar to my sentence.
Coming from the source language, I find it natural and it means that there is potential environmental crisis coming up in future for the world, but I am afraid this might sound weird in English.
As an alternative, I can write for example:
The world is moving toward an environmental crisis
However, I am curious if there is any usage for pregnant as mentioned in the first sentence in English literature and if it is legal from grammatical point of view.
Any tips?
Best Answer
Depends what you mean by OK. It is grammatical, the meaning is apparent, and you would not be thrown in gaol for writing it. And (written later) I see that @Wilk has found some examples of “pregnant with crisis”.
However I would not write it myself as I find it rather forced and unnatural. Perhaps the psychological basis of this is a positive association of pregnancy with life, rather the negative crisis. The sort of metaphor I would use for a latent crisis would be something like:
Clearly it depends on the literary style of the original, but if I were translating it into English, if at all possible, I would abort the pregnancy and write something straightforward, like:
or
I would try to translate the idea, not the individual words.