Translating anthropomorphic metaphors of war: an ecolinguistic approach

: This paper explores the formation of the anthropomorphic image of war in German and Ukrainian, highlighting the primary associations connected with the concept "war", revealing the influence of mass media on the deeply rooted patterns of anthropomorphic metaphor and discussing semantic aspects of its translation. The data was derived from the German and Ukrainian mass media (2014-2021) and verified within the framework of the sociolinguistic experiment, word association test to investigate the conceptualisation of war by the speakers of both languages in order to show that the choice of equivalents while translating publications about war should correspond to the socio-cultural dimension of a particular speech community, maintaining the ecolinguistic balance. Fifty respondents (25 German-speaking and 25 Ukrainian-speaking) aged from 18 to 50 (and above) were questioned, forming the focus-group for the pilot survey. The semantic and contextual analysis of the media publications, the conducted survey explicated that the main conceptual metaphorical and metaphtonymical patterns forming the anthropomorphic representation of war are used to revise the main principles of intercultural relations and proclaim the new age of the posthuman ethics underlining the inconsistency of war for the human nature. It was found out that the anthropomorphic metaphor is a means of media influence awaking the ecolinguistic consciousness, changing the translator's role to that of a mediator and peacemaker. Differences in the conceptualisation of war in German and Ukrainian can provoke misunderstanding or an inevitable semantic loss while translating anthropomorphic metaphors.


Introduction
The modern mass media is not only a means of public opinion formation, an elaborated system of obtaining and retranslating of the up-to-date information about the most important world news but also a substantial part of the ecological environment in which humanity exists. Therefore, intercultural communication is based on ideas and stereotypes widespread in the media space, disseminated and reduplicated by numerous online publications, ensuring their global impact. The digitalisation of the information flow changes the process of delivering media content extensively.
The influence of media communication on mass consciousness is actively studied within one of the modern linguistics areas -media ecology. Media ecology within the 1 ecolinguistic mode of discursive studies (considered as multimodal [1, p. 5]) aims at promoting ecolinguistics consciousness, harmonising the coexistence of different languages and cultures in a multicultural, multilingual continuum, contributing to the formation of posthumanism ethics, which is determined by a new way of thinking (focused on achieving the common well-being). In this context, the media and journalists, as well as translators, have a shared responsibility for the atmosphere they create, which a priori should be aimed at uniting society, rather than inciting conflict and hostility. It is crucial to determine how media content affects the formation of speakers' specific ideas, forming their figurative world, because, that is namely the emotional plane of news reports which is the basis for their success and citation rank of individual publications.
The ecolinguistic perspective within modern linguistic studies, following new "prospects and aspirations" [2, p. 2] proclaims a departure from the anthropocentric worldview, which is more focused on humans, who perceive nature solely as a means of satisfying their needs [3, p. 347]. Instead, the ecolinguistic approach to communication is enhanced, according to which much attention is paid to each statement's correctness and the consequences it causes. The role of the translator / interpreter (often journalist at the same time) is changing significantly [4, p. 86], predetermining the active position of a mediator, who realises the importance of the ecological balance in a particular speech community, makes efforts to guarantee this balance by choosing the right translation equivalents, giving background information for the so-called asymmetrical editions (Ukrainian / English): "Tyzhden", "Day", "Unian" or multilingual, including the German-Ukrainian version, for example: 'Deutsche Welle" and many others. Sometimes that means for the translator / interpreter being a peacemaker by choosing the most neutral equivalents for the translation of news.
Mass media translation strategies appear to be in the centre of interest for ecolinguistics because "…translated news contributes to the shaping of readers' opinions, actively influencing the way they perceive the world around them." [5, p. 35] and it seems to be justified to treat media as an environment [6, p. 162]. The functions of semantical transformations while translating / interpreting and the role of the translators' personality often remain invisible for the readers. They perceive the source text and the target text as the same source of information unaware of the semantic changes on the cultural and linguistic planes.
The proposed research aims at outlining primary associations related to the concept of WAR, revealing the impact of mass media on the representation and conceptualisation of WAR in German-speaking and Ukrainian-speaking focus groups, examining the understanding of the main metaphorical and metonymical patterns, which create an anthropomorphic image of war [7,8]. It is the anthropomorphic image of war in mass media publications that draws readers' attention to the incompatibility of human nature and global devastating and cruel consequences of war. The latter allows journalists to cultivate a critical attitude to the military actions according to the ecolinguistic approach and penetrate the deepest roots of human nature. Publications on media discourse, investigating war and violence [9][10][11][12], the latest theoretical and empirical findings in the field of ecolinguistics and media ecology are taken into account, creating the relevant methodological background of this study [3,13,6,14,15]. The recent discussions in the field of translation theory helped to clarify the scope and the theoretical framework of this research, namely those, dealing with the translation of metaphor [16,4,17].
It is for the first time when an ecolinguistic approach to language studies, a media ecology perspective [15, p. 108] is combined with the methodology of the socio-and psycholinguistic experiments (word association test in particular) to provide a comprehensive research of the anthropomorphic image of war in the mass media publications, see the previous publications on the topic [7,8]. The attention is focused on the semantic aspects of the anthropomorphic metaphor translation in German and Ukrainian. The complex analysis of the empirical data received from the German-speaking and Ukrainian-speaking respondents enabled a better understanding of the anthropomorphic metaphor's categorisation by the speakers of both languages under study.
The evaluation of the results obtained helps to choose the right translating strategy when dealing with the anthropomorphic metaphors and understand their meaning and pragmatic value. As it is impossible to present the whole investigation in this proceedings paper, the main postulates are exemplified by the most compelling examples. The empirical data is extracted mainly from German and Ukrainian papers, but the English-Ukrainian contexts in different asymmetrical editions are considered as well. A multilingual translation of the mass media publication causes many different problems for the media platforms. They are explained by the ethnocultural differences, which should be taken into account, instant search for the proper equivalents, which does not correspond to media translations' general speed. Many of them preserve only the initial sense of an article, published in the source language and a significant number of articles in multilingual editions are still translated only in one or two languages. The semantic aspect of translation is the highest priority for the translators / interpreters. The published contents should be readable; they form the public opinion being much more than just a source of information.

Methodological premises
It is always a tremendous challenge to find a suitable metaphor while translating, which would respect the languages diversity and different mental organisation of the language speakers, their life experiences, significantly different worldviews and consider different metaphorical conceptualisations of the world. That would mean applying an ecological approach aimed at mutual understanding and preserving the speakers' identity [13, p. 214]. There is also a doubt whether different linguistic types of metaphor should or can be translated in different ways, or one should also preserve the type of metaphor and its stylistic features, originating from the source text. "These distinctions suggest that, in translation, we need to be aware of conceptual elements which are universal and make sure they are retained, while also trying to keep whatever is specific to the culture or writer in question." [16, p. 98]. Thus a careful conceptual analysis of the metaphor which has to be translated should precede the translation itself.
The conceptual metaphors can be universal, but they are often based on rather specific association in particular languages and then are difficult to translate. "Transference of meaning based on metaphorical comparison existing in one language need not necessarily exist in another." [17, p. 131]. This study will demonstrate how gender-specific stereotypes influence the formation of the anthropomorphic image of war in German and Ukrainian, resulting from the grammatical gender markers existing in the language structure.
At the first stage of the study, the anthropomorphic metaphors were derived from the contexts in German and Ukrainian mass media, dated from 2014-2021, the corpus of texts of the German Language Institute in Mannheim (IDS), in particular COSMAS II (DeReKo-2018-II), was also used to record the anthropomorphic representation of war in German. The empirical data helped to identify the basic conceptual models of the anthropomorphic representation of war in German and Ukrainian mass media [7, p. 171-175], in particular, the metaphorical ones [8, p.  "DER KRIEG IST EIN LÜGNER / EIN HEUCHLER" / "WAR -A LIER"; "DER KRIEG IST ZERSTÖRER" / "WAR -A DESTROYER". The research methodology combines the traditional linguistic framework within the theory of conceptual metaphor using the semantic analysis (componential, contextual analysis) and an ecolinguistic approach, the paradigm of media ecology to examine the manipulative effect of the anthropomorphic metaphor being a part of the media environment.
Several examples will help to understand the main problem of the research, concerning the translation of these metaphors. As their nature and semantic peculiarities were already discussed in detail in previous publications [7,8], it allows concentrating on examples revealing the essential semantic differences and specific ways of conceptualisation difficult for translation. Such differences provoke misunderstanding or an inevitable semantic loss while translating anthropomorphic metaphors.
One of these problems is that war is masculine in German language (der Krieg) and feminine in the Ukrainian language (війна). The German folklore entails such images as der Gevatter Tod 'Godfather Death' as the death itself and is also masculine in German (feminine in Ukrainian). Logically the image of a woman is associated with war in Ukrainian language and that of a man -in German. Within this pattern war is described in certain contexts as a mother in Ukrainian. There is a need for adaptation and descriptive translation of this metaphor. Such an expression as: Ukr. Кому війна, а кому мати рідна (Some experience the war, some make profit of it) cannot be directly translated into German or English. Of course, some images are equivalent in the contrasted languages such as: Germ. Kinder des Krieges, Engl. сhildren of war, Ukr. діти війни within this metaphorical pattern.
The anthropomorphic image of war is also formed by the verbs, usually describing a human being's acts such as: to bring up, to come, to take away: Ukr. "Війна триває і забирає нові жертви майже щодня." [18], "That the war continues with casualties on a near-daily basis." [19]. These examples are retrieved from the Ukrainian edition "Den" ('Day'), which has an English version at its platform. It is evident from the contexts above that the English speaking version does not preserve the anthropomorphic metaphor of war, and the personified image of war is lost. The pragmatic effect will be surely different. The dual nature of war assigned the human treats of character by its deeds, which should awake the inner protest in the audience is gone away and the emotional plane of the statement implicated by the metaphor usage has been changed to the informative one. The choice between casualty and victim in the English version is also rather discrepant. In the German language the Ukrainian жертва would correspond to the direct equivalent Opfer: Germ. "Hitlers Lüge und das erste Kriegsopfer" (Hitler's lie and the first victim of the war) [20]. Thus it is clear that a translator's choice can crucially change the manipulative shade of the publication.
It is necessary to understand not only the models of the media representation of war, namely the anthropomorphic one, but to be able to compare it with the reaction and beliefs of the readers. Even the definition of war does not coincide in the German, English, and Ukrainian languages. The lexemes, denoting new strategies and tactics of war -Germ. der hybride Krieg 'hybrid war', der Informationskrieg 'information war / information warfare' are a bit differently treated by the German-speaking and Ukrainian-speaking community and different war appellations are used to describe the military actions in eastern Ukraine. As an example, a clear difference between the notions of the information war (as of the new strategy of information manipulation with fake news and propaganda, misuse of information) and of the information warfare (as a means of military intelligence, suppression and neutralisation being a part of military invasion also cyber attacks, psychological operators using persuasive strategies [12, p. 49]) is not always reflected in publications, compare: Ukr. "Як загрозу безпеці було оголошено: «розробку низкою держав концепції інформаційної війни…" [21], in the English version of the magazine "Among what was formulated as threats to national security was the concept of information warfare…" [22]. The same notion in German (der Informationskrieg) corresponds entirely to the Ukrainian word combination 'інформаційна війна'.
At the second stage of the research, the sociolinguistic experiment and the word association test within the psycholinguistic experiment framework were conducted to verify the data obtained during the analysis of mass media publications in German and Ukrainian, which formed an anthropomorphic profile of war. An experiment was performed using a questionnaire to identify the main associations connected with the notion of war, metaphorical and metonymical clichés and set expressions, which are used by the speakers of German and Ukrainian, to determine the influence of mass media discourse on the formation of ideas about war by respondents. This article presents a pilot survey result, which should become a model for further surveys. It was launched in Germany (at the Ruhr University in Bochum) and Ukraine. Questions were offered to 50 respondents (25 German-speaking and 25 Ukrainian-speaking), which formed a focus-group in the compared languages. Their answers were thoroughly analysed. Each questionnaire contained a combination of 15 closed and open-ended questions within a free and targeted word association test (an alternative answer option was added to each question). The experiment's socio-demographic component was based on the fact that the vast majority of respondents will be native speakers of the languages under study, living mainly in Germany or, respectively, in Ukraine. The respondents' age limits were determined in the intervals: 18-29 years, 30-39 years, 40-49 years, 50 years and above to involve respondents of different age and cultural experience. Most of the respondents who took part in the pilot survey professionally are involved in the humanitarian sector (however, there are also representatives of the medical, economic and other sectors). All respondents actively communicate and are interested in world news; they often speak several languages (for example, Ukrainian-speaking respondents often master in addition to Ukrainian and Russian -German and English). The sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic analysis was used to evaluate the empirical study results.

Research results and discussion
The first block of questions defines the respondents' general ideas about the concept of war, describes their perception of the military actions, main grounds, and consequences of such actions. The second block of questions aims at determining the physiological and psychological profile of war within the formation of an anthropomorphic image of war.
One of the introductory survey's questions determines how the respondents prefer to obtain the most relevant information from various media sources and platforms. Different answers were offered to the respondents such as -electronic media, the Internet or print media, television or alternative sources. It was also possible to indicate a combination of different ways of getting informed. As the results show -84% of Ukrainian speakers use Internet sources to obtain the most up-to-date information, and the low level of their trust in the television news and other programmes broadcasted on television is obvious (only 4% of respondents use it as a source of information). The ability to obtain information from various sources is inherent for the speakers of both contrasted languages (German and Ukrainian). However, the variability of different information sources (including printed media editions and television, social networks, links from acquaintances, social networks and other sources) is a typical feature of German-speaking respondents (64% of them mostly use online sources to find information about the latest news in the world).
It should be mentioned that the definition of war is vast in its meaning and is used in absolutely different ways. In different combination one can talk about the "war on terror", referring to the headlines of newspapers on 9/11 where the term of war gains "a protean elasticity" [23, p. 24] or about "war of religion" or the so-called "language wars" / Ukr. «мовна війна» [24], "the war of ideas and ideologies" [25]. Various forms of war are also mentioned in German media such as: der Krieg der Worte (the war of words) [26], der religiöse und weltanschauliche Krieg (the religious and ideological war) [27] and many others. A certain trivialisation and aestheticisation of war also lead to such new terms as Germ. Krieg der Bilder, which could be translated as 'the war of pictures /photos', Ukr. війна картинок / світлин. A translation comment should be added during translation. In this case, the nomination is explained by a wide range of pictures, photos processed in Photoshop and flooding the internet sources. They are concentrated on presenting the event as vividly and heroically as possible even though all these images are connected with people's death. Their main goal is to shock the reader, impress him with devastations and blood, and they are much less concerned about the consequences of such illustrations.
That means that this term's definition depends on the intensity of the emotions expressed and their stylistic value in a particular type of text. "So, as a term, war had both a figurative life and a literal one. At times it seemed the only adequate term at hand to respond to large-scale tragic loss of life and the generalised reactions which follow in response. At other times it described quite specific military operations on foreign soil. Overall, however, it moves easily between one plane of reference and the other." [23, p. 24]. This fact presupposes different reaction of the speakers of different languages talking about the same events. Their life experience involving war as their present-day situation, past or future potential threat is displayed in their reactions to the offered questions.
It is also justified to notice that the German-speaking community tends to use the term war very carefully, believing that it has a global character.
When asked to define the term "war", respondents provided definitions based on perceptions of opposition between two or more parties of the confrontation, conflict of interest, most definitions showed a clear connection between the concept of "war" and such concepts as "power" and "money", "ideas "(also religious beliefs). Examples of respondents' answers are the following: «The word war describes a state of emergency in one or more countries, which is characterised by destructive interference in all areas of the life of the population.", "By war I understand an armed and hostile state of affairs in which at least two parties are involved, who fight or conflict with one another intending to pursue their interests." Ukrainian-speaking respondents noted that the war arises from a sense of inferiority, selfishness and the struggle for illusory ideals, the dissonance of opinions between different peoples. It can be stated that there is an undeniable close connection in the mentality of speakers of both languages not only between the concept of "war" and concepts traditionally associated with hostilities but, above all, between the deeply rooted reasons of such actions and the anthropogenic environment. Their reaction to this standard question reveals that war's perception is forming mainly in the psychological dimension. The importance of the associative connection between the concept of "war" and the psychoemotional state of a person is further demonstrated by questions aimed at forming a network of semantic interrelations within the physiological and psychological profile of war. A number of questions concern forming a global psycho-physiological anthropomorphic portrait of the war and the events in eastern Ukraine. If 100% of Ukrainian-speaking respondents expectedly gave positive answers to the question "Are you informed about the latest events in eastern Ukraine?" the reaction of German-speaking respondents was somewhat different. 72% gave an affirmative answer to this question, 12%  thought they were not informed about the latest events in eastern Ukraine (optionally appeared such answers as more or less informed / partially informed), 4% said that German mass media had been recently rarely writing about the latest news from eastern Ukraine. The informational coverage of these events, in their opinion, is not sufficient.
An equally important problem that arises during the analysis of media reports in German and Ukrainian mass media is the equivalence of concepts used to describe events in Ukraine: Germ. der Krieg 'war' / Ukr. війна 'war'; Germ. militärische Auseinandersetzung 'military conflict / military confrontation' / Ukr. військове протистояння 'military conflict / military confrontation'; Germ. bewaffneter Konflikt 'armed conflict' / Ukr. збройний конфлікт 'armed conflict' etc. Respondents were asked to provide an appropriate definition of events in eastern Ukraine using the above concepts or to provide their own definition. 40% of German-speaking respondents described the situation in Ukraine as: militärische Auseinandersetzung 'military conflict / military confrontation', 36% as der Krieg 'war', 12% chose der Konflikt 'conflict'.
This data indicates that the respondents' opinion is formed by media sources, which tend to use a cautious term for military actions to avoid the term "war" in German discourse. Still, a significant number of respondents and a vast majority of the analysed mass media, reports clearly define the latest events in eastern Ukraine as "war".
The majority of the Ukrainian-speaking respondents described the events in eastern Ukraine as war -56%, 24% of respondents chose the term -військове протистояння 'military conflict / military confrontation', збройний конфлікт 'armed conflict'. Within this focus group no respondent chose the variant -conflict, suggested alternatives were as follows -money laundering, nightmare, circus, and the struggle for survival of Ukraine. The German mass media sources such as Deutsche Welle (dw.de), for instance, tend to use the diplomatic cliches in the materials published in Ukrainian, including such lexical variants as: Ukr. "…врегулювання ситуації на Сході України" 'settlement of the situation in eastern Ukraine', "вирішення конфлікту" 'conflict resolution', "…в районі проведення Операції об'єднаних сил" '…in the area of the Joint Forces Operation' [28]. This tendency is explained by the diplomatic protocol. The clear difference between the designations for the same situation used by the focus-group of the Ukrainian-and Germanspeaking respondents is observed. A translator should also follow the same protocol in official publications and has the right to chose a more neutral variant from the above mentioned or just the opposite semantically more intensive lexeme to describe the news from Ukraine.
One of the questions was offered to assess whether war / military action could be perceived as a positive phenomenon. 64% of German-speaking respondents believe that war always has only negative consequences. 20% think that in the absence of civilian casualties or in the struggle to overthrow the dictator, war can have a positive impact. The Ukrainian-speaking respondents expressed similar views -64% said that war could only lead to negative consequences, 28% chose the answer that war could have some positive consequences (also indicated as the necessary conditions for such circumstances the absence of civilian casualties, the struggle for liberation from dictatorship or freedom in general).
The meaning of the concepts Germ. der hybride Krieg, Engl. hybrid war, Germ. der Informationskrieg, Engl. information war / information warfare is differently defined in the press and by the German and Ukrainian language speakers. Among the answers of the respondents the following remarks can be found: using information war a certain political force usually operates with different means of propaganda (also the electronic ones), trying to drag a reader to the right side, manipulating with his mind and convincing him of trusting the carefully selected facts and arguments, depriving the audience of any analytical comprehension.
The Ukrainian respondents accentuate the contradictory information flow in the modern papers, fake news being used as an appropriate term adopted from English in its original form and extremely popular in Ukrainian media sources. They underline that an information war is a virtual reality created by interpreting and decoding the media's news. Respondents of both contrasted languages emphasise that hybrid and information warfare are a means of manipulating public opinion ("brainwashing" and "dirty laundry"), which are supposed to set people against each other. Journalism can become a heavy weapon that works on a particular side.
The socio-and psycholinguistic survey demonstrates that the main problem of the anthropomorphic representation of war concerns its perception and depiction / translation. The anthropomorphic metaphor remains one of the most controversial stylistic figures for the translator.
The following questions were also to be answered: how respondents in both languages perceive the image of war, particularly the anthropomorphic image of war created in media texts with the help of numerous stylistic figures, metaphors within personification, for example, the most frequently used metaphor Germ. das Gesicht des Krieges / Engl. the face of war, which fits into the pattern of the conceptual metaphor "DER KRIEG IST EIN LEBEWESEN, DER KRIEG IST EIN MENSCH" / "WAR -A LIVING BEING / WAR -A HUMAN BEING»; «DER KRIEG HAT KÖRPERTEILE" (auch virtuelle) / "WAR HAS PARTS OF THE BODY (ALSO IMAGINARY)". The problem evoked by this metaphorical pattern is that it is not always only metaphorical but can also be the metaphtonymical one [29, p. 369]. With Germ. öffentliches Gesicht des Krieges / Engl. the public face of war, Ukr. публічне обличчя війни not only the personified image of war is created but also a metonymical (part-whole) relation is reconstructed to mean that certain people represent the image of war. The metaphtonymy enriches the context with its double sense interpretation implicated by one stylistic figure.
One more obstacle for a translator could be the occasional nominations that due to its further usage appear to be well-established in the media space, for example, Germ. prowestliches vs prorussisches Gesicht, Engl. pro-Western "vs" pro-Russian face [30], Ukr. «прозахідне» vs «проросійське» обличчя [31]. There is still a need for explanations and translators' comments on the topic.
In the case of Germ. weibliches / männliches Gesicht des Krieges, Engl. masculine or feminine face of war, Ukr. чоловіче /жіноче обличчя війни, a translator, is dealing with various contexts and allusions. As it has been already mentioned in this paper, both direct allusions to the image of war (as of a woman in the Ukrainian language) and (as of a warrior, a soldier  a man  in German) have been recorded. Such images are influenced by gender labelling. The opposition of the womanly nature und inhuman cruelty is implied (compare this with the title of Svetlana Alexievich's well-known book "The Unwomanly Face of War: An Oral History of Women in World War II" [32]).
It is essential to understand that within the metaphor Germ. das Gesicht des Krieges / Engl. the face of war, respondents in both languages singled out a generalised image of war as a reflection of human nature. They provided such definitions as, for example, the metaphor "the face of war" describing the damage and loss as the consequences of war, which are visible to the outside world. They have demonstrated a good understanding of this expressive stylistic figure. A war acquires human qualities that presuppose a comparison with a human being and a direct hint that only people can start a war. As the Ukrainian-speaking respondents said 'This expression, in my opinion, is associated primarily with negative aspects. If the war had a face  it would be all scarred, gloomy, dirty, empty, angry and worried". Ukrainian-speaking respondents noted that the expression "the face of war" is a horrible "face of humanity", and also described situations in which they see a murdered mother and children crying next to her, a murdered woman who had lost everything.
The survey displays the situation that war in the traditional view of Ukrainian-speaking respondents appears not only in a woman's image (also death with a scythe over the shoulders), but that women are mostly viewed as victims of war. The perception of the personified image of Ukraine as a woman allows us to perceive the suffering of the generalised female image of MOTHER / WIFE / SISTER / DAUGHTER as the suffering of the whole country. As can be seen from the respondents' answers, the anthropomorphic metaphor formed within the anthropocentric worldview, in this case allows emphasising the dualism of eco-conscious attitude to life / nature and blatant disregard for all moral values and ideals.
The physiological profile of war is formed by a number of anthropomorphic metaphors noted by German-speaking respondents (media contexts also confirm these metaphors, see [7,8]), for example, an emotional variant of the metaphor Gesicht des Krieges 'face of war', Fratze des Krieges 'grimace of war', or such anthropomorphic metaphors as: Atem des Krieges 'breath of war', Hand / Faust des Krieges 'hand, fist of war', das Erwachen des Krieges 'awakening of war', der Krieg schläft nie 'war never sleeps'. Ukrainian-speaking respondents noted the following phrases: the war took everything, the war continues, the war does not sleep, to look through the war's eyes, the war is marching, coming, injuring, destroying and many others.
The psychological profile of war was determined within the personification framework due to such attributes as Germ. Grausamkeit des Krieges, Unbarmherzigkeit des Krieges, Kälte des Krieges, Barbarei des Krieges, die Katastrophe des Krieges, die Seelenlosigkeit des Krieges 'brutality of war, the mercilessness of war, coldness of war, barbarism of war, catastrophe of war, the callousness of war' or Logik des Krieges, Kriegsgedächtnis, Kriegsleiden, Kriegsangst, Kriegslust 'logic of war, the memory of war, suffering during the war, fear of war, militancy' and many others. Ukrainian-speaking respondents noted such qualities of war as: anger, brutality, indifference, callousness, the cruelty of war, danger, relentlessness, power, craftiness, ability to inspire fear, ruthlessness and some other anthropomorphic traits that create the psychological profile of war.
While translating anthropomorphic metaphors, a translator should preserve their emotionality, looking for the right equivalent (if not the best one, emotionally equal at least). Unfortunately, as demonstrated in this article, a translator prefers in certain situations to refuse from using this stylistic figure and translate the content descriptively. It deprives the anthropomorphic image of war its figural power and impressiveness.

Conclusion
The above material allows drawing the following conclusions: This study gains a more profound understanding of the reasons for the departure from the anthropocentric worldview (mainly focused on a human being) by engaging with the ecolinguistics's theoretical premises. The harmonisation of the intercultural media communication depends on the conscientious approach to the produced content in different mass media sources (especially in press) which often manipulate the readers' opinion. The role of a translator / interpreter (often journalist at the same time) is changing to that of a mediator, who maintains the ecological balance in a speech community. The equivalents' right choice while translating the most widely discussed and provoking publications sustains the achieved balance.
The sociolinguistic experiment and the word association test within the psycholinguistic experiment framework have significantly enriched the list of key concepts and primary associations connected with the concept of war. Preliminary analysis of the mass media publications in both languages under analysis made it possible to identify conceptual metaphors that form an anthropomorphic image of war in German and Ukrainian mass media. It is a matter of journalistic responsibility on how to use the expected pragmatic effect of media publications, achieved through anthropomorphic metaphor.
Respondents involved in the survey enabled verifying the data obtained. The respondents' reaction to the offered questions allowed to see how different means of information used by the respondents formed a specific idea about war, its causes and consequences, determined its anthropomorphic image. Although it is a pilot survey, the focus group responses modelled a network of basic associations within WAR's semantic field and identified the main metaphorical patterns that shape the anthropomorphic portrait of war.
Awareness of the social significance, the global nature of military action is achieved according to the obtained data mainly in the emotional plane, so manipulative media content is of great importance. The notion of ecological consciousness distinguished within the conceptual paradigm of media ecology describes the tendency to raise the moral responsibility in the media environment, even if it is the mere translation of the already existing contents. The responsibility for the linguistic "decoration" of current publications lies with journalists, who, by creating vivid imagery (also with anthropomorphic metaphors), directly influence readers' perception of certain events. Presenting the information about military events (analysing and translating the world news), the journalists can emphasise that we exist in a multicultural, multilingual and richly diverse society, where the humans are not the centre of the Universe any more.
On the other hand, it is also important to appeal to the anthropocentric worldview inherent in speakers of any language to stress a vital necessity of avoiding military conflicts. The semantics of the anthropomorphic metaphors (metaphtonymy as an interplay of the metaphor and metonymy) makes these stylistic figures a real challenge for translation because of the multilayer meanings implied. The mass media can draw attention to the inconsistency of what is happening globally, forming the physiological and psychological profile of war within the basic associative anthropomorphic ideas of a human being about the surrounding world. The anthropomorphic metaphor (being an instrument of powerful manipulative influence on the readership) comes into the focus of media ecology as an element of the ecolinguistic consciousness.
Further research prospects include studying the associative basis for developing an anthropomorphic image of war in the socio-psycholinguistic dimension. The language sample could be extensively expanded. The problem of aestheticisation and trivialisation of war within the media ecology framework deserves a separate investigation.