Lexical Semantic Problems in Translation

Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Education, Language, Literature, and Arts (ICELLA 2021), 2021

Cultural problems in translation arise due to differences between the two languages in expressing identity and lifestyle. Translators will find it difficult to translate abstract or concrete concepts in the source language/culture (SL/C), completely unknown in the target language/culture (TL/C). This paper addresses two problems namely linguistic problems and cultural problems. Linguistic problems include lexical, morphological, syntactical, and semantic problems. The cultural problems include terms in ecology, terms related to cultural objects,terms related to life like society, work and leisure, and terms related to organization, customs, activities, procedures, and concepts. The data was gathered from J.R.R. Tolkien's novel "The Hobbit or There and Back Again" and its Indonesian translation "Hobit atau Pergi dan Kembali" which is translated by A. Adiwiyoto. The findings show that there are many adjustments as well as the phenomenon of equivalence between the two languages. The meaning that the author wants to convey, the structure of words and sentences, point of view, rhyme, wordplay, context, socio-cultural, and geographical conditions are things that affect the form of translation presented. These findings suggest that the use of good approaches, methods, and procedures will result in an acceptable translation and convey the meaning of the SL without having to sacrifice many things.

Resumen Se comparan en primer lugar los campos de la Traducción y de la Lexicografía, po-niendo de relieve las coincidencias y diferencias de tipo general que hay entre ambas disciplinas. A continuación se hace un repaso de la bibliografía (no demasiado exten-sa) sobre el tema, destacando que la mayoría de los trabajos se han centrado en el uso de los diccionarios por parte de los traductores, su utilidad, qué tipo de diccionarios prefieren estos y otros aspectos relacionados. Se pone de relieve el escaso interés de los lexicógrafos por el campo de la traducción, al menos como posible fuente para la redacción de diccionarios. Se dejan abiertos varios caminos que podrían ser recorridos con provecho mutuo por traductores y lexicógrafos. Abstract Firstly, the fields of Translation and Lexicography are compared and their similarities and differences are brought to the fore. Later, a review of the (slightly scarce) literature on the topic shows that most of the work has focused on how translators use dictionaries , how useful they are, and which kinds of dictionaries are preferred, among other similar issues. It is highlighted that lexicographers show little interest in the field of translation, at least as a source for dictionary building. A few potential avenues of research are defined, which could be beneficial for translators and lexicographers alike.

According to the school of thought of target-oriented translation, it is necessary to focus on the accuracy of the remarks at the expense of style, when necessary. Most freelance translators, telling that they are specialized in just about everything, contradict the term of specialization. It is obvious that their behavior is looking for maximum translation work. A well-known difficulty for translators, but there is little awareness outside of them, is the fact that the text to be translated is often already a translation, not necessarily true, and it must, to the extent possible, to try passing it back to the original. For a “smart”, sensible translation, you should forget not the knowledge acquired at school or university, but the corrective standards. Some people want a translation with the touch of the source version, while another people feel that in a successful version, we should not be able to guess the original language

Journal Polingua: Scientific Journal of Linguistic Literatura and Education, 2018

Translation is a process to render the meaning from the source text into the target text. A translator, however, will find some problems during translation process. Equivalence is the case which often appears (i.e. culture specific concept, the source-language concept is not lexicalized in the target language, source-language word is semantically complex, etc). To cope with equivalnce problems in translation process, some experts suggest some strategies which can be applied in doing translation. Some strategies are transference, naturalization, cultural equivalent, etc. The strategies which often appears in the example texts in this paper are transference, naturalization, descriptive equivalent, couplet and through-translation. It is recomended that translator apply the strategies if only there is no equivalence problem in target language.

This study aims to observe the development of translation studies through three concepts of descriptive translation studies; product-based, process-based, and functionalbased translation studies. The readers are introduced to some famous translation scholars including their view of translation studies. At the further discussions, this study lets the readers to acknowledge the main issues on translation studies, focusing on the debate of equivalence versus variations in intertextual texts analysis. Some tendencies of variations, such as different grammar and sentence structure, diglossia leakage, and pragmatic consideration are also presented to present to what extent variations occur during investigation processes. Therefore, regarding those tendencies, this study is closed by the description of Matthiessen's proposals about points of consideration to construct a parameter to measure meaning variations. This study may help those who are interested to conduct translation researches and help them by giving options of which theories is beneficial to their analysis.

InterConf

In modern linguistics, one of the current topics is the study of the relationships between languages, as one of the main means of transmission of meanings and the socio-cultural reality. Among the many challenges studied by the modern linguistics, an important place is the study of the linguistic aspects of cross-language speech activity, which is called «translation» or «translation activity». It is through the translation, we have access to the systems of meanings of other cultures, which with the help of translators acquire its interpretation. Translation implies a correct and clear rendering of what is expressed in one language by means of another language. Within the field of translation theory, certain notions have been researched from a wide range of perspectives and have been assigned a multitude of labels. Due to the confusing use of concepts and terms, we aim to present and define the most important ones, with which the translation theory operates, such as: translation pro...

Vertimo studijos

This research investigates the opinions of novice translators–35 students of the Institute of Applied Linguistics, in Bachelor’s and Master’s Programmes of Technical Translation at Riga Technical University–regarding the problems encountered while translating. Data for the research were drawn from the students’ essays and then explored using content analysis. According to the views of technical translation students, knowledge of the type and nature of translation problems helps the translator solve them and provide adequate, quality translations.

A step-by-step procedure for translating from one language to another, intended for students who are going to major in translation as well as those in other fields of study such as medicine, engineering, management, journalism, etc, who are interested in the art of translating or merely aspire to succeed in a translation test as part of a college or university program entrance examination. The main objective is to give the students an insight into both linguistic and cultural aspects of translation and guide them along the path where they will have to meet a great variety of requirements drawing on their knowledge of languages, knowledge of the subject-matter, knowledge of the world, cognitive power, plus a reasonable measure of natural flair for writing in the target language.

EMBLEM, 2054 BS, pp. 32-35, 1997

This article is basicaly intended for those students, who are prepared specifically to develop the communicative conpetence in translation ftom Nepali into English. The communioative competence here refers to the control over the grammar and structure of both mother tongue and English language and the ability to use them appropriately in real-life situations. In Nepal despite the fact that many attempts have been made to improve teaching and leaming situation of English. the level of the communicative competence of the learners of English is not encouraging. In most cases when they are asked to express in Nepali or their mother tongue, the level of knowledge of the subject matter is undoubtedly considerable, but when they have to express in English, they lack communicative competence. This situation leads us to make some remarks on the present and the past English courses in Nepal. Prior to the New Education System Plan (2028 B.S.) translation was one of the prominent components of English sylabus from primary to university levels. After the introduction of the plan the syllabus of English discarded translation. The Second Convention of T.U.

2016

The present work was completed within the framework of a research programme of the Ionian University and was initiated by the following questions: A: which set of criteria should be employed in order to determine whether a text is "easy" or "difficult" to translate; B: which set of criteria should be employed in order to evaluate the translation act, i.e. the final result produced by the translation effort of students in the translation department of a university. In our attempt to research into the above questions, we examined 150 translations of scientific, political and journalistic texts, translated from German into Greek by students of German Literature in the University of Athens. We introduce the term "displacement" which we use as a methodological tool; it is intended to describe the phenomenon where an element of the source language (SL) ext shifts during the translation process from its initial position to another position η an abstract scale which is common both to the SL and the target language (TL) systems and appears as such in the TL text. Displacements occur on the semantic, syntactic, morphological, lexical, stylistic and pragmatic level. They are considered indicators of translation

2022

Abstract Translation plays an important role in communication among people. It is special type of communication which is accompanied by many challenges, because the translator has to convey the message into another language and readers. Translation has become independent discipline in the last three decades of 20th century and it has its own scholars, theories and schools all over the world. The study has aimed at realizing the difficulties of translation process and the reasons behind them to raise the competency of the novice translators so as to present high quality translation. This paper has used analytical descriptive approach and chosen the questionnaire to collect the data. The questionnaire has distributed to the sample of the study, this sample contains 40 participants from the translation teaching staffs and translators. The answers of the participants in the questionnaire are 54.03% strongly agree and 32.30% agree. The participants’ response in the questionnaire verifies the 7 hypotheses of this study. The important findings of this study that the new translators had weak knowledge on the concept, theories and strategies of translation, also the novice translators were unable to indentify translation problems and how to overcome these problems. The study has recommended the necessity of training the new translators to realize translation problems and how to overcome them. Also the new translator has to study the translation theories and its strategies. Besides be trained in choosing the suitable equivalence in the TL. The study also has recommended avoiding literal translation so as translation looks natural (the target readers not feel it is translation). The study has suggested further researches in the written translation strategies and specialized translation such as legal or scientific translation.

Translation and Lexicography. Traducción y lexicografía, 2014

Firstly, the fields of Translation and Lexicography are compared and their similarities and differences are brought to the fore. Later, a review of the (slightly scarce) literature on the topic shows that most of the work has focused on how translators use dictionaries, how useful they are, and which kinds of dictionaries are preferred, among other similar issues. It is highlighted that lexicographers show little interest in the field of translation, at least as a source for dictionary building. A few potential avenues of research are defined, which could be beneficial for translators and lexicographers alike.

2011

The aim of this essay is to outline an operational protocol with which to carry out an analysis of the translated text. The starting point will be the selected texts (linked to the three fundamental procedures: linguistic transposition, cultural transposition and recuperation of the otherness). Then the differing levels of the discourse that the translated text foments (the critical point of view of the translator who is fluent in the original language; the point of view of the reader of the translated foreign language texts, who is not necessarily acquainted with the language of the original text. Finally the relationship that the translated text has with the original, taking into consideration textual and intertextual signifiers that the translation itself creates.

Translation nowadays is noted as a kind of skill of transferring messages from one language into another language. One cannot translate something without ignoring errors that may happen during the process of translation. These errors are not ignorable since translation deals with how to bring the same message from one language and to make these messages into the same meaning in other language. Form may differ but the message itself cannot be changed. Since this paper is not a result of a research, it is only intended to enlighten translation errors that may occur during the translation process. Some errors are familiar but others may not to some translator due to different cultural background. Regarding to these errors, there are also solution on how to overcome these errors. Though this paper is not a scientific research but still there are information that may be used for translator, especially those who always face these similar errors. In the end, it can be concluded that how expert a translator is, he or she cannot ignore and may face the errors, and it becomes a tricky problem for translators.

PhD thesis, 2023

ABSTRACT The purpose of this study was to examine the special problems of equivalence that arise when translating non-literary academic texts. The data of the study consisted of English and Amharic source texts and their Oromo translation of Civics and Ethical Education, Students' textbook for grade 8. The method for analyzing this data was comparative linguistic text analysis along with the assessment of the methods of translation: the English and Amharic source texts and their Oromo translation was analyzed and compared at different linguistic ranks and strata, with the objective of locating potential non-equivalences of difficulty in the texts. These, in turn, were determined on the basis of skopos theories of translation. The analysis was mainly qualitative but also contained quantitative comparisons. The analysis pointed to seven main categories of problems: problems related to differences in graphology, problems having to do with morphology, problems related to syntax, problems associated with semantics, problems concerning pragmatics, problems related to formal correspondence and problems related to the strategies/methods used and choices made by the translators. The problems differed considerably between the types of categories, both in number and quality. Quantitatively, they (excluding the category of translation method) were clearly most numerous in the category of graphology; when proportioned to the length of the texts, however, they were most frequent in the sameness relations of semantic sense relations. Taken together, the least problematic category seemed to be the syntax part. In addition, the distribution of the problems varied noticeably between the methods used across the six linguistic categories. In the graphology section, the problems were related to the misuse of amplification as a method of translation. In the morphology level, the principal problems were the numerous misuses of transposition and to a lesser degree reduction as a method of translation. Moreover, in the syntax, semantics and pragmatics the problems of translation methods were numerous in the misuse of literal translation, modulation and transference respectively. Because of all the problems, the TT was equivalent in none of the six analyzing criteria. The results suggest that it will probably never be possible to attain full equivalence between the English and Amharic STs and Oromo TT. A relatively high level of equivalence, however, seems to be attainable. To this end, the study of the students' text of grade 8 civics and Ethical Education makes it clear that it is essential to have a committee that shoulders the responsibility of translating academic texts so as to avoid the production of deficient translations. This committee should include highly knowledgeable scholars in both the SLs and the TL.