...ADAB AL-RAFIDAYN vol. (40) 1426 / 2005 Problems of Translating Some Polysemous and Homonymous Lexical Verbs in the Glorious Qur'a:n into English Dr. Misbah M. D. Al- Sulaimaan (*) The present paper aims at: (I) specifying some polysemous and homonymous lexical verbs in the glorious Qur'a:n, (2) showing how these verbs are realized in English by different translators, (3) specifying the method of translating these verbs, (4) pointing out some problems that may arise from translating these verbs, (5) suggesting some remedies for solving these problems, and (6) proposing or choosing a rendering which coincides with the religious interpretation. To achieve these aims the study hypothesizes that: (I) there is no one-to-one correspondence between these polysemous and homonymous lexical verbs, and their equivalents in English, (2) rendering these verbs is affected by the cultural background of the translators, and (3) an effective rendering can be achieved if and only if both transliteration and communicative method are used. 1- Polysemy The term „polysemy‟ has been tackled by many scholars quite differently to the extent that confusion may undoubtedly occur. Any attempt to find a clear-cut definition of the term seems at first to be rather difficult. In this respect, different views will be presented in order to come up with an operational definition. (*) College of Arts / University of Mosul. 45 Problems of Translating Some Polysemous and Homonymous Dr. Misbah...
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...University of Carthage, Tunisia hammouda_s@hotmail.com Abstract: This article investigates a topic at the interface between translation studies, lexical semantics and corpus linguistics. Its general aim is to show how translation studies could profit from the work done in both lexical semantics and corpus linguistics in an attempt to help ‘endear’ linguists to translators (Malmkjær, 1998). The specific objective is to capture the semantic and pragmatic behavior of the noun ‘destruction’ from its different translations into Arabic. The data are taken from an English-Arabic parallel corpus collected from UN texts and their translations (hereafter EAPCOUNT). While it seems that ‘destruction’ is monosemous, it turns out, after exploring its occurrences, to be highly polysemous and shows a case of complementary polysemy, where a number of alternations can be captured. These findings are broadly in line with the results reached in recent developments in lexical semantics, and more particularly the Generative Lexicon (GL) theory developed by James Pustejovsky. Some concrete suggestions are made at the end on how to enhance the relation between linguists and translators and their mutual cooperation. Key words: Lexical semantics, corpus linguistics, translation studies, complementary polysemy, coercion, parallel corpora, lexical ambiguities Résumé: Le présent article aborde un sujet à la croisée des études de traduction, de la sémantique lexicale...
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...examining how lexical cohesion is achieved in Naguib Mahfouz’s novel The Thief and The Dogs and how the translators have dealt with this device in the translated version. The paper compares lexical cohesive devices in this novel and in its English version. It is also an attempt to test two hypotheses that account for the degree of explicitness in the translated text as compared to the source text: the Explicitation Hypothesis and the Stylistic Preference Hypothesis. Both Aziz (1998) and Obeidat (1998) adopt the Stylistic Preference Hypothesis which attributes explicitness or implicitness to Stylistic preference of the target language. The Explicitation Hypothesis is shown to offer a more appropriate explanation for the way lexical cohesion is rendered in the target language. 0. Introduction Cohesion is defined “as the set of possibilities that exist in the language for making text hang together: the potential that the speaker or writer has at his disposal.” (Halliday and Hasan 1976:18). Halliday and Hasan (1976) identify several devices that are used as cohesive devices the function of which is to tie a text together. The cohesive devices fall into five types: reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction and lexical cohesion. (1) This paper focuses on one cohesive device (i.e. lexical cohesion)...
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...The Influences of Lexical Approach on College English Teaching in China I. Introduction 1.1 Background In recent years, college English teaching research focuses on exploring more effective teaching methods to improve the students’English proficiency and self-learning ability. China's college English teaching find itself caught in a dilemma of time-consuming but low-efficiency. The undesirable language teaching situation drives the teaching researchers to make great efforts to innovate present teaching ideas and methods. No matter how much attention has been paid to reading and writing training, teachers and students generally think that vocabulary teaching is of vital importance and it is the foundation of English learning. However, a majority of students acquire new words by rote learning and some students even try to memorize the words based on the vocabulary list. Although students' vocabulary size is increased quickly, their English language skills have not been improved. In order to resolve these problems, we can try to update the teaching idea of vocabulary and to improve the teaching method. 1.2 Purpose of the Paper The focus of traditional English teaching is mainly on grammar and vocabulary, which are regarded as two independent items. In fact, students cannot express themselves very well even though they have acquired many words and grammar rules. So, how can we change the situation? Many studies have been conducted to improve English teaching efficiency...
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...of these key areas can guide and inform at least some of the decisions that translators have to make. It draws on insights from current research in such areas as lexical studies, text linguistics and pragmatics to maintain a constant link between language, translation, and the social and cultural environment in which both language and translation operate. In Other Words examines various areas of language, ranging from the meaning of single words and expressions to grammatical categories and cultural contexts. Firmly grounded in modern linguistic theory, the book starts at a simple level and grows in complexity by widening its focus gradually. The author explains with clarity and precision the concepts and theoretical positions explored within each chapter and relates these to authentic examples of translated texts in a variety of languages, although a knowledge of English is all that is required to understand the examples presented. Each chapter ends with a series of practical exercises which provide the translator with an opportunity to test the relevance of the issues discussed. This combination of theoretical discussion and practical application provides a sound basis for the study of translation as a professional activity. Mona Baker is Chairman of the Education and Training Committee of the Institute of Translation and Interpreting. She has more than seventeen years’ experience as a translator and has taught at a number of academic institutions such as the University of Birmingham...
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...3.2.3. Collocation As one of seven categories of meaning, Leech (1974: 20) defines collocative meaning as “the associations a word acquires on account of the meaning of words which tend to occur in its environment”. Leech exemplifies ‘pretty’ and ‘handsome’ and the collocates of each. These words share the common grounds of ‘good looking’, but they are differentiated by the range of nouns with which they are likely to co-occur. ‘Pretty’ collocates with ‘girl’, ‘boy’, woman’, ‘flower’, while ‘handsome’ collocates with ‘boy’, ‘man’, ‘vessel’, etc. Baker (1992: 47) states that “collocations are often semantically arbitrary co-occurrence restrictions which do not follow logically from the propositional meaning of the word”. She says that the propositional (denotative) meaning of a word does not always determine the collocational patterning. For example, English speakers typically ‘pay a visit’ but less typically ‘make a visit’ and they do not ‘perform a visit’. Another example of collocation in English is ‘rancid’ and ‘addled’. Though the two words have the same denotative meaning, they have different collocational patterning. ‘Addled’ collocates with ‘eggs’, while ‘rancid’ collocates with ‘butter’ (ibid: 47). As the previous examples show collocation is not merely a matter of association of ideas, but as Bollinger, quoted in Emery (1991: 59) says: “a collocation may involve normal senses of all the words in a string but without the easy possibility of substituting some other word...
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...rohanamahmud@um.edu.my Arun Anand Sadanandan MIMOS Berhad Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia arun.anand@mimos.my Kow Weng Onn MIMOS Berhad Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia kwonn@mimos.my Dickson Lukose MIMOS Berhad Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia dickson.lukose@mimos.my Abstract—Semantic Text Understanding is a process that transforms text into conceptual representation. In this paper, we propose a Text Understanding System for Malay Language. The system comprises of two components: Morphology Analyzer and Semantic Text Interpreter. Some initial evaluation experiments were conducted on these components to gain explanatory insights into its performance. All the current text processing systems we reviewed are focused on preliminary algorithms and rules associated to lexical, morphological and syntax analysis. In our paper, we developed an integrated approach for a text understanding system that has the ability to represent the semantics of the text. Keywords-Natural Language Understanding; Morphology Interpretation. Processing; Semantic Analysis; Semantic Text Text I. INTRODUCTION The development of fast algorithms to understand and exploit the content of a document, and extracting useful information is very critical. In recent years, development in the area of semantic analysis of natural language text has triggered many applications in Text Mining, Summarization, Text Understanding, Information Retrieval and Extraction. Extracting actionable insight from large highly dimensional data sets, and its...
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...CHALLENGES OF HUMOUR TRANSLATION IN FICTION Reda Baranauskienė, Laura Pociūtė Šiauliai University Introduction Humour is not a modern invention nor is humorous literature. However, what concerns its perception, it appears that humour is highly dependent on cultural background of the perceivers not to mention different cultures and different languages in which people express themselves. All these factors affect the understanding of humorous material and its ability to travel from one culture to the other. Although humour has been studied from philosophical and psychological point of view in the first place, linguistics is not an exception. The patterns of humour and its mechanisms have been studied by Hazlitt (1903), Raskin (1994), Attardo (1994), Alexander (1997), Chiaro (2010) and Berger (2010). The problems of translation have been studied by Nida and Taber (1969), Newmark (1991), Bell (1991) and Chiaro (2010). What concerns translation into Lithuanian valuable contribution has been made by the Lithuanian linguists Armalytė and Pažūsis (1990). Translation of humour has been researched by Alexieva (1997), Chiaro (2010) and Lithuanian linguist Pažūsis (2006). The novelty of the work: the problems of translating English humour into Lithuanian have not been thoroughly studied, therefore it has been chosen as a subject of this paper. The article reveals the complexity of humour phenomenon which exists in every part of the world, nevertheless, travels from one language to another...
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...Department of CSE -2- Executing a program written n HLL programming language is basically of two parts. the source program must first be compiled translated into a object program. Then the results object program is loaded into a memory executed. Source pgm Compiler obj pgm Obj pgm input Obj pgm opj pgm output 1.4 ASSEMBLER: programmers found it difficult to write or read programs in machine language. They begin to use a mnemonic (symbols) for each machine instruction, which they would subsequently translate into machine language. Such a mnemonic machine language is now called an assembly language. Programs known as assembler were written to automate the translation of assembly language in to machine language. The input to an assembler program is called source program, the output is a machine language translation (object program). 1.5 INTERPRETER: An interpreter is a program that appears to execute a source program as if...
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...Treiman, R., Clifton, C., Jr, Meyer, A. S., & Wurm, L. H. (2003). Language comprehension and production. Comprehensive Handbook of Psychology, Volume 4: Experimental Psychology. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Pages 527-548. Copyright John Wiley & Sons. Psycholinguistics: Language comprehension and production Rebecca Treiman Wayne State University Charles Clifton, Jr. University of Massachusetts Antje S. Meyer University of Birmingham Lee H. Wurm Wayne State University Acknowledgments: Preparation of this chapter was supported by NSF Grant SBR-9807736 to R.T. and NIH Grant HD18708 to the University of Massachusetts. To appear in A.F. Healy & R.W. Proctor (Eds.), Comprehensive handbook of psychology, Vol. 4: Experimental Psychology. New York: Wiley. Treiman et al., Psycholinguistics, 2 Introduction Language comprehension Spoken word recognition Printed word recognition The mental lexicon Comprehension of sentences and discourse Phenomena common to reading and listening comprehension Phenomena specific to the comprehension of spoken language Phenomena specific to the comprehension of written language Language production Access to single words in spoken language production Generation of sentences in spoken language production Written language production Conclusions INTRODUCTION Psychologists have long been interested in language, but psycholinguistics...
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...Linguistic Errors Lexical Errors H: Lexical interference traps are common enough but more invidious are innocent looking collocations which appear to make sense until one asks oneself what they mean in particular context. Lexical interference is very dangerous because it can distort the meaning of a sentence. 1. Context CT: The context itself determines the meaning of words. Therefore, their meaning should be solved in the context. It is commonly known that a word may have equivalents and accordingly the analysis of its meaning has to be made carefully in order to pick out the most appropriate word. There are many ways of translating of some nouns related to professions, classes, and fields in society. H : Polish President affirmed that the Polish government would continue to create favourable conditions for the Vietnamese community, the fourth largest foreign community in Poland. Tổng thống Balan khẳng định rằng chính phủ Balan sẽ tiếp tục tạo điều kiện thuần lợi cho cộng đồng người Việt, cộng đồng nước ngoài lớn nhất thứ tư ở Balan. President Ho Chi Minh is a lofty example of sacrifice in Vietnamese revolution cause. Chủ tịch Hồ Chí Minh là tấm gương hy sinh cao cả trong sự nghiệp cách mạng Việt Nam. Last year, there was a conference for alumni of Harvard University in New Delhi and Mr. Larry Summners, a former President of Havard, he said in his speech that the U.S. has to change its thinking and has to change its look at the world. Năm ngoái, trong một...
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...scholar A. Fedorov, who states that realia is an extralingual phenomenon [15, 48]. The definition of realia was provided later by S. Vlakhov and S. Florin as words and collocations of a language which denote objects, concepts and phenomena that are peculiar to the life (the geographical surroundings, culture, everyday realities or sociological and historical specifics) of the people of one nation, country or tribe, and alien for another, thus conveying national, local or historical colouring. As a result, they do not have exact equivalents in other languages and, therefore, need to adopt alternative approaches to their translation [11, 47]. The notion of realia was further developed and enriched in terms of the Translation Studies by prof. R. Zorivchak, who suggests the following definition of the term: realia is a mono- and polylexeme unit, whose main lexical meaning contains (in a binary opposition) the traditionally attached complex of ethno-cultural information alien to the objective reality of the target language [15, 58]. Furthermore, the scholar lays great emphasis on the fact that the concept is a relative changeable category which is distinct in the binary contrastive opposition of certain languages and cultures. The aforementioned definition would be a working definition for this chapter of the course paper. The definitions of realia vary with the scholars. A lot of prominent researches have investigated this cultural notion, naming it differently, in particular,...
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...TRANSLATION QUALITY ASSESSMENT Translation quality assessment has become one of the key issues in translation studies. This comprehensive and up-to-date treatment of translation evaluation makes explicit the grounds of judging the worth of a translation and emphasizes that translation is, at its core, a linguistic operation. Written by the author of the world’s best known model of translation quality assessment, Juliane House, this book provides an overview of relevant contemporary interdisciplinary research on translation, intercultural communication and globalization, and corpus and psycho- and neuro-linguistic studies. House acknowledges the importance of the socio-cultural and situational contexts in which texts are embedded, and which need to be analysed when they are transferred through space and time in acts of translation, at the same time highlighting the linguistic nature of translation. The text includes a newly revised and presented model of translation quality assessment which, like its predecessors, relies on detailed textual and culturally informed contextual analysis and comparison. The test cases also show that there are two steps in translation evaluation: firstly, analysis, description and explanation; secondly, judgements of value, socio-cultural relevance and appropriateness. The second is futile without the first: to judge is easy, to understand less so. Translation Quality Assessment is an invaluable resource for students and researchers...
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...original intention of the author. In this assignment I will be doing an exegesis on the book of Amos 5:4-6 whereby I will try to get closer to the real intention of the author, by looking at different translation, words, background and by following the exegetical processes that was given to us in class. Outline I. Text II. Translation A. Version comparison B. Own translation III. Historical Context and Literary Context A. Immediate background B. Date C. Authorship D. Geographical Setting E. Social Setting IV. Form and Structure A. Genre B. Structural Plan V. Grammatical Data and Lexical Data A. Grammatical issues B. Lexical Data VI. Biblical context and Theology VII. Secondary literature VIII. Application IX. Conclusion I. Text: Amos 5:4-6 I have chosen the text from the book of Amos 5:4-6. Because in the Hebrew bible this is a unit with in itself: NASB: (v4) for thus says the LORD to the house of Israel, "Seek Me that you may live. (v5) "But do not resort to , And do not come to , Nor cross over to Beersheba; For Gilgal will certainly go into captivity, And Bethel will come to trouble. (v6) "Seek the LORD that you may live, Lest He break forth like a fire, O house of Joseph, And it consume with none to quench it for Bethel II. Translation A. Version Comparison `Wy*x.wI) ynIWvßr>DI lae_r"f.yI tybeäl. hw"ßhy> rm:±a' hkoï yKiä WTT Amos 5:4 Waboêt'...
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...the comparative study of repeated nomination of a person in the original and in the translation. We aim at revealing the specificity of repeated nomination usage as an expressive means in English and Russian. 236 examples of repeated nomination selected from the English fiction and their Russian translations served as material for our analyses. The aim and tasks of the diploma paper determined the structure of the work. It consists of preface, two chapters, conclusion and bibliography. The first chapter is dedicated to the discussion of some theoretical questions, connected with our investigation. Thus, we touch on the problems of nomination in general, types of nomination. The second chapter is dedicated to the analyses of the repeated nomination, its functional types and the ways of its handling in the translation. Nomination is the process of fixing in the linguistic sigh the features and qualities of the phenomena of reality. As a result, they become the meaningful elements of the verbal communication. In the process of nomination, three elements interact: the object of reality, the notional component, and the sound form. It is known that the repeated nomination, i.e. the way the character is named in the literary work, plays an important role in disclosing his image. The primary, name of a character is his proper name. Repeated nomination is the whole complex of lexical means used by the author to call his personage. It is expressed by common nouns and...
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