As a translator, we constantly try our best to get the most equivalence word, sentence, and text. We are forced to choose whether translating the source text locally, or change a little bit of the feature to be able to deliver it more accurately. This is where we face the lexical choices and somehow become a problem in translation.
Lexical problems include lexical ambiguity, lexical gaps, unrecognized words, idioms, and sub idiomatic expressions. The example of lexical ambiguity in part of speech is syntactically or semantically ambiguous words that are often common and brief; words of denotation ambiguity, and abbreviation of denotation that required appropriate punctuation and capitalization.
Lexical gap is a phenomenon where the translator is out of words to express a certain concept, for instance between oppress and aggress. Those words tend to be considered as normalization while no part of it is actually matched. People usually encounter words that they don’t actually understand or probably meaningless, which commonly called as unrecognized words. Words such as ‘blivit’ or ‘chela’ included here.
Idioms can include neologism and proper names and more of a concrete sense. In other hand, sub idiomatic expression has a role to facilitate expression or linguistic shortcuts. A sub idiom expression is sense limited and homologue to the sense of modifier or the part with which it occurs.
Lexical problems may come in some cases such as literal meaning, synonyms, polysemy, collocations, idioms, proverbs, metaphors, technical terms, proper names, titles, political establishments, geographical terms and acronyms.
A research was trying to find out how learners misuse the phrasal verbs, which is one of the lexical errors. Learners used to avoid using them because of their lack of experience or habit of using them. Secondly, they use the wrong combination, for instance using the right verb but the wrong particle. Third, learners used to confuse between phrasal verbs and single word verbs whose meanings are related.
In conclusion, these lexical problems in translation occurred because learners or translators ignore the use of phrasal verbs (for instance) and confusing them with similar simple verbs. Not to mention the literal translation they did or probably the misleading translation.
Lexical Problems in Translation
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Oleh
Rahmatan Lil 'Alamin
