Translation

2. Lexical meaning:
The meaning of a content word that depends on the
nonlinguistic concepts it is used to express.
Table - rose - dog - book

3. Types of lexical meaning
• According to Cruse, we can distinguish four main types of
meaning in words and utterances (utterances being
stretches of written or spoken text):
• propositional meaning
• expressive meaning
• presupposed meaning
• evoked meaning

4. Propositional meaning
It arises from the relation between the word or utterance
and what it refers to or describes in a real or imaginary
world, as conceived by the speakers of a particular
language.
It can be judged as true or false
Example.— dog
a common animal with four legs, especially kept by people as a pet or
to hunt or guard things

5. Expressive meaning
• It cannot be judged as true or false.
• It relates to the speaker’s feelings or attitude rather to what words and
utterances refer to
• .E.g. -- Quiet, please! Vs. Shut your mouth!
• The difference in the sentences does not lie in the propositional meaning but
in their expressiveness.

6. Presupposed meaning
• It arises from co-occurrence restrictions, i.e. restrictions on what other words or expressions we expect to see before or
after a particular lexical unit.
• These restrictions are of two types:
• Selectional restrictions: these are a function of the propositional meaning of a word.
• Selectional restrictions are deliberately violated in the case of figurative language but are otherwise strictly observed.
• We expect a human subject for the adjective studious and an inanimate one for geometrical.
• Sally is studious The cake had a geometrical shape.
• person is a count noun, and blood is a mass noun; the determiners that they can combine are different
• a person, #a blood.
• #much person, much blood.

7. Violation of selectional restriction (presupposed
meaning)
Figurative language
• Romeo: "Why then, O brawling love! O loving hate!
O anything, of nothing first create!
O heavy lightness! serious vanity!
Misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms!
Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health!"
OXYMORON
• Romeo is confused and upset. He tries to describe his feelings
about love using contradictory expressions

8. Collocational restrictions
These are semantically arbitrary restrictions.
They do not follow logically from the propositional meaning of a word.
Laws are broken in English, but in Arabic they are ‘contradicted’. In English, teeth are brushed, but in
German and Italian they are ‘polished’, in Polish they are ‘washed’, and in Russian they are ‘cleaned’.
• a.John swept the kitchen.
• b.John swept the dust.
• c.John swept the dust and the leaves.
• d.#John swept the dust and the kitchen.

9. Evoked meaning
• It arises from dialect and register variation.
• A dialect is a variety of language which has currency
within a specific community or group of speakers.
• It may be classified on one of the following bases:
• Geographical
• Temporal
• Social

10. Geographical Evoked meaning
• American as opposed to British English
• lift – elevator
• waistcoat – vest
• chips – fries
• trousers – pants
• pavement – sidewalk
• flat – apartment
• underground – subway
• Pibes - gurises

11. Temporal Evoked meaning
• Words and structures used by members of different age groups within
a community, or words used at different periods in the history of a
language:
• Thou is an old-fashioned, poetic, or religious word for 'you' when you
are talking to only one person. It is used as the subject of a verb.
(Collins COBUILDAdvanced Learner’s Dictionary. Copyright © HarperCollins Publishers)
Thou shall not pass

12. Social Evoked meaning
• Words and structures used by members of different social classes:
• scent – perfume
• napkin -- serviette

13. Register
• Register is a variety of language that a language user considers appropriate
to a specific situation.
• Notions of field, tenor and mode of discourse are three abstract terms
denoting the phenomena the choice of register arises from.

14. Field
• Field of discourse is an abstract term for ‘what is going on’ that is relevant to
the speaker’s choice of linguistic items.
• “the total event, in which the text is functioning, together with
the purposive activity of the speaker or writer; it thus includes
the subject-matter as one element in it” (Halliday 1994, 22)

15. Field
• What the communication is about and the goals of the text
• What is the content matter or topic of the communication?
Within the context of situation, field refers to:
what is happening, the nature of the social action that is taking place:
what is it that the participants are engaged in, in which language
features as some essential component?
(Halliday & Hasan, 1985, p.12)
Is it, for example, intended to tell someone about how snow is
formed in the atmosphere or is it a letter to a friend describing a
holiday and making suggestions?

16. The tenor
• ¿Who are the people taking part in the communication?
• It refers to the relationship between the speaker / writer and the hearer / reader.
• the social relationships existing between participants in terms of power and
status
• E.g. manager and clerk; how they feel about each other; whether they know each
other well;
• the role of the participants (questioner/answerer, informer/require)(e.g. Who are
taking part?
• Language varies according to whom someone is speaking or writing, and what
roles and status these people have in the communicative act and in the
situational and cultural context;
• speech acts (proposal, inform, question, give an order, etc.)

17. Mode
-It refers to the type of text.
-How you are communicating your message
-Is this a letter, an essay, an email, a telephone message, a
face-to-face conversation?
-It refers to the organization of a text, whether it is written (faxed)
or spoken (recorded, on the phone, etc.); the medium employed:
written to be spoken (political speeches) or spoken to be written
(e.g. dictated letters); whether a text is performative (carrying out
an action), descriptive, or reflective, spontaneous or well-thought

20. Equivalence typology
• Equivalence at word level- the meaning of single words
• Equivalence above word level- explores combinations
phrases (stretches of language)
• Grammatical equivalence-
deals with grammatical categories

21. Equivalence typology
• Textual equivalence discusses the text level (word
• Pragmatic equivalence - how texts are used in
that involves variables such as writers, readers, and

22. Equivalence typology
Equivalence at word level
• What does a translator do when there is no word in the target language which
as the source language word?
• Is there a one-to-one relationship between word and meaning?
• There is no one-to-one correspondence between orthographic words and
across language:
eg. words such as tennis player
3 words in Romanian: jucător de tenis
one word in Turkish tenisçi, etc.
the verb to type - a dactilografia- one word in Romanian
three words in Spanish: pasar a máquina.

23. Non-equivalence at word level and some common strategies to deal with it
• Common problems of non-equivalence:
(a) Culture-specific concepts
The source-language word may express a concept which is totally unknown in the target
abstract or concrete
-it may relate to a religious belief, a social custom or even a type of food.
eg. English concept difficult to translate: Speaker (of the House of Commons)
-it has no equivalent in many languages, such as Russian, Chinese and Arabic, among others. It
as “Chairman”, which does not reflect the role of the Speaker of the House of Commons as an
maintains authority and order in Parliament.

24. Non-equivalence at word level and some common strategies to deal with it
• Common problems of non-equivalence:
(b) The source-language concept is not lexicalized in the target language
• The source-language word may express a concept which is known in the target culture
there is not an “allocated” target-language word to express it.
eg. the adjective standard (meaning “ordinary, not extra”, as is standard range of
very accessible and readily understood by most people, yet Arabic has no equivalent for it.

25. Non-equivalence at word level and some common strategies to deal with it
• Common problems of non-equivalence:
(c) The source-language word is semantically complex
The source-language word may be semantically complex.
eg: arruação, a Brazilian word which means “clearing the ground under the coffee trees of
the row in order to aid in the recovery of beans dropped during harvesting” (ITI News,
(d) The source and the target languages make different distinctions in meaning
The target language may make more or fewer distinctions in meaning than the source
distinction between going out in the rain without the knowledge that is it raining (kehujanan)
knowledge that it is raining (hujanhujanan). English does not makes that distinction, with the
to going out in the rain, the Indonesian translator may find it difficult to choose the right

26. Non-equivalence at word level and some common strategies to deal with it
Common problems of non-equivalence:
(e) The target language lacks a superordinate
• The target language may have specific words (hyponyms) but no general word
semantic field.
eg. Russian has no equivalent for the word facilities, meaning “any equipment,
provided for a particular activity or purpose.” It does, however, have several specific
can be thought of as types of facilities, for example sredstvaperedvizheniya(“means of
neobkhodimyepomeschcheniya (“essential accommodation”) and
equipment”).

27. Non-equivalence at word level and some common strategies to deal with it
Common problems of non-equivalence:
(f) The target language lacks a specific term (hyponym)
More commonly, languages tend to have general words (superordinates) but lack specific
eg. English has a variety of hyponyms which have no equivalents in many languages, for
croft, chalet, lodge, hut, mansion, manor, villa and hall.
(g) Differences in physical or interpersonal perspective
Physical perspective has to do with where things or people are in relation to one another
pairs of words such as come/ go, take/ bring, arrive/ depart, etc. Perspective may also
participants in the discourse (tenor). eg. Japanese has six equivalents for give, depending
ageru, morau, kureru, itadakuand kudasaru (McCreary, 1986).

28. Non-equivalence at word level and some common strategies to deal with it
Common problems of non-equivalence:
h) Differences in expressive meaning
There may be a target-language word which has the same propositional meaning as the
have a different expressive meaning.
If the target-language equivalent is neutral compared to the source-language item, the
evaluative element by means of a modifier or adverb if necessary, or by building it in
eg. the rendering of the English verb to batter (as in child/ wife battering) by the more neutral
“to beat” plus an equivalent modifier such as “savagely” or “ruthlessly”.

29. Non-equivalence at word level and some common strategies to deal with it
Common problems of non-equivalence:
(i) Difference in form
There is often no equivalent in the target language for a particular form in the
eg. English makes frequent use of suffixes such as –ish (somewhat / rather) (e.g.
and –able (e.g. conceivable, retrievable, drinkable).
Arabic, for instance, has no ready mechanism for producing such forms and so
appropriate paraphrase, depending on the meaning they convey (e.g. retrievable
drinkable as “suitable for drinking”).

30. Non-equivalence at word level and some common strategies to deal with it
Common problems of non-equivalence:
(j) Differences in frequency and purpose of using specific forms
Even when a particular form does have a ready equivalent in the target language, there
frequency with which it is used or the purpose for which it is used.
eg. English, for instance, uses the continuous –ing form for binding clauses much more
languages which have equivalents for it, for example German and the Scandinavian
rendering every –ing form in an English source text with an equivalent –ing form in a
target text would result in stilted, unnatural style.

31. Non-equivalence at word level and some common strategies to deal with it
Common problems of non-equivalence:
(k) The use of loan words in the source text
• Words such as au fait, chic and alfresco in English are used for their prestige value,
sophistication to the text or its subject matter. This is often lost in translation
a loan word with the same meaning in the target language. eg. dilettante is a loan
Japanese; but Arabic has no equivalent loan word. This means that only the
be rendered into Arabic; its stylistic effect would almost certainly have to be
Loanword: a word taken from one language and used in other.

32. • https://www.eltconcourse.com/training/inservice/lexicogrammar/sfg
_introduction.html

33. • We can divide field into three areas:
• 1. experiential domain, or what the text is about. In the case of a recipe, it is about food
and food preparation.
• 2. goal orientation, or what the text is for in terms of both short-term and long-term goals.
The short-term goal is obviously to make the recipe but the long-term goal is, I think, a
little more complicated. Why are we making this dish? For example, as some research
shows, there are cultural differences between Japanese and English that affect the long-
term goals of food preparation. In Japan, cooking is, to a large degree, a serious matter
and the goal is to reproduce the recipe exactly as shown, as opposed to the life-
style/aspirational aspect of more Western cooking. I think also there are differences in the
idea of the home as a private space, as in Japan, or a more public space for entertaining,
as in English. This in turn affects the last area:
• 3. social activity, or what the text is doing. The activity of cooking in Japan is essentially
a private or family activity. There is no real equivalent of the English-speaking or
European idea of entertaining in your home or the dinner party. You can see this
difference most