Table 2 Categorization of translation difficulties
Category | Definition |
|---|---|
Cultural | A word or formulation in the original is culturally loaded in the target context due to societal or religious taboos (i.e., eating habits in Asian countries, taboos in Muslim areas). The usage of certain words or phrases based on the culture of a given society may be improper in the target language. |
E.g., starchy foods (e.g. potato, bread, etc .), starchy foods (e.g. rice, pasta, chapatti, etc .). | |
Semantic | Semantics concerns meanings, which are both denotative, i.e. the literal word (lexis), and connotative, namely the set of cultural and/or subjective associations implied by a word in addition to its literal explicit meaning. This category includes lexical differences and phraseology. |
E.g., meet your responsibilities , meet your duties , meet your obligations . | |
Idiomatic/Pragmatics | The practicalities of how a language is used in its everyday context are different between the source and target language. For example, one language may have more social registers than another (there are a number of different forms of addressing a person in Japanese, whereas English may only have one) and the idiosyncrasies of one language (repetitions, focus on particular words, etc.) may not be found in another. |
E.g., I feel downhearted and blue , I feel down and sad. | |
Syntactic | Correspond to specific aspects related to word morphology, sentence structure, grammar, punctuation. The structure and grammar of the source and target language diverge. For example, there is no grammatical form for the past tense in Tagalog. |
E.g., How flexible have you been finding …? How flexible have you found …? |