Table 1 Categorization of translation difficulties

Cultural (C)

A word or formulation in the original is culturally loaded in the target context due to societal or religious customs (e.g., eating habits in Asian countries). The usage of certain words or phrases based on the culture of a given society may be improper in the target language.

For instance,, starchy foods (e.g., potato, bread, etc.), starchy foods (e.g.,. rice, pasta, chapatti, etc.).

Semantic (S)

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.

For instance, meet your responsibilities, meet your duties, meet your obligation s.

Idiomatic/pragmatics (I)

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, use of idiomatic expressions, etc.) may not be found in another.

For instance, I feel downhearted and blue, I feel down and sad.

Syntactic/grammar (Sy)

Syntactic difficulties correspond to specific aspects related to sentence structure, grammar, punctuation. The structure and grammar of the source and target language may diverge. For example, there is no grammatical form for the past tense in Tagalog.

For instance, How flexible have you been finding …? How flexible have you found …?