translationstudies.pptVIP

Translation Studies 15. Lexical TOs: narrowing and broadening of meaning Krisztina Károly, Spring, 2006 Sources: Klaudy, 2003; Klaudy Károly, 2005 1. Narrowing of meaning (differentiation and specifiation) Lexical narrowing i.e., particularisation (Vinay and Darbelnet 1995), concretisation (Klaudy 1996b) = the SL unit of a more general meaning is replaced by a TL unit of a more specific meaning specification (or concretisation) is generally discussed together with differentiation since the narrowing of SL meaning is achieved by distinguishing the various meanings of the SL word (differentiation) and then by selecting one of them (specification or concretisation). can be explained partly by the differences in the mental mapping of the world and by the linguistic consequences of this phenomenon Lexical narrowing cont. language communities segment times of the day, various parts of the body, colours, kinship relations and spatial structures differently ? “interlingual asymmetry” (Gak in Zlateva 1993, Russo 1997) if there is a higher number of words in these semantic fields in the TL than in the SL, the translator must first identify the meanings of the TL words and than select one, which will than be narrower than the meaning of the SL word ? more specific is generally an optional transfer operation ? presupposes some kind of decision-making on the part of translators ? can be regarded as a manifestation of the translator’s creativity. Subtypes: 1.1. Specification of parts of the body 1.2. Specification of reporting verbs 1.3. Specification of inchoative verbs 1.4. Specification of semantically depleted verbs (1) Specification of parts of the body Predominant direction: from Hungarian ? into IE reason: the different segmentation of the human body by different language communities specification takes place when there is a more detailed lexical representation of the face, mouth, hand and leg in the TL than in the SL English makes a distinction between fac