The Translation of Attribute Groups

The Translation of Attribute Groups and Multinomials

Internationalisms (Borrowings)

Translation of Internationalisms (Borrowings) and the Problem of False Friends

Lexical universals

A translator is always looking for linguistic or semantic universals, that is lexical items, that have more or less the same application in two or more languages. Sometimes they are called isomorphous (изоморфный) units. The most likely instances are words denoting objects, common to ecology.

Ex: sun, moon, see (German has two words for sea), star, rain (Russian has no verb), etc.

Another examples:

1) the terms sun and moon appear to be lexical constants. But English and German distinguish between sky and heaven;

2) French has two words for river;

3) Russian has one word for wood and tree;

4) German – the same for hill and mountain.

Parts of the body, common human activities and kinship terms would appear to have claims to universality. Moreover, Russian doesn’t distinguish between hand and arm; English distinguish from tongue and language.

The only semantic invariables appear to be the numbers and a few terms in that lexical field.

Ex: minutes, seconds, days of the week, months

Words denoting universal natural objects are likely to be more isomorphous than others. Such words are much easier to translate than those more obviously coloured by the uses of feelings or thoughts.

Borrowing is a word or phrase which has been taken from one language and used in another language.

Borrowed terms often pass into general usage, for example in the fields of technology ("software") and culture ("punk"). It can be pure (without any change, when speakers pronounce them as they are pronounced in the original language), e.g., lobby (English) and лобби (Russian), or it can be naturalized (when speakers pronounce it according to the sound system of their own language), e.g., globalization – глобализация. (Longman Dictionary of Language Teaching & Applied Linguistics, p. 57)

False friend is a word or expression in one language that, because it resembles one in another language, is often wrongly taken to have the same meaning

Classification of False Friends (Читалина, стр. 25-26)

I. The attribute group consists of two words.

In these word-combinations the right noun is a prop word (опорное слово) and the left noun is a determiner ( определяющее).

The prop word is considered the first member, and the determiner is the second member.

From the structurally-semantic point of vie w attribute word-combinations are divided into two groups:

1) adjective / participle + noun (A/P + N);

2) noun + noun (N + N).

The attribute group (or the nomial word-combination) can be introduced by articles, possessive pronouns (this, that), indefinite pronouns (some, any), negative pronouns and nouns in the possessive case.

So they serve as syntactic words but not as members of word-combinations. As a rule they refer to the prop word.

One should bear in mind that these syntactic words are the markers of the left border of the word-combination, and the marker of the right border cannot be anything but a noun.

Ex: our service station is … - наше обслуживание станции …

In order to understand the two-member word-combination correctly it’s necessary to establish a sense connection between its members.

Ex: a service station = a station for service

We are to transform this word-combination into a noun word-combination with a noun in the function of the right attribute and find a suitable preposition which will connect both nouns into a logical word-combination.

Ex: radiation protection equals protection from radiation

shape difference equals difference in shape

II. The multinomial word-combination consists of several members.

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