اصول و روش ترجمه(Meaning based translation)

اصول و روش ترجمه  Mildred L. Larson

Chapter 8

Discovering Meaning by Grouping and Contrast

  The meaning of a lexical item can only be discovered by studying that particular item in contrast to other items which are closely related. 

Part- whole relations

  One way in which languages group words is by the relationship known as part- whole. For example, in English, chin cheek, forehead, nose, and ear are part of the body.

Contrastive pairs

  There are pairs of words in all languages which differ from one another only by a single component of meaning. For example, show and see contrast only in that show has the additional meaning of cause to.

   There would be no advantage to comparing the word leg with the word house. They do not make a pair for comparison because they do not have anything in common. 

Contrastive features

   In order to study meaning, it is necessary to have words in sets which share some features of meaning and have some contrastive features as well.

   The meaning components of words may be isolated by looking at lexical matrices. This is called componential analysis. This kind of analysis points to the fact that each word is a bundle of meaning components.

   In order to study words through componential analysis, they should be related in some way. There would be no point in comparing words if there were not some shared components.

   The English words man, woman, boy and girl are human beings. They have a generic component which they share as the central component, HUMAN BEING. 

Contrastive components

    In addition to the central component, each of words “man, woman, girl and boy has contrastive components which distinguish it from all other words of the set.

   In addition to the central component and the contrastive components, there are often incidental components. Their presence or absence is incidental for the contrast needed to differentiate a certain set of terms.