LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow

Volume 20:5 May 2020
ISSN 1930-2940

Editors:
         Sam Mohanlal, Ph.D.
         B. Mallikarjun, Ph.D.
         A. R. Fatihi, Ph.D.
         G. Baskaran, Ph.D.
         T. Deivasigamani, Ph.D.
         Pammi Pavan Kumar, Ph.D.
         Soibam Rebika Devi, M.Sc., Ph.D.

Managing Editor & Publisher: M. S. Thirumalai, Ph.D.

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Lexical Gaps and Untraslatability in Translation

Prof. Rajendran Sankaravelayuthan

1. Introduction

Linguists consider the word as a crucial unit in their description of language. While doing so they mostly focus on those words that are recognized as part of the vocabulary of a language. Sometimes it is relevant to consider the words that are not part of the vocabulary. They can be referred to as non-existing words. In lexical semantics, it is customary to talk about lexical gaps instead of referring to non-existing words. The non-existing words are indications of “gaps” or “holes” in the lexicon of the language that could be filled.

Lexical gaps are also known as lexical lacunae. The vocabulary of all the languages, including English and Tamil, shows lexical gaps. For example, the English noun horse as a hypernym incorporates its denotation both stallion (male horse) and mare (female horse). However, there is no such hypernym in the case of cows and bulls, which subsumes both cow and bull in denotation. The absence of such a hypernym is called a lexical gap. Lyons (1977, pp. 301-305) addresses lexical gaps from a structuralist perspective. He defines lexical gaps as slots in a patterning. Wang (1989) defines lexical gaps as empty linguistic symbols and Fan (1989) defines them as empty spaces in a lexeme cluster. Rajendran (2001) defines lexical gap as a vacuum in the vocabulary structure of a language.

We always encounter the lexical gaps when we try to translate one language into another or develop a bilingual or multilingual dictionary or lexical data bases like WordNet or Thesaurus or Ontology for the vocabulary of a language. The present work addresses how lexical gaps constitute a thorny area for translation between English and Tamil and the strategies adopted by the translators to encounter or overcome the problem of the lexical gap.

Untranslatability is a property of a text or of any utterance, in one language, for which no equivalent text or utterance can be found in another language when translated. Terms are, however, neither exclusively translatable nor exclusively untranslatable. Rather, the difficult level of translation depends on their nature, as well as on the translator's knowledge of the languages in question. Quite often, a text or utterance that is considered "untranslatable" is actually a lacuna or lexical gap. That is, there is no one-to-one equivalence between the word, expression or turn of phrase in the source language and another word, expression or turn of phrase in the target language. A translator can, however, resort to number of translation procedures to compensate lexical gap. Therefore, untranslatability or difficulty of translation does not always carry deep linguistic relativity implications; denotation can virtually always be translated, given enough circumlocution, although connotation may be ineffable or inefficient to convey. (Wikipedia on “Untranslatability”).

This is only the beginning part of the article. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.

Prof. Rajendran Sankaravelayuthan
Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetam University
Coimbatore 641 112
rajushush@gmail.com
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