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Common problems of non-equivalence
The following are some common types of non-equivalence at word level, with examples from various languages:
(a) Culture-specific concepts
The source-language word may express a concept which is totally unknown in the target culture. The concept in question may be abstract or concrete; it may relate to a religious belief, a social custom, or even a type of food. Such concepts are often referred to as ‘culture-specific’. An example of an abstract English concept which is notoriously difficult to translate into other languages is that expressed by the word privacy. This is a very ‘English’ concept which is rarely understood by people from other cultures. Speaker (of the House of Commons) has no equivalent in many languages, such as Russian, Chinese, and Arabic among others. It is often translated into Russian as ‘Chairman’, which does not reflect the role of the Speaker of the House of Commons as an independent person who maintains authority and order in Parliament. An example of a concrete concept is airing cupboard in English which, again, is unknown to speakers of most languages.
(b) The source-language concept is not lexicalized in the target language
The source-language word may express a concept which is known in the target culture but simply not lexicalized, that is not ‘allocated’ a target-language word to express it. The word savoury has no equivalent in many languages, although it expresses a concept which is easy to understand. The adjective standard ( meaning ‘ordinary, not extra’, as in standard range of products) also express a concept which is very accessible and readily understood by most people, yet Arabic has no equivalent for it. Landslide has no ready equivalent in many languages, although it simply means ‘overwhelming majority’.
(c) The source-language word is semantically complex
The source-language word may be semantically complex. This is a fairly common problem in translation. Words do not have to be morphologically complex to be semantically (Bolinger and Sears,1968). In other words, a single word which consisits of a single morpheme can sometimes express a more complex set of meanings than a whole sentence. Languages Automatically develop very concise forms for referring to complex concepts if the concepts become important enough to be talked about often. Bolinger and Sears suggest that ‘if we should ever need to talk regularly and frequently about independently operated sawmills from which striking workers are locked out on Thursday when the temperature is between 500°and 600°F, we would find a concise way to do it’ (ibid.:114). We do not translate it into a language which does not have an equivalent for it. An example of such a semantically complex word is arruacao, a Brazilian word which means ‘clearing the ground under coffee trees of rubbish and piling it in the middle of the row in order to aid in the recovery of beans dropped during harvesting’(ITI News,1988:57).
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