TRANSLATION AND MEANING: A CULTURAL- COGNITIVE ...

TRANSLATION
EQUIVALENT
NUMBER PERCENTAGE
1. PHRASAL COMPOUND 13 12.03
2. ADJECTIVE COMPOUND 12 11.12
3. SIMPLE ADJECTIVE 21 19.45
4. ADJECTIVE PHRASE 9 8.33
5. PREPOSITIONAL PHRASE 12 11.12
6. SIMPLE NOUN 4 3.70
7. NOUN PHRASE 12 11.12
8. VERB PHRASE 1 0.92
9. ADJECTIVE CLAUSE 6 5.55
10. ZERO EQUIVALENT 18 16.66
Total 108 100
Table 1: Type of translation equivalent for APCs and their part in the sum of translation
equivalents.
An unexpectedly high percentage of English APCs were translated
by means of corresponding formal elements in Serbian. The correspondence
between the original form and the translation equivalent is counted at 12%
since APCs were translated with forms which could be treated as such.
Apparently, the research results show that English APCs were translated by
more or less unacceptable lexical constructs in Serbian. This fact suggests at
least two things: First, that the influence exerted by the original form was so
strong that the translator succumbed to the interference on the part of the SL
and formed an equivalent formally identical to the original in order to avoid
interpretation, even though the semantic content could have been and
perhaps should have been transfered differently. This phenomenon can be
perhaps named forced formal correspondence. Also, this indicates that the
SL in translation can influence the TL by presenting erstwhile non-existant
formal elements into it. The fact that this is the case in contemporary
Serbian more than ever can be corroborated by an example from Serbian
which is not a direct translation equivalent itself, but appeared in a
newspaper article from Narodne Novine, Niš, April 08 2005, p. 6.
(14) Ovo je vrsta turizma jedi-i-beži. = “This is a kind of eat-and-run tourism”
When it comes to the type of the APC translated with an APC in
Serbian, the ratio is 70:30 in favour of the APC formed by lexicalized
clauses rather than phrases. On the other hand, the translator would not have