Iv - University of Salford Institutional Repository

lexical items in any language develop much more rapidly than can
ever be expected. More words are coined and much more words assume
different if not radical meaning. Scores of words and phrases are
borrowed wholesale from other languages or from adjacent
disciplines in the same language. The absorptive capacity of a
given language, ie. its readiness to incorporate foreign lexical
units, depends largely on the manipulatablity of its intrinsic
language systems and subsystems to cope with newly emerging
concepts in various disciplines. Complete lexical correspondence
between any two languages, which is hardly achievable, poses an
unbeatable challenge for translators. No two formally lexical
items mean precisely the same. Even in one and the same langauge a
single lexical item may possess a relatively wide semantic range.
Lexical units derive their semantic significances and roles from
their inner-relationships with preceding and succeeding units in
the same linguistic neighbourhood. Furthermore,a lexical unit, if
transplanted in another linguistic neighbourhood e would, for
survival purposes, slightly modify its behaviour to fit in the new
environment. Otherwise( it would eventually perish and die.
Translators should be sensitive to the slight and formally
imperceptible shades of meanings attached to lexical structures in
continued discourse. What translators are expected to. be
concerned with is the arduous attempt to seek in the receptor
language a lexical item that would semantically match the formal
lexical item in the source language. If such lexical formal
correspondence proved practically unattainable, manufactured
coinage and/or a foreign borrowing would be the only possible
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