2025/1 Translation

A word, as a lexical unit of a language, carries many meanings (polysemous). For example, the word “house” may mean rumah atau gedung tempat tinggal. “House” may also be translated into dinasti as in the “House of Carringtons”, or dewan in “the House of Representatives”. In addition, the word “house” in “the House of Commons” does not have anything to do with “house” or rumah. On the other hand, the word rumah in these words should not be translated with “house”, rumah makan (restaurant), rumah sakit (hospital), rumah sakit jiwa (soul asylum), rumah yatim piatu (orphanage). Thus, the lexical meaning of a word is not one-to one, relationship with another word in another language.

Meaning also varies across languages. The word “rice” can be translated into Indonesian padi, gabah, beras, and nasi. It’s important to see these different meanings when translating “rice” into Indonesian. Similarly, when translating “go” into German, it is important to know whether the equivalent word would be “gehen (on foot)” or “fahren (by car)”. The word hutan may be translated into “woods”, “forest”, “jungle”, “wilderness” in English. Likewise, Eskimo even has around fifty words for “snow”. The Russian word ruka refers to the “hand and arm”, making it problematic to translate. Therefore, translators must be aware of meaning variations across languages.

In linguistics, we have known semantic fields, conceptual concepts which reflect the divisions and subdivisions imposed by a given linguistic community on the continuum of experience, e.g. the field of ‘plants’ with subdivisions such as “flowers”, “shrubs”, and “trees”. “Plants” are the hypernym (superordinate) and “flowers”, “shrubs”, and “trees” are hyponyms (subordinate). Sometimes, the semantic fields in one language are different from those in another language. For example, the verbs “hear” (mendengar) and “see” (melihat) have their own lexical meanings, but they belong to the same semantic field, “perception”. Overlapping semantic fields are problematic in translation. Words that have multiple meanings (polysemous words) are often untranslatable. In translating, translators must find equivalents by considering their semantic fields.