It is not uncommon for a translator to face some translation difficulty while executing their job, whether they are translating a key investor information document (KIID) or a leaflet.
Usually, a translation service near “Silom” (รับแปลเอกสาร สีลม, which is the term in Thai) might encounter five different problematic areas when working. We will take a look at these five problems to understand them better.
Lexical-Semantic Problems
These problems can be referring to a dictionary, glossary, and terminology bank. These problems comprise of semantic gaps, neologisms, terminology alternatives, lexical networks, semantic continuity (a process that works by distinguishing a semantic feature common to one or two terms), contextual antonyms and synonyms (these influence polysemic units: antonyms and synonyms are aimed only at an acceptance based on the context to decide which meaning is accurate).
Grammatical Problems
These problems consist of questions of aspectuality, temporality (the appearance shows the state expressed by the verb from the developer’s point of view, or how the process is represented), pronouns, and whether to make the subject pronoun direct or not.
Syntactical Problems
These problems can originate in the direction of the passive voice, synthetic parallels, rhetorical figures of speech like hyperbaton, an anaphora (repetition of a segment or word at the beginning of a phrase or a line), or even the focus (a point of view from where something is told, like a story).
Rhetorical Problems
These problems are associated with the recreation and identification of figures of diction and thought (paradox, oxymoron, synecdoche, metonymy, metaphor, comparison, etc.)
Pragmatic Problems
These problems deal with the difference in the informal and formal mode of address using “you”, as well as, sarcasm, humor, irony, sayings, and idiomatic phrases. Also included in this difficulty are challenges like in the translation of a particular text from French to Spanish.