Informing about adjectival ambiguity through translation

Abstract

While linguistic research puts an emphasis on the centrality of lexical ambiguity, translation literature seems to focus on the restricted, exceptional and accidental side of the problem. This article sets out to investigate the empirical and systematic corpus-based method for trainee translators allowing them to discuss the often undermined and neglected problem of adjectival ambiguity in SL texts. This study used the highly polysemous adjective good and its Arabic equivalents in the English-Arabic Parallel Corpus of United Nations Texts EAPCOUNT, a parallel corpus of about seven million word tokens. Results showed that almost with every usage of the adjective, there is a different novel meaning and, therefore, a different equivalent term. Resolving the ambiguity of this adjective and establishing equivalence at both word and collocation levels depended heavily on the head noun that good modified. It could be suggested that a corpus-based approach is highly appropriate in the translation classroom when dealing with the problem posed by lexical ambiguity.