A study of M.A translation students’ errors in translating Metaphorical extension and Homonyms in English and Persian

The present study was conducted to examine two types of lexical relation; metaphorical extension and homonyms, that the sensitivity of their meaning to context causes difficulties for the description of the content of the meaning of the word. Metaphorical extension means two related meanings with the same spelling and pronunciation; moreover, homonym means two unrelated words with the same phonology and orthography. Some translation problems arise at the word level, In other words, students sometimes find difficulty in getting the meaning of some words in English and Persian. Therefore, they fail most of the time in transmitting the message clearly because of the difficulty and ambiguity of the words. This research can be considered a pedagogical contrastive analysis as a method of explaining why some features of the target language are more difficult to acquire than others. As a whole homonymy and metaphorical extension is the sub-division of lexical ambiguity. Due to the lexical ambiguity, words may have several senses and the senses may be close to or remote from each other. This study is based on naturalness; it is a key requirement for Nida (1964). He stresses the importance of context for communication when dealing with the metaphorical meaning of words. According to him there are ‘four basic requirements of a translation’, which are (p. 164): (1) making sense; (2) conveying the spirit and manner of the original; (3) having a natural and easy form of expression; (4) producing a similar response. To conduct the research 40 male and female M.A. translation students at Islamic Azad University, Ferdowsi University and Allame Tabatabai’ University invited to answer two exams of translation test and English proficiency test. It is important to note that the subjects were homogenized by Oxford Placement Test (OPT). The English proficiency levels of them were upper intermediate. Another test contained a number of sentences as a translation test, the test included two parts, and it was related to the knowledge of Metaphorical extension and homonyms. In this investigation the gathered data were classified into three major types; inaccurate translation, naturalness translation and not translated words, the data collected was analyzed via employing SPSS software and the results revealed that MA students made significant errors in the translation of metaphorical extension more than that of homonyms. It can be concluded that, in some cases students interpreted literally because some lexical items are potentially ambiguous, so the interpretation of them depends on the context of use. Context gives the word a meaning or renders its meaning more concrete.