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According to Dr. Miremadi (1991), translation problems are divided into two main categories: lexical problems and syntactic problems.
1. Lexical problemsIn the interpretation of lexical problems, Miremadi states that, although words are entities that refer to objects or concepts, a word in one language may not be substituted with a word in another language when referring to the same concepts or objects.
He divides lexical problems into five subcategories:
Straight/ denotative meaning
This kind of meaning refers to those words of the source text that can be matched with those of the target text "without missing images" (e.g. mother, father, etc).
Lexical meaning
Lexical meaning refers to words or phrases which seem to be equivalen, although in that situation this may not be the case; the translator must be aware of the intention beyond the words in order not to misrepresent the author's message.
Metaphorical expression
This subcategory refers to the problematic issues of translating idioms and similar expressions.
Broeik (1981) quoted by Dr. Miremadi (1991) offers the following suggestions for translating idiomatic expressions:
a) Distinguishing between ordinary expressions and metaphors
b) Having access to the resources of translating a single metaphor
c) Being aware of different contexts and their constraints on using metaphors
d) Correctly realizing the constraints on the translation, and rendering the message.
Semantic voids
This subcategory includes those words and/or expressions that represent concepts that cannot be found in other special communities. The close equivalents may be found, although the exact equivalent cannot.
According to Dr. Miremadi (1991), this may happen in two cases, subjects to extra-linguistic factors such as those words that have referents in a certain speech community but not in others, and subject to intra-linguistic factors such as those concepts that may exist in two language communities but the structure of their use may be completely different, Dagut (1931) believes, as Dr. Miremadi (1991) mentioned, that this case occurs when the systems of lexicalization of shared expressions are different from each other.
Proper names
The last but not the least sub-category in this group is the problem of proper names. Although proper names refer to individuals and can be transcribed from one language into another, sometimes the specific meaning that they carry, which do not exist in the target speech community, may be lost (e.g. Asghar Rize in Persian).
2. Syntactic problems
Syntactic problems are the other main category of translation problems; as Dr. Miremadi (1991) quoted Nida (1975), one can find no two languages that have the exact identical systems of structural organizations (i.e. language structure varies from one language to another).
These differences include:
Word classes
Languages differ from each other in the internal word formation of language classification.
Grammatical relations
This difference exists among the languages in the way that a constituent of a sentence functions within that sentence.
Word order
Style
Pragmatic aspects
Considering all these problems, a translator is expected to convey the message of the source text to target readers; however, there is no completely exact translation between any two languages and as Dr. Miremadi (1991) quoted Werner (1961), the degree of approximation between two language systems determines the effectiveness of the translation.
