57TRANSLATION PROBLEMS OF PHRASEOLOGICAL UNITS: IDIOMS
AND SET EXPRESSIONS
Shakhlo Ulugbekovna Nuniyazova
1st year master's degree student Department of Foreign language and literature (English), CSPI E-mail: mite90_90@mail.ru Tel: +998 99 402 42 75
A lot of teachers, today, are actively searching for new forms, methods and ways of teaching. Modern education should prepare students for the active development of the situation of social change, not only the development of the ability to adapt. There is a gap when it comes to English idioms and how to express them correctly and effectively into other languages as Uzbek or Russian. This study aims to discuss translation problems of idioms and the way of using them in oral speech and set up the criteria in the process of learning then in Uzbek and Russian.
Keywords: idiom, speech unit, literary translation, semantic translation, structure of an idiom
Many may not realize this but idioms are not the same in each language and cannot directly be translated. Being a fluent speaker or even a native speaker, you can sometimes find these confusing, so a machine translator would be baffled if they felt the emotion of baffleness. Idioms cannot simply be translated word for word, as the context does not transfer; we need knowledge of the original language to understand it and knowledge of the target language to find the equivalent.
An idiom is a group of words established by usage as having a meaning not deducible from those of the individual words or a form of expression natural to a language, person or group of people. In other words, the only way to know what an idiom means is to know the idiom. Their very nature means that you can't work out the meaning of the phrase from the phrase alone. There are some simple rules how to deal with idioms. At first, it is important to
Jamila Sharipovna Djumabaeva
Scientific advisor, DSc., National University of Uzbekistan named after Mirzo Ulugbek
ABSTRACT
think of idioms as being just like single words, and then we must
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record a whole phrase in the notebook, along with the information on grammar and collocation.
Idioms are usually rather informal and you must be careful using them. It is important to know that their grammar is flexible and some idioms are more fixed than others are.
As a matter of fact there are so many languages all around the world each of which differs from the others in some aspects. In addition, it is obvious that the people of different countries have got diverse ideologies and every society perceives the world in a different way from the other one and consequently the ideologies influence the languages and the ways of expressing meanings. Finally, as the result, the collocations and idiomatic expressions of the languages diverge from each other in most cases. [1]
Translating idioms is one of the most difficult tasks for translators. The main problems consist in recognizing an idiom, understanding it and distinguishing idiomatic from nonidiomatic usage.
According to Brown and Yule (1983)[2], when the speaker says words to the listener, it is not only to express what is in his/her mind but also to cater to the needs or information services of the listener. Speaking is the process of building and sharing meaning through the use of verbal and non-verbal symbols, in a 136 variety of contexts' (Chaney, 1998)[3]. It is an extremely important faculty, and essential for an individual's living as are the abilities of seeing and walking.
An idiom is an integral semantic structure. Semantics in this structure plays a dominant role. However, semantics does not depend on the meaning of the words that form an idiom. Words, combined into the structure of an idiom, in most cases lose their original meaning. Therefore, it is very difficult to translate an idiom into another language without knowing the actual meaning of this phraseological unit (mare's nest - nonsense; spill the beans - reveal a secret). Idioms are a special linguistic phenomenon and demonstrate linguistic, semantic, artistic richness language, its wide possibilities, diversity and originality.
These standard or traditional features are metaphoricity or figurativeness, analyzability or non- compositionality, fixedness of form, the level of formality, and being multi-word expressions. Metaphoricity is deemed the principal feature of idioms. Non-compositionality indicates that idioms are dead, whereby their meanings are arbitrary and not figurative. Fixedness of form signifies the intolerant syntactic nature of idioms, as they are frozen. The level
of formality is related to the fact that idioms are considered to
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belong to informal, spoken language rather than formal, written language. Last, of all, idioms are composed of more than one word and, thus, they are multi-word expressions.
Baker (2018) postulates that the problems in translating idioms are prompted by two causes, viz., the ability to recognize and interpret an idiom correctly, and how to render the various aspects of the meaning of the ST idiom into the TL. Recognizing an expression as an idiom may not be an easy task as it might seem to. Translators sometimes fall in the trap of perceiving an idiom literally, and thus the inability to recognize it as an idiom.
Baker believes that the more complicated an expression to understand in specific contexts, the more likely a translator will recognize it as an idiom. For example, the expression "Put your money where your mouth is" surely must mystify target-language readers, and the translator would realize that this saying is not meant to be taken literally. However, Baker mentioned that there are some instances where idioms can be misleading for a translator. Some idioms can be interpreted, and they render some vague, poorly understood meaning, the meaning that is obvious resulting from the most straightforward word to direct word translation. However, the problem is that these idioms may have a different meaning from the literal meaning that they mean. A case in point is the idiomatic expression "go out with", which if translated the meaning literally will not correspond with the ST meaning in some contexts. People who are just starting dating are said to be going on a date. If they continue past the first date, people will ask "Are you going to see him/her again?" or "Are you going to go out with him/her again?" or "Are you going to go on another date with him/her again?" Or someone will say, "They're going on another date." If they continue to date, they're "checking each other out.", seeing how it goes and where or how far it goes. When the dates continue, and it becomes a pattern, then people will say, "They're dating" When the couple becomes a couple, then the terms "boyfriend" and "girlfriend" will be used. Or people may describe the couple as "being an item.[4]
U. Khoshimov and I. Yokubov in the book "Methods of teaching English" emphasized that the difficulties encountered in the assimilation of words arise, first of all, in each word, based on its form, semantics and application. The teacher of the Uzbek State University of World Languages D. Nurmuratova classifies the difficulties that arise in the study of phraseological units of the English language into 4 groups:
1) The first group includes international combinations that
do not cause difficulties in their study. They are familiar to
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students or found in their native language. For example: Achilles hell; flat broke; right now; as for me house - wife.
2) A characteristic feature of the second group is that they belong in their form and semantics only to one or another language. For example: to leave school (literally: leave school) - maktabni bitirmoq (finish school; beat the band (literally: beat the band) - jon-jahdi bilan ishga kirishmoq (get to work vigorously). If we start from the form of revolutions, then we must say that phraseological units in English begin with a verb, and in Uzbek they begin with a noun and end with a verb.[5]
Big fish (literally: big fish) - obro'li, katta lavozimdagi shaxs (authoritative, person of a high rank). From a semantic point of view, this combination is found only in English (compare with colloquial Russian: big shot). The combination "Big fish" does not occur in the Uzbek language. It is used in English in relation to high officials.
3) Phraseological units of the third group are found in both languages. On one hand they are similar, and on the other hand they differ from each other. For example: Cry over spilled milk means "so'nggi pushaymon o'zingga dushman" in Uzbek, Give a ring means "sim qoqmoq" As you can see, they differ mainly in form, but are similar in meaning. The literal translation of the turnover "Cry over spilled milk" into Uzbek is as follows: "toshib ketgan sut ustida yig'lamoq" (cry over spilled milk). This meaning fits the phrase "so'nggi pushaymon o'zingga dushman" (the last regret is your enemy). But they differ in form, so students make mistakes when applying them.
4) The fourth group is based on polysemantics, when a phraseological unit has many meanings. For example: "All thumbs" can mean in Uzbek "o'ng'aysizlik" (inconvenience, awkward position), "omadsiz kun" (bad day), "chap yondan turmoq" (get up with your left foot). "Gift of gab" can mean "aravani quruq olib qochmoq" (run away with an empty cart), "gapni boshqa tomonga burmoq" (turn the conversation the other way). These phraseological units cannot be defined by any one exact combination, therefore they give rise to difficulties in assimilation.
According to our observations, when translating English gomes into Uzbek, there are the following features of translation:
- the complete absence in the language of translation of an adequate content to the original or equivalent ready-made expression or phraseological unit;
- partial presence in the target language of an expression that corresponds only in content to the semantics of the original,
but does not repeat the original in its structure;
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- partial presence in the target language of an expression that has a specially formed own unique structure and content corresponds to the original.
An important feature of the translation of English idioms into Uzbek or Russian is the need to clearly indicate the semantic aspect of the imagery of the original in order to find an adequate imagery aspect in terms of its content in the target language. For example, the idiom "to give somebody the finger" literally translates to "give someone your finger". In the idiom, the content of the image is built based on an empty promise. In fact, this means that no one is going to give a finger to someone, since you cannot give it away if you do not cut it off. Therefore, the figurative expression of this idiom comes to the meaning of "promise to give what you are not going to give".
The impossibility of carrying out this action proves the opposite - nothing will not be given to anyone. In terms of figurativeness, this idiom fits the Russian set expression "to promise from three boxes, to promise mountains of gold". If we search in the Uzbek language for a stable phrase that would correspond to the content involved in the idiom, then we can easily find the following expression: "Birovning ko'nglini puch yong'oqqa to'ldirmoq" It literally means, "to fill someone's bosom with empty nuts", i.e. give nuts, nuts are given away, but there is no core in them, which means there is nothing in them. In these three phrases, the imagery is built on various keywords, in English, it is a finger, in Russian it is three boxes, golden mountains, and in Uzbek, it is empty nuts.
Consequently, the study of methods for translating English idioms into Uzbek is a special area of comparative linguistics, in which the lexical layer and its features are studied based on phraseological units. For example, the English idiom "What the heart thinks, the tong speaks" can be adequately translated only based on an understanding of its content. Therefore, it would be appropriate to translate the idiom into Russian as "Whoever hurts, he talks about that". If we translate this phrase into Uzbek word for word, we get "Language speaks about what the heart thinks about".
However, if the translator chooses this form of translation, the special specificity, uniqueness, and elegance of the language inherent in the English language and the language of the writer will undoubtedly be lost. Therefore, only in the case of finding the corresponding phrase, equal in content to the given idiom from the semantic-lexical point of view, the translation will be justified. From this position, one can choose the Uzbek stable expression 'Har kim o'z dardini aitib yig'laydi" (lit. "everyone cries about his own", i.e. everyone mourns his own pain in his own way).
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Thus, when translating English idioms into another language, in particular into Uzbek and Russian, the following should be taken into account:
a) a literal translation of English idioms into Uzbek is not possible, only a translation that conveys the content of the idiom by means of another language;
b) it is necessary to try to find an adequate or equivalent set phrase (proverbs, sayings, phraseological units, catchwords, etc.) in the target language, which conveys the content of the original;
c) it is not possible to fully convey the content of the original idiom when translated into Uzbek, therefore, a meaningful perspective is used that can convey one semantic direction, to the detriment of the entire general semantics of the idiom.
REFERENCES
1. Amir Shojaei, Translation of Idioms and Fixed Expressions: Strategies and Difficulties. Theory and Practice in Language Studies, Vol. 2, No. 6, pp. 1220-1229, June 2012.
2. Brown G. and Yule G., Discourse analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Pp. xii + 288. - M. Stubbs, Discourse analysis. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983. Pp. xiv + 272.
3. Chaney, Ann L.; Burk, Tamara L. Teaching Oral Communication in Grades K-8.
4. Abdelaal N. , Alazzawie A. Translation strategies in the translation of idioms in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, 2019.
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8. Chris Callison-Burch, Colin Bannard, and Josh Shroeder. A compact data structure for searchable translation memories. In Proceedings of EAMT, pages 59-65, Budapest, Hungary, 2005.
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