Units of Meaning Analysis

1. Introduction

Translation equivalence is an important issue for all who apply multilingual skills in a professional or even a non-professional environment. This includes teachers, translators and students. Translation equivalence has therefore to be dealt with academic ways. For bilingual speakers, it is easy to understand meaning in either direction, however translating or interpreting is somewhat different. We all talk in phrases, in ready-made chunks of language. While these chunks do consist of words, we have to keep in mind that it is less the individual word than the chunks that account for the meaning. Therefore the units of meaning in the text should be academically analyzed. In some cases, units of meaning can be a single word. In many cases, it will be more complex. Translated language seems somewhat different from natural language. In this case, translator should be able to tell us how those two languages are linked. There are good translators and bad translators of course. The good translators are the ones who do not translate word by word but learned to identify units of meaning. Translators’ job is to disambiguate the meaning and deliver them so that others have no problem understanding the products. The units of meaning are only rarely the traditional single words. They can be larger chunks, phrases and even full sentences. These are called collocations. They are the real vocabulary in language. Teubert (1999) stated that “Collocations are statistically significant co-occurrences of words in a corpus. But they also have to be semantically relevant. They have to have a meaning of their own, a meaning that is not obvious from the meaning of the parts they are composed of.” To determine if a text is a collocation or just a series of words, it is important to decide from the perspective of a source language. A series of experiments were conducted during this research and the results and analysis will illustrate how the units of meaning were...