Peculiarities în Translating Phraseological Units From English into Romanian

Introduction

This is an actual topic; investigating it, you achieve great knowledges. It is quite difficult to understand somebody without knowing all the colors, peculiarities and particularities of his language . Translating is a process one has to be devoted to in order to decode the right message. One who works in this area must work carefully with words that hide a meaning, because it is very easy “damaging the phone”, but this is a mistake. Such mistakes could begin a war or isolate a country.

The vocabulary of a language is enriched not only by words but also by phraseological units. They cannot be made in the process of speech, because they exist in the language as ready made units.There are special dictionaries for them as L. Smith Words and Idioms, V. Collins A book of English Idioms and others. In these dictionaries you can easily decode the message.

It would not be a such an explored branch if there were not dictionaries of idioms. Translating idioms one has to penetrate the context, circumstances in which this content was written and be unlimited in thinking. This is like a perfectly resolved equation, you have the unknowns and the variables and you have to do all the changes possible in order to find out the result..

Between all these notions related to phraseological units, phraseological fusions are the most difficult to translate, because they lack motivation. Their meaning cannot be deduced from the meanings of their component elements.

Some linguists do not ascribe proverbs and saying to the category of phraseological unities because they are taken from people’s speech and underwent changes while traveling from mouth to mouth. But anyway they are phraseological units, because they have the direct meaning, Sometimes they may have the opposite meaning.

Somebody could easily confuse a phraseological unit with a stylistic device, because they both have in common the hidden meaning, but there is a difference between them. There is a transference based on metaphor or simile but it is wrong to consider them as being the same

It was possible to explore this topic thank to the methods research used, which helped a lot. Phraseological units cannot be studied without a definition, criteria of classification, classifications by different authors, comparing or contrasting, analyzing particular cases. This research includes classifications according to the ways phraseological unit are formed, according to the degree of motivation of their meaning, according to their structure and their part of speech meaning. It is obiective to express more opinions,classification while searching a topic. To offer a large spectrum of poits of view is necessary, in order to be reliable and the sourses matter ,they have to be true,searched and revised by specialists.

Every language has such patterns as phraseological units whom native speakers are used to or look for their definitions in reliable sources in order to get the point. Some of these have equivalents while others not, and the peculiarities of translating them from English into Romanian seems to be very interesting due to the fact that there can be word by word translation , there can be equivalences or just explanation.

The motivation to study closer the phraseological units in S.W. Maugham’s works was dictated by the large amount of idioms, which makes the language more colorful and more expressive. Besides this colored elements, i.e. phraseological units, make the context difficult to understand and, while translating them, the meaning may be lost. Moreover, there is a dictionary of phraseological units , where the English explanations or the Romanian equivalents are indicated.

The purpose of this work is to identify the semantic and idiomatic peculiarities of translating the phraseological units and to determine the means used for this.

The practical value of this work consists in the realization of a three classifications and compilation of a model of idioms use in short stories. The appendix containing examples of phraseological units might be useful for linguists and translators dealing with idioms. The glossary of phraseological units constitutes a beginning for a eventual more complex study of idioms.

The objectives of this study are:

- to define the concept of translation;

- to classify the ways of translation;

- to establish the differences between different types of translation;

- to define phraseological units;

-to characterize and classify the phraseological units on the basis of the compiled corpus linguistic;

- to analyze phraseological units from the semantic perspective;

- to determine the effect of different ways of translation from English into Romanian

The research methods employed in the work are analysis, which was used for the study of phraseological units and determining their essential features; diachronic analysis, that focuses on the etymology and the historical evolution of phraseological units; the classification, and the contextual analysis.

The structure of this paper features an introduction, two chapters, conclusions, a bibliography, a glossary of terms and an appendix.

The first chapter focuses on the study of the types of translation related to phraseological units. It examines the classification of different means of translation. There are represented the concepts and the features of phraseological units and the peculiarities within the process of translating it.

The second chapter examines the semantic peculiarities in translating phraseological units in context. It deals with a 150 examples corpus linguistic compiled from W. S. Maugham’s works. The semantic and functional peculiarities of phraseological units have been analized in this chapter. Each of this classifications ends with a statistic study on translation phraseological units.

The conclusions summarize the theoretical and practical results of the investigations, whereas the bibliography gives a list of the sources used in the thesis.

The most important sources that have been used in the theoretical part of our research are: Stylistics by Galperin I.R., Stylistic Approaches to Translation by Beier J.B., Written Translation Techniques by Lupan R., A Guide To Translation From English Into Romanian by Saganean G., Matei T., The theory and the practice of translation by Nida A.E. and Taber C.A., some articles and courses which express the scientific point of view regarding the topic of this thsis. The examples of phraseological units were collected from Maugham’s like Painted Veil and The Moon and The Six Pence.

Through this study we expect to determine the features which provide the often use of phraseological units and the peculiarities of translating them into Romanian.