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Now, how about English as an international language? Here’s an exercise to further test your knowledge of our language and the potential problems that our sometimes cavalier use of it can create. This example demonstrates the familiarity with which we often speak and write — somewhat carelessly, yet with results that are understandable by most people for whom English is the primary language
Certain aspects of this familiarity can cause problems for translators and for others who learned English as an additional language. The corrections in this exercise demonstrate some typical problems that can be encountered by these readers, problems that are generally related to the latent (and, therefore, potential) ambiguity of the English language.
Based on the potential for ambiguity-based errors during translation, copy editing of material intended for translation is very intense compared to normal copy editing. More rules must be followed, with even the slightest nuance of ambiguity needing to be addressed and, if deemed potentially troublesome, eliminated. The following definitions help to define the scope of this issue.
Lexical ambiguity: occurs from words that either sound the same or are spelled the same, and which can have multiple related meanings, multiple unrelated meanings, or different meanings.
Syntactic ambiguity: occurs when multiple words in a sentence can belong to multiple grammatical categories, or when multiple-compound modifiers are too limited in scope.
Structural ambiguity: occurs with leading conjunctive adverbs or missing commas.
Anaphoric ambiguity: occurs when a phrase or word refers to something previously mentioned, but more than one possibility exists for the referred-to item, as in the following use of the pronoun “he.” (John asked Fred to sit down, but he remained standing.)
Cultural ambiguity is a specific form of lexical ambiguity. It occurs when the meaning of a word or phrase is dependent on the source culture and the meaning differs in the target culture.
Referential ambiguity: occurs when direction or location do not necessarily translate correctly, as in target languages that read from right-to-left or from bottom-to-top. It can also occur as a result of text flow, which can cause incorrect references.
Pragmatic ambiguity: occurs when the information presented and the audience disagree on the current situation, due to differences in semantics or the frame of reference being used. (This room is too warm.)
Additional guidelines for these corrections are based on feedback from translators and other “English as a secondary language” readers who could not discern the correct meaning of the English text provided to them.
Print the test documents. Identify the errors and indicate how you would fix them. Then compare your answers to ours by viewing the answer documents, which show how AVS would correct the errors (in highlighted text) and describe the reasons for the corrections.
Note: In some cases, there are multiple ways to eliminate the problem—for instance, by rewriting the offending text. Therefore, some of your answers may correctly address the problems, yet differ from ours.
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