Translation Strategies and Difficulties in Translating English Idiomatic Expressions

‘Actually’ in translation: The case of English and Slovak

This pilot study examines how the English adverb actually is rendered in Slovak translation, drawing on a corpus of literary texts and their translations. As a multifunctional item, actually performs a range of syntactic and pragmatic functions in context, most notably those of emphasizer and disjunct. The analysis draws on three Slovak translations of works by the same English-speaking author. Although each translator worked on a different set of books, the corpus still makes it possible to compare translation strategies within a relatively consistent authorial style and to observe how individual translators deal with the same multifunctional source item. The study combines qualitative functional analysis with quantitative observations in order to identify recurrent Slovak renderings of actually, including lexical substitution, structural reformulation, attenuation, and omission. The findings suggest that translation difficulty arises not from the lack of Slovak expressive resources, but from differences between English and Slovak in the grammatical encoding of discourse-related meaning. In particular, functions expressed in English through sentence adverbials do not always correspond to a single formal category in Slovak, which increases the likelihood of functional shift or translation loss. The study contributes to translation studies and contrastive linguistics by showing how the pragmatic contribution of a frequent multifunctional item may be preserved, reinterpreted, weakened, or omitted in translation, and how these outcomes vary across translators.

JOURNAL OF COMMUNICATION, LANGUAGE AND CULTURE

An Investigation of Lexical Choices in Translation Among EFL Students

This study aims to (1) identify and describe the characteristics of lexical choices in EFL students’ Indonesian–English translations and (2) investigate the factors influencing students’ lexical choices during the translation process. A qualitative descriptive approach was employed, involving 20 fourth-semester EFL students at Universitas Negeri Gorontalo enrolled in a Translation and Interpreting course. Data were collected through handwritten translations of an argumentative text and semi-structured retrospective interviews with five selected participants. The translation products were analyzed using Baker’s (1992) framework of meaning, comprising propositional, expressive, presupposed, and evoked meaning, while interview data were analyzed using qualitative content analysis. The findings showed that students generally preserved propositional meaning but experienced greater difficulties with expressive, presupposed, and evoked meanings, particularly in conveying evaluative nuances, producing natural collocations, and maintaining appropriate register. Five interconnected factors influenced students’ lexical choices: limited vocabulary mastery, reliance on dictionaries and machine translation, cognitive factors, limited contextual understanding, and register and source language influence. All five interviewed students reported using Google Translate or DeepL, while four out of five did not consider alternative lexical choices. These findings highlight the need for translation instruction that develops collocational awareness, contextual understanding, register awareness, and critical evaluation of machine translation output.

ENGLISH-LANGUAGE PSYCHOLOGICAL DISCOURSE: A TRANSLATION STUDIES PERSPECTIVE

The article examines the peculiarities of translating English psychological terminology into Ukrainian and identifies the most effective translation methods used to ensure semantic accuracy and communicative adequacy. The relevance of the study is determined by the growing popularity of psychological literature and the need for a consistent rendering of specialized terminology in Ukrainian. The research aims to analyze the main translation techniques applied to English psychological terms and to determine their frequency and effectiveness. The corpus of the study comprised 128 terms selected from English-language professional psychology texts and their Ukrainian translations. The findings indicate that the most frequently employed techniques are variant equivalent selection (33%), calque translation (25%), and dictionary equivalents (21%). Less common methods include concretization, generalization, contextual substitution, semantic development, descriptive translation, part-of-speech substitution, and transcoding. The study demonstrates that the choice of translation method depends on a term's semantic characteristics, its degree of standardization in the target language, and its use context.

Translating English Modal Auxiliary Verbs into Indonesian

Translating English modal auxiliary verbs into Indonesian presents a unique linguistic challenge because the two languages express modality through entirely different grammatical structures. In literary texts, these verbs do far more than indicate tense or possibility; they are crucial for establishing tone, perspective, and character depth. Despite their narrative weight, modal verbs are often overlooked in English-Indonesian literary translation studies. This study addresses the gap by identifying the core modal auxiliary verbs in Aurélie Moeremans’s memoir Broken Strings and analyzing how they are rendered into Indonesian. Utilizing a descriptive qualitative approach supported by quantitative data, the study tracked nine core modals—can, could, may, might, must, shall, should, will, and would—through the lens of Molina and Albir’s (2002) translation techniques framework. The analysis revealed 682 total occurrences, with could appearing most frequently at 245 instances (35.92%), followed by would at 216 instances (31.67%). Five specific translation techniques emerged: established equivalent, reduction, transposition, modulation, and variation. Established equivalent was the dominant strategy, used in 382 cases (56.01%), which underscores the translator's strong preference for natural Indonesian phrasing over the rigid preservation of English grammatical forms. Ultimately, the study demonstrates that translating modal verbs relies heavily on contextual nuance and communicative intent, requiring flexible structural and semantic shifts to ensure clarity and readability in the target text.

Assessing English-Arabic translation of verb phrase ellipsis: A comparative study of Google Translate and ChatGPT-4o

Assessment of how GT and GPT-4o translate English VPE into Arabic focuses on the accuracy of ellipsis reconstruction and the translation strategies employed, highlighting the importance of better-quality training data for NMT and LLM tools for both discourse-level processing and context-dependent data.