When translating texts into a language that lacks relevant terminology, translation equivalence is difficult to achieve, and the accuracy, accessibility and effectiveness of communication of the translated texts may be compromised. This article investigated various approaches to the translation of terminology when no direct translation equivalents were available in the target languages. The researchers performed a comparative analysis of strategies applied in the translation of the South African Constitution from English into Xitsonga, Siswati and isiNdebele. Firstly, Voyant tools were used to identify terms in the English version. Secondly, a multilingual concordancer (ParaConc) was employed to extract translation equivalence. ParaConc allows for contrastive studies on aligned corpora. The strategies that were found were borrowing, paraphrasing, derivation and compounding. Paraphrasing, derivation and compounding are productive strategies, because equivalents are formed using the already existing words in the languages which native speakers clearly understand. The use of borrowing revealed a critical need for terminology development work in these languages to avoid transliterating terms from foreign languages in which the meaning is not directly clear to the native speakers. This article also demonstrated the usefulness of computational approaches in identifying terminology and translation techniques in the context of South Africa’s official languages.
The article demonstrates word-formation strategies that were used in the translated South African constitution from English into Xitsonga, Siswati and isiNdebele when no translation equivalents of terminology are available in these target languages.
Of the 11 official languages of South Africa, Xitsonga, Siswati and isiNdebele are three of the four minority indigenous languages, with less access than the other languages to translated materials and a scarcity of the terminology required for current legal, administrative, educational and other official use. Translations are required to provide open access to all documents in the official languages with clear and unambiguous meaning for all speakers of these languages. Moropa (
To find possible solutions for future translation work, this article describes a comparative investigation into the strategies that have been used for translating the Constitution from the source language, English, into Xitsonga, Siswati and isiNdebele. In particular, the researchers focus on word-formation strategies in which we refer to the methods used by translators when no translation equivalents of terminology are available in these target languages. The English–Xitsonga–Siswati–isiNdebele Parallel Corpus (EXSNPC) is used as the data set for analysis. Voyant Tools (VT) and ParaConc are computational tools used to identify and extract terms from the source language and their translation equivalents in the target languages.
Van Huyssteen (
Madiba (
Sineke (
Both Moropa (
Mabunda (
Mojapelo (
Letsoalo, Mabaso and Gouws (
As far as researchers know, no other study has embarked on exploring and comparing word-formation strategies used in the texts translated into Xitsonga, Siswati and isiNdebele. Scholars who studied translation strategies in South African languages focused on translation from a source language into one target language. There is still a gap in investigating the strategies used in the translated texts when no direct translation equivalents of a source language exist in the multiple target languages. Therefore, this article fills the gap in translation studies by examining and comparing the strategies used in the translation of the Constitution from English as a source language into Xitsonga, Siswati and isiNdebele as target languages with limited terminology developed.
This section describes the methodology employed in the investigation, beginning with a description of the data set used. Next, the different procedures used to identify translation equivalents are explained, and the different word-formation strategies are described.
The versions of the Constitution in English, Xitsonga, Siswati and isiNdebele were downloaded in PDF format from the Department of Justice website. Next, these versions were converted into plain text format to be conveniently analysed using computational tools. This resulted in the creation of an EXSNPC. The EXSNPC is a multilingual corpus which was manually aligned into paragraphs, sentences, phrases and words. The corpus consists of a total of 173 351 tokens (including numbers but excluding punctuation) with 47 551 tokens in English, 57 258 tokens in Xitsonga, 34 054 tokens in Siswati and 34 488 tokens in isiNdebele.
Voyant Tools, accessed online from
Voyant Tools term list.
Purposive sampling was then used to select 30 terms from the VT term list. The selected terms from the English corpus were then searched in ParaConc to extract translation equivalents for the target languages. ParaConc was utilised because of its ability to semi-automatically retrieve the translated equivalents of the lexical terms in the target languages Xitsonga, Siswati and isiNdebele, as presented in
English term and its equivalents in target languages.
After the equivalent terms in the target languages were identified through the assistance of ParaConc, a manual analysis was then conducted in which the terms were compared to establish word-formation strategies employed by translators.
Word formation is a research area in linguistics that examines processes in which users of a language create new lexical units (Fandrych
Taljard (
Paraphrasing expresses phrases or a single word to clarify, describe and define concepts when part of the meaning is contentious; it is significant for exploring natural language semantics (Danielsson
Yule (
Compounding is a morphological process in which new words are formed by combining different words or lexical elements (Ten Hacken
This subsection shows the results of strategies used to translate the 30 sampled terms that were extracted from the data sets. Only examples of each strategy that are applicable in the respective languages are given in the tables.
Examples of borrowing.
English | Xitsonga | Siswati | isiNdebele |
---|---|---|---|
Commission | |||
Office | |||
Republic | |||
Parliament | |||
Court | |||
Referendum | - | ||
Summons | - | ||
Budget | - | - |
Examples of paraphrasing.
English | Xitsonga | Siswati | isiNdebele |
---|---|---|---|
Suffrage | |||
Swear | - | - | |
Executive | - | - | |
Detained | |||
Privilege | - | - | |
Judiciary | - | ||
Legislature | - | - | |
Servitude | |||
Misconduct | |||
Senate | |||
Sovereign |
Examples of derivation.
English | Xitsonga | Siswati | isiNdebele |
---|---|---|---|
Oath | |||
Justice | |||
Offenders | |||
Prosecution | - | ||
Pardoning | - | ||
Judiciary | - | ||
Obligation | |||
Restitution | |||
Conflicts | |||
Privilege | - | - | |
Summons | - | - | |
Budget | - | - |
Examples of compounding.
English | Xitsonga | Siswati | isiNdebele |
---|---|---|---|
Auditor-General | |||
Constitution | - | ||
Executive | - | - | |
Legislature | - | ||
Bill | - | - | |
Budget | - | - | |
Privilege | - | - |
All the terms from
Various strategies are used by translators of the Constitution for the target languages. This article has found that all word-formation strategies that were used when no equivalent translation was available are typically recognised in other indigenous languages. Some of the strategies are more productive than others in closing the lexical gaps between a source and target language in the absence of relevant terminology. From the study, we observed that the strategies used in the translations of the Constitution seem to be a common pattern used by translators of other South African indigenous languages, as already found in the studies by Sineke (
Paraphrasing, derivation and compounding were found to be productive strategies used by translators of the target languages. These strategies were applied using already existing words in the target languages. Paraphrasing was used by translators to clarify and describe concepts using related and unrelated words. Regarding derivation, equivalent terms in the target languages were formed from existing words by attaching affixes. The terms were mainly derived from verbs to form nouns within the target language concerned. Compositional compounds were formed by combining two free morphemes, and others were formed by joining three lexical terms. In the context of the African languages, these strategies are productive in creating relevant terminology when no direct translation equivalents are available in the target languages. Therefore, they fill the existing gap in equivalent terms between the source and target languages.
Borrowing was used as a strategy in the target languages, in which terms were borrowed mainly from English and Afrikaans through transliteration. The borrowed terms were modified to the phonological and morphological rules of the target language. This strategy does not provide an ideal contribution to close lexical gaps that exist with the target languages, as observed by Mphahlele (
This article described the strategies used in translating the South African Constitution from English as a source language into Xitsonga, Siswati and isiNdebele when no translation equivalents of terminology are available in the target languages. We showed that borrowing, paraphrasing, derivation and compounding were the different strategies employed. In instances where borrowing was used, the target languages borrowed terms mainly from English, and in a few instances from Afrikaans, through transliteration. The borrowed terms were adapted following the spelling and orthographical rules of the receiving languages. The use of borrowing has limitations, because the meaning is not directly clear to the native speakers who are not familiar with the loaned term which has not yet been lexicalised in the target language. The study recommends the use of productive strategies such as paraphrasing, derivation and compounding to narrow the lexical gaps that exist within the indigenous South African minority languages.
In the future, we will investigate how translators working with the other indigenous languages dealt with the issue of equivalence in translated texts, as these languages are perceived to be reasonably well-resourced compared to the minority languages. We are also interested in investigating the preferred strategies used by translators and the reasons that inform their preferences in contemporary translated texts in specialised fields.
The authors would like to thank the following people for their helpful comments and feedback during the writing of this article: Menno van Zaanen and Juan Steyn.
The authors have declared that no competing interest exists.
All authors contributed equally in the writing of this paper.
This article followed all ethical standards for research without direct contact with human or animal subjects.
This publication was made possible with the support from the South African Centre for Digital Language Resources (SADiLaR). South African Centre for Digital Language Resources is a research infrastructure established by the Department of Science and Innovation of the South African government as part of the South African Research Infrastructure Roadmap (SARIR).
The data that support the findings of this study are available in the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa at:
The views shared in this paper are those of the authors and do not represent the opinions of others or the associated authors’ organisation.