Humanities & Social Sciences, Vol 8, No 2 (2015)

Tackling the Problem of Translation of Turkish Phonetically Motivated Units

Olga A. Bartashova, Anna V. Krasnova

Abstract


The article is dedicated to the problem of Turkish-English phonosemantic parallels from the point of translation. In past researches were likely to view iconic units as untranslatable ones, which led to a variety of problems in the process of translation. Translation of these language units from Turkish into English may become much more challenging as we face two typologically different languages, which morphology barely has anything in common. Although Turkish onomatopoeic and symbolic words comprise a remarkable part of the language, there are still little efforts made to examine them properly. These units were predominantly examined in connection with the problem of some word-formation ways (mainly reduplication). However, methods applied in phonosemantics provide a translator with efficient tools, which allow preserving these units in a target language.