Ensayos

The Translation of Neologisms

Neologisms are perhaps the non-literary and the professional translator's biggest problem. New objects and processes are continually created in technology. New ideas and variations on feelings come from the media. Terms from the social sciences, slang, dialect coming into the mainstream of language, transferred words, make up the rest. It has been stated that eachlanguage acquire 3000 new words, annually, but in fact, neologisms can not be accurately quantified, since so many hover between acceptance and oblivion and many are short-lived, individual creations. In other words, Neologisms are new words, word-combinations or fixed phrases that appear in the language due to the development of social life, culture, science and engineering. New meanings ofexisting words are also accepted as neologisms. A problem of translation of new words ranks high on the list of challenges facing translators because such words are not readily found in ordinary dictionaries and even in the newest specialized dictionaries.

In 1975nthe French lexicographer and terminologist Alain Ray set up a theoretical model, suggesting that

'..., the neologism will beperceived as belonging to the language in general or only to one of its special usages; or as belonging to a subject-specific usage which may be specialized or general.' (Ray, 1975 cited in Yiokari, 2005:3)

Old words with new senses
Existing words with new senses, these don't normally refer to new objects or processes and therefore are rarely technological. For example, a Le Petit Termophile point outthat refoulement is used in English as 'return of refugee' but may also mean 'refusal of entry' 'deportation.' It is a loose term, dependent on its context. In psychology it is translated as 'repression.'
To sum up old words with new senses tend to be non-cultural and non-technical. They are usually translated either by a word that already exists in the TL, or by a brief functional ordescriptive term.
Existing collocations with new senses are a translator's trap: usually these are 'normal' descriptive term which suddenly becomes technical terms, their meaning sometimes hides innocently behind a more general or figurative meaning e.g. 'token woman' (single woman representative on committee of men), 'high speed train'-TGV (train de grande vitesse). Existing collocations with new sensesmay be cultural or non-cultural, if the referent (concept or object) exist in the TL, there is usually a recognized translation or through-translation.

New CoinagesIt is well known hypothesis that there is no such thing as a brand new word; if a word does not derive from various morphemes then it is more or less phonaesthetic or synaesthetic. All sounds or phonemes are phonaesthetic, have somekind of meaning but the best known exception to this hypothesis is the internationalism 'quark,' coined by James Joyce in Finnegan's Wake, a fundamental particle in physics. The computer term 'byte,' sometimes spelt 'bite,' is also an internationalism, the origin of the 'y' being obscure. Both these words have phonaesthetic qualities-quark is humorously related to 'quack.'
Derived wordsThe greatmajority of neologisms are words derived by analogy from ancient Greek (increasingly) and Latin morphemes usually with suffixes such as -ismo, -ismus, -ja, etc., naturalized in the appropriate language. Sawahili appears o be the main non-European language that 'imports' them.In all derived words, you have to distinguish between terms like ecosysteme and ecotone which have a solid referentialbasis, and fulfill the conditions of internationalisms and those like 'ecofreak' and ecotage (sabotage of ecology) , which, whatever their future, do not at present warrant the formation of a TL neologism.
AbbreviationsAbbreviations have always been a common type of pseudo-neologism, probably more common in French than in English. For many speakers of American English, one time abbreviations such as...