This paper concisely reinvestigates translatorial action and observes that the ‘meaning’ of lexical items is not the same with the ‘sense’ of lexical items. The central distinctions between the two terms are that the meaning of lexical items is not only a subjective application, but is also dependent on its environment for its truth-value within any given linguistic discourse. The sense of a word however, refers to its objective use and is context independent. Meaning is viewed as having a direct link with the communicative approach to translation. The approach derives from the Communication Theory, which core assumption is that unpredictability is equivalent to informativity. Unpredictability can be unravelled by building in redundancy into the target text to avoid communication overload.<p>Through a rigorous theoretical explications coupled with an avalanche of exemplifications, it is observed that communicatively generated texts appear smoother and more comprehensible than its semantic counter part. However, the writers, suggest that the communicative approach to translation is necessarily applicable in cases of use variations occasioned by differential discourse practice between the source and the target language socio-cultures. Sequel to that, use variations between languages and socio-cultures in contact often pose linguistic structures that resist semantic rendition, because it fails to recapture the ideational content of the source language text in such instances. It is the failure of the semantic approach to yield adequate text(s) at the target end that necessitates the communicative type.<p>
It is difficult to deny the existence of Nigerian English, just as it is difficult to deny the existence of British English and American English. This claim arises from the fact that what characterizes a people's linguistic norm takes its rise from the totality of the people's sociocultural practices of which meaningful verbal sounds are of great essence.The meaningful verbal sounds serve as the chief instrument for communicating meanings, feelings, ideas, and abstractions. Whereas the existence of Nigerian English is no doubt, what constitutes its standard variety has been under contestation. In this write up, argument on standardization of Nigerian English is built-up on the basis of the various stages which the language has passed through and is still passing through in Nigeria. Argumentatively, standard variety of Nigerian English is identified and examined with the aim of demonstrating how efforts in standardizing it are made through empirically reliable criteria.
Translatorial action is a Janus-headed enterprise, whose main objective is to transfer source language (SL) message(s) into a target language (TL). But it is noticeable from a preponderance of previous studies that in pursuance of either the dynamic or the optimum communicative equivalence, the translator often assumes a total authority of the original author. Subsequently, he/she recreates the SL message(s) in such a way that the TL message(s) leaves little or no trace to the SL text ingenuities. This is problematic, because the end-product of the translatorial action often fails to initiate the target audience into the peculiarities of the SL text. The TL audience is rather misinformed. Semantic approach to translation is explained as bearing on the semantic theory. The theory explains meaning in terms of naming relations that exist between the word and what it stands for in the real world.However, the existence of opaque contexts and words like prepositions, which do not refer to any tangible thing (known as their extensions) in the real world redirects the essence of the theory to concepts. Thus, within the broad theory of semantics, the conceptual theory is formulated to address the problems of opaque contexts and extensionalism by relating signs to concepts, that is, a capsule of thought that represents distinct experiences.Subsequently, the sense of a word is likened to concepts upon which real world experiences are pegged.Subsequently, a concept bears a sense(s)-the word's nucleus, which signifies or denotes, but does not connote; yet connotations rely on the sense to operate. Sequel to that, the semantic approach is used copiously to exemplify how the pursuance of sense relations in translatorial actions works for the recapturing of the situational context of the SL text production and ingenuities at the TL end as opposed to the communicatively translated texts. However, in the cases of use variations between the two languages in contact, the approach often fails to convey the message adequately and thereby necessitates the use of the communicative approach to translation.
Democracy has been acclaimed as the best form of government practicable. Its core essence is that the authority of the government is a trust, which is lost once the government becomes a danger to the governed. Power-elites in evolving democracies, especially Nigeria, a pivotal state, consisting of north and south political divides, generate conceptualisations, (i.e., language: arts and culture) for sustenance of inequality. Using the heterogeneous purposive sampling, 7 texts produced by power-elites of Nigeria are selected and subjected to critical discourse analysis (CDA). The core assumptions of CDA are: language is both the site for power struggle and the instrument for domination and inequality. The Muslim northern Nigeria power-elites coercively dominate access to political discourse. The marginalised southern participants should strategically rethink their language to gain access to political discourse in the evolving democracy. Received: 5 December 2020 / Accepted: 21 January 2021 / Published: 5 March 2021
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