Extremes Meet: What Kind of Opposite Meanings Do Translators Produce?

Abstract

Although translators can make mistakes, they would definitely prefer to avoid conveying the opposite of what the source text has intended. Thus, students who learn to translate texts in writing should be made aware of typical cases, when translation might lead to the creation of opposite meaning. This paper analyses opposite meanings in the translations from English to Ukrainian of popular articles, done by the students under the author’s supervision and published between 18 May 2018 and 20 June 2022. Having access to the draft version of these translations, the author compares the initial student works with the final published texts and discusses thirty cases when translators produced opposite meanings. The article examines such tentative groups of opposition as causation (subject and object, agent and patient), quality, modality, time, space, quantity, and grammatical gender. The reasons for these mistakes appear to be misunderstanding of voice (passive versus active), modality (e.g., necessity, prohibition), idioms, negation, as well as strong reliance on local collocation of words while disregarding the context of the sentence and the overall message of the text. The categorization of mistakes appears to be problematic because oppositions are often multilayered and simultaneously touch upon various linguistic issues. Further, different languages have different oppositions, which complicates the identification and categorization of translation mistakes. The article concludes that opposite meanings present both significant challenges and creative opportunities to translators. Understanding how oppositions work in different languages is essential for successful translation. Thus, translators should learn how to deal with oppositions and consider their context in order to avoid misunderstanding.