Linguistic Divergences in English to Bengali Translation

Abstract

Translation is an endeavour to automate all or part of the process of translation from one language to another. In general, translation is a complex task, which aims at preserving the semantic and stylistic equivalents of the source language texts into the target language texts. The most problematic area in manual and machine translation is the lexicon and the role it plays according to the context to create deviations. There are also cases where deviations occur owing to the divergence – one of the complex areas of investigation in translation. Divergence in translation normally arises when the sentences in the source language are realized differently in the target language. This paper seeks to discuss some of the major divergences that observed in English to Bengali translation. It also investigates how the different linguistic and extralinguistic constraints can play decisive roles in translation, resulting in divergences and other issues. The primary objective of this paper is to understand the types of divergence problems that operate behind English to Bengali translation the study of which is still in a state of its infancy. Proper identification and understanding of these problems are important in both manual and machine translation. Moreover, resolution of these problems is a pre-requisite for designing a robust machine translation system between the languages considered for the present study