Today we’ll focus upon lexical transformations
43) Differentiation of Meaning
Sometimes to achieve adequacy the translator must considerably change words and phrases of the original and instead of formal Ukrainian correspondences to English words and phrases he must use the functional ones. This sort of change is called “contextual substitutions” or lexical transformations. The semantic aspect of transformations reveals in a substitution of a the lexical unit under translation for a word or word combination, the inner form of which being different from the first, but still containing a seme that must be activated in a certain context. As a result, the meaning of a word or word combination in the ST may be made more specific, more general or somewhat modified as a way to discovering a appropriate equivalent in TL. It is very difficult to classify every example of translation since the demarcation line between transformations is very often blurred. At the level of semantics of lexical units involved into the translation process we shall distinguish between three main types of transformations: differentiation and concrete definition of meaning, generalization of meaning, semantic (logical) development of meaning.
