Spell-boundness by the Primary Meaning in Translation

Abstract

Of the most crucial issues in rendering translation from English to Persian is the requirement to pay special attention to various meanings of words and expressions in different contexts. English as a widely-used language has an extended range of vocabulary in which a lot of terms in different contexts may take several different syntactic and semantic structures and convey less familiar or unexpected meanings. Despite the importance of this issue, it is most often observed that translators are unfortunately easily exposed to the potential threats of sticking to the first equivalent proposed in dictionaries and neglect the other implications of words, as if the first equivalent given has a fascinating attraction that forces the other meanings back. In this paper, the author mentions some of the reasons for translators' lack of attention to other meanings of words in the process of translation and then the linguistic factors that bring about such problems are categorized into five groups. Next, more examples are provided to clarify the importance of preventing being spell-bound by the first meaning, and finally some suggestions will be given to improve the process of translating texts from English to Persian Language.