The Effect of Context on Meaning Representation of Adjectives such as Big and Large in Translation from Different Languages such as Russian, Persian and Azeri to English Language Texts

Abstract

People’s understanding of the meaning of sentences is far more reliable than their understanding of the meaning of words. Since what people know when they know the meaning of a word is important, but the skill of incorporating that word appropriately into meaningful linguistic contexts is more important. Our interest here lies in the shift of emphasis from referential or dictionary meaning to contextual meaning of adjectives such as big and large in translation to English language texts or vice versa. Since big and large are synonyms, it is not surprising that they can be used to describe many of the same nouns. However, they are not perfect synonyms, and there are some differences in the distribution of these adjectives which make some problems for translators especially from those languages which these kinds of differences are not so obvious. Therefore, a comparison of the lists of the words which occurred only with big and those which occurred only with large in English should reveal some differences in translations.