Lexical strategies

3. The concept of lexical transformations

Some sense units of the SL retain their sense and structure in the TL unchanged, other retain only their content (i.e. meaning) unchanged, but alter or completely change their original (source language) form.

The kind of major and minor alterations performed in the structural form of language units performed with the aim of achieving faithfulness in translation are referred to as translator’s transformations (Korunets’, p. 361).
They are carried out either because of the incompatibility of the TL means of expression, which makes the transplantation of some SL units to it impossible, or in order to retain the style of the SL sense units and thus maintain expressiveness of the SL sense units (ibid., p. 361).
Not all sense units need to be structurally transformed in the process of translation. A considerable number of them are also transplanted to the TL in the form, meaning and structure of the original, i.e. unchanged or little changed (ibid., p. 361).
Substitution of a source language unit by a target language unit, which is not registered as its dictionary equivalent, is called lexical transformation
Taken separately they have a different from the original referential meaning.
Thus, semantically lexical transformation is substitution of a SL lexical unit by a lexical unit with different inner form, which actualizes the sense of the SL lexical unit realized in the given context.
All types of lexical transformations involve certain semantic changes. As a result the meaning of a word or word combination in source text may be made:

• 
  more specific,
  
• 
  more general or
  
• 
  somewhat modified as a way to discovering an appropriate equivalent in TL (Komissarov, Koralova, p. 32).
  

The reasons that call forth lexical transformations.
1. Differences in semantic structures of the correlated words. The corresponding words may signify the same object – referent or concept of reality – by reflecting their different aspects and so the words’ denotational meanings can’t coincide fully.