Abstract:
Translation of shortened lexical units is in many ways problematic (Zandrahimi
and Afzoon, 2017:192). This compels translators to look for other ways that
they can employ in order to translate the shortened lexical units from one
language into the other. The purpose of this study, therefore, is to identify the
abbreviated lexical units in the English version of the Lesotho’s Intended
Nationally Determined Contributions (INDC) document. This also includes the
exploration of strategies that have been employed to translate abbreviations
from English into Sesotho in the aforementioned document and to examine
challenges that abbreviations seem to have posed during the English-Sesotho
translation of the INDC document.
The qualitative data of this study is categorised and presented, using the
methodological principles of thematic analysis while interpretation draws from
the Descriptive Translation Studies (DTS) as the major analytical tool. Both
the Equivalence as well as the General and Axiomatic Principle of
abbreviations translation are employed as complementary tools for data
analysis. The data selected based on the purposively sampling have given
evidence that programme names, project names, classification of organisations,
names of departments or divisions, names of institutions and centres, names of
gases and units of measurements are examples of linguistic units that have been
abbreviated in the English INDC document. The study argued that the
abbreviations that it analysed are equivalent to their full multi-word names that
they can also replace in a text.
The data further revealed that the Lesotho Meteorological Services translatoemployed borrowing a source text (ST) abbreviations in the target text (TT),
omission of the ST abbreviations, descriptive translation of the ST
ix
abbreviation, descriptive translation plus borrowing of the ST abbreviation, as
well as explicitation of the borrowed abbreviation. This study also discovered
that there were different challenges that abbreviations seem to have posed
during the English-Sesotho translation of the INDC document. Such challenges
are lack of equivalent abbreviations, handling the grammatical meaning of theST abbreviations, omission of the ST abbreviation, maintaining consistency in
the translation of the ST abbreviation and comprehending the meaning of the
ST abbreviations that were no spelt out in their first-time occurrence.
