Strategies and challenges of translating abbreviations in scientific texts

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.