Exploring lexical lacunae in the scientific translation of theoretical physics books: an English-Kurdish case-study

Abstract EN

This research paper explores lexical lacunae at the word level at the context of English-Kurdish scientific translation.

First, the paper briefly describes the development of scientific translation through space and time, and then it demonstrates the status of English and Kurdish as the language of natural sciences.

Despite its significance, scientific translation has received little attention in the realm of Translation Studies, and none of the mainstream theories of translation is associated with scientific translation.

Thus, this paper assumes that different translation procedures were opted for in overcoming the lexical lacunae in the context of English-Kurdish scientific translation.

This paper scrutinises the English-Kurdish translation in the field of theoretical physics, an area which has hitherto left untouched.

It explores a set of five theoretical physics books and their translated Kurdish versions, which altogether constitutes a corpus of circa 520,000 words.

The study discloses that triplets, borrowing, expansion and omission procedures are employed to deal with lexical lacuna in the context of English-Kurdish scientific translation.

It further reveals that LSP specialists were moderately prosperous in transmitting the full lexical contents of the ST.