Challenges Faced by Translators in Translating Idioms from English to Sinhala

Abstract

Many linguistic professionals mention that idioms are the most difficult phrases to translate. Moreover, most importantly, the meaning of these peculiar phrases cannot be predicted by the literary definitions without alternating the meaning. Sinhala has a variety of idioms that are widely used to communicate in different ways. Therefore, many of Sinhala translators try to omit such idioms or use inequivalents in their translations to avoid meaningless expressions and maintain the contextual meaning of the text. The major objective of this research was to investigate those challenges faced by Sinhala translators. The data relevant to the study was critically analyzed in two major ways: interviewing resource persons of the subject area and referring books related to this subject area. According to findings of the research, challenges of translating idioms could be classified into few categories. Accordingly, the relevant categories investigate whether idioms could be translated directly while retaining the original text and whether these idioms can be translated parallelly as the first and second changers respectively. The identified third challenge was, whether it is possible to define the general idea conveyed by the original text. Furthermore, solutions for the above challenges will be discussed. Eventually, this research will pave the path to translating idioms aptly sans any difficulty.