Ambiguity in English and Albanian Sentences

Abstract

The concept of ambiguity as a semantic complex category is very little dealt in English language and almost none in Albanian language even though its importance is increasing every day in Modern Linguistics. This was one of the reasons that made us convey a comparative and contrastive semantic analysis on the concept of ambiguity in Albanian language and observe it in through the prism of English language. We hope that with this research we will help Albanian students understand better the process of translating ambiguous sentences from Albanian to English language. Our corpus is consisted of translation paradigms (Levenston, 1965) of ambiguous sentences that are identified and observed in Albanian language and how are they translated in English language. The main task of this research is to find out do ambiguous sentences continue to be ambiguous after translation process or they are disambiguated by the translators and what helps this process. Except the main question we will try to find out similarities and differences regarding the concept of definition and classification of ambiguity in English and Albanian language. The methods used in this research are descriptive (we have tried to describe in details the phenomena of metaphors in English and Albanian language), modelling method (with this method we have tried to link theoretical issues with practical examples, ambiguous sentences taken from translated books from Albanian to English language), comparative method (the phenomena of ambiguity in sentences is compared and contrasted in order to find similarities and differences concerning the concept and classification of ambiguity in Albanian and English language) and analytical method (we will try to give suggestions regarding the problems that came up during our analysis).