Translatability and Equivalence in English Specialized Vocabulary of Image Taking

Abstract

Photography is a relatively young form of fine art. Although the history of photography is only about 200 years old, its techniques and technology are developing rapidly and depend directly on scientific progress. Photography finds its application in all social spheres becoming a global phenomenon. As a form of visual communication, it fulfils applied, artistic, social, and communicative functions. The language of image making includes structural and semantic variations of terminological units, which translation requires a careful scientific and linguistic analysis. The present article studies challenges in translation of various types of English photography terms into Romanian (metaphorical terms, terminological combinations, anglicisms). When translating photography terms the interaction of the term with the context is of great importance to select the proper translation procedure and to find the best equivalent. The translation of metaphorical photography terms formed based on shape and color semantic transference involves the use of a direct equivalent or one of the lexical variants of polysemantic nature. The results of the investigation showed the predominance of borrowing (for English loan terms and abbreviations) and syntactic transformation translation techniques (for terminological combinations).