Word Concreteness and Word Translatability: Relations and Implications for Second Language Acquisition

Abstract

AbstractThis study examined the relation between word concreteness and word translatability. Translatability was operationalized in terms of both lexical and semantic cross-transparency. Two separate scales were used to measure the level of concreteness of 123 target English words and their translatability into Chinese. The results of this study showed that word concreteness and translatability are significantly correlated, and that word concreteness determines the extent of semantic closeness between the translation of English and Chinese word pairs. Concreteness might be a variable that influences how translatable a word is between English and Chinese. However, this influence mainly applies to the semantic cross-transparency between the two languages, not the lexical cross-transparency. A link was proposed between the levels of translatability of a translation pair according to concreteness and associated properties. The paper also discusses the implications of the findings for second language learning and teaching, in particular the “translation effect” and teachers’ “codeswitching” behavior.