[Corpora-List] Quotation (lexicography) - "as many senses"

[John F. Sowa]

On 9/8/2010 12:43 PM, Tad Piotr wrote:
> I do not think the statement "a word has as many senses as
> translations" is true, because translation is dependent on the
> language into which you translate. And you do not translate words but
> texts with words, which means that the number of possible translations
> is huge, perhaps even infinite.

But as you say, "you do not translate words but texts with words."

The context of each occurrence of each word drastically reduces
the number of possible interpretations for that occurrence --
ideally, to one sense.  But even then, different translators
make different choices of words for the target language.

John Sowa

_______________________________________________
Corpora mailing list
Corpora at uib.no
http://mailman.uib.no/listinfo/corpora