Semantics and (machine) Translation

concepts not analysable extensionally thus indeterminate in reference as argued by Wheeler and above for words like beauty truth values for example with respect to possible worlds presupositions statements and derived consequences roughly separating statements actually and explicitly expressed and others who are implicitly pragmatically un derstood or inferred without being mentioned This list was presented with the goal to propose for each item a translation criterion which is di erent from simple identity I will be concerned solely with the relation of possible translation see Landsbergen between the pieces of text in A and B de ned as follows the extralinguistic entities mentioned in A and B should have a non null intersection instead of denoting the same set or structure of the model Example both rivi ere and euve are correct French translations of English river neither term however encompasses the whole set of what in English are called rivers The prototypical concepts mentioned in A and B should have a maximal intersection which is not going to be de ned precisely in this paper but which should account for non identical beliefs towards a concept while still accepting its translation Jan Engh has called my attention to the existence of correct translations of terms denoting physical objects which have a null intersection but which have the same use in the two language communities An example is Norwegian stalull lit steel wool and Portuguese palha de a co lit steel straw both denoting a tool for cleaning saucepans etc made from steel bers Material and purpose are the same still they are di erent This may mean that still a ner distinction should be made at the level of terms denoting extralinguistc entities maybe involving man made versus natural objects The abstract concepts mentioned in A and B should have been a priori de ned as mu tual translations through the compared study of two civilizations In here bilingual dictionaries are supposed to be the only source of knowledge and no other concept than pre de ned translation will help us truth values of A and B are not contradictory Example even though I am not claiming that the words actually correspond to the boolean connectives the best example is the common translation of or by and in contexts where the intended truth value is true The set of the presuppositions assertions and derived consequences of A and the corresponding set of B have a maximal intersection and their union is not inconsistent That is we may need to make explicit in one language something that it is only presupposed in another however we cannot accept for translation two texts which contradict each other even if they only do it through the derived conclusions that speakers of each language are bound to make