Absence d’équivalent lexical d’une langue à l’autre: la traduction du nom français action en suédois

Résumé

Despite its general sense, the translation of the French name action into Swedish, as it appears in a parallel corpus, is problematic. Indeed, the Europarl corpus show two main translations: åtgärd and handling. A qualitative examination of the occurrences enables to explain this semantic difference by the co-occurrence with terms which refer to a particular semantic relationship (engynomy) with it.

We show that some co-occurrent units to a given word are the trace of a semantic feature, highlighting the value of linguistic work on a corpus made of full texts. Moreover, the parallel corpus can highlight differences in meaning within a given language, which were not obvious a priori in a monolingual corpus. Finally, we emphasize the need for a semantic explanation of semantic differences that goes beyond the mere finding of co-occurrences.