Chapter5
Translating English and Thai words based on their grammatical categories
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This chapter defines and gives a general idea about grammatical and lexical categories, as well as word order,which are likely to differ across language.
5.1 Grammatical and lexical categories
Grammatical categories or syntactic classes may be previously known as 'part of speech.' In a grammatical perspective, words or expressions from the same grammatical categories can replace one another without losing the grammaticality
at the sentence level. Fromkin et al.(2003) have maintained that native speakers of any language have their mental lexicon to enable them to know both the meaning and grammatical category of each word. For instance, English speakers know that the word fast can be a noun, an adjective or an adverb, each with a different meaning, as shown in the sentences : The fast of Ramadan extends from the first light of dawn until sunset, You're a fast swimmer, and His business is growing fast. They also know that as a noun, fast is countable, while as an adjective and adverb it can take the
(61) suffix -er and -est for comparative and superlative meanings.
Translation at the grammatical level, according to Baker (1992), is thus concerned with two aspects of grammar : morphology(word grammar) with syntax (sentence grammar). This morphosyntactic level involves translators'chices in: words used to indicate singularity/plurality,tense, and gender. These grammatical categories are considered 'obligatory' in that translators need to use them regularly if they are in the morphological system of the target language. Also, they need to bear in mind some exceptional rules; for instance, if the target language is English, some nouns like team or committee can take both singular and plural verb forms. Nevertheless, these morphosyntactic rules play much less significant roles in non-inflectional languages, where there are nearly no resources for inflections in number(for nouns), tense(for verbs),and gender(for pronouns). Additional words or phrases are used to express these grammatical aspects instead.
Lexical categories are considered a subtype of phrasal categories (e.g.noun phrases, verb phrases, and so on). Dealing with what are traditionally called 'parts of speech', they specifically involve:1) content categories, namely noun,verb, adjective, or adverb; and 2)