TRANSLATION PORTUGUESE-LIBRAS FACE THE PHENOMENON OF LEXICAL AMBIGUITY: FOCUS ON THE WORD 'STATE'

Abstract

The act of translation is an old practice, but still challenging and complex. According to Campos (1986), do not translate from one language to another but from one culture to another. Therefore, only the vocabulary and linguistic knowledge of the translator does not guarantee the quality of the translated text, it must have a great cultural knowledge of the people involved. Among the complexities involving the translation, one deserves more attention: the lexical ambiguity.  We discuss in this article the challenges and dilemmas that lexical ambiguity present in Portuguese, tends to impose on the translation of texts for glosses Libras. More specifically, we will treat the case of the word ‘state’. For our analysis, we selected a corpus, consisting of 774 instances of the word 'state' in context. Such instances were extracted from texts collected from different sources such as newspapers, magazines and online books. However, for this study, we present instances in which 'state' assumes two specific directions: place / location and condition (health). For this, we take as a basis for discussion the main concepts underlying the translation under the assumptions of authors such as: Campos (1986 ), Quadros (2002, 2004) , Jakobson (1975), and those dealing with lexical ambiguity, Ullmann (1964 ), Azeredo (2011) and Silva (2006).