POLYSEMY IN TRANSLATION STUDIES: CHALLENGES IN TRANSLATING POLYSEMOUS LEXICAL ITEMS

Abstract

Polysemy—the phenomenon where a single lexical form carries multiple related senses—creates persistent translation difficulties because dictionaries list meanings, but context selects the intended one. This article explains how polysemy functions as a “sense-selection” problem in Translation Studies and why mistranslating a polysemous item often produces not only semantic error but also pragmatic distortion and coherence failure. Building on discourse- and pragmatics-oriented views of translation (which treat meaning as realized in use), the paper shows how translators can identify contextual triggers, narrow the active sense, and choose equivalents that fit collocation, register, and communicative purpose. The discussion also connects human translation practice to “word sense disambiguation” in language technology, where polysemy is formalized as a context-driven decision task. Recent research trends confirm that polysemy remains a major source of ambiguity and variability across languages, especially in culturally loaded or domain-specific texts.