Processus qui dégage le sens d’une chaîne sonore ou graphique grâce à l’association de significations linguistiques et de compléments cognitifs.

Comprendre un texte c’est faire appel à une compétence linguistique et, simultanément, à un savoir encyclopédique. La compréhension est une activité globale, difficilement subdivisible en phases distinctes ; je ferai néanmoins par commodité la distinction entre ses deux composantes, linguistique et encyclopédique, pour dissiper une confusion communément commise en particulier dans les manuels dits de traduction où les erreurs dues à une connaissance insuffisante de la langue étrangère sont traitées en erreurs de traduction.

Process in which sense is extracted from an aural or graphic sequence through the combination of cognitive inputs with linguistic meanings.

Understanding a text is to call on both linguistic competence and encyclopaedic knowledge simultaneously. It is a global activity which is difficult to break down into separate phases. For the sake of clarity however, I will make a distinction between the two components of understanding – linguistic and encyclopaedic – so as to do away with a common error made by so called translation handbooks where mistakes arising from an inadequate knowledge of the foreign language are treated as translation errors.

Understanding is conceived as an interpretive process geared to the generation of sense. According to ITT ( Interpretive Theory of Translation), experience in translation and interpreting has shown that linguistic knowledge alone does not suffice and it needs to be supplemented by other cognitive inputs (compléments cognitifs): encyclopaedic knowledge (bagage cognitif) and contextual knowledge (contexte cognitif), a type of storage which builds up from the beginning of the process of understanding. Additionally, ITT highlights the role of memory in the process of understanding and distinguishes between immediate memory, which stores words for a short time, and cognitive memory, which stores the whole range of knowledge possessed by an individual. The end product of the process of understanding is called sense and it results from the interdependence of all linguistic and non-linguistic elements which play a role in the process.

Absence dans la langue d’arrivée d’un mot, d’une expression ou d’une tournure syntaxique existant en langue de départ.

Les vides lexicaux sont le pendant dans la langue d’arrivée des mots dits intraduisibles dans la langue de départ. Ce qui est en cause, dans un cas comme dans l’autre, est l’absence de correspondance directe d’une langue à l’autre ; or, le manque de correspondance intégralement bi-univoque est le propre de la quasi-totalité du lexique, et l’absence d’une correspondance donnée ne saurait étonner. Elle est comblée par la reformulation de l’idée.

Dans l’exemple suivant, mouné représente un vide lexical en français :

« […] La mouné (conserves alimentaires traditionnelles), c’est la conservation par la mise en bocal des richesses du présent afin qu’elles se perpétuent. […] La vie paysanne étant ponctuée par l’alternance de périodes de pénurie et d’abondance, il importe de conserver quand il y a abondance, c’est-à-dire quand la nature est à son sommet de fécondité et de vie, pour préparer la pénurie.»

(Makhlouf, G. (30 décembre 2020). Le regard, le souffle et l’âme : anthropologie du mezzé, L’Orient-Le Jour)

Lexical gaps are the target language counterparts of words labelled ‘untranslatable’ in the source language. What is involved in both instances is the lack of direct correspondences from one language to another. And yet, the lack of completely bi-univocal correspondences is true of almost the whole lexicon making the absence of a single correspondence hardly astonishing. Besides, the ‘gap’ disappears when the idea is reformulated. 

There are four types of voids: 

1- Environmental voids are those voids which arise from the untranslatability of natural phenomena (e.g. Arabic wadi or Russian tundra). The most effective way to deal which such voids is through transcription. 

2- Cultural voids as English cream tea and Russian samovar generally more translation-resistant than type one and most effectively filled in TL by means of transcription, if necessary with a footnote added.

3- Lexical voids for which the problem is that a particular set of semantic features denoted by a single word in one language may only be expressible by a phrase in another. Three translation tactics are commonly encountered: selecting a one-word equivalent which covers part of the meaning of the SL original, paraphrasing selected features of the SL item (a technique which is sometimes unacceptable for stylistic reasons), or omitting it altogether. 

4- Syntactical voids where TL has a suitable equivalent, but it may only be used if some syntactical rearrangement is made. 

Hachis Parmentier is a well-seasoned meat-and-mashed-potato pie that is customarily made with leftovers from a boiled beef dinner, like pot-au-feu.

Hachis Parmentier and pot-au-feu are lacunae in the English language.