Synonymic, homonymic, and polysemous interference in the translation of terminological units of hydrotechnical construction from English into Uzbek and Russian

Abstract

This article presents a comparative linguistic analysis of synonymic, homonymic, and polysemantic interference in translating English hydrotechnical terminology into Uzbek and Russian. The study applies the methodological scheme term – seme – context – translation variant – semantic shift – pragmatic outcome, drawing on a corpus based on GOST and ISO standards and terminological sources (Lotte, 1961; Wüster, 1979). The analysis revealed neutralization of functional distinctions within the synonymic series dam, levee, and weir, contextual ambiguity in the homonymic units head and bank, and semantic narrowing in the polysemantic terms channel and intake (Komissarov, 1990; Leychik, 2007). Translation strategies were systematized, including transliteration, calquing, direct equivalence, functional equivalence, and descriptive translation (Vinay & Darbelnet, 1995; Nida, 1964). Analysis of a 535-term corpus showed that 60 percent retain full equivalence, 30 percent partial equivalence, and 10 percent undergo semantic loss (Grinev-Grinevich, 2008). These findings have practical value for translation practice in hydraulic engineering and for compiling multilingual terminological dictionaries.