5. Relations of polysemy and synonymy and causes of ambiguity of translation equivalents

The use of the same term with different meanings and the use of different terms with somewhat analogous meanings are not exceptional phenomena in scientific language. The semantic structure of a polysemantic word is treated as a system of meanings. For example, the semantic structure of the noun fire could be roughly presented by this scheme(only the most frequent meanings are given)

Fire, n. - I flame- II instance of destructive burning (e.g. a forest fire); - III burning materials in a stove, fire-place (e.g. There is a fire in the next room. A camp fire); - IV shooting of guns (e.g. to open/case fire); - V strong feeling, passion, enthusiasm (e.g. a speech lacking fire)

It is not in every polysemantic word that such a center can be found. Some semantic structures are arranged on a different principle. In the following list of meaning of the adjective dull one can hardly hope to find a generalized meaning covering and holding together the rest of the semantic structure.

Dull, adj.: 1.Uninteresting, monotonous, boring; 2.Slow in understanding, stupid; 3.Not clear or bright; 4.Not loud or distinct; 5.Not sharp; 6.Not active; 7.Seeing badly; 8.Hearing badly.

Yet, one distinctly feels that there is something that all these meanings holds together. It’s a certain component that can be easily singled out within each separate meaning.

Synonyms are different words with almost identical or similar meanings. Words that are synonyms are said to be synonymous, and the state of being a synonym is called synonymy. The word comes from Ancient Greek syn (σύν) ("with") and onoma (ὄνομα) ("name"). The words car and automobile are synonyms. Similarly, if we talk about a long time or an extended time, long and extended become synonyms. Synonyms can be any part of speech (such as nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs or prepositions), as long as both members of the pair are the same part of speech. Here are more examples of English synonyms:

• verb "buy" and "purchase"

• adjective "sick" and "ill"

• adverb "quickly" and "speedily"

• preposition "on" and "upon"

Problems in translation may appear while trying to interpretate: documentary/instrumental translation, overt/covert translation and interlingual interpretive/interlingual descriptive communication as well as direct/indirect translation, it is necessary to dispose of a metalanguage and that terminological diversity as a reflection of theoretic-conceptual diversity may be seen as an opportunity.

6. The concepts of a system.

7. Language as a system existing in formal and semantic planes.

Formal language is language that one would use to speak to a person who is in authority or to an individual who is older than the speaker. Such language is usually spoken to an individual who is respectable or holds a high position. This language may sound a bit archaic but is still used today in the wording that appears on wedding or graduation invitations, in courts of law, and with regard to employees and high management.

Semantics is the study of the meaning of linguistic expressions. The language can be a natural language, such as English or Navajo, or an artificial language, like a computer programming language. Meaning in natural languages is mainly studied by linguists. In fact, semantics is one of the main branches of contemporary linguistics. Theoretical computer scientists and logicians think about artificial languages. In some areas of computer science, these divisions are crossed. In machine translation, for instance, computer scientists may want to relate natural language texts to abstract representations of their meanings; to do this, they have to design artificial languages for representing meanings. Because the meaning of a sentence depends so closely on its syntactic structure, linguists have given a lot of thought to the relations between syntactic structure and meaning; in fact, evidence about ambiguity is one way of testing ideas about syntactic structure. You would expect an expert in semantics to know a lot about what meanings are. But linguists haven't directly answered this question very successfully.Semantics probably won't help you find out the meaning of a word you don't understand, though it does have a lot to say about the patterns of meaningfulness that you find in words. It certainly can't help you understand the meaning of one of Shakespeare's sonnets, since poetic meaning is so different from literal meaning. But as we learn more about semantics, we are finding out a lot about how the world's languages match forms to meanings. And in doing that, we are learning a lot about ourselves and how we think, as well as acquiring knowledge that is useful in many different fields and applications.