Microsoft Word Revised Syllabus Ver doc

On Ambiguity
Most sentences carry a deal of lexical and grammatical ambiguity, which may be 
linguistic or referential; hopefully all this ambiguity will be cleared up by the micro and the 
macro context. Where the ambiguity remains in spite of the macro context, the translator has 
to determine whether it is referential or linguistics, or between the two extremes. A referential 
ambiguity must always be retained and pointed out, if it cannot be cleared up by an expert. A 
linguistic ambiguity may enrich a text as both meanings may be intended, and the translator 
should attempt to reproduce the ambiguity, but if he is unable to do so, he normally translates 
one of the meanings and let the other go. Whilst lexical ambiguities are more common, 
grammatical ambiguities arise when the point of stress in a clause or when relationship 
between word-groups or clauses in a larger unit are clear, i.e. one does not know 'what goes 
with what'.
Language as code and system
The translator is continuously made aware of the functional and structural nature of 
language, which appears to him in the common dynamic-functional simile of a game of chess 
and the static-structural simile of a crossword puzzle. Thus one mistranslated word may still 
half-convincing nonsense of a passage since it forces valid senses (sememes) on to other 
words and phrases in the passage. When the word is corrected, the whole passage is switched 
along different lines.
For the translator, language is a code which he is well aware he will never break, a 
system he cannot wholly grasp, because it is lexically infinite. All he can do is make 
assumptions about it, in accordance with the benefits he derives from it, depending on the 
yield that suits the users at the time; the assumption, like the sense of the words, will change 
continuously. He is frequently faced with too little extra linguistic reality and too much 
linguistic ambiguity - words either too far out of their usual collocation or so frequently in, 
them that they become meaningless cliché, fitting as loosely as yale keys in the huge locks of 
their context.