Issues in employing metaphorically equivalent phrases according to cognitive translation hypothesis in translating Sinhala text into English to train an AI translation software

Abstract

This paper explores the issues in translating Sinhala metaphorical/cultural phrases into English because of the indirectness of their meanings especially when translating material to train an AI software. Current research shows that using the Cognitive Translation Hypothesis (here on CTH) is one of the most successful solutions for this issue which suggests that using metaphorically equivalent phrases in translation is effective to convey the meaning. However, one of the problems in using metaphorically equivalent phrases is that the meanings of such phrases in the source language can be entirely different from the target language in its literal sense, even though the metaphorical meaning can be equivalent. Thus, in translating material from Sinhala to English using CTH, especially to train an AI software to translate text feed, can be unsuccessful since it can confuse between the literal meaning and the metaphorical meaning that could occur in the text feed in both ways.