Cross-Linguistic Grammatical Relationship: A Translational Analysis with Reference to English and Tamil

Abstract

Language is a system of symbols. They represented things are not the things themselves. The symbols of language is varied and complex. The words play the role of symbols. The contribution of linguistics is effective when the speaker and the learner know the symbols. Linguistics has contributed a lot for communication. Previously, during olden days people communicated through signals and gestures. Language is a skill subject unlike history or physics or maths, which are content or knowledge subjects. But even a language like English is taught as a content subject by many teachers, as a body of information and a number of rules and definitions. What is usually taught in the English class room is the meaning of certain words and how certain words are combined to form structures or sentences or sentences. In other words, the rules of grammar and meanings of the words are taught as another theoretical subject. Before discussing the relationship between words and groups of words, it would be profitable to discuss the nature of grammar a little bit, when we use a language we generally feel that the words alone have got meaning but its structure, grammar, etc., don’t have any role to play in conveying the meaning. This is because most of the people believe that grammar is a system, which helped the users of the language to arrange the words into a sentence. But this is not enough. Grammar too has meaning. Similarly, the grammatical relationships are also considered as important factor for translating the text. This paper therefore seeks to explore the nature of grammatical relationships and highlight their vital role in translation studies. Understanding language as a system of symbols, and recognising grammar as a meaningful component rather than a mechanical one, enables more effective communication and more accurate translation across languages. This short paper is an attempt to find out grammatical relationships and their role in the place of translation studies.