Open Access

Åsa Apelkvist

• This article discusses one of many possible strategies that translators use in rendering an idiom from a L1 to a L2, i.e. the verbatim or the literal translation. The points of view according to this strategy differ very much among the researchers: some treat them as semantic false friends. Based on the replies to a questionnaire that was handed out to 10 Romanian native speakers, one could state that the context in which the literal translation of a source-idiom is situated plays an important role for the understanding of the text. Beyond that, the translation of an idiom cannot be judged only by virtue of the denotative meaning – the pragmatic function of the translation as a whole is just as important. The questionnaire was compiled of literal translations of Swedish idioms into Romanian (from different translations of different novels). The article further discusses some of the text examples from this questionnaire and describes some of the phenomena related to idioms which hinder the so-called idiom-understanding and which probably led to misinterpretation and a failed literal translation.