Converses and Antonyms in Translation

Semanticists have already proven that antonyms and converses are two distinct types of sense relations. However, even recent studies make little distinction between the two, with the term antonym being used for both (e.g. Jones, 2002). The goal of the article is to show that the two categories are different in several aspects and that their differences are reflected in translation. Analysis of the corpus of about 1,000 English sentences and their translations into Lithuanian has revealed that antonymic translation is much more frequent compared to converse translation because of the pragmatic role of the units comprising a converse pair.