【正文】 nyms 8 Problems and difficulties caused by polysemic words 103. Translation of English ambiguous words 12 The foundation of translating English ambiguous words 12 Methods in translating English ambiguous words 15 Using the literal translation 15 Keeping English words and adding note 17 Other methods of translating English ambiguous words 194. Conclusion 21References 221. Introduction With the rapid development of crosscultural munication, people are paying more and more attention to the ambiguity of language. Ambiguity is a pervasive phenomenon in natural language. However, this phenomenon has caused difficulties in people’s munication and translation work. The errors in people’s translation or interpretation works are attributed to their misunderstanding the English sentences with ambiguities. Ambiguity is one of the forms of language, including words, sentences, which lacks clearness and has two or more ambiguous meanings in understanding the semantic meaning. It exists in every language, there is no exception to English which has a large number of vocabularies. Kess, . and Hoppe, . (1981) hold the opinion in their monograph Ambiguity in Psycholinguistics that ambiguity is everywhere in language. They say: “upon careful consideration, one cannot but be amazed at the ubiquity of ambiguity in language.”(Kess, . and Hoppe, ., 1981) “Translation, essentially, is the faithful representation, in one language, of what is written or said in another language. However, as proved by practice, translation cannot be viewed as a merely linguistic undertaking, but should be regarded as an aspect of a larger domain, namely, that of munication.” (Zhong Shukong, 1997) From the sentences above it can be concluded that a translator or an interpreter should translate the original faithfully, clearly and accurately. However, English has the largest number of vocabularies which differs from the other western languages, including a lot of ambiguous words which are caused by polysemic words and homonyms that attribute to the wrong translations in people’s oral and written translation work. As is known, translation is based on the correct understanding. Therefore, it is wise for translators or interpreters to study the causes of ambiguity so as to solve the problems caused by ambiguous words and get a correct understanding while translating.2. English ambiguity and the problems caused by ambiguity in translation Brief introduction about English ambiguityAmbiguity is a more plicated and pervasive phenomenon in human language. “In natural languages, ambiguity is the property of expressions that can be interpreted in several ways, or, rather, that can be multiply specified in linguistic description from lexical, semantic, syntactic, and other aspects. Depending on whether ambiguity results from the use of specific lexemes or from the syntactic structure of plex expressions, a distinction is drawn between (a) lexical ambiguity (also polysemy, homonymy) and (b) syntactic ambiguity (also polysyntacticity, constructional homonymy).”(Hadumod Bussmann, 2000: 19) “A word or sentence is ambiguous when it has more than one understanding.” (Fromkin and Rodman, 1983) American linguist Kaplan (1966) says that ambiguity is a mon phenomenon of language just as a mon cold of pathology. English is the widelyused language in people’s crossmunication, so more and more learners in China have set foot on studying English ambiguity. Qiu Shude points out, “Ambiguity is a special relationship between language structural form and its meaning.”(Qiu Shude, 1998) He studies it from four cases: phonemic ambiguity, semantic ambiguity, grammatical ambiguity and pragmatic ambiguity. “Ambiguity is the phenomenon that some words or expressions have two or more meanings,” said by Zhu Li,(Zhu Li, 2005) who concludes ambiguity into the following aspects: phonological ambiguity, lexical ambiguity, syntactic ambiguity, deixis ambiguity and pragmatic ambiguity. “Ambiguity is an idea, statement or expression capable of being understood in more than one sense.” (An Yan, Li Shaofeng, 1995) In their essay “A Brief Analysis of English ambiguity”, they discuss ambiguity in the following four cases: phonetic ambiguity, lexical ambiguity, grammatical ambiguity and transcultural ambiguity. Due to different purposes in the study of ambiguity, different people have different understandings which result in the study from different aspects. This paper aims at discussing English ambiguous words and their translations, so the English ambiguity in two forms, phonological ambiguity and lexical ambiguity will be discussed below. Phonological ambiguityPhonological ambiguity is mainly caused by two kinds of homonyms: perfect homonym and homophone. Homonymy is a type of lexical ambiguity involving two or more different words. (Hadumod Bussmann, 2000: 210) . found (meaning ‘establish’ or ‘cast’), kitty (meaning ‘fund’ or ‘cat’), scour (meaning ‘polish’ or ‘search’). Such words are called homonym. It contains three kinds of words. The first kind is perfect homonym which has the same pronunciation and spelling but different meanings, . ear1: the organ of hearing (耳朵) ，ear2: the head of a grainproducing plant such as corn or wheat (穗), ear3: (sing.) an ability to recognize and copy sounds well (靈敏的聽力，辨音力)；the second one is homophone which has the same pronunciation but different spellings and meanings，. sun (太陽)son (兒子)，sight (視力)site (地基)，meat(肉)meet (遇見)， right (正確的)rite (儀式)write (寫)。 to bee damages in this way (撕裂，撕碎). No matter which kind of homonymy, it will cause phonological ambiguity in people’s translation work. For examples:(1) I have got some flour (flower)(2) They eat what they can, and can what they cannot. (An Yan, Li Shaofeng, 1995)In example (1), the pronunciation of the word “flour”(面粉 “a fine white or brown powder”) is just the same as that of the word “flo