European Journal of Science and Theology, October 2018, Vol.14, No.5, 113-122 _______________________________________________________________________ THE INFLUENCE OF THE CULTURAL CONTEXT AND THE BROADENING OF THE SEMANTIC SPHERE OF THE TERMS TWO CONCRETE CASES Emanuel Grosu * ‘Alexandru Ioan Cuza’ University of Iași, Department of Interdisciplinary Research – Humanities and Social Sciences, Str. Lascăr Catarghi nr. 54, 700107, Iași, Romania (Received 12 March 2018, revised 27 March 2018) Abstract We can understand the richness of the vocabulary of a language as either the number of words or as the number of meanings that can be accessed by the users. A characteristic of the Latin language is the comprehensive semantic sphere of the terms. Throughout the long evolution of the language, semantics has been influenced directly by the cultural- historical context where the terms – I refer especially to the abstract ones – have been used. In the following lines, I proposed the analysis of two Latin terms – absolutio, aestimatio – starting precisely from the etymological analysis and from underscoring both the main meaning alterations suffered throughout the history and the semantic nuances conveyed for the terms they have generated, especially in the Romanian language. Keywords: translation, difficulties, diachronic, analysis, absolutio 1. Introduction As an expression of a culture, of a society or, more generally, of a civilization, vocabulary records with a high degree of accuracy all the mutations occurring within it. Furthermore, it can achieve this by adopting (using derivation, borrowing, loan translation, enrichment, degradation, etc.) the meanings of existing terms. The fact is all the more obvious as the idiom in question is older and more widely used. Except for Latin, it is very hard to find another language where such types of conditioning are used. The general opinion is that translating a text from a source language into a target language involves, first of all, the mastering of a set of knowledge pertaining exclusively to the text approached, from grammar (morphology, syntax) and lexicon to the functional style of to the style to which it belongs, including here notions of prosody and stylistics. This is true, but it must always * E-mail: emanuel.grosu@uaic.ro