Literal translation

Last updated December 13, 2024

Literal translation, direct translation, or word-for-word translation is a translation of a text done by translating each word separately without looking at how the words are used together in a phrase or sentence.^[1]

Translation studies

Usage

The term "literal translation" often appeared in the titles of 19th-century English translations of the classical Bible and other texts.^{[ citation needed ]}

Cribs

Word-for-word translations ("cribs", "ponies", or "trots") are sometimes prepared for writers who are translating a work written in a language they do not know. For example, Robert Pinsky is reported to have used a literal translation in preparing his translation of Dante's Inferno (1994), as he does not know Italian.^{[ citation needed ]} Similarly, Richard Pevear worked from literal translations provided by his wife, Larissa Volokhonsky, in their translations of several Russian novels.^{[ citation needed ]}

Poetry to prose

Literal translation can also denote a translation that represents the precise meaning of the original text but does not attempt to convey its style, beauty, or poetry. There is, however, a great deal of difference between a literal translation of a poetic work and a prose translation. A literal translation of poetry may be in prose rather than verse but also be error-free. Charles Singleton's 1975 translation of the Divine Comedy is regarded as a prose translation.^{[ citation needed ]}

Bad practice

The term literal translation implies that it is probably full of errors,^{[ citation needed ]} since the translator has made no effort to (or is unable to) convey correct idioms or shades of meaning, for example, but it can also be a useful way of seeing how words are used to convey meaning in the source language.

Examples

A literal English translation of the German phrase "Ich habe Hunger" would be "I have hunger" in English, but this is clearly not a phrase that would generally be used in English, even though its meaning might be clear. Literal translations in which individual components within words or compounds are translated to create new lexical items in the target language (a process also known as "loan translation") are called calques, e.g., beer garden from German Biergarten .

The literal translation of the Italian sentence, "So che questo non va bene" ("I know that this is not good"), produces "(I) know that this not (it) goes well", which has English words and Italian grammar.

Machine translation

Early machine translations (as of 1962^[2] at least) were notorious for this type of translation, as they simply employed a database of words and their translations. Later attempts utilized common phrases, which resulted in better grammatical structure and the capture of idioms, but with many words left in the original language. For translating synthetic languages, a morphosyntactic analyzer and synthesizer are required.

The best systems today use a combination of the above technologies and apply algorithms to correct the "natural" sound of the translation. In the end, though, professional translation firms that employ machine translation use it as a tool to create a rough translation that is then tweaked by a human, professional translator.

Douglas Hofstadter gave an example of a failure of machine translation: the English sentence "In their house, everything comes in pairs. There's his car and her car, his towels and her towels, and his library and hers." might be translated into French as "Dans leur maison, tout vient en paires. Il y a sa voiture et sa voiture, ses serviettes et ses serviettes, sa bibliothèque et les siennes." That does not make sense because it does not distinguish between "his" car and "hers".^[3]

Pidgins

Often, first-generation immigrants create something of a literal translation in how they speak their parents' native language. This results in a mix of the two languages that is something of a pidgin. Many such mixes have specific names, e.g., Spanglish or Denglisch. For example, American children of German immigrants are heard using "rockingstool" from the German word Schaukelstuhl instead of "rocking chair".^{[ citation needed ]}

Translator's humor

Literal translation of idioms is a source of translators' jokes. One such joke, often told about machine translation, translates "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak" (an allusion to Mark 14:38) into Russian and then back into English, getting "The vodka is good, but the meat is rotten". This is not an actual machine-translation error, but rather a joke which dates back to 1956 or 1958. Another joke in the genre transforms "out of sight, out of mind" to "blind idiot" or "invisible idiot".^[2]

Related Research Articles

An idiom is a phrase or expression that largely or exclusively carries a figurative or non-literal meaning, rather than making any literal sense. Categorized as formulaic language, an idiomatic expression's meaning is different from the literal meanings of each word inside it. Idioms occur frequently in all languages; in English alone there are an estimated twenty-five thousand idiomatic expressions. Some well known idioms in English are spill the beans, it's raining cats and dogs, and break a leg.

Literal and figurative language is a distinction that exists in all natural languages; it is studied within certain areas of language analysis, in particular stylistics, rhetoric, and semantics.

In linguistics, a calque or loan translation is a word or phrase borrowed from another language by literal word-for-word or root-for-root translation. When used as a verb, “to calque” means to borrow a word or phrase from another language while translating its components, so as to create a new word or phrase (lexeme) in the target language. For instance, the English word skyscraper has been calqued in dozens of other languages, combining words for "sky" and "scrape" in each language, as for example Wolkenkratzer in German, arranha-céu in Portuguese, grattacielo in Italian, gökdelen in Turkish, and matenrou(摩天楼) in Japanese.

An idiom dictionary is a dictionary or phrase book that lists and explains idioms – distinctive words or phrases having a figurative meaning that goes beyond the original semantics of the words.

The Bible has been translated into many languages from the biblical languages of Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. As of November 2024 the whole Bible has been translated into 756 languages, the New Testament has been translated into an additional 1,726 languages, and smaller portions of the Bible have been translated into 1,274 other languages according to Wycliffe Global Alliance. Thus, at least some portions of the Bible have been translated into 3,756 languages.

Pleonasm is redundancy in linguistic expression, such as in "black darkness," "burning fire," "the man he said," or "vibrating with motion." It is a manifestation of tautology by traditional rhetorical criteria. Pleonasm may also be used for emphasis, or because the phrase has become established in a certain form. Tautology and pleonasm are not consistently differentiated in literature.

More than 100 complete translations into English languages have been produced. Translations of Biblical books, especially passages read in the Liturgy can be traced back to the late 7th century, including translations into Old and Middle English.

Untranslatability is the property of text or speech for which no equivalent can be found when translated into another (given) language. A text that is considered to be untranslatable is considered a lacuna, or lexical gap. The term arises when describing the difficulty of achieving the so-called perfect translation. It is based on the notion that there are certain concepts and words that are so interrelated that an accurate translation becomes an impossible task.

The Julia Evelina Smith Parker Translation is considered the first complete translation of the Bible into English by a woman. As of 2017, she is still the only woman to have translated the entire Bible unaided. The Bible was titled The Holy Bible: Containing the Old and New Testaments; Translated Literally from the Original Tongues, and was published in 1876.

In semantics, the best-known types of semantic equivalence are dynamic equivalence and formal equivalence, which employ translation approaches that focus, respectively, on conveying the meaning of the source text; and that lend greater importance to preserving, in the translation, the literal structure of the source text. Nida formulated the distinction originally in relation to Bible translations.

Green's Literal Translation or the Literal Translation of the Holy Bible (LITV) is a translation of the Bible by Jay P. Green Sr., first published in 1985. The LITV takes a literal, formal equivalence approach to translation. The Masoretic Text is used as the Hebrew basis for the Old Testament, and the Textus Receptus is used as the Greek basis for the New Testament. This translation is available in book form and is freely available online for use with the e-Sword software program. Some also refer to it as the "KJ3" or "KJV3".

There have been various debates concerning the proper family of biblical manuscripts and translation techniques that should be used to translate the Bible into other languages. Biblical translation has been employed since the first translations were made from the Hebrew Bible into Greek and Aramaic. Until the Late Middle Ages, the Western Church used the Latin Vulgate almost entirely while the Eastern Church, centered in Constantinople, mostly used the Greek Byzantine text. Beginning in the 14th century, there have been increasing numbers of vernacular translations into various languages. With the development of modern printing techniques, these increased enormously.

"On Translating Beowulf" is an essay by J. R. R. Tolkien which discusses the difficulties faced by anyone attempting to translate the Old English heroic-elegiac poem Beowulf into modern English. It was first published in 1940 as a preface contributed by Tolkien to a translation of Old English poetry; it was first published as an essay under its current name in the 1983 collection The Monsters and the Critics, and Other Essays.

Statistical machine translation (SMT) was a machine translation approach, that superseded the previous, rule-based approach because it required explicit description of each and every linguistic rule, which was costly, and which often did not generalize to other languages. Since 2003, the statistical approach itself has been gradually superseded by the deep learning-based neural machine translation.

The Tyndale Bible (TYN) generally refers to the body of biblical translations by William Tyndale into Early Modern English, made c. 1522–1535. Tyndale's biblical text is credited with being the first Anglophone Biblical translation to work directly from Hebrew and Greek texts, although it relied heavily upon the Latin Vulgate and Luther's German New Testament. Furthermore, it was the first English biblical translation that was mass-produced as a result of new advances in the art of printing.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Translation</span> Transfer of the meaning of something in one language into another

Translation is the communication of the meaning of a source-language text by means of an equivalent target-language text. The English language draws a terminological distinction between translating and interpreting ; under this distinction, translation can begin only after the appearance of writing within a language community.

The Lexham English Bible (LEB) is an online Bible released by Logos Bible Software; no printed copy is available. The New Testament was published in October 2010 and has an audio narration spoken by Marv Allen. It lists as General Editor W. Hall Harris, III. The Old Testament translation was completed in 2011.

Sense-for-sense translation is the oldest norm for translating. It fundamentally means translating the meaning of each whole sentence before moving on to the next, and stands in normative opposition to word-for-word translation.

Humour in translation can be caused by translation errors, because of irregularities and discrepancies between certain items that translators attempt to translate. This could be due to the ignorance of the translator, as well as the untranslatability of the text as a result of linguistic or cultural differences. In addition, translation errors can be caused by the language incompetence of the translator in the target language, resulting in unintended ambiguity in the message conveyed. Translation errors can distort the intended meaning of the author or speaker, to the point of absurdity and ludicrousness, giving a humorous and comedic effect.

The Literal Standard Version (LSV) is a Modern English translation of the Bible with a number of distinctive features. It describes itself as the most literal translation of the Bible into the modern English language. The first edition was published on February 2, 2020.

References

↑ "LITERAL | meaning in the Cambridge English Dictionary". dictionary.cambridge.org. Archived from the original on 11 November 2020. Retrieved 21 September 2019.
1 2 3 Hutchins, John (June 1995). ""The whisky was invisible", or Persistent myths of MT" (PDF). MT News International (11): 17–18. Archived from the original on 3 January 2021. Retrieved 16 February 2022.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: unfit URL (link)
↑ Hofstadter, Douglas (30 January 2018). "The Shallowness of Google Translate". The Atlantic . Archived from the original on 22 March 2020. Retrieved 16 February 2022.