Translation

Translation is an activity comprising the interpretation of the meaning of a text in one language — the source text — and the production of a new, equivalent text in another language — called the target text, or the translation.

Translation problems

General problems

Translation is inherently a difficult activity. Translators can face additional problems which make the process even more difficult, such as:

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• Problems with the source text:
• Changes made to the text during the translation process
• Illegible text
• Misspelt text
• Incomplete text
• Poorly written text
• Missing references in the text (e.g. the translator is to translate captions to missing photos)
• The source text is a translation of a quotation that was originally made in the target language, and the original text is unavailable, making word-for-word quoting nearly impossible
• Language problems
• Dialect terms and neologisms
• Unexplained acronyms and abbreviations
• Obscure jargon
• Other
• Rhymes, puns and poetic meters
• Highly specific cultural references
• Subtle but important properties of language such as euphony or dissonance

The problem of "untranslatability"

See also full article: Untranslatability .

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The question of whether particular words are untranslatable is often debated, with lists of "untranslatable" words being produced from time to time.

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These lists often include words such as saudade, a Portuguese word (also used in Spanish) as an example of an "untranslatable". It translates quite neatly however as "sorrowful longing", but does have some nuances that are hard to include in a translation; for instance, it is a positive-valued concept, a subtlety which is not clear in this basic translation.

Related Topics:
Portuguese - Spanish

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Some words are hard to translate only if one wishes to remain in the same grammatical category. For example, it is hard to find a noun corresponding to the Russian почемучка (pochemuchka) or the Yiddish שלימזל (shlimazl), but the English adjectives "inquisitive" and "jinxed" correspond just fine.

Related Topics:
Noun - Russian - Yiddish - English - Adjective

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Linguists are naturally enthusiastic about obscure words with local flavour, and are wont to declare them "untranslatable", but in reality these incredibly culture-laden terms are the easiest of all to translate, even more so than universal concepts such as "mother". This is because it is standard practice to translate these words by the same word in the other language, borrowing it for the first time if necessary. For example, an English version of a menu in a French restaurant would rarely translate pâté de foie gras as "fat liver paste", although this is a good description. Instead, the accepted translation is simply pâté de foie gras, or, at most, foie gras pâté. In some cases, only transcription is required: Japanese 山葵 translates into English as wasabi. A short description or parallel with a familiar concept is also often acceptable: わさび may also be translated as "Japanese horseradish" or "Japanese mustard".

Related Topics:
Transcription - Wasabi - Horseradish - Mustard

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The more obscure and specific to a culture the term is, the simpler it is to translate. For example, the name of an insignificant settlement such as Euroa in Australia is automatically just "Euroa" in every language in the world that uses the Roman alphabet, whilst it takes some knowledge to be aware that Saragossa is Zaragoza, Saragosse, etc. or that China is 中国, Cina, Chine, and so forth.

Related Topics:
Euroa - Australia - Roman alphabet - Saragossa - China

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The problem of common words

The words that are truly difficult to translate are often the small, common words. For example, the verb "to get" in all its various uses covers nearly seven columns of the most recent version of the Robert-Collins French-English dictionary. The same is true for most apparently simple, common words, such as "go" (seven columns), "come" (four and a half columns), and so forth.

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Cultural aspects can complicate translation. Consider the example of a word like "bread". At first glance, it is a very simple word, referring in everyday use to just one thing, with obvious translations in other languages. But ask people from England, France or China to describe or draw "bread", du pain or 包 (bāo), and they will describe different things, based on their individual cultures.

Related Topics:
England - France - China

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Differing levels of precision inherent in a language also play a role. What does "there" mean? Even discounting idiomatic uses such as "there, there, don't cry", we can be confronted by several possibilities. If something is "there" but not very far away, a Spaniard will say ahí; if it is further away he or she will say allí, unless there are connotations of "near there", "over yonder" or "on that side", in which case the word is likely to be allá. Conversely, in colloquial French, all three "there" concepts plus the concept of "here" all tend to be expressed with the word là.

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Expressions may also exist in one language which refer to concepts that don't exist in another language. For example, the French "tutoyer"' and "vouvoyer" would both be translated into English as "to address as 'you'", since the singular informal second person pronoun is archaic in English. Yet this simplistic translation completely destroys the meaning of the verbs: "vouvoyer" means to address using the formal "you" form ("vous"), whereas "tutoyer" means to use the informal form ("tu"). Indeed, when English was using the "thou" pronoun, "thou" as a verb would have been a translation for "tutoyer"; today, it is difficult to give a concise translation that captures the nuances of "tu" vs. "vous".

Related Topics:
French - Tutoyer - Vouvoyer

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The problem often lies in failure to distinguish between translation and glossing. Glossing is what a glossarydoes: give a short (usually one-word) equivalent for each term. Translation, as explained above, is decoding meaning and intent at the text level (not the word level or even sentence level) and then re-encoding them in a target language. Words like saudade and שלימזל are hard to "gloss" into a single other word, but given two or more words they can be perfectly adequately "translated". Similarly, depending on the context, the meaning of the French word "tutoyer", or Spanish "tutear", could be translated as "to be on first name terms with". "Bread" has perhaps a better claim to being untranslatable, since even if we resort to saying "French bread", "Chinese bread", "Algerian bread", etc. we are relying on our audience knowing what these are like.

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