Definition of word for word translation

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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]

In translation theory, another term for «literal translation» is metaphrase (as opposed to paraphrase for an analogous translation).

Literal translation leads to mistranslation of idioms, which was once a serious problem for machine translation.^[2]

The term as used in translation studies[edit]

Usage[edit]

The term «literal translation» often appeared in the titles of 19th-century English translations of classical, Bible and other texts.

Cribs[edit]

Word-for-word translations («cribs,» «ponies» or «trots») are sometimes prepared for a writer who is 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[edit]

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 translation of the Divine Comedy (1975) is regarded as a prose translation.

As bad practice[edit]

«Literal» translation implies that it is probably full of errors, 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[edit]

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 «Know(I) that this not goes(it) well,» which has English words and Italian grammar.

Machine translation[edit]

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 capture of idioms, but with many words left in the original language. For translating synthetic languages, a morphosyntactic analyzer and synthesizer is 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 for the failures of a 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.» is 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 the literal translation of both «his» and «hers» into French is «sa» in case of singular, and «ses» in case of plural, therefore the French version is not understandable.^[3]

Pidgins[edit]

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 in 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».

Translator’s humor[edit]

Literal translation of idioms is a source of translators’ jokes and apocrypha. The following has often been told in relation to inexperienced translators or to machine translations: When the sentence, «The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak» («дух бодр, плоть же немощна«, an allusion to Mark 14:38) was translated into Russian and then back into English, the result was «The vodka is good, but the meat is rotten» («водка хорошая, но мясо протухло«). This is generally believed to be an amusing apocrypha rather than a reference to an actual machine-translation error.^[2]

See also[edit]

• All your base are belong to us
• Calque
• Dynamic and formal equivalence
• Literal Standard Version
• Metaphrase
• Semantic translation
• Translation
• Transliteration
• Young’s Literal Translation (of the Bible)

References[edit]

Further reading[edit]

• Olive Classe, Encyclopedia of literary translation into English, vol. 1, Taylor & Francis, 2000, ISBN 1-884964-36-2, p. viii.

Word-for-word
translation is another method of rendering sense.
It presents a consecutive verbal translation though at the level of
word-groups and sentences. This way of translation is often employed
both consciously and subconsciously by students in the process
of translating alien grammatical constructions/word forms. Sometimes
students at the initial stage of learning a foreign language may
employ
this way of translation even when dealing with seemingly common
phrases or sentences, which are structurally different from their
equivalents in the native tongue. Usually the students employ
word-for-word
translation to convey the sense of word-groups or sentences which
have a structural form, the order of words, and the means of
connection
quite different from those in the target language. To achieve
faithfulness
various grammtical in translation, word-for-word variants are
to be corrected to avoid various grammatical violations made by the
inexperienced students. Cf. You
are right to begin with*BU маєте
рацію,
щоб
почати
з
instead of Почнемо
з
того/припустимо,
що
ви
маєте
рацію/що
ви
праві.

1. Interlinear translation.

The
interlinear¹
way/method of translating is
a conventional
term for a strictly faithful rendering of sense expressed by
word-groups
and sentences at the level of some text. The
method
of interlinear translation may be practically applied to all speech
units(sentences, super syntactic units, passages). Interlinear
translation always provides a completely faithful conveying only of
content, which is often achieved through various transformations of
structure of many sense units.

Interlinear
translating is widely practiced at the intermediary and
advanced stages of studying a foreign language. It is helpful when
checking up the students’ understanding of certain structurally
peculiar
English sense units in the passage under translation.
The interlinear method of translating helps the student to obtain
the necessary training in rendering the main aspects of the foreign
language.

The
method
of interlinear translation is practically employed when rendering
some passages or works for internal office use in scientific/research
centers and laboratories and other organizations and by students in
their translation
practice

1. Literary translation.

Literary
translating represents the highest level of translator’s activity.
Literary translators in addition to dealing with the difficulties
inherent to translations
of all fields, must consider the aesthetic aspects of the text, its
beauty and style, as well as its marks (lexical, grammatical or
phonological) keeping in mind that one language’s stylistic marcs
can be different from another’s. the important idea is that the
quality of the translation
be the same in both languages while also maintaining the integrity of
the contents at the same time.

For
a translator, the fundamental issue is searching for equivalents that
produce the same effects in the translated text as those that the
author was seeking for readers of the original text.

Literary
artistic translation
presents a faithful transmission of content and of the artistic
merits only of a work.

Literary
translations are always performed in literary all-nation languages
and with many transformations which help achieve the ease and beauty
of
the original composition.

When
the SL and TL belong to different cultural groups the first problem
faced by the translator is finding terms in his own language that
express
the highest level of faithfulness possible to the meaning of certain
worlds.

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Advantages and disadvantages of Word for Word Translation

Word for word translation or literal translation is the rendering of text from one language to another one word at a time with or without conveying the sense of the original text. In translation studies, literal translation is often associated with scientific, technical, technological or legal texts.

A bad practice

It is often considered a bad practice of conveying word by word translation in non-technical texts. This usually refers to the mistranslation of idioms that affects the meaning of the text, making it unintelligible. The concept of literal translation may be viewed as an oxymoron (contradiction in terms), given that literal denotes something existing without interpretation, whereas a translation, by its very nature, is an interpretation (an interpretation of the meaning of words from one language into another).

Usage

A word for word translation can be used in some languages and not others dependent on the sentence structure: El equipo está trabajando para terminar el informe would translate into English as The team is working to finish the report. Sometimes it works and sometimes it does not. For example, the Spanish sentence above could not be translated into French or German using this technique because the French and German sentence structures are completely different. And because one sentence can be translated literally across languages does not mean that all sentences can be translated literally.

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 translation of The Divine Comedy (1975) is regarded as a prose translation.

Machine Translation

Early machine translations were famous for this type of translation because they simply created a database of words and their translations. Later attempts utilized common phrases which resulted in better grammatical structure and capture of idioms but with many words left in the original language.

The systems that we use nowadays are based on a combination of technologies and apply algorithms to correct the “natural” sound of the translation. However, professional translation agencies that use machine translation create a rough translation first that is then tweaked by a professional translator.

Mistakes and Jokes

Literal translation of idioms results quite often in jokes and amusement among translators and not only. The following famous example has often been told both in the context of newbie translators and that of machine translation: When the sentence “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak was translated into Russian and then back to English, the result was “The vodka is good, but the meat is rotten. This is generally believed to be simply an amusing story, and not a factual reference to an actual machine translation error.

Since an early age I have been passionate about languages. I hold a Master’s degree in Translation and Interpreting, and I have worked as a freelance translator for several years. I specialize in Marketing, Digital Marketing, Web and Social Media. I love blogging and I also run the blog www.italiasocialmedia.com

First off, some data:

According to COCA word-for-word has 60 usages, 3 of them are «word-for-word translation». Word-by-word has 26 usages, none of them are «word-by-word translation» (but some with «transcription»).

The definition of word-for-word:

Oxford: In exactly the same or, when translated, exactly equivalent words
Merriam-Webster: being in or following the exact words, verbatim
The Free Dictionary: one word at a time, without regard for the sense of the whole

Only the last dictionary contains a definition for word-by-word, too:

The Free Dictionary: one word at a time

The definitions given by The Free Dictionary are, obviously, identical to each other.

Google hits:
Word-for-word ~21m
Word-for-word translation ~318k
Word-by-word ~3.8m
Word-by-word translation ~95k

According to usages and dictionaries word-by-word is, at least, less popular. And assuming that there may be a lot of usages from non-natives among the Google hits, this could be an indicator for word-by-word being even utterly wrong.

In another forum I found the following statement:

When I translate something «literally,» (wörtlich) it still follows the main rules of the language I’m translating into. What you mean is «word-by-word» (wortwörtlich) to me.

I assume that this was written by a German but I don’t know it. However, if this would be true a «word-by-word translation» would be a translation where I keep, for instance, the order of the words, disregarding if it makes sense in the target language.

Some examples:

Original: word-by-word
Word-by-word translation: Wort bei Wort (That’s a terrible translation!)

Original: It is critical to know…
Word-by-word translation: Es ist kritisch zu wissen… (That’s a terrible translation!)

Original: Ich glaub, ich spinne.
Word-by-word translation: I think I spider. (I guess only Germans understand this.)

A «word-for-word translation», however, would be an attempt to keep the word-choice as close as possible but following the rules of the target language (e.g. order of words) and also considering if the statement still makes sense in the other language. Here are better translations for the examples above:

Wort für Wort
Es ist wichtig zu wissen…
I think, I’m going nuts. (Actually, this is not a word-for-word translation but rather a sense-for-sense translation.)

So, my questions again:

1. As neither Oxford nor Merriam-Webster have any entries for word-by-word in their dictionaries: is word-by-word actually valid?
2. If yes, is there any difference between «word-by-word translation» and «word-for-word translation»? If yes again, what is it specifically?

From Teflpedia

Let me be clear, word-for-word translation doesn’t alter the grammar at all from source language (SL) to target language (TL). It is considered ridiculous, means nothing, and try not to use it if you’re a professional translator. The history of word-for-word translation began when people wanted to convert backwater people to learn their sacred texts (presumably the Bible), so they wanted to translate the sacred texts into the native languages. But they’re scared of changing the word of God, so they tried to preserve the “form” of the original text as much as possible, i.e., number of sentences, number of words in each sentence, and words in exactly the same order. Needless to say, the result is gibberish.

Translation that is fit for purpose should not achieve “formal equivalence” but “functional equivalence” and to do that, the “words” will disappear, change places, multiply, sprout, one will turn into ten and vice versa. Since translation’s main objective is “meaning”, it is very important to study about the theory of meaning. This is where semantics comes into the picture.

According to Catford (1965: 94) untranslatability occurs when it is impossible to build functionally relevant features of the situation into the contextual meaning of the TL text. Those happen where the difficulty is linguistic such as ambiguity (due to shared exponent of two or more SL grammatical or lexical items and polisemy) and oligosemy, and where difficulty is cultural. In semantics, there are some methods of analyzing the meaning of a word. Ogden & Richard propose the triangular concept of meaning in which semantics is also related to semiotics, pragmatics  and discourse. The point is, in understanding the meaning we also need to relate it with the context.

Componential/Feature/Contrast analysis refers to the description of the meaning of words through structured sets of semantic features, which are given as “present”, “absent” or “indifferent with reference to feature”. Componential analysis is a method typical of structural semantics which analyzes the structure of a word’s meaning. Thus, it reveals the culturally important features by which speakers of the language distinguish different words in the domain (Ottenheimer, 2006:20). This is a highly valuable approach to learning another language and understanding a specific semantic domain of and Ethnography. For examples:

Man = [+ male], [+ mature],

Woman = [– male], [+ mature],

Boy = [+ male], [– mature],

Girl = [– male] [– mature],

Child = [+/– male] [– mature].

Another approach in meaning which is also very useful for translation study is a theory proposed by Anna Wierzbicka (1996) known as Natural semantic metalanguage (NSM) which employs simple culturally-shared meanings (semantic primes) as its vocabulary of semantic and pragmatic description. NSM is based on evidence supporting the view that, despite their enormous differences, all languages share a small but stable but stable core of simple shared meanings (semantic primes), that these meanings have concrete linguistic exponents as words or word-like expressions in all languages, and that they share a universal grammar of combination, valency, and contemplation. That is, in any natural language one can isolate a small vocabulary and grammar which has precise equivalents in all other languages. The number of semantic primes appears to be in the low-sixties. Examples include the primary meanings of the English words: someone/person, something/thing, people, say, words, do, think, want, good, bad, if, can, because. Semantic primes can be combined, according to grammatical patterns which also appear to be universal, to form simple phrases and sentences such as: ‘people think that this is good’, ‘it is bad if someone says something like this’, ‘if you do something like this, people will think something bad about you’, and so on. The words and grammar of the natural semantic metalanguage jointly constitute a surprisingly flexible and expressive “mini-language”.

Hermeneutics proposed by Shi in the article entitled Hermeneutics and Translation Theory, this approach is relevant to translation because there is no translation without understanding and interpreting texts, which is the intial step in any kinds of translation. It involves cultivating the ability to understand things from somebody else’s point of view & appreciate the cultural and social forces that may have influenced their outlook. Through understanding the ‘inner life’ or an insider/first-person perspective of an engaged participant in these phenomena, hermeneutics interprets and inquires into the meaning and import of these phenomena.

In addition, lexical semantics is also very necessary as it deals with synonym, antonym, polisemy, and hyponymy. It involves more or less explicit considerations concerning the number of interpretational variants of a word form, i.e., identifying the lexical items associated with a lexeme.

Parker Sante’s explanation on Transliteration vs Translation

A transliteration is a word-for-word translation from one language to another.

A translation is what it would sound like in common speak.

Say you wanted to translate “la madre de mi madre es mi abuela” into English.

The transliteration would be “the mom of my mom is my grandmother”, which sounds kind of clunky.

Let’s fix that up. The translation would be “my mom’s mom is my grandmother”, which sounds like more actual normal English. The transliteration issue results from the fact that contractions don’t exist in Spanish, so the transliteration is changed to accommodate it.

P.S. “Transliteration” is the representation of sounds in a source language (SL) in the phonetic notation of the target language (TL). So when we talk about the capital of Japan we talk about “Tokyo”. That is a transliteration into the Roman letters of the English alphabet of the Japanese word 東京. If we were to translate that word it would be “East Capital” but generally we don’t translate proper nouns — Chris Poole

See Chris Poole’s cool explanation on the difference of word-for-word translation and literal translation.

Tatum Derin consistently writes research with her team who equally loves writing too. A research assistant who loves to hunt for stories and opportunities. A nerdfighter who likes to spend time reading about the science of language and outer space, and geeks with fellow Anime fans (definitely One Piece and Attack on Titan!). Adores tear-jerking family movies badly (and Billie Eilish level of horror).
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