The most translated word

It’s official: the most common word translated via Google Translate is “beautiful,” according to a joint project from Google News Lab and data visualization company Virtual Cinnamon. Closely following this are words like “good,” “love,” and “mama.” Indeed, many of the top 10 commonly translated words have positive connotations, and according to a brief coverage by Wired, if anything, it’s a hopeful reminder that in spite of language barriers, the words people want to express the most reflect positivity.

The result of the collaboration between Virtual Cinnamon and Google can be viewed through Beautiful in English, a website with interactive visual data representations of information taken from Google Translate. Created from February to March 2017 using Google Translate data from August to December 2016, Beautiful in English displays the project’s findings through several interactive data visualizations visitors can mouseover or click to view additional information.

Dataset and Methodology

The project only looked at single word translations for nouns and adjectives, and also limited the research to 10 of the most commonly used languages on Google Translate:

• French
• Spanish
• Portuguese
• Italian
• Japanese
• Dutch
• Polish
• German
• Russian
• Turkish

The dataset used in the project only dealt with translations from one of these languages to English.

The project notes a couple of caveats. For instance, the words used for the project were tagged as nouns and verbs in their English translations instead of their source language. For non-English words that had several English translations, manual verification had to be performed. Words with similar meanings (like in Spanish where there are male and female forms of the same word) were combined.

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Positive Words of Admiration

The end-product is a reflection of what Google Translate users want to express in different languages: a mixture of positive words of admiration, and apparently, days of the week.

The top ranked word, “beautiful,” for instance, is immediately followed by “Thursday,” “Tuesday,” and “Wednesday” sequentially. The project goes on to compare similarities in the top words translated from different languages into English. In this section, too, the project highlights some interesting cultural and linguistic similarities and differences.

Among the top 10 words in Spanish, French, Italian, and Portuguese, the words “beautiful” and “good” are consistently present. On the other hand, Spanish only has the words “Thursday” and “Wednesday” in common with Polish, whose closest language in this group is Russian, where “Tuesday,” ‘Wednesday,” “Thursday,” and, curiously, “little” are all present in the top 10 most commonly translated words.

Notably, the Japanese language’s top 10 words are completely different from all other languages in the project. The top words in Japanese are “work,” “confirmation,” and “decision,” with perhaps the only word with a positive connotation being “friend.”

Which words are the most commonly translated English words? While most of the words on this list are pretty basic, they actually generate more translation issues than you might think. Let’s take a look at five of the most commonly translated words.

1. The

As boring as it might sound, “the” actually takes first place for the most commonly translated word. While it might seem like a piece of cake, translating this word actually isn’t so easy. “The” is a definite article, which is used to specify the type of reference being made to a noun. In English there is only one version of this definite article. In many other languages, however, there are various versions. For example, many romance languages have both feminine and masculine versions of “the” (such as “el” or “la” in Spanish and “le” and “la” in French), depending on the article to which it refers. There are also different versions depending on the numerical quantity of the noun in question. So while in English you would use “the” to refer to both the table (singular) and the tables (plural), in Spanish you would need to change the form of “the” being used. La mesa would denote a single table, while las mesas would denote plural. When there are four different way to translate “the,” things can get a bit confusing.

1. Be

“To be, or not to be, that is the question,” Shakespeare famously wrote in “Hamlet.” In a plethora of other languages, however, it isn’t as simple as “being” or not “being,” but rather which be to be. In Spanish and French, for example, there are two different kinds of “to be,” one of which refers to a permanent state (nationality, physical characteristics, personality, profession, etc.) and one of which refers to more ambiguous temporary states, such as location, emotional states, and physical conditions. In English, this doesn’t exist, meaning it is incredibly important to have a translator who understands the nuances of the target language.

1. To

Yet again, nothing is a simple as it seems when it comes to translation. “To” has at least a dozen translations in German, as well as in the romance languages. In Italian, for example, “to” can be translated to (no pun intended) “a,” “verso,” “di,” “in,” “con,” and “fino a.”

1. It

This pronoun might seem pretty basic in English, but it actually generates all sorts of translation problems. Again, we run into the same problems of gender and numerical quantity. There is only one “it” in English, but in many of the romance languages, there are multiple, depending on the gender of the article and the quantity, as well as the positioning of the pronoun in the sentence. In French, “it” can be translated as “il,” “elle,” “le,” “l’,” “la,” and “lui.”

1. For

Just like many of the other words on our list, “for” can be translated a variety of different ways in a variety of different languages. In Spanish, for example, “for” can be translated as “por” or “para,” depending on the context.

большинство, наиболее, самый, многие, наибольший

существительное ↓

наречие ↓

прилагательное ↓

Словосочетания

Примеры с переводом

Возможные однокоренные слова

inmost  — сокровенный, глубочайший, самый сокровенный, лежащий глубоко внутри
mostly  — главным образом, по большей части, обычно, обыкновенно
undermost  — низший, самый нижний