Translation techniques

TRANSLATION TECHNIQUES

If you are reading this post and your first language is not English, it means you are a bilingual person. It also means that you have used at some point of your learning process different translation techniques, sometimes aware and sometimes unaware. Anyway, and it is my personal opinion, it is necessary to know about these techniques in order to make better translations.

Please, participate in this blog by providing at least three examples for each translation technique.

Here we go!

 



Source - http://www.interproinc.com/articles.asp?id=0303

Borrowing

Borrowing is the taking of words directly from one language into another without translation. Many English words are "borrowed" into other languages; for example software in the field of technology and funk in culture. English also borrows numerous words from other languages; abbatoire, café, passé and résumé from French; hamburger and kindergarten from German; bandana, musk and sugar from Sanskrit.

Borrowed words are often printed in italics when they are considered to be "foreign".

Transposition

This is the process where parts of speech change their sequence when they are translated (blue ball becomes boule bleue in French). It is in a sense a shift of word class. Grammatical structures are often different in different languages. He likes swimming translates as Er schwimmt gern in German. Transposition is often used between English and Spanish because of the preferred position of the verb in the sentence: English often has the verb near the beginning of a sentence; Spanish can have it closer to the end. This requires that the translator knows that it is possible to replace a word category in the target language without altering the meaning of the source text, for example: English Hand knitted (noun + participle) becomes Spanish Tejido a mano (participle + adverbial phrase).

 

Calque

A calque or loan translation (itself a calque of German Lehnübersetzung) is a phrase borrowed from another language and translated literally word-for-word. You often see them in specialized or internationalized fields such as quality assurance (aseguramiento de calidad, assurance qualité taken from English). Examples that have been absorbed into English include standpoint and beer garden from German Standpunkt and Biergarten; breakfast from French déjeuner (which now means lunch in Europe, but maintains the same meaning of breakfast in Québec). Some calques can become widely accepted in the target language (such as standpoint, beer garden and breakfast and Spanish peso mosca and Casa Blanca from English flyweight and White House). The meaning other calques can be rather obscure for most people, especially when they relate to specific vocations or subjects such as science and law. Solución de compromiso is a Spanish legal term taken from the English compromise solution and although Spanish attorneys understand it, the meaning is not readily understood by the layman. An unsuccessful calque can be extremely unnatural, and can cause unwanted humor, often interpreted as indicating the lack of expertise of the translator in the target language.

 

Literal Translation

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 different. And because one sentence can be translated literally across languages does not mean that all sentences can be translated literally. El equipo experimentado está trabajando para terminar el informe translates into English as The experienced team is working to finish the report ("experienced" and "team" are reversed).

 

 

Let me read your three examples for each translation technique!