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Literal translation
 
 
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Literal translation, also known as direct translation, is the rendering of text from one language to another "word-for-word" (Latin
Latin

Latin is an Italic language, historically spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. Through the Military history of the Roman Empire, Latin spread throughout the Mediterranean and a large part of Europe....
: "verbum pro verbo") rather than conveying the sense
Word sense

In linguistics, a word sense is one of the meaning s of a word.For example a dictionary may have over 50 different meanings of the word play, each of these having a different meaning based on the context of the word usage in a sentence....
 of the original. Literal translation
Translation

Translation is the hermeneutics of the Meaning of a text and the subsequent production of an Dynamic and formal equivalence text, likewise called a "translation," that communicates the same message in another language....
s thus commonly mis-translate idiom
Idiom

An idiom is a phrase whose meaning cannot be determined by the literal definition of the phrase itself, but refers instead to a figurative language meaning that is known only through common use....
s. Also, in the context of translating an analytic language to a synthetic language
Synthetic language

A synthetic language, in linguistic typology, is a language with a high morpheme-per-word ratio. This linguistic classification is largely independent of morpheme-usage classifications , although there is a common tendency for agglutinative languages to exhibit synthetic properties....
, it renders even the grammar
Grammar

Grammar is the field of linguistics that covers the conventions governing the use of any given natural language. It includes morphology and syntax, often complemented by phonetics, phonology, semantics, and pragmatics....
  unintelligible.

teral English
English language

English is a West Germanic language that originated in Anglo-Saxon England and has lingua franca status in many parts of the world as a result of the military, economic, scientific, political and cultural influence of the British Empire in the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries and that of the United States from the mid 20th century onwa...
 translation
Translation

Translation is the hermeneutics of the Meaning of a text and the subsequent production of an Dynamic and formal equivalence text, likewise called a "translation," that communicates the same message in another language....
 of the German
German language

German is a West Germanic languages, thus related to and classified alongside English language and Dutch language. It is one of the world's world language and the most widely spoken mother tongue in the European Union....
 word "Kindergarten" would be "children garden," but in English the expression refers to the school year between pre-school and first grade.






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Literal translation, also known as direct translation, is the rendering of text from one language to another "word-for-word" (Latin
Latin

Latin is an Italic language, historically spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. Through the Military history of the Roman Empire, Latin spread throughout the Mediterranean and a large part of Europe....
: "verbum pro verbo") rather than conveying the sense
Word sense

In linguistics, a word sense is one of the meaning s of a word.For example a dictionary may have over 50 different meanings of the word play, each of these having a different meaning based on the context of the word usage in a sentence....
 of the original. Literal translation
Translation

Translation is the hermeneutics of the Meaning of a text and the subsequent production of an Dynamic and formal equivalence text, likewise called a "translation," that communicates the same message in another language....
s thus commonly mis-translate idiom
Idiom

An idiom is a phrase whose meaning cannot be determined by the literal definition of the phrase itself, but refers instead to a figurative language meaning that is known only through common use....
s. Also, in the context of translating an analytic language to a synthetic language
Synthetic language

A synthetic language, in linguistic typology, is a language with a high morpheme-per-word ratio. This linguistic classification is largely independent of morpheme-usage classifications , although there is a common tendency for agglutinative languages to exhibit synthetic properties....
, it renders even the grammar
Grammar

Grammar is the field of linguistics that covers the conventions governing the use of any given natural language. It includes morphology and syntax, often complemented by phonetics, phonology, semantics, and pragmatics....
  unintelligible.

Examples

A literal English
English language

English is a West Germanic language that originated in Anglo-Saxon England and has lingua franca status in many parts of the world as a result of the military, economic, scientific, political and cultural influence of the British Empire in the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries and that of the United States from the mid 20th century onwa...
 translation
Translation

Translation is the hermeneutics of the Meaning of a text and the subsequent production of an Dynamic and formal equivalence text, likewise called a "translation," that communicates the same message in another language....
 of the German
German language

German is a West Germanic languages, thus related to and classified alongside English language and Dutch language. It is one of the world's world language and the most widely spoken mother tongue in the European Union....
 word "Kindergarten" would be "children garden," but in English the expression refers to the school year between pre-school and first grade. 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 calque
Calque

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....
s, e.g., “beer garden” from German “Biergarten.”

Literal translation of the Italian
Italian language

Italian is a Romance languages spoken by about 63 million people as a first language, primarily in Italy. In Switzerland, Italian is one of four Linguistic geography of Switzerlands....
 sentence, "So che questa non va bene" ("I know that this is not good"), produces "Know(I) that this not go(it) well," which has English words and Italian grammar.

Machine translation

Early machine translation
Machine translation

Machine translation, sometimes referred to by the abbreviation MT, is a sub-field of computational linguistics that investigates the use of computer software to translation text or speech from one natural language to another....
s were notorious for this type of translation as they simply employed a database of words and their translations. Later attempts utilized common phrase
Phrase

In grammar, a phrase is a group of words that functions as a single unit in the syntax of a Sentence .For example the house at the end of the street is a phrase....
s 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.

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 in something of a pidgin
Pidgin

A pidgin is a simplified language that develops as a means of communication between two or more groups that do not have a language in common, in situations such as trade....
. Many such mixes have specific names, e.g. Spanglish
Spanglish

Spanglish refers to the code-switching of "English language" and "Spanish language", in the speech of the Hispanic population of the United States, Gibraltar and most of the spanish holiday resorts, who are exposed to both Spanish language and English language....
 or Germish. For example, American children of German
Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a country in Central Europe. It is bordered to the north by the North Sea, Denmark, and the Baltic Sea; to the east by Poland and the Czech Republic; to the south by Austria and Switzerland; and to the west by France, Luxembourg, Belgium, and the Netherlands....
 immigrants are heard using "rockingstool" for "rocking chair" instead of the correct German "Schaukelstuhl."

Mistranslations

Literal translation of idiom
Idiom

An idiom is a phrase whose meaning cannot be determined by the literal definition of the phrase itself, but refers instead to a figurative language meaning that is known only through common use....
s is a source of numerous translators' jokes and apocrypha
Apocrypha

Apocrypha are texts of uncertain authenticity, or writings where the authorship is questioned.When used in the specific context of Judeo-Christian theology, the term apocrypha refers to any collection of scriptural texts that falls outside the Biblical canon....
. The following famous example has often been told both in the context of newbie
Newbie

Newbie is a slang term for a newcomer to online gaming or an Internet activity. It can also be used for any other activity in whose context a somewhat clueless newcomer could exist....
 translators and that of machine translation
Machine translation

Machine translation, sometimes referred to by the abbreviation MT, is a sub-field of computational linguistics that investigates the use of computer software to translation text or speech from one natural language to another....
: When the sentence "The spirit is strong, but the flesh is weak" (an allusion to ) was translated into Russian
Russian language

Russian is the most geographically widespread language of Eurasia, the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages, and the largest native language in Europe....
 and then back to English
English language

English is a West Germanic language that originated in Anglo-Saxon England and has lingua franca status in many parts of the world as a result of the military, economic, scientific, political and cultural influence of the British Empire in the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries and that of the United States from the mid 20th century onwa...
, 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 .

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. Charles Singleton's translation of The Divine Comedy
The Divine Comedy

The Divine Comedy , written by Dante Alighieri between 1308 and his death in 1321, is widely considered the central epic poem of Italian literature, and is seen as one of the greatest works of world literature....
 (1975) is regarded as a literal translation.

Cribs

Literal translations ("cribs," "ponies") are sometimes prepared for a writer who is translating a work written in a language he does not know. For example, Robert Pinsky
Robert Pinsky

Robert Pinsky is an American poet, essayist, literary criticism, and translator. From 1997 to 2000, he served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress....
 is reported to have used a literal translation in preparing his translation of Dante
DANTE

DANTE is a not-for-profit organisation that plans, builds and operates the international networks that interconnect the various National Research and Education Networks in Europe and surrounding regions....
's Inferno
Inferno

Inferno is the Italian term for Hell, also used in English for a large uncontrolled fire. It may also refer to:...
 (1994), as he does not know Italian. Similarly, Richard Pevear
Richard Pevear

Richard Pevear is a poet and translator. He is best known for his translations in collaboration with his Russian-born wife, Larissa Volokhonsky, on literature principally in Russian....
 worked from literal translations provided by his wife, Larissa Volokhonsky
Larissa Volokhonsky

Larissa Volokhonsky is a Russian-born translator who frequently collaborates with her American-born husband, Richard Pevear, on translations of works mainly in Russian, but also French, Italian, and Greek....
, in their translations of several Russian novels.

See also

  • Translation
    Translation

    Translation is the hermeneutics of the Meaning of a text and the subsequent production of an Dynamic and formal equivalence text, likewise called a "translation," that communicates the same message in another language....
  • Dynamic and formal equivalence
    Dynamic and formal equivalence

    Dynamic equivalence and formal equivalence are two approaches to translation. The dynamic attempts to convey the thought expressed in a source text , while formal attempts to render the text word-for-word ....
  • Calque
    Calque

    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....
  • Young's Literal Translation
    Young's Literal Translation

    Young's Literal Translation is a translation of the Bible into English language, published in 1862. The translation was made by Robert Young , compiler of Young's Analytical Concordance to the Bible and Concise Critical Comments on the New Testament....
     (of the Bible
    Bible

    The Bible is the central religious text of Judaism and Christianity. The exact Books of the Bible is dependent on the religious traditions of specific denominations....
    )