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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).
Metaphrase is a term referring to literal translation, i.e., "word by word and line by line" [1] translation. In everyday usage, metaphrase means literalism; however, metaphrase is also the translation of poetry into prose. [2] Unlike "paraphrase," which has an ordinary use in literature theory, the term "metaphrase" is only used in translation ...
Grammatical abbreviations are generally written in full or small caps to visually distinguish them from the translations of lexical words. For instance, capital or small-cap PAST (frequently abbreviated to PST) glosses a grammatical past-tense morpheme, while lower-case 'past' would be a literal translation of a word with that meaning.
a word-by-word or morpheme-by-morpheme gloss, where morphemes within a word are separated by hyphens or other punctuation, and finally a free translation, which may be placed in a separate paragraph or on the facing page if the structures of the languages are too different for it to follow the text line by line.
In some dialects of French, the English term "weekend" becomes la fin de semaine ("the end of week"), a calque, but in some it is left untranslated as le week-end, a loanword. French cor anglais (literally English horn) is a near-calque of English French horn. In English cor anglais refers to a completely different musical instrument.
The inference of a use from its abuse is not valid: i.e., a right is still a right even if it is abused (e.g. practiced in a morally/ethically wrong way); cf. § abusus non tollit usum. ab aeterno: from the eternal: Literally, "from the everlasting", "from eternity", or "from outside of time".
A literal translation tries to remain as close to the original text as possible, without adding the translators' ideas and thoughts into the translation. Thus, the argument goes, the more literal the translation is, the less danger there is of corrupting the original message. This is therefore much more of a word-for-word view of translation.
In semantics, the best-known types of semantic equivalence are dynamic equivalence and formal equivalence (two terms coined by Eugene Nida), which employ translation approaches that focus, respectively, on conveying the meaning of the source text; and that lend greater importance to preserving, in the translation, the literal structure of the source text.