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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 ...
The concept of metaphrase (word-for-word translation) is an imperfect concept, because a given word in a given language often carries more than one meaning, and because a similar given meaning may often be represented in a given language by more than one word. Nevertheless, metaphrase and paraphrase may be useful as ideal concepts that mark the ...
One approach to doing so was by calque from the original (often German or Yiddish) surname. For instance, Imi Lichtenfield (itself a half-calque [definition needed]), founder of the martial art Krav Maga, became Imi Sde-Or. Both last names mean "light field". For more examples and other approaches, see the article on Hebraization of surnames.
In linguistics, a calque (/ k æ l k /) or loan translation is a word or phrase borrowed from another language by literal word-for-word or root-for-root translation.When used as a verb, “to calque” means to borrow a word or phrase from another language while translating its components, so as to create a new word or phrase in the target language.
Any sentence that requires a play on those different meanings will not work the same way in Chinese. In fact, very simple concepts in English can sometimes be difficult to translate, for example, there is no single direct translation for the word "yes" in Chinese, as in Chinese the affirmative is said by repeating the verb in the question.
Antonyms are words with opposite or nearly opposite meanings. For example: hot ↔ cold, large ↔ small, thick ↔ thin, synonym ↔ antonym; Hypernyms and hyponyms are words that refer to, respectively, a general category and a specific instance of that category. For example, vehicle is a hypernym of car, and car is a hyponym of vehicle.
Sense-for-sense translation is the oldest norm for translating. It fundamentally means translating the meaning of each whole sentence before moving on to the next, and stands in normative opposition to word-for-word translation (also known as literal translation).