Literal translation

Literal translation is a way of translating a text by taking each word and changing it directly into another language, without looking at how the words work together in a sentence. This is also called direct translation, word-for-word translation, or metaphrase.

It is different from paraphrase, which looks at the whole idea of a sentence. Literal translation can cause problems, especially when trying to translate idioms, or phrases that don’t make sense when taken word by word.

Because of these issues, literal translation can be tricky for machine translation, where computers try to change text from one language to another. It is important to understand the meaning behind words, not just change each one individually.

Translation studies

Literal translation means changing each word in a text without looking at how the words work together. This method was often used in old English translations of important books like the Bible.

Sometimes writers use literal translations to help them when they are translating a book in a language they don’t know. For example, Robert Pinsky used a literal translation when he translated Dante’s Inferno because he doesn’t know Italian. Likewise, Richard Pevear used literal translations that his wife provided to help translate Russian novels.

A literal translation can also mean keeping the exact meaning of the original text but not trying to keep its style or beauty, especially in poetry. This can turn a poem into plain prose, but it can still be correct. Charles Singleton’s 1975 translation of the Divine Comedy is an example of this.

Bad practice

Literal translation means translating each word one by one without looking at how the words work together. For example, the German phrase "Ich habe Hunger" literally translates to "I have hunger" in English. While you can understand it, it sounds odd. A better way to say it in English would be "I am hungry".

Early machine translations often made this kind of mistake because they just swapped words from one language to another. Even today, machines need help from people to make translations sound natural.

Sometimes, when people from different countries speak, they mix words from each language. This can create new words, like using "rockingstool" instead of "rocking chair".

Translator's humor

When people translate phrases word by word, it can lead to funny mistakes. For example, the phrase "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak" might be translated into Russian and then back into English as "The vodka is good, but the meat is rotten." This is just a joke and not something that really happens when using machines to translate. Another funny example changes "out of sight, out of mind" to something like "blind idiot" or "invisible idiot." These jokes show why understanding how words work together is important in translation.