Questions tagged [translation]
Use this tag for questions about the practice, techniques, and methodology of translation — communicating a source language A in a target language B. Don't use this tag for questions asking to translate a particular word, phrase, or text piece, as such questions are explicitly defined off-topic.
119 questions
1
vote
0
answers
80
views
Is it acceptable to add a "literal" translation to an interlinear gloss?
None of the official guidelines (Leipzig Glossing Rules) and other references I've seen give examples of interlinear glosses that include a line for a literal translation.
In some cases, especially ...
- 83
0
votes
0
answers
84
views
Insight into basic machine translation error from major email service
I recently ordered a product through a Japanese company (I live in Tokyo), and received an email response that due to a recent backlog of orders I should expect my product shipped within 2-3 weeks (in ...
-1
votes
1
answer
140
views
Original meaning very very lost in translation. Cool stuff. (New to linguistics)
I am writing only to share something cool but I'd appreciate insights from you guys.
I wanted to translate Rammstein's song "Du hast" to Hebrew and look at the result. The main lyrics make ...
- 9
1
vote
0
answers
59
views
A Conditional Sentence in Turkish
On a recent visit to Dalyan I asked two local people how the following sentence was to be translated into Turkish:
"If you would have come to Ankara, last week, you would have seen me."
A ...
- 111
0
votes
1
answer
80
views
What is the standard/comprehensive reference for grammatical number in different languages?
I am a novice in this area so apologies if I use the wrong terminology.
For the purpose of content localization, I am seeking an easy and reliable reference for how numbers map to different plural ...
- 127
-1
votes
2
answers
190
views
The Phoenician or Punic Term for Captain [closed]
So, I have been looking around for a few days now into finding what title the Phoenicians, or at least the Carthaginians, used for their ship officers.
My interest is due to the fact that the word ...
1
vote
1
answer
145
views
Are there any studies on vocabulary loss and/or simplification of "thought structures" due to multilingualism?
(I am not a linguist, so please forgive any wrong term or concept)
This question comes from personal experience. I have studied in a trilingual university, so that each student knew at least three ...
- 11
0
votes
1
answer
118
views
Are there ways to convey any type of knowledge from one language to another?
In terms of linguistic possibility, is it possible to translate any term from one language to another? Expanding, to what extent is it possible to translate scientific or philosophical terms, for ...
- 103
1
vote
2
answers
65
views
How do you attest that two modal particles in different languages are of similar semantic attributes?
especially fellow English-Dutch speakers.
I am wondering as to how we can attest that two modal particles in different languages share similar semantic attributes. Is there any metrics/theories to ...
- 43
-1
votes
2
answers
720
views
Is calque equal to literal translation？
Calque is a way of borrowing words from another language. In this process, there's a direct translation of the elements of a word into the borrowing language.
Is calque equal to literal translation?
- 109
10
votes
2
answers
4k
views
Is there a list of word meanings that are universally represented in all languages?
I am looking for a comprehensive list of words/concepts that are represented in most if not all known languages - presumably the category would include human body parts (hand, foot, mouth, eye), ...
- 231
21
votes
2
answers
6k
views
Is J. R. R. Tolkien's "translation" scheme found in real life?
A summary of J. R. R. Tolkien's "translation" methodology:
J. R. R. Tolkien was best known for his fantasy world - Middle-earth. He almost always presented his works as translated from ...
- 377
-2
votes
2
answers
80
views
Are there any languages with greetings that could be easily mixed up with other phrases? [closed]
I'm currently writing a script in which a character tries to use a machine translator, but it fails and shocks/offends the person she's trying to talk to. Are there any languages I could use that have ...
- 97
-1
votes
1
answer
46
views
What aspect of meaning is not captured by the translation from natural language to PropL?
So I was given the sentence "I don’t drink and drive", and asked to translate it into PropL and indicate at least one aspect of meaning that the logical translation doesn’t
capture.
To ...
- 1
3
votes
2
answers
92
views
Looking for references on translatability from the point of view of theories of meaning
I am looking for references on un/translatability from the view point of theories of meaning.
In philosophy of language there is a variety of theories of meaning. On the other hand, there are ...
- 99
4
votes
4
answers
211
views
Is Sign Language "spoken" in other languages?
In English we say "I speak sign language," I'm curious if the same idiom exists in other languages too or do they refer to it differently?
- 157
0
votes
0
answers
63
views
Where does one go to get a language identified?
I have a massive book from the pawn shop (i make conlangs and loved the script), and it seems to have an alphabetic 36-character script that doesn't match up to anything on omniglot or the like. I'd ...
3
votes
2
answers
416
views
How does one identify the language a text is written in. Or if it is a code
How does one decode a language? I bought a book the other day, and its like 3,000 pages worth of stuff. I'd like to read my book, but I'm not sure what language it's in or it's grammar, so what does ...
2
votes
1
answer
304
views
How To Solve UKLO Mandombe Problem
Premise
I was looking at a two-part problem from the 2021 UKLO titled "Mandombe". UKLO is a linguistics olympiad, which is mostly a code-breaking competition. In this problem, we were given ...
3
votes
3
answers
225
views
Is there a a name for the process of translating from a language to another following the evolution of words in each of the languages?
The process I'm trying to describe is what someone does instinctively when they are still learning a language that has the same origin as their mother tongue, and they don't know a particular word, so ...
- 131
2
votes
2
answers
158
views
Types of transliteration and/or translation
There are cases where abbreviations or proper names like brands get transliterated/translated differently. This question is asking whether there are linguistic names for these phenomena, e.g.
The ...
- 379
-1
votes
3
answers
258
views
Some languages take more words to say the same thing. Is there a reliable source for this?
I am working on a way for scientists in my field (archaeology) to evaluate how many words they have published per days they have spent doing fieldwork. Some people do lots of fieldwork, then don't ...
- 107
-5
votes
1
answer
122
views
How to translate words like "the" to other languages?
So this question boils down to, how do you teach someone in Inuktitut (or elsewhere) about the word "the" (or "a")? How do you translate phrases like "the big red tree" ...
- 4,438
0
votes
1
answer
138
views
How did Shiloah (שילוח) become Siloam and Silwan?
What sorts of changes led the Biblical Hebrew name Shiloah (שילוח) to become Siloam (in Greek) and Silwan (in Arabic)? Has this been discussed anywhere?
EDITED I removed the word morphological from my ...
0
votes
1
answer
445
views
What are these variants (Nguyễn and Nguyến) of Vietnamese last name Nguyen?
I saw these two variants (Nguyễn and Nguyến) of spelling of Nguyen. Which of the two variants are the most original and correct Vietnamese spelling of Nguyen? Are both legitimate representation of ...
- 109
1
vote
2
answers
378
views
What is the term for the phenomenon where certain languages cannot describe certain concepts?
I am super-fascinated by the fact that English speakers cannot accurately describe how something smells and there are languages that can differentiate different shades of color that English speakers ...
- 29
0
votes
1
answer
35
views
Comparing Text Translations by Conducting Corpus Analysis
Provided one has three pieces of text called - “Text A”, “Text B” and “Text C”.
Text A is the original text.
Text B and Text C are translations of Text A (Text A, being initially written in another ...
9
votes
3
answers
820
views
Is there any formally recognised concept of a “standard” translation?
It’s common to hear in translation theory that when you translate a work you change it fundamentally, for example because words have multiple meanings and very specific connotations depending on their ...
- 817
2
votes
1
answer
106
views
Etymology of words in English translations
I posted this in English but they suggested this site. The question was about the English language because of roughly 50/50 Germanic/Latin roots. Anyhow here it is...
I have often daydreamed about ...
- 121
8
votes
1
answer
274
views
How and when did the modern western convention of not translating personal names arise?
In many languages it is a convention to translate or at least adapt foreign personal names to the language when discussing foreign people, especially notable and often mentioned people such as foreign ...
- 181
-2
votes
2
answers
297
views
Egyptian Hieroglyphics: where are Champollion's proofs?
I'm reading both the French Dictionnaire égyptien by J. Champollion published in 1841 and the English edition. It's my understanding that it is the standard for decipherment. The text provides a ...
- 123
-1
votes
2
answers
74
views
Is it possible given a set of translated words from a foreign to predict the translation for an untranslated word?
Basically, will knowing some fairly large set of words and phrases and their translations, could a computer perhaps predict what the word for perhaps a very basic word, like "eye?"
...
- 555
1
vote
2
answers
122
views
Meaning of Old Babylonian word pāqidūtum [closed]
I am learning the Old Babylonian language and just stumbled over the word/form pāqidūtum. It seems to be a third person male stativ singular + u + the female ending tum of the verb paqadum (to care ...
- 121
1
vote
1
answer
430
views
Examples for calque / loan-translation words with different meanings in different languages
Are there words/phrases/compound-words in two different languages that use the same words in their respective languages (like a calque / loan translation) but result in different meanings?
Here is a ...
- 79
1
vote
0
answers
120
views
Origin of mistake when a Dutch says "You are true." [closed]
Speaking English, Mark Rutte, the Dutch prime minister, mistakenly said you are true instead of you are right.
But where does the confusion comes from? 'You are right is' is 'je hebt gelijk' and 'True'...
- 356
6
votes
2
answers
12k
views
Norwegian Translation Codes (no, nn, nb) - Which to use on a website?
I have a website which currently uses the Norwegian language code 'no' for translations, but I am not a native speaker and noticed some differences between 'no' and 'nb' when it comes to currency. Did ...
1
vote
2
answers
134
views
Is there a concept to describe "a way of saying something that is incorrect, but occurs frequently due to the speaker speaking a second language"?
In the past ten years I've started working with people who's native language is not English. I've noticed that these folks say thing to get a concept across, but it's not something you'd hear a native ...
- 151
4
votes
1
answer
414
views
Do Native Americans' names mean the same to Native Americans as to English (or other languages) speakers?
I was researching on the topic of representation of ethnic minorities in the dominant ethnic group's media, when this question came up. What I'm trying know more is whether and to what extent ...
- 141
1
vote
1
answer
83
views
What branch in computational linguistics should I study if I am interested in machine translation?
I am graduate student and I am doing a Master of Translation and interpretation Arabic English. I need to pursue study in machine translation but I do not know where exactly to start, NLP, ...
3
votes
1
answer
402
views
What is aesthetic equivalence in translation?
I found this phrase in a theory about directional equivalence and I'm not sure what it means and if it is part of linguistic aspect of translation.
- 309
0
votes
1
answer
176
views
How to convert Old Irish Latin script to Ogham?
If you look on at an online Ogham Translator, it converts words like "crann" to ᚉᚏᚐᚅᚅ, which seems to be a letter-for-letter translation. The only guide I've seen to Old Irish pronunciation is this. ...
- 4,438
4
votes
1
answer
213
views
Can word embeddings between any two languages be transformed in a linear way?
In this paper: Word Translation Without Parallel Data researchers from FaceBook found that using a matrix and adversarial training the word embedding in one language can be transformed into(or ...
- 163
2
votes
2
answers
1k
views
How important is syntax to translation?
I'm interested in becoming a translator in the future. I heard someone said syntax is essential if you want to be a good translator.
If that is the case, what theory is best suited for applying to ...
- 21
-1
votes
1
answer
554
views
When was the name of Wales first attested in Romanian, and in which form?
As a native speaker, I am amazed that in Romanian the name of Wales, when it was introduced, very probably in the 19th century, was translated as Ţara Galilor, literally "Country of the Gauls", unlike ...
- 780
4
votes
1
answer
2k
views
Excepting Romanian, is "Wales" ever translated/transliterated in modern languages with the same term as that meaning "Gaul" or "Gauls"?
I have noticed that in Romanian the name of Wales is Ţara Galilor, which literally means Country of the Gauls or "Gauls-land". I consider this not just unusual, something that is not present ...
- 780
4
votes
1
answer
180
views
How to localize country names in phrases?
I want to localize phrases like "Places in {country name}" where the (already localized) country name is dynamically obtained according to the ISO country code.
The problem is that for some ...
- 157
2
votes
3
answers
134
views
What is the French equivalent of the English linguistic term "reflex" (the descendant sound of a sound in a proto-language)?
I looked it up in different dictionaries but could not find anything. Thank you in advance.
- 29
0
votes
0
answers
49
views
How can I obtain a list / cross-comparison table of function / closed-class words in the world's languages? (preferably in softcopy, online etc.)
How can I obtain a list / cross-comparison table of function / closed-class words in the world's languages? (preferably in softcopy, online etc.)
I am looking for something like:
...
- 347
1
vote
1
answer
894
views
If you can use nouns as verbs for different languages
Along the same lines of If you can use Chinese nouns as verbs, or vice versa, I am wondering if you can treat nouns as verbs or verbs as nouns in languages such as these:
Inuktitut
Hebrew
Japanese
...
- 4,438
0
votes
1
answer
72
views
Helping to compare 'descriptive power' of languages
Hello to everyone who read this! And sorry for my English...
I have a discussion on some particular internet forum which is now about a languages. In short:
I saying that all languages have ...
- 11