Featured A Glossary of Translation Terms

Thanks. This is good input, though I would say that in a word-for-word method also we look for meanings in the context, so that is not the exclusive method of thought for thought methods.

 

At this point, let me throw in a few definitions from linguistics. Every wise translator studies linguistics some, and several translation methods depend highly on linguistics.

morpheme: in linguistics, a minimum unit of meaning. So, "-ed" is a morpheme, but "stopped" is a complete word with more than one morpheme. Part of the process a linguist goes through in order to analyze a language to produce a written form of it, is to determine and map the phonemes and morphemes of a language. A tribal Bible translator, working in a language with no written form, must spend literally hundreds, maybe thousands of hours to accomplish this.

phoneme: in linguistics, a minimum unit of sound. So, "ah" is a phoneme, but "art" is not, since it consists of more sounds than one.

etymology: the study of how the meaning of a word develops and changes over time. See “historical linguistics.”

historical linguistics (also called diachronic linguistics): the study of how language develops and changes over a period of time, in particular the etymology of individual words. This becomes important primarily when a hapax legomena is present in the source document.

semantics: a linguistic term for the study of meaning.

root fallacy: the mistaken belief that the meaning in contemporary usage of a particular word is determined by its etymology. See Exegetical Fallacies by D. A. Carson for a detailed description of this error.

 

And now, some definitions from the process of translation.

equivalence: the concept that for every word or phrase in one language there is a word or phrase in another language with the same or nearly the same meaning. This concept has been used in the naming of translation methods such as dynamic equivalence (functional equivalence), optimal equivalence, etc.

 

Since you brought it up :smilewinkgrin:"

concordance: (1) the process of translating every occurrence of a given word in the original with the same word in the TL (target language). The problem with this is that seldom does a given word in the TL have the same range of meaning as a word in the SL (source language). (2) a book or document listing every occurrence of various words in a document.

 

source language (SL): the language of the document being translated.

target language (TL): the language into which a document is being translated.

receptor language: the term used in dynamic equivalence for TL, this term is based on how the target audience receives the translation in an existential event.

original language (see source language): In Bible translation, the language that a document was originally written in. In the case of the Bible, the original languages are Hebrew (and some Aramaic) for the Old Testament, and Koine Greek for the New Testament.

 

It's a pretty basic definition, I'll agree. So, give a better one.

 

I looked at this once and thought, "Hmm." I looked at it twice and thought, "Not bad." :thumbs:

 

You're welcome. Glad you're enjoying it. It's helpful to me too as I systematize things in my head.

Hesselgrave's is a great book maybe the best ever advanced missiology textbook. And he was a missionary in Japan!

 

translate: to carry the meaning of a spoken or written text from one language into another.

render: a technical term used by translators for the process of translating, often referring to translating a certain portion of the original text. Example: "How would you render John 3:16 into Chinese?"

interpret: (1) to render spoken language into another language. (2) to exegete in the original language the passage to be translated.

 

shift: anything that is new or different in the translation in respect to the original text. A shift may be a result of error, deliberate change, paraphrase, purposeful style change, etc. Many examples of purposeful shifts occurred in 19th and early 20th century translations of ancient Greek documents in which the immorality (homosexuality, etc.) of the original documents were hidden in the translated documents.

 

"gloss Any explanation of the meaning of a word or expression. Traditionally of glosses added to texts: e.g. a translation into Old Irish in the margin of a manuscript in Latin. Thence to entries in glossaries or collections of glosses, or in dictionaries" (Oxford Concise Dictionary of Linguistics, by P. H. Matthews, p. 159).

In books and articles on Bible translation, this word is often used of definitions of just one or several words such as are found many times in Strong's dictionaries and similar works. The wise translator will not be satisfied with a gloss for difficult words, but will research the contemporary usage of the word to come up with the best equivalent in the target language.

 

polysemy: the tendency of a word to have more than one meaning.

contemporary usage: how a word is used in the source document and in other documents during the same time frame as the source document.

 

The term "full effect" marks this as a DE definition.