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After looking through a few translations of texts, I started wondering how people go about actually doing the translation. For example, translating between Chinese and English. They have very different structures, and it's almost like you can get down to the level of a "sentence" (or string of words) being simply a chain of concepts. So instead of:

I went to the store and bought some food.

It is more like:

[self] [go] [past] [determiner] [store] [conjunction] [buy] [past] [quantity] [food]

That's at least how it feels when learning a new language. So then you have to translate that into Japanese lets say. So you swap around some nouns and verbs, reorder some adjectives, etc. But it's more than that. You want to make it sound good in the language. So somehow you have to get the essence of what the person is saying (basically experiencing what they are saying, or painting the picture in your mind), and then transcribe that into the text as the translation. But then you try to balance that with keeping close to the original grammatical structure, so it's not completely different. Like, you don't want to just retell the story from scratch, otherwise it doesn't really fit into the concept of a translation and it is more a retelling.

So I'm wondering if there are any general techniques to do this. It's probably a very complicated topic, so if that's too much, just wondering what some good starting points (resources) are to learn more about this would be.

Lance
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    Do you know a second language fluently? – Adam Bittlingmayer Sep 23 '18 at 19:49
  • It can help to use an intra-language that separates morphemes and restores elisions; then switch parameters (SOV, head last, etc.) and the lexicon (go=itte, etc.). The hard part is using context to resolve polysemy. – amI Sep 23 '18 at 20:26
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    There are different philosophies, which makes this a very broad question. But in general, translators will consider the meaning of sentences as a whole. Only (bad) Bible translations are concerned with mirroring the original grammatical structure. – curiousdannii Sep 24 '18 at 00:30

1 Answers1

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That's at least how it feels when learning a new language.

That's not how it feels when already knowing both languages at a high level or even just fluently.

Most of the translation happens effortlessly and without thinking, and > 90% of the mental effort goes into translation < 10% of the words or phrases. Translators and interpreters not only know both languages well, they have training and practice translating or interpreting.

To repeat my comment here, Learning a few foreign languages to a moderate level builds a good immunity against certain types of assumptions.

Adam Bittlingmayer
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