Translation Techniques

by Gabriela Bosco

As somebody who has been translating professionally for over 15 years now, I must confess the
topic of Translation Techniques poses somewhat of a challenge; trying to pin down strategies that
you use almost intuitively every day of your life becomes a rather difficult task.

That is why I decided to outline a widely-accepted list of translation techniques in the hope that
the reader may become interested in knowing a little bit more about translation and its nuances.

Direct Translation Techniques

Direct Translation Techniques are used when structural and conceptual elements of the source
language can be transposed into the target language. Direct translation techniques include:

 Borrowing

 Calque

 Literal Translation

Borrowing

Borrowing is the taking of words directly from one language into another without translation.
Many English words are "borrowed" into other languages; for example software in the field of
technology and funk in culture. English also borrows numerous words from other languages;
abbatoire, café, passé and résumé from French; hamburger and kindergarten from German;
bandana, musk and sugar from Sanskrit.

Borrowed words are often printed in italics when they are considered to be "foreign".

Calque

A calque or loan translation (itself a calque of German Lehnübersetzung) is a phrase borrowed

from another language and translated literally word-for-word. You often see them in specialized
or internationalized fields such as quality assurance (aseguramiento de calidad, assurance
qualité taken from English). Examples that have been absorbed into English include standpoint
and beer garden from German Standpunkt and Biergarten; breakfast from French déjeuner
(which now means lunch in Europe, but maintains the same meaning of breakfast in Québec).
Some calques can become widely accepted in the target language (such as standpoint, beer
garden and breakfast and Spanish peso mosca and Casa Blanca from English flyweight and
White House). The meaning other calques can be rather obscure for most people, especially when
they relate to specific vocations or subjects such as science and law. Solución de compromiso is a
Spanish legal term taken from the English compromise solution and although Spanish attorneys
understand it, the meaning is not readily understood by the layman. An unsuccessful calque can
be extremely unnatural, and can cause unwanted humor, often interpreted as indicating the lack
of expertise of the translator in the target language.

Literal Translation

A word-for-word translation can be used in some languages and not others dependent on the
sentence structure: El equipo está trabajando para terminar el informe would translate into
English as The team is working to finish the report. Sometimes it works and sometimes it does
not. For example, the Spanish sentence above could not be translated into French or German
using this technique because the French and German sentence structures are different. And
because one sentence can be translated literally across languages does not mean that all sentences
can be translated literally. El equipo experimentado está trabajando para terminar el informe
translates into English as The experienced team is working to finish the report ("experienced"
and "team" are reversed).

Oblique Translation Techniques

Oblique Translation Techniques are used when the structural or conceptual elements of the
source language cannot be directly translated without altering meaning or upsetting the
grammatical and stylistics elements of the target language.

Oblique translation techniques include:

 Transposition

 Modulation

 Reformulation or Equivalence

 Adaptation

 Compensation

Transposition

This is the process where parts of speech change their sequence when they are translated (blue
ball becomes boule bleue in French). It is in a sense a shift of word class. Grammatical structures
are often different in different languages. He likes swimming translates as Er schwimmt gern in
German. Transposition is often used between English and Spanish because of the preferred
position of the verb in the sentence: English often has the verb near the beginning of a sentence;
Spanish can have it closer to the end. This requires that the translator knows that it is possible to
replace a word category in the target language without altering the meaning of the source text,
for example: English Hand knitted (noun + participle) becomes Spanish Tejido a mano
(participle + adverbial phrase).

Modulation

Modulation consists of using a phrase that is different in the source and target languages to
convey the same idea: Te lo dejo means literally I leave it to you but translates better as You can
have it. It changes the semantics and shifts the point of view of the source language. Through
modulation, the translator generates a change in the point of view of the message without altering
meaning and without generating a sense of awkwardness in the reader of the target text. It is
often used within the same language. The expressions es fácil de entender (it is easy to
understand) and no es complicado de entender (it is not complicated to understand) are
examples of modulation. Although both convey the same meaning, it is easy to understand
simply conveys "easiness" whereas it is not complicated to understand implies a previous
assumption of difficulty that we are denying by asserting it is not complicated to understand.
This type of change of point of view in a message is what makes a reader say: "Yes, this is
exactly how we say it in our language".

Reformulation or Equivalence

Here you have to express something in a completely different way, for example when translating
idioms or advertising slogans. The process is creative, but not always easy. Would you have
translated the movie The Sound of Music into Spanish as La novicia rebelde (The Rebellious
Novice in Latin America) or Sonrisas y lágrimas (Smiles and Tears in Spain)?

Adaptation

Adaptation occurs when something specific to one language culture is expressed in a totally
different way that is familiar or appropriate to another language culture. It is a shift in cultural
environment. Should pincho (a Spanish restaurant menu dish) be translated as kebab in English?
It involves changing the cultural reference when a situation in the source culture does not exist in
the target culture (for example France has Belgian jokes and England has Irish jokes).

Compensation

In general terms compensation can be used when something cannot be translated, and the
meaning that is lost is expressed somewhere else in the translated text. Peter Fawcett defines it
as: "...making good in one part of the text something that could not be translated in another". One
example given by Fawcett is the problem of translating nuances of formality from languages that
use forms such as Spanish informal tú and formal usted, French tu and vous, and German du and
sie into English which only has 'you', and expresses degrees of formality in different ways.

As Louise M. Haywood from the University of Cambridge puts it, "we have to remember that
translation is not just a movement between two languages but also between two cultures.
Cultural transposition is present in all translation as degrees of free textual adaptation departing
from maximally literal translation, and involves replacing items whose roots are in the source
language culture with elements that are indigenous to the target language. The translator
exercises a degree of choice in his or her use of indigenous features, and, as a consequence,
successful translation may depend on the translator's command of cultural assumptions in each
language in which he or she works".

If you are interested in reading further on the subject, please refer to Peter Fawcett, Translation
and Language, St. Jerome, Manchester, 1997 (especially Chapter 4 on Translation Techniques).

Difference Between Metaphor and Idiom

This is just a brief guide to the difference between idiom and metaphor, something which shows
up very often as a source of confusion.

The Cambridge dictionary offers this definition of idiom:

"a group of words whose meaning considered as a unit is different from the meanings of each
word considered separately."

and Cambridge gives us this definition of metaphor:

"an expression that describes a person or object by referring to something that is considered to
possess similar characteristics."

Very often, an idiom has no association to metaphor, being simply a phrase that becomes adopted
by language as if a single word. These idioms are not readily confused with metaphor, though
there are times when an idiom is also a metaphor or metaphor system. A good example is the
"carrot and stick".

The "carrot and stick" idiom refers to the use of enticement and punishment to motivate a horse
or donkey. The carrot was dangled before the animal as a lure, while the stick was used to
reprimand stubbornness. Without knowing the relationship between carrot and stick, the group of
words seem out of place in a sentence, which is central to its identification as an idiom.

However, in its common use, this idiom makes metaphorical equations, such as this one:

Iran: West's carrot & stick method failed

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/2236065.cms

Here, the West is seen as making the following equations:

1. Iran is equated to a donkey, being stubborn and unwilling to change its position.

2. Trade incentives are equated to the carrot, aimed at luring Iran from its current position.

3. U.N. sanctions are equated to the stick, used to force a change in Iran's position.
 4. The West is equated to the farmer, and is assumed by this model to own or control Iran.

Extending this further, the West may accuse Iran of "digging in its heels" as a way of protecting
its position. For example, since the stick equals sanctions of some kind, say, cutting grain
shipments to Iran, Iran may "dig in its heels" by stockpiling current grain supplies in preparation.
The donkey of this metaphor system has as many parts as we choose to give it.

The way to spot those times when an idiom behaves as a metaphor is to look for signs of an
equation being made, then check to see if the equation can be extended, as you see in the above
example. There may even be times when you discover that it never really was an idiom after all.
It's only natural - cases of mistaken identity are very common among idiom, metaphor and
simile.