Translation Section

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Gabriele Berghammer

the text clinic

www.the-text-clinic.com

Google translation

It can be quite handy to pop a simple French or German text into Google translation if you just want to get the general gist of what it means in English. Google is not great at tenses, e.g. I found that text written in the past tense in German was translated into the past perfect in English. And Google cannot be accused of lacking fantasy. Here is an example.

Original German: Ende Juni, Anfang Juli bin ich dann eine Woche nach Kroatien zu meinem Bruder gefahren. Er hat dort einen Wohnwagen in einem Nudistencamp stehen.

Google translation: Late June, early July, I'm a week after Croatia to my brother is run. The bear has a caravan in a nudist camp standing.

My translation: End of June, beginning of July I then went to Croatia to my brother for a week. He has a caravan standing in a nudist camp there.

© Anders Holmqvist, 2012

I have translated bin gefahren as went but the literal translation would be drove. There is no hint of ‘run’ nor any sign of bears in the original German text.

Elise Langdon-Neuner

[email protected]

Concepts from the linguistic crossroads

What's in a word…?

Ever thought about what a word is? In rather technical terms, a word may be defined as ‘a sequence of letters with an orthographic space on either side’.¹ Taking a more philosophical stance, a word is ‘the smallest unit of language that can be used by itself’² and that has literal (semantic) or practical (pragmatic) meaning.

We tend to think of a word as the very element in a language that carries meaning. Yet, meaning can be carried by units smaller than a word – morphemes. A morpheme cannot be further broken down into other elements of meaning and very often cannot be used on its own. For example, the morpheme ‘re’, such as in ‘rebuild’ or ‘recapitulate’, means ‘again’, and cannot stand alone. The morpheme ‘hyper’ in ‘hypersensitivity’ means ‘excessive’ and is also used in composite words although it has, since the early 1940s,³ also been used as a stand-alone colloquial shortening of ‘hyperactive’.

cross·road noun ˈkro\s-ˌrōd also -ˈrōd\

a: the place of intersection of two or more roads

b: (1) a small community located at such a crossroads (2) a central meeting place

c: a crucial point especially where a decision must be made⁴

Morphemes can have a grammatical function, e.g. the suffix ‘ity’ in ‘hypersensitivity’, where it forms an abstract noun from an adjective. Also, morphemes may be used to form a plural (texts) or a tense (reported) or to turn an adjective into an adverb (hyperactively).

Why would this be of relevance for translation? Because very often there is no one-to-one relationship between word and meaning in different languages. In isolating languages, such as Vietnamese, there is a one-to-one correspondence of morphemes to words, i.e. any one word contains only one morpheme. By contrast, the two-morpheme English word ‘disbelieve’ is represented by two German words, i.e. nicht glauben, and the German Handrücken is ‘dorsum of the hand’ in English. Overall, therefore, an element of meaning represented by a single word in one language may be represented by a number of words in another.

In the language of medicine, many terms are made up of Greek or Latin roots, but they may also originate from common speech. The same register in different languages may make different use of these Greek, Latin, and common-speech roots. For example, the English ‘metacarpals’, made up entirely of Greek morphemes, is Mittelhandknochen in German, consisting of common-language morphemes only. The Greek-derived term ephelides finds its English equivalent in the Scandinavian-derived two-morpheme word ‘freckles’, which in German becomes the three-morpheme Sommersprossen, a word which also highlights an additional aspect of meaning, namely that freckles, or ‘summer sprouts’, appear on the skin when exposed to the summer sun.

In translation, words may pose a problem when they refer to culture-specific concepts, such as the English ‘copyright’ and the German Urheberrecht, which, although very often used interchangeably, have rather different meanings. The English morpheme ‘copy’ derives from the Latin copiare, meaning ‘to write in plenty’ or ‘to write an original text many times’³ and placing the emphasis on who holds the right to reproduce or commercialize a piece of intellectual property. The German morpheme Urheber derives from the Old High German urhab⁵ and focuses on who ‘brought into being’ or ‘created’ a piece of intellectual property. The difference in meaning between the two composites, therefore, should not come as a surprise.

More often than not, of course, meaning is carried by structures larger than a single word.

LINGUEE has come of age

http://www.linguee.com

The web service Linguee – the search engine combing the internet for translated texts and making them available as a bilingual data pool that can be searched for words and phrases – has truly come of age. After a 1-year beta testing phase, the full version of Linguee, the then German–English bilingual translation tool, went live in May 2010. Since then, Linguee has expanded its service to include English–Spanish, English–French, and English–Portuguese as additional language pairs and has come to rank among the top 100 websites in Germany.

A specialized computer program – a web crawler – automatically searches the internet for webpages containing bi- or multilingual content. The texts are evaluated by a machine-learning algorithm, and translated sentences and words are extracted. The system is capable of autonomously learning to filter out the best translations based on quality criteria continuously refined on the basis of user feedback. Of the more than a trillion sentences that Linguee computers have already compared, only the top 0.01%, i.e. 100 million of the translated sentences, have been retained.

Linguee presents words in context

One major advantage over traditional dictionaries is that Linguee presents any word or phrase in the context of an entire sentence.

Many of the texts Linguee is based on derive from European institutions or EUR-Lex, the database of EU legislative texts. For example, some of the text pairs displayed when looking for German ways of translating the phrase ‘application for marketing authorisation’ are displayed in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Linguee search result.

Linguee provides direct access to the source texts

A really nice feature of Linguee is that it does not only display translated sentence pairs, but also takes you straight to the documents the translation derives from. For example, clicking the ‘eur-lex.europe.eu’ hyperlink in Figure 1 opens to the original publications in both languages – in our case the relevant EU Regulation.

Linguee: a vast collection of human translations

Of note, Linguee is not an automatic translator like Google Translate or Microsoft's Bing Translator. These tools, although helping you understand the gist of foreign language text, may not always use the correct term or phrase in a given context because they do not understand the subtleties of language. By contrast, what Linguee displays is human-translated entries, showing you how other people have solved a particular translation problem. Although, as with any linguistic resource or dictionary, caution is required when making your choice, Linguee is a highly valuable addition to any multilingual toolkit.

For more information, go to http://www.linguee.com/

Gabriele Berghammer

the text clinic

http://www.the-text-clinic.com

Notes

* English original: ‘The first dose may be administered from the age of six weeks and not later than the age of 12 weeks.’

** English original: ‘In 5,673 vaccinated infants (2,834 in the vaccine group) protective efficacy was measured as a reduction in the incidence of rotavirus (RV) gastroenteritis caused by vaccine G serotypes (G1-G4) that occurred at least 14 days after the third dose of vaccine through the first full rotavirus season after vaccination.’

* Referring to the motto of the Habsburgs to have their members marry into other royal families to forge alliances: Bella gerant alii, tu, felix Austria, nube. ‘Let others wage wars, but you, happy Austria, marry’.