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23-564: Kalaallisut ( lit.   ' language of the Kalaallit ' ), also known as West Greenlandic ( Danish : vestgrønlandsk ), is the primary language of Greenland and constitutes the Greenlandic language , spoken by the vast majority of the inhabitants of Greenland , as well as by thousands of Greenlandic Inuit in Denmark proper (in total, approximately 50,000 people). It

46-617: A diminutive or, in Chinese , adding the word " cursor " ( 标 ), making shǔbiāo "mouse cursor" ( simplified Chinese : 鼠标 ; traditional Chinese : 鼠標 ; pinyin : shǔbiāo ). Another example is the Spanish word ratón that means both the animal and the computer mouse. The common English phrase " flea market " is a loan translation of the French marché aux puces ("market with fleas"). At least 22 other languages calque

69-638: A human, professional translator. Douglas Hofstadter gave an example of a failure of machine translation: the English sentence "In their house, everything comes in pairs. There's his car and her car, his towels and her towels, and his library and hers." might be translated into French as " Dans leur maison, tout vient en paires. Il y a sa voiture et sa voiture, ses serviettes et ses serviettes, sa bibliothèque et les siennes. " That does not make sense because it does not distinguish between "his" car and "hers". Often, first-generation immigrants create something of

92-460: A literal translation in how they speak their parents' native language. This results in a mix of the two languages that is something of a pidgin . Many such mixes have specific names, e.g., Spanglish or Denglisch . For example, American children of German immigrants are heard using "rockingstool" from the German word Schaukelstuhl instead of "rocking chair". Literal translation of idioms

115-751: A practice known as interpretatio germanica : the Latin "Day of Mercury ", Mercurii dies (later mercredi in modern French ), was borrowed into Late Proto-Germanic as the "Day of Wōđanaz " ( Wodanesdag ), which became Wōdnesdæg in Old English , then "Wednesday" in Modern English. Since at least 1894, according to the Trésor de la langue française informatisé , the French term calque has been used in its linguistic sense, namely in

138-567: A publication by Louis Duvau: Un autre phénomène d'hybridation est la création dans une langue d'un mot nouveau, dérivé ou composé à l'aide d'éléments existant déja dans cette langue, et ne se distinguant en rien par l'aspect extérieur des mots plus anciens, mais qui, en fait, n'est que le calque d'un mot existant dans la langue maternelle de celui qui s'essaye à un parler nouveau. [...] nous voulons rappeler seulement deux ou trois exemples de ces calques d'expressions, parmi les plus certains et les plus frappants. Another phenomenon of hybridization

161-415: A similar phrase might have arisen in both languages independently. This is less likely to be the case when the grammar of the proposed calque is quite different from that of the borrowing language, or when the calque contains less obvious imagery. One system classifies calques into five groups. This terminology is not universal: Some linguists refer to a phonological calque , in which the pronunciation of

184-460: A translation that represents the precise meaning of the original text but does not attempt to convey its style, beauty, or poetry. There is, however, a great deal of difference between a literal translation of a poetic work and a prose translation. A literal translation of poetry may be in prose rather than verse but also be error-free. Charles Singleton's 1975 translation of the Divine Comedy

207-460: A word is imitated in the other language. For example, the English word "radar" becomes the similar-sounding Chinese word 雷达 ( pinyin : léidá ), which literally means "to arrive (as fast) as thunder". Partial calques, or loan blends, translate some parts of a compound but not others. For example, the name of the Irish digital television service Saorview is a partial calque of that of

230-406: A work written in a language they do not know. For example, Robert Pinsky is reported to have used a literal translation in preparing his translation of Dante 's Inferno (1994), as he does not know Italian. Similarly, Richard Pevear worked from literal translations provided by his wife, Larissa Volokhonsky, in their translations of several Russian novels. Literal translation can also denote

253-549: Is metaphrase (as opposed to paraphrase for an analogous translation). It is to be distinguished from an interpretation (done, for example, by an interpreter ). Literal translation leads to mistranslation of idioms , which can be a serious problem for machine translation . The term "literal translation" often appeared in the titles of 19th-century English translations of the classical Bible and other texts. Word-for-word translations ("cribs", "ponies", or "trots") are sometimes prepared for writers who are translating

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276-506: Is a source of translators' jokes. One such joke, often told about machine translation , translates "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak" (an allusion to Mark 14:38 ) into Russian and then back into English, getting "The vodka is good, but the meat is rotten". This is not an actual machine-translation error, but rather a joke which dates back to 1956 or 1958. Another joke in the genre transforms "out of sight, out of mind" to "blind idiot" or "invisible idiot". Calque Calquing

299-526: Is clearly not a phrase that would generally be used in English, even though its meaning might be clear. Literal translations in which individual components within words or compounds are translated to create new lexical items in the target language (a process also known as "loan translation") are called calques , e.g., beer garden from German Biergarten . The literal translation of the Italian sentence, " So che questo non va bene " ("I know that this

322-425: Is distinct from phono-semantic matching : while calquing includes semantic translation, it does not consist of phonetic matching—i.e., of retaining the approximate sound of the borrowed word by matching it with a similar-sounding pre-existing word or morpheme in the target language. Proving that a word is a calque sometimes requires more documentation than does an untranslated loanword because, in some cases,

345-424: Is not good"), produces "(I) know that this not (it) goes well", which has English words and Italian grammar . Early machine translations (as of 1962 at least) were notorious for this type of translation, as they simply employed a database of words and their translations. Later attempts utilized common phrases , which resulted in better grammatical structure and the capture of idioms, but with many words left in

368-457: Is regarded as a prose translation. The term literal translation implies that it is probably full of errors, since the translator has made no effort to (or is unable to) convey correct idioms or shades of meaning, for example, but it can also be a useful way of seeing how words are used to convey meaning in the source language. A literal English translation of the German phrase " Ich habe Hunger " would be "I have hunger" in English, but this

391-444: Is the creation in a language of a new word, derived or composed with the help of elements already existing in that language, and which is not distinguished in any way by the external aspect of the older words, but which, in fact, is only the copy ( calque ) of a word existing in the mother tongue of the one who tries out a new language. [...] we want to recall only two or three examples of these copies ( calques ) of expressions, among

414-525: The French expression directly or indirectly through another language. The word loanword is a calque of the German noun Lehnwort . In contrast, the term calque is a loanword, from the French noun calque ("tracing, imitation, close copy"). Another example of a common morpheme-by-morpheme loan-translation is of the English word " skyscraper ", a kenning -like term which may be calqued using

437-476: The UK service " Freeview ", translating the first half of the word from English to Irish but leaving the second half unchanged. Other examples include " liverwurst " (< German Leberwurst ) and " apple strudel " (< German Apfelstrudel ). The " computer mouse " was named in English for its resemblance to the animal . Many other languages use their word for "mouse" for the "computer mouse", sometimes using

460-413: The original language. For translating synthetic languages , a morphosyntactic analyzer and synthesizer are required. The best systems today use a combination of the above technologies and apply algorithms to correct the "natural" sound of the translation. In the end, though, professional translation firms that employ machine translation use it as a tool to create a rough translation that is then tweaked by

483-483: The word for "sky" or "cloud" and the word, variously, for "scrape", "scratch", "pierce", "sweep", "kiss", etc. At least 54 languages have their own versions of the English word. Some Germanic and Slavic languages derived their words for "translation" from words meaning "carrying across" or "bringing across", calquing from the Latin translātiō or trādūcō . The Latin weekday names came to be associated by ancient Germanic speakers with their own gods following

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506-588: Was based on West Greenlandic. This article related to the Indigenous languages of the Americas is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Literal translation Literal translation , direct translation , or word-for-word translation is a translation of a text done by translating each word separately without looking at how the words are used together in a phrase or sentence. In translation theory , another term for literal translation

529-511: Was historically spoken in the southwestern part of Greenland, i.e. the region around Nuuk . Tunumiisut and Inuktun are the two other native languages of Greenland, spoken by a small minority of the population. Danish remains an important lingua franca in Greenland and used in many parts of public life, as well as being the main language spoken by Danes in Greenland . An extinct mixed trade language known as West Greenlandic Pidgin

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