What does ‘translation’ mean?
The word TRANSLATE comes from the Latin root transferre, which means ‘to carry across’, like TRANSFER in English.
What about the Japanese word, 翻訳？「翻」ひるがえ（る）means not so much to ‘carry across’ as to ‘turn over’, to ‘change’ something.
These are slightly different meanings.
- Does the translator try to carry the meaning from one language to another?(the meaning remains the same)?
OR
- Does the translator ‘turn over’ the meaning (the meaning changes)?
In fact, translation may do both of these things, depending on the purpose of the translation. Even in the first case, when you ‘carry something over’ it’s easy to lose some of the thing you carry. So some things ‘get lost in translation’. In other words some change of meaning is inevitable. In Italian, there is a phrase traduttore, traditore (the translator is a traitor) to express this problem.
Translation losses
Some things that can be lost in translation
- Sound. For example in the phrase traduttore, traditore, the similarity of the two sounds is an important part of the communication. In English ‘traitor translator’ it’s not quite as strong, but still a little similar, but in Japanese, 裏切もの翻訳者 or 翻訳者は裏切り者 the element of similarity of the sound is lost.
- Word order. For example, ‘Help me, please’ and ‘Please, help me’ have different nuances in English, but both are quite natural. The natural word order in Japanese might be 「助けてください」. Would something be lost in translation?
- Connotations of a word and the word that usually translates it. For example, 作成 may be somewhere between ‘make’ or ‘make up’ or ‘prepare’.
- Lexical gaps. There may not be an exact translation for some words. For example, 就職活動 or 注意事項. English has no single word for these things.
One meaning – many translations or many translations – many meanings?
The problem with the ‘carry over’ definition of translation is that it assumes we have ‘meaning’ in our head before we put it into words in our head. Therefore we can put that meaning into words in any language, and still have the exact same meaning.
However, many linguists say that this is not the case. We cannot have meaning without language. We use language to MAKE meaning, not simply to REPRESENT it. Therefore a translation is a RE-CREATION (re-making) of meaning. This point of view suggests that for any one meaning in one language, there is more than one possible translation in another language.