Literal translation, direct translation or word-for-word translation, is a

translation Translation is the communication of the Meaning (linguistic), meaning of a #Source and target languages, source-language text by means of an Dynamic and formal equivalence, equivalent #Source and target languages, target-language text. The ...

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 Translation is the communication of the meaning of a source-language text by means of an equivalent target-language text. The English language draws a terminological distinction (which does not exist in every language) between ''transla ...

, another term for "literal translation" is ''

metaphrase Metaphrase is a term referring to literal translation, i.e., "word by word and line by line" translation. In everyday usage, metaphrase means literalism; however, metaphrase is also the translation of poetry into prose.Andrew Dousa Hepburn, Manual ...

'' (as opposed to ''

paraphrase A paraphrase () is a restatement of the meaning of a text or passage using other words. The term itself is derived via Latin ', . The act of paraphrasing is also called ''paraphrasis''. History Although paraphrases likely abounded in oral tra ...

'' for an

analogous Analogy (from Greek ''analogia'', "proportion", from ''ana-'' "upon, according to" lso "against", "anew"+ ''logos'' "ratio" lso "word, speech, reckoning" is a cognitive process of transferring information or meaning from a particular subject ( ...

translation). Literal translation leads to mistranslating of

idiom An idiom is a phrase or expression that typically presents a figurative, non-literal meaning attached to the phrase; but some phrases become figurative idioms while retaining the literal meaning of the phrase. Categorized as formulaic language, ...

s, which is a serious problem for

machine translation Machine translation, sometimes referred to by the abbreviation MT (not to be confused with computer-aided translation, machine-aided human translation or interactive translation), is a sub-field of computational linguistics that investigates t ...

The term as used in translation studies

Usage

The term "literal translation" often appeared in the titles of 19th-century

English English usually refers to: * English language * English people English may also refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England ** English national ide ...

translations of classical, Bible and other texts.

Cribs

Word-for-word translations ("cribs," "ponies" or "trots") are sometimes prepared for a writer who is translating a work written in a language they do not know. For example,

Robert Pinsky Robert Pinsky (born October 20, 1940) is an American poet, essayist, literary critic, and translator. From 1997 to 2000, he served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. Pinsky is the author of nineteen books, most of ...

is reported to have used a literal translation in preparing his translation of

Dante Dante Alighieri (; – 14 September 1321), probably baptized Durante di Alighiero degli Alighieri and often referred to as Dante (, ), was an Italian poet, writer and philosopher. His ''Divine Comedy'', originally called (modern Italian: '' ...

's ''

Inferno Inferno may refer to: * Hell, an afterlife place of suffering * Conflagration, a large uncontrolled fire Film * ''L'Inferno'', a 1911 Italian film * Inferno (1953 film), ''Inferno'' (1953 film), a film noir by Roy Ward Baker * Inferno (1973 fi ...

'' (1994), as he does not know Italian. Similarly,

Richard Pevear Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky are literary translators best known for their collaborative English translations of classic Russian literature. Individually, Pevear has also translated into English works from French, Italian, and Greek. The ...

worked from literal translations provided by his wife, Larissa Volokhonsky, in their translations of several Russian novels.

Poetry to prose

Literal translation can also denote 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 translation of the ''

Divine Comedy The ''Divine Comedy'' ( it, Divina Commedia ) is an Italian narrative poem by Dante Alighieri, begun 1308 and completed in around 1321, shortly before the author's death. It is widely considered the pre-eminent work in Italian literature and ...

'' (1975) is regarded as a prose translation.

As bad practice

"Literal" translation implies that it is probably full of errors, since the translator has made no effort to convey, for example, correct idioms or shades of meaning, but it might be also useful in seeing how words are used to convey meaning in the source language.

Examples

A literal

translation of the

German German(s) may refer to: * Germany (of or related to) ** Germania (historical use) * Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language ** For citizens of Germany, see also German nationality law **Ge ...

word "'" would be "children's garden," but also in (mainly US) English, the expression refers to the preschool institution. 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

calque In linguistics, a calque () or loan translation is a word or phrase borrowed from another language by literal word-for-word or root-for-root translation. When used as a verb, "to calque" means to borrow a word or phrase from another language wh ...

s, e.g., “beer garden” from German “.” The literal translation of the

Italian Italian(s) may refer to: * Anything of, from, or related to the people of Italy over the centuries ** Italians, an ethnic group or simply a citizen of the Italian Republic or Italian Kingdom ** Italian language, a Romance language *** Regional Ita ...

sentence, "'" ("I know that this is not good"), produces "Know(I) that this not goes(it) well," which has English ''words'' and Italian ''grammar''.

Machine translation

Early

s (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

phrase In syntax and grammar, a phrase is a group of words or singular word acting as a grammatical unit. For instance, the English expression "the very happy squirrel" is a noun phrase which contains the adjective phrase "very happy". Phrases can consi ...

s which resulted in better grammatical structure and capture of idioms, but with many words left in the original language. For translating

synthetic languages A synthetic language uses inflection or agglutination to express syntactic relationships within a sentence. Inflection is the addition of morphemes to a root word that assigns grammatical property to that word, while agglutination is the combina ...

, a morphosyntactic analyzer and synthesizer is 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 a human, professional translator.

Douglas Hofstadter Douglas Richard Hofstadter (born February 15, 1945) is an American scholar of cognitive science, physics, and comparative literature whose research includes concepts such as the sense of self in relation to the external world, consciousness, an ...

gave an example for the failures of a 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." is translated into French as "" That does not make sense, because the literal translation of both "his" and "hers" into French is "" in case of singular, and "" in case of plural, therefore the French version is not understandable.

Pidgins

Often, first-generation immigrants create something of a literal translation in how they speak their parents' native language. This results in a mix of the two languages in something of a

pidgin A pidgin , or pidgin language, is a grammatically simplified means of communication that develops between two or more groups of people that do not have a language in common: typically, its vocabulary and grammar are limited and often drawn from s ...

. Many such mixes have specific names, e.g.

Spanglish Spanglish (a portmanteau of the words "Spanish" and "English") is any language variety (such as a contact dialect, hybrid language, pidgin, or creole language) that results from conversationally combining Spanish and English. The term is mos ...

Denglisch Denglisch is a term describing the increased use of anglicisms and pseudo-anglicisms in the German language. It is a portmanteau of the German words german: Deutsch, label=none (''German'') and german: Englisch, label=none. The term is firs ...

. For example, American children of

immigrants are heard using "rockingstool" from the German word "" instead of "rocking chair".

Translator's humor

Literal translation of

s is a source of translators' jokes and

apocrypha Apocrypha are works, usually written, of unknown authorship or of doubtful origin. The word ''apocryphal'' (ἀπόκρυφος) was first applied to writings which were kept secret because they were the vehicles of esoteric knowledge considered ...

. The following has often been told in relation to inexperienced translators or to

s: When the sentence, "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak" ("'", an allusion t
Mark 14:38
was translated into

Russian Russian(s) refers to anything related to Russia, including: *Russians (, ''russkiye''), an ethnic group of the East Slavic peoples, primarily living in Russia and neighboring countries *Rossiyane (), Russian language term for all citizens and peo ...

and then back into English, the result was "The vodka is good, but the meat is rotten" ("'"). This is generally believed to be an amusing apocrypha rather than a reference to an actual machine-translation error.