A synthetic language is a language that is statistically characterized by a higher morpheme-to-word ratio. Rule-wise, a synthetic language is characterized by denoting syntactic relationship between the words via inflection and agglutination , dividing them into fusional or agglutinating subtypes of word synthesis. Further divisions include polysynthetic languages (most of them belonging to an agglutinative subtype, although Navajo and other Athabaskan languages are often classified as belonging to a fusional subtype) and oligosynthetic languages (only found in constructed languages ). In contrast, rule-wise, the analytic languages rely more on auxiliary verbs and word order to denote syntactic relationship between the words.
15-578: Tunumiisut ( lit. ' language of the Tunumiit ' ), also known as East Greenlandic ( Danish : østgrønlandsk ), is the language of the Tunumiit in East Greenland . It is generally categorised as a dialect of Greenlandic , but verges on being a distinct language. The largest town where it is the primary language is Tasiilaq on Ammassalik Island , with the island's name being derived from
30-633: 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
45-456: 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
60-429: A phrase or sentence. In translation theory , another term for literal translation 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
75-426: A root word is used in inflection to convey a grammatical property of the word, such as denoting a subject or an object. Combining two or more morphemes into one word is used in agglutinating languages , instead. For example, the word fast , if inflectionally combined with er to form the word faster , remains an adjective, while the word teach derivatively combined with er to form the word teacher ceases to be
90-453: 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
105-564: A verb. Some linguists consider relational morphology to be a type of derivational morphology, which may complicate the classification. Derivational and relational morphology represent opposite ends of a spectrum; that is, a single word in a given language may exhibit varying degrees of both of them simultaneously. Similarly, some words may have derivational morphology while others have relational morphology. In derivational synthesis , morphemes of different types ( nouns , verbs , affixes , etc.) are joined to create new words. That is, in general,
120-532: 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". Synthetic languages Adding morphemes to
135-521: 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
150-424: 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
165-457: 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
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#1732844091891180-562: The West Greenlandic name of the town. 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
195-576: The morphemes being combined are more concrete units of meaning. The morphemes being synthesized in the following examples either belong to a particular grammatical class – such as adjectives , nouns, or prepositions – or are affixes that usually have a single form and meaning: Aufsicht supervision -s- Rat council -s- Mitglieder members Versammlung assembly Aufsicht -s- Rat -s- Mitglieder Versammlung supervision {} council {} members assembly "Meeting of members of
210-413: 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
225-613: 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 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
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