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25-685: Smålandsfarvandet ( lit. "The small-land waterway") is a body of water in Denmark . It connects Storebælt in the west with Storstrømmen and Guldborgsund in the east and serves as a waterway for coastal traffic, yachts, and other small craft. It is bordered by Zealand in the north and Falster and Lolland in the south. The largest of the many islands in Smålandsfarvandet are Fejø , Femø , Askø , Lilleø , Skalø , Vejrø , and Rågø . 55°00′N 11°36′E  /  55°N 11.6°E  / 55; 11.6 This Danish location article

50-596: A functional, possibly covert head (denoted INFL) which is supposed to encode the requirements for the verb to inflect – for agreement with its subject (which is the specifier of INFL), for tense and aspect , etc. If these factors are treated separately, then more specific categories may be considered: tense phrase (TP), where the verb phrase is the complement of an abstract "tense" element; aspect phrase ; agreement phrase and so on. Further examples of such proposed categories include topic phrase and focus phrase , which are argued to be headed by elements that encode

75-438: A head, but some non-headed phrases are acknowledged. A phrase lacking a head is known as exocentric , and phrases with heads are endocentric . Some modern theories of syntax introduce functional categories in which the head of a phrase is a functional lexical item. Some functional heads in some languages are not pronounced, but are rather covert . For example, in order to explain certain syntactic patterns which correlate with

100-633: 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

125-456: 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

150-399: A phrase by any node that exerts dependency upon, or dominates, another node. And, using dependency analysis, there are six phrases in the sentence. The trees and phrase-counts demonstrate that different theories of syntax differ in the word combinations they qualify as a phrase. Here the constituency tree identifies three phrases that the dependency trees does not, namely: house at the end of

175-402: A phrase is any group of words, or sometimes a single word, which plays a particular role within the syntactic structure of a sentence . It does not have to have any special meaning or significance, or even exist anywhere outside of the sentence being analyzed, but it must function there as a complete grammatical unit. For example, in the sentence Yesterday I saw an orange bird with a white neck ,

200-416: A phrase, and the head-word gives its syntactic name, "subordinator", to the grammatical category of the entire phrase. But this phrase, " before that happened", is more commonly classified in other grammars, including traditional English grammars, as a subordinate clause (or dependent clause ); and it is then labelled not as a phrase, but as a clause . Most theories of syntax view most phrases as having

225-440: A sentence. Any word combination that corresponds to a complete subtree can be seen as a phrase. There are two competing principles for constructing trees; they produce 'constituency' and 'dependency' trees and both are illustrated here using an example sentence. The constituency-based tree is on the left and the dependency-based tree is on the right: The tree on the left is of the constituency-based, phrase structure grammar , and

250-453: 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

275-406: 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

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300-420: Is a noun is called a noun phrase . The remaining words in a phrase are called the dependents of the head. In the following phrases the head-word, or head, is bolded: The above five examples are the most common of phrase types; but, by the logic of heads and dependents, others can be routinely produced. For instance, the subordinator phrase: By linguistic analysis this is a group of words that qualifies as

325-456: 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 is metaphrase (as opposed to paraphrase for an analogous translation). It

350-522: 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". Phrase In theories of syntax ,

375-521: 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

400-424: 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

425-457: 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

450-465: 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

475-399: The speech act a sentence performs, some researchers have posited force phrases (ForceP), whose heads are not pronounced in many languages including English. Similarly, many frameworks assume that covert determiners are present in bare noun phrases such as proper names . Another type is the inflectional phrase , where (for example) a finite verb phrase is taken to be the complement of

500-487: The need for a constituent of the sentence to be marked as the topic or focus . Theories of syntax differ in what they regard as a phrase. For instance, while most if not all theories of syntax acknowledge the existence of verb phrases (VPs), Phrase structure grammars acknowledge both finite verb phrases and non-finite verb phrases while dependency grammars only acknowledge non-finite verb phrases. The split between these views persists due to conflicting results from

525-413: 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

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550-435: The standard empirical diagnostics of phrasehood such as constituency tests . The distinction is illustrated with the following examples: The syntax trees of this sentence are next: The constituency tree on the left shows the finite verb string may nominate Newt as a constituent; it corresponds to VP 1 . In contrast, this same string is not shown as a phrase in the dependency tree on the right. However, both trees, take

575-412: The street , end of the street , and the end . More analysis, including about the plausibilities of both grammars, can be made empirically by applying constituency tests . In grammatical analysis, most phrases contain a head , which identifies the type and linguistic features of the phrase. The syntactic category of the head is used to name the category of the phrase; for example, a phrase whose head

600-408: The tree on the right is of the dependency grammar . The node labels in the two trees mark the syntactic category of the different constituents , or word elements, of the sentence. In the constituency tree each phrase is marked by a phrasal node (NP, PP, VP); and there are eight phrases identified by phrase structure analysis in the example sentence. On the other hand, the dependency tree identifies

625-402: The words an orange bird with a white neck form a noun phrase , or a determiner phrase in some theories, which functions as the object of the sentence. Many theories of syntax and grammar illustrate sentence structure using phrase ' trees ', which provide schematics of how the words in a sentence are grouped and relate to each other. A tree shows the words, phrases, and clauses that make up

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