Other forms: translations
A translation is the same text carried over into another language. A new translation, lost in translation, read it in translation.
The word covers both the process and the result. Literal and free translation are the two poles, and every translator works somewhere between them. Machine translation has improved enormously and still fails on tone, idiom and jokes. In translation means reading a work in a language other than the one it was written in. Note translator, and that in biology translation is the step from RNA to protein.
1nountranslationA text carried over into another language.
“The new translation is about a third shorter and much better.”
2nounprocessThe process of translating.
“Translation of legal documents needs great care, since one wrong word can change the meaning.”
translation is a carrying across.
Latin translatio means a carrying across, from trans plus ferre. Metaphor is the same idea in Greek — meta plus pherein — so a translation and a metaphor are the same word in two languages.
Proto-Indo-European
*telh₂- (bear)
Middle English
translacioun
English, today
translation
Built from
From Middle English translacioun. From Middle English translacioun (“transfer, translation”), from Anglo-Norman translacioun, from Latin trānslātiō, from trānslāt-, the supine stem of trānsferō (“to transfer, transport, transform, translate”). Equivalent to translate + ion. Displaced native wending.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA