There are few things more silly than a tourist in a foreign country with a foreign language dictionary trying to communicate with someone in their native tongue. It took years of study to master these languages and it takes practice to maintain them.

As a student I found out that there is no such thing as a word for word translation.

One must learn the proper idioms and then render English thought into Russian thought and vice-versa. Every language has unique grammar and syntax. German has a precise word order that accounts for time, place, and manner. However Latin and Russian, for example have loosely structured word order because case endings on each word determine the function of the word in the sentence.

Then there’s the trouble of conveying meaning. What good is an exact translation when the actual words fail to convey the intended meaning?

A statistical analysis is often of no help.

In any text or document, a statistical analysis will show that definite and indefinite articles, prepositions, and conjunctions will show up more frequently than nouns or verbs. It is simply the nature of English language. The statistical search for the true meaning of a word in this case offers no value. In such a phrase as “face to face” you have  two nouns, one of which is the object of a preposition. In languages that use case endings to determine the function of a word (such as Latin, Russian) in a sentence would not be readily apparent from a dictionary search. It’s like trying to look up a conjugated verb in a dictionary when what you really need to know is its infinitive. Using an online lexicon without a high degree of instruction in the language is almost useless.

How do juries choose between translations of very different kinds of books? Do they look for those that are unusually faithful to the original or for those that read as though they were originally written in the new language?

Translating plays must present a different set of problems from translating poetry. The dialogue has to sound authentic and yet has to convey more meaning than real speech does.

The question is often asked: “What got lost in translation?” Even if you’ve learned another language so well you can translate it into your mother language, can you ever know the nuances and the emotions associated with words and phrases that a child learns instinctively?

They say that Shakespeare is all about language, but his plays have always been revered in other tongues.

It is all about the feeling, something incomprehensible, I guess.

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