How word meaning crosses languages
Words carry literal meaning, emotion, expectations about neighbouring words and associations with a particular register. Translation must weigh these meanings when no target-language word carries them all.
Kinds of lexical meaning
Lexical meaning is a word's meaning considered apart from its sentence and grammatical role; it includes propositional, expressive, presupposed and evoked meaning.
Propositional meaning is what a word denotes: liver can mean the large dark-red gland in the upper right abdomen or food eaten baked, fried or in pâté or sausage, while bloody means containing blood in phrases such as bloody diarrhoea or bloody mucus. A translation is generally considered inaccurate when the target expression's propositional meaning does not match the source expression's.
Expressive meaning concerns a speaker's feelings, opinions or attitudes. “What am I, chopped liver?” expresses disappointment at being socially overlooked, while bloody in “This is bloody brilliant” or “I can't see a bloody thing” adds emotion as an intensifier.
Presupposed meaning arises from restrictions on which words are expected together. Collocational restrictions are arbitrary matters of usage: English speakers brush their teeth and go and see a doctor, while German speakers clean their teeth and visit a doctor. Selectional restrictions concern propositional meaning: elderly describes people, while old also describes objects and abstractions; conventional English usage generally calls men handsome and women pretty.
Evoked meaning comes from language varieties and registers. Varieties belong to groups sharing geographical, temporal or social affiliations: British speakers commonly use the intensifier bloody where Americans tend to use damn, while sausages called Wiener Würstel in Germany are Frankfurter Würstel in Austria. Register is language appropriate to a social setting: a physician may use haemorrhagic diarrhoea and haemoptysis with a colleague but watery bloody stool and coughing up blood with a patient.
The boundaries between these kinds of meaning are not clear-cut. Translators must weigh expressive, presupposed and evoked meaning alongside propositional meaning, whether consciously or unconsciously, and finding the propositional match is sometimes the easier part.
Words and smaller units of meaning
A word can be defined orthographically as letters with a space on either side, or as the smallest independently usable unit of language carrying semantic or pragmatic meaning. Meaning can also be carried by smaller units, morphemes, which cannot be broken down into further meaningful elements and often cannot stand alone. For example, re- in rebuild or recapitulate means again, and hyper- in hypersensitivity means excessive; since the early 1940s, hyper has also been used alone as a colloquial shortening of hyperactive. Morphemes can form an abstract noun from an adjective, as -ity does in hypersensitivity, or mark a plural, a tense or an adverb.
Word and meaning often have no one-to-one relationship across languages: isolating languages such as Vietnamese contrast with the two-morpheme English disbelieve, which corresponds to German nicht glauben, while German Handrücken becomes dorsum of the hand. Meaning carried by one word can therefore require several words in another language, and meaning is also often carried by structures larger than one word.
The same register can use Greek, Latin and common-language roots differently across languages: English metacarpals consists of Greek morphemes, while German Mittelhandknochen uses common-language ones. Greek-derived ephelides corresponds to Scandinavian-derived, two-morpheme English freckles and three-morpheme German Sommersprossen, whose meaning additionally evokes marks appearing on skin in summer sun.
Culture-specific concepts can also differ beneath apparent equivalents: English copyright emphasises rights to reproduce or commercialise intellectual property, through Latin copiare, meaning to write an original text many times, while German Urheberrecht emphasises its creator, through Old High German urhab.
Meaning within phrases
In “good pharma”, good most probably means morally excellent and refers to industry conduct rather than product quality or financial performance; in “a good medical writer”, it means doing the job very well. The phrase carries information that a word considered alone does not. Another use of “good pharma” refers to good pharmaceutical products, such as effective and safe medicines. Pharma is a shortened form of pharmaceutical and can mean a pharmaceutical company or the industry collectively.
Mutual information measures how strongly words are associated through their occurrence together, with London and UK as an example of a strongly linked pair.
Gaps between vocabularies
Word-level equivalence is harder in non-standardised general speech than in standardised technical language, because languages emphasise aspects of the world relevant to their speakers rather than capturing it objectively. Difficulties include culture-specific words, differences in expressive meaning, differences in form and words not yet lexicalised in the target language.
Culture-specific words
Cultural substitution can bring a text closer to its reader through a term that may differ in meaning but should have a similar effect or evoke a similar image in the target culture. For example, a German translation of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland retains miles in Alice's question about how far she has fallen but changes her estimate of four thousand miles to approximately six thousand kilometres.
Political, legal, administrative, healthcare and educational systems contain many culture-specific terms. In examples given in 2014, German or Austrian Assistenzarzt, literally assistant physician, could be rendered as resident for a US audience, specialty registrar for a UK readership or senior house officer in many Commonwealth countries. In some contexts, retaining Assistenzarzt as a loanword and describing a medical graduate receiving in-depth specialty training and practising under a licensed physician's supervision may be more appropriate.
In 2014, German Zusammenfassung der Produktmerkmale, a literal translation of summary of product characteristics, was generally used for marketing-authorisation applications, while Fachinformation generally referred to the same document for marketed products. The German health ministry's English translation of the Medicines Act rendered Fachinformation as expert information and reserved summary of product characteristics for Zusammenfassung der Produktmerkmale in authorisation dossiers.
Expressive differences
Expressive meaning in verbs should also be matched, but matching every nuance may be difficult. An English sentence about parents who acknowledged “shouting, screaming or yelling” used three distinct nuances: a sudden loud cry, a sharp loud cry and a loud piercing sound. A German rendering used angeschriehen oder angebrüllt, because finding three equivalents, particularly for the piercing, high-pitched element, was difficult. Omission may be more appropriate than adding an unusual third verb that distracts from the main point.
Differences in form
English can turn nouns into verbs, such as to email, to mastermind, to text-message or to verb, where another language may need a paraphrase. German can render to text-message as eine SMS-Nachricht senden and to verb as ein Verb bilden.
The English suffix -ee derives from the French passive participle and identifies a person acted upon, as in payer/payee and trainer/trainee. German may need paraphrases: Zahlungsempfänger means payment recipient, while payer can become Zahlungspflichtige(r), someone liable to pay, or Auftraggeber(in), someone commissioning payment; unlike English, German marks male and female payers through suffixes.
A pseudo-loanword acquires a different meaning in the borrowing language and can be overlooked as needing translation. English trainee can mean anyone being trained for a job, while German Trainee refers to university graduates hired by international corporations with a view to managerial advancement. German Trainer(in) has long meant sports coach, while its course-instructor sense was described as relatively new in 2014. Other German pseudo-loanwords include Handy for a mobile phone, Smoking for a dinner jacket and Messie for a compulsive hoarder.
The English suffix -ese, as in journalese, medicalese, legalese and technicalese, describes language typical of a profession or difficult for non-experts, with a slightly pejorative tone. German requires an explanation or paraphrase, such as Journalistensprech for journalese or Fachchinesisch for medicalese, legalese or technicalese.
New words
New words are common in rapidly advancing science and technology and may take time to become lexicalised in another language. Possible strategies include a more general word, paraphrase, descriptive translation, loanword or loan translation, also called a calque.
The German Dämmerschlaf originally described light general anaesthesia produced by subcutaneous scopolamine and morphine, introduced at the end of the nineteenth century and later developed for surgical use. The English calque twilight sleep captured the effect, expressiveness and vagueness of the German term. In 1915, a gynaecologist criticised the calque and proposed semi-narcosis or semi-narcosis with hydrochloride of scopolamin and morphin. By 2014, twilight sleep and Dämmerschlaf remained colloquial umbrella terms for a range of analgosedation using agents other than scopolamine.
A different calque, German Evidenz-basierte Medizin for evidence-based medicine, was criticised in 2014 as misleading: English scientific evidence supports access to truth that would otherwise be difficult, whereas German Evidenz implies directly grasped certainty based on irrefutable facts. Suggested alternatives were auf wissenschaftlichen Erkenntnissen begründete Medizin, nachweisorientierte Medizin and nachweisgestützte Medizin.
Across these gaps, translators can use cultural substitution, a loanword, a loan translation, a less expressive word, a paraphrase or an explanation, or omit an aspect that would distract from the key message. Where equivalence is not straightforward, the translator must choose which aspects to convey in what they judge the most effective trade-off between readability and precision.