Translation Tips

(Class Assignment)

What should one keep in mind in order to translate a text from English to any of the following languages?

1. German
Since German has 3 genders, one has to make sure that that is respected in the translation. One must pay attention to word order and use tenses like subjunctive, which is frequently used. One must make sure that all nouns are capitalised. Lengthy compound words to be used instead of 2-3 words. There is a closer relationship between German spelling and pronunciation as compared to English. One must be aware of B (voiceless ‘S’), umlauted vowels a, o and u of functions of verbs. It is necessary to have knowledge of Fraktur to understand/works printed before 1945, so translation must be done accordingly.

2. Mandarin
All the words in Mandarin are monosyllabic. There are notions as to gender, tense, the way and person, but they are not necessarily marked by an indicator. Mandarin is of the subject-verb-object type, which is like most Western languages. One needs to pay extra attention to the characters since even a small mistake could change the entire meaning of the word.

3. Dutch
It is one of the closest relatives of German and English. One must consider the three grammatical genders as well as three natural genders that exist in Dutch while translating. There are four main types of verbs – weak, strong, irregular and mixed verbs that must be kept in mind while conjugating. The article has just two forms, de and het, more complex than English, which has only “the”. The Dutch word order is subject-object-verb, whereas in English, it is subject-verb-object. Like German, Dutch also has compound words.

4. Assamese
It is written in Assamese script. In the third person pronoun, there is lexical distinction of gender. Transitive verbs are distinguished from intransitive. Assamese has a huge collection of classifiers, which are used for different kinds of objects. These are used in numeral+classifier+noun or noun+numeral+classifier forms.

5. Malayalam
Most of the words are borrowed from Sanskrit. It follows the subject-object-verb pattern. Adjectives and possessive adjectives precede the nouns, as in English. Verbs are conjugated for tense, mood and aspect, but not for gender, person or number.