Professional Documents
Culture Documents
A Textbook of Translation
by: Peter Newmark (1988)
1. WORD-FOR-WORD TRANSLATION
Source language word order is preserved.
Words are translated by their most common meanings.
Non-grammatical
It is used in pre-translation process of difficult text in order to gain sense of meaning.
2. LITERAL TRANSLATION
The source language grammatical constructions are converted to their nearest target language
equivalents but the lexical items are again translated out of context.
It is also used for pre-translation process to identify problems.
3. FAITHFUL TRANSLATION
It attempts to reproduce the precise contextual meaning of the original within the constraints of the
target language grammatical structures.
It transfers cultural words and preserves the degree of grammatical and lexical deviation from source
language norms.
It attempts to be completely faithful to the intentions and the text-realization of the source language
writer.
4. SEMANTIC TRANSLATION
It is more flexible than faithful translation.
It naturalizes in order to achieve aesthetic effect (may translate cultural words with neutral or functional
terms)
Great focus on aesthetic features
Close rendering of metaphors, collocations, technical terms, slang, colloquialisms, unusual syntactic
structures and collocations, peculiarly used words, neologism.
Used for expressive texts: e.g., literature
5. COMMUNICATIVE TRANSLATION
It attempts to render the exact contextual meaning of the original in such a way that both language and
content are readily acceptable and has comprehensible readership.
6. ADAPTIVE TRANSLATION
Freest form of translation mainly used for plays and poetry.
Themes/ characters/plots are preserved.
Source language culture is converted to target language culture.
Text is rewritten.
7. FREE TRANSLATION
It reproduces the matter without the manner, or the content without the form of the original.
Usually it is a paraphrase much longer than the original.
8. IDIOMATIC TRANSLATION
It reproduces the message of the original.
Tends to distort nuances of meaning by preferring colloquialisms and idioms