Translation Studies Terms Every Translation Scholar Should Know
1. Transcreation
Not just translating words but recreating meaning, emotion, and cultural resonance — often used in marketing or literature.
Think: poetry, slogans, or humor across cultures.
2. Skopos Theory
A translation theory that prioritizes the purpose (skopos) of the target text over literal equivalence.
Introduced by Hans Vermeer.
3. Equivalence Effect
A principle where the impact on the target reader should be as close as possible to that on the source audience.
Focus shifts from words to reader experience.
4. Pseudo-Translation
A text presented as a translation though no original exists in another language.
Borges and other authors have used this creatively.
5. Intralingual Translation
Translation within the same language — e.g., modernizing Shakespearean English, simplifying legalese.
Roman Jakobson’s famous tripartite model.
6. Domestication vs. Foreignization
Two opposite strategies:
- Domestication makes the translation feel local and familiar.
- Foreignization preserves the cultural "otherness" of the original.
- Coined by Venuti.
A loan translation where the structure of a phrase is copied word-for-word into another language.
E.g., “flea market” from French marché aux puces.
8. Code-Switching in Translation
Not just multilingual mixing in speech — but deliberate preservation or modulation of language shifts in translated texts.
9. Zero Equivalence
When a word or phrase has no direct counterpart in the target language.
Often leads to paraphrasing, borrowing, or neologisms.
10. Realia
Culture-specific items (clothing, food, institutions) that are untranslatable without explanation or adaptation.
Kimono, Eid, Thanksgiving.
11. Explicitation
The translator adds clarity or detail that is implicit in the source text.
E.g., “he” → “the president” for clarity.
12. Cultural Filter
A concept from Juliane House: how systematic differences in expectations between source and target cultures affect translation.
13. Paratranslation
Involves extra-textual elements like covers, blurbs, prefaces, and layout that shape how a translation is received.
Especially important in publishing and localization.
14. Semantic Void
A lexical or conceptual gap between languages — similar to zero equivalence but deeper in cultural or experiential absence.
15. Back Translation
Re-translating a translated text into the original language to check accuracy or detect shifts.
Common in medical or legal contexts.
16. Fuzzy Matching
Used in Computer-Assisted Translation (CAT) tools — identifies approximate rather than exact segment matches.
17. Post-Editing
The process of human editing machine-translated text, a growing field with AI and NMT (Neural Machine Translation).
18. Target-Oriented Approach
A view that prioritizes the needs, norms, and readers of the target culture over the source.
Prominent in Descriptive Translation Studies.
19. Translationese
The often awkward, unnatural style of writing that betrays a text as a translation.
20. Anisomorphism
The structural mismatch between languages — a root cause of many translation problems.
E.g., gendered nouns in French vs. English.
