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Calque
A calque or loan translation consists of borrowing of a phrase from one language into another, in the process of which individual "words" native to the borrowing language semantically match the individual "words" in the source language. Example: Superman is a calque from the German word bermensch.
Governor-General calques from the French Gouverneur général.
Colloction
A recurrent word combination characterized by cohesion in that the components of the collocation must co-occur within an utterance.
Example: immunization against [measles], not with or about.
Faux Amis
False friends of the translator are words in a foreign language that sound very much like a word in your own language, so that you are inclined to think they mean the same as well. Examples :
French
assister
aider
demander
exiger
journal
revue |
English
attend
assist
ask
demand
newspaper
journal
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Gender
Gender is a grammatical means of classifying entities referred to by a language according to a variety of factors, Some gender marking in languages is purely arbitrary, such as the fact that Spanish la pluma "the pen" is feminine, but the semantically related el lapiz "the pencil" is masculine.
Register
The various styles of language available for writing or speaking--from the informal register of slang, to the formal register. These include: slang, colloquial, informal, formal, classic, literary and academic. It is important to set a translation in the correct register to suit the original, bearing in mind certain misleading indicators. These include the formal or polite form of the word "you" (e.g. "vous", "Sie") that occurs in most European languages but does not exist in English.
Source Language
The language from which something is being translated.
Target Language
The language into which something is translated.
Void
Refers to something that does not exist. This can take two forms, lexical and cultural. For example, the eskimo Inuit language has more than 20 words for different types of snow, though no generic word just for snow. Whereas English has only the one word, therefore all those snow variants represent lexical voids in English. On the other hand, an Eskimo, a Frenchman and an Israeli would find it very difficult to describe the game of cricket, which is a classic cultural void (and therefore a lexical void too).
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