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system of rules; grammar
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No clear line can be drawn between syntax and morphology. Analytic languages use syntax to convey information that is encoded via inflection in synthetic languages. / / / / / / In other words, word order is not significant and morphology is highly significant in a purely synthetic language, whereas morphology is not significant and syntax is highly significant in an analytic language.
/ / / / / / Chinese and Afrikaans, for example, are highly analytic and meaning is therefore very context dependent. (Both do have some inflections, and had more in the past; thus, they are becoming even less synthetic and more “purely� analytic over time.) Latin, which is highly synthetic, uses affixes and inflections to convey the same information that Chinese does with syntax. Because Latin words are quite self-contained, an intelligible Latin sentence can be made from elements placed in largely arbitrary order. Latin has a complex affixation and a simple syntax, while Chinese has the opposite. / / / / / /
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Grammar included morphology and syntax. In modern linguistics these subfields are complemented by phonetics, phonology, orthography, semantics, and pragmatics.
Grammars evolve through usage and also of human population separations. With the advent of written representations, formal rules about language usage tend to appear also. Formal grammars are codifications of usage that are developed by observation. As the rules become established and developed, the prescriptive concept of grammatical correctness can arise. / / / / / / This often creates a gulf between contemporary usage and that which is accepted as correct. Linguists normally consider that prescriptive grammars do not have any justification beyond their authors’ aesthetic tastes. However, prescriptions are considered in sociolinguistics as part of the explanation for why some people say “I didn’t do nothing”, some say “I didn’t do anything”, and some say one or the other depending on social context.
The formal study of grammar is an important part of education from a young age through advanced learning, though the rules taught in schools are not a “grammar” in the sense most linguists use the term, as they are often prescriptive rather than descriptive. / / / / / /
/ / / / / / Constructed languages (also called planned languages or conlangs) are more common in the modern day. Many have been designed to aid human communication (for example, naturalistic Interlingua, schematic Esperanto, and the highly logic-compatible artificial language Lojban). Each of these languages has its own grammar.
“As a transcendent law, grammar acts as a mechanism that regulates the free circulation of meaning, organizing the fragmentary and local into compound, totalized wholes. Through grammatical constraint then, meanings coalesce into meaning. Denied independent and undetermined discharge through a surface play, the controlled parts are thrust into an aggregated phrase that projects meaning as a destination or culmination to a gaze. . . . grammar extends a law of value to new objects by a process of totalization, reducing the free play of the fragments to the status of delimited, organizing parts within an intended larger whole. Signifiers apear and are then subordinately organized into these larger units whose culmination is a meaning which is then invested in a further aggregation. Grammar`s law is a combinatory, totalizing logic that excludes at all costs any fragmentary life,� writes Steve McCaffery.
References / / American Academic Press, The (ed.). William Strunk, Jr., et al. The Classics of Style: The Fundamentals of Language Style From Our American Craftsmen. Cleveland: The American Academic Press, 2006.
/ / Rundle, Bede. Grammar in Philosophy. Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1979.
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symbol
Symbols are objects, characters, or other concrete representations of ideas, concepts, or other abstractions. For example, in the United States, Canada, Australia and Great Britain, a red octagon is a symbol for the traffic sign meaning “STOP”. Common examples of symbols are the symbols used on maps to denote places of interest, such as crossed sabers to indicate a battlefield, and the numerals used to represent numbers. / / / / / /
/ / / / / / All languages are made up of symbols. The word “cat”, whether spoken or written, is not a cat, but is a symbol for a cat.
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all languages are made up of symbols 27
/// Relative frequencies of letters in the English language
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12.702 %
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* MINDMAP
/ / / / / / A language is a system of symbols and the rules used to manipulate them. Language can also refer to the use of such systems as a general phenomenon. Though commonly used as a means of communication among people, human language is only one instance of this phenomenon. This article concerns the properties of language in general. For information specifically on the use of language by humans see the main article on natural language. , or system of rules, used to manipulate the symbols. While a set of symbols may be used for expression or communication, it is primitive and relatively inexpressive, because there are no clear or regular relationships between the symbols. Because a language also has a grammar, it can manipulate its symbols to express clear and regular relationships between them.
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Interpretation
01 grammar 02 symbol 03 interpretation
Languages live, die, move from place to place and change with time.
/ / / / / / Another property of language is the arbitrariness of the symbols. Any symbol can be mapped onto any concept (or even onto one of the rules of the grammar). For instance, there is nothing about the Spanish word nada itself that forces Spanish speakers to use it to mean “nothing”. That is the meaning all Spanish speakers have memorized for that sound pattern. But for Croatian, Serbian or Bosnian speakers, nada means “hope”. However, it must be understood that just because in principle the symbols are arbitrary does not mean that a language cannot have symbols that are iconic of what they stand for. Words such as “meow” sound similar to what they represent, but they could be replaced with words such as “jarn”, and as long as everyone memorized the new word, the same concepts could be expressed with it. Human languages are usually referred to as natural languages, and the science of studying them is linguistics. Languages are first of all spoken, then written, then an understanding and explanation of their grammar (according to speech) is attempted.. / / / / / / Languages live, die, move from place to place and change with time. Any language that stops changing begins to die; any language that is a living language is a language in a state of continuous change. Making a principled distinction between one language and another is usually impossible. For instance, there are a few dialects of German similar to some dialects of Dutch. The transition between languages within the same language family is sometimes gradual.
/ / / / / / Some like to make parallels with biology, where it is not always possible to make a well-defined distinction between one species and the next. In either case, the ultimate difficulty may stem from the interactions between languages and populations. The concepts of Ausbausprache, Abstandsprache and Dachsprache are used to make finer distinctions about the degrees of difference between languages or dialects. Some languages are meant specifically for communication between people of different nationalities or language groups. Several of these languages have been constructed by an individual or group, as noted below. Others are seen as natural, pre-existing languages. Their developers merely catalogued and standardized their vocabulary and identified their grammatical rules. These languages are called naturalistic. One such language, Latino Sine Flexione, is a simplified form of Latin. Another, Occidental, was drawn from several Western languages. To date, the most successful auxiliary language is Esperanto, invented by the Polish ophthalmologist Zamenhof, which has about 2 million speakers over the world and which has hundreds of songs sung in it, and a vast amount of literature written in it. The Stone City, for example, was originally written in Esperanto. Other auxiliary languages with an important group of speakers are Interlingua and Ido (however, the latter is believed to have only a few hundred speakers)
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References / / David G. Myers, Psychology, Worth Publishers; 7th edition 2004.
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[ Language interpreting or interpretation is the intellectual activity of facilitating oral and sign-language communication, either simultaneously or consecutively, between two, or among three or more, speakers who neither speak nor sign the same source language. Functionally, interpreting and interpretation are the descriptive words for the activity; in professional practice interpreting denotes spoken language, while interpretation denotes translation studies work. This important distinction is observed to avoid confusuion between the interpreter and the client. Functionally, an interpreter orally translates a source language to a target language; likewise in sign language. The interpreter’s function is conveying every semantic element (tone and register) and every intention and feeling of the message that the source-language speaker is directing to the target-language listeners. / / / / / /
Despite being used interchangeably, interpretation and translation are not synonymous, yet both refer, respectively, to the spoken and written transference of equivalent meaning between two languages. Interpreting occurs in real time, in the physical, televised, or telephonic presence of the parties for whom the interpreter renders an interpretation. Translation is the transference of meaning from text to text (written, recorded, sign), with the translator having time and access to resources (dictionaries, glossaries, etc.) to produce a faithful, true, and accurate document or vebal artefact.
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Interpretation is rendered in two modes: simultaneous and consecutive. In simultaneous interpreting (SI), the interpreter immediately speaks the message in the target-language whilst listening to it in the source language. In consecutive interpreting (CI), the interpreter renders the source-language message after the source-language speaker pauses. Consecutive interpretation rendered as ‘short CI’ and ‘long CI’. In short CI, the interpreter relies on memory; each message segment being brief enough to memorise. / / / / / / In long CI, the interpreter takes notes of the message to aid rendering long passages. These informal divisions are established with the client before the interpretation is effected, depending upon the subject, its complexity, and the purpose of the interpretation. On occasion, document sight translation is required of the interpreter, usually in consecutive interpretation work. Sight translation combines interpretation and translation; the interpreter must read aloud the source-language document to the target-language as if it were written in the target language. Sight translation occurs usually, but not exclusively, in judicial and medical work.
/ / / / / / Relay interpretation occurs when several languages are the target-language. A source-language interpreter renders the message to a language common to every interpreter, who then renders the message to his or her specific target-language. / / / / / / For example, a Japanese source message first is rendered to English, then it is rendered to the other target-languages.
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References / / / / Cohen, J.M., “Translation,” Encyclopedia America, 1986, vol. 27. / / / / Rundle, Bede. Grammar in Philosophy. Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1979.
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Translation is the interpretation of the meaning of a text in one language (the “source text”) and the production, in another language, of an equivalent text (the “target text,” or “translation”) that communicates the same message. Translation must take into account a number of constraints, including context, the rules of grammar of the two languages, their writing conventions, and their idioms. / / / / / /
/ / / / / / Traditionally translation has been a human activity, though attempts have been made to computerize or otherwise automate the translation of natural-language texts (machine translation) or to use computers as an aid to translation (computer-assisted translation). Perhaps the most common misconception about translation is that there exists a simple “word-for-word” correspondence between any two languages, and that translation is therefore a straightforward mechanical process. On the contrary, every language is a historically-evolved selfcontained system, and historically-determined differences between languages may dictate differences of expression. Translation is fraught with uncertainties as well as the potential for inadvertent “spilling over” of idioms and usages from one language into the other, producing linguistic hybrids, for example, “Franglais” (French-English), “Spanglish” (Spanish-English), “Poglish” (Polish-English) and “Portunhol” (Portuguese-Spanish). / / / / / /
/ / / / / / Etymologically, “translation” is a “carrying across” or “bringing across.” The Latin “translatio” derives from the perfect passive participle, “translatum,” of “transferre” (“to transfer” — from “trans,” “across” + “ferre,” “to carry” or “to bring”). The modern Romance, Germanic and Slavic European languages have generally formed their own equivalent terms for this concept after the Latin model — after “transferre” or after the kindred “traducere” (“to bring across” or “to lead across”) Fidelity (otherwise “faithfulness”) and transparency are two often-competing qualities that have been regarded for millennia as ideals for translation, particularly literary translation. A critic of the 17th century French translator Nicolas Perrot d’Ablancourt coined the phrase, “les belles infidèles,” to suggest that translations, like women, could be either faithful or beautiful, but not both at the same time. Fidelity is the extent to which a translation accurately renders the meaning of the source text, without adding to or subtracting from it, and without intensifying or weakening any part of the meaning. / / / / / Transparency is the extent to which a translation appears to a native speaker of the target language to have originally been written in that language, and conforms to the language’s grammatical, syntactic and idiomatic conventions. A translation meeting the first criterion is said to be a “faithful translation”; a translation meeting the second criterion — an “idiomatic translation.” The two qualities are not necessarily mutually exclusive. The criteria used to judge the faithfulness of a translation vary according to the subject, the precision of the original contents, the type, function and use of the text, its literary qualities, its social or historical context, and so forth. The criteria for judging the transparency of a translation would appear more straightforward: an unidiomatic translation “sounds wrong,” and in the extreme case of word-for-word translations generated by many machinetranslation systems, often results in patent nonsense with only a humorous value. / / / / / /
/ / / / / / Nevertheless, in certain contexts a translator may consciously strive to produce a literal translation. Literary translators and translators of religious or historic texts often adhere as closely as possible to the source.
In order to do this, they deliberately stretch the boundaries of the target lation” (1813) he distinguished between translation methods that move language to produce an unidiomatic text. Likewise, a literary translator “the writer toward [the reader],” i.e., transparency, and those that move the may wish to adopt words or expressions from the source language in or- “reader toward,” i.e., an extreme fidelity to the foreignness of the source der to provide “local color” in the translation. The concepts of fidelity and text. Schleiermacher clearly favored the latter approach. His preference transparency are viewed differently in some recent translation theories. In was motivated, however, not so much by a desire to embrace the foreign, some quarters, the idea is gaining momentum that acceptable translations as by a nationalist desire to oppose France’s cultural domination and to can be as creative and original as their source texts. promote German literature. / / / / / /
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In recent decades, the most prominent advocates of non-transparent translation modes have included the French translation scholar Antoine Berman, who identified twelve deforming tendencies inherent in most prose translations (L’épreuve de l’étranger, 1984), and the American theorist Lawrence Venuti, who has called upon translators to apply “foreignizing” translation strategies instead of domesticating ones.
/ / / / / / Many non-transparent-translation theories draw on concepts of German Romanticism, the most obvious influence on latter-day theories of “foreignization” being the German theologian and philosopher Friedrich Schleiermacher. In his seminal lecture “On the Different Methods of Trans-
/ / / / / / For the most part, the concepts of “fidelity” and “transparency” remain strong in Western traditions. They are, however, not as prevalent in some non-Western ones. Thus the Indian epic, the Ramayana, has numerous versions in the many Indian languages, and the stories are different in each. If one considers the words used for translating into the Indian languages, whether those be Aryan or Dravidian languages, he is struck by the freedom that is granted to the translators. / / / / / / This may relate to a devotion to prophetic passages that strike a deep religious chord, or to a vocation to instruct unbelievers. Similar examples are to be found in medieval Christian literature, which adjusted the text to the customs and values of the audience.
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Translation is fraught with uncertainties.
References / / / / Cohen, J.M., “Translation,” Encyclopedia America, 1986, vol. 27. / / / / Rundle, Bede. Grammar in Philosophy. Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1979.
* SURVEY
{TRANSLATION +Interpretation +COMMuNICATION}
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