Translation involves communicating the meaning of a source text in the target language. It requires understanding themes, patterns and styles at both deep and surface levels of communication. The translator must decode the source text and encode the themes, patterns and styles into the target language. This process involves considering both linguistic and extra-linguistic aspects such as pragmatics, semantics, context and register. Corpus linguistics can help produce accurate translations by analyzing large collections of authentic texts.

1. Translation principals and methods
Presented by
A.L. Mohammed Aladdin

2. What is translation definition?
The Oxford Companion to the English Language, Namit Bhatia, ed., 1992, pp. 1,051–
54. define translation as:
Translation is the communication of the meaning of a source-
language text by means of an equivalent target-language text.

3. In linguistics, meaning is the information or concepts that
a sender intends to convey, or actually does convey, in
communication with a receiver.
Akmajian, Adrian, Richard Demers, Ann Farmer, and Robert Harnish.
Linguistics: an introduction to language and communication, 4th
edition. 1995. Cambridge.

4. • Pragmatics: Pragmatics is the study of how context affects meaning.
• Semantic: Semantics is the study of how meaning is conveyed
through signs and language.
• Conceptual: People connect words with meaning and use words to
refer to concepts.

5. I prefer to define it as follow:
Translation: is decoding a text into themes,
patterns, and styles and encoding them into text in
a target language.
• Themes: the cognitive and pragmatic level of a text that implicit and
explicit messages rely on to convey it in a text.

6. • Patterns: is the way that the text is organized.
There are seven common types of patterns of organizations or
text structures:
• Chronological
• Compare and Contrast
• Order of Importance
• Sequence
• Spatial
• Cause and Effect
• Problem and Solution

7. Style:
•"Style is the dress of thoughts."
(Lord Chesterfield)

8. "To translate, one must have a style of his own, for
otherwise the translation will have no rhythm or nuance,
which come from the process of artistically thinking
through and molding the sentences; they cannot be
reconstituted by piecemeal imitation. The problem of
translation is to retreat to a simpler tenor of one's own
style and creatively adjust this to one's author.“
(Paul Goodman, Five Years: Thoughts During a Useless Time, 1969)

9. What are the rules that one should use to translate a
text? what are the levels of translation? Is there any
method of translation?

10. ‘Can eagles that fly swim?’
Language and the Cognitive Science Revolution(s) Noam Chomsky

12. • ‘Can (younger/elder) eagles that fly swim?’
• Can eagles swim?

13. Did the mechanic repair the car?
• No, not yet.
• No, I fixed it myself.
• Did the mechanic repair the car? Yet/yourself

14. "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously"
a sentence composed by Noam Chomsky in his 1957 book Syntactic Structures as an example of a sentence that is grammatically correct, but
semantically nonsensical.
• Fernando Pereira of the University of Pennsylvania has fitted
a simple statistical Markov model to a body of newspaper
text, and shown that under this model, "Furiously sleep
ideas green colorless" is about 200,000 times less probable
than "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously".

15. The crazy manpoet said
My colorless green ideas sleep furiously on the
edge of reality waking upon the fade of rainbow.

16. This implies ‘contextuality’ and eventually
register.
• "[M.A.K. Halliday] maintains that meaning should be
analyzed not only within the linguistic system, but also
taking into account the social system in which it
occurs. In order to accomplish this task, both text
and context must be considered. Context is a crucial
ingredient in Halliday's framework: Based on the
context, people make predictions about the meanings
of utterances."
(Patricia Mayes, Language, Social Structure, and Culture. John Benjamins,
2003)

17. register (language style): it is also called
stylistic variation.
• in style, stylistic variation is determined by factors such as
social occasion, context, purpose, and audience.

18. Deep communicative level and surface
communicative level.

19. • what method and framework one can conclude from the
mentioned?
• Can corpus linguistics help producing accurate and reliable
translation?

20. Basic and practical information concerning translation.
These pages can be used as practical reference in further practices.
According to my method for better translation, mental metacognitive level would
include:
First: we must identify the ‘processes’ verbs within the sentence.
Note: “Perfect tenses are the older processes”.
Second: we must verify the ‘agents’ subjects and objects.
Third: we must verify the main and sub connectors in the sentence.
Fourth: rebuilding these processes separately (simple sentences), either mentally
or on paper.
Fifth: starting to translate each sentence individually.
Sixth: connect the sentences.