Translation Distortions: Semantic Differentiation

A recent translation project I worked on for a client highlighted a couple of potential “translation distortions” or pitfalls that professional translators are much better at identifying than AI or machine translation. 

Even if you only occasionally deal with languages in translation, you may be familiar with the concept of “false friends” (a loan translation from the French faux amis). This is when pairs of words in two languages look or sound similar but have different meanings or are used in different ways.

A classic example, when translating between French and English: The English word “actual”, and the French word “actuel” or “actuelle”. (This is not limited to French, by the way; the same word, with minor differences in spelling, is used in most, if not all, Romance/Latin languages.)

In English, “actual” means “real” or “genuine”; in French, it means “current” or “present”. This often leads to French-to-English mistranslations, where someone is “actually” doing something, when what is meant is that they are “currently” doing it.

The second pitfall I came across was when a single term in a source language can be translated in two or more different ways in a target language, a concept known as “semantic differentiation” or “semantic expansion”.

The French term financement, for example, can be translated either of two ways in English: “financing”, or “funding” – but these are not interchangeable. Running the French term through a couple of online translation tools, I discovered that the French word is either (a) consistently translated using one or the other term, or (b) translated using both terms, but not always correctly. This is simply because AI (so far) does a poor job of understanding context.

These examples came from a text in the field of international cooperation and humanitarian assistance, but the same pitfall can crop up in other sectors, such as the arts & humanities or in technical translation. Would you know when to use “financing” instead of “funding”, and vice versa?

Would you trust AI to know?

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Are you looking for a professional translator with experience in the fields of international cooperation and humanitarian assistance? Check out my Areas of Expertise, my listing with the Chartered Institute of Linguists, and get in touch to discuss your projects!

This post was originally written in English. If you are reading it in any other language, it may be the result of an unverified machine translation.

Image credits: Photo “Chicago” by Jeremy Thompson via flickr. Free for use with no changes made, pursuant to Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic Deed (CC BY 2.0).