Literal Translation

Literal translation – transference of one language format to another following the form of the source language and using the ‘verbum pro verbo’ principle. This is also known as metaphrase process and commonly used in technical translation and legal annotation conversions to preserve the original format of the text undermining the context of the original text. 

In the light of contextual aspect, literal translation can be considered as erroneous since it does not carry the register of the source language.

As for usage, literal translation can be a very useful tool for translation preparation as it serves as a foundation in translating unfamiliar language format.

In communication, literal translation is currently being used in the form of machine translation. One the most common example of these would be internet translators (i.e. babelfish, google translate, microsofttranslator, freetranslation, worldlingo, etc.)

Without the tweaking process of human translators, machine translation could be misleading and sometimes totally erroneous. The common result of this would be pidgins or translation with reference to the target language’s native format and mistranslations that contextually unacceptable.

Grammatical Categories

Grammatical Categories refers to classes of word that traditionally known as parts of speech

Noun - word that can be used to refer to a person, place, thing, quality, or action; can be subject or object of the sentence

Ex. dog, group, happiness, UNESCO

Verb-  a content word that denotes an action, occurrence, or state of existence; the word class that serves as the predicate of a sentence

Ex. Do, be walk, shall

Adjectives – a word that expresses an attribute of something; the word class that qualifies nouns

Ex. Sad, green, asleep, burn

Adverb- the word class that qualifies verbs or clauses; a word that modifies something other than a noun

Ex. Well, later, near, however

Pronoun - a function word that is used in place of a noun or noun phrase

Ex. You, yourself, one, anything

Article - a determiner that may indicate the specificity of reference of a noun phrase

Ex. A, the

Preposition - a function word that combines with a noun or pronoun or noun phrase to form a prepositional phrase that can have an adverbial or adjectival relation to some other word

Ex. On, of, across, like

Conjunction - an uninflected function word that serves to conjoin words or phrases or clauses or sentences

Ex. And, or, since , if

Interjection- an abrupt emphatic exclamation expressing emotion

Ex. Oh!, Alas!, No!