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• Although machine-powered translation is far from perfect, these Translation Tools can help you translate texts, including emails and websites, between a number of different languages.

• Fast Facts

  1. Etymology: From the Latin "translatio," meaning "to carry across"
  2. Translation is evident from as early as the second millennium BCE
  3. Epic of Gilgamesh among oldest known translated literary works

• What is Translation?

  The act of translation involves taking a text written in one language and producing the equivalent text in another language. Translation is an imperfect art as there is no word-to-word correspondence between two languages. A mechanical word-to-word translation cannot take into account grammatical rules, idioms, context or the conventions of writing systems.

• Etymology

  The world "translation" is derived from the Latin "translatio" meaning "to carry across." The Greek word for "translation," "metaphrasis," has provided English with the terms "metaphrase," meaning word-for-word, and "paraphrase," meaning "a saying in other words." The distinction, taken from the Greek, allows translators to differentiate between metaphrase, the formal equivalent of a text, and paraphrase, the dynamic equivalent of a text.

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