target languagen.

1953 Philos. Sci. 20 217 Imagine an utterly moronic student without the slightest knowledge of either the source-language or the target-language, i.e., the language into which the given text is to be translated.

1959 E. M. Grabbe et al. Handbk. Automation, Computation, & Control II. ii. 186 The purpose of these activities has been to..set up a class of languages that will be easily translatable by machine from one to another, and also easily recognizable to the ordinary human user... Such languages form the input to a class of automatic computer programs called translators, which perform a translation..into a second or target language. The latter may be either (1) an assembly language such as soap, sap, or magic.., or (2) a straight machine language, in pure decimal, binary (or in some cases such as the Univac I and II), alphanumeric.

1969 P. B. Jordain Condensed Computer Encycl. 515 In assembly and compiler operations, a programmer-oriented language is converted to a target language for execution on the computer.

1976 Canad. Jrnl. Linguistics 21 96 A translator needs to have deciphered the ambiguity in a given sentence..in order to be able to translate it, provided of course that this sentence does not have a syntactic homonym in the target language.

1965 P. Strevens Papers in Lang. viii. 103 The difficulties..vary according to the learner's mother-tongue as well as his target-language.

1973 K. A. Sey Ghanaian Eng. ii. 22 Lacking the native speaker's linguistic intuitions, the L₂ speaker has to depend on his limited acquaintance with the target language.

1976 Word 27 351 Integratively oriented students are more strongly motivated and more successful in learning the target language than instrumentally oriented students.