translationnoun [ C or U ]
uk/trænzˈleɪ.ʃən//trænsˈleɪ.ʃən/us/trænsˈleɪ.ʃən//trænzˈleɪ.ʃən/B1 something that is translated, or the process of translating something, from one language to another:
Students will do one Spanish translation a week.
A literal translation of "euthanasia" would be "good death".
The English version is boring - maybe it has lost something in translation (= is not as good as the original).
in translation
changed into someone's own language, not in the original language:
She reads Proust in translation.
More examples
- I have tried to keep my translation as faithful as possible to the original book.
- The novel's complex, imaginative style does not lend itself to translation.
- Her translation is too literal , resulting in heavy, unnatural prose.
- It's only a loose translation of the poem.
- The translation of the instructions was so poor they were just nonsense.
Thesaurus: synonyms and related words
Using other languages
- anglophone
- code switching
- diglossia
- first language
- francophone
- interpret
- linguist
- lusophone
- machine translation
- modern languages
- monolingual
- multilingual
- native
- non-native speaker
- pinyin
- polyglot
- speak
- translate
- trilingual
- word
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