What's the English for...?

For our first entry (after the Introduction), I’d like to deal with translation. Sometimes students find it difficult to express themselves in English. For example, when students write essays for their examinations, they would ask me, “Sir, ano po sa English ang…?” (I have since taught them to ask in English: “Sir, what’s the English for…?”). I would then ask, “What’s the sentence?”

Words are not used in isolation: we use them in sentences. This is why many times we cannot translate a word apart from the context. This is why what somebody asks me, “What’s the English for…?” or “What’s … in Tagalog?” I immediately ask, “What’s the sentence?”

 

One student named Carlo, who is studying Mass Communication, asked me what “konduktor” in English, as in “yung sa bus po”. He immediately supplied me with the context: the konduktor that we find in buses. The English word “conductor” can mean:  1) one who conducts, i.e., a guide; 2) the leader of a musical ensemble; or even 3) a material that permits electrical current to flow easily. The correct answer for this is “fare collector”. (I was surprised that Merriam-Webster dictionary gave the definition “a collector of fares in a public conveyance”.)

I tell my students in my Translation and Editing of Texts course (a subject which I feel eminently qualified to teach), that a translator needs to know not two languages but three languages: 1) the source language (e.g., Tagalog), 2) the target language (e.g., English) and 3) the language of the field (e.g., agriculture, math, medicine, law, etc.).

Another student—Jhen, also studying Mass Communication— asked me for the English of “pagpatay ng sunog”. 

Tagalog can be notoriously hard when it comes to what is called “case grammar”. To make sure the translation would be accurate I asked how it would be used in a sentence. (She was writing a new article.) She answered, “nahirapan ang mga bumbero sa pagpatay ng apoy”. I translated the sentence as “The firefighters found it hard to put out (or to extinguish, or to fight) the fire.” Because in English, we do not say really, “the killing of fires”.

So in translation, it is not only important to know the equivalent of a word in another language, but also understanding how a word is used in a sentence.

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Is there a word or sentence you want to be translated? Use it in a sentence and post it below as a comment.