Types and Methods of Translation

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Types and Methods 
of 
Translation
Before we discuss types of translation, a distinction should be first made between translation 
methods and translation procedures or techniques. ‘While translation methods relate to whole 
texts, translation procedures are used for sentences and the smaller units of language’ 
(Newmark 1988a: 81).
The question whether a translation should be literal or free is as old as
 
translation itself. The 
argument in favour of the spirit and sense as against the letter or the
 
word has been going on at 
least from the beginning of the first century B.C. The view that translation was impossible 
gained popularity when the cultural anthropologists suggested that language was culture 
bound. Walter Benjamin and Valdimir Nabokov who were considered the 'literalists' 
concluded that a translation must be as literal as possible. But in their argument the purpose of 
translation, the nature of readership, the type of text were not discussed.
Though several methods have been suggested for translation it is quite evident that a 
substantially good translation cannot be produced by holding fast to any one of those methods. 
During the process of translation, depending on the type of the source language text, the 
translator resorts to the combination of these different methods. 
Some of the methods mentioned by Peter Newmark, in his 
'A Textbook of Translalion 
' and 
other scholars are: word-for-word translation, literal translation, faithful translation, 
communicative translation, semantic translation, adaptation and free translation. These will be 
explained below with examples illustrating each type. 
1)
 
Word-for-word translation 
This type of translation keeps the SL word order; words are translated out of context according 
to their most common meaning. Such kind of translation can be used as a preliminary 
translation step but it is not applied in real translation tasks. The following lines are from 
The 
Secret Sharer 
by Joseph Conrad with their translation into Arabic following the word-for-
word method. 
- That child is intelligent. 
- That child is intelligent. 
كاذ لفطلا نوكي اًيكذ 
كاذ
لفطلا
نوكي
اًيكذ
This method or type of translation takes the meaning of each word in isolation regardless of 
differences between both Arabic and English in grammar, word order, context, and special 
usage. Moreover, this translation focuses on the source language and the target should follow 
it step by step. Hence, it seems a very easy way to translate and it is common between 
students. However, this method is very risky because it does not consider the target language 
and relies on the source language only. In addition, it does not take account of the grammars of 
both languages, namely when these two languages descend from two very different families 
such as English which is an Indo-European West Germanic language and Arabic which is a 
Semitic language. Furthermore, this method does not take both languages word order into 
account. This method also neglects the context which is very important to understand the 
meaning of a given sentence. Likewise, it ignores the metaphorical use of words which 

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represents the culture of language. Finally, this method cannot find equivalents which do not 
exist in the target language. So, example (a) above can be corrected as: 
كاذ
لفطلا
كذ
ي
.