Direct transfer

Translation label

A provisional rendering, flagged as provisional, for a term with no settled equivalent. Also called Provisional rendering or working translation.

Reference/All techniques

Optional Word Phrase Newmark (1988)

What it is

A translation label is a temporary rendering of a term that has no accepted target counterpart, offered openly as temporary. Newmark's description is precise on both halves: the rendering is approximate, usually of a new institutional term, and it is normally placed in inverted commas so that the reader can see it is the translator's coinage rather than a term. Once a settled equivalent emerges, the label can be withdrawn discreetly, which is to say without any need to defend the earlier version, because it was never presented as settled.

The technique exists because the alternatives are worse. Leaving the source term bare leaves the reader with nothing; supplying an unmarked rendering asserts an equivalence the domain has not established; supplying a description each time inflates a designation into a definition. The label occupies the space between these, doing the referential work while declaring its own status. It is normally paired with the source term at first occurrence, and often with a short gloss.

Against its neighbours: a recognized translation is the institution's own form or the settled usage, and is obligatory where it exists; a translation label is precisely what one uses when that form does not yet exist. Discursive creation also produces an unpredictable rendering, but for a different purpose: it is a deliberate, context-bound equivalence for a title or a slogan, presented as final within its text, not as an interim measure. The label announces its provisional status; a discursive creation conceals having any.

When it applies

  • New legislation introduces an instrument, a status or a benefit that the target jurisdiction does not have, and the drafting authority has published no translation.
  • A body has just been created, renamed or restructured, and no target-language designation is yet in circulation.
  • A technical field is young enough that its vocabulary is still moving, and competing renderings are visible in the target sources.
  • A term is contested, and the translator needs a form that can be corrected later without the correction reading as an admission of error.

Examples

TR>EN

  • Source: Sulh Ceza Hâkimliği
  • Target: the Sulh Ceza Hâkimliği ("criminal judgeship of peace")
  • Comment: A judicial office created in 2014, with functions distributed differently from any target-jurisdiction equivalent. Circulating English renderings include "criminal judgeship of peace", "criminal court of peace" and "magistracy". None is authoritative, and choosing one without marking it as a label implies an equivalence that would mislead a court reading the document.

DE>EN

  • Source: Bürgergeld
  • Target: the Bürgergeld ("citizen's benefit")
  • Comment: Introduced in 2023 in place of the previous basic income support scheme. English-language sources produced "citizen's income", "citizen's benefit" and "citizen's money" concurrently, each carrying a different implication about the entitlement's nature. A label with the source term retained keeps the reference stable while the target usage settles.

NL>EN

  • Source: participatiesamenleving
  • Target: "participation society"
  • Comment: A policy coinage from a 2013 government statement, describing a shift of welfare responsibilities toward citizens themselves. The label is the transparent calque, kept in inverted commas because it names a specific Dutch policy programme rather than a general social concept, and because the coinage was itself contested in the source language.

Watch out for

The whole value of the technique is in the flag, and a label whose marking is lost in production is no longer a label: it is an unattributed coinage, and it propagates. Once such a form has been quoted onward two or three times it starts to look established, which is the mechanism by which bad renderings enter terminology records.

  • Keep the source term visible. A label without the original alongside it cannot be checked, and the reader has no route back to what was actually named.
  • Record it as provisional in the terminology record, not merely in the text. The status is the information a later translator needs.
  • Do not use a label to postpone research. It is legitimate where no settled form exists, not where one exists and has not been looked for, and a reviser will ask which of the two applied.

References

  • Newmark, P. (1988). A Textbook of Translation. London: Prentice Hall, p. 90.

Terminological situations that call for this

The entries below describe states of a concept or of its designation in which this technique is the operation that answers them. They are reasons of evidence and of conceptual fit rather than of grammar.

Ranking the options when no equivalent existsSystem-bound concepts and incongruityPrinciples for forming and judging terms

Fixed units this technique approximates

For the entries below the target community has no fixed counterpart, or has one that does different work. This technique produces the substitute, and the entry says what the substitute should keep visible.

Judicial and procedural formulae

Related entries

Recognized translation Discursive creation Notes and glosses

Translation that can be checked

Every Translyta delivery comes with a quality report and a terminology report, so the decisions described here are visible to your reviser instead of buried in the text.

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