ABSTRACT
At the extreme of SL bias is interlinear translation, where the TT does not necessarily respect TL grammar, but has grammatical units corresponding as closely as possible to every grammatical unit of the ST. Here is an interlinear translation of an Italian proverb:
Normally only used in descriptive linguistics or language teaching, interlinear translation is of no practical use for this course. It is actually an extreme form of the much more common literal translation, where the literal meaning of words is taken as if straight from the dictionary (that is, out of context), but TL grammar is respected. Since TL grammar is respected, literal translation very often unavoidably involves grammatical transposition-the replacement or reinforcement of given parts of speech in the ST by other parts of speech in the TT. A simple example is translating ‘Ho fame’ as ‘I am hungry’: the TT has a subject pronoun where there is none in the ST, and the ST noun is rendered with a TL adjective. A literal translation of the proverb would be: ‘Who does not risk does not nibble.’ We shall take literal translation as the practical extreme of SL bias.
