translation

Behind this sense is Latin trānslātiō, from trānsferō, "to transfer, transport, transform, translate". The word first meant carrying something across, and every other use of it keeps that idea. It displaced the native Old English wending. Its usual construction names the destination with into: a text needs translation into modern English, often with from marking the language it leaves.

Here the word stops naming a process and names a thing you can hold, count and compare: two translations of the same poem, or a smoother translation than the last. It can name the result of any kind of translating, though a rendered text is by far the most familiar case. Unlike the act of translating, it always takes an article or a plural.

The field is formally called translation studies, and its central boundary is the medium. Translation works on written text, while interpretation works on spoken language, so the two professions are not interchangeable. Because the same word covers both the subject and the act of rendering a text, context decides which one is meant: a degree in translation is the discipline, and a translation of a contract is the practice.

Physics uses the word as the counterpart of rotation. A body in pure translation slides without turning or changing shape, so every point keeps pace with every other and its orientation never changes. The meaning also covers a compulsion to motion, a push toward such movement, and not only the movement itself. The geometric version treats the same shift as a relation between figures.

In geometry nothing actually travels. The word names a relation in which one figure is simply the other with a constant added to every coordinate. Because the same amount is added everywhere, shape, size and orientation all survive the shift, which is what sets it apart from a turn or a stretch. Mathematicians speak of applying a translation to a graph, or of one figure being a translation of another.

Biology borrowed the language metaphor almost exactly. A message written in the nucleotide code of mRNA is read codon by codon at the ribosome and rendered as a chain of amino acids, with transfer RNAs carrying each one into place. Biologists speak of translation starting, stalling or being blocked, and they say that a gene's message is translated into protein.