Prioritizing Semantics over Structures

Linguistic structures are the formal patterns that realize linguistic meanings. In the process of translation, it is the meanings that are translated; the structures are left behind by design. Semantics are the priority in translation.

Note: between two languages, the semantic systems are not isomorphic. This mismatch means that we cannot assume that the precise semantic categories of one language may be transferred into another. Comparing the lexicogrammatical systems of gender in two languages should suffice to illustrate this point. However, the general semantic categories seem to be fairly universal (one would have to compare every language to actually establish this claim).

This fundamental observation must be factored into the translation process as we consider how AI tools might be leveraged for translation drafting.

For instance, rather than trying to account for every word in the source by translating a word in the target, we should attempt to account for the things the words are being used to realise, namely the entities, processes, traits, collocations, logical sets, speech acts, and more.

It is definitively better to traffic in semantic units such as these, since accounting for such meanings is what makes a translation good or bad.

By contrast, imagine if someone claimed that you needed to account for every character in the source text (all the alphas, omegas, deltas, and iotas). If you did somehow manage to do this, you would not be translating, but copying.