alloglottography

English

Etymology

Coined by Ilya Gershevitch as allo- +‎ glotto- +‎ -graphy

Noun

alloglottography (countable and uncountable, plural alloglottographies)

1. A direct translation of an utterance from one language to another such that the original utterance can be unambiguously and correctly recovered.
   • 2006, Seth L. Sanders, Margins of Writing, Origins of Cultures, page 40:

     For Iranian-speaking scribes, alloglottography would be rather preposterous.

   • 2012, Rebecca Hasselbach, Na'ama Pat-El, Language and Nature, →ISBN:

     With a narrow definition of alloglottography, one that sees language learning via speech as inherent to scribal education and scribal life, I could definitely agree.

   • 2015, Aaron Butts, Semitic Languages in Contact, →ISBN, page 160:

     Some texts extend alloglottography over entire clauses or even a whole text.

   • 2017, Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Behr, Academic Seminar: “Variation, deviation, migration: How unified was Old Chinese?”:

     Such narratives almost inevitably lead to the postulation of neat trees of dialect divergence out of the homogenous standard of an assumed prestige koiné, and to widespread neglect of colloquial, technical, or ritual speech, of loanwords, alloglottographies and similar phenomena.

Usage notes

This term is used most commonly for situations in which the translation sounds odd or nonsensical in the target language, such as the literal translation of an idiom that does not exist in the target language.