How were languages first translated?

The grammar of human languages is surprisingly similar. That makes sense, since humans share language hardware in our brains.

Please remember that there are students in our universities that do college level work in English though their native languages come from nearly every country on earth.

If they can do it, we can do it. We're just not as educated in language.

 

Like sekai in japanese is used the same exact way world is used in English.

 

The drew pictures first.

 

I don't know that one.

However, we in English like subject verb object, but occasionally use verb subject object, and subject object verb (which is rarer and usually viewed as more formal, like "by the power ... I thee wed") German does the same, but sticks more to subject object verb. As I remember, Arabic tends to prefer verb subject object. Most languages put adjectives and adverbs pretty much where you would expect.

 

I speak three languages and belong to an interpreter/translator association. The answer as noted above is that reliable dictionaries are prepared by or in consultation with fully bilingual people, preferably people who grew up learning two or more at the same time. A good example is Ingrid Bergman, who grew up in Sweden but whose mother was German. She had English influences very early as well.

So she would have known very early not only the words for physical things like table, meat, school, bus, sky and clock, hearing them in two languages all day every day, but also intangibles like anger, love, green, sleepiness, cost, happen, example, generation.

There is no way that Ingrid Bergman would have been at a loss to translate any of those words, from a pretty early age, from German to Swedish to English and back again, because she learned and used them all, in context, on a regular basis, not from just reading about them.

Remember too, though, that even translators disagree on the proper translation of certain words, and it gets even worse if one learned his Spanish in Paraguay, another in Cuba, and a third in Spain. They just do the best they can and sometimes agree to disagree.

 

which chinese language, there are many and they're not mutually intelligible...westerners make this mistake all the time thinking china has one language, it has an official government language Mandarin but it has I believe over a 100 languages and various dialects of each of those...my wife is ethnic Chinese and doesn't understand a word of Mandarin, she speaks a regional dialect of Cantonese yet doesn't understand Cantonese either...

 

Language dictionaries go through an editing and peer review process to ensure they are reasonably accurate.

Bilingual children are the most ancient way that kings and princes raised up translators. They then became royal scribes.

 

even with fluent bilingual translators there can be issues as some thoughts just don't translate...a good translator also needs to have a talent to convey very subtle meanings that are lost in translation...