transverbate

English

Etymology

From trans- +‎ Latin verbum (“word”) +‎ -ate.

Verb

transverbate (third-person singular simple present transverbates, present participle transverbating, simple past and past participle transverbated)

1. To translate word by word, making only syntactic adjustments, but not adapting to the idiom of the target language.

   Synonym: transverbalize

   • 1897, Bible Society Record, page 2:

     If we could take the Hebrew and the Greek and transverbate them it would be comparatively easy; but we have to remember always that we are translating for a people who do not regard the Bible in any sense as a book of authority.

   • 1899, Richard Lovett, The History of the London Missionary Society, 1795-1895:

     But here also one of the crying needs of the day is for competent, well-equipped native Christians who shall substitute for the translated or transverbated publications of the present, Christian tracts and books written by Chinese for the Chinese, in the form that will most powerfully appeal to their type of mind and training and social culture.

   • 1908, The Missionary Review of the World - Volume 31, Part 1, page 263:

     All the more is he called upon to answer the difficult question: What terms or phrases enshrine specifically biblical conceptions or teachings, and therefore must be transverbated into the speech of India, as a Christian enlargement of her world of thought, and which will exercise their true force by freer translation?