Wednesday, 14 September 2016

Kade's fourth and last mode of equivalence, if indeed it can be called such, is One-to-none:

No equivalent is available in the target language. For example, most languages did not have a term for computer a century ago. When that term had to be translated, the translators could use a circumlocution (a phrase to describe the object), they could generate a term from within the target language (e.g. French ordinateur and Iberian Spanish ordenador), or they could borrow the form og the English term (e.g. German Computer, Danish computer, or Latin American Spanish computadora). Some cultures prefer to import or represent foreign terms; others prefer to generate new terms from their own existing resources.

Modern Israelis very resistant to imported loan-words and has a special government department whose sole job it is to find or generate new modern Hebrew words based on the classic three-letter root system.