Translation Techniques: Chunking Up, Chunking Down And Lateral Chunking

How To Translate A Word That Doesn’t Exist In Your Language

In a previous post I’ve analysed three of the main translation techniques: loan words, nominalisation and verbalisation. In this article I’d like to introduce some translation techniques you can use when translating a word without a precise equivalent in the target language (the language we are translating into).

There are three useful translation techniques you can use to overcome this problem:

• chunking up: “move up” to a more general word that includes yours, like a more general concept or a more general category of object.
• chunking down: get specific, describing the components of the object or the word.
• lateral chunking: a match, a  similar word/object in the target culture that recalls the word you have to translate.

Let’s suppose you need to translate the word rickshaw (the object in the photo, which I won’t translate on purpose so you can practice the three techniques and choose the best translation)and the target language doesn’t have the equivalent word due to the fact that in the target culture this object doesn’t exist. According to the techniques which I have previously presented, there are three ways to tackle the problem.

Chunking up

As we mentioned earlier, chunking up means to “move up” a level. We can use a more general word that includes the original one. This means a more general concept or a more general category of object.

If you use this translation technique you could translate rickshaw as vehicle. The word vehicle is the general category that includes all those objects which allow you to move from one place to another. As the rickshaw is indeed a vehicle, you’ll allow the reader of your translation to understand at least the general category of the object we’re talking about.

• Pros: it allows you to translate almost every word.
• Cons: the translation will be generic and may not be accurate.

Chunking down

You can describe the components of the rickshaw. In other words, you could explain how it is made. This way you give the reader a precise image of the object. If you choose to use this translation technique you could say “the rickshaw is a mean of transportation made of two wheels, a single seat, and two long sticks that allow a person to pull it”.

• Pros: the description will be very accurate. In fact, the more details you give the more accurate image the reader will be able to form in his/her mind of this mysterious object (supposing there is no picture to look at)
• Cons: you need many more words, so the text becomes longer.

Lateral chunking

This translation technique involves a mental association, or a match in the target culture that recalls the word you have to translate. In the rickshaw example, you could say it’s a “kind of bicycle” used to carry people, as bicycle is more familiar to the reader. You could also say is a cart with no engine, pulled by a person. The reader will immediately picture in her mind the objects “bicycle” or “cart”, and understand what rickshaw roughly resembles. Most importantly, the reader will understand the role of this object in the culture, using her/his own cultural reference of what a bicycle or a cart is used for in her culture.

She will know it’s a mean of transportation, that is used for relatively short distances (as opposed to a plane for instance), and that is probably quite affordable (because you didn’t say “it’s the equivalent of a fancy car”). I like this method, because it leverages the power of imagination that we all have, and it recalls something familiar to the reader to build a new piece of information.

• Pros: it’s something we do instinctively, so it should be quite easy to find a “match” in the target language
• Cons: the translation will not be 100% accurate of course, since it invokes another concept, that sometimes could be quite far from the object or concept we want to describe

Why we call these translation techniques “chunking”?

The term chunking means to change the size of a unit. It is a technique often used in fields other than translation, most notably in information technology and psychology.

Other than being a great translation method, it can also be viewed as a good mental exercise for translators, who often have to juggle between two languages and need to make one cultural system accessible to another.

Finally, keep in mind that the goal of translation is to make sure the reader understands the original concepts as much as possible.

This means that you do not need to translate word for word (as you’ve seen in this example, we didn’t use a single word translation) but rather to express the same message with equivalent cultural references that allow the reader to grasp the new concept using the knowledge she already has. To achieve this, you might not stick to the original piece 100%, but rather use other translation techniques such as the three we described in this article that modifies the text structure in order to preserve the original message.