Meaning Transfer: Accuracy and Completeness
Accuracy is about effect, not word count
Meaning transfer requires carrying propositional content, illocutionary force (is it a promise, a warning, a permission?), modality and hedging, evaluative stance, and cohesive links. A target sentence that preserves every noun but loses the hedging has failed, even if a bilingual reader could match it back word for word.
The standard tool kit
- Addition/omission: legitimate when required by target grammar (articles, obligatory subjects) or to avoid a misleading implicature; illegitimate when it changes commitment or drops a qualifier.
- Explicitation/implicitation: making a source inference explicit, or leaving a redundant element implicit - both must be justified by target norms and reader need, not by convenience.
- Compensation: recovering a lost effect (punning, rhythm, connotation, formality) elsewhere in the same text.
- False fluency: a target sentence that reads smoothly but says something slightly different is the most dangerous error, because a quick reader will never catch it.
Traps
Dropping "alleged", "up to", "may", or "subject to" is a meaning error, not a style choice. So is turning a suggestion into an obligation, or a possibility into a prediction. Watch for scope changes: moving a negative or a quantifier can reverse the sense of a clause.
Rule of thumb
Back-translate the target segment informally into the source language and compare it with the original. Any difference in who is committed to what is an accuracy defect and must be fixed before any style polishing.