Translation isn’t subtraction – sometimes meaning requires expansion
It happens occasionally on projects: a client reviews a translation and flags a word or phrase that doesn’t appear in the original. “This wasn’t in the source,” they say. And they’re right – it wasn’t. But that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be there.
Some languages require structural elements that English simply doesn’t. Articles, prepositions, connectors – words that exist to make a sentence grammatically correct and naturally readable in the target language. English can often get away without them. Italian, for instance, frequently cannot.
Take a string like “Michael’s new car is faster than mine” In English, that’s a perfectly functional piece of content – the possessive ‘s, the comparative -er, ‘car’ and ‘mine’ do not need articles and do not have gender. In Italian, dropping those words directly into the same format produces something that would have little sense and read extremely awkward. The structure of the sentence has to be completely adapted. We need an article to start the sentence: LA – which is singular, feminine for ‘car’, which moved to the second place. The possessive ‘s has to be replaced with an article – DI. The comparative needs an extra word. ‘than’ needs to be adapted to the right gender and case. The overall sentence in Italian becomes: LA macchina DI Michael è PIU’ veloce DELLA mia. Quite longer as well!
This is why reviewing a translation purely by comparing it word-for-word against the source is rarely the right approach. The question isn’t “does every word have a direct equivalent?” – it’s “does this communicate the same thing, clearly and naturally, to a reader in the target language?” Those are very different questions, and they often lead to very different texts.
When a translator adds words, they’re not departing from the original. They’re honouring it – and in most cases, they do not really have options, simply because the grammar rules are fixed.