Why word order in translation is about more than rearranging words
There’s a assumption that translation is largely a substitution exercise: take the words in one language, replace them with their equivalents in another, and you’re done. Anyone who has worked seriously with more than one language knows this isn’t how it works.
Take a sentence like “Get your Coldplay tickets at Wembley Stadium at competitive prices.” In English, it’s clean, direct, and immediately readable. In Italian, that same sentence needs to be restructured almost entirely. The word order changes. Articles and prepositions that don’t exist in the English version need to be added. The verb “get” – which in English floats comfortably between buying, obtaining, and accessing – needs to become something specific, because Italian doesn’t carry that same comfortable ambiguity.
The result might look very different from the original. Longer, in some cases. Structured differently. With words that weren’t in the source at all. And yet it communicates the same thing, to the same audience, with the same intent, which is precisely the point.
This is what makes localisation different from translation in the strictest sense. It’s not enough to find equivalent words. The sentence needs to work in the target language on its own terms: grammatically, tonally, and contextually. Forcing the structure of one language onto another almost always produces something that reads as awkward at best, and misleading at worst.
When a translated sentence looks quite different from the original, that’s often not a mistake. It’s the linguist doing their job properly.