Brontaal

Brontaal is a Dutch term for the source language—the original language in which a text was written before translation. In translation studies, brontaal is used to denote the language of the source text, as opposed to doeltaal, the language into which the text is translated. The concept helps identify translation direction, inform localization workflows, and support linguistic analysis and metadata tagging.

Origin and usage: The term combines "bron" meaning source or origin and "taal" meaning language. It appears in bibliographic records, translation contracts, and machine translation pipelines, where brontaal and doeltaal are tracked to guide translation memory, glossary selection, and quality assessment. When a French novel is translated into English, the brontaal is French and the doeltaal is English; in multilingual editions, each text with a different original language will have its own brontaal.

In practice, brontaal influences translation choices—idioms, cultural references, and terminology—differing between languages. In corpus linguistics, brontaal tagging enables sentence alignment, cross-language analysis, and evaluation of translation equivalence. Limitations arise when the original text is revised or heavily adapted, or when multiple languages could be considered the source in collaborative translations. See also: doeltaal, translation studies, bibliographic metadata, localization, machine translation, parallel corpus.