Translatedturned

Translatedturned is a neologism used in discussions of translation workflows to describe a text created through a two-stage translation process. In its typical sense, the term refers to content that is translated from a source language into an intermediate language and then translated again into the final language, producing a version that has been altered by the intermediate turn. It is often used to denote back-translation artifacts or two-step translation pipelines rather than to name a distinct literary style.

The term blends translated and turned and has appeared in online discussions, blogs, and some scholarly commentary since the 2010s. It does not have a universally accepted definition, and its exact meaning can vary by context or by the specifics of a given translation workflow.

Translatedturned texts commonly exhibit features associated with translationese, such as lexical or syntactic drift, idiomatic shifts, or semantic changes introduced by the intermediary language. They are of interest in evaluating machine translation systems, study of corpus data produced through back-translation, and quality control in multilingual projects, where researchers analyze how meaning and style may be altered through successive transfers.

Because the concept is informal and not standardized, critics note that translatedturned can be conflated with broader notions of translationese or with the generic effects of back-translation. Proponents view it as a useful label for diagnosing artifacts in multi-step translation processes and for guiding improvements in translation pipelines and evaluation methods.

See also: translationese; back-translation; machine translation; translation studies.