# transverbalize
## English
### Verb

transverbalize (third-person singular simple present transverbalizes, present participle transverbalizing, simple past and past participle transverbalized)
* To translate language one word at a time.
    Synonym: transverbate
** 1908, Classical World, page 126:But Mr. Shedd would have the boy “transverbalize” to acquire a feeling for the Latin order.
** 1921, Maryland School Bulletin, page 19:Thus they may learn strictly idiomatic French and attain some spoken French that is not merely English transverbalized.
** 1925–34, Proceedings of the Convocation, pages 76 and 78:The great majority of pupils confess that they do not even try to read the Latin; they begin at once to translate or to decipher or to transverbalize. […] 5 Translating (that is, transverbalizing) a series of Latin sentences—almost meaningless in themselves and without any discoverable connection with each other. […] And we must train them in habits of fitting response other than merely transverbalizing the printed or spoken word.
** 1925, Henry Clinton Morrison, The Teaching Technique of the Secondary School, pages 60, 73, and 86:He is not reading but deciphering, not translating but "transverbalising". […] The matter of critical importance is that there shall be no transverbalizing the passage, or translation in the ordinary school use of that term. […] divert it into a process of acquiring deciphering or transverbalizing ability.
** 1926–31, Research Studies in Commercial Education, page 92:However, the next time I simply indicated the beginning of the sentence to prevent word-calling, or transverbalizing, which many teachers mistake for “reading back,” and to assist in the development of a wide eye-span, so necessary in good reading and absolutely essential to the stenographer in making perfect transcripts.
** 1926, Teaching, page 11:The so-called translation ability in which a pupil learns to use a lexicon to decipher the meaning of a page is really ‘transverbalizing.’ He may become skillful, but he is still deciphering, not reading.
** 1927, Proceedings of the High School Conference, page 271:In the first place, I do not mean “translation” ability, which is normally only transverbalizing, a game involving a lexicon, a nimble wit, some shrewdness of judgment, a good memory and external pressure of some sort.
** 1927, School Publication, pages 31 and 39:He proceeds haltingly and after long and laborious effort to build up a deciphering transverbalizing ability falsely called translation. […] That is, pupils who transverbalize the material written in the text will be inclined to do so likewise in reading supplementary material written in the foreign language; pupils who have difficulty in locating material in the text will experience the same thing in regard to supplementary content, etc.
** 1928, Edgar Clarke Fontaine, Ways to Better Teaching in the Secondary School, page 57:This method is conducive to word-by-word transverbalizing, almost constant vocabulary thumbing, and a stiff, stilted version which is neither English nor French.
** 1929, Proceedings of the High School Conference, page 60:And so by example, if not by precept, such teachers train their pupils to transpose the Latin words of a Latin sentence into normal English order before attempting to read it or to transverbalize it.
** 1929, Mason DeWitt Gray, The Teaching of Latin, page 65:While this familiarizes the pupil with the order in which thought is presented in Latin, it does not insure the actual comprehension of the relations of words as transverbalized. The perception of relations, the crucial element, frequently comes about only through a rearrangement of the transverbalized elements into the usual English order so as to make sense.
** 1930, School of Education Bulletin, page 21:The visitor in one of these classrooms is likely to rub his eyes and recall with regret the days when he dissected and transverbalized his Latin into English which meant little or nothing.
** 1931, The Classical Journal, page 128:1. Ability, actually or mentally, to transpose the words of a Latin sentence into English order and then to transverbalize the Latin words thus transposed into more or less equivalent English words or phrases so as to “make sense.” 2. Ability to transverbalize the words of a Latin sentence into more or less equivalent English words or phrases and then to transpose and rearrange these English words and phrases thus transverbalized so as to “make sense.”
** 1931–45, Edward Yoder, edited by Ida Yoder, Edward, Pilgrimage of a Mind: The Journal of Edward Yoder, 1931-1945, published 1985, page 153:As it is with me now I transverbalize most of it mentally into English and get the thought in that way.
** 1933, Latin Notes, page 2:5. The Translation Method. As under the Reading Method described above, the teacher puts chief emphasis upon the pupil’s getting the meaning from the printed page, but regularly employs transverbalization or translation as the chief means of teaching the pupil the meaning of words and grammatical forms, and thereby encourages him to transpose the words of the Latin sentence into the familiar order of the vernacular and to transverbalize each word into what he considers its nearest English equivalent.
** 1936, Journal of Secondary Education, page 62:The pupil learns that to translate is not merely to transverbalize, but clearly to grasp in every detail the thought to be translated, and then to express it in the most accurate and effective manner in the foreign language, having regard for exact equivalents in meaning, verb form, phrase, and idiom.
** 1936, The Classical Outlook, pages 27 and 49:The exercise may be used as a device to test and improve pronunciation; as a vocabulary drill, by the repetition of a difficult word in its various forms; as a grammar drill, by the repetition of a difficult construction in many questions and answers; as a medium for the development of “Latin thinking,” eliminating the waste motion of transverbalizing ideas; finally, as training in alertness, because every student must be on the lookout for his question. […] The “direct” reader of Latin (that is, the reader who does not transverbalize into English words or transpose into English order) will have no difficulty in handling the remaining 4% as broadly adverbial in function, while the transverbalizer may, perhaps, need to interpret domum as “homeward” and Romam as “Romeward.”
** 1936, Edgar Marian Draper, Principles and Techniques of Curriculum Making, page 568:In Professor [Henry Clinton] Morrison’s opinion the matter of critical importance is that there should be no transverbalizing, which would accustom the pupils to the notion that language learning is a matter of learning words and forms in isolation and afterward putting them together in discourse which has a meaning.
** 1937, Ann Brewington, Direct-Method Materials for Gregg Shorthand: Teacher’s Manual, page 22:He should not be permitted to “translate” or “transverbalize” the meaning into longhand nor into print—or even into the key to the materials in his textbook.
** 1937, The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, page 541:It does not appear far-fetched to suppose that this attitude of theirs was probably due to the fact that they found their Bible to be a transverbalizing sort of translation […]
** 1938, Purpose, page 114:Translators, who would scorn to transliterate the actual German words, yet content themselves with merely transverbalising the German sentences.
** 1938, The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, page 362:On the other hand, if the renderings are idiomatic, they are stated ‘conveniently to themselves’ (to transverbalize for once an idiom), that is, as they ought to be stated to be correct.
** 1940, Henry Clinton Morrison, The Curriculum of the Common School: From the Beginning of the Primary School to the End of the Junior College, page 299:Hence, much the same as the Civil Building later had strong proclivities to transverbalize without translating the Palace, so the beautiful guildhall was likely to copy the style of the church building.
** 1940, The Teaching of German, page 102:[…] idea that “transverbalizing” is foolish and grotesque, and that an idiom must be learned by heart with its best free translation: […]
** 1940, Worship: A Review Devoted to the Liturgical Apostolate, page 46:One feels that the translator was too faithful to the text—transverbalizing instead of translating—in trying to preserve the Gallic flavor of the original.
** 1941, Encyclopedia of Educational Research, page 656:To some teachers “reading” means reading aloud; to others it means the silent reading for comprehension of the Latin words in the Latin order; to still other teachers “reading” means getting the meaning by the indirect method of transverbalizing or transposing or both.
** 1942, Walter Vincent Kaulfers, Modern Languages for Modern Schools, pages 146 and 254:Moving-picture records of the pupil’s eyes in silent reading showed that even when the content was phrased in words with which the students were familiar, the process was distinctly one of deciphering, decoding, and transverbalizing, rather than of absorbing the current of meaning conveyed by the printed page. […] Naturally, a topic that can be illustrated is easier to handle at the beginning than one that can only be transverbalized.
** 1943, Revista, page 124:Without a thorough knowledge of the sound system we do not read, we decipher, transverbalize, stutter, stumble and grope.
** 1943, The American Ecclesiastical Review: A Monthly Publication for the Clergy, page 110:Transverbalizing idioms is misleading, as it gives wrong notions about their meanings to those not already acquainted with their sense.
** 1943, The Classical Journal, pages 101–102 and 415:Cases should be transverbalized according to the basic meanings of the case, except, of course, when a preposition defines the meaning of a case. […] But he would insist that translation should follow, not precede or accompany comprehension; that “reading” Latin as English (that is, transverbalizing the Latin into English words and transposing words, phrases, and clauses into familiar English word-order) is, in the long run, an uneconomical method and a method that hinders instead of helping a pupil ever to read Latin as Latin and in the Latin order.
** 1945, The American Business Education Yearbook, page 128:[…] translating and transverbalizing through the use of a key by the student […]
** 1945, The Classical Journal, page 29:The teacher transverbalizes or metaphrases new material, and the students follow the Latin text carefully.
** 1946, B. Marian Brooks, Harry Alvin Brown, Music Education in the Elementary School, page 55:Reading notes spellingwise is fatal to expressing feeling through song or instrument. It is like deciphering in reading or transverbalizing in translating a foreign language.
** 1948, The Classical Weekly, pages 12–14:Step 3. If Step 2 has failed to bring comprehension, transverbalize or metaphrase those parts of the sentence not yet comprehended. Step 4. If Step 3 has failed to bring comprehension, transpose into normal English order those parts of the sentence not yet comprehended, and then transverbalize or metaphrase. […] If we assume, as I think we safely can assume, that the student habitually treats res publica as a sort of compound word, something like English ‘common-wealth’, and that he has long since learned how to handle the enclitic -que, he will certainly be able to sweep cleanly straight through the whole sentence, transverbalizing word by word, except for the following concessions, each of which would have to be frequently granted in the transverbalization of any Classical Latin author: […] A novice at the game of transverbalizing might be tempted to give up the struggle when he encountered a sentence of fourteen words with an attributive adjective at one end and its noun at the other. […] Accordingly, he lifts the magna out of the rough, so to speak, and drops it right in front of gratia when he gets there, having transverbalized all the intervening words in their Latin order. […] In transverbalizing a substantive in the genitive, dative, or ablative (without a preposition), the student should limit himself to the stock prepositions: ‘of’ for a genitive; ‘to’ or ‘for’ for a dative, and ‘with’, ‘by’, ‘in’, ‘on’, or ‘from’ for an ablative.
** 1948, The Modern Language Forum, page 106:The student is thus trained from the start not to transverbalize but to substitute concept for concept, idiom for idiom.
** 1949, Kentucky School Journal, page 17:Each new basic word is used several times in the reading so that, after the passage is read in Latin and then transverbalized, the new word has a definite meaning.
** 1950, The Classical Journal, page 336:Rewriting a Latin author in English order merely enables the student to transverbalize and decode; it does not teach him to read.
** 1951, The Education Digest, page 51:[…] word order, even if transverbalized, is realizing one of the aims in teaching Latin, that of teaching judgment by the suspension of opinion until all facts are marshalled.
** 1952, The Month, page 187:But Professor Allison Peers explains very exactly his method of translating Teresa’s conversational style: he does not attempt the impossible (and unjustifiable) task of making you suppose she was an Englishwoman and not a Spaniard; yet he does not delay or exasperate you by “transverbalizing,” e.g. her portentous honorific titles—thus in a letter of thirty-eight lines she calls a cardinal “Your most Illustrious Lordship” no less than fifteen times.
** 1958, The Classical Outlook, page 37:Selections are read orally, and when a check on comprehension is required, they are transverbalized.
** 1963, Miles V. Zintz, Education Across Cultures, page 120:Kaulfers writes of the relation of culture to language: How translation can defeat its own ends if words are merely transverbalized without regard for their pleasant or unpleasant associations is illustrated by the difficulties missionaries have sometimes had in trying to convert remote populations to Christianity.
** 1963, Publication of the Indiana University Research Center in Anthropology, Folklore, and Linguistics, page 100:Much time is lost by the student in thumbing the vocabulary, and there is usually not enough time to review the day’s assignment once it has been painfully transverbalized.
** 1964, Catholic Biblical Quarterly, page 83:To add—after the Latin transliterated, or transverbalized, expression—clearer, commoner, or more idiomatic forms, in order to show, by comparison, the textual agreements or differences between the two renderings: […]
** 1967, The Tablet, page 1313:Try again to do what? To make it better of its kind? or to make it what it is not, a transverbalised translation, and so less desacralised? […] To be rid of the hieratic language of the Western rite, to change the actions which stress the sacral character of what is either a profound and unfathomable mystery or nothing, to transfer the emphasis from propitiatory sacrifice to “commemorative meal,” somehow to diminish the numinous by abandoning Western modal chant and vestments: all these counts make it clear that his plea is for the retention of the Latin, because any translation is either a transverbalised one, as incomprehensible to the uninitiated as its Latin original, or a desacralised one, robbing the mysterium fidei of what makes it what it is, and reducing it almost to nothing.
** 1978, Translation Review, page 2:Historically, that training has stressed the ability to transverbalize literally at the expense of elegant or even tasteful translation.
** 1988, Aylward Shorter, Toward a Theology of Inculturation, page 23:Language is too closely tied to culture, and a transverbalized liturgy eventually fails to satisfy.
** 1993, Notebook for the Maya Hieroglyphic Workshop at Texas, page 27:The first three glyphs above Scene 1 would be transverbalized form;
** 2015, Rodney A. Whitacre, Using and Enjoying Biblical Greek: Reading the New Testament with Fluency and Devotion, Baker Academic, →ISBN:Harris, William. “The Sin of Transverbalizing … or Translating as you Read!” Latin Studies and Background Essays. http://[…]

#### Related terms

* transverbalization