transverbate

present singular third person transverbates · participle present transverbating · participle past transverbated · past transverbated

1. To translate word by word, making only syntactic adjustments, but not adapting to the idiom of the target language.

   If we could take the Hebrew and the Greek and transverbate them it would be comparatively easy; but we have to remember always that we are translating for a people who do not regard the Bible in any sense as a book of authority.

   1897, Bible Society Record, page 2

   2 more examples

   But here also one of the crying needs of the day is for competent, well-equipped native Christians who shall substitute for the translated or transverbated publications of the present, Christian tracts and books written by Chinese for the Chinese, in the form that will most powerfully appeal to their type of mind and training and social culture.

   1899, Richard Lovett, The History of the London Missionary Society, 1795-1895

   All the more is he called upon to answer the difficult question: What terms or phrases enshrine specifically biblical conceptions or teachings, and therefore must be transverbated into the speech of India, as a Christian enlargement of her world of thought, and which will exercise their true force by freer translation?

   1908, The Missionary Review of the World - Volume 31, Part 1, page 263

   Synonyms: transverbalize