Translation and the Manner or Way of Saying

My translation is basically dynamic (thought-for-thought equivalence) and adaptive. In the future, I will explain why I call it ‘dynamic’ and ‘adaptive,’ but for now, let me just focus on the ‘thought equivalence.’  

I don’t follow a strict word-for-word translation. A very simple example is this: if I translate the English sentence: “The boy kicks the ball” it will NOT look like this: Ang (The)Bata (Boy)ay sumisipa (kicks)sa Bola (the ball). Yes, it’s a word-for-word translation and even the order of words is the same, but Filipino readers will hear or find it ‘not smooth’ or not a way of saying that sentence in Filipino. Sometimes, mechanical translations like Google Translate will do translations that way, although there are hi-tech AI translation tools that can do much better. Even so, although AI can translate good sentences,sometimes the ‘manner of saying’ a sentence in a particular culture is lost—I call it the ‘cultural soul of a sentence.’ The good translation for “The boy kicks the ball” is this: “Sinisipa ng bata ang bola.” Yet, the word order of this Filipino translation looks like this in English: Kicks, the boy, the ball. That’s an example of what I call ‘the manner of saying’ or the ‘cultural soul of a sentence.’

What I’m saying here might look easy on this particular and simple example, but when you apply this to complicated or complex sentences filled with cultural tones, technicalities, idioms, and manner of speaking, it becomes challenging to the translator.