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of “a translation.” Here, for example, are the main words that you have to talk about them in Japanese:

    If the translation we are discussing is complete, we might call it a zen’yaku or a kan’yaku … A first translation is a shoyaku . A retranslation is a kaiyaku , and the new translation is a shin’yaku that replaces the old translation, or kyyaku . A translation of a translation is a jyaku . A standard translation that seems unlikely to be replaced is a teiyaku ; equally unlikely to be replaced is a mei-yaku , or “celebrated translation.” When a celebrated translator speaks of her own work, she may disparage it as setsuyaku , “clumsy translation,” i.e., “my own translation,” which is not to be confused with a genuinely bad translation, disparaged as a dayaku or an akuyaku . A co-translation is a kyyaku or gyaku ; a draft translation, or shitayaku , may be polished through a process of “supervising translation” or kan’yaku , without it becoming a kyyaku or gyaku . Translations are given different names depending on the approach they take to the original: they can be chokuyaku (literally, “direct translation”), chikugoyaku (“word-for-word translation”), iyaku (“sense translation”), taiyaku (“translation presented with the original text on facing pages”), or, in the case of translations of works by Sidney Sheldon, Danielle Steel, John Grisham, and other popular American writers, chyaku (“translations that are even better than the originals,” an invention and registered trademark of the Academy Press). 1
     

    English possesses a wide range of names for different kinds of flowers: one way of referring to the relationship between, say, tulip and flower is to call flower a hypernym and tulip , along with rose , hydrangea , camellia , and so on, the hyponyms of the term flower . Hypernym and hyponym refer to relationships between words in a language, not to (botanical or other) relations between the things they refer to. So we could say that Japanese lacks a hypernym for all its various translation terms, whereas English has the hypernym but no readily available set of hyponyms. But the very structure of such an argument takes us into dangerous territory. It sets up English as the “Standard” or the “Thinking Language” because it alone has the general term, and could easily accommodate new coinages to give the meanings of the Japanese terms— uptranslate , downtranslate , newtranslate , retranslate , cotranslate , and so on. But it is not so obvious how we could translate the general or abstract notion of translation into Japanese, and so we would be predisposed to thinking of that language as deficient in precisely the respect in which it is richer than English.
    In practice, Japanese speakers do have a way of translating the English term translation into Japanese. The word hon’yaku is used for that purpose in Japanese translations of English-language works about comparative literature and translation theory, and also in the world of publishing and the international book trade. But its range of uses makes it an imperfect match for the word translation . Hon’yaku covers translation from foreign (non-Japanese) languages into Japanese (or vice versa), sometimes more specifically translations from Europe or the United States, but not most other meanings of translation. According to Michael Emmerich, “Those like myself who attempt to translate ‘translation’ with the word hon’yaku are … subtly carrying out the type of translation known in Japanese as goyaku , or ‘mistranslation.’” 2 Hon’yaku is more like a term of art, whereas we think that the English term translation names something general of self-evident reality.
    The Word Magic effect of a category term is that it leads unwary users to believe that the category thus named really exists. One way of looking at this is to say that the category or class—any category or class—really does exist as a mental