source language

American  

noun

1. the language in which a text appears that is to be translated into another language.

2. a language, usually the learner's native language, that is a source of interference in learning another language.

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Etymology

Origin of source language

First recorded in 1955–60

Example Sentences

This uniformity strongly suggests this word was found in the languages' early Germanic parent – that is, the source language from which all these Germanic languages descended.

From Salon • Jun. 18, 2022

This means that the word "father" likely came from a long-dead source language, estimated to date back some 6,000 years.

From Salon • Jun. 18, 2022

And so Lewis followed some stringent, self-imposed rules in composing this long poem, altering nothing about her source language except its punctuation.

From The New Yorker • Oct. 19, 2015

Typically on a sentence-by-sentence level, the program translates by finding words in the target language that both make sense together grammatically and are likely to match well with their analogues in the source language.

From Slate • May 11, 2012

MT analyzes the language text in the source language and automatically generates corresponding text in the target language.

From Multilingualism on the Web by Lebert, Marie