That makes more sense. I thought se baña looked wrong.
I’m here to correct you. 
(Although I’m not a native speaker.)
“Bañarse” means “to bathe one’s self.” “El perro se baña” does mean “the dog bathes itself.” “El perro bañarse” does not make sense, it would mean something like “the dog to bathe itself.”
“Se” is a reflexive word, meaning it is only used when the action is performed on the actor. Somebody bathing a dog would be, “Ella le baña al perro,” le being the word reflecting the dog as the recipient of the action.
And now somebody will come in and correct my grammar on that last sentence…ducks head and looks around
Ella le baña al perro would only be correct if you are talking about an action she is performing for someone else, she washes his dog for him is a close transation for that, more accurately, in the context that it’s her duty or work to do so. You use “le” for indicating that kind of action on behalf or against someone else.
-“El le cortó el pelo a Susana” He cut Susana´s hair (for her)
-“Le dió una golpiza a José” He beated José up (against him)
You get the idea.
To simply say that she is washing the dog get rid of the “le” and just say “Ella baña al perro” as an idefinite pharase, or “Ella está bañando al perro” to describe something that is heppening right now.
Agreed. Although, I would say that it made a hard come back in slang around the time Run DMC used it in “Peter Piper”, which was out at least a year or two before Michael Jackson’s “Bad”. But who’s counting, I guess.
You might be right. I never learned it all proper. I just remember seeing “se” and wondering what it meant and finding out that it made the verb reflexive somehow. I could probably properly translate a sentence that had it, but also would probably fail to construct a good sentence using it.
Maybe…? When I took Latin the teacher had a copy of Vergil’s Aenied that did the thing I described, with the original sentence in Latin, followed by a literal word for word translation, followed by a more conventional English sentence, rinse and repeat. I’m pretty sure it had “transliteration” in the title, but it was some years ago. Definitely it was a term that was similar sounding, and definitely it wasn’t just “translation”. Is there another word that fits those criteria?
I don’t know the word, but I will concur that “transliteration” can’t be it. Transliteration doesn’t even make sense in this context since Vergil used the same alphabet we do. Transliterating Plato makes sense, but not Vergil.
Are the terms ‘calque’ or ‘verbum pro verbo’ familiar to you? Because those are the terms that best fit what you were doing.
“El perro bañarse”? What is that supposed to mean? “The dog to bath”? It makee no sensee!
El perro se baña: the dog is having a bath, the dog is bathing himself. He’s gotten into the water himself.
Baño al perro: I’m bathing the dog. He’s gotten wet because I’m his alpha human, not because he wants to. There’s probably shampoo involved.
The people who didn’t know that specific “se” is reflexive either didn’t have formal instruction in Spanish grammar or weren’t paying attention. I know my brothers had as much formal instruction as I did, but just a few weeks back one of them, who’d been preparing some ESL exams, was asking “ok, so what is the ‘se’, eh?” and we answered “eeeh… reflexive verb? You studied it in fifth grade!” “¡Ay joder! smacks himself with the dictionary”
A moment ago I’d have said no, there’s no single word that means that, but I’m a librarian and I don’t like to give answers like that unless I’ve tried to look it up first. It turns out that there is a word, “metaphrase” (as opposed to “paraphrase”), that does mean a literal translation.
However, I think it’s far more likely that the title of your book contained the phrase “literal translation” and you’ve switched it around in your memory to “transliteration”. Looking in WorldCat right now, I can’t find any record of any English version of the Aeneid with either “metaphrase” or “transliteration” in the title. There are a few different versions that include the term “literal translation” in the title, so you may have had one of those.
Lamia, you might want to introduce them to the word frotteur. Sounds French, but is a real English word! Not very common, though, I suppose.
That’s fairly close, but not exactly the same meaning. A chikan might grab a woman’s breasts or put a hand up her skirt rather than rub himself against her. But it’s not being a common term that would have been the real issue; I was teaching conversational English, and my students were generally concerned with learning how to speak in a way that wouldn’t seem awkward or overly formal to native English speakers.
After explaining that there wasn’t a perfect English translation of “chikan”, I taught them how to describe the behavior, which I feel would be the more natural way for a native speaker to phrase things (“A man assaulted/groped me on the train”).
I explain it as being analogous to something like “just.” As in how “Just do it” is different from “Do it.”