translate

Translate comes from Middle English translaten, meaning "to transport, translate, transform," borrowed via Anglo-Norman translater from Latin trānslātus, the perfect passive participle of trānsferō, "to transport, carry across, translate."

The word once carried a broader sense of physically transporting or transforming something, not just converting language, which lingers in its Latin root's meaning "to carry across." It displaced the Old English wendan, which had also meant "to translate" as well as "to turn" or "to change."

It's a distant doublet of transfer, since both trace back to Latin trānsferō — one word came through the participle trānslātus, the other more directly. Wiktionary also groups it with pairs like collate/confer, delate/defer, and prelate/prefer, which share this same pattern.