I commented on this on FB because I was struck by comments from a number of language-bound minds, then thought you all might enjoy it.
The art of translation—as practiced by Bren Cameron — or others— is NOT a straightforward equivalency which a machine could do easily. I taught foreign language for a decade. And I coped with students who thought, for example, that a ‘wave’ was a ‘wave’ was a ‘wave’ and that the dictionary would always be right. No. The word ‘to wave’ a handkerchief—“agitare’ . The word ‘wave’ in your hair —‘crispata’. The word ‘wave’ in the sea—‘unda’. That’s a SIMPLE one. There are a number of translations that are made limpingly and with difficulty, because they’re abstracts, and the BELIEF of the people is different. Greek, the language of the New Testament, owns no word for ‘sin.’ The word used is actually ‘goofup’ [hamartia]—or a ‘try and a miss’ in archery. I could go on for hours about the kind of tradeoffs you have to make when rendering something from one language into another…and sometimes you just throw up your hands and ‘make it like us,’ because, say, no American is going to automatically understand what a Roman meant by ‘pietas’—and ‘piety’ ain’t it! [It was simultaneous right relationship to the celestial, terrestial, and infernal realms, achieved by proper respect and treatment of the gods, neighbors, and ancestors.]
And then words change meanings or applications, so knowing the era matters. ‘Let’ can mean ‘prevention’ or ‘rented’ or ‘expanded’ or ‘allowed…’ somewhat depending on the era from which the particular MODEL for the statement originated. So we say, antique form: ‘without let or hindrance’—a fossilized form. He ‘let the apartment.’ He ‘let the jacket out.’ He ‘let the dog out.’ And he ‘let his daughter drive the car.’ All different—and some from different ages.
I find it not too amazing that translated works and texts come under debate—and are subject to a lot of varying interpretation. Once a work leaves its context in time AND culture, interpretations are going to be different in every new era and locale in which it is read. The Bible is one example. Ayn Rand. Plato. All linguistically and temporally dislocated. The US Constitution and Declaration of Independence. Thomas Payne’s writings. Thomas Jefferson’s. Abraham Lincoln’s…shifted in time. And requiring mental flexibility and historic context to truly ‘get.’
And there are nuances to words, too. Take walk, plod, trudge, march, stalk, and slink. All of those describe the way someone moves. But you get a much different picture if you use them in the same sentence. (Try it: The man (fill in verb) into the office. Entirely different images, right?) But now try thinking about how you would explain that to someone who doesn’t speak the language. You might, after enough discussion, have them say that the word for “plod” is X. But can you ever be sure that it conveys the same image?
And, for another set of words that you just need to know, and which I found out about the hard way: spices and seasonings. Had a friend from another country visit who wanted to cook me dinner, but needed a certain seasoning. He knew it in his language, I know them in mine. Imagine trying to ask for something like “dried thyme” when you have no clue what the word is. It’s green, and leafy, but that could be thyme, oregano, savory, marjoram, sage… I think we finally just opened up spices until we found one that smelled right.
Thanks, it prompted me to check something out. Remember the apocriphal story of the first machine translation of the phrase “Out of sight, out of mind” translated to Russian and back, returning as “Invisible idiot”?
OMG!!! It’s February already! Time for a change… 😉
I enjoy Persian food, but the dishes don’t translate into English at all well, although they’re delicious (and most of them include onions or their near relations – sorry, CJ!) and have analogues in European and American meals.
I once tried to explain what “silly” meant to a Hungarian teenager and simply couldn’t. For years I’ve been keeping an eye out for good definitions. Originally it meant (and often can still mean) “foolish,” as in “don’t be silly,” but I had affectionately called her “silly,” as in something like “oh, silly, be careful.” Maybe “foolish” is still the closest equivalent (it didn’t occur to me at all in that long ago conversation, only that “stupid” definitely was not right), but it doesn’t at all capture the informal, affectionate nature of an adjective used as a vocative.
Also, often languages do not break out or categorize parts of our shared, everyday, human world and then communications between the two linguistic cultures can completely boggle. “What do you mean, you don’t have a word for X?!” The Celtic languages don’t separate out green from blue and, I have argued in a paper, categorize some “colors” by different principles than the rainbow spectrum. Other cultures divide and name body parts differently, for example not dividing the arm into component parts (so much for elbow then, you just have to use a work-around phrase such as “knobby bit in the middle.”).
This doesn’t even get into differing dialects or age/class-based slang within the same language!
Great topic! A favorite topic.
I grew up in a religious, faithful family where Bible study and questions were (mostly) encouraged. I was lucky enough to know a few people with good Bible scholarship backgrounds, and my parents both were better read than a lot of people. My dad loved history and my mom was an English major. I started out as an English major with more than enough language skill that my French prof tried very hard to convince me to switch. In retrospect, she was probably right. I was confused about a great many things at that point. Heh.
However, CJ, I had never heard from anyone (including a couple of ministers who knew Biblical Greek and Latin) that Biblical Greek didn’t really translate “sin” as such, but instead as something like a “miss, goofup, simple mistake.” Now that gives a very different perspective than the view I grew up with. — And as someone who became, as a young man, very overly concerned about some such things…I dearly wish someone had said that to me, in high school or early college, when I was struggling so much with it. That’s a much more freeing way to look at it, that well, so you made a mistake, but it’s not going to be such a permanent screwup.
It was not until the internet came along that I got brave enough or desperate enough to look up things on Biblical translation regarding another big translation and interpretation issue, regarding sexuality. — By then, I’d come to the idea that there must be some more open, wider view than the one I’d grown up believing, and I wanted, needed that very much. — It was something of a shock to find that what I’d grown up with was quite possibly a misinterpretation or mistranslation on a number of words (ideas). — That, in short, if I’d known that (or had had more accepting friends and relationships) I might’ve avoided a lot of anxious, wasted time … and accepted myself sooner.
Somewhat related: I first read the Cyteen books that were out when I was in college. It wasn’t until the second book, and I think a second reading, that it dawned on me that Grant and Justin’s relationship was more than I’d thought. … And then I was surprised and wondered why I hadn’t figured it out until then. Why? Because that was where my own mental state was at the time, not accepting myself. — Realizing that these two close friends were more than close friends was a step in the right direction, and one of the turning points. (Ironically, I’d also read other books that had characters more or less open about it, including a couple that had helped or intrigued me as a boy growing up. I’m very grateful for all those.)
So, for an explanation of one concept alone, plus another concept shown in fiction — Thank you dearly.
I’d like to chime in about the overall translation issue regarding nuance and connotation, for more general things, but I’ll do so later in a separate post.
Aaand, to top the lot, English has a cornucopia of embedded metaphor (see what I did there?): back in the nineties I was training Czech telco people in the art (!) of econometric demand forecasting. We hit a major speed bump (!) on the concept of ‘churn’ – customers who join and then leave a service (e.g. sign up for cable TV with a special offer then leave as soon as the discounted period finishes). It turns out that Czech doesn’t have a lot of metaphor, just simile. The translator: “what is churn? – I only know in context of butter-making”: Me: “well it is a bit like that” – makes spiral motions with arms – and so on …
And … embedded terms from historical usage: Captain Boycott was an Irish landlord’s agent whose behaviour sparked (!) a rent-strike – a boycott http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boycott. Fortunately for the follow-up to the churn discussion, the Czech for boycott (v) is ‘boycottovani’. Not much chance of the average Czech knowing the etymology of that.
Not that it helps now, but for “churn,” I’d suggest also the idea that “churning” mixes or kneads together a mass of things, like customers, and some bits rise to the top, others fall to the bottom, and others are incorporated into the mass. Those who rise or fall may remain on the outside or get pushed out altogether, which I take it is what you were trying to get across. The Czech translator had the butter-making context right, but was having trouble seeing how that applied to the other…which, of course, you knew…. Uh, never mind me, I just babble on….. *ahem*
Churn can be used several ways. A butter churn is much like a centrifuge, separating oils from milk.
The metaphor of a moored boat churning the water but going nowhere can be used in two opposite ways. The customers who join and leave are churning the telco; but a stock broker always selling and buying different stocks is churning the customer’s account so he can charge fees: the customer loses money–goes backwards–if anything.
A language isn’t an isolated thing. It occurs in a cultural, historical and behavioral context. It’s one of those you have to be there. It’s hard enough translating one Human language/culture into another. Bren is trying to translate between two peoples who don’t even have the same planetary context, let alone the same genetic context. Bren can never be “there” enough to understand concepts that you can only get if you are an Atevi. And vice versa. Salads.
Atevi and Humans are both technical civilizations. I think that implies some commonality. Dolphins may be great philosophers, but they won’t evolve hands, so they can’t become technical; octopi can manipulate objects, and are smarter than anyone expected, so they might develop some technology (obviously with great difficulty underwater). I think an argument can be made for needing to be omnivorous: you need both the high populations allowed by the nutritional efficiency of vegetarianism and agriculture, and the time-efficiency of a high protein diet, from herding or animal “farming”, allowing time for invention.
Those who enabled Chinese or Japanese communications with Europeans had some very high barriers, too. Even knowing exactly what to listen for, I could not hear or speak using Japanese timing-stress.
Here are some examples of how meanings of English words have changed since the 18th century, from the diary of the novelist Fanny Burney. She was about to leave to travel around southern England, and was talking to a friend: “She asked me where I was travelling to, and my direction.”
‘Direction’ here does not mean what you may think. It doesn’t mean north, south, east or west. It means ‘address for sending letters’. So the friend was asking where she was travelling to, and what address she should use for letters to her.
The word address was used in a different way in 18th century English. If someone had an ‘excellent address’, it didn’t mean that he lived in an expensive part of town, it meant that he spoke very politely.
Burney says that though she didn’t personally like the Prince of Wales, yet “he was always polite and condescending” to her. To be condescending was a good thing in the 18th century, because it meant exactly the opposite of what we mean by it. To be condescending to someone meant to treat them as an equal, rather than standing on rank.
In Johnson’s dictionary (1755), he defines ‘condescend’ as “To depart from the privileges of superiority by a voluntary submission; to sink willingly to equal terms with inferiors; to soothe by familiarity.”
He defines familiarity as “Easy intercourse”.
He defines intercourse as “1. Commerce; exchange. 2. Communication.”
He defines communication as “Interchange of knowledge; good intelligence between several persons”.
He defines intelligence, in this sense, as “Commerce of acquaintance; terms on which men live one with another.”
He defines commerce as…
Yes, language changes, and the danger of misunderstandings grows.
You would love Patrick O’Brian!
No, I don’t like Patrick O’Brian. I much prefer C.S. Forrester and Captain Frederick Marryat.
Marryat was the real thing – an actual British navy captain who saw almost continuous action at sea from 1806 to 1830, serving in the Napoleonic wars, the War of 1812, and a colonial expedition to Burma amongst others. He later became a very successful author who wrote about 30 books, and was a personal friend of Charles Dickens.
He actually lived through everything he wrote about.
Oh, I love the nuances when you start getting into a language.
I read Ovid’s Metamorphoses on the bus to and from Uni one year, and I’d been studying Latin for 7 years by then and was starting to get some of the subtle shadings. I’m sure people were wondering about the laughing hyena up the back. 🙂
And there’s been times with French, where I can get the feeling of the word, but have to go “it’s sort of like…but not exactly” when translating to English.
I’ve come across another interesting area of translation. I’ve been following the saga of Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito on and off for more than 6 years now. (They are guilty, by the way. No doubt about it, despite Knox’s concerted PR campaign.)
Translation of the Italian court documents into English proved quite difficult for the translation teams on the discussion forums, even though the teams consisted of Italian, American and British lawyers, and people fluent in both Italian and English. The problem is that the Italian legal system is so different from Common Law systems that major concepts and legal phrases can’t be directly translated. There are no exact equivalents in the two systems.
To take one simple example, how do you translate the term giudici popolari into English? I’ve seen it tanslated as jurors, judges, and lay judges. In trials before the Corte d’Assise and Corte d’Appello (first and second level criminal courts) the court is presided over by two professional judges and six giudici popolari. These are members of the public over 30 years of age with a minimum level of education, selected at random. They perform a similar function to a jury in common law systems, but they sit along with the judges, not separately. They have equal votes with the professional judges in deciding the verdict. They are not sequestered, and the prosecution and defence play no part in their selection and cannot object to them. The English term ‘jury’ doesn’t quite convey their function accurately. They sit with the professional judges at the front of the courtroom, and decide on the verdict in consultation with the professional judges, who also have a vote on the verdict. This is just one example of the translation issues.
In many ways, the Italian legal system is better than common law systems, but very different. From what I’ve learned of the Italian legal system by following the case, if I were to be put on trial for a crime I didn’t commit, I would very much prefer to be tried in Italy than in the USA or UK. There are far more checks and balances and reviews, and the accused have more protections than under common law systems.
If Knox had been tried in the USA on the identical evidence, there is no question that she would now be serving life without parole (if she didn’t do an O.J.) That she isn’t, shows a certain inbuilt leniency in the Italian system. Yet that system also works very well for dealing with tough Mafiosi, putting them behind bars and keeping them there.
The mills of the Italian justice system grind very slowly, but they grind exceedingly fine.
CJ, I just tried to add another comment on this page, but it also disappeared. Your spam system must have me flagged in some way. The ID of the comment that disappeared was #35114, if that helps.
I got it—somehow your server has landed on the WordPress blacklist and I don’t know why—it COULD be the length of your post, since this one got through, but I have no problems about the length, myself!: I’m poking about to see if I can whitelist you. I check my blog several times a day, so if you don’t see your comment appear, it ‘s stuck again, and I’ll find it and make it appear. I’m so sorry you’re having this trouble, but at least I can rescue your posts when I happen to log in.
Many thanks! 🙂
AFAIK, every so often WP gets a wild hair up its bum and decides to arbitrarily blacklist someone who has been posting just fine previously. It took CJ several weeks to persuade WP that I wasn’t a Nigerian spammer! 😀