See below for the introductory post about Bambi. This post compares the old translation and the new translation; let’s call them OT and NT. My edition of the OT was kindly purchased for me by my traumatized reader (see intro post) from a used book shop in Tennessee. It had previously been given as a… Continue reading Bambi (part II)
Category: Translation quandaries
Sorry, everyone
Hey, entire world. I’m really sorry translations can’t be perfect. And by that I don’t mean translators are bound to make a few mistakes, though of course that’s also true. I mean no translation will ever be exactly the same text or give you exactly the same experience as the original. Think you’ve read War… Continue reading Sorry, everyone
More German adjective endings in English
In this post, I discussed whether to decline German adjectives when you use them in an English sentence. I don’t, but here’s somebody doing it on the Wikipedia page for Leo von König: He was not well thought of by Adolf Hitler, however, and his works were removed from the “Großen Deutschen Kunstausstellung” at the… Continue reading More German adjective endings in English
Practice makes worse
In Brideshead Revisited, Cordelia Flyte returns from her long sojourn in war-torn Spain and the narrator tells us: “She looked more than her twenty-six years; hard living had roughened her; constant intercourse in a foreign tongue had worn away the nuances of speech; she straddled a little as she sat by the fire, and when… Continue reading Practice makes worse
Under the lime trees
While doing research for a project, I came across this 1997 review of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s novel Petrolio . It was amusing, and since I’m from the future, I can answer this question: Is there any chance that, with the alleged collapse of Communism in the Western world, no one will ever again dismiss his… Continue reading Under the lime trees
Warning: explicit language
This morning someone on my local NPR station said that English is a very implicit language, while American Sign Language is a very explicit language. What the heck does that mean? The speaker, who interprets into ASL at stage productions, cited the example of translating the phrase “a cosmopolitan city”: “Well, you can finger-spell ‘cosmopolitan,’… Continue reading Warning: explicit language
Interlingual puns
Some people seem to think (see this post) that a really great machine-translation program would be able to “handle complicated multilingual puns with ease.” But what is a “multilingual pun” anyway? The prefix “multi” implies more than two, and honestly, off the top of my head I can’t think of any puns involving more than… Continue reading Interlingual puns
Puns and jokes
In this post I promised to go through some pun-translation strategies. What makes puns hard to translate is that there is almost never one “right” or “best” solution. Puns give rise to several different scenarios: 1. You just translate the straight meaning and write a footnote about how it was a pun in the source… Continue reading Puns and jokes
German adjective endings in English
The phrase “the Romanische Café” caught my eye in an English-language book about Berlin and I got so stuck on this phrase that I couldn’t concentrate on the rest of the paragraph. Why? Because I would have written “the Romanisches Café” for logical reasons, but the version above also makes a kind of sense and… Continue reading German adjective endings in English