[Multilingual Monday] "Aunt Hope"?
I was talking with Tzachi the other day, and he's been making videos of clips from Eurovision entries with snide comments in Hebrew here and there. He sent me the video he did of various entries from Cyprus, and it came to the entry below, and I had to ask him what the caption meant. דודה תקווה -- Doda Tikva?? "Aunt Hope"??
"It's something that's really hard to explain -- you kinda have to be Israeli to understand," he said. Apparently the phrase "Aunt Tikva" (with its share of alternatives, like דודה מרים, Doda Miryam, "Aunt Miriam"), refer to a person like a cleaning lady or the like. Thus, apparently Tzachi must have seen the lady singing for Cyprus vacuuming up a Super 8 or something, and now that I understand that, it makes a LOT more sense. Still, there's really no equivalent to this (excluding the running gag I have with "María Yolanda") without explaining too much and thus killing the joke ...
Another good example : really, I don't know what to translate the "duende" of poetry by Lorca as, except as a "duende" -- this term shows up now in music and novels and there's really no good way to state what it is, really, in English ...
I've had discussions before on things that are deemed "untranslatable", as there's some essence that is not brought over when one attempts to find any kind of equivalent into another language -- I highly disagree with the statement, "Technically, no word is unstranslatable. The translation just might not be as concise as you'd like," as yes, conciseness can be an issue, but there's a "soul" to a word that just gets left behind, leaving a soulless clone "translation". Indeed, while you can translate the DENOTATIVE, the CONNOTATIVE isn't so easy, and it's even harder while doing a translation and trying to make natural-sounding dialogue from a foreign language.
When I was translating from Japanese, it was everyday common words that would trip me up, mainly because there was no really GOOD way to state what one wanted in English. In the above panel from a Go Fujimoto comic, the character is saying よりしくお願いします, yoroshiku onegai shimasu, which can be literally translated to something like, "Please be kind to me," but is used literally everywhere and is very context-dependent. In some cases it was easy to put into English (like at the end of a letter discussing a year of sales, where it could be said to be "thank you for a great year, and we hope for your continued patronage." But in this case, the man is starting a new job -- at a fire department -- and it means here, "I'll give it my all", but there's really nothing in English to replace this with. While some works may leave in Japanese text (opting to keep in "sempai", "rounin", "-san" and "-chan"), this doesn't work here as this work takes place in America, thus making the science/art ratio of translation higher in the latter category. Other troublesome phrases included いただきます, itadakimasu, said before one eats a meal. Again, this is a cultural thing, leaving one being creative in replacing this section of text...
Of course, these are two different kinds of "untranslatable" above -- I'd love to hear more from you guys.