Anna Molly, Anna Molly, anomaly
Random language talk:
I came across the phrase "golpe de estado" rather randomly earlier today and put it into an online translator that came back with the phrase "coup d'etat", which tickled me a little bit. For some reason lately, a lot of conversations I've had have centered around language and communication and information transmission and translation and all that jazz, and I find it interesting that there isn't an English equivalent in place to describe the overthrowing of a state.
A friend recently made a presentation on translation and used a short story of Haruki Murakami's as an example and posited that there were two main poles in regards to translation and the first was to make the end-language as colloquial as possible, rendering the text as easy to access as possible. The second pole was what he called "localization" and depended more on the original context of the story, in terms of cultural references, geographics, etc. Personally, I'm a fan of the latter because I kinda like context and the "strangeness" of non-English texts, but it led to an interesting discussion on language appropriation.
An example: The word "ashika" is Japanese for sealion and in the original text, ashika is used both as the word sealion and as a proper noun, though the characters of the latter are slightly different because it's a proper noun in that case. (sealion & Sealion) But in the English translation this friend conducted, there were times where he named the sealion Ashika and other times when he just used the word sealion. And I thought it was interesting, given the word's strangeness, that an English-speaking reader like myself automatically assumes Ashika, when used in that context, is the name of this particular sealion when, in reality, it's just Sealion.
All this is perhaps a very longwinded way of saying I think (and I'm not saying anything new here) that the reason "coup d'etat" has no English equivalent is that the context of that phrase so perfectly informs that which it is supposed to describe that there cannot be an English equivalent because a similar context (arguably) has not been formed and embedded into a societal framework.
I do not envy translators, but that work very much intrigues me.
I came across the phrase "golpe de estado" rather randomly earlier today and put it into an online translator that came back with the phrase "coup d'etat", which tickled me a little bit. For some reason lately, a lot of conversations I've had have centered around language and communication and information transmission and translation and all that jazz, and I find it interesting that there isn't an English equivalent in place to describe the overthrowing of a state.
A friend recently made a presentation on translation and used a short story of Haruki Murakami's as an example and posited that there were two main poles in regards to translation and the first was to make the end-language as colloquial as possible, rendering the text as easy to access as possible. The second pole was what he called "localization" and depended more on the original context of the story, in terms of cultural references, geographics, etc. Personally, I'm a fan of the latter because I kinda like context and the "strangeness" of non-English texts, but it led to an interesting discussion on language appropriation.
An example: The word "ashika" is Japanese for sealion and in the original text, ashika is used both as the word sealion and as a proper noun, though the characters of the latter are slightly different because it's a proper noun in that case. (sealion & Sealion) But in the English translation this friend conducted, there were times where he named the sealion Ashika and other times when he just used the word sealion. And I thought it was interesting, given the word's strangeness, that an English-speaking reader like myself automatically assumes Ashika, when used in that context, is the name of this particular sealion when, in reality, it's just Sealion.
All this is perhaps a very longwinded way of saying I think (and I'm not saying anything new here) that the reason "coup d'etat" has no English equivalent is that the context of that phrase so perfectly informs that which it is supposed to describe that there cannot be an English equivalent because a similar context (arguably) has not been formed and embedded into a societal framework.
I do not envy translators, but that work very much intrigues me.