[Multilingual Monday] Lost In Translation

[aadroma]

In today's Multilingual Monday, we're going to look at things that were lost in translation from English into another language, causing an unintended different meaning from the source. I admit, I find these things fascinating, as so much in a language can be reliant on context or social interactions that a direct translation is certainly bound

Comments

[morimur]

If I had to translate Big Easy Bears, I would've gone with Бесшабашные мужики. The first word has the following connotations: frisky, carefree, playful, cavorting. The second word describes brawny, strong and muscular men

голубых медведей

[bluebear2]

Blue bears? Really?

[dodgingwndshlds]

Oh man, do I have stories about interpretations missing the mark... Especially around humor...I recently took a workshop on interpreting humor where we talked about entendre, double meanings, janus words, etc and how to find cultural equivalents in the target language.... It was a good workshop, but it remains one of the hardest things to do well....

Add in sub-sub cultures like Bears.. fergitaboutit... I couldn't even interpret that video title into Heterosexual American English without a shit TON of cultural expansions.... I could render it in Gay ASL pretty efficiently...I could interpret it into Spanish for a Mexican or Spanish Gay person pretty easily, too... But even if the person were Gay, I don't think I could render it into South American Spanish.... Or Heterosexual Spanish... or Heterosexual ASL without, again, a lot of cultural expansions...The audience and their schemas are everything....

[dodgingwndshlds]

Oh!! Wait!! I do have a recent example!!

I was given a business card from someone who works at the Oregon School for the Deaf... One side of the card is in Spanish... Only, the Spanish translation of the School's name is "Esquela para El Sordo."

Except, in Spanish, "The Deaf" is a count noun (Los Sordos)... So this card says "School for the Deaf Guy."

Which cracked me up but good! When I tried to explain it to my monolingual Ruling Reddcub, he thought I was a geek.

[gorkabear]

omg
Esquela is what you write on the newspaper announcing that someone is dead, too :(
The "right" term is "Escuela para sordos" or in politically correct language, "Escuela para discapacitados auditivos".

Doh!

[dodgingwndshlds]

Nope... the card is right.. that is my spelling error.. I always make that specific mistake... I can't spell in English, either..LOL

Re: Doh!

[dodgingwndshlds]

oops! That was me!

[gorkabear]

Oh, lovely translations from English into Spanish... The US are full of crimes to Cervantes's language, basically because of the position of prestige of English against Spanish, which makes the US Spanish to adopt more and more English structures. To me, it's hard to hear expressions such as "Aplicar por una visa" when we have the cool verb "Solicitar" and the even useful noun "visado" (Solicitar un visado). Nevertheless, the RAE is so happy to say that the US is becoming bilingual that they will accept that someday so as they can tell there are more Spanish speakers

[strongaxe]

I cringe whenever I see a Spanish word containing the letter K. Is that letter actually ever legitimately used anywhere?

[gorkabear]

It's legitimate when the word starts with a "scientific" thing, such as kilo-. It's also legit for a small number of loanwords such as kiosco, kikos or whisky, although madrileños often adapt it to their spelling (quiosco, güisqui)

Then you have two modern unregulated uses (I can think of)

- If you mention a radical movement, because it's usually related to Basque stuff (a language which only uses K), even remotely. Therefore, radical people would say "radikal" and punks would often use the K constantly. Even my town (Viladecans) has a "radikal" grafitti name "VDK". However, in common language, there's a well-known word that uses it: Squatter in Spain is "Okupa"

- Teenagers use the K for all /K/ sounds... It's a economy of characters for sms, although some expressions use q, like "TQM" (Te Quiero Mucho). It's horrible.

[progbear]

¡Ugh! I’ve seen “ke” instead of “qué” a lot on Youtube comments. I agree, it’s horrible!

Another legitimate use for the letter “k” is in Latin American place names derived from native American languages. It turns up a lot in Mayan-derived place names in Central America (like the town Kantunit Kin in Quintana Roo, Mexico and Tikal in Guatemala).

ねじ

[kevynjacobs]

Years ago, Consumer Reports ran a story about Engrish translations of user manuals. They highlighted the user manual for a Casio keyboard, which described how to attach a sheet music stand to the keyboard. The writers of the manual intended to say "Turn the attached screw..." ( ねじ ), but "screw" was not the English word that it got translated into...