lost in translation: foreign words for familiar concepts

I came across this post about untranslatable words from other languages via the wonderful blog A Cup of Jo. I just loved the illustrations, and it's a theme I often studied (and found fascinating) in many of my college linguistics classes. We tend to think that since English is so powerful and dominant, it can easily express any concept--but sometimes it simply lacks the conciseness and elegance of other languages. Here are a few examples, ranging from the familiar French and Spanish to the lesser-known Inuit and Urdu.

(Soon to be a familiar feeling)

(Perhaps the most enjoyable part of Spanish culture)

See the full post here.

Originally posted on Maptia, also mentioned on A Cup of Jo.

lost in translation: Harry Potter

With just four weeks left until Spain, I've shifted my focus from bolstering my English lexicon to refreshing my grasp on Spanish. My fluency has definitely suffered now that I've been away from Granada for over a year. What's more, I no longer work at my UCSB job surrounded by Mexican cooks. To revive my vocabulary, including the all-important words "wand" and "curse," I've taken to re-reading the Harry Potter series in Spanish.

Doing so has shed light onto the trials of literary translation, especially when dealing with such sacred appellations and plot developments as appear in J.K. Rowling's books--translated into more than 70 languages worldwide. In her books, there are certain creations, such as the Pensieve or Knockturn Alley, that are extremely difficult to translate due to the sort of play-on-words that Rowling invokes to create such terms (i.e., Pensieve is basically a bowl of thoughts, or a "pensive sieve"). Translators must choose to either forgo the underlying connotations and stick with a phrase that will appear random to most readers, or figure out a way in their own language to convey such double meanings.

Other such ingenuities, like many characters' names and spells, would also be lost in translation. Although this does not affect the plot, it certainly dissolves some of the magic of the books. Many incantations are based on Latin roots, such as lumos (to light a wand), imperio (to control sombody), and priori incantatem (reproducing the last spell of the wand). Names often provide insight into the characters themselves--Draco Malfoy is based off the Latin root for dragon, while Remus Lupin draws his surname from the Latin for wolf. Luckily, these terms go over fine in a majority of translations, since a large chunk of the foreign market plays out in Romance languages (Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese), all based off Latin. But it's a whole level of ingenuity lost on the poor Arabic or Russian reader!

And lastly, what I just stumbled upon in my reading and what inspired this post, is how the different translations deal with anagrams. In Chamber of Secrets, Tom Marvolo Riddle rearranges the letters of his name to spell out "I am Lord Voldemort." In the version I'm reading, the translator had to compensate for the fact that "I am" is "soy" in Spanish, and thus changed Tom's name to "Tom Sorvolo Ryddle" throughout the whole series. Many languages can accomplish this by only changing the middle name--Servolo in Brazilian Portuguese, Vandrolo in Hebrew, Marvoldo in Turkish, Vorlost in German. Other languages, like Norwegian and French, simply replace the entire name so that the letters are able to spell out "I am Lord Voldemort" in the respective languages. (In Icelandic, for example, his name becomes Trevor Delgome--sort of has a different feel to it, doesn't it?)

But apparently, some languages pose too mountainous a task. The translators of Mandarin, for example, went about their business with the appropriate Chinese characters, and then made a footnote at the bottom: "In English, 汤姆･马沃罗･里德尔 is 'Tom Marvolo Riddle.' The letters in this name are exactly the same as those in 我是伏地魔 'I am Lord Voldemort,' arranged in a different order!" (source) In the Arabic version, the author threw out the whole word game altogether, and had the character simply write "I am Lord Voldemort" out of thin air. Less awe-factor, sure, but also less hassle. After all, this scene occurs at the end of the book--can we blame the translators for just wanting to be done with it?

So there you have it! Important linguistic insight into the greatest series of all time. Or, several hours of Harry Potter research, in lieu of deep-cleaning my room or taking GRE practice tests.

Source

P.S. More lost in translation moments

lost in translation: that cursed pause

           I posted recently about the importance of punctuation in writing, lest Grandpa should unfortunately be eaten at the writer's expense. As I found out during one particularly awkward moment in Spain, the placement of commas is also extremely important in speech. With the addition of a pause (in my case, I was wracking my brain for the right Spanish word), I managed to insult someone I had only met a few weeks prior. Instead of saying Feliz cumpleaños retrasado, or Happy belated birthday, I slipped in that cursed comma, Feliz cumpleaños, retrasado, and ended up turning beet red when my friend later told me that what I actually said, thanks to that deceivingly small pause, was Happy birthday, retard.It all became clear why the addressee didn't seem too grateful for my nice wishes. Timing really is everything. (And no wonder I wasn't drowning in a sea of Spanish friends :)

lost in translation: literally

             Lost in translation, although a nice title for this series, is sometimes literally what happens upon changing text between two languages. When my family visited the torture museum in Santillana del Mar (what…there was nothing else to do in that tiny town), a plaque explained in English that a particularly menacing torture device was used for the “annihilation of stubboons and protestants.” Stubboons, perhaps a particularly ornery breed of anarchists. As this isn't even close to a Spanish cognate, I can only guess that an attempt to spell stubborns went awry, although that itself isn't even a word in English. The translators went 0 for 2 on that one.

Another disturbing mechanism clamped onto a miscreant woman’s chest, destroying her parts so much that she could no longer “give breast milk to her creatures,” a practice made all the more visually disturbing by the incorrect translation. In Spanish, criaturas means babies, but the mistaken translation to English makes me picture a woman breastfeeding hungry goblins.

In my Contrastive Linguistics class, my professor warned us of such mistakes. He said that he once visited a restaurant with the typical Spanish plate “rape a la marinera,” a kind of fish with red sauce. In the English menu, the writers kept the type of fish—rape—the same, but detailed how it was prepared, so the dish was translated “Rape sailor style.” I’ll venture to say it wasn’t a favorite among the British tourists.

These mistranslations go both ways, though. We English-speakers are just as guilty of mistakes, like an ad for an airline’s first-class seating that tried to translate too literally the phrase “Fly in Leather.” The direct translation, “volar en cueros,” just happens to include a Spanish idiom, “en cueros,” which means naked. So instead of suggesting that people fly in luxury, the airline suggested that people take trips in the nude. It would be interesting to see if ticket sales went up after the advertising campaign—perhaps the idea of a little freedom while flying really attracted people. 

Stubboons, beware

lost in translation: forgetting English

Yowza I have not posted a Lost in Translation piece in a while! Remember what they are even about? (Hint: My experience learning Spanish abroad.)

Once I got into a steady rhythm of speaking Spanish everyday, sometimes my English would come out muddled. Since Spanish has a much smaller vocabulary than English, many times the words that stuck in its lexicon happen to be cognates of English’s fancier word bank. This means that at times I sounded like a very classy Brit when I would directly translate back from Spanish into English. “I’m enchanted to meet you,” “Would you like to take a coffee on the terrace?” “I’m going to pass a small while reading now,” or, “I’m absolutely enamored of this Zara top.”

I always took this as a great sign—my foreign language was conquering my native one!—but sometimes my backwards translations would have consequences, like when I exclaimed to my friend Luc one day, “Professor Antonio just assigned us a 20-page-paper due in a week. He molests me so much sometimes!” 

lost in translation: an odd shop

In Granada, and in Spanish-speaking places in general, they have lots of “rías.”

There’s the panadería, the bread shop.

            The frutería, the fruit shop.

            The carnicería, the meat shop.

            The ferretería, the hardware shop.

            The peluquería, the barber shop.

But the most famous neighborhood in Cordoba, with its winding cobblestone streets and historic monuments, is called the judería.

      ….the Jew shop?

Judería in Cordoba

lost in translation: is cussing a grammatical category?

          There came a moment during my stay in Spain, probably around January or so, when I realized I knew 20 different ways to cuss somebody out but was still gesturing to mops and frying pans with a meager “esto” (‘this’). At times it would be valuable to consider a home-stay with a kosher working mother rather than learning Spanish from your college-age roommates, who seem to think that “coño” is an acceptable replacement for any sort of personal pronoun. 

lost in translation: hassling

Spain’s got a more relaxed take on sexual harassment. Catcalls are as common as cigarette smoke there (which one is more unpleasant?), and sometimes wearing heels out is more uncomfortable due to the ensuing comments than the physical pain. (I’ve even received catcalls from women as I’ve passed by, which is not to illustrate that I was looking particularly well-groomed that day but rather that anything goes.) Ninety-five percent of the time you want to bury your face or shout at these hasslers, “You misogynist pig! In the U.S. you could be sued!” But then there’s that five percent, usually on those mornings when you return from the discoteca at 8 a.m. with beer on your dress and hair that’s less than prom-day perfect. It’s those times, when you still get an “ehhh, guapa!” (hey, pretty girl) that the only reasonable reaction that comes to mind is, “Bless his little heart.”

lost in translation: compliments

Literally every Spaniard I met during my year abroad, and this is no exaggeration, complimented my Spanish.

Wait, don’t roll your eyes and stop reading! Hear me out!

At first I was elated. I thought, after two weeks of being in that country, “Dayummm, I’m on fire here!” But then I started picking up on something. These comments didn’t follow long conversations that exhibited my skilled control over verb conjugations or the subjunctive tense (which, at that time, was not skilled at all, but more like a guessing game). More often than not they didn’t even follow what can be considered conversations at all! Here are some scenarios that exemplify my point:

            #1: In the dining hall, asking the chef for more coffee. “Más café, por favor.” Más is probably learned in the first week of Spanish class, right after sí, no, and me llamo Jenny. Café is a cognate. And if you travel to Spain without knowing how to say “por favor,” your manners and upbringing will be questioned. But the chef overlooked all these tid-bits and expressed his amazement at my masterful handle on the language.

            #2. Madrid bus station, 2 hours after arriving in Spain. Me: “Uno a Granada, por favor.” Attendant: “You speak really great Spanish!” He must have brushed aside the fact that he could have understood the destination of my desired ticket merely from the name of the city. (Looking back, I don’t know if I should be more shocked that he complimented this juvenile level of Spanish or that he smiled and made a compliment at all. Customer Service in Spain is not the warmest).

#3. My all-time favorite, buying sheets at a department store. This is when I knew that this complimentary trend was more automatic than heartfelt. I say one word, one tiny four-letter word, and accompany it with a gesture: “¿Pago?” I ask as I point to the cash register. The salesman explodes with a massive grin and a whopping, “WOW! You speak such great Spanish! How long have you been in Granada?!?”

It was then that I shed my false ego and realized that if someone would compliment my language level after hearing only one word, they were clearly overdoing the praise and most likely just trying to flatter me into buying more sheets. 

lost in translation: journal romance

Many times in Granada I would sit by myself and read or people-watch in my favorite plaza. It was always full of Granadino families, the kids racing around while their parents shared a beer. Most times I sat close enough to the bar tables to shamelessly eavesdrop—anything in the name of learning Spanish! On one particular day I was reading some notes for school when two little kids ran up and started playing right next to me. I pretended to keep reading but was really listening to them the whole time, which they might have picked up on since I didn’t turn a single page for a full fifteen minutes.

I remember this conversation so vividly because it was a perfect snapshot of childhood, no matter what culture. The little boy and girl were playing tag and teasing each other, and then sat neatly on the bench so the boy could explain to the girl a present she had just received, but didn’t know how to use: a journal. The boy said, in the cutest little Andalucian accent, “It’s a diary, Ana. It’s for writing down all your secrets. See, this is where you write what day it is, always at the top. And then this is where you write everything that you’re thinking.”

The girl looked up and said mischievously, “I can write about you in there!” (Leave it to a five-year-old to tell the truth about love.) They immediately both shrieked with laughter, cackling like crazy people, and then the girl threw down the diary and they resumed chasing each other around the plaza. Enough romance, it was tag time again.

I looked around to see if all this was actually being filmed for a childhood flashback scene in a rom-com, but it was a truly organic exchange. I hope these kids marry each other in 20 years and I can come eavesdrop on their wedding vows. 

Plaza Bib-Rambla, where the magic happens.

(Photo: aloasis.com)

lost in translation: she's probably not a cougar

When I first got to Granada I noticed a startling phenomenon. People were saying “tío” and “tía” in almost every sentence, which I learned in school to mean “uncle” and “aunt.” I thought to myself, what is wrong with this country? Why is everyone interrelated? I know they say Latin families tend to be large, but this is verging on ridiculous….

Turns out “tío” means dude, mate, or guy. So if you travel to Spain, keep in mind that one ten-year-old boy calling another “tío” does not necessarily imply that his father’s sister likes them young.  

lost in translation: biggest regret

Bear with me while I kick off this series on a somber note: my biggest regret.

           My biggest regret in my language learning process was that I didn’t record myself speaking Spanish before I first moved to Spain. I had taken seven years of Spanish and had lived in Nicaragua with a family for one month, but by no means was I fluent. During my time in Spain it was difficult to notice if I was improving my Spanish, because day-to-day conversations blend together and I was learning at such a gradual and consistent pace. Sort of the way you don’t realize you’re putting on weight, but then your friends, who haven’t seen you in a really long time, take one look at you and are like, That girl really let loose, eh? Anyway the same goes for learning a language. Which is why my biggest recommendation to anyone going abroad is: take a before-and-after shot. Or, in this case, recording. That way you can hear yourself talking in a hybrid valley-girl/Spanish accent or confusing gender and referring to yourself as a man. It will be very hilarious and oh-so-gratifying to look back on your progress. 

lost in translation

As I’ve alluded to before, the idea for this blog grew out of the many entertaining moments in my quest for fluency during my year in Spain. I’m going to start this Lost in Translation series that will cover all my favorite anecdotes throughout the process. Enjoy!