Information AboutUntranslatability |
| CATEGORIES ABOUT UNTRANSLATABILITY | |
| translation | |
|
OVERVIEW Contrary to popular belief, words are not either translatable or untranslatable. They are only words, and these words are more or less hard to translate depending on their nature and the translator's skills. Quite often, a text or utterance that is considered to be "untranslatable" is actually a '' Lacuna '', or lexical gap, that is to say that there is no one-to-one equivalence between the word, expression or turn of phrase in the source language and another word, expression or turn of phrase in the target language. A Translator , however, can resort to a number of translation procedures to compensate. AVAILABLE TRANSLATION PROCEDURES The translation procedures that are available in cases of lacunae, or lexical gaps, include the following: Adaptation An adaptation, also known as a '''free translation''', is a translation procedure whereby the translator replaces a social, or cultural, reality in the source text with a corresponding reality in the target text; this new reality would be more usual to the audience of the target text. For example, in the Belgian Comic Book '' The Adventures Of Tintin '', Tintin's trusty canine sidekick ''Milou'', is translated as ''Snowy'' in English , ''Bobby'' in Dutch , and ''Struppi'' in German ; likewise the detectives ''Dupond'' and ''Dupont'' become ''Thomson'' and ''Thompson'' in English, ''Jansen'' and ''Janssen'' in Dutch, ''Schultze'' and ''Schulze'' in German, ''Hernández'' and ''Fernández'' in Spanish , and 杜本 and 杜朋 (''Dùběn'' and ''Dùpéng'') in Chinese — the Spanish and Chinese examples not being quite so faithful translations since the pronunciation of the two names is different, and not just the spelling. Similarly, when Quebec playwright Michel Tremblay adapted Gogol's play ''Revizor'' ('' The Inspector General ''), as ''Le gars de Québec'', he transposed the setting from Russia to his home province. Adaptation is often used when translating Poetry , works of Theatre and Advertising . Borrowing Borrowing is a translation procedure whereby the translator uses a word or expression from the source text in the target text . Borrowings are normally printed in italics if they are not considered to have been naturalized in the target language. See '' Loanword '' Calque Calque is a translation procedure whereby a translator translates an expression (or, occasionally, a word) literally into the target language, translating the elements of the expression word for word. Compensation Compensation is a translation procedure whereby the translator solves the problem of aspects of the source text that cannot take the same form in the target language by replacing these aspects with other elements or forms in the source text. For example, many languages have two forms of the second person , and have retained the ''you'' form only. Hence, to translate a text from one of these languages to English, the translator may have to compensate by using a First Name or Nickname , or by using Syntactic phrasing that are viewed as informal in English (I'm, you're, gonna, dontcha, etc.) Paraphrase Paraphrase, sometimes called ''' Periphrasis ''', is a translation procedure whereby the translator replaces a word in the source text by a group of words or an expression in the target text. An extreme example of paraphrase can be found in the BBC reports of June 22 2004 of the identification of the "most untranslatable" word. The word chosen is '' Ilunga '', a word supposedly from a language in the Democratic Republic Of The Congo . The BBC article states that "Ilunga means 'a person who is ready to forgive any abuse for the first time, to tolerate it a second time, but never a third time'." Incidentally, the word ''Ilunga'' is of questionable provenance, as some Congolese (notably the Congo government) claim that it is simply a name, without additional connotations. See the article Ilunga for more information. Another example of paraphrase is the Portuguese word '' Saudade '', which is often translated at a loss into English as "missing a person who is gone". Translator's note A translator's note is a note (usually a Footnote or an Endnote ) added by the translator to the target text to provide additional information pertaining to the limits of the translation, the cultural background or any other explanations. Some translation exams allow or demand such notes. Despite this, resorting to notes is normally seen as a failure by many translation professionals. UNTRANSLATABILITY IN POETRY AND PUNS The two areas which most nearly approach total untranslatability are Poetry and Puns ; poetry is difficult to translate because of its reliance on the sounds (for example, rhymes) and rhythms of the source language; puns, and other similar Semantic wordplay, because of how tightly they are tied to the original language. That being said, many of the translation procedures discussed here can be used in these cases. For example, the translator can compensate for an "untranslatable" pun in one part of a text by adding a new pun in another part of the translated text. Hofstadter 's book '' Le Ton Beau De Marot '' is devoted to the issues and problems of translation, with particular emphasis on the translation of poetry. THEORY Objects unknown to a culture can actually be easy to translate. For example, in Japanese, ; people may parallel it with Mustard . Hence, in some places, ''yellow mustard'' refers to imported mustard sauce; ''green mustard'' refers to wasabi. SPECIFIC EXAMPLES In the case of translating the English word have to Hebrew , Arabic , Finnish or Irish , some difficulty may be found. There is no specific verb with this meaning in these languages. Instead, for "I have X" they use a combination of words that mean ''X is to me''. In the case of Irish, this phrasing has passed over into Hiberno-English . A similar construction occurs in Russian : here, the verb is replaced by a phrase that, literally, means ''at me/you/he/she/they there is''. (Russian does have a word that means "to have": иметь (''imet''') — but it is rarely used by Russian speakers in the same way English speakers use the word ''have''). Another example are family members. English has different words for "nephew", "niece", and "cousin" (note the use of "cousin" for both sexes). Romance languages do distinguish between the latter, but not always between the former: e.g. Italian "cugino" and "cugina" for "cousin" (male) and "cousin" (female), but "nipote" (nephew/niece) for both genders. Moreover, "nipote" can also mean "grandchild" (a distinction between male and female can however be made by adding the male or female article before the noun). Dutch on the other hand does distinguish between gender: "neef" (male) and "nicht" (female), but it does not have different terms for "nephew" and "cousin". I.e., both a son of a sibling and a son of an uncle are called "neef". Sibling is another word for which German does have an expression (Geschwister) but Dutch not. Conversely, English is entirely lacking some grammatical categories. For example, there is no simple way in English to contrast Finnish ''kirjoittaa'' (continuing, corresponding to English ''to write'') and ''kirjoitella'' (a regular ''quotus'', German ''wievielte'', or Dutch "hoeveelste". Further examples derive from the fact that English has fewer tenses than Romance languages. As in Latin, Italian has for example two distinct declined past tenses, where "io fui" (passato remoto) and "io ero" (passato prossimo) both mean "I was", the former indicating a concluded action in the (remote) past, and the latter an action that holds some connection to the present. The "passato remoto" is for example used for narrative history (e.g. novels). However, the difference is nowadays also partly geographic. In the north of Italy (and standard Italian) the "passato remoto" is rarely used in spoken language, whereas in the south it does and often takes the place of the "passato prossimo". Another instance is the Russian word пошлость /posh-lost'/. This noun roughly means a mixture of banality, commonality and vulgarity. Vladimir Nabokov mentions it as one of hardest Russian words to translate precisely into English. Another well-known example comes from Portuguese or Spanish verbs ''ser'' and ''estar'', both translatable as ''to be'' (see Romance Copula ). However ''estar'' is used only with temporary conditions, while ''ser'' is used with permanent conditions. Sometimes this information is not very relevant for the meaning of the whole sentence, and the translator will ignore it, some other times it can be retrieved from Context . When none of these applies, the translator will usually use a Paraphrase or simply add words that can convey that meaning. The following example comes from Portuguese: :Não estou bonito, eu ''sou'' bonito. :Literal translation: I am not (temporarily) handsome, I ''am'' (permanently) handsome. :Adding words: I am not handsome today, I am always handsome. :Paraphrase: I don't just look handsome, I ''am'' handsome. Ancient Greek ''φθάνω'' (phthánō) approximately translates like "I do something before someone else realises that I'm doing it". Languages that are extremely different from each other, like English and Chinese , need their translations to almost be adaptations. Chinese has no tenses ''per se'', only three "aspects". Also concepts like "brother", "sister", "grandmother" and "grandfather" don't really exist in Chinese, where they are always more specific: the words for brother and sister always specify whether it is the older or younger sibling, and the words for a specific grandparent specify whether it is the paternal or maternal one. Again, a concept such as "sister" that would englobe both older and younger sisters does not exist. Also, the English verb "to be" does not have a direct equivalent in Chinese. In an English sentence where "to be" leads to an adjective ("It is blue"), there is no "to be" in Chinese. (There are no adjectives in Chinese, instead there are "status verbs" that don't need an extra verb.) If it states a location, the verb "zài" (在) is used, as in "We '''are''' in the house". And in most other cases, the verb "shì" (是) is used, as in "I '''am''' the leader." Any sentence that requires a play on those different meanings will not work in Chinese. THE LIST BY TODAY TRANSLATIONS ''Words hardest to translate'' (Today Translations, June 2004 ) was a list of words reported as being the World 's most difficult words to translate. The British company surveyed 1,000 linguists to create the list. According to Jurga Zilinskiene, head of Today Translations, the difficulty in translating the words identified by the survey is not finding the meaning of these words, but conveying their Cultural Connotation s and Overtone s. Not all of the words on the list were legitimate. Some of them turned out to be mistakes and Hoax es. The following list presents the words hardest to translate as claimed by ''Today Translations''. Daggers (†) lead to the definition of the word in the Wiktionary project. The first is the absolute list, containing the ten words hardest to translate all over the world, independent of linguistic context: # ''' of Tshiluba for "a person who is ready to forgive any abuse for the first time, to tolerate it a second time, but never a third time." However, there is no independent evidence that the word actually means what the translation company claims. When asked for confirmation by one reporter, representatives of the Congo government recognized the word only as a personal name. Furthermore, the translation company failed to respond to inquiries regarding the survey. # Shlimazl (שלימזל): Yiddish for a chronically unlucky person. (Cf. ''Schlemiel''). (NOTE. In colloquial Italian, it is very common to use the word '''sfigato''' with exactly the same meaning, in Dutch and German one says '''pechvogel'''The spelling is dutch, as in German the noun '''Pechvogel''' is spelled with a captial letter., also used in colloq. German is the word '''Schlamassel''', which refers to an unlucky situation) # Radiostukacz: Polish for a person who worked as a Telegraphist for the resistance movements on the Soviet side of the Iron Curtain . It is not a real word, only a mistake or a hoax. # Naa (なぁ or なー): Japanese word originating in the Kansai (関西) area of Japan , especially in Osaka (大阪府), to emphasize statements or agree with someone. # Altahmam (التهمام) for a kind of deep Sadness . # Gezellig for companiable or convivial (a person), cosy (room, house, chair, etc.), friendly (atmosphere), pleasant (evening spent with friends). Similarly, German '''gesellig''', having the first three meanings. Yiddish "heymish" is close, as well. # ''' for a certain type of longing. # Sellaadhiroopavar for a certain type of Truancy . # ''' for a person who asks a lot of questions (usually a child). # Klloshar for loser. Could be derived from French ''clochard'' (tramp). The following list shows the ten English words supposed by the same company to be the hardest to translate: # # # # # # # # # # However, '' Plenipotentiary '' has perfect equivalents in several Romance Languages (''e.g.'', Portuguese ''plenipotenciário'' and French ''plénipotentiaire''), as it is common with words of a Latin origin. Several other languages use a direct Calque from Latin; for example, Finnish has ''täysivaltainen'', and German ''Bevollmächtigte''. '' Serendipity '' has originated equivalents in some other languages (''e.g.'', Portuguese ''serendipicidade'', and Dutch ''serendipiteit''). The claim that "poppycock" is particularly untranslatable is balderdash. '' Spam '' has somehow become an international word, keeping its English form (originally a Trademark ed Brand Name anyway, which normally does not get translated). '' Kitsch '' is itself a German word that has spread to many other languages and is still in common use in the German-speaking countries. SEE ALSO REFERENCE
EXTERNAL LINKS
|
|
|