Wednesday, September 5, 2012

Found in Translation


Transferring text from one language to another is a tricky thing. Meanings are lost. But sometimes found.

If a good translator did not need to have mastered the artistry of words then novels would be run through a refined edition of Google Translate and that would be that. But this is by no means the case and not only because of the ridiculousness that would ensue. A word might be a word but well strung together words have to power to inspire, evoke happiness, fear, hurt and any other feeling imaginable. A new feeling, not previously recognised, might even result. Badly constructed, sentences fall flat and dull, reading or sounding like footnotes on a tax return. So translators sure have their job cut out for them.

But as fond and in awe as I am of what translators do so well ,what I wanted to mention are examples of ridiculously bad translations that one sometimes comes across in the Icelandic media. Before I give examples I should note that errors in news translations usually make the article more interesting than the original version, certainly funnier.

 
What has prompted me to approach this subject is Justin Timberlake. Obviously. Last week the online edition of one of the Icelandic newspapers reported that Justin uses Microsoft Excel for everything regarding his personal and professional life. The article noted him as not getting through the day without entering everything into a spreadsheet and that the actor/singer would not want to live without Excel. As I work as an engineer I am no stranger to this particular computer program. I find it quite useful but would not consider suicide if it went off the market, unlike Justin. The day this was on the web he did however get a lot of respect at the office and it was mentioned more than once that he must be pretty smart for a singer/actor. His ranking amongst my engineer co-workers did however fall drastically when it came out that this whole article was a misunderstanding. The seed that inspired the fabulation turned out to be an English gossip headline where Justin’s girlfriend was quoted as saying: “Justin excels at everything!”

The Icelandic version of the headline: "Could not live without excel-spreadsheets".

Another example is when the Icelandic TV reported news from a vote in the English House of Commons. The Icelandic subtitles reported the votes as having fallen: 317 eyes and 300 noses. The ayes and nos had taken on a new meaning, leaving the Icelandic public amazed at how disproportionate the number of eyes were compared to the noses when it came to English parliament members. Didn’t someone, somewhere say that in the land of the blind the one eyed man is king? Not that I consider England to be the land of the blind. Far from it.

When discussing the Justin debacle a friend of mine reminded me of another translation news mix-up.  This one originated from the US where American scientists made a brilliant scientific advance, managing to create a living organism in a lab. In Iceland the translated article ended up telling us that foreign scientists had finally been able to create a living, breathing orgasm. It was hailed as one of the most important scientific breakthroughs in recent centuries. When reading this one must remember that the Icelandic word for orgasm (fullnæging) does not look like the Icelandic word for organism (lífvera), at all. And neither bears any resemblance to the English words so inference was not a given. The readers of this article were thus left scratching their heads in amazement at how far science has come.

When googling for other examples I found a sum-up of such errors, also inspired by the now very-famous-in-Iceland Justin Timberlake and the whole excel debacle. This was written by a reporter at Iceland Review (Jóhannes Benediktsson) and he mentioned the winner in my opinion. The translation bummer he remembered and I had not, was when the TV here began showing Law and Order – Criminal Intent. The name of the show in Icelandic: Lög og Regla - Glæpamaður í tjaldi.

Law and Order – Criminal in a Tent

Yrsa - miðvikudagur

13 comments:

  1. I have soooo many of these...translations even happen here from one coast of the US to the other...thanks again for the laugh and such a great read!!!!

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  2. Love love love your entry. It made me laugh out loud. Especially since it is my goal to become a professional translator.

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  3. Very funny. I remember buying a Big Mac in Sapporo in Japan. I walked out of the place with my food safely in a bag that had the following printed on it: Food you have to eat fast! Apparently eating it in a park down the street was fast enough for I'm still here to tell the tale.

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  5. "The readers of this article were thus left scratching their heads in amazement at how far science has come."

    About how far science had ... oh, yes, yes, yesss! come, you mean.

    The Italian word for mushrooms is funghi, but the imperfectly multilingual menu I once saw posted at a Chinese restaurant in Florence probably attracted few English-reading diners by offering "fungus."

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  7. Nice article, Yrsa! Yes, translating English scientific articles is difficult. I heard a Pakistani reporter on the BBC say that assignments to translate English science articles into Urdu are given out as punishment!

    But since Icelandic is one of the few languages to use Ð (upper case eth) and ð (lower case eth) as a letter of the alphabet, there must be amusing examples of mistranslations into English. Surely many English speakers assume that the lower-case form, ð, is just a malformed "d."

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    1. In my experience, English speakers usually do not recognize ð (lower case eth) as being a variant of 'd' but instead assume that it is an o with some kind of accent.

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  8. I shutter/shudder at translators who go on the sound in deciding what the word means. One of my favorites being, "The boy had a window in his side." Yes, pain became pane became...OUCH.

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  9. I guess something gets lost in translation. Sorry, I love the post!

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  10. My favorites are menus. Here's one that made my daughter and me laugh so hard we could not order or eat our food without giggling: French offering: chèvre aux raisins. English translation: goats dung with dried grapes!

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  11. Lovely stuff - a Thai restaurant opened around the corner from me recently. On the menu was 'Sliced Roast Dick.' More of a typo than translation problem, but...'Ow.'

    I also knew an author whose book sold very moderately in the UK but was a massive bestseller in Germany. He was trying to work out why there would be such a discrepancy in its popularity. 'Do you think it might have gained something in translation,' a friend said to him. Again...'Ow.'

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    1. 'Gained in translation' has been mentioned as the reason why Icelandic crime fiction is so popular abroad. (And yes: I realize that it is also popular at home.)

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