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from the mister-translation-wants-equal-time dept.
Mark Polizzotti, author of "Sympathy for the Traitor: A Translation Manifesto" writes an Opinion column in The New York Times entitled Why Mistranslation Matters:
Translation is the silent waiter of linguistic performance: It often gets noticed only when it knocks over the serving cart. Sometimes these are relatively minor errors — a ham-handed rendering of an author's prose, the sort of thing a book reviewer might skewer with an acid pen.
But history is littered with more consequential mistranslations — erroneous, intentional or simply misunderstood. For a job that often involves endless hours poring over books or laptop screens, translation can prove surprisingly hazardous.
Nikita Khrushchev's infamous statement in 1956 — "We will bury you" — ushered in one of the Cold War's most dangerous phases, one rife with paranoia and conviction that both sides were out to destroy the other. But it turns out that's not what he said, not in Russian, anyway. Khrushchev's actual declaration was "We will outlast you" — prematurely boastful, perhaps, but not quite the declaration of hostilities most Americans heard, thanks to his interpreter's mistake.
The response of Kantaro Suzuki, prime minister of Japan, to an Allied ultimatum in July 1945 — just days before Hiroshima — was conveyed to Harry Truman as "silent contempt" ("mokusatsu"), when it was actually intended as "No comment. We need more time." Japan was not given any.
[...] Lately, the perils of mistranslation have taken on renewed currency. How to convey Donald Trump's free-form declarations to a global audience? The president's capricious employ of his native idiom, his fractured syntax and streaming non sequiturs are challenging enough for Anglophones, so imagine the difficulties they pose to foreigners: How, exactly, do you translate "braggadocious"?
The speed and frequency of Mr. Trump's tweets have spawned an explosion of equally fast, equally viral amateur renditions, with little thought as to how they might be interpreted worldwide. The incendiary nature of many of his statements about other political leaders only exacerbates the problem.
When words collide?
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 04 2018, @02:58PM (2 children)
Translation is an act of compassion both for the speaker/writer's point of view, the ideas they are trying to convey, and the listener's context in which she will receive those ideas.
In all natural languages (so excepting Lojban among others...), some ideas are easy to express, and other ideas are difficult to express. However, in each language, the set of ideas easy to express and the set of ideas difficult to express (if we may create a temporary dichotomy where a spectrum exists instead) may be wildly different.
That even extends to both the speaker and the listener using a shared first language. Even if both the speaker and listener are native English speakers, it's so easy to begin speaking a dialect/jargon/lingo/etc of English that will not effectively convey the speaker's meaning to the listener. Example most here will understand is computer lingo. Stop calling them "I pee addresses;" they're "network addresses." The listener does not give a damn whether the speaker is talking about a MAC address, a v4 address, a v6 address, an IPX/SPX address, etc etc, and that detail is entirely orthogonal to any possible meaning the speaker could be trying to convey to a layman with "I pee address." A broader term will not only suffice but function better.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 04 2018, @05:48PM
The intent of most jargon and slang is to obfuscate meaning. Job security and privacy from snoopers...
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Sunday August 05 2018, @02:52PM
You mean, in Lojban all ideas are difficult to express?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.