Archive for Translation
February 7, 2017 @ 7:11 pm· Filed by Victor Mair under Swear words, Translation
Here and here are links (South China Morning Post [SCMP] and the Chinese website of a German radio channel) re yesterday’s surprising statement by Judge HE Fan of China’s supreme court calling President Trump a "public enemy of the rule of law".
The story is being well covered by the international media (NYT, The Independent, ABC News), so I won't repeat all the details readily available there. Here I wish only to concentrate on a term of disapprobation that Judge He applied to Trump when he referred to him as “ègùn 恶棍”, which SCMP translates as “bastard”.
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January 29, 2017 @ 8:38 am· Filed by Victor Mair under Borrowing, Diglossia and digraphia, Language and computers, Style and register, Topolects, Translation
The inability of Google Translate, Microsoft Translator, Baidu Fanyi, and other translation services to correctly render jī nián dàjí 鸡年大吉 ("may the / your year of the chicken be greatly auspicious!") in various languages points up a vital distinction that I have long wanted to make, and now is as good a time as ever. Namely, just as you could not expect these translation services to handle Cantonese, Shanghainese, Taiwanese, etc. (unless specifically and separately programmed to do so), we should not expect them to deal with Literary Sinitic / Classical Chinese (LS / CC).
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January 28, 2017 @ 12:27 pm· Filed by Victor Mair under Idioms, Language and culture, Tones, Translation, Writing
From Li Wei on Facebook:
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January 17, 2017 @ 11:33 pm· Filed by Victor Mair under Errors, Grammar, Signs, Translation
[This is a guest post by Nathan Hopson]
I know you've written a lot about character amnesia in the greater Sinosphere. But I think I witnessed the related, but significantly different, phenomenon of (grammatical) particle amnesia (or perhaps, "drift") during a recent trip to Hawaii.
As you know, Hawaii has a large nikkei* population. This is especially true in and around Honolulu, where I was for the Japanese Studies Association conference last week. In addition to an extraordinary number of Japanese tourists, Oahu is home to nisei,** sansei,*** and many people of mixed heritage. Japanese signs abound, and Japanese is spoken in many hotels, restaurants, and stores.
[*an American of Japanese descent.]
[**second generation; ***third generation]
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January 14, 2017 @ 12:07 am· Filed by Victor Mair under Slogans, Translation
Photograph taken by Hervé Guérin in the main lobby of IBM France:
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January 13, 2017 @ 9:48 pm· Filed by Victor Mair under Language and literature, Language and medicine, Transcription, Translation, Writing systems
For several days I've been aware of a strange poem that has gone viral in China:
"Read The Smog-Inspired Poem That China Can't Stop Talking About" (NPR, 1/12/17)
The strangeness of the poem is due to its being written from the perspective of lung cancer and addressed to the patient. You judge for yourself — here's the complete poem:
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January 4, 2017 @ 12:19 pm· Filed by Victor Mair under Gender, Translation
For some reason, the Chinese have taken to comparing President Elect Trump to a rooster, this year's symbol in the 12-year cycle of the zodiac.
![Click to embiggen](http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/~bgzimmer/trumprooster.jpg)
A giant chicken sculpture outside a shopping mall in Taiyuan, north China's
Shanxi province, that looks like US president-elect Donald Trump Getty Images
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January 3, 2017 @ 10:07 am· Filed by Victor Mair under Names, Signs, Transcription, Translation
In several recent posts, I have pointed out how Chinese and Japanese announcements and greetings for foreigners are often pronounced in a special way that deviates markedly from what Chinese and Japanese would say to each other:
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December 31, 2016 @ 8:03 pm· Filed by Victor Mair under Language and medicine, Translation
Stephen Hart sent in this scan of a box containing medicine that he bought in Malaysia in 1972:
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December 20, 2016 @ 4:59 pm· Filed by Geoffrey K. Pullum under Dialects, Gift ideas, Grammar, Humor, Intelligibility, Language and advertising, Language and business, Lost in translation, Orthography, Punctuation, Quizzes, Signs, Silliness, Translatese, Translation, WTF
A neighbor of mine, a respectable woman retired from medical practice, set a number of friends of hers a one-question quiz this week. The puzzle was to identify an item she recently purchased, based solely on what was stated on the tag attached to it. The tag said this (I reproduce it carefully, preserving the strange punctuation, line breaks, capitalization, and grammar, but replacing two searchable proper nouns by xxxxxxxx because they might provide clues):
ABOUT xxxxxxxx
He comfortable
He elastic
He quickly dry
He let you unfettered experience and indulgence. Please! Hurry up
No matter where you are. No matter what you do.
Let xxxxxxxx Change your life,
Become your friends, Partner,
Part of life
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November 18, 2016 @ 7:25 pm· Filed by Victor Mair under Language and psychology, Lexicon and lexicography, Translation
Lisa Feldman Barrett has an article on "The Varieties of Anger" in last Sunday's NYT. Most of it consists of reflections on pre- and post-election anger in our society. But Barrett has one paragraph in which she makes some rather dubious claims about the number of words for “anger” in several languages:
The Russian language has two distinct concepts within what Americans call “anger” — one that’s directed at a person, called “serditsia,” and another that’s felt for more abstract reasons such as the political situation, known as “zlitsia.” The ancient Greeks distinguished quick bursts of temper from long-lasting wrath. German has three distinct angers, Mandarin has five and biblical Hebrew has seven.
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November 17, 2016 @ 9:53 am· Filed by Victor Mair under Lexicon and lexicography, Multilingualism, Topolects, Transcription, Translation
Page of a phrasebook published in 1941 (click to embiggen):
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November 15, 2016 @ 3:19 pm· Filed by Victor Mair under Language and art, Signs, Translation, Writing systems
From Donald Clarke:
![Click to embiggen](http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/~bgzimmer/whitcombsign.jpg)
The sign seems straightforwardly to be a warning that this is a "dangerous construction site". The more you look at it, however, the more questions arise.
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