Language Log

Language Log has not so far commented on Jason Wire's 20 Awesomely Untranslatable Words from Around the World on the Matador Network. You might expect (since I yield to no Language Log writer in the fierceness of my hatred for things-people-have-no-words-for genre of writing about language) that I would hate it like poison. But in fact I rather liked it. I just want to point out, however, that not a single one of the words shows any of the promised untranslatability.

The story line in the Doonesbury strip for the last week or so (I omit links because direct links to within the doonesbury.com domain apparently don't work) has been about Jeff Redfern masquerading as an Afghan superhero figure of his own invention (and getting to meet a somewhat credulous and off-his-meds President Karzai). In his superhero persona, Jeff styles himself Sorkh Razil, the Red Rascal. But a minute or two conferring with online Pashto dictionaries fails to confirm the meaning and transliteration of either the word sorkh or the word razil.

We've often seen how pop-Whorfian depictions of linguistic difference rely on the facile "no word for X" trope — see our long list of examples here. Frequently the trope imagines a vast cultural gap between Western modernity and various exotic Others. The latest entry comes via Ron Stack, who points us to this television commercial from the Aruba Tourism Authority (reported by MediaPost). In the commercial, Ian Wright, the British host of the adventure tourism show "Globe Trekker," learns from an Aruban fisherman that the local creole language, Papiamento, has no word for "work-related stress."

I'm not sure whether this is a joke or a genuine example of problematic machine translation, but either way, it's funny.

Once again, our man in Hangzhou, Ian Mair (no relation), has spotted a splendid Chinglish sign:

At first I was puzzled by why the Ramada Hotel Hangzhou would want to put its customers at risk, but it only took a few seconds before I realized what must have happened.  Where the sign has yòu yī jù xiàn 又一巨献 ("another great offering"), the person who was tasked with rendering the sign into English must have entered you yi ju xian, not paying attention to the tones, and what came out was yòu yī jù xiǎn 又一巨险 ("another great danger / risk").  Admittedly, if you drink too much at Oktoberfest, you might put yourself at risk, but I don't think that's what the Ramada management had in mind.

In "Beginning of the Semester Blues," I surmised that Chinese translators and translation software seemed unable to handle the construction "XX zhōng" "XX 中" ("in the process / midst of XX"). Two more examples sent in by Dan Bloom would seem to confirm that surmise.

According to Matthew Mosk, Brian Ross, and Joseph Rhee, "Whistleblower Claims Many U.S. Interpreters Can't Speak Afghan Languages", ABC Nightline 9/8/2010:

More than one quarter of the translators working alongside American soldiers in Afghanistan failed language proficiency exams but were sent onto the battlefield anyway, according to a former employee of the company that holds contracts worth up to $1.4 billion to supply interpreters to the U.S. Army.

"I determined that someone — and I didn't know [who] at that time — was changing the grades from blanks or zeros to passing grades," said Paul Funk, who used to oversee the screening of Afghan linguists for the Columbus, Ohio-based contractor, Mission Essential Personnel. "Many who failed were marked as being passed."

The following picture appears on the cleverly named "Ni Howdy" blog:

I can usually figure out the specific reasons that statistical MT systems come up with peculiar translations.  But this one has me stumped:

Google Translate renders "Montar un vínculo con Israel" into English as ""Build a bond with Israel", which seems accurate. But how did Israel slip into the English-to-Spanish mapping?

The comments on my recent post, "Making linguistics relevant (for sports blogs)" meandered into a discussion of linguistic example sentences that display morphosyntactic patterning devoid of semantic content. The most famous example is of course Noam Chomsky's Colorless green ideas sleep furiously, though many have argued that it's quite possible to assign meaning to the sentence, given the right context (see Wikipedia for more).

But what about sentences that use pure nonsense in place of "open-class" or "lexical" morphemes, joined together by inflectional morphemes and function words? This characterizes nonsense verse of the "Jabberwocky" variety ('Twas brillig and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe). One commenter recalled a classic of the genre, The ventious crapests pounted raditally, which was introduced by the cognitive scientist Colin Cherry in his 1957 book, On Human Communication: A Review, Survey, and a Criticism.

This notice on the window of a shop selling a very special type of life-extending egg in Hakone, Japan vies for the worst signage translation we've ever seen.

Dance translations for the culturally inexperienced:

Is this a loose translation?

If you know your modern East Asian history at all well, the name Sun Yat-sen (1866-1925) will be familiar to you as that of the man chiefly responsible for the overthrow of the last imperial dynasty, the Manchu Qing, and the father of the Republic of China.  Like most Chinese with any pretensions to cultural dignity, Sun Yat-sen has many names (the renowned 20th-century author Lu Xun had over a hundred).  His real (genealogical) name was Sūn Démíng 孫德明 (Sun Virtue-Bright).  Sun Yat-sen, the name by which he is best known in English, is actually derived from the Cantonese pronunciation of one of his pseudonyms, 逸仙 (Leisurely Immortal; pronounced Yìxiān in Modern Standard Mandarin).  Most ironically, the name by which he is best known in China, Zhōngshān 中山 (Middle Mountain) is based on his Japanese name, Nakayama Shō 中山樵 (Woodcutter Nakayama).