There was an interview with three translators on CBC radio the other day. The main point was that there are often no direct word for word translations that make sense in another language. One translator said that because she didn’t write poetry herself she would never be able to translate poetry. Leave that to the poets. It is a fascinating art, translating.
Last night (after our duets) Yoko and her husband Hiro (who joined us for dinner) started talking about the differences in our languages. It started with Hiro asking me why we (English speaking people) call someone “cool as a cucumber.” We think of cool in this case as aloof. In Japan, someone is considered like a cucumber when they are rail thin. If you think about some of our idiomatic expressions, they can seem quite odd. For instance: It’s raining cats and dogs. Why cats and dogs? What a strange image, raining cats and dogs. In Japan the image is it is raining like a mud slide. Something they know a lot about in their country. But do we have cats and dogs in the air, sitting in the clouds waiting to come visit en masse when it rains?
I recently named a painting To Under Stand, but when I gave the image to the photo store to be duplicated with the title imprinted on the slide, the pun was lost: she printed it To Understand. To me, a big difference. Take the word “understand”: what are you standing under when you understand a concept? When looking it up in Webster’s New Universal Unabridged Universal Dictionary (who quoted Shakespeare: “My legs do better understand me, sir, than I understand what you mean”), the understanding immerged that you understand when you are emerged, surrounded by, and thereby standing in the concept. Understand?
Posted by leya at October 28, 2004 08:56 PM