Toki Pona: A created language that has only 100 words

Maybe not that exact phrasing but "he gave me a cool look" can mean exact opposites. Depends entirely on dialect / register. The direct metaphorical version ("he gave me an unfriendly look") is reasonably common in English. The other reading of it isn't so much, but is perfectly understandable (probably incorrectly).

How about an "icy glare"?

Maybe your native language has metaphors similar to English, or maybe your friends are better at learning English than my friends. :P

But my point is that many metaphors look "natural" only after you learn it: you have to memorize them, and you think it's natural only because you've been doing it all your life.

E.g., "hot-headed" is a decidedly English metaphor. In Korean, "his head is getting hot" would mean he's getting annoyed/angry at the present situation, not that he has a propensity for getting annoyed in general (which is what English "hot-headed" means).

Similarly, English "cool" doesn't just mean "the situation isn't hot."; it also implies a positive situation. In contrast, you can say "The show only received a lukewarm reception.", but you can't say "It's OK, he was lukewarm about the mishap."

As another example, in Korean, you "turn blue" when you're shocked/aghast, not when you're gloomy. All this stuff is basically a minefield of subtle misunderstandings.

You're confusing stresses and tones.

I think if you say the phrase "to buffalo" and "a buffalo", you'll pronounce those words in the same way. It's only when putting a sentence together that you'll stress them differently to indicate their usage in that sentence.

In tonal languages, you always say the word with the given tone, regardless of context.

British English (and American English?) sometimes uses stress to distinguish between nouns and verbs written the same way, eg. "record a record", "permit a permit", "present a present". It's possible that "buffalo a buffalo" should ideally have this difference, but buffalo is so rare as a verb that the difference has been lost.

People can often tell the difference between "vial" and "vile", even though I feel like I'm pronouncing them the exact same way.

> Or is your assertion that "Buffalo buffalo..." is pronounced by repeating the exact same pattern of sound eight times?

English doesn't require semantic tone, its use just makes conversing easier.

But within NSM scholarship, overloading is probably more descriptive than words that happen to sound the same but have well-known distinct meanings. In blurb form:

"This book is based on two ideas: first, that any language--English no less than any other-represents a universe of meaning, shaped by the history and experience of the men and women who have created it, and second, that in any language certain culture--specific words act as linchpins for whole networks of meanings, and that penetrating the meanings of those key words can therefore open our eyes to an entire cultural universe. In this book Anna Wierzbicka demonstrates that three uniquely English words--evidence, experience, and sense--are exactly such linchpins. Using a rigorous plain language approach to meaning analysis, she unpacks the dense cultural meanings of these key words, disentangles their multiple meanings, and traces their origins back to the tradition of British empiricism. In so doing she reveals much about cultural attitudes embedded not only in British and American English, but also English as a global language."

http://www.amazon.com/Experience-Evidence-Sense-Cultural-Eng...

Both of those people would be equally unacceptable as a professional translator. It's true that #2 would be better if those were your only two options, but that's an unrealistic limitation.

A guy who is 99% fluent in source and 100% fluent in target will generally produce a flawless translation--if he happens across a word or idiom in the source that he doesn't quite understand, it will stand out to him, and he will pause to research it before continuing.

A guy who is 100% fluent in source and 99% fluent in target will produce a perfectly clear but very slightly stilted translation, because he's not aware of the few mistakes that he makes.

If you're translating a commercial product and you have my two guys to choose between, you would want #1.

Think about it this way.

Case 1: SRC->TGT (fluent) gives you a grammatically correct text that may have bits that are lost in translation. Misunderstood idioms and connotations. A reduction in nuance.

Case 2: (fluent) SRC->TGT gives you an incorrect text that contains errors of syntax and semantics, that doesn't use natural sentence construction. It'll reads like it was written by someone with less than a perfect grasp on the language, which will be true. They won't be able to accurately convey the meaning because they won't have an accurate grasp of the target language.

Also in case 1 you can consult expert quality reference texts to make up for your lack of knowledge in the source language. Not so in case 2.

I think fluency in the target language is more important for the reasons PhasmaFelis and igravious say. Or to put it more bluntly, because understanding is generally an easier task than speaking/writing.

For example with my level of English (a lowish C2), I can understand all kinds of texts, including literary texts (I read lots of novels), but there is no way I can write English at a literary level. I would tell the facts of the story just fine, but the special "feeling" that good writers give to the text would be lost.

Curiously, this notion (that the best translator is one who is native or 100% fluent in the target language) is widely accepted in Western cultures, but someone told me that in China is the other way around. When they hire Chinese to English translators, they especially value their knowledge of Chinese, not English. Which may partially explain the "Engrish" phenomenon...

Translation also requires you to produce a style that is consistent with the source material. Professional translation is used to produce a similar quality document as the source material.

If you translate english legalese into Spanish, you expect Spanish legalese output.

Writing skills and specific domain experience is necessary. That is easier to achieve that level in your native language living in the target country.

Nowadays, translator are rarely used for "meaning translation" ( like translating journal article for the managers ) as there is always some foreigner guy speaking that language and able to "explain" rather than translate the material. Except for less common language like Hebrew, Japanese, ... or big governmental organisations.

BTW I think the requirement is reversed for interpretation. You need to be native of the source language, because you need to convey the meaning regardless of the form.

Translating is often more than mechanically trying to convey the rough meaning. You want to capture the rhythm and flow and poetry (or lack of) in the original. You want to try to map idioms an word play from one language to another, and so and so forth. This requires a near-native level of understanding of the language you are translating to

I have a friend who is a translator and one of the hardest things for him in the beginning was not to act as a editor. If the original has a long, badly structured sentence with a misplaced comma, then you have to try to translate that into a long, badly structured sentence with a misplaced comma.

i think ur parent assumed without saying that both translators were equally (well?) versed in the source language, so ur example does not compute.

Nitpicking is welcome! mi toki mute alla pona. I've not seen 'toki Toki Pona' used that way though, I've rarely seen it capitalised and used as a proper noun. So 'sona e toki pona' (nimi pi lipu pi jan Piljin e 'o kama sona e toki pona!'). That said, the rule for the extra verb I end up dropping quite often from carelessness, so 'sina telo allo telo Coca Cola?' rather than 'sina telo allo telo telo Coca Cola?' So it was a good nitpick.

'tan seme' is usually 'why', I think (I learned it as a compound lexicon entry I guess). 'sine sona kama tan seme?' for where from?

Thanks.