Yes: it would be tricky and unpalatable for much of the audience, but I personally find it fascinating to get in to the “mind” of a language and would like the opportunity without having to memorize (something I find particularly challenging) the “words” of a language.
Movie and TV subtitles especially.
But when I did my translation, I tried to stick to the word order and expressions of the original language when possible. You could translate each sentence to the most likely way an English-speaking person would express themselves, but can also stray a bit, pick something that's closer to the original, but still works. I wanted to subtly remind people that they're not in Kansas anymore. Even though the show is a teen high school drama, it's absolutely not an American high school, so you can't use words associated with that either.
One example from the French remake: In English, a conventional piece of dialogue goes "I love you" - "I love you too".
But in French, that dialogue goes "Je t'aime" - "Moi aussi". So in this case we actually picked "Me too" as the translation for that, which definitely sticks out, but comes across as a little bit of a teaching French moment, because you can clearly hear that the character isn't saying "Je t'aime aussi".
That's kinda what you were looking for, right?
However, somewhere there is a line, across which lies a sea of Bad English, and even further from that line, you get the incomprehensible gibberish of the work in the article, and you really, really don't want to end up there.
true! and to be honest, also the first one isn't probably meaning "je t'aime" at all
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breathless_(1960_film)#Closi...
There's a common misconception among a lot of people, and definitely among the HN crowd, that there exists a good translation for every sentence in every language to every other language. I remember some articles a year ago or so here about how Google Translate had supposedly created some kind of internal language through its ML algorithms and data.
Yeah, but no. Google Translate would completely fail on that dialogue from Out of Breath, and if you were relying on it, you wouldn't even know it had failed!
E.g., if I say in Korean that I've become "green onion kimchi", I'm not picturing green onion kimchi in my mind. (I don't even particularly like green onion kimchi.) I'm saying I'm dead tired. When I say "my nose is three feet", I'm not picturing my face being deformed like Pinocchio - I'm saying I'm in no situation to help another.
At the end in your example, I feel like I would have a deeper understanding of kimchi as it relates to Korean speakers, how “green onion kimchi” is different, and why that means someone is dead tired.
Then, next time it comes up I would understand it a little better due to slightly different context.
To me, that all feels like a win
Picture this situation in reverse. If you were instead a Korean person, digging in to why Americans associate cats and dogs with heavy rain? Or why English speakers eat butterflies before they do something on stage?
Learning idioms is useful and interesting, but I agree with the other commenter that you shouldn't look to an idiom to gain cultural insight.
“Raining cats and dogs” I had not looked up before, but I don’t hear it much currently so I would likely associate it with someone of a specific older age range, or someone younger who’s been around (or who is emulating) older people. Even that small inference brings some depth to understanding what someone is saying, and the character of the person saying it.
As for “butterflies in my stomach”, that’s even more important as it’s a tactile expression, describing the feeling of nerves as though there were literal butterflies fluttering lightly in one’s stomach. The fact that at some point an english speaker decided to express the internal feeling as though it was something tangible that other people around them were familiar with, that’s (imo) some pretty fascinating cultural context and something that I see repeated throughout english. I also suspect that it happens in many (but importantly not all) other languages/cultures, which is also pretty fascinating.
> Reproducing the texts' often fragmentary formulations without augmentation or correction, he has produced a pitilessly literal translation, one that captures the texts' impenetrability and unfinished quality while awakening readers to an uncanniness that often lies hidden beneath doctrinal layers.
From wiki: "Alter's translation aims to convey the literary style of the original Hebrew text in English, recreating as much as possible its poetic rhythms and metaphors"
I think many of the Psalms and Ecclesiastes in particular are more beautifully rendered in his translation
Traduttore, traditore, etc.
I had a great time playing it and noting the differences/absurd translations with my friends.
They have the target language on the left side and usually both a literal and an easy-to-understand translation on the same height of the page on the right side.
Sometimes with explanations as to where the expression comes from.
Also: very little grammar (only to the extended needed, nothing upfront)
Best books I ever found for learning languages.
I have no affiliation, but learnt 2 languages to B2/C1 level with their help.
Examples include "long time no see" which is now common in English but has roots in either Chinese or Native American languages.
Likewise, the phrasing "chicken-egg problem" originated in Western culture but is now often used literally in modern Chinese, e.g. "雞和蛋的問題".
Another famous calque is "groudhog", which comes from the Dutch aardvark. Yes, the two animals are completely unrelated: the Dutch referred to them both as aardvark though, and only one of them got calqued into English.
They are idioms and quite often native speakers do not actually realize what they are saying when they use them.
I remember that when I gained more proficiency at Finnish, that many Finns remarked that I was teaching them because I was manually analyzing what was actually literally being said and they never quite considered what they were saying.
Consider that many English speakers when they are saying “God damn it.” they are really not realizing that “God” is the subject, “damn” is the finite verb in the subjunctive mood, and “it” is the direct object, thus expressing a wish that God damn it, whatever “it” might be. — it is an indivisible idiom for them which is also why it is often spelt as one word.
Especially because the subjunctive mood is rarely used as such to express a wish in modern English.
There are dozens of examples I can think of, such as how people refer to themselves and to others (Japanese is especially interesting here), how people communicate spatial relationships/directions, and how people refer to body parts (calf in Portuguese literally translates as “potato of the leg”).
It’s said that our language shapes how we think, and just the barest glimpse I’ve seen in to “literal” translations gives me a window in to not only how that’s true, but how particular languages can shape particular thought patterns.
The last one is surely an idiom, and the other parts are the ones that are often hard to translate literally.
I wouldn't say that “the honorable front” as a translation would really do justice to the meaning of /omae/ in Japanese and how it differs from, say, /anata/. “the honorable front” is the literal meaning of /omae/, but it's again an idiom that Japanese speakers scarcely realize the origins of, though Japanese's ideographic spelling perhaps would serve to make speakers more aware of such origins.
What about French’s “potato” translating as “Apple of the ground”?
In Canada that’s how bilingual packaging labels potatoes.
This also I suppose raises an interesting question: is the boundary between idiom and word really that clear?
[1]https://www.reddit.com/r/controlgame/comments/d5f0ki/ahtis_i...
That book is more like getting a phrase translate into a chain of languages and see what it comes out in the other side.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestication_and_foreignizati...
If you use "freshmen" to describe them, you get the "new at school" aspect, but viewers will get the completely wrong idea about their age. If you use "juniors", you get the age aspect right, but their role and social standing at school would be completely off.
So in a case like that, domesticating the translation simply doesn't work, you'd get super confused as a viewer if you use American high school terms. So you have to foreignize it, you have to call them something else, and you have to make up new terms when translating the various Norwegian derogatory terms for first-year students that exist.
I'm glad you didn't use the word. It would seem really out of place.
In England, we just said "6th year" (cf Harry Potter), "lower sixth" or "Year 12", depending on how old fashioned the school was.
I ended up using "first-year", "second-year" and "third-year", and "firstie" for when older students were looking down on them.