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Comment by mc32 | Hacker News Reader

I think "see ice for the first time" might work.

You just provided the best translation :-)

Now I'm wondering if the translators were intentionally trying to avoid multiple words, or if they didn't realize how much meaning they were losing.

Sometimes you have to just leave meanings implied to avoid being very discursive. Why would you take a child to see ice? Why would it be significant? "See" doesn't usually carry that connotation of "for the first time", but really the sentence can't possibly mean anything else.

Exactly.

The sentence in English is translated perfectly in this instance - the underlying implication of 'to see ice' carries the exact same meaning as the Spanish.

Not really. "to see ice" in English is more dubious than the phrase in Spanish, as you don't really know whether or not the character is doing it for the first time. A translation closer in meaning would be "to get to know ice".

This whole debate is why the translator chose "discover". It's a bit awkward because it can be interpreted two ways, but in one of the ways it carries the connotation of seeing for the first time, without the lengthy phrase "to get to know" or "to see for the first time" disrupting the rhythm of the prose.

The crux of the problem, of course, is that the word "meet" in English only applies to people.

"The crux of the problem, of course, is that the word "meet" in English only applies to people."

Says who? The last time I met with danger, I won! ;-)

"Meet" in the sense of being introduced, not in the sense of two entities coming into contact.

Don't forget that the translator knows just as well as you or I what the Spanish means - he also understands what it means when you take a child to see something - an expression that almost without exclusion means taking a child to see something for the first time.

"To get to know" takes us further away from the meaning, not closer.

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