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“A Great Ox Stands on My Tongue”: The Pitfalls of Latin Translation

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Re: “A Great Ox Stands on My Tongue”: The Pitfalls of Latin Translation

#31

Post by chinaman425 »

jaclaz wrote: post #29
lgeorget wrote: post #9

Funnily, and ironically, enough, as a native French speaker, I would never translate "ce ne sont pas mes oignons" (litt. "those are not my onions") as "it's not my cup of tea". To me, it actually means "it's none of my business".

There are many queer things in (past) translations, it is funny when they stick. In Italian we have the expression "la bellezza dell'asino" (which is "the beauty of the donkey" and it means - nonsensically - the kind of beauty/freshness that only young people can have and that will vanish with the passing of time). It derives from the combination of a typo with a "faithful" translation from French, the original “la b…

[dead]

Re: “A Great Ox Stands on My Tongue”: The Pitfalls of Latin Translation

#32

Post by Tor3 »

rvba wrote: post #25

In Polish there is this saying that "faithful translations are not beautiful and beautiful translations are not faithfull". The translator always adds a bit of own style.

When I was young someone decided to publish Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction magazine in my native language, as a series of short books (i.e. not like a magazine at all). As this was a series, the publisher used a relatively small group of translators to translate all the issues.

After reading a number of the books I started to notice that I could easily tell who had done the translation, and it was at that point I started to get an aversion to reading translations. I didn't want to read the translator, I wanted to read the author. So I gradually started to switch to English originals (if the original was written in English). (And that, incidentally, is how I learned English.)

Re: “A Great Ox Stands on My Tongue”: The Pitfalls of Latin Translation

#33

Post by pavlov »

wcrossbow wrote: post #7

We have a fun way to describe mechanical, word for word translations in Spanish. It's called _from lost to the river_, that's the direct translation of _de perdidos al rio_, which is a saying meaning that once you have embarked onto a silly/dangerous/nonsense business you might just as well go through with it. A sort of reverse sunken cost fallacy. Of course, the fun is in that it makes no sense once translated. I fi…

> “direct translation of _de perdidos al rio_, which is a saying meaning that once you have embarked onto a silly/dangerous/nonsense business you might just as well go through with it”

Essentially the same saying with the river metaphor exists in Finnish (ojasta allikkoon) but its implied meaning is the opposite of what you’re describing. There’s no suggestion of “might as well”, it’s just: “you were in trouble already but now you’ve really blown it.”

I suppose that fits the national stereotypes of adventurous Spaniards vs. cautious and pessimistic Finns.

Re: “A Great Ox Stands on My Tongue”: The Pitfalls of Latin Translation

#34

Post by tgv »

wcrossbow wrote: post #7

We have a fun way to describe mechanical, word for word translations in Spanish. It's called _from lost to the river_, that's the direct translation of _de perdidos al rio_, which is a saying meaning that once you have embarked onto a silly/dangerous/nonsense business you might just as well go through with it. A sort of reverse sunken cost fallacy. Of course, the fun is in that it makes no sense once translated. I fi…

Which reminds me of another source of translation errors. Once in a village bar, I saw ensaladilla de cangrejo translated as crap salad.

Re: “A Great Ox Stands on My Tongue”: The Pitfalls of Latin Translation

#35

Post by EntrePrescott »

What I'd like is a good bidirectional Latin English AI translation model, ideally downloadable (though even an online version with an interface like DeepL - which doesn't do latin - would be better than the current situation of having nothing at all). It probably wouldn't be on par with the best human translators, at least not at the beginning, but that's not a problem.

Re: “A Great Ox Stands on My Tongue”: The Pitfalls of Latin Translation

#36

Post by lproven »

emodendroket wrote: post #4
triyambakam wrote: post #2

> even though he seems tacitly to accept its inferiority to Greek literature I would have said "seems to tacitly accept" instead of "seems tacitly to accept" I wonder if the author purposely avoids the split infinitive. I've heard Latin enthusiasts like to prescribe that onto English, because it's not grammatical in Latin. But maybe that's just the author's English. I don't think it's wrong.

Yes, I find it very plausible that a spud writing about Latin literature observes that rule.

A "spud"?

That manages to seem both incomprehensible and very offensive at once, which an impressive trick. And not impressive in a good way.

Re: “A Great Ox Stands on My Tongue”: The Pitfalls of Latin Translation

#37

Post by Ekaros »

Tor3 wrote: post #32
rvba wrote: post #25

In Polish there is this saying that "faithful translations are not beautiful and beautiful translations are not faithfull". The translator always adds a bit of own style.

When I was young someone decided to publish Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction magazine in my native language, as a series of short books (i.e. not like a magazine at all). As this was a series, the publisher used a relatively small group of translators to translate all the issues. After reading a number of the books I started to notice that I could easily tell who had done the translation, and it was at that point I sta…

Where it becomes hard is non-English scifi. If you don't understand the language, do you pick the English or the native translation of for example Polish or Russian? Specially when those native translations are likely not too bad, albeit horribly expensive at this point.

Re: “A Great Ox Stands on My Tongue”: The Pitfalls of Latin Translation

#38

Post by tgv »

gumby wrote: post #12

> For over a thousand years, nobody has been brought up to speak [Latin] naturally at home; ... except Milton. In my high school (literally a Latin school) you could hear Latin spoken in the corridor, but I'm pretty sure never by any student, unless put on the spot by a teacher! So yes, it was technically a spoken language, but without gainsaying the author's point.

I'm reading a biography on Erasmus, and he lived in England, had pupils there, made friends and visited the archbishop of Canterbury and even the king, not speaking English. He taught his pupils in Latin. English, or Dutch for that matter, was not a proper language.

So Latin wouldn't be really alive, but also not dead. It was still a second language to more than a few as late as the 16th century.

Re: “A Great Ox Stands on My Tongue”: The Pitfalls of Latin Translation

#39

Post by lproven »

poulsbohemian wrote: post #10
marginalia_nu wrote: post #8

> For over a thousand years, nobody has been brought up to speak [Latin] naturally at home Uh, except Montaigne.

> For over a thousand years, nobody has been brought up to speak [Latin] naturally at home I know it is a very small number of people, and perhaps not Latin as it was spoken in Rome, but I think an argument could be made that Romansh is a direct descendant of Latin still actively spoken today.

True, but also Romanian (and Moldovan), and Ladino...

Living in central Europe for nearly a decade, it was fascinating to get drunk with groups of Romanians a few times, with only knowledge of Western Latinate languages. Sometimes you can just hear the meaning... but only if it's something 2 Roman legionaries might have said to each other 2 millennia ago.

Re: “A Great Ox Stands on My Tongue”: The Pitfalls of Latin Translation

#40

Post by tremon »

kriro wrote: post #28

I have mixed feelings about Latin. Excuse my lengthy rambling about the German school system. In many German high schools (at least the highest or "Gymnasium" level which is kind of a hillarious name if you are an English speaker but I digress) the first foraign language is English starting in the 5th grade which is basically the first year in the new school (years 1-4 are "Grundschule"). Then in 7th grade you typica…

As you say, you don't study Latin for its own sake. My Latin classes taught me a lot about more about grammar, syntax and language structure than I got from other languages, and I think a big part of that is exactly because it's a dead language: since you don't need to teach pupils how to read or write, all effort can go into reading comprehension and text analysis, and eventually language theory.

Also, my teacher (at least for most of the years) was a language historian and would speak a lot about language development from proto-indo-european to greek to modern-day romance languages. For example, being aware of the rl and h->f consonant shifts from Spanish to Portuguese allowed me to more easily recognize unknown words when learning the latter.

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