Not anywhere near the extent that it happens in Japan. I’ve been hounded by acquaintances at work because I’ve said the equivalent of, “I’m sorry, I have other plans.”
“What other plans?”
“Who are you meeting?”
“Where are you going together?”
“For how long?”
“What’s your relationship to this person?”
…and on and on. These are people I barely know outside of work. It’s not just that I’m not Japanese either, I’ve seen it happen with Japanese friends and colleagues. Instead of a simple white lie about not being able to go, you have to make up an elaborate story that covers most or all of the potential questions. And even then, sometimes they won’t fucking let it go. It’s a major cultural difference, not just a little foible.
This is as weird as it’s interesting. So what do Japanese people do ? Do they all go to any crummy party they have the misfortune of getting invited to out of politeness, or do they get really good at making stuff up as a coping mechanism ?
I’m not Japanese and never been there, but in their fiction you see variations of “going to the crummy parties because they couldn’t say no” quite a lot. Lots of peer pressure, trying to save face and keep up appearances and stuff. Coming from a completely different culture and having even less inclination to be peer pressured into things because of my mild autism, it can be almost painful to watch at times.
My example might not have been the best. But I think the intent of “multiple choice” questions is generally ambiguous and depends on context, at least in English.
If you ask your kid, “Did you take a bath or shower?”, it might sound like you want to know specifically which event occurred, but really, you’re probably just asking “Did you clean yourself in some manner, yes or no?” On the other hand, if you ask a new co-worker, “Are you part-time or full-time?”, it’s understood that those are the only possibilities (or the only ones you’re allowing for anyway), and you’re asking which specific one is the case.
So yes, using a single, generic word in a yes/no question — like “contact” instead of “write or talk to” — is preferable to eliminate that ambiguity. But sometimes a good generic word isn’t available, or it exists but is awkward or overly technical, or the questioner just doesn’t think of it.
There are many difficult to translate phrases in English that we take for granted.
And how do you say “take for granted” in other languages?
Anyway…
One of my favorite gaps in the Portuguese language is the English verb “to cheat”
We use this to describe infidelity, unfair game practices, and illicit test taking methods. All of those can be described in any language, but “cheat” has a general sense of “doing something in a mischievous, improper fashion for personal gain” and there is often a sly wink implied. There just isn’t a simple word that expresses that though in Portuguese.
All poetry is a trek through Hell to translate, from any language into any language. It relies so much on sounds, rhythms, cadences and imagery conjured specifically from the words and even phonemes used, you essentially have to write an entirely new poem from scratch in order to not end up with something that’s almost, but not quite, entirely unlike the source.
According to my Larousse Etymologie, “chauve” is actually a folk-etymological alteration of the Francique form cawa sorix, meaning “owl mouse” (so etymologically it’s not a chauve-souris but a chouette-souris.)
I’m told that in some other cultures, it’s normal to accept an invitation you have no intention of keeping, because it would be ruder to refuse than not to come. Don’t ask me how they ever plan how much food to buy.
Another one came to mind: humour (or humor, for you Americans). This is actually pretty understandable. The original meaning of humour and its cognates in other European languages was bodily fluid (the four humours), and consequently mood, emotion, or disposition (we still say “to be in ill humour”).
The meaning “things that are funny, capacity to find things funny” evolved from a genre of English-language plays called “humour plays,” of which a prominent example was Ben Jonson’s Every Man In His Humour. These were comic or farcical plays in which the characters were archetypes of moods or dispositions (humours). Eventually, “humour” in literature, and thence generally, came to be associated with comedy.
French, whose native reflex of Latin humor is “humeur” (être en mauvais humeur), borrowed back the English word as “humour” in the 18th century, with the associated adjective “humoristique.”
Sometimes I watch English language movies and television with the English subtitles. Occassionally, the translation is not accurate.
Recently watched Unforgiven, and wondered about some line being growled out. Turned on captioning, and discovered a lengthy paragraph being subtitled in 3 brief sentences. Something like:
“I’m about to go get them cowboys. Are you coming with me, or stayin’ here on your own?”
to
“I’m going to get them. You coming?”
Another old example was an episode of Buffy: the Vampire Slayer. There was something like a three round exchange between Buffy and the bad guy in the captioning that played on screen as a one-liner from Buffy.
I also recall there was a similar event in Beyond Thuderdome, but nothing of the details remain.
Some of this is just the challenge of displaying lengthy conversational exchanges on the screen in rapid fire nature that the pacing of the scene conveys. You don’t have time for the three paragraph version, so some editing is required to play it out.
And then there’s real-time captioning, like on news programs, where the captioning is running 3 or 4 sentences behind the vocals and visuals, and they often mishear things and bungle the words. Then get too far behind, give up, and jump to the current conversation.
But yeah, I can imagine translating languages getting goofy.
There is a bit in Asterix Gallus in Latin where Asterix is shown laughing over a line of dialogue that isn’t particularly funny. On the panel, there is a box as for a footnote, but the box is empty. I got a chance to see an English copy, and the text was something like “He wants us to be more loquacious? We’ll loquace loquaciously like no one’s ever loquaced before!” The footnote is present in the English version and says “This is bad grammar”. So, I got a look at the French version. I don’t know a lick of French, but the footnote seemed to say something like “This is not French”.
So, near as I can tell, the joke translated from French to English, but not from French to Latin because in Latin there are verbal, adjectival and adverbial forms from the same root (loquī,loquāx and loquāciter). Rendered into Latin, it was no longer bad grammar, therefore no longer a joke.
Talk show host Jack Paar once had a panel of international entertainers for guests. He decided to play a game of “telephone” (repeating a story until it becomes hopelessly garbled.) Paar told a story to a French-speaking guest, who translated it to a German speaker, who translated it to a Spanish speaker. The word that got consistently mistranslated was “barbecue” – the device you keep outside that uses charcoal or propane to cook food. All of them knew the word in English, but they couldn’t properly translate it.
Another political word: gerrymander.
Is there a parallel in other nations that refers to a legislative district designed to include certain neighbrohoods and exclude others to benefit the incumbent office holder?
My eighth grade anthropology teacher gave the example of asking a !Tgong man (African “Bushman”) how tall his son was. Having no system of measurement, he described the boy as being as high as the shoulder of an eland. His companions scoffed, and accused him of bragging.
The comparison could have been to the height of any animal, from the height of a baboon to the knee of a giraffe. Each possibility would have carried with it an entire description of the boy’s carriage, personality, and gait. An eland being the most noble of the creatures the !Tgong hunt, it was considered over-proud to suggest that the boy was like one.
Even in all those words I have not truly conveyed the level of detail the man was providing. There is no English word or phrase which can equal it, unless you know the significance of an Eland, the assumptions attached to the choice of comaprison, and the characteristics considered positive by the !Tgong in a person. For all you know, saying “the shoulder of a newborn giraffe” might be a compliment; in fact that would indicate a gangly, ungainly and naive young man, unlikely to ever lead a hunt. * If he had used an inanimate opbject, like poitning to a rock or tree branch, it would have indicated a lazy or even a stupid boy.
It’s untranslatable. In order to understand it you must know the people, the culture, the local fauna, and even the comparisons he could have used, but chose to discard.
*These are loose examples from over twenty years ago. Except for the Eland, any resemblence to the actual animals and characteristics she mentioned is probably coincidental. But you get my point. . .
I get a little nervous whenever people talk about those countries where “party’s at 7” means “it starts at midnight”. God, what if I ever ended up in one of those places unaware?
Of course other languages have words for “stealing” and “apples” but the english word carries with it much more subtlety of meaning.
It means young boys taking apples, from someone’s garden. And this is not a malicious act. It is not wholesale theft (as taking too many would cease to be scrumping) and it has to carry with it the possibility of being caught (taking apples from a tree in an abandoned house garden just wouldn’t be scrumping).