Today I found myself at google translate, seeking to translate the following into Arabic:
Raising children teaches you infinite strength and infinite gentleness.
When translating stuff, I always double-check it by running the result back through the other way. The translation algorithm gives me “infinite power and infinite meekness.” Well, “meekness” is not at all what I mean, so I change it to “tenderness.” That’s fine.
But then, since “power” is not what I mean in this instance by “strength,” I clear the field, and type in strength. And then I am faced with a vast existential selection of nuances of meaning, nearly all of which are part of what I mean when I talk about the strength that parenting teaches you.
I’m not looking for translation advice. I’m just kind of contemplating this concept and it’s blowing my mind.
When I had my son, and later when nannying a little girl, I found all kinds of strength I never knew I had. Strength to stand up for myself, and for him (and her). Strength to take him to emergency when a dog bit his scalp. (there was so much blood!) Strength to make him go to bed, and to carry him when he was tired, and to get up early in the morning to walk him to school. Strength to put him first most of the time, and strength to put myself first sometimes.
Strength to tell them about the awful things in the world that you hate to ever have to explain, but you have to. Strength to hold on tight, and strength to let them go. Each of those containing a seed of the other, like a yinyang.
<sigh> Really, it’s odd that we have just one word that somehow encompasses all that; all its own synonyms and something else besides. There may not be a way to translate that.
Most of your meanings, in Spanish would not be fuerza but fortaleza: fuerza is physical strength, fortaleza is strength of spirit. Fuerza also refers to force; fortaleza also means fortress. One pushes; one withstands.
We did a word-association exercise in English class once that I’ve repeated a few times as a game with friends. The teacher started it by writing “red” on the blackboard. Red is a color in English: it leads to blue, black, yellow… but red is web or net in Spanish, so it leads to web, net… and web leads to spider, and net leads to fish, and… the whole blackboard took less than half an hour to fill up, and it was a big blackboard!
It’s interesting because the teacher chose a word that is in both languages. If the teacher wrote roja, the results might be far less interesting. Native English speakers might look blank for a moment, dredging up a translation, then come up with Spanish words for colors. If the teacher had written “blue” what might have been the association in the class? Or scarlet? Crimson? Yellow?
The color is rojo, not roja. Almost! And yeah, she picked that word specifically because it has two completely different meanings in the two languages.
Let’s say it was blue. On one hand, you get colors (and their translations). On the other, you jump from blue to blues, which takes you to music genres (most of which transfer without translation) and psychiatry (with its translations).
scarlet: translates to escarlata, from which the direct jump is to O’Hara and movies.
crimson would have required the dictionary. And there we run into a problem: colors are one of the areas where Spanish/English have a lot of false friends and where you may get different translations depending on who wrote the dictionary.
yellow: I think by then some of us already knew the English meaning of yellow as “cowardly”, which opens a whole family of words; in Spanish there’s no such association but some of us might have remembered that there is a town in Texas called Amarillo. That leads to “American places with names in Spanish”, and to the translations of these.
Haha, both. I guess what is in my mind is strength in the sense of potential ability to do things and hold things. Strength enough for whatever comes up. Definitely more in the sense of latency than active. I was just kind of boggled at the more specific Arab words for various kinds of strength, with their accompanying English synonyms, because each of those is part of what I meant, but not all of it.
I was also distracted by the question of why, when the app suggested “power,” why that didn’t seem right. Like, strength and power are pretty similar – what connotations does “power” have for me that make it not a synonym for strength.
I think it’s because power is almost a transitive notion – it’s something you use on or against others. Whereas strength is what makes you able to do for love what you never thought you could do.
Nava: I love “fortaleza!” The fortress is both the structure that harbors and protects, and the immovable object that withstands assault.
And that reminds me of two things. The first is the name of a candle one can buy in botanicas, “El Mano Mas Poderoso.” Meaning roughly, “the hand most able to,” i.e., the hand of God. I like to call it “The Hand What Can” haha.
The second thing is a Steely Dan song called “The Fez.” It goes, “never gonna do it without your fez on.” One of my friends says that “fez on” is a pun on a French word that means “the ability to do something.” Like, you’re never gonna do it if you can’t.