In Frederick Pohl’s anthology Pohlstars, there’s a short story of his that someone found in a Chinese collection and translated back into English. The original title was The Wizards of Pung’s Corners, but it was retranslated back into English as The Wizard-Masters of Peng-Shi Angle.
I never read the original story, but it had something to do with advertising. Several (fictitious) product names were written phonetically in the Chinese translation, and picked up unwanted meanings when the pictograms were translated into English. I remember that there was a breakfast cereal which was translated as “The son has approval to fasten the Buddhist nun to the hermaphrodite.”
Are those two sentences supposed to be closely related, or only in the way we’re all related to the primordial amoeba?
Sarcasm, metonymy, any kind of figurative speech at all. Another coworker set off in a crusade to find a joke Ana would not screech about and he finally found it: a fart joke he’d gotten from his five year old. Oh, and of course anything involving fantasy at all was also rejected: any fairy tale with actual fairies, talking animals and so forth? Unacceptable! The Valiant Little Tailor was ok; about anything else, no.
For example, sometimes the only way I can get an English speaker to fully understand a Mandarin term, is to explain a little bit of how Mandarin Chinese works, and maybe some background on Chinese culture.
Such an explanation is of course in English, but I think it’s misleading to say that I am therefore expressing the word in English. I would personally draw a distinction between simply translating a term and giving background information.
I don’t see what would preclude a PhD from making a statement like that. Now, a “PhD scientist” in linguistics, or East Asian Language/History or whatever, probably not.
I guess I’m unsure what you mean. Say I speak another language and I use the word ‘spling’ and you want to know what it means. If it takes me 5 minutes and a quick overview of the mythological history of Splingvania in order to give you the proper context of the word and at the end of my spiel, you have an understanding of the meaning that is rough around the edges but essentially correct, how is that not expressing the meaning in another language?
That’s impossible with valid science, as there’s no scientifically valid grouping of humans that includes ‘asians’, ‘whites’, and ‘blacks’.
Sure there are all kinds of scientifically bogus tests confirming whatever the tester wants to see, but, no, science has confirmed nothing of the sort.
To do justice to my pedant friend: he’s not quite so far off in some other planet / galaxy / universe, as that. Admittedly it would seem that he has little taste for poetry, or prose fiction in general – and as for fairy tales and talking animals… (though with his being a keen proponent of the rights of, and need for good treatment of, animals; he found Richard Adams’s The Plague Dogs compulsive reading).
No, it hasn’t. The only studies that claim to do so (the Pioneer Fund Babies: Rushton, Jensen, Lynn and their ilk) have been shown time and time again to be terrible science and damn near fraudulent in their creative massaging of dubious data and outright invention of figures.