Baggage for an interesting trip, indeed–but I like all kinds of travel.
I suppose I meant more “cultural references” but I’m glad I did it wrong because - what a poetic response you had!
Same thing for me. I guess it’s a tendancy to translate too literary, when in fact one would need to make massive changes.
German uses SOV (subject, object, verb) word order only in certain constructions. Simple verb phrases are SVO, same as in English, nicht war?
There are many SOV languages all over the world. In fact, SOV is the typology used by the most number of languages in the world. Our SVO comes in second place. For a very brief sampling off the top of my head, Amharic, Burmese, Georgian, Hindi (+all the Indo-Aryan languages), Japanese, Korean, Lakhota, Mongolian, Panjabi, Persian, Quechua, Somali, Tamil (+all the Dravidian languages), Tatar, Tibetan, Turkish (+all the Turkic languages, Urdu… are SOV all the time. Latin and Hungarian go SOV a lot of the time too.
I’ve also noticed this. I think I’m worse going from Dutch into English, because the two languages are very similar, but not so similar that you can do a word for word translation. Going from Auslan into English, the grammar is so different, you have to completely remake the sentence anyway, so it often comes out as more natural English. But making an accurate translation from Auslan is much harder when it includes a lot of spatial information and I can’t decide if it’s relevant or not.
Something else that affects this, and which is even harder to deal with, is that cultures differ in the manner they express themselves. For example, even when dealing with the same subject, Spanish tends to be more flowery (some would say long-winded) than English. Even if the translation is accurate and idiomatic, it’s going to sound somewhat different than the way an English writer would typically write about a subject. I once was reading an article in English and realized it had been translated from German when the author started to describe some overly-detailed classification scheme.
After having lost my Bavarian accent when we came to the US, I find myself speaking what is called “Hoch-Deutsch” (literally “high German” which is that broadcast voice you referred to upthread) when I go home on vacation. I also speak slowly and watch my enunciations at those times.
Yeah, it sounds stilted and have been told as much, and after a few days, hearing the accent again makes me respond in kind.
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Translation is just plain hard, regardless of your fluency in both languages. I can understand 99% of everything said in normal, Mexican Spanish (aside from specific industry/technical jargon and youngster street slang), and I can speak it convincingly (similar limitations as previously described), and with a good spell checker I can even write it convincingly (but, think Ernest Hemingway rather than John Steinbeck), but God help you if you ask me to translate it into English (my native language).
Actually, until my recent move, people asked me to translate all the time. It sucked, and I’m certain that it looked (to them) that I had no comprehension of Spanish. In order to do a good job, I’d really have to grok the Spanish, and re-write everything in my own words completely.
I kind of think I’m going to have to do the same thing now, except it will be translating someone else’s translated English into English.