Rise Up, Oh Heart, For There is Another Battle to Win

meme-me-in-the-pit:

maurypovichofficial:

Languages are made up can you believe that? it’s just a bunch of phonetic sounds gibberish none of it actually means anything. this post??? i could smash my hand on the keyboard and it could mean the same thing, it only doesn’t because we say so. Nothing is real 

jacques derrida is gonna rise from his grave and give you a high five bc you just described his theory to 75,000 teenagers and they listened

(via slyrider)

True names of Swedish animals

andreaszchen:

Today I figured I’d write a bit about an interesting phenomenon in Scandinavian folklore: the concealment of the true names of some of our wild animals.

The idea that a true name holds magical power is fairly universal; it pops up in everything from Egyptian mythology to German fairytales, and nowadays it’s a pretty common fantasy trope too. In Nordic folklore in particular, it was often believed that speaking the true name of a dangerous creature could actually summon it. For example, the English idiom “speak of the devil (and he shall appear)” has as its Swedish equivalent “speak of the trolls (and they stand in the hallway)”, stemming from the belief that trolls would appear if you mentioned them by name.

Now, what’s really interesting about all this is the way it’s shaped the Swedish language. You see, the danger of speaking a creature’s name out loud also applied to wild animals that were feared in the old days: bears, wolves, and so on. As a result, people invented new names for these animals - false names, if you will, that could be spoken without risk. Nowadays, such false names are said to be “noa words”, while the true names are “tabu words” (these terms are borrowed from Māori, just like the English word taboo).

Over time, the noa words for many of these animals became their de facto names. That’s just kind of how language works: call something an X enough times, and voilà, now its name is X. Even today, many of our animals’ true names are archaic words that a Swedish speaker would never use naturally. Here are some examples:

• Wolf: The true name of the wolf is ulv, which shares its etymology with the English word. Ulv is archaic; the average Swedish speaker would recognize it, but never think to use it. Instead, we say varg, which originally means something along the lines of “killer” or “criminal”.
  
• Magpie: The true name of the magpie is skjora. This word is still in use in some dialects, but most Swedish people would not have heard it, and it is not officially recognized. Instead we say skata, meaning “something long and thin” or “something that sticks out”, referring to the tail. The magpie might not seem like an animal to be afraid of, but they were considered bad omens, thieves, or even harbingers of death… and besides, have you ever been swooped by a magpie?
• Fox: The true name of the fox is räv, and in this case, it has actually remained in usage. I guess the fox wasn’t intimidating enough for its name to become completely forbidden, hehe! In the old days, farmers would sometimes refer to the fox as Mickel to avoid summoning it. You see, foxes weren’t direct threats to humans, but they did have a tendency to break into hen houses and run off with the chickens. (This is also why foxes are known in our folklore for being cunning and sly, rather than outright dangerous). I’m not entirely sure why the farmers chose to refer to the fox by what is essentially a Scandinavian version of “Michael”, but I did a bit of digging, and it turns out that old Danish uses Mikkel as a generic insult for an incompetent or foolish man. So, I guess it’s a little bit like calling the fox an asshole.
• Bear: The true name of the bear has been lost to history! No one actually knows what they were originally called, since all Germanic languages use “bear” or some variation thereof, and Slavic languages use medved (meaning “honey-eater”, from what I gather). In any case, the contemporary Swedish word is björn, which - like the English word - seems to just mean “brown”. Historians speculate that the true name of the bear might be similar to the Greek ἄρκτος (arktos), but I guess we’ll never know.

There are more examples on Swedish Wikipedia, but sadly there seems to be no article in English. Still, I hope you learned something interesting from all this!

Now, imagine the kind of power we would have if we knew the bear’s true name… 

(via cthulhu-with-a-fez)

gotinterest:

physicsphoenix:

dragtimdrake:

witchshaming:

kirby-ebooks:

ihamtmus:

corn-free-awesomesauce:

The best part of ‘me, an intellectual’ is that the grammatically correct pronoun would be ‘I’.

you: me, an intellectual

me, an intellectual: I, an intellectual

hi where the fuck do you think that fragment is getting nominative case. listen to me. subjects of transitive verbs in nom-acc languages get nominative case by agreeing with a tense node. are you listening. fragments are accusative in english because that’s the default case when there’s no case-assigning node. meet me in the pit behind the denny’s and i will explain this to you. bring a whiteboard

you: The best part of ‘me, an intellectual’ is that the grammatically correct pronoun would be ‘I’.

kirby, a linguist: meet me in the pit behind the denny’s and i will explain this to you. bring a whiteboard

maybe my favorite post to ever happen

“hi where the fuck do you think that fragment is getting nominative case”

Does kirby-ebooks know that literally everything they said here is Iconic?

(Source: technicolor-werewolf, via redrowan)

wildehacked:

fromtokyotokyoto:

gotou-kiichi:

marchionessofmustache:

kzinssie:

the thing you need to realize about localization is that japanese and english are such vastly different languages that a straight translation is always going to be worse than the original script. nuance is going to be lost and, if you give a shit about your job, you should fill the gaps left with equivalent nuance in english. take ff6, my personal favorite localization of all time: in the original japanese cefca was memorable primarily for his manic, childish speaking style - but since english speaking styles arent nearly as expressive, woolsey adapted that by making the localized english kefka much more prone to making outright jokes. cefca/kefka is beloved in both regions as a result - hell, hes even more popular here

yes this

a literal translation is an inaccurate translation.

localization’s job is to create a meaningful experience for a different audience which has a different language and different culture. they translate ideas and concepts, not words and sentences. often this means choosing new ideas that will be more meaningful and contribute to the experience more for a different audience.

There was an example during late Tokugawa period in Japan where the translator translated, "Я люблю Вас” (I love you), to “I could die for you,” while translating  Ася, ( Asya) a novel by Ivan Turgenev. This was because a woman saying, “I love you,” to a man was considered a very hard thing to do in Japanese society.

In a more well-known example,  Natsume Soseki, a great writer who wrote, I am a Cat, had his students translate “I love you,” to “the moon is beautiful [because of] having you beside tonight,” because Japanese men would not say such strong emotions right away. He said that it would be weird and Japanese men would have more elegance.

Both of these are great examples of localization that wasn’t a straight up translation and both of these are valid. I feel like a lot of people forget the nuances in language and culture and how damn hard a translator’s job is and how knowledgeable the person has to be about both cultures. [x]

Important stuff about translation!

Note that you can apply this to your own translations even if they aren’t big pieces of literature or something. Don’t feel bad about not translating word for word. An everyday sentence may sound odd translated literally - it’s okay to edit a little bit so it feels right!

Oh my god, I’m about to go on a ramble, I’m sorry, I can’t help it, the inner translation nerd is coming out. I’m so sorry. The thing is–there is actually no such thing as an accurate translation.

 It’s literally an impossible endeavor. Word for word doesn’t cut it. Sense for sense doesn’t cut it, because then you’re potentially missing cool stuff like context and nuance and rhyme and humor. Even localization doesn’t really cut it, because that means you’re prioritizing the audience over the author, and you’re missing out on the original context, and the possibility of bringing something new and exciting to your host language. Foreignization, which aims to replicate the rhythms of the original language, or to use terminology that will be unfamiliar to the target culture–(for example: the first few American-published Harry Potter books domesticated the English, and traded “trousers” for “pants”, and “Mom” for “Mum”. Later on they stopped, and let the American children view such foreignizing words as “snog” and “porridge.”)–also doesn’t cut it, because you risk alienating the target readers, or obscuring meaning. 

Another cool example is Dante, and the words written above the gates of hell: Abandon hope, all ye who enter here. 

In the original Italian, that’s Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate. Speranza, like most nouns in latinate languages, has a gender: la. Hope, in Italian, is gendered female. Abandon hope, who is female. Abandon hope, who is a woman. When the original Dante enters hell, searching for Beatrice, he is doomed, subtly, from the start. That’s beautiful, subtle, the kind of delicate poetic move literature nerds gorge themselves on, and you can’t keep it in English. Literally, how do you preserve it? We don’t have a gendered hope. It doesn’t work, can’t work. So how do you compensate? Can you sneak in a reference to Beatrice in a different line? Or do you chalk her up as a loss and move onto the next problem?

You’re always going to miss something–the cool part is that, knowing you’re going to fail, you get to decide how to fail. Ortega y Gasset called this The Misery and Splendor of Translation. Basically, translation is impossible–so why not make it a beautiful failure? 

My point is that literary translation is creative writing, full of as many creative decisions as any original poem or short story. It has more limitations, rules, and structures to consider, for sure–but sometimes the best artistic decision is going to be the one that breaks the rules. 

My favorite breakdown of this is Le Ton Beau De Marot, a beautiful brick of a translator’s joke, in which the author tries over and over again to create a “perfect” translation of “A une Damoyselle Malade”, an itsy bitsy poem Clement Marot dashed off to his patron’s daughter, who was sick, in 1537. 

This is the poem: 

Ma mignonne,
Je vous donne
Le bon jour;
Le séjour
C’est prison.
Guérison
Recouvrez,
Puis ouvrez
Votre porte
Et qu’on sorte
Vitement,
Car Clément
Le vous mande.
Va, friande
De ta bouche,
Qui se couche
En danger
Pour manger
Confitures;
Si tu dures
Trop malade,
Couleur fade
Tu prendras,
Et perdras
L’embonpoint.
Dieu te doint
Santé bonne,
Ma mignonne.

Seems simple enough, right? But it’s got a huge host of challenges: the rhyme, the tone, the archaic language (if you’re translating something old, do you want it to sound old in the target language, too? or are you translating not just across language, but across time?) 

Le Ton Beau De Marot is a monster of a book that compiles all of Hofstader’s “failed” translations of Ma Mignonne, as well as the “failed” translations of his friends, and his students, and hundreds of strangers who were given the translation challenge (which you can play here, should you like!) 

The end result is a hilarious archive of Sweet Damosels, Malingering Ladies, Chickadees, Fairest Friends, and Cutie Pies. It’s the clearest, funniest, best example of what I think is true of all literary translations: that they’re a thing you make up, not a thing you discover. There is no magic bridge between languages, or magic window, or magic vessel to pour the poem from one language to another–translation is always subjective, it’s always individual, it’s always inaccurate, it’s always a failure. 

It’s always, in other words, art. 

Which, as a translator, I find incredibly reassuring! You’re definitely, one hundred percent absolutely, gonna fuck up. Which means you can’t fuck up. You can take risks! You can experiment! You can do cool stuff like bilingual translations, or footnote translations! You write your own code of honor, your own rules that your translations will hold inviolable, and fuck it if that code doesn’t match everyone else’s*. The translations they hold inviolable are also flawed, are failures at the core, from the King James Bible right on down to No Fear Shakespeare. So have fun! It’s all in your hands, miseries and splendors both. 

Speaking as someone who’s fucked around with a couple languages and translating them into English, nothing has ever driven this home as hard as translating the Aeneid, or Terence. One word in Latin can require ten to explain it, or have five possible translations. So if you want to preserve the drama (Aeneid) or the humor (Terence) there’s a lot of creative thinking that has to go into it.

(Source: dj-bayeux-tapestry)

faded-mind:

theangelshavethetimeturner:

invite-me-to-your-memories:

i understand the historical reasons why English is the most common language

but if I was writing a speculative fiction novel

and I said “the language that most people learn as a second language, usually for professional reasons, is also the only one with a spelling system so terrible that spelling words correctly is a broadcasted competition”

you’d be like “extremely unrealistic 0/10”

i never thought of this, do other languages not have spelling bees?

#no we don’t

(via ofgeography)

rossareads:

motorizedduck:

Translating is hard work. Even with pretty simple translations there can be unexpected difficulties if one of the languages has some funny special rules that apply to everyday life like honorifics and proper address, or words with multiple meanings so instead of asking what time it is you’ll end up asking for a potato. A professional translator can deal with this, of course. But for someone who just knows two pretty different languages, translating even something simple suddenly takes time and ends up getting pretty confusing for everyone involved.

And that leads us to ALIENS!

I think we’ve all read one scifi story or another where an alien is explaining some kind of concept that their species has - it might be related to their Special Sense or something else, but they always conveniently manage to put it in words that the character (and the reader) understand. This makes sense from a storytelling viewpoint, because we’re telling the story to human readers/listeners/viewers who need to understand what’s going on and why.

But it might be fun if the character is teamed up with an alien who gets so confused and/or worked up about some trivial translation that it gets turned into this big whole mysterious deal.

Human: “So, what’s this word mean, ‘thnguwe’?”

Alien: “Thnguwe has… special meaning for our people. It refers to a person’s ability to… form a meaningful connection with another of our kind, and our… entire society is built according to the… concept of thnguwe.”

Human: “How profound! Your civilization has much to teach us!”

Alien #2: “It means ‘talking’. Thnguwe means talking.”

Alien #1: “Oh, talking! I forgot what that word was in human language!”

As a linguist and a translator, I can attest: this is how it works in real life. But, also, when you know more than one language, and you are tired or distracted sometimes they just blurr together and you mix them up. Moreso if you are doing something, say reading in A, but then someone speaks to you in B.

Recon Mission went well. Kind of. They are all tired because Scientists human Marja just had to see if that big apex carnivore could be approached to be petted, for ‘Science!’. Or so Marja had explained to their Mission Commander larlik Kri’l, whom was not amused by an explanation so sensible for such an illogical behaviour. But nobody died so Head Scientist, human Cristina, declared it a win for the Science Team.

They were all dragging themselves to the Sustainance Unit in their ship when Scientist Second in Command, globrl Bwir inquired about what earthling cute companion the big apex carnivore - that almost got everyone killed, added Kri’l using only one mouth so only those in close proximity could hear xem - resembled.

“Oh, yeah it looked just like, ugh, what’stheword uhm, это канареечный” answered Marja whilst grabbing the concoction that all humans called coffe. The human had certainly started in Standard Interspace Communication Language, but the last words were uttered in Standard Earthlings Communication Language.

All turned head(s) to the other human in the Unit, who shrugged “That’s not my mother tongue”.

“Head Scientist Cristina, you are human, aren’t you? From Space Aust- I meant, from Earth, right?”

“Yes, but, it’s not like I know every language spoken on Earth!”

Silence resonated in the Unit.

Scientist Bwir dared to ask “W-what do you mean languages, as in more than one?”

“What, like in your planets they all speak the same language” was the crossed response xem had.

“Yes. Yes we do, because that’s the sensible thing to do. That’s what all sensible life forms who reach interspace travel do. One language, one planet” said slowly Bwird, while all the present crewmembers, who were able to, facepalmed.

Of course the deathplaneters had to complicate even the simplest thing.

Can we stop using Earthlings and start using DeathPlaneteers.

(via cthulhu-with-a-fez)