"Language is the source of misunderstandings."
— Antoine de Saunt-Exupéry
Translating from English to Spanish or from Italian to English has never been one of my favorite things to do. It seemed like I was able to get the word for word literal translation, but something was lost, something was distorted. I found this interesting website that shows how when translating a sentence five times by computer the meaning is completely lost and distorted. It reminded me of one of my favorite childhood games, telephone. In the play, Translations, it was also so interesting to see the distortion of the of translations played out. When I was in Guatemala a few years ago, we were talking to some local women. After talking a while, we realized that they spoke a different dialect of Spanish. We were talking about this piece of fruit we had found, and they immediately started laughing. Apparently, we had found a very unripe piece of fruit, while we thought we had found a great treasure that was going to be a delicious snack later in the day. Do you have any crazy translating experiences or misunderstandings? Here is a movie that relates to this topic that you may be interested in.
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I actually thought about this movie while we were reading the book! I enjoyed reading your blog..especially the part about telephone.
ReplyDeleteI really like how you brought up the childhood game telephone. I have never had to act like a translator for a person but I've played that game. Hearing that refrence helped me understand how hard it could be!
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