Broken Translation Game 2018

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Re: Broken Translation Game 2018

Postby kevin » 2019-02-05, 14:58

księżycowy compensated for that when he translated the final conjunction "um" as "around (itself)". ;)

księżycowy wrote:Did I do an ok job on my German -> English translation?

I think you did well with the sentences that had a simple structure. With the more complex ones, it shows that you aren't familiar enough yet with the German syntax to parse them correctly. To be fair, the more complex sentences were already pretty messy when you got them, so they wouldn't have made much sense either way.

If you want a more detailed correction, maybe we should take this to your German thread?

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Re: Broken Translation Game 2018

Postby księżycowy » 2019-02-05, 15:17

Sure, I'd been interested in seeing a better break down.

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Re: Broken Translation Game 2018

Postby linguoboy » 2019-02-05, 15:34

I know that gemma can mean "bud" but that's not the central meaning. Moreover, given the surrounding terminology, I thought Mencius launched into his horticultural metaphor halfway through the paragraph and not from the beginning. I never would have thought of using it as a translation of capullo but, then again, I never would've used capullo in that context anyway. (Now I'm curious what the Tamil equivalent was.)

My translation of mi chiedo as is ionadh liom was obviously influenced by English "I wonder". There's not really a good Irish equivalent in any case.

Ar a mhalairt de chuma is an idiom meaning "in a different way". This may be a Munsterism.

fásann dosna trátaí airde "the tomatoes grow in height". (I guess airde is the logical subject of the sentence?)

Overall, a very good translation of a munged original!
Last edited by linguoboy on 2019-02-05, 18:38, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Broken Translation Game 2018

Postby Bubulus » 2019-02-05, 17:40

vijayjohn wrote:Where does the text originally come from, by the way?

It is a grammatical simplification of part of a paragraph in Owen J. Flanagan's Moral Sprouts and Natural Teleologies: 21st Century Moral Psychology Meets Classical Chinese Philosophy (2014), a book that compares and criticizes Mencius' virtue sprouts and Jonathan Haidt et al.'s model of how humans make moral decisions (which posits axiomatic moral dimensions that are kind of similar to Mencius' sprouts). I don't remember what page specifically the paragraph I looked at is found in.

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Re: Broken Translation Game 2018

Postby vijayjohn » 2019-02-06, 1:29

linguoboy wrote:I know that gemma can mean "bud" but that's not the central meaning. Moreover, given the surrounding terminology, I thought Mencius launched into his horticultural metaphor halfway through the paragraph and not from the beginning. I never would have thought of using it as a translation of capullo but, then again, I never would've used capullo in that context anyway. (Now I'm curious what the Tamil equivalent was.)

The Tamil equivalent was மொட்டு; in Malayalam at least, we pronounce this [mɔˈʈɯ]. It means 'bud', but apparently, in Malayalam, it can also mean 'nipple', and in Tamil, it can also mean 'glans penis', which might be how it ended up being capullo in Spanish! :shock: :lol:

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Re: Broken Translation Game 2018

Postby dEhiN » 2019-02-06, 16:51

vijayjohn wrote:So what I did was to translate it more or less as follows: "If the watermelon ends up growing quickly and first, as for the basil (கரந்தையோ), it will similarly have to sprout immediately." (கரந்தையோ is pronounced something like [kaɾan̪d̪ajˈjoː]).

கரந்தை ([kaˈɾan̪d̪aj]?) means 'basil', and -யோ [joː] is normally an interrogative suffix of some sort, I think (in Malayalam, it is the only one we have), but it can also be used to emphasize an argument in a sentence (not sure whether this would be topicalization or focus), which is why I picked it. Of course, there was no way for dEhiN to actually know any of this, and the translation was already difficult and convoluted enough as it was, so understandably, he just ignored it.

I knew that கரந்தை meant basil (well, it was one of the many new Tamil words I looked up and learned!). I also knew that the -யோ suffix was used for emphasis of sorts in Tamil, but I couldn't put it all together to mean "as for the basil". So I was just confused on where the basil fit in, and thus ignored it.

Luís wrote:Btw, à sua volta doesn't mean in its turn but rather around it.

I'm assuming the it in this case refers to the watermelon? That's how I read the French autour d'elle.

vijayjohn wrote:
linguoboy wrote:I know that gemma can mean "bud" but that's not the central meaning. Moreover, given the surrounding terminology, I thought Mencius launched into his horticultural metaphor halfway through the paragraph and not from the beginning. I never would have thought of using it as a translation of capullo but, then again, I never would've used capullo in that context anyway. (Now I'm curious what the Tamil equivalent was.)

The Tamil equivalent was மொட்டு; in Malayalam at least, we pronounce this [mɔˈʈɯ]. It means 'bud', but apparently, in Malayalam, it can also mean 'nipple', and in Tamil, it can also mean 'glans penis', which might be how it ended up being capullo in Spanish! :shock: :lol:

I knew the word meant was bud. Wordreference gives both botón and capullo as translations for bud in the sense of unopened flower, with capullo listed first, so I picked the first one. I didn't know about the slang meaning of மொட்டு. Linguoboy, what context would you use capullo in normally?

Also, if anyone is willing to help me, I would love to go over my Spanish translation in more detail in order to improve my Spanish. I believe I have a Spanish thread that we could move the discussion to.
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Re: Broken Translation Game 2018

Postby linguoboy » 2019-02-06, 17:22

dEhiN wrote:Linguoboy, what context would you use capullo in normally?

Primarily as an insult, secondarily with the meaning "foreskin". (I see from the DRAE that it's also used for cocoons and acorn caps. I haven't had any reason to discuss these in Spanish, but if I did I'd use capullo now since I don't know any other Spanish word for them.)
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Re: Broken Translation Game 2018

Postby dEhiN » 2019-02-06, 18:53

linguoboy wrote:
dEhiN wrote:Linguoboy, what context would you use capullo in normally?

Primarily as an insult, secondarily with the meaning "foreskin". (I see from the DRAE that it's also used for cocoons and acorn caps. I haven't had any reason to discuss these in Spanish, but if I did I'd use capullo now since I don't know any other Spanish word for them.)

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Re: Broken Translation Game 2018

Postby linguoboy » 2019-02-06, 18:59

I did check with a native Mexican-Spanish speaker (Michoacán) and he said that "bud" is the primary meaning for him and that capullo de rosa is how he would normally say "rosebud". (I would say botón de rosa.)

I was also surprised to see how several of these languages don't differentiate clearly between "buds" and "sprouts". These are completely different things to me.

ETA: Yesterday I asked a colleague who's a native Spanish-speaker from Spain how she would say "rosebud" and she didn't like either or botón de rosa or capullo de rosa (though she did explain that she's lived here long enough that she often has trouble remembering how to say something in Spanish). But whereas the former just didn't sound right, the latter appalled her. She admitted that capullo did have "bud" as a literal meaning but she was uncomfortable even just repeating the word in polite company.
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Re: Broken Translation Game 2018

Postby kevin » 2019-02-08, 22:32

linguoboy wrote:My translation of mi chiedo as is ionadh liom was obviously influenced by English "I wonder". There's not really a good Irish equivalent in any case.

I actually considered whether you meant "I wonder", but the usual dictionaries (in both directions) didn't have that as a possible translation of "is ionadh liom". They suggest that "iontas a dhéanamh" might work better. The other thing that stopped me from translating it like this is that I think "má" can only be translated as "wenn", but not as "ob".

Ar a mhalairt de chuma is an idiom meaning "in a different way". This may be a Munsterism.

I didn't know this phrase before. It seems to have both meanings, but I don't know if there are dialectal differences.

fásann dosna trátaí airde "the tomatoes grow in height". (I guess airde is the logical subject of the sentence?)

I didn't really understand how this sentence worked, and I still don't. If you say "airde" is the logical subject, does this mean that mean that literally the height is growing for the tomatoes or something? Where does the "i dtreo" fit in this sentence? (It's actually in the dictionary as a conjunction "in such a way". I parsed this completely wrong and never thought of looking up "i dtreo go".) This was definitely one of the two hard sentences in the translation.

The other really hard sentence was "Cé acu atánn nó ná fuileann garraithe ár n-eitice chomh curtha in eagar le h-iompar ár saolta, nó lesna garraíodóiríbh.", but that's probably because it already was nonsense. "curtha in eagar" didn't seem like something for which different degrees could be distinguished and "chomh" suggested the opposite. Took me a while to figure out a translation that leaves every possible meaning open. (And don't ask me what the resulting German sentence even means.)

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Re: Broken Translation Game 2018

Postby vijayjohn » 2021-10-02, 0:23

It seems that aaakknu and I are still up for a FUBAR game, but correct me if I'm wrong. A few other people also expressed interest. Are you all still interested?

(Repeating myself here just in case you didn't already see this, but) do you want to host the next game, aaakknu, or would you prefer for me to do it? No one else has expressed interest yet. :)

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Re: Broken Translation Game 2018

Postby linguoboy » 2021-10-07, 18:45

I might could be talked into it again.
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Re: Broken Translation Game 2018

Postby vijayjohn » 2021-10-07, 19:02

We've already started it, I'm afraid. I'm not sure how to include you in the lineup.

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Re: Broken Translation Game 2018

Postby dEhiN » 2021-10-07, 19:35

linguoboy wrote:I might could be talked into it again.

What language pairs would you be willing to do?

vijayjohn wrote:We've already started it, I'm afraid. I'm not sure how to include you in the lineup.

It's only at the second translation. We can fit him in! Plus, after all this is done, I really want him to tell me how badly (or well) my Welsh and Korean translations are/will be. :whistle: :D

PS. I'm being serious though, I am interested in linguoboy's feedback since I know he's studied both languages quite well.
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Re: Broken Translation Game 2018

Postby kevin » 2021-10-07, 21:28

It might actually be more helpful not to know Welsh to translate this because I don't know it either. :lol:

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Re: Broken Translation Game 2018

Postby vijayjohn » 2021-10-07, 21:56

He'll be getting it in Indonesian, though, not Welsh, and perhaps he can help explain any errors in the Welsh translation later. :)

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Re: Broken Translation Game 2018

Postby dEhiN » 2021-10-07, 23:41

vijayjohn wrote:He'll be getting it in Indonesian, though, not Welsh, and perhaps he can help explain any errors in the Welsh translation later. :)

Oh God, now the pressure is on! I might need to shift my plan of 5 days on Welsh and 5 days on Korean to 25% of the time on Welsh and 75% on Indonesian! :shock:
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Re: Broken Translation Game 2018

Postby linguoboy » 2021-10-07, 23:53

:twisted:
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Re: Broken Translation Game 2018

Postby vijayjohn » 2021-10-08, 0:12

So you have less than two more days to translate all the Welsh? :P

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Re: Broken Translation Game 2018

Postby kevin » 2021-10-08, 12:43

I wrote it in two days, so it should be possible. :P


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