lpetrich
Contributor
The Shallowness of Google Translate - The Atlantic -- about natural-language translation software. Author Douglas Hofstadter objects rather strongly to the proposition that the existing sort of autotranslation software will make human translators pretty much obsolete, except for doing touch-ups and the like.
I don't feel as strongly, but I think that his overall point is correct. Rhythms in words and other such things can be difficult to get across without some creative less-than-literal translation. I also find that autotranslators often do clumsy-looking translation, and sometimes very screwy trasnlation.
Sometimes it is fairly easy. "The Song of the Bell" (Friedrich Schiller, 1798) contains this inscription on the titular bell, an inscription in Latin:
Vivos voco
Mortuos plango
Fulgura frango
A fairly literal translation nevertheless keeps the rhythm of the original:
I call the living
I mourn the dead
I break the lightning
A certain Alexander Unzicker once wrote a book in German, "Vom Urknall zum Durchknall". A literal translation of that title is "From the Big Bang to madness", but that title lacks the rhythm of the original. I thought of a less literal but more rhythmic translation: "From the Big Bang to the Big Crack-Up". He and Sheilla Jones worked on an English translation, but they titled it "Bankrupting Physics".
I close with noting an old Italian saying, "traduttore, traditore": "translator, traitor".
I don't feel as strongly, but I think that his overall point is correct. Rhythms in words and other such things can be difficult to get across without some creative less-than-literal translation. I also find that autotranslators often do clumsy-looking translation, and sometimes very screwy trasnlation.
Sometimes it is fairly easy. "The Song of the Bell" (Friedrich Schiller, 1798) contains this inscription on the titular bell, an inscription in Latin:
Vivos voco
Mortuos plango
Fulgura frango
A fairly literal translation nevertheless keeps the rhythm of the original:
I call the living
I mourn the dead
I break the lightning
A certain Alexander Unzicker once wrote a book in German, "Vom Urknall zum Durchknall". A literal translation of that title is "From the Big Bang to madness", but that title lacks the rhythm of the original. I thought of a less literal but more rhythmic translation: "From the Big Bang to the Big Crack-Up". He and Sheilla Jones worked on an English translation, but they titled it "Bankrupting Physics".
I close with noting an old Italian saying, "traduttore, traditore": "translator, traitor".