The perils of self-translation.
I’m often baffled by the number of people who seem to think that you can translate from one language to another simply by pulling the words of one language from a dictionary and plugging them into the syntax of the other. It just doesn’t work that way, friends.
Read to the end for a wonderfully delicious twist in the tale.
Amadán.
A fascinating look into the challenges encountered translating Anne Leckie’s excellent Radchaai novels into Bulgarian, German, Hebrew, Japanese, and Hungarian.
What is clear in all of these responses is that by examining the notions of ‘neutral’ and ‘feminine’ in grammar and gender through the lens of translation, we reveal their complexity – and some of their possible futures in languages, in both literature and speech.
This is called expletive infixation.
I’ll always remember the “Phila-fucking-delphia” example from Steven Pinker’s The Language Instinct:
If you said “Philadel-fucking-phia”, you’d be laughed out of the pool hall.
I bet you’re going to just keep clicking and clicking and clicking…
Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse than “webinar.”
