Re: NRC kwaliteitskrant? Echt niet!

On May 30, 9:21 am, "Ekkehard Dengler" <ED...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Harlan Messinger wrote:

I don't understand that. Why would (presumably) native German speakers
who are paid to translate foreign material into their own language,
translate it with words that they know perfectly well don't exist in
their language?

I'm surprised you're surprised; in fact at first I thought you were joking.
Poor translations are not the exception, but the rule, and the more a
language is translated into, the more likely it is to be influenced by the
language or languages of the source texts.
Translators are almost invariably underpaid and under constant pressure to
meet unreasonable deadlines. Another problem is that translators are paid
not by the hour, but by the word or page, which effectively rewards sloppy
work:
The more time you spend looking for the right word, the less you earn. Since
you're never going to be paid well, though, no matter how fast you work,
translation is not a very attractive career option. As a result, far more
untalented and/or lazy people go into translation than you would expect.
One convenient way of dealing with translation problems is leaving difficult
bits untranslated. Scientific jargon can be very, very difficult to
translate because new terms are coined every day but can take years to find
their way into any dictionary. Ideally, scientific jargon would be
translated by bilingual scientists, but bilingual scientists are thin on the
ground and tend to have other, more lucrative things to do.

It's unlikely that any particular pheonomenon would be discovered or
described independently by more than one (team of) scientist(s), so
there isn't going to be some extant equivalent in the target language
that the translator might need to know about. Borrowing the neologism
is surely the best way to proceed; calquing its components used to be
done (cf. threads on oxygen) but doesn't make much sense these days.
Even Arabic, which used to coin new words from old roots, is likely
(like Modern Hebrew) to borrow rather than invent. And the "poetic"
Chinese method of finding characters that are semantically as well as
phonetically relevant to borrowed words is used in special cases, not
in all cases.
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Can anyone translate English to Aramaic?
    ... But not the English language generally. ... post the translation at least into Hebrew ... write it in French or German and I'll translate it into English. ... You wear your vast erudition with consummate grace, Mr. Peter T. Daniels. ...
    (sci.lang)
  • Re: Can anyone translate English to Aramaic?
    ... But not the English language generally. ... write it in French or German and I'll translate it into English. ... I can see why Dan ... The people in the movie who don't speak Aramaic speak "Latin." ...
    (sci.lang)
  • Re: The phrase =?ISO-8859-1?Q?=22T=E1im_ar_do_thaobh=22?=
    ... Carpenter, Wainright etc. - it, the language, has existed here, pre- ... culture suited to these islands. ... Taim ciallmhar would translate as 'I exist being intelligent' - 'I ... Christian invaders translated Irish into writing they were very aware ...
    (soc.culture.irish)
  • Re: Python from Wise Guys Viewpoint
    ... > have silently corrected this bug. ... type is given by a limited language describing such classes. ... or they translate to similar dynamic ... I would debate both points, but this is about static typing, not about ...
    (comp.lang.lisp)
  • Re: Python from Wise Guys Viewpoint
    ... > have silently corrected this bug. ... type is given by a limited language describing such classes. ... or they translate to similar dynamic ... I would debate both points, but this is about static typing, not about ...
    (comp.lang.python)