“Lions Bible”, from 1804: 1 Kings 8:19 reads “thy son that shall come forth out of thy lions”, rather than “loins”. What would the world have been like had the Lyle’s Golden Syrup tin borne a picture of the rotting carcass of some loins with a swarm of bees? (Via a lovely guy who seems…
“All day I’ve faced, the barren waste,without a taste of… Can you see that big green tree,Where the sandwish’s running free,And it’s waiting there for you and me?” I do Cool Water with the organ, and it’s a great favourite, but the other day I made the mistake of introducing the mirage song as a…
All-star bill featuring Dan Mendoza aka the fighting Jew, manly Victorians, Joe Louis and the Dixieaires at the Battle of Jericho, Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger, Rocky Graziano aka the Maharishi Yoghurt, Bob Dylan and Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, Muhammad Ali and over-reliance on computer technology, Rich Hall and the George Foreman Grill, Wesley Willis and Batman, and Ivor Cutler.
The London Magazine, 1734: Verses occasioned by Mr. Budgel’s modest Proposal, in the Daily Post-Boy of Aug. 31. to give the Publick a new and accurate Translation of a late celebrated French Treatise, on the Causes of the Grandeur and Declension of the Romans, and which has been already translated. Dulness, good goddess, chanc’d to…
The Vocabulaire européen des philosophies has now been versioned in English as Dictionary of untranslatables and Spanish as Diccionario de intraducibles. Here Mark Liberman cites Adam Gopnik, who seems to think the book is self-refuting Sapir-Whorfism, and here Jacques Lezra, coordinator of the English-language version, seems to be indulging the following incoherence: linguistic relativism is…
Between thieves, who profit from mistranslation, and fools, who know no better (and no profit), there lurks an intriguing class: lunatics, whose often considerable mind is whisked off to unexpected places by absurd fancies as to the nature of their task. The bigot Barnaby Rich writes in The Irish Hubbub (1617): And as the irish…
Colin‘s letter to the Galicians: Ten years or so ago, I sent a personal letter to the Director of the said Rías Baixas Tourist Board, offering to translate all their promotional material for nowt. I never even had the courtesy of a reply. But, anyway, here’s how their English material turned out, absent my help.…
Don Colin, who has more members than Lingual S&M, wonders whether this is de la abeja rodillas. Just out of interest, here’s the original 1st para: Se encuentra a pie mar, sobre una pequeña península y, durante el siglo I a.C., las gentes que lo habitaron vivían en unas 20 viviendas en forma circular dentro…
Via LS an anonymous cartoon of the gulf between what we (would like to) think we have said and what we (are understood to) have actually said: Why don’t we say what we think? Why do the inventors of magnificent flying machines gibber like madmen? Why, in our case, do excellent Spanish bars produce hilarious…
