Tag: translation
Fishy metaphor
Truffle kerfuffle
Spanish translation out-sourcing
El País macht Arbeit
Sweet broom
Spanish omelette trick
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An excerpt in The Gentleman’s Magazine in 1835, translated by the excellent Louisa Stuart Costello, for whom the gents very sensibly made an exception: If I must fly thee, turn away Those eyes where love is sweetly dwelling, And bid each charm, each grace decay, That smile, that voice, all else excelling; Banish those gentle…
The excerpt feature in Google Books sometimes delivers surreal gems, Escher stones. Here’s one from Advance Japan: A Nation Thoroughly in Earnest: “that the equivalent of the expression ‘not worth a button’ is, in Japanese, ‘not worth the head of a sardine.’ Mackerel also are extremely plentiful.” (I’m translating some mid-nineteenth century colloquial Flemish and…
From Ibn ‘AbdÅ«n’s rulebook for Seville market, translated by Bernard Lewis: “Truffles should not be sold around the mosque, for this is a delicacy of the dissolute.” (Medieval Iberia: Readings from Christian, Muslim, and Jewish Sources, ed Olivia R Constable) There’s no reason to believe this ties in with the prohibition on the use of…
I’ve long shared Mr Davies’ view that translation budgets here are viewed principally as a means of financing feckless relatives and acquaintances.
In reporting the Pope’s visit to Auschwitz, Lola Galán puts in overtime to come up with a curious translation of the German School Association’s most famous pick-me-up slogan, “Arbeit macht frei”: “El trabajo nos hace libres”, “Work makes us free”, which carries a rather different load to the more literal and linguistically perfectly acceptable “El…
Here’s an old foreshadow–give or take the odd sacrifice–of a recent nocturnal trip in the English translation by Grace Frick of Yourcenar’s Hadrian: A few days before the departure from Antioch I went to offer sacrifice, as in other years, on the summit of Mount Casius. The ascent was made by night; just as for…
From John Henry Pepper, The Playbook of Metals: Including Personal Narratives of Visits to Coal, Lead, Copper, and Tin Mines; With a Large Number of Interesting Experiments Relating to Alchemy and the Chemistry of the Fifty Metallic Elements (The Author reserves the right of translation) (London, 1861), chapter entitled The Tricks of the Alchemists: Another…
This is re Margaret’s post re Stewart Lee’s. The first references I know to the stereotype are not British but are to be found in the early German romantics. They note (1), as does Lee, the various expressive possibilities afforded by various languages; (2) the failure of German writers to exploit these former to the…
Rodrigo and Blas Nieto have had their horses translate their website: Along the years the selective selection carried out adquiring black products with the line and origins of Yeguada Militar, José Luis de la Escalera y Bocado, the cattle raising takes an upward line thanks to those good children and daughters that are born annually…
It would be rather nice for someone I know if there were a translation into one of the Romance dialects of Under der linden, but I don’t think there is, and I’m not that far. People probably weren’t as sensitive to lime pollen back then. (I do like Craig E Bertolet’s jealous husband translation, although…
Great tunes, great doggerel, small simians