Translation

My last post on this site about Japanese Language and Culture grew organically out of me keeping this clip about the proper way to wear a kimono. I kept it in part because I have a long-standing interest in clothes but also because it explains that a Japanese idiom for I'm broke originated from how the kimono is worn and used and where people kept their wallets while wearing a kimono.

Idioms are especially hard to learn and translate. They typically grow out of cultural context and even the people using them routinely because it's their native language frequently don't know the history and context of common phrases.

Growing up in the Deep South, I often heard people say I could care less when they really meant I couldn't care less. And that's not even an idiom.

So he says one way to say "I'm broke" in Japanese is a Japanese phrase that he translates as "My bosom is cold."

That's probably not exactly what that means in Japanese. It probably means "My chest is cold" and it's a mistranslation because breast can mean either bosom or chest and such details are exactly why translation is extremely hard.

We call a man's armor for his chest a breastplate though you don't typically refer to a man's chest as his breast. We also speak of breast meat when carving birds up for dinner and talking about the chest part of the bird, though birds have no mammaries at all.

So he looked up some word in Japanese similar to breast -- which can potentially mean either chest or bosom -- and came up with bosom instead of chest. And this happens a LOT.

In some video game, a Japanese word that can mean either feather or wing got translated wrong because the translator didn't have images in front of them and there's a Japanese word that can mean either blue or green that frequently is translated as the wrong color if the translator doesn't have an image in front of them.

This post began because I recently told a story elsewhere about my understanding of böse auge and schimpfen and that understanding comes from being told anecdotes and my understanding doesn't quite match what Google translate says. It says schimpfen means to scold and that's probably not entirely wrong but after publishing that, it occurred to me that probably anytime Google translate says to (verb) it can also be translated as (verb)ing and scolding would be closer to what I understand schimpfen to mean.

It's from an anecdote about my older sister getting mad at Daddy when she was little and glaring at him. And my German mother told her she was schimpfen and had böse auge.

Google translate says böse auge means evil eye. I suspect a better translation would be something like giving him the stink eye or if looks could kill. We have the phrase evil eye, but we don't use it to mean staring angrily at someone like my sister was doing to her adoring father for some reason.

It's not like Dad was abusive. My Dad desperately wanted children and had two previous wives and no kids and my sister was their first child and he DOTED on her. I don't even know WHY she was making faces to communicate her disapproval of whatever he had done.

It's a story about a small child having a big emotional reaction and it's a very innocent story where her mom tenderly validates her feelings by explaining it in German, our mother's native language, to kind of playfully distract her.

I understand schimpfen to mean angry at someone and communicating it in some fashion and scolding is not outright wrong. If I'm correct, it might be better to say something like giving him a piece of my mind.

It's super hard to accurately translate language because language is associated with cultural context. The clip above doesn't bother to try to translate kimono because there is no English word for it. Calling it a dress would be wrong.

I use the fact that translation is almost never exact to help me remember foreign words.

The German word for bottle is flasche which I remember as similar to flask. But flask and bottle aren't used identically in English.

Fenêtre is French for window. The little "hat" over the middle e means in old French there was an s before the t. The German word for window is fenster. 

I wouldn't translate flasche as flask, but I associate the words in my mind to help me make that leap to bottle more easily.

My mind works a certain way and I know those are not exactly correct but I also know a lot of things don't really translate and to actually understand it, you would need authentic experience, like knowing this garment is a kimono, not a dress, but many things get translated to something like "dress" for kimono to try to communicate at all.