Interesting in translation vol. 4: Smarter than me

Something i came up a few days ago, originally in italian. Let see if it works in english too... you tell me.


Smarter than me

It was said it would be updated
but it wasn't. On the contrary, I lose it.
We are speaking about Facebook,
something worth a withdrawal crisis!
But maybe it's just that:
my cellphone is,
really, a smartphone.


The original italian:


Lui e' piu' furbo di me

Dice che lo aggiorna,
ma poi non lo fa, anzi resto senza.
Parliamo di Facebook,
roba da crisi d'astinenza!
O forse semplicemente
il mio cellulare lo e',
smartphone veramente.

And now some observation:
The biggest issue was the gender. A phone, being an inanimate object require neutral gender pronouns in english, immediately giving away that we are speaking about an object while in italian, not having a formal neutral gender, the inanimate nature of the subject can't be noticed until the final reveal).
In italian there are a couple rhymes too (senza/astinenza and semplicemente/veramente), something i will not touch in english as my pronunciation is something horrible, practically it is only a written language to me... and it seems there are no good rules to sort out how a written world should be spoken in english ;-)

Interesting in translation vol. 3

In past weeks i had my brain swirling with thoughts about the use of you in english as both the singular and plural form of the second person. I'm not thinking about the T-V question (the intimate against the honorific use of the second person) but just on how much this lack of number distinction influence thinking.

Even if in the end ideas come before language, language influences thinking patterns (Newspeak from 1984 anyone ?) and so i'm wondering how english speaking minds deal with this lack of differentiation.
Whenever i think about that i think also about subtle and evil group dynamics, with people thinking about friend/neutral/antagonist factions and speaking differentiating between a single you and making the others you becoming a threatening them.

In every language, especially in writings this problem arises, just think about this: in a group of more than three persons one of them says "Would you come with us ?" In english it is not clear how many people are asked to come with how many "of us", in italian it could be translated in two ways, "[Tu] Vieni con noi ?" and "[Voi] Venite con noi ?". The first form is clear, one person is asked to come while in the second at least two persons are asked; it is always unclear how many people "us" is referring to.  And in both cases if this is happening in writing instead of face to face it is absolutely unclear who exactly the you are!  The bracketed pronouns are usually omitted as the italian verb conjugation is explicit enough to get the idea. I find it almost amusing that the language using pronouns more explicitly is the one being more confusing ;-) .

In a similar way i'm even wondering if/how much people living in the United States of America thinks about the pronoun us  being the same as the usual shortening of their state name: US.  Do they notice that or they always think about those two letters as separated when using it for the state ?

Oh, lovely polymorphic untameable languages! :-)

Interesting in translation vol. 2

A silly wordplay in italian: "Qual'e' il contrario di abbondantemente ?" (what is the opposite of abbondantemente ?) And the answer would be "aberlinopetrarcadicelaverita'".

Dante and Petrarca,
painted by Giovanni dal Ponte

And now we are going to see its silliness.
Lets start it the literal translation: abbondantemente means "plenty"... but aberlinopetrarcadicelaverita' has no meaning, at least not in italian.
...So where is the joke ?
The joke is in cutting down the words in smaller ones; for abbondantemente we have
abbon = in Bonn
dante = Dante Alighieri (the greatest italian poet)
mente = tells lies;
while for aberlinopetrarcadicelaverita' we have:
aberlino = in Berlin
petrarca = Francesco Petrarca (another of the greatest italian poets and almost contemporary to Dante)
dicelaverita' = tells the true.


Now the question is if this post is silly enough to keep me awake in a dull and rainy Sunday afternoon ?

Interesting in translation vol. 1

Languages are wonderful things, so different as cultures and histories are varied but still so similar as they are still the same thing, the instrument with humans try to communicate with each other. I'm not a linguist but i still like to learn things about languages and noticing differences and similarities between them on my own.

That said I'm thinking about a series of posts about the interesting, curious, funny and nice (or not so nice) things about languages i found.I will write mainly about the two languages i know better, italian (my own language) and english, but i may wander around to languages i don't know but I've read something about (and i will probably make a fool of myself doing that).

I'll start with one of the most famous italian word: ciao.
Ciao is the main informal greeting in italian, used both when meeting and when leaving people. The thing i find interesting about it is that not many people (not even italians) know its meaning and origin (maybe ciao wikipedia page may help it).  Ciao comes from venetian language as a contraption of  "sciào vostro" or "sciào su" and both can be translated as "I'm your slave".  But when it was borrowed by italian it completely lost even the faintest idea of putting yourself at someone service and now it does only carry the greeting meaning.

Image used under Creative Commons from xueexueg.