as the days pass, I am even more impressed

[kaigou]

It's crazy, the things you never realize about language, when it comes to translations. How do brains work on two tracks at once? What lies in the heads of all those people at the UN who can listen, real-time, to one language and simultaneously speak the same meaning in a different language?

Hell, I can barely manage it for a word, maybe a single phrase, and then my brain breaks. But more than that, slowly working my way through corrections is really making me think (which, okay, is a something I like) about what words and phrases mean.

For instance, the phrase: I feel bad when... In French, this has been translated as je compatis -- which really means, "I sympathize."

Immediately, I recall the phrase a lawyer/linguist friend used to tell me: "I empathize but I do not sympathize." In other words: I feel your pain, but I don't feel sorry on your behalf. What does it mean to say, "I feel bad"? Does it mean sympathy -- as in, a feeling of shared pain/upset? Or does it include an element of regret, as though one is responsible for it: I'm sorry this happened to you.

You feel bad on someone's behalf without actually feeling responsible for the situation, which is what I'd consider empathy -- but the distinction between the two words (sympathy and empathy) is one that's frequently lost on many readers. Both are mentally translated (it seems to me) as "I feel bad", hence the ambiguity.

Talking it over with CP, and I suggested "I'm bothered when..." but as he pointed out, "bother" has a connotation of annoyance. In other words, "I'm inconvenienced when..." and that's not the same at all. Then we thought of "I take it personally", but that implies that the situation is causing one to be on the defensive. Just what are you taking personally? If it's "I take it personally when a friend is upset," does this mean you're feeling yourself guilty for their upset, or are your personal feelings because you're upset on your friend's behalf?

So perhaps simply, "I get upset when my friend is upset." I suppose most people would say that's sympathy (it's actually empathy), and then we're back to the beginning. Though CP suggested taking it down to the actual meaning: do you share the upset, or are you upset only by extension?

Perhaps "I share my friend's reaction..." is less ambiguous. Hm. I wonder what that is in Spanish.

Comments

[nagasvoice]

Oddly enough, last night I happened to wander into the section of Wikipedia which offers proverbs in other languages and their translation. Some sections are pretty small. Checking on the big Spanish section, you often see one Spanish phrase provide several variants (sometimes from different countries) and there can be subtle differences between several sample translations, very much like the English ambiguity in "I feel bad". It's clear that these differing shades of meaning can all apply to how the phrase gets used. The really interesting part were the connections that seem unfamiliar, that are not linked like that in English.

[kaigou]

Ahahaha, Chinese was the opposite. I found a page of someone's collections of Chinese proverbs, and four characters -- just four characters! -- would have like five or six different English translations. All sort of the same, but off by just a hair.

Though with Spanish proverbs, I've found the same -- there's one that, IIRC, is literally "no mind, no heart", ack, something like that, I can't recall now. But it's the one that's sometimes translated as "out of sight, out of mind," but then I've come across it being translated elsewhere as something more like "distance makes the heart grow fonder" which I would've thought was the exact opposite. That kind of, "is this supposed to be sarcasm?"

But then, those nuances are what makes learning a different language feel like an impossible task, sometimes. Like you could know the entire dictionary and still not really get the meaning.

[nagasvoice]

Of course the problem with learning it instead from being immersed in speaking and hearing it, is being immersed in making all those odd mistakes...
Interesting blog I came across last week is called "Ask a Korean". I haven't yet pulled together an actual question to pose there, as vague nebulous stuff looks pretty silly when diced and sliced with that kind of wit.
Back to the point, he had a post talking about the problems with current models of acquiring a new language as an adult, and how by brute force memorizing/hard work he became proficient in English at a college level in two years from pretty much nuthin'.
http://askakorean.blogspot.com/2010/01/koreans-english-acquisition-and-best.html

[kaigou]

Ayup, someone sent me to that blog awhile ago. Informative and witty, and his posts about language are really... well, not fun (in that, it's the reality of a learning a new language) but definitely something that I think people sometimes need to hear. When you get right down to it, the only way to expand your vocabulary is by sheer memorization.

That was probably one of the worst parts about studying Mandarin, was the fact that the only way to get through was to simply memorize. But at the same time, it gave me even more of a distaste for the trend going through some schools of having kids "spell it out". That's how you end up with kids like -- well, I won't say who, but let's just say so much for public education -- who write things like "hopping" for "hoping", which isn't even accurate spelling-it-out. You just have to memorize.

This lack of memorization is also the reason that although I could understand a great deal when I was in France, thanks to sheer immersion, I couldn't actually say a great deal, comparatively. My vocabulary was just never that large, so I didn't have the words at my fingertips (tonguetip?). I could understand a word if I heard it, but the words that were second nature were actually only, I don't know, maybe a thousand at most... and most adult vocabularies in any language are easily ten times that. Pulling numbers off my head, but you get what I mean.

Unfortunately, the "watch and repeat" has been a miserable failure, because I can't put up with the Mainland/PRC insistence on dubbing EVERYTHING on television, even when the actors are native speakers. (I don't get it, I really don't.) And I prefer the storylines in Taiwanese dramas, anyway, but then I trip over the peculiar-to-my-Mainland-taught-ears Taiwanese accents. Either what little decent pronunciation I have is going to end up completely skewered, or I should just give up and try to get really, really good at reading characters on-screen, really fast. *sigh*

[nagasvoice]

My sympathy is with you on the difficulties!

[soukup]

Here's a nosy question about language-learning and memory which you can feel totally free to ignore if it's too weird and/or personal:

I'm so curious about what it was like to learn French purely by immersion and without knowing how anything was spelled, because when I say I'd be helpless without my alphabets, I'm really not kidding. Do you think it's possible that not being familiar with the spelling/phonetics was part of what made it hard for you to speak that language? In other words, do you remember words better when you feel like you can link them to a phonetics system?

[kaigou]

I should probably clarify: I had only a year's worth of classroom French before going overseas. I had some basic comprehension of how things were spelled, and the rudimentary understanding of the most common vocabulary, irregular verbs, and things like that. What I didn't have was practice stringing it all together, let alone in dealing with unfamiliar words added in.

What I basically figured out once there, on a sort of unconscious level, was that if you knew whether you were talking plural or singular, and what person (1st, 2nd, 3rd) then spelling aside, the sound is often very similar. A lot of the verbs end in either a long-a sound, a long-e sound, and sometimes an eu-sound, from what I recall. Something like that. If you could narrow it down by knowing it's masculine and singular, then chances were pretty good the ending sound would be such-and-such. Written, the ending might be -e, -eau, et, es. Like the last sound of 'travailler' and 'des' is the same, though spelled completely differently.

And, too, if you can get out the first half of any word, the rest can trail off. There is nothing that sounds like a native quite so much as slurring, but I didn't do it to sound native, I did it to avoid being definitive about which sound-ending I had guessed would work (and thus revealing for a fact how ignorant I really was). So a lot of my speech probably sounded sort of like, "I work... yester... an' the bi(ke)" with barest hints of the final sound. Speak fast, and slur, and you sound like everyone around you, anyway -- people really only require the first sound to know where you're going with something, and the rest they gather from context.

I guess what I'm saying is that I only had the basics of a formal phonetic system, in that I knew the fundamental sound-patterns that would form words, and I knew the sounds I could expect to hear. If that's a phonetic system (if very informal), then that's what I latched onto, but I didn't have spelling to go with it. Or maybe I should say, I rapidly cast aside the issue of spelling in favor of just keeping up with the conversations.

Strangely, similar happens to me when I read Mandarin: I can't read the characters and think, "two dogs played in the park" -- I see each character and 'hear' the character-name in my head: er ge gou... and then I translate the sound into the English meaning. Perhaps that comes from my first major second language also working in that way -- because I've noticed in reading over the French translation of the survey, it only makes sense to me if I read it out loud. Then suddenly I can understand what's being said, and I can sense when something's off -- not because I know the word to replace it, but because the sounds, or the pattern of them, are still buried in my neurons somewhere.

[leorising]

And then there's, "Tu es tres sympathique," which means, "You're nice." Sympathetic=nice. Buh? Sorry, I'm too tired to parse this tonight, LOL.

[kaigou]

The one that tripped me up only a few days ago was, I was reminded, one that tripped me up even when i was in France: assister, "to attend". I think I actually went out of my way to use an alternate, rather peculiar (as in, not usually used in that way) verb rather than use 'assiste' because I just couldn't get that one word right in my head. It's like we get connections/connotations (rightly or wrongly) and ever after, we have to work twice as hard to remember, wait, no, that word actually means this.

There are several english words that are the same for me, so it's not just the specific language: overt is one of them. Another is the phrase, "again by half" which always makes me stop and do math or something. (And then I end up still unable to parse the phrase, and translate it instead as just "more" and I'm not even sure that's right. Bleah.)

[leorising]

I've been a little slow with this, but:

Let us not forget das Gift, which means "poison". Think of the cultural dissociation when non-English-savvy Germans get off the plane and see the airport Gift Shop...!

Or how we went around the first week of first-year French saying, "Blessez-vous" when someone sneezed, only to find out blesser means "to wound".

Fun times with language. :D

[kaigou]

Yeah. I had a friend who came to the US to work in IT, and he told me that the first time he came to the US, he landed in JFK airport, where he had a few hours before his flight to DC. The problem? He really really needed to go, but he couldn't find any bathrooms. What he could find were plenty of "rest" rooms. What the hell, he said his reaction had been: do Americans not have public bathrooms? And how many naps do Americans take, anyway?

[leorising]

HAhaha!

[(Anonymous)]

Except that the translation of 'I feel bad when... ' is 'Je suis desole(e) quand... ', not 'Je compatis quand... ' and the word for word translation of 'Je suis desole(e) quand... ' is 'I am sorry when... '

'Je compatis quand... ' on the other hand, is closer to 'I sympathize when...' or 'I empathize when... ' if you prefer, the distinction is just not that clear in French either.

Just my two cents.

[kaigou]

Which was exactly my point: that the apparently inaccurate translation revealed the ambiguity in the original English phrase.

(Especially since "I feel bad" does not necessarily imply feeling sorry, in English. It's a rather neutral term, as to whether one is responsible, or to what exactly one feels bad about. The alt-languages translations don't seem to have a common everyday phrase that captures the same level of vagueness.)

[hl]

I don't remember how I translated it off-hand, but I think I would go with a literal translation (me siento mal cuando) just to keep the ambiguity. (I do remember the phrase in English being very ambiguous when I answered the poll. I answered positively -- I feel bad when people feel bad, in general -- though the feeling wouldn't change at all my behaviour towards fanfiction. I.e. they have a right to feel as they feel and I empathize, but I have a right to write fanfic, so I wouldn't let their feelings encroach upon my freedom to act as I please in this matter.)

[kaigou]

It's the phrase's ambiguity in English that I didn't really grasp fully until I realized the difficulty of translating it -- and it does seem that this ambiguity opens the door to different people reading it different ways. But then again, to say, "I sympathize" may be more specific but it's still an ambiguous phrase, compared to something like, oh, "I share my friend's hurt..."

I remember my mother talking about doing major surveys and how Every. Little. Word. had to be considered, and I remember nodding like, oh, of course! But I really had no idea how much a single word or phrase can be read in such different ways. I mean, maybe it's that we get used to seeing/reading a word or phrase per our own exposure to it, and close our minds off to the potential ambiguity... and it takes people with different experience/exposure to snap us back open again.