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

[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.