13 September 2008

A Play on Words

One of the many interesting bits of information forthcoming from the monitor service I’ve engaged is that this blog is being read on a regular basis by thousands in 213 cities in 48 of the world’s nations — large, medium, and small. Which allows me to assume that, whoever all those readers are, they can handle not only basic American English but at least one other language as well.

Either I’ve plunged into a mother lode of American expatriates living and working abroad or I’ve tweaked the interest of many citizens of places from Sweden to Madagascar, from the Netherlands to Taiwan, who count English among their familiar tongues. I can speculate that the Americans over there are, perhaps, lured by the sheer “American-ness” of the blog (and therefore find that it assuages whatever levels of homesickness they may endure). But I’m especially charmed by the idea that there’s also a whole huge potful of erudite “foreigners” who aren’t one bit linguistically or culturally challenged by my often provincial Yankee-doodlings.

All of which caused me, while noodling my doodlings today, to wonder if there might be some fun in giving my readers a translation option. There are some excellent “immediate translations” services available, so why not put links to one of them on my web site? Why not let the German in, say, Kempten, Bavaria, or the Italian in Guardiagrele, or the Ukrainian in Kiev translate the blog for friends and relatives who aren’t so zippy on that arcane American gibberish yet are curious as to what the yokels are chattering about these days?

Hmmm, I thought. Let’s give it a look-see.

Since I was once fairly fluent in German, I decided to do a test run in that language to see how the blog would look in today’s German idiom. So I popped it onto several of the services and followed their instructions, and, sure enough, each returned my blog in a spectacularly Germanic persona. Trouble was, there seemed to be a total absence of the understanding of translation, which, to be accurate and effective, must convey meaning, not just word-for-word exchange. Each service was so utterly electronic and literal, so lacking in the appreciation of nuance, some of the translated passages were absolutely knee-slapping hilarious.

Example: “The Blue Max” was not seen as a proper name or a title but as “das blaue maximus,” when even in 1918 Von Richthofen himself called it “der blaue Max.” Even the medal’s true official name, Pour le Mérite, was translated literally into “pouring the meritorious.”

Example: The services gave up even on simple modifiers such as “graying” (as in “a graying man”) and “wordlessly,” and on common place usages such as “small talk” and “hatefulness,” in each case simply throwing the original English into the German context.

And so on. But the crowning yuk came when I saw my own name translated into Jack Jäger.

So, I thought, maybe this isn’t such a great idea. If these services can project such absurdities in German, I hate to think of what they might do to French, or Russian, or Spanish, or Portugese, or Chinese or whatever. I could become an out-and-out world-wide laughing-stock.

But then, after a moment, my own waggishness intervened. Hey, how about the entertainment value, Jack Jäger? Wouldn’t the reader in, say, Taiwan, get a laugh out of this kind of thing? Wouldn’t it be just as much fun for those guys as it is for me?

And I remembered when, just before VE Day in 1945, a jittery American GI burst into a pillbox, waving his rifle at its occupants, a gaggle of equally frightened German soldiers, shouting a phrase he’d tried to memorize from a handbook but improperly transposed the vowels: “Hände hoch, oder ich scheisse!” and the Germans surrendered their weapons while rolling in gales of laughter. I mean, funny’s funny in any language, right?

So, dear reader, as a temporary experiment and just for the pure heck of it, we’ll be running a translation link on these blog pages. And if you spot some gigglers, please forward them so that we, too, can enjoy the laugh. Okay?