Quote:
Originally Posted by lagtight
1. I'd first off like to apologize for derailing this thread. I wasn't really trying to provoke a fight about dynamic versus formal equivalence, so I should probably should have not brought it up in the first place.
2. Having said that, let's say I'm translating a German novel into English. Let's use your example. The formal equivalence would be "We do not own the needle in the wall." As a translator, should I render the quote as "We do not own the needle in the wall" or as "We're broke?"
3. I'll let you have the last word in this derail if you'd like.
4. Have a blessed day!
A Norwegian novel, but that's not on you since I never declared my first language.
It's not a derail, issues of translations are important to a theological discussion on "What does God want me to do", which is the thread topic. I don't think anyone here masters ancient hebrew, and even the ones who do disagree on Biblical translations.
I think direct translations are almost always bad for idioms and expressions and often bad for statements that depend on flow and context to convey meaning.
Consider the statement "He fought the system". Even in English it can convey anything from violent rebellion to sending letters, so we can't know what is meant without looking at the context. A target language for translation might operate less dependently on context to convey such meanings. Secondly, the target language might not have a word for fighting which is so broad. Thirdly, the expression could lose all meaning if the target language does not share the concept of "system" as some sort of antagonist whole.
Now, to answer your question 2.
First we need to realize that "nål" doesn't mean needle, it means nail. This is an older usage of the word that is longer commonly understood. Already here you see how challenging a translation effort can be, because we're translating an expression that even the people who speak the language usually misreads.
Secondly we have to know our language history to and context of the text and when it was written to know exactly the sense sense of despair and tragedy that is implied, as over the time the expression became more commonly used to just mean "broke" and not necessarily "extremely poor".
We could do a half'n'half translation, trying to keep the actual implication of the idiom in our phrase. "We were so poor we could not even afford nails to hang our belongings on". But again, this is a bad translation, because we're not actually saying that we can't afford nails, it would originally just have been a figurative way of saying we own very little of value.
We could directly translate it into a meaning that is never technically wrong, "we're broke", but that loses the lyrical flow of the original sentence and some of the tragedy conveyed.
The best approach is probably to use some fitting expression in the target language, if available. "We are dirt poor" or "we have next to nothing", for example, preferably one that fits the prose in the text.
Usually when languages share language groups this isn't very difficult to do, since the shared cultural heritage also means that cultural concepts are often shared. But when you go from one language group to another, like ancient Hebrew to English does, things can get very tricky very fast.
Last edited by tame_deuces; 02-08-2018 at 07:48 AM.