I owe everybody a post in which I compare various language learning programs such as Fluenz and Rosetta Stone. This isn't that post. Instead, my jumping-off point is the historical Rosetta Stone itself.
I suspect most folks reading this are familiar with the story. Napoleon's troops in Egypt found a stone inscribed with the same text three ways: in ancient Greek (known), in Egyptian hieroglyphics (not known), and in an alternate Egyptian script (known). The parallel text gave researchers their first toehold into the decipherment of hieroglyphics, thus paving the way for many Scooby Doo mysteries.
I've been wondering recently: just how parallel were those supposedly parallel texts, anyway? Here in Europe, where multilingual texts are everywhere, it seems fiendishly difficult to say the same thing in different languages. For example, here near the Mont Blanc tunnel, a major European truck thoroughfare, signs in French, German, Italian, and English are all over the highways. We often drive a very steep grade where signs in each language advise truckers to use a low gear-- except for the German sign, which says instead Gehen Sie zurück! "Go back!" Fortunately, one does not see jackknifed German trucks littering the valleys, probably because all the truckers these days are Polish or Slovenian anyway.
Either Gehen Sie zurück here is an error or else a German motoring term I am not familiar with. But you find plenty of instances where texts differ in ways that seem intriguingly intentional. Our family spent last weekend in a hotel in Italy, in which placards gave emergency instructions in Spanish, French, German, Italian, English, Russian, Chinese, and Japanese. I'm not competent to say anything useful about the last three languages, but the first four advised guests to remain calm in precisely the grammatical spot where English speakers were directed to "keep quiet!"
Do Italians think Anglophones are loud? Louder than, say, the klaxons? I daresay the words for "quiet" and "calm" in various languages fill out a kind of cloud of meaning, and the translator happened to select an English word from one of the outer precincts of the cloud. But it is still very easy, and a lot of fun, to see the specter of linguistico-cultural nationalism.
I have never found a purer example of non-parallel parallel texts than a lowly placard I once saw in a U.S.-based airliner lavatory. The English said, as it always does, "Please use your towel to wipe the basin for the next passenger." There was a French "translation" below, but even with my then much weaker French I could readily see that it was not the same text at all. It read "The washbasin is a shared resource. A simple coup of the towel keeps it presentable for everyone."
This took my breath away (to be fair, the condition of the lavatory made that easy). The French translator could have provided a word-for-word translation of the English; but this anonymous philosophe determined that, in place of the English speakers' appeal to be nice to a randomly selected fellow passenger, Francophones were more likely to be moved by an invocation of civic virtue.
What are we missing between the lines of that Rosetta Stone, anyway? There must be something hiding in there, some epochal secret, probably about ancient Greeks' personal grooming.
I used to believe those nuances in wording provided cultural insight, but now I think they're more likely the result of translator inexperience or incompetence. (Sadly; the former view was much more inspiring.)
ReplyDeleteThere are two likely explanations for, say, the German on the Italian tunnel sign. First, the administrative body responsible for getting the sign translated into all those languages used native Italian speakers, and the one who produced the German was not a translator at all, nor a particularly good speaker of German, and this is what they could come up with. Second, the author of the German was, in fact, German, but not a translator, and was in a very cross mood that day. Or is afraid of tunnels. Or felt the Italian was too namby-pamby for the situation, and provided a little editorial enhancing. Either way, that translation is a major no-no, and I can't imagine a professional translator would have made it.
You'd be surprised how often the "hey, Bob down the hall speaks X" approach is used. For some reason, people seem to think only their own language contains native speakers who are bad at it; a native speaker of any other language is automatically a linguistic genius. I once translated a series of computer how-to books into English. I opened my complementary copy of the third one to a random page when it arrived, and saw sentences that were quite definitely not mine staring back at me. (Effect where affect should be, and so forth.) Turns out the client had gotten his webmaster, who happened to be American, to do the "copyediting." I was, and still am, livid. My name is on those books, errors and all.
That said, I still harbor some hope that your French-in-the-lavatory example is that peek into a culture's psyche I once naively assumed...though, having experienced French toilets over the summer, I rather doubt it is.
I have another theory regarding the "Gehen Sie zurück" sign. Maybe they actually meant "Gehen Sie einen Gang zurück", which essentially means "Downshift". But I don't know why they would have left out essential words. Didn't fit on the sign and someone took it upon themselves to edit arbitrarily? Or maybe Germans just like to play it safe :-).
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