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Conference thebay::joyoflex

Title:	The Joy of Lex
Notice:	A Notes File even your grammar could love
Moderator:	THEBAY::SYSTEM

Created:	Fri Feb 28 1986
Last Modified:	Mon Jun 02 1997
Last Successful Update:	Fri Jun 06 1997
Number of topics:	1192
Total number of notes:	42769

885.0. "Huit jours, and other translation oddities" by SMURF::SMURF::BINDER (Simplicitas gratia simplicitatis) Thu May 16 1991 14:42

    This is a continuation of "in three days" from the American V. English
    topic.  My thought is that here might be a place to explore some of the
    complexities of translating even the simplest phrase.  Maybe things
    could progress - or digress, as appropriate - to the ways these
    problems affect our thinking.
    
    The original quotation from the Bible (Matthew 26:61) has witnesses
    declaring that Jesus said "...in three days."  This exact phrasing
    appears in the New International Version, the New American Standard
    Version, the King James Version, the Revised Standard Version, and the
    Living Bible.
    
    So I went back to the Greek.  From the "received text" that is supposed
    to underlie the King James Version and most modern translations (the
    latter in the form of the 1966 Nestle Greek Text), I found that the
    original words are "dia' trion hemeron."  This translates, in a very
    scholarish way, as "through the agency or channel of three periods from
    dawn to dark."  As I explained over in A. v. E., the actual time was
    some 39 hours, but it fell across three dawn-to-dark periods.
    
    We could assume that European culture grew to some extent out of
    earlier cultures - a blithe assumption, that - and that the same
    concept of including the parts of the extreme days might have developed
    into the way "huit jours" and "quinze jours" are expressed in French.
    From now (on a Thursday) to next Thursday could easily be counted as
    eight days by this logic.
    
    -d

T.R	Title	User	Personal Name	Date	Lines
885.1	dawn to dark	CSSE32::RANDALL	Bonnie Randall Schutzman, CSSE/DSS	`Thu May 16 1991 16:16`	14
	>Original words are "dia' trion hemeron." This translates, in a >very scholarish way, as "through the agency or channel of three >periods from dawn to dark." Complicated by the fact that the Jewish system is to count a "day" as "sunset to sunset." The event in question still falls across parts of three days, though, so it's possibly a moot point. Does the translation of day as "dawn to dark" imply that the times when it was dark weren't part of any day to the Greeks??? --bonnie
885.2	Re: dawn to dark	SMURF::CALIPH::binder	Simplicitas gratia simplicitatis	`Thu May 16 1991 18:59`	7
	No, the "dawn to dark" concept isn't to imply that dark time wasn't seen as part of the day. As with may words in most languages, "hemera" has more than one shade of meaning; it can, less commonly, mean the whole 24-hour period. In English, we talk about "day" and "night" as separate things, and we also think of a day as 24 hours. -d
885.3	Coming Soon: Le Monde de Wayne	RDVAX::KALIKOW	This is your Brain on VACATION!	`Tue May 12 1992 18:17`	26
	... sent to me by the "West Coast branch of JoyOfLex" (i.e., my kid Jodie) and plunked down here because it seemed the most appropriate note responding to a dir/tit="transl"... Anyone got a better home for this, sing out... :-) ===== Seen in (I think) Time Magazine: It's the ultimate challenge for translators: getting Europeans to understand the uniquely American dialogue of "Wayne's World." Right now, translators at United International Pictures are trying to do just that for French, Spanish and German audiences. Some samples: "Schwing!" In French: "Ch'poing!" In Spanish: "Dooing!" "Extreme closeup!" In German: "Pull in on the [teeth] fillings!" "I think I'm gonna hurl." In Spanish: "An urge to vomit is entering me." In French: "It's time to purge." "He shoots, he scores!" In German: "Each shot a hit." "And monkeys might fly out of my butt!" In Spanish: "Judgment Day is tomorrow." [Jodie's aside: I'm glad I'm not a Spanish native speaker to miss out on that one!] =====
885.4		PASTIS::MONAHAN	humanity is a trojan horse	`Wed May 13 1992 00:38`	9
	It is interesting that in some respects a translation can sometimes better than the original. Many of you have probably seen the "Asterix le Gaulois" books. In the original, the druid who prepares the magic potions is Panoramix and the bard who plays intolerable music is Assurancetourix. In French the names are mildly amusing, but the meaning has nothing to do with their trades. In the English translation they are called Getafix and Cacofonix.
885.5		RANGER::BACKSTROM	bwk,pjp;SwTools;pg2;lines23-24	`Thu Jun 11 1992 20:37`	4
	Fwiw, in the Finnish version those characters are named respectively Akvavitix and Turbadurix, which can be related to their roles. ...petri