Lost In Translation / Real Life

• The famous Greek cynic Diogenes was known to walk the streets with a lamp in the middle of the day, and if asked would say "I am looking for a man". For whatever reason this is widely translated as "I am looking for an honest man". This causes problems when combined with the incident in which he brought a featherless chicken to Plato (who had defined a "man" as a featherless biped) and exclaimed "Behold! I have found a man". Because of the change, most readers won't realize that the latter incident was not simply mocking Plato's definition, but also the culmination of a long Running Gag.
• This is a recurring, cross-language problem with translation of nicknames of various rulers. Sometimes the end result is completely different than the original, intended meaning. One of the most notable examples is Carolingian king Charles III. His nickname, Simplex, references the fact he was both very straightforward and, unlike his father, didn't have a stutter. Cue being known in whole lot of languages as Charles the Simple Minded or a variation of this.
• In English, half eight means 08.30; in German 'halb acht' means 07.30. In the dub of Bang Boom Bang, the translators got some instances right but then other instances wrong.
  • This idiom, as well as "a quarter eight", varies in English dialects (say between Canadian, British, and American English) and with regional dialects as well. A good translator would be able to understand the idiom at both ends of translation, but local or regional variances may still cause confusion with an already ambiguous statement.
  • English as spoken in much of America uses "quarter past", "half past" and "quarter 'til/to" due to this confusion. Examples would include 3:15, 3:30, and 3:45 being "quarter past 3," "half past 3," and "quarter 'til 4," respectively.
  • South African English does the same. However, occasionally you will hear some people mention something like "half three", which would mean 2:30, since it's halfway to 3.
  • It also existd in Germany, where in the North, it is common to say "quarter until eight" and "quarter after eight", but in the South, most people will say "three quarter eight" and "quarter nine". Northerners moving south always need some time to get used to it, while the other way round it is quite obvious.
  • Norwegian custom uses "kvart på/etter" (quarter on/after) to denote :45 and :15 respectively, but "half four" is 3:30. Some Norwegians alternatively prefer 24-hour time, e.g. "nineteen thirty-five of the clock"
  • In Russian, when quarters and halves are used, it usually means quarter/half OF the hour you're saying, as opposed to the hour PLUS what you're saying. It can be confusing, since Russian uses suffixes instead of many conjunctions and all articles. "Quarter fourth" is 3:15.
    • Generally speaking, the idiom with more things explicitly stated is easier to understand for people whose idiom has fewer words than the other way around—a part of why people whose native language marks more things than English does can have trouble with English.
• Written time can cause confusion as well — for instance, the examples above would all be considered to related to the morning for those parts of the world which exclusively use the 24-hour clock.
• Related to written time is numerical dates: for example, 12-01-09 to most of the Western world would mean the 12th of January 2009, while in most Eastern countries, it would mean the 9th of January 2012; and in the USA, it would be the 1st of December 2009.
  • However, as xkcd notes, 2009-01-12 is unambiguously January 12. To remember this, know the principle behind it: it lets you sort dates as though digits were letters of the alphabet, which is easier to program into a computer.
• James Randi, when interviewed by a Japanese newspaper, jokingly mentioned that a person he once talked to performed a Seen-It-All Suicide. The newspaper took it literally.
  • Sarcasm's not really big in much of East Asia. In fact frequently, when a Japanese person says something was "an American style joke"... they mean it was a lie.
• Ever wonder why DVD players from different manufacturers do not always play discs as expected? The reason is because the DVD video specification was developed by an initially-Japanese consortium and published in a licensed manual printed in Japanese; early licensees of the DVD specification who were based outside of Japan had to translate from this manual to their native language when developing DVD players or commercial DVD-authoring software. Small parts of the manual that were incorrectly machine-translated unintentionally introduced minor incompatibilities among some of the early DVD players compared to those released later when an American English specification manual was made available.
• Often, the word "disc" (in DVD context) is translated into "disk" in Swedish, even though the Swedish word for "disc" is "skiva." "Disk" usually means "dishes" (as in, what you use a dishwasher for.) Swedish did use "Diskett" (disc-ette) for "floppy disc" and still uses "hårddisk" for hard drive, so it isn't as big a linguistic abomination as it may seem, though.
• Some Cebuano (a Visayan language branch) jokes in the Philippines can confuse foreigners when translated since they seem to be lame jokes or simple puns yet can still get uproarious laughter from the native audience. This is because "Bisdak" ^note Bisayang dako, literally "Largely Visayan," meaning someone who is extremely native in character, personality, etc. humor has a lot to do with how the whole joke is pronounced, with minor inflections making or breaking the joke. This also makes up the humor of many of the Bisaya Gag Dubs is YouTube: it's not only the incongruity of characters in Western movies speaking Cebuano, it's about the exaggeratedly colloquial way it's pronounced.
• Nikita Khrushchev's famous "Мы вас закопаем" ("We will bury you") quote was taken by many in 'the West' (NATO et. al) to be a promise of nuclear holocaust. While that was the literal translation of what he said, it was in fact a Russian-language proverb. The metaphorical meaning was that the Soviet Union would outlive the capitalist countries and be there to help out at their proverbial funerals.
• The term "Not Safe for Work" has no equivalent in many languages, as it's normally considered formal/legal speech in English, especially in American English. Other languages refrain from using that kind of speech outside specific backgrounds. Per example, in Spanish the term is translated as Se Recomienda Discreción (Discretion advised) or sometimes, between younger people, it's normally left untranslated from English.
• There are many words and terminology in Spanish that are very difficult to translate into English or other languages, due to the contextual nature of the language and the fact that the language is spoken in many countries:
  • The use of the term "Intellectual Property" (IP) is considered formal speech in English, but in other languages is considered legal speech, and as such, it's not used outside the field of law. This is especially egregious in Mexican Spanish, when the acronym IP stands for Iniciativa Privada. (Private Initiative, translated context-wise as "Private (non-government owned) enterprises")
  • In Spanish, the word ardilla stands for both squirrels and chipmunks, but when being specific, the word "squirrel" is normally translated as plain ardilla, while "chipmunk" is translated in scientific speech as ardilla rayada (stripped chipmunk) or tamia, albeit no one of those terms are used in normal speech in Spanish. This causes lots of confusion between Spanish-speaking viewers when dealing with squirrels and chipmunks in fiction, like Alvin and the Chipmunks (Known in Spanish as Alvin y las ardillas) , Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers, who are chipmunks, and Slappy Squirrel (Spanish name: Slappy Ardilla), who is a squirrel.
  • In a similar way, turtles, tortoises, and terrapins are named tortugas in Spanish, and they are only distinguished by including where they usually live - sea turtles are "tortugas de mar" (sea turtles), tortoises are "tortugas de tierra" (land tortoises) or just "tortuga", and freshwater turtles (which are sometimes called terrapins in English) are "tortugas de agua dulce" (freshwater turtles).
  • A subversion of this happens in Japanese: While turtles and tortoises are commonly named kame (亀), their giant cousins are called rikugame (陸亀) instead in science.
  • The word bully doesn't have a very good translation in that language. Many translators leave the word untranslated. Sometimes it's translated as Acosador but that word is normally translated as "stalker", and it's not a good equivalent. Some online translators, like Google Translate, translate the word as Matón, but that word is normally translated as "hitman" in Spanish. There's lots of heated discussions about how to properly translate "bully" in Spanish, to the point the topic could became into a Flame War.
  • Polish also has no real translation for "bully", so we either make do with the English term or describe the concept.
• The English language, especially the American dialects, is very analogy-based and full of idioms that make no sense at all when translated literally into any other language, as you can see in this example:^note In this example, anyone, be a person unfamiliar with modern English-speaking culture or a computer translator, would translate the idiom "dog whistling language" in its literal sense (as someone who used a literal dog whistle), rather than intended one (using racist/discriminatory language in a coded way) so it's up to either the human translator or the machine to figure out how the original text really mean compared with the literal meaning of the words.
  English text with idioms: The staff member responsible for the rejection is not familiar with the politics of the day, and didn’t realize he used dog whistling language.
  English text with the idioms removed: The staff member responsible for the rejection is not familiar with the politics of the day, and didn’t realize he used discriminatory language in coded form.
• The political term Impeachment doesn't have a good equivalent in almost any language outside English, Japanese, Korean, and some others, since its use is mostly exclusive from countries using The Common Law, and other languages doesn't have an equivalent in the own legal codes. In other countries, the closest equivalent would be "motion of no confidence" or other terms, It should be noted that, due to its ties with the Common Law, the word is normally left untranslated from English in other languages in order to keep the nuance between any other used local term for the same legal procedure and the English one.
• Some languages, like English, Japanese, Korean, Chinese and many others don't have grammatical genders for many words and it can be a pain to translate to languages that features them, like Spanish, Italian, French, Norwegian, etc, especially when the original author keeps the gender of the person as ambiguous. This can become nightmarish when Values Dissonance are involved, especially when the Ambiguous Gender Identity trope is involved between countries when that trope is normally accepted or tolerated and countries when this is definitely out of question.
• Emoji:
  • As emoji were developed initially for the Japanese market, they contain a lot of symbols that only have meanings in a Japanese cultural context, causing Western users to find other uses for them. According to research, "Fish Cake With Swirl Design" tends to be used as a negative 'downwards spiral' symbol in many western countries (where most people have never seen a narutomaki before), and "Face With Look Of Triumph" looks to Westerners like someone being "steaming mad" (the allegorical expression about someone being so angry that smoke came out of their nostrils) rather than the haughty snort that it appears to be to Japanese users. This makes each culture's use of emoji confusing to the other, annulling one of the main benefits of using emoji.
  • The 'Emoji Gap' refers to the difference in emoji appearence between different providers' emoji sets which alter meaning. One particularly alarming example of this is Apple's decision to replace their "Gun" emoji with a water pistol to protest gun violence, which has the effect of translating an iPhone user's playful threat into a serious death threat to a user on any other platform. The Apple version of "Grinning Face With Smiling Eyes" for a while looked like a grimace or cringe on that platform, but appeared happy on others, causing its art to be changed. Android inexplicably rendered "Yellow Heart" as a pink heart with hair growing out of it for a while.
  • Certain emoji with no clear meaning have developed different meanings on different social media. On Twitter, "Upside Down Face" is used to indicate something like 'I'm smiling because if I don't I'll lose control of my emotions' ("found the lunchbox I lost six months ago while clearing out my room, and when I move it I can hear the sound of cockroaches skittering around inside 🙃"), while on Instagram it indicates being goofy ("i dont usually wear colourful stuff but its fun to try out new LEWKS while im still young lol! 🙃"). "Thinking Face" is virtually never used without sarcasm on the more 'extremely online' platforms like Twitter and Reddit, instead being used to indicate a ridiculous train of logic or draw attention to an implicit but obvious conclusion ("all the guys spamming her with seemingly reasonable questions were posters on Holocaust denial boards 🤔"); on more 'normie' platforms like Facebook and Instagram it's often used sincerely to indicate thinking ("what would Jesus think about the way we talk about ourselves? 🤔"), which ends up reading very oddly to people who have absorbed the tone one of one or the other platform.
    • Platforms like Discord that allow for custom emojis sometimes get around this by using a crudely-drawn version of 🤔 usually referred to as "thonk" to denote the sarcastic usage, though.
  • Only Apple has the license to use Space Invaders as the icon for the Alien emoji, and other carriers use generic aliens. Apple users often use it to represent video games, which is incoherent to users on other platforms.
  • The "Blood Type Indicator B" emoji was designed to indicate the B blood type, for the purpose of Japanese fortune-telling services. In the West, (or more accurately, the U.S.) where most people don't care about blood types, it tends to get used as a deliberately gaudy substitute for Bs and other letters in a popular form of shitposting (referencing the Bloods). It goes without saying that it would be extremely difficult to explain to a Japanese person why just posting the emoji "🅱" (and only that letter) is funny.
  • Westerners tend to use 😂 to represent laughing so hard that they cry. However, Chinese people tend to use it when they're unsure whether to laugh or cry, or to represent laughing in an awkward situation.
• Brook Busey-Maurio pen name Diablo Cody was chosen after she finds out that Diablo means "Devil" in Spanish. Problem is it means male devil. Words in Spanish have gender and the "o" termination normally reflects masculinity (for example gato = male cat and gata = female cat). The correct usage for a woman's name would be Diabla Cody. This is why a lot of people in Spanish-speaking countries thought that Juno's creator was a man.
• A famous battle was fought near the River Plate / Río de la Plata in 1939 in which the German pocket battleship Graf Spee was defeated by three British cruisers and subsequently scuttled itself in Montevideo harbor. For the British, and most English-speaking military historians thereafter, this event became "The Battle of the River Plate." This is an abomination to Spanish speakers on two counts: first, "plata" means "silver", and second, the Spanish word for "plate" is "plato". Even worse, sometimes the name is misspelled "Platte", which is the name of a river in the United States! Some people now refer to the "La Plata River", which is accurate enough. However, as late as 2017, a map of the area published by Microsoft still reads "River Plate". Spanish speakers also fail to realize that "plate" in English can also refer to silver, though it tends to be used in only very formal or archaic contexts. (The words are related in both languages.) Granted, it is unusual to translate the name of a river, but if anyone would do it, it would be the British.
• The proverb Fortune favours the bold, which is in original Latin audaces Fortuna iuvat. Unfortunately this proverb is a Broken Aesop in the original language. The stem word is audax, which means "bold" in the sense of "insolent", "impudent", "uppity", "rude" and "outrageous", giving English language the word "audacious". The proverb is intended to mean "know when it is time to break the rules and not get caught", not that "be brave and you will succeed".
• An anatomy paper in PLOS ONE written by Chinese-national authors referred to (mother) nature as a "creator" because how one of the scientists (who was neither a native English speaker, nor professional translator) translated the Chinese word, resulting in an outcry among British and American scientists, bringing increased scrutiny on the paper, which it didn't survive. China, of course, has a very different religious tradition than the UK or US, and the furthest thing in a Chinese scientist's mind conducting state-sponsered research in an officially atheist state, just before their leader reaffirmed China's committment to atheism, would be to be mistaken for an American/British-style creationist. It's now an example in ESL materials how even having a high level of formal knowledge in a specific domain does not prevent the need of native speaker consultation, as even one single poorly translated word can have serious professional ramifications, especially if that word has a lot of cultural baggage to the listener.
• According to this article, part of the reason behind Realm's name change from "Serial Box" was that "the company has listeners in 120 countries — and the 'Serial Box' pun doesn't translate into other languages."
• When Scandinavian drama shows were translated and subtitled for screening in Britain by the BBC, an unexpected problem emerged. The BBC considered it necessary to preface broadcast with an advisory that the shows contained extremely bad language. But anyone unfamiliar with Norwegian or Swedish might be puzzled to read the subtitles, and assume they'd already been bowdlerized, as the characters in a pitched argument, with no holding back and verging on fisticuffs, seemed merely to be telling each other to "Go to Hell!" and "Devil take you!" This literal translation of the source language for the subtitles did not convey that these are, in fact, the strongest expletives available in Scandinavia, where curses drawn from religion carry the same weight there as, for instance, "fuck you!" or "fuck off and die!" do for Brits. In English, "Go to Hell!" scores very, very, low on the Richter scale of profanity, but try this in Norway...

---