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Bad foreign language quotes in novels | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Cultural Experiences in Foreign Languages |  | |
| robarb Nonaglot Senior Member United States languagenpluson Joined 5044 days ago 361 posts - 921 votes  Speaks: Portuguese, English*, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, French Studies: Mandarin, Danish, Russian, Norwegian, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Greek, Latin, Nepali, Modern Hebrew | Message 9 of 11 12 January 2015 at 9:16pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Sometimes stilted language feels more appropriate when the characters aren't supposed to be speakers of the
language the book's written in. Like in Dune, the characters (who live in outer space in the future) say things like "Let us..." and "May we not..." and "Whence," and it has the desired effect of making them not sound like 20th- century Americans. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| kanewai Triglot Senior Member United States justpaste.it/kanewai Joined 4874 days ago 1386 posts - 3054 votes Speaks: English*, French, Marshallese Studies: Italian, Spanish | Message 10 of 11 13 January 2015 at 4:03am | IP Logged | ||||||||
True, my Italian isn't anywhere near good enough to pick up register, or details like this. Though the novel is pretty good about indicating when the Finzi-Contini are using posh words ... Micòl, the daughter, likes to drop in Venetian phrases, or Austrian words she picked up on ski trips to the Alps (she refers to the cottage in the garden as the Hütte, and likes to have a drink of Skiwasser before going to bed). Though in this case the speaker is a middle class student in the Jewish ghetto, not one of the elite! 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Doitsujin Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5305 days ago 1256 posts - 2363 votes Speaks: German*, English | Message 11 of 11 13 January 2015 at 11:30am | IP Logged | ||||||||
However, sometimes English translators overdo this. A good example is Richard Burton's translation of the Arabian Nights; Burton unnecessarily used archaic English even though the book is a collection of folk tales written in plain Arabic. Here's an excerpt from the well-known story of the fisherman and the genie in the bottle:
Here's a Google Books link to a modern translation of the same passage by Malcolm C. Lyons. (Click the Page link to see the full passage.) Edited by Doitsujin on 13 January 2015 at 12:43pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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