Lost in translation.

Lost in translation.

“Anything that can be said in one language can be said in another, unless the form is an essential element of the message“

 Eugene Nadi says this, who wrote a book named, “The Theory and Practice of Translation“.

It is very important that translation must be done very carefully, or we can miss the core content from it. For example, ”A cowboy went to the hairdresser’s. When he got out again, his pony was gone.“ Do you think this joke is funny? It is translated word by word from German into English. In German this sentence is a joke. The part which makes this sentence funny, however, cannot be translated into English because the German word for pony and fringe is the same – ”Pony“. This shows that the joke is lost in translation.

 When we translate its not just words that we translate, it’s meaning.

Now we will talk about loss in the translation of news. Mainly news is depending upon the proximity. There is huge effect of local atmosphere we can see n the news. There are different meanings of same words, there are some words which can be only understood after knowing that language. For example there was news in Marathi newspaper “pudhari” after transfer of Arup Patnaik. “naikanch pat kadhla”, here phrase “pat kadhla” means to throw someone in shame, this phrase basically used in Kolhapur, Maharashtra.

In language there is bond between the words, sentence shapes,  and the inter-sentence forces, meaning between the words.

When we specially talk about India, we have to be more careful.  Different cultures, different languages, perfect translation is not possible.

But we can try to understand the core content and translate the meaning not the words.