Categories: phd
Tags: Moldova, fieldwork, translation
Date: 10 September 2007 15:21:19
No, not *that* Lost In Translation. But Kerensa did, a week or so ago, share a particularly cringeworthy English translation about Moldova and Romanian Language Day (for what it's worth, I reckon that was done by an electronic translator - it didn't make the usual mistakes that real people often do and was much worse than any written translation I've seen. It mostly reminded me of an essay I marked a couple of years ago which I also suspected had been put through an electronic translator. But I digress). A couple of days ago I was reading the English translation of a report relevant to my research, and the person who had given it to me had already warned me wasn't the greatest translation in the world. Actually it wasn't (mostly) that bad, but there was one phrase which really made me smile. The Romanian word for fallopian tubes is "trompe" (the 'e' on the end is the plural form), and at one point this report, referring to female sterilisation, said "2.0% of women had their tromps strung". I must admit I giggled - I thought it sounded like something Roald Dahl might have thought up as a creatively cruel and unusual punishment for evil step-aunts or something.