Translatable but Debatable — Remaining Silent

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Translatable but Debatable — Remaining Silent

Once when I was a kid watching a TV courtroom drama, a plot twist put one of the lawyers on the witness stand.  When he didn’t want to answer a question, he said “I remain silent.”  I was impressed on the one hand that he obliged even the humble, unsung court reporter by not requiring everyone to wait through an actual silence.  On the other hand, I was impressed by the paradox whereby the words “I remain silent” are acceptable at face value while obviously false.

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Translatable but Debatable — Israel versus Israeli

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Translatable but Debatable — Israel versus Israeli

I don’t know who decided that over here we’re Israelis, rather than Israelians or Israelese, or Israelites like our ancestors, but I’m happy with the decision.  I like the brevity and the distinctiveness, and I’m glad that the English-speaking community has spared us in its tilt toward standardization.  The word “Bosniak” had scarcely flickered on the news pages, back in the nineties, before a sweeping consensus settled on “Bosnian” instead.  The people who can be called Chadi, fellow bearers with us of the “i” suffix, are more often termed “Chadian.”

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Translatable but Debatable — Trends and Fads

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Translatable but Debatable — Trends and Fads

The word “trend” has recently reproduced itself in Hebrew, but with a mutation.  In Hebrew, “trend” (טרנד) means “fad.”  

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Translatable but Debatable - Fish, Crawfish, Frogs, and Cows

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Translatable but Debatable - Fish, Crawfish, Frogs, and Cows

In a list of Hebrew expressions that have had their day and should be retired from the language, a blog or blogger named Areshet mentions “where the fish pisses from.”  Areshet says, “That’s enough.  We get it.  We’ve had it up to here.  We appreciate the earthy humor, now let’s move on.”  But that blog page is four years old and the fish haven’t stopped.

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Translatable but Debatable — Ionesco and Fiesco

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Besides the question of whether one sincerely becomes a rhinoceros or just opportunistically fits in with them (although everyone in Ionesco's play seems sincerely won over), there is also the question of whether hitkarnefut means merely becoming like everyone else or becoming like a rhinoceros in more specific ways.

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Translatable but Debatable – נפגעי חרדה

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I once worked with a fellow who was hard of hearing, and he said that the cause was trauma. For a while, I thought he was like Tommy, the pinball wizard who was struck deaf, dumb, and blind because he witnessed a terrible event. Then I realized that trauma can also refer to a damaging physical blow, or even a damagingly loud noise.

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Translatable but Debatable - הרי and הלא

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Take for example this well-known sentence:וכל המרבה לספר ביציאת מצרים, הרי זה משובח The Hagaddah at chabad.org translates it \"and everyone who discusses the exodus from Egypt at length is praiseworthy.\" The הרי doesn\'t survive translation. And a case could be made that it’s a mere expletive in the sentence, nothing to worry about. But I think that it helps balance the short ending of the sentence against the long subject.

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Translatable but Debatable – There Is No Zero

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I asked around and my sister-in-law, a Sabra of a certain age, told me the slogan was used years ago by the Payis lottery.  On the Internet, all I found was a single hit, in which Shlomo Hillel (of all people), serving as Speaker of the Knesset in 1988, refers to the phrase as if it’s familiar.

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Translatable but Debatable — הגזמת

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In the news, you often see “exaggerate” used inappropriately to translate "l'hagzim."  For example, an Israeli colonel was quoted in the Jerusalem Post  as saying, “We did not exaggerate in our use of firepower.”  Presumably he didn’t mean exaggeration in the sense of trying to inflate a story, he meant simply “We did not use too much firepower.”

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Translatable but Debatable - Song Foreignization

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There are two Hebrew translations of “Les Trois Cloches” — one by Ehud Manor and one by Avi Koren. Unlike the English translation, both Hebrew translations leave Jean-François Nicot a Frenchman. They don’t localize him, they foreignize him.

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Translatable but Debatable - Nidbakh

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Encouraging eleventh-graders to enroll for an educational trip to Poland, a Hebrew letter quoted in Wiktionary says that the trip will surely add an important נדבך (nidbakh) to them personally as citizens of the sovereign state of Israel. The word nidbakh goes back to the Book of Ezra, where King James translates it as “row”: “... with three rows of great stones, and a row of new timber...”

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Translatable but Debatable - Tachleet תכלית

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I found that on the Internet, source after source says a t’tsugat tachleet is not the performance that is the culmination or the purpose of someone’s efforts, or that demonstrates what others should aim for, but a mere “lesson introduction.” This week we will learn to multiply decimals, or whatever. 

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Song Localization: A Case Study (Translatable but Debatable)

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While the song “City of New Orleans” is all about America and its Israeli version is all about Israel, the French lyrics don’t mention France.  Nationalism has not been widely admired in France for quite some time.  But “Salut les Amoureux,” the song’s French version as performed by Joe Dassin, does give us a dose of tension relating to the narrator.  It’s a good French existentialist tension that takes the form of observing your own behavior detachedly.

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Translatable but Debatable - Nana נענע

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On packaging, I’ve seen the term “Moroccan spearmint” used for nana, and I’ve used it myself in translations, so I’m not happy thinking that maybe the real stuff is from Asia Minor and I should have written “Anatolian spearmint” instead.

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Translatable but Debatable - (בערבון מוגבל (לא רק בע"מ

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Explaining British punctuation, Oxford Dictionaries writes: “If an abbreviation consists of the first and last letters of a word, you don’t need to use a full stop at the end,” and its examples are “Mr”, “Ltd”, and “Dr”.  Actually the abbreviation “Ltd” doesn’t consist of the first and last letters of the word, although it uses them.  But maybe fine distinctions of terminology aren’t what the Oxford Dictionaries are about.

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Translatable but Debatable — l'haskil (להשכיל)

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As the scriptural saying goes. “From all my teachers, I’ve learned.” The Even Shoshan dictionary agrees with King James that when the Psalmist used it, that remark actually meant “I have more understanding than all my teachers.”

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Translatable but Debatable - מענה (ma'aneh or maaneh)

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The word ma’aneh seems to enjoy staying in reserve while the word tshuva does conversational duty to describe the answer required by an everyday request for directions or by an arithmetic exercise. The word ma’aneh comes out for the bigger questions. Sometimes questions that don’t even come with a question mark.  The question of nuclear proliferation.  The heat of August.  The needs of a particular child.

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Translatable but Debatable - ערירי (ariri)

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As a term meaning “childless,” the word ערירי (ariri) is first found where God promises to reward Abram generously and Abram asks what the point of any reward is with no one to bequeath it to:  מה־תתן־לי ואנכי הולך ערירי (“what wilt thou give me, seeing I go childless” — King James). It’s not the sort of response you’d expect to hear from a childless man today, for example from some elderly bachelor offered a prize on a quiz show. 

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