I have translated HPMoR and some Lesswrong’s post into Russian. And sometimes I was discovering an absence of Russian translations for some terms (especially in psychology). Often it was hard to find some “less wrong” words.
For example, one arc in HPMoR is titled “Taboo tradeoffs”. And we (our translation team) asked some people who studied psychology, but no one had known Russian analogue for this term. In the end we gave up and changed the title. (Russian version can be translated into English as “Price of priceless things”.)
In fiction sometimes you can change a sentence to translate its meaning without using a particular word. (Sometimes it doesn’t work because you need to show a character who used a particular scientific term.) Sometimes I am just using “calque” and footnote with English term and short description or link to Wikipedia.
If you encounter the term and you are not sure what it means you can google it and find out that there’s a lot of hits, that some pretty serious people are discussing it, you can even learn what it means yourself.
In addition I think it’s easier to learn a new term if it is made of “usual” words rather than a calque.
Interestingly, “taboo” is itself a recent introduction to English; I suspect that one of English’s strengths is that it’s so full of pilfered words that it is natural to take another given the opportunity, whereas in more coherent languages they would stick out like a sore thumb.
In Russian word “taboo” was introduced too. Problem was with a term “taboo tradeoff” as a whole. We had thought that a literal translation may produce wrong connotation or no connotation.
In Russian we have many adopted words too, but, yes, it is more difficult due to declinations and conjugations.
Whether it’s a calque or a descriptive expression, I think the main problem is still that it addresses only one term. You encounter a term that has no good translation, invent your own translation, start using it and maybe it’ll eventually catch on. But then you have to do the entire dance again for the next term.
What I was thinking of was using the English terms. There are, obviously, problems with the declinations, transliteration to cyrilic or what not, but the main blocker, I think, is that using English terms is seen as ugly, un-literary and generally low status.
But that doesn’t have to be so: Consider the use of Latin phrases in Europe in XIX. century. It was, back then, seen as beautiful, literary and high-status. If the same could be achieved today with English, it would allow small language communities to break out of the language cage.
using English terms is seen as ugly, un-literary and generally low status.
Not sure how transparent is this for native English speakers, but imagine something like this:
A: “To avoid dehydration, you should drink a lot of aqua.”
B: “Just say ‘water’, moron!”
The connotation is that the first speaker is either pretentious, trying to gain some status cheaply by using a Latin word (connotating “I am educated”, without actually saying anything impressive), which gets a fair slapdown (“we are just as educated as you”)… or maybe actually repeats the teacher’s password without fully understanding it, which would be quite shameful in case of an idea this simple.
The principle is that the person who fully understands the idea (that you should drink water), and isn’t trying to play blatant status moves, would almost certainly have said “water” instead.
Which is a good heuristic (communication should be as clear as possible)… that fails if you are using the foreign word because there literally is no good translation (that would convey the intended connotations).
Whether it’s a calque or a descriptive expression, I think the main problem is still that it addresses only one term. You encounter a term that has no good translation, invent your own translation, start using it and maybe it’ll eventually catch on. But then you have to do the entire dance again for the next term.
Yes, I agree.
Consider the use of Latin phrases in Europe in XIX. century. It was, back then, seen as beautiful, literary and high-status. If the same could be achieved today with English, it would allow small language communities to break out of the language cage.
I think it depends on education in the community. Yes, for example, Leo Tolstoy in “War and peace” wrote even vast fragments in French. But most of his readers knew French well. (Almost exclusively well-educated person had time for fiction reading.) Now despite mandatory learning in school at least one foreign language many Russians know very badly even Latin alphabet (not to mention rules about reading English words). If you are writing/translating something for specialists, you may ignore that. But if you are writing fiction or something for beginners, you need to think about that.
And yes, we have problems with declinations. It is hard to read sentences in Russian with words which cannot be declined by language rules.
And I often think about the problem: If a reader knows English and sees words, for example, “taboo tradeoff”, I think they can understand that “tradeoff” is about changing something to something. And due to that they can understand the whole term easier. If a reader doesn’t know English, they see only some strange letter set. I think it may be important in writing text for beginners.
I think I can understand the problem.
I have translated HPMoR and some Lesswrong’s post into Russian. And sometimes I was discovering an absence of Russian translations for some terms (especially in psychology). Often it was hard to find some “less wrong” words.
For example, one arc in HPMoR is titled “Taboo tradeoffs”. And we (our translation team) asked some people who studied psychology, but no one had known Russian analogue for this term. In the end we gave up and changed the title. (Russian version can be translated into English as “Price of priceless things”.)
In fiction sometimes you can change a sentence to translate its meaning without using a particular word. (Sometimes it doesn’t work because you need to show a character who used a particular scientific term.) Sometimes I am just using “calque” and footnote with English term and short description or link to Wikipedia.
In addition I think it’s easier to learn a new term if it is made of “usual” words rather than a calque.
Interestingly, “taboo” is itself a recent introduction to English; I suspect that one of English’s strengths is that it’s so full of pilfered words that it is natural to take another given the opportunity, whereas in more coherent languages they would stick out like a sore thumb.
In Russian word “taboo” was introduced too. Problem was with a term “taboo tradeoff” as a whole. We had thought that a literal translation may produce wrong connotation or no connotation.
In Russian we have many adopted words too, but, yes, it is more difficult due to declinations and conjugations.
Whether it’s a calque or a descriptive expression, I think the main problem is still that it addresses only one term. You encounter a term that has no good translation, invent your own translation, start using it and maybe it’ll eventually catch on. But then you have to do the entire dance again for the next term.
What I was thinking of was using the English terms. There are, obviously, problems with the declinations, transliteration to cyrilic or what not, but the main blocker, I think, is that using English terms is seen as ugly, un-literary and generally low status.
But that doesn’t have to be so: Consider the use of Latin phrases in Europe in XIX. century. It was, back then, seen as beautiful, literary and high-status. If the same could be achieved today with English, it would allow small language communities to break out of the language cage.
Not sure how transparent is this for native English speakers, but imagine something like this:
A: “To avoid dehydration, you should drink a lot of aqua.”
B: “Just say ‘water’, moron!”
The connotation is that the first speaker is either pretentious, trying to gain some status cheaply by using a Latin word (connotating “I am educated”, without actually saying anything impressive), which gets a fair slapdown (“we are just as educated as you”)… or maybe actually repeats the teacher’s password without fully understanding it, which would be quite shameful in case of an idea this simple.
The principle is that the person who fully understands the idea (that you should drink water), and isn’t trying to play blatant status moves, would almost certainly have said “water” instead.
Which is a good heuristic (communication should be as clear as possible)… that fails if you are using the foreign word because there literally is no good translation (that would convey the intended connotations).
Yes, I agree.
I think it depends on education in the community. Yes, for example, Leo Tolstoy in “War and peace” wrote even vast fragments in French. But most of his readers knew French well. (Almost exclusively well-educated person had time for fiction reading.) Now despite mandatory learning in school at least one foreign language many Russians know very badly even Latin alphabet (not to mention rules about reading English words). If you are writing/translating something for specialists, you may ignore that. But if you are writing fiction or something for beginners, you need to think about that.
And yes, we have problems with declinations. It is hard to read sentences in Russian with words which cannot be declined by language rules.
And I often think about the problem: If a reader knows English and sees words, for example, “taboo tradeoff”, I think they can understand that “tradeoff” is about changing something to something. And due to that they can understand the whole term easier. If a reader doesn’t know English, they see only some strange letter set. I think it may be important in writing text for beginners.