Comments on: Foreign Concepts

By: transubstantiation

transubstantiation — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 06:34:20 +0000

It may well ‘do the trick’ but it is a little long.

By: una

una — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 00:36:17 +0000

maybe a bit off topic but perhaps “pot holes” as in “depression or hollow in road surface caused by wear or subsidence” may do the trick…

By: The GITS Blog » Is it really un-translatable?

The GITS Blog » Is it really un-translatable? — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 17:53:27 +0000

[...] can’t be translated into another language seems to be on translators’ minds a lot. It’s also a common theme over at the transubstantiation [...]

By: transubstantiation

transubstantiation — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 05:27:11 +0000

Wonderful expression – “institutional non-equivalence”. Thank you!

By: Colin Brayton

Colin Brayton — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 17:33:23 +0000

I meant “Roman elements” …

By: Colin Brayton

Colin Brayton — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 17:32:40 +0000

What drive me crazy are what I tend to think of as “institutional nonequivalence.”

In Brazil, for example — whose legal system has Napoleonic and Roan elements — a police delegado is often some sort of commander, but the term does not actually denote a specific rank or function. It just means you have a college degree and passed the delegado test, making you eligible for posts that only delegados can occupy.

It is sort of like the general line differentiating a military officer from “enlisted personnel,” which in Brazilian police forces are agentes (or, in the case of the policia militar, praças.)
And the delegado also has legal rights and duties that go beyond what, say, an American “precinct captain” might have, such as limited prosecutorial powers.

I have been translating PT-Br for years now and have never really developed a satisfying solution.

Anyway, cheers from a fellow transblogger and consider yourself bookmarked.

By: transubstantiation

transubstantiation — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 06:43:13 +0000

Fascinating stuff. Some work needs to be done in this field, and how communication is different because of it. Very interesting…

By: Michael Farris

Michael Farris — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 18:59:13 +0000

anecdote evidence coming!
I remember a long time speaking with a fellow American (who also had learned Polish as an adult).
We agreed that it was hard to describe the personalities of individual Polish people in English (and the personalities of Americans in Polish).
For the Polish people the independent variable was the language that we usually spoke with them, that is it was easier to describe a Polish person in English if we usually interacted with them in English than if we interacted with them in Polish.

By: transubstantiation

transubstantiation — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 16:29:40 +0000

Sonja, if you could expand on this it would be thoroughly interesting to know which adjectives are ‘universal’ and, more importantly, which personality theories suggest this.

By: Sonja

Sonja — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 16:13:42 +0000

I am currently doing a course in psychology, and found that especially implict personality theories suggest that there only a handful of adjectives in all languages describe personality traits in a universal manner. Others are more culture-specific, which makes it difficult to develop universal personality tests in all languages and across cultures.