The machine translation story I've heard is: "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak," after a round trip from English to Russian and back, became "The vodka is good, but the meat is spoiled."
~~James On Fri, Dec 3, 2010 at 1:16 AM, Robert Holmes <[email protected]> wrote: > And Gamlet is available on Netflix I see. That's one for the queue. > Your comment about the mistranslation reminds me of the (almost certainly > apocryphal) anecdote about the early days of computerized translation. The > researcher types the phrase "out of sight, out of mind" and requests > English-Russian followed by Russian-English translation, only to get > "invisible lunatic". > Of course, I've also heard versions where the mediating language is Arabic, > Chinese etc. But a good anecdote (even a poor one) is always more truthy > than mere facts. > -- R > > On Thu, Dec 2, 2010 at 11:00 PM, <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> Shakespeare versus Friam! Oh, My! Seems like a hugely mismatched >> intellectual exercise! Well, Will wrote words for that, too! Perhaps: “A >> concatenation of cats”. Or: “What fools these mortals be!” It’s poetry, >> fellas! Didn’t anyone tell you? Before penning ab initio, ab ignorantio >> analyses, just study a leetle of the overwhelming volume of criticism on the >> Melancholy Prince. A good modern one, of the tens of 1,000’s of articles, >> is in Marjorie Garber’s, Shakespeare after All (2004). Read, and then >> write. >> >> >> >> But, but, but, to the horror of literalists, in the “To be, or not...” >> soliloquy (III, i) our forgetful Prince describes death as “The undiscovered >> country from whose bourn no traveler returns,” when two acts earlier (I, ii, >> iii), on the battlements, he’d actually been hearing some unpleasant >> revelations from his father’s ghost, “sy pappie se spook”, as the inelegant >> Afrikaans translation has it! Ah, consistency -- the hobgoblin of small >> minds -- but nevah the Bard’s! >> >> >> >> I view with delight all foreign versions of the play in “tongues unknown >> and accents yet unheard” that I can dig up. The Russian “Gamlet” (1964), >> with Smoktunovsky, and Shostakovich’s score, is pretty good. A darkly grand >> gothic revenge horse-opera. Much cold steel and poisoned chalices!! The >> Russian dialog is very impressive, sonorous and sinister, but a particular >> delight are the English captions. They are good, and grammatical, but >> weirdly, unaccountably, contain none of Shakespeare’s lines!! I have a >> vision of some good, grey Apparatchik Soviet State Translator, in the >> editing room earnestly listening to the spoken words and transcribing same >> into nice twentieth century English dialog with not the slightest inkling >> that there had actually been an English script (First Quarto, 1603), that a >> lotta Capitalists, over the centuries, found pretty inspiring! >> >> Peter Lissaman, Da Vinci Ventures >> >> Expertise is not knowing everything, but knowing what to look for. >> >> 1454 Miracerros Loop South, Santa Fe, New Mexico 87505,USA >> tel:(505)983-7728 >> >> >> ============================================================ >> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv >> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College >> lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org > > > ============================================================ > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College > lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org > ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
