Here’s a fairly plain sentence from a collection of Umberto Eco essays that nevertheless caused me to stumble:
Doctors know how to spell but write badly, and you can be an expert calligrapher and still not know how to spell accommodation.
Of course it is necessary to know that Eco wrote in Italian, and that the sentence above is from Richard Dixon’s translation. Once you know those facts it should immediately trigger the question: is spelling accommodation a challenge in both Italian and English? Since that’s more than a bit unlikely, I needed to search for the original Italian sentence. You don’t need to read Italian to spot some distinctions:
i medici conoscono l'ortografia e scrivono male, e si può essere calligrafo diplomato e non sapere se si scrive 'taccuino', 'tacquino' o 'taqquino' come ‘soqquadro’.
The first part of the sentence matches the English word-for-word, but the misspelled word in Eco’s original is notebook—which he recounts in various levels of wrongness. Because it would have been ridiculous in the English translation to point out the difficulty of spelling notebook, Dixon had a thorny issue. And this is a good example of how translation fails when words are simply mapped directly onto a different language. In the same essay, with another troublesome phrase, Dixon translates a grumpy Eco into these English sentences:
And using the cell phone encourages younger generations to write “HAND” instead of “have a nice day.”
There’s no need, once again, to know Italian to spot the differences:
e se l'uso del telefonino induce le giovani generazioni a scrivere 'T 6 xduto?' in luogo di 'ti sei perduto?’
Other than the disturbing sensation of being confused in two languages at once—both HAND and T 6 xduto are new to me—I like seeing these examples, because translations are best viewed as a collaboration between two writers. Just transplanting an original sentence onto your language with the same words will rarely reveal the original meaning. That kind of direct translation often provides you, instead, with a meaning that’s a little blurry, which means that a translator needs to take a peculiar journey away from the original sentence to maintain the original meaning. You can think of a good translation like a good lens prescription: the lens does distort the scene, but it distorts the scene specifically for your eyes.
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