I use this webpage to log mistranslations I find in books, on web pages, or anywhere. Some of them were originally posted on the language learners’ forum.
There is an English mistranslation of Frederick Engels' words. In his Die Familie, Engels' Einzelfamilie was translated as 'monogamous family' in English. I don't think that's right. The German original is
"Es wird sich dann zeigen, daß die Befreiung der Frau zur ersten Vorbedingung hat die Wiedereinführung des ganzen weiblichen Geschlechts in die öffentliche Industrie, und daß dies wieder erfordert die Beseitigung der Eigenschaft der Einzelfamilie als wirtschaftlicher Einheit der Gesellschaft."
The English translation on the rather authoritative or at least frequently cited website Marxists.org is
"Then it will be plain that the first condition for the liberation of the wife is to bring the whole female sex back into public industry, and that this in turn demands the abolition of the monogamous family as the economic unit of society."
I think the German word Einzelfamilie should be translated simply and literally as 'single family' or 'individual family'. Engels was proposing that we not treat each family as an economic unit, implying that a larger unit is needed. It's possible that a careless English reader of the above translation would focus on just the phrase "abolition of the monogamous family" and assume that Engels was advocating abolition of monogamous families (and therefore calling for polygamy). That would be a gross misunderstanding of Engels. The English word monogamous or its noun monogamy means something totally different.
Also, the German word Frau in this context probably means 'woman' more than 'wife'. But that's a minor point.
The Chinese translation is good. But '那时就可以看出' probably should be '那么就可以看出'.
Sep 13, 2024
This posting is not quite about a mistranslation, but about an ambiguous translation. The ambiguity is not necessarily the translator's fault. It's a problem inherent in English as well as some other languages. First, we know that the sentence "He hit the man with a crutch" is ambiguous, as the meaning depends on whether you interpret "with a crutch" as a complement modifying the verb "hit" or as an attributive clause modifying the noun "man". So this is what I'm going to talk about.
In Matthew 6:19-21 of the Bible, we read "Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moths and vermin destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moths and vermin do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal." Should we consider "on earth" and "in heaven" as a complement of "store up" or an attributive clause of "treasures"? I checked a few other languages. Unfortunately, the French, Spanish, and Italian translations I found all have this ambiguity. But the German translation has this passage rendered as "Ihr sollt euch nicht Schätze sammeln auf Erden". Since "auf Erden" and "Schätze" are separate, it's safe to assume that "auf Erden" is a complement of "sammeln", not an attributive of "Schätze". I posted a question to a Facebook group, where someone told me the Japanese translation is "地上に財宝を蓄えるな", where "地上に" is a complement of the verb "蓄える", not an attributive of the noun "財宝". I find the Chinese translation "不要为自己积攒财宝在地上" agrees as well, where "在地上" is a complement of the verb "积攒", not an attributive of the noun "财宝".
Since Jesus said those words in Aramaic, the definitive answer probably has to come from the Aramaic original. On the Internet, I found the 8th century Aramaic version, not any earlier one. Ignorant of this ancient language, I have to rely on the author of that web page who provides a good English translation, i.e. "You are not to place treasure for yourself in the Ara {the Earth}, a place that the sasa {the moth} and the akla {the weevil} destroy, and where the ganabe {the thieves} break through and they steal." Obviously he treats "in the Ara {the Earth}" as a complement of the verb "place", not an attributive of "treasure".
It seems that there is consensus among various sources about this quote in the Bible. Curiously, when I asked this question in a forum dedicated to discussions about religions, they all support the other understanding, i.e. "Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth" is equivalent to "Do not store up for yourselves treasures that are on earth", not "Do not store up on earth treasures for yourselves". (I find it easier to explain to them by rewriting the sentence than using linguistic jargon.) After I point out the Aramaic source, I get a reply "When it comes to grammar and God's Word, grammar gets a no-go". That's indeed an impeccable argument!
Sep 18, 2024
French socialist, philosopher and economist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon wrote a book titled Philosophie de la misère. The titles of its Italian and Spanish translations both translate misère to its cognate, miseria (Italian and Spanish take exactly the same spelling). Its German translation uses the word Elend, which means "misery". The book is indeed about human misery or suffering. But its English translation has both Philosophy of Misery and Philosophy of Poverty. According to Google Ngram, most of the time since its early translation, especially since 1970, the latter is a much more popular title. And the title of the Chinese translation, literally translated back to English, is "Philosophy of Poverty". This is unfortunate because the readers may mistakenly think that the book is only about poverty, not misery in general.
Karl Marx responded to Proudhon's book immediately by writing a book, by playing with the words, titled Misère de la philosophie. Now, even more unfortunate than translation of Proudhon's book is that Marx's book is almost exclusively translated into English as Poverty of Philosophy instead of Misery of Philosophy. Are we really supposed to equate misery with poverty? No. If Victor Hugo's Les Misérables had been called, say, Les Pauvres, readers would be misled and confused. Poverty is neither a sufficient nor a necessary condition for misery. St Francis of Assisi lived in poverty without being in misery, while extremely rich people may still feel living a life of misery.
A Google search finds a person named Tim Newcomb, who recently translated Marx's book as Misery of Philosophy. I can't find any information about this translator. But we can thank him for making this long overdue correction.
Sep 22, 2024
French singer Aya Nakamura's Japanese name
Most people know Lady Gaga, Celine Dion, and probably Ariana Grande, some of the most notable singers at the opening ceremony of the 2024 Paris Olympic Games. But you may not know Aya Nakamura unless you're French. Her singing was accompanied by the French national guards, and according to news media, "[She] Proves Why She's France's Biggest Star at the 2024 Paris", "France's most streamed musician". When Le Figaro posted a message on Facebook a few days before Celine Dion would come to perform, one reader posted a comment, in French of course, to the effect that we have our own Aya (why do we invite a foreigner?).
Here I'm going to talk about Aya's name. Her last name appears to be Japanese. She was born Aya Danioko in Mali and is now a French citizen. She adopted a Japanese name because she liked the protagonist Hiro Nakamura in the American drama "Heroes". Although the fictional character Hiro Nakamura is not acknowledged to be Japanese, his behavior in the act proves him to be so.
Why does this matter? If a name is clearly a Japanese one, when it's translated into Japanese, should it use Japanese Hiragana instead of Katakana, which is only used to transliterate a foreign name? Intuitively, I would think so. Nakamura is almost unambiguously 中村 in Japanese. We may expect Aya Nakamura's last name to be 中村 in Japanese. Right? But according to the Japanese page of Wikipedia, it is actually アヤ・ナカムラ, using Katakana. In fact, the web page even warns that "「中村綾」あるいは「中村彩」とは別人です" (this is a person different from 中村綾 or 中村彩]. In other words, the Japanese do not recognize Aya Nakamura as a real Japanese name. It's not clear whether this rejection is due to lack of research of her history of adopting this name or simply because they don't think she's of Japanese descent. That's fine. This is a neutral question, absolutely not to be tainted by a hint of discrimination or anything.
Interestingly, the Chinese web page of Wikipedia for her does say 阿雅·中村. Whoever translated it must have done research on her name, because if it were unrelated to Japanese and happened to be spelled Nakamura, the Chinese name would sure be a pure transliteration, for instance 纳卡穆拉.
Sep 29, 2024
Word order flexibility
Legend has it that "Aristotle advised his pupil Alexander to avoid the king's seductive mistress, Phyllis, but was himself captivated by her. She agreed to ride him, on condition that she could play the role of dominatrix." (summarized by Wikipedia) On the Wikipedia page, the Old French verse that told this story ended with Aristotle excusing himself to Alexander, saying
Amour vainc tot, & tot vaincra
tant com li monde durera
with Modern English translation as "Love conquers all, and all shall conquer / As long as the world shall last".
English readers don't need to be fluent in French, much less Old French, to identify the French words corresponding to the English words; e.g. amour "love", vainc "conquers" (think of vanquish), tot "all" (think of total), etc. But what's troubling to me is that the second part of the first line, tot vaincra, is translated as "all shall conquer". The English word conquer is a transitive verb, i.e. it must be followed by an object. It took me a while to realize that "all shall conquer" actually means "(love) shall conquer all". The original author of the verse didn't write "& vaincra tot" simply because the inversion that places vaincra at the end makes it rhyme with the last word of the second line, durera ("last"). But an average English reader having no knowledge of French will have difficulty understanding "all shall conquer". So I edited the Wikipedia page to read "and shall conquer all". A few months later, someone disagreed and changed the translation back, saying it's poetic English.
I took this issue to a language forum and asked for people's opinions. As expected, most forum members agree with me. One even says he initially thought "all shall conquer" meant "all will fight back", which is a totally wrong interpretation. But one member, apparently a native Frenchman, disagreed with me and said the reader should adapt to the text of the author and the translator should respect the style of the author. Others disagreed with him, and my response was that "the adaptation should not go so far as to rendering the 'translated' text incomprehensible in the target language". I have no doubt that his mother tongue influences his assessment of English speakers' low tolerance of flexible word order. If he were to translate the Old French verse into Chinese (suppose he knows some Chinese), the Chinese verse would probably read "爱征服一切，一切征服", the latter part of which likewise makes no sense to a native Chinese speaker.
In Romance languages such as French or Spanish, the primary word order is SVO (Subject-Verb-Object), just like English or Chinese. However, occasionally we see sentences whose constituent is moved to a different position than the SVO rule would stipulate. (E.g. "Ont été reçus Pierre, Paul et Marie", possibly in response to "à Qui a été reçu ?") Native speakers are used to these sentence structures and can understand the meaning based on context and/or the idiomatic nature of such expressions. As far as I know, there is no metric or index in linguistics to measure the word order flexibility of a language. We know that highly inflected languages such as Latin and Russian have fairly flexible word order. But English and Chinese would be quite low on this metric, while various Romance languages are probably in the middle. Old French was probably even closer to Latin because the case system of nouns had not been entirely eliminated. While Old French tot is not a noun, the very existence of a case system must have accustomed the speakers back then to mentally evaluate various word orders until the best sense was made. But modern day English speakers don't do that, ending up with a wrong understanding or lack of understanding of the word-by-word literal translation, "all shall conquer".
Oct 3, 2024
Here's a minor mistranslation. In one of the rooms of the Victor Hugo House in Paris, there is a plaque of 3 languages. The French reads,
--- begin quote ---
Pendant l'exil (1851-1870) salles 3 & 4
3 - Le Salon chinois
Cette pièce était autrefois le grand salon. Elle introduit aujourd'hui la période de l'exil qui va durer dix-neuf ans. Après le coup d'État de Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, le 2 décembre 1851, Victor Hugo ...
--- end quote ---
The English description reads,
--- begin quote ---
...
After the overthrow of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, on 2 December 1851, Victor Hugo ...
--- end quote ---
The English word overthrow here is incorrect. Readers will interpret it as Napoléon being overthrown in this incident, which would be the opposite of what actually happened. The French phrase coup d'État is directly borrowed into English as coup d'état. The best translation is simply to use this borrowed loan word. The Spanish translation, to the right of the English on the plaque, reads, "Después del golpe de estado de Luis Napoleón Bonaparte", which is correct. The phrase golpe de estado is a calque of the French phrase.
Historians call this December 2, 1851 incident "a self-coup, staged by Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte (later Napoleon III)" (see the Wikipedia entry 1851 French coup d'état). This does not change the fact that it was Napoleon that did the coup d'état and does not make Napoleon the victim of this incident as if he had been overthrown out of power.
Oct 9, 2024
American and British floor
This posting is not about mistranslation per se but intends to comment on the usage of the word floor. Americans call the ground floor "the first floor", and the floors above it "the second floor", "the third floor",... The British call the ground floor "ground floor", and those above it "the first floor", "the second floor",... European countries and many parts of the world follow the British convention. But Latin American countries could follow either the British or American convention, seemingly with no pattern. (See Storey on Wikipedia for such information, except that some parts of Mexico may be following the American convention.)
There is a logical difficulty in the British usage of the word floor. The phrase "ground floor" implies that this level is a member of the set (think of the concept of "set" in mathematics) called floor. The level above the ground floor is called "first floor". Unless we alter the meaning of the very basic word first, the ground floor is, due to the definition of first, excluded from the floor set. This logical difficulty could be resolved by calling the ground floor something not using the word floor, such as "ground level" (just like some Mexicans call the ground floor planta baja and the next floor primer piso, using different words, planta vs. piso), and interpreting the word floor as denoting a level or layer definitely above (i.e. not including) the ground level. Here's an analogy. Suppose you have three sons. The oldest can be called "the oldest son". The second is of course "the second son", and the third "the third son". It will be wrong to call the second "the first son" and the third "the second son", no matter how special the oldest son is.
There is the phrase "zeroth patient" or "patient zero (or 0)" in epidemiology. But when people use that phrase, do they call the (actually) second patient, i.e. the first one infected by patient 0, "first patient" or "patient 1"? It would sound strange but I'd like to know the thoughts of the experts in this field. If they do, it will have the same logical difficulty of including and at the same time excluding a member of a set. Is the zeroth patient a patient or not?
Oct 19, 2024
中国 and "Middle Kingdom"
The Chinese name for China is 中国. According to Wikipedia, "The name Zhongguo is also translated as 'Middle Kingdom' in English". Indeed the phrase "Middle Kingdom" is the most popular sense (or sense-for-sense) translation of the Chinese word 中国. But this is not the most appropriate one, and was not the only one more than a century ago; Evariste Régis Huc in 1855 called it "Central Empire" and Richard Simpson Gundry in 1895 called it "Central Kingdom". I believe the best sense translation is "Central Empire".
We know that there was a period of Middle Kingdom in the history of Egypt. The word Middle here refers to the middle in time, not in place; the English word middle can refer to the middle part in either type of dimension. On the other hand, the word center or central refers to the middle in place only. Due to its lack of ambiguity, center or central is better than middle in translating 中 in 中国. After all, 中国 definitely does not refer to the middle period of a kingdom.
How about 国 in 中国? We know a kingdom is generally smaller than an empire, just as a king is lesser than an emperor. An empire may contain multiple kingdoms, in which people may speak different languages or may be different even in race and ethnicity. The reference of 中国 is confined to the central plain of the modern-day China in the ancient times, but after the Han (ca. the 1st century) and particularly Tang (7th to 9th century) dynasties, the term clearly refers to a much wider area where various peoples resided. The word empire is certainly better than kingdom in describing this social, cultural, and geographic entity. In fact, many western scholars in Sinology call the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1910) dynasties "the Late Imperial China".
In short, literally, 中国 does not quite mean "Middle Kingdom", but means "Central Empire" instead. "Middle" is not a mistranslation; it's just not as unambiguous as "Central". "Kingdom" can be considered a mistranslation, since it implies that the sovereign is a king instead of an emperor, and the territory he rules is small and culturally and linguistically homogeneous. On both accounts, it was and is incorrect.
Oct 30, 2024
Lebanese poet Khali Gibran's famous poem "On Children":
---begin quote---
Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you.
---end quote---
The second line sounds philosophical and may not be easy to understand. When it's translated into other languages, some translators choose to alter the text to make it a little more understandable. Here are some examples:
Spanish:
Spanish:
Spanish:
German:
Italian:
We see that the second Spanish translation (using the word anhelo) and the German translation (Sehnsucht) literally translate the word longing in Gibran's poem. The French translation (appel) and the first Spanish translation (llamada) change the original longing to "call" or "calling". The third Spanish translation and the Italian one seem to be unhappy with the poetic language and opt to plainly say the words to the readers. Why this diversity in translation? What does this line really mean? It is actually not that hard. "Life's longing for itself", in this context of human procreation, simply means that life intends to reproduce life, just as the plain, "prosaic" third Spanish translation is saying, and in a corrupted and equally insipid way the Italian translation is saying. Changing "longing" to "calling" is not right, because they are different actions; when you long for something, you don't necessarily call out. For this reason, I consider both approaches, changing a key word or plainly interpreting the poetic line, mistranslation of a poem. A literal translation of this particular word longing in the case of the second Spanish translation and the German translation is appropriate.
Nov 8, 2024
Son los hijos y las hijas de la llamada de la vida a sí misma.
Son hijos e hijas del anhelo de la Vida por sí misma.
Son los hijos y las hijas de la Vida
que quiere seguir dando Vida.
Sie sind die Söhne und Töchter der Sehnsucht des Lebens nach sich selbst.
sono figli e le figlie della vita stessa.