Исследуем. Проектируем. Предлагаем

Problem: Mistakes in translation can change the meaning of the text.

Subject: the English language.

Hypothesis: If you know the most common mistakes in translating, you can avoid them.

Goal: Study different types of mistakes and make a conclusion.

Studying methods: collecting, rearranging and analyzing information.

Plan: collecting, rearranging and analyzing information.

Brief description: A study of different factors and mistakes when translating from English.

Main conclusion: There are a lot of traps when translating from English into Russian.

Introduction

An incredibly large number of works, both literary and scientific, are translated from English and other languages. In certain professional spheres, you need, for example, a book which is available only in a foreign language. With the help of translation, you can access almost any information in every corner of the world, and therefore its accuracy is extremely important. Of course, not all translation errors significantly affect the text, but due to such errors, the meaning of the text and its perception can change. I would like to focus on these mistakes, because they are the most common. In the process of my research, I plan to find the ways to avoid any mistakes and also to understand the impact of errors in translation in history. As it turned out, these mistakes influenced even the political situation in different countries. I believe that such a study will be very important in a modern, ever-changing world. The relevance of the work lies in the universal use of foreign resources, and they can be understood with accuracy without any errors in the translation of the text. Therefore, it is so important to be aware of the most frequent errors in translation. It is assumed that, being aware of the different subtleties of the translation, you can convey the correct information to the reader.

Translation mistakes in history

Throughout the history of mankind, translation errors have engendered diplomatic conflicts and misunderstandings that have lasted for centuries. Translation is a simple thing and some people believe that it can be done using Google Translator. However, it is no longer funny when it comes to important articles or documents.

It is hard to believe that translation errors in international relations continue to be made in the modern globalized world and, particularly, in the EU space. Nevertheless, it is true. In November 2013, the entire Spanish press (under the influence of news agencies) wrote that the official representative of the European Commission called the statement of Minister Vert "garbage". In fact, the representative of the European Union for Education Dennis Abbot used the word "rubbish", which can really mean "junk", but in this context the correct translation would be "absurdities". It is not the same. Abbott tried to solve the problem, but without much success.

What happens when a bad translation is mistaken for the right one? Here are the six most famous translation errors that changed the course of events.

1. The Horns of Moses

During the Late Gothic period and until the second half of the Renaissance, Christian artists and sculptors portrayed Moses with horns on his head. And the reason for this was a mistake made by St. Jerome, the patron of translators.

His translation of Vulgate into Latin (The Common Bible) was the official text of the Catholic Church for 1,500 years (from 382 to 1979), but it contained a curious error. The expression “keren”, which in Hebrew means the shining face of Moses, was erroneously translated as "horns". It was nonsense, but who would doubt the sacred text?

2. The Threat ofKhrushchev

In 1956, when the Cold War was in full swing, the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev made a speech at the Polish embassy at a banquet attended by many ambassadors of Western countries. The guests were literally dumbfounded when they heard the following words from Khrushchev: "Whether you like it or not, the history is on our side. We'll bury you!".

In the conditions of a fierce arms race, the Western press took his words as a direct threat, but the Soviet side hastened to state that Khrushchev had been misunderstood, and his words had been taken out of context.

In fact, the Soviet leader meant Marx's phrase from "The Manifesto of the Communist Party" that the bourgeoisie generates its own gravediggers. The correct translation of his speech, which does not need to be verbatim, would sound like this: "Whether you like it or not, the history is on our side. We will live to see that you are buried". It cannot be said that this is a very friendly phrase, but in any case, it was an ideological slogan, not a threat.

3. Channels on Mars

In 1877, an Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli made one of the first descriptions of the Martian surface. The director of the Milan Observatory, Brera, thought that he saw continents and canals on Mars.

In 1908, an American astronomer Percival Lowell reconsidered the results of Schiaparelli's work and came to the conclusion that the channels were built by intelligent creatures to deliver water (which was missing from the Martian surface) from the polar regions to the desert regions. This statement gave rise to many myths and legends about the Martians, despite the fact that it was the result of a translation error.

Schiaparelli never considered the Martian channels the work of humans. In fact, he used the Italian word "canali", meaning a pass or a gorge, that is, an exclusively natural object.

4. The word that led to an atomic bombing

On July 26, 1945, the countries of the anti-Hitler coalition published the Potsdam Declaration, which specified the conditions for the surrender of the Japanese empire, stressing that in case of refusal, "rapid and complete destruction" was waiting for it.

The declaration was a typical ultimatum. Prime Minister of Japan Kantaro Suzuki convened a press conference and said: "No comment. We continue to think about it". The thing is that the representatives of the allied countries understood his words differently. Suzuki made the mistake of using the word "mokusatsu", which could mean "no comment", but also "we reject it". Only 10 days after the press conference, Truman, the President of the USA, clarified what "rapid and complete annihilation" means. We will never know whether the course of events would have changed in the case of a correct translation.

5. Treaty of Waitangi

Sometimes translation errors are unintentional, and sometimes they are committed for the sake of changing the true meaning of something. Indicative in this respect is the Treaty of Waitangi, which the Maori of New Zealand signed in 1840. In fact, this document meant the transformation of the island into a British colony.

The British and the Maori signed two copies of the treaty, one in English and the other one in Maori. Both texts are similar, except for the most important detail. The Maori text says that the locals allow the British to stay on the island in exchange for permanent protection from the British Empire. The English version, however, says that the Maori are subordinated to the British crown in exchange for protection from the British Empire. So, is that a trick or a contract?

6. The word which cost 71 million dollars (and one human life)

In 1978, Willie Ramirez was in hospital in Florida with a very serious condition and his relatives could not explain what had happened to him, since they did not know English. They told the doctors that they assumed that Ramirez had food poisoning. The medical staff, who supposedly understood Spanish and English, translated the word "poisoned" as intoxicated, which in English applies only to people who have taken an excessive dose of drugs or alcohol. Although Ramirez believed that he had gastroenteritis, in reality it was a cerebral hemorrhage. However, the doctors, believing that the patient had been intoxicated, prescribed a completely wrong treatment. Because of this negligence, Ramirez suffered paralysis of four limbs (tetraplegia), and the hospital had to pay him $ 71 million in compensation.

The influence of errors on the perception of a work

It is well known that in English all nouns that do not point to the gender of human beings formally belong to the middle genus, and the absence of inflexions opens up great opportunities for writers to attribute gender characteristics to the characters. So, Shakespeare decided to name the elf from the "Midsummer Night's Dream" Mustard Seed. Elf was, apparently, male, but if the reader or the viewer likes to perceive him as a girl, Shakespeare does not interfere with this, especially since in the Elizabeth elf theater, in any case, the boy had to play. Perhaps, the idea is that the elf is sexless, without indication of gender. In English in such cases the transition from the neuter gender to the male and female is carried out with equal probability. As the name Mustard Seed becomes more common than the average, whereas the Russian "Горчичное зерно" is purely middle: the Russian grammatical gender almost never affects the context.

But the tradition of the Russian language does not provide for the names of its own grammatical middle genus (names such as "Vavilo" and "Danilo" never bow completely in the middle genus and almost always have an alternative option in -a), moreover, insists on attributing the name to a specific grammatical genus, corresponding to the real sex. There are, of course, diminutive names of a generic kind, like "Zhenya" and "Valya," and sometimes words of the feminine kind can be used as nicknames for male characters (in Russian translations of Shakespeare – Башка, Основа, Пена), but note – in both cases we are talking only about a-declination, grammatically indistinguishable for masculine and feminine genera. That is why the literal translation – Горчичное зерно – sounds in Russian incomparably less easily and naturally than the Mustard Seed of the original. The reader (and in the perspective of the director) has difficulties abstracting from this middle-class – he "sees" it, whereas the Englishman behind Mustard Seed sees what his imagination or a specific theatrical performance will tell him.

Even more difficult is the case with the names of generic characters, acting as the proper names of the characters, whose gender is fully defined and known from the text. A classic example from German is Heine's story about pine and palm trees translated by M.Lermontov. As I. Chistova writes, "Lermontov did not take into account the essential grammatical generic differences for Heine. In German, "pine" is of masculine gender, "palm" is feminine. Therefore, Lermontov's poem is written not about the separation of lovers, as in Heine, but about the tragedy of loneliness, the insuperable disunity of people". Lermontov "pulled" behind him the inertia of the Russian grammatical gender. With an English translator, this would not happen – he would simply supply the pine and palm with the relevant pronouns he / his and she / her. Strangely enough, in most cases Russian translators just do not realize the gender of the character as a special problem. It is the translation of fiction that is the sphere in which one can see that the concept of "gender" has some objective methodological meaning. In fact, animals have males and females (wolf – she-wolf, rooster is chicken). Yet, what if inanimate objects act in the text? What "sex" can be a rose? In the majority of literary traditions it appears to be of the feminine gender, but in Shakespeare's 99

sonnet it suddenly assumes the masculine gender. And this is not a grammatical convention, as the image of the rose in all cultures familiar with this flower is closely related to the love theme. Rose as "she" is the traditional substitute for the beloved. And in this Shakespeare’s poem the sonnet's addressee is a young man, so it is quite logical that the rose is of the masculine gender.

Difficulties of translation

All the above examples confirm that errors in translation significantly affect the perception of the work or even the course of events. Therefore, it is worthwhile to know what difficulties the translation may face in order to prevent these mistakes.

Many Russian phrases are cumbersome in comparison with those in English. It also happens that not every word can be translated from one language to another. This can affect the nature of the sentence translated from English: Coffee, chocolate, men. Some things are just better rich.

In the English phrase a play on words is used. "Rich" in English can mean "wealthy" and "saturated". In Russian, with a literal translation, you face the problem of choice. In Russian there is no word that simultaneously would have two same meanings and which could be equally used for coffee, chocolate and men.

There are no endings in English. One way to transfer the relationship between words is to use prepositions or postpositions. The latter occur in stable verbal combinations:

to look – смотреть,

to look after – заботиться о ком-либо,

to look for – искать что-либо.

The same verb with different prepositions acquires new meanings which can be completely unrelated to the root word.

Let us recall the joking assertion about the "scarcity" of the English language and the "wealth" of Russian: Green green gets green. – Зеленая трава зеленеет.

And yet the English word "green" in this sentence is both an adjective, a noun, and a verb. For English, this is a common situation, while in Russian such "copies" will rarely be found.

Also, many homophones can bring a lot of difficulties. Homophones are words that are the same in sound, but have different spelling and meaning: