A talented translator and linguist (whose name I cannot force myself to remember because I have already plunged into a holiday haze) once said, “Translating from one language to another is translating one universe to another.” Here is a little true story that illustrates this statement.
The Chair of my department is a polyglot who always addresses people in different languages.
One day, he came into my office and said to me in Ukrainian, “Harna divchyna!”
At that moment, an older female colleague walked in and asked, “So what did he say to you?”
I opened my mouth to respond and realized that what the Chair had said means “You are a beautiful girl!” And that sounds really bad in English when said by an older senior colleague to a female junior faculty member. In Ukrainian, however, this doesn’t sound creepy at all. It’s completely inoffensive.
This was one of those cases where a word-for-word translation would have perverted the original meaning of the utterance. So I looked for a statement in English that would be as neutral as the original.
“He said I’m a good person,” I translated.
A language is truly a universe, people.
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