Diacritiques

Update 3: To make this perfectly clear, there is no deadline. As long as the translated posts were published in June 2006.

Hell and damnation! I hate it when that happens — and this was indeed a bad time for things to go awry. No I didn’t forget the Carnival of Blog Translation, which I’ve agreed to host for the month of June. I’ve just been horribly snowed under with my new job and moving to the pleasant suburb of Brixton. So not only did I find myself too sleepy to blog, I even missed posts going missing and all but the most egregious server problems. Because there’ve been some.

Update 1: This post, too, is affected. It seems it’s up now — at least I hope so.

Be that as it may, I am horribly, horribly late for the June edition, which Angelo/Caelestis at Sauvage Noble so kindly suggested that I host. No; Liz Henry’s excellent initiative deserves better.

Still, all is not lost, maybe, and June’s not really quite finished yet, if you squint. So Bi- and Multilingual Bloggers of All Countries, Unite! Here are the rules:

1. Choose a blog post written in June 2006 and get permission to translate it. You can choose one of your own.
2. Translate it.
3. Post it on your blog.
4. All topics and language combinations are welcome.
5. Notify me, either by leaving a comment or trackback here, or by email to chris AT lascribe POINT net, or by Technorati-tagging your post. The notification should include: The URL, title and author’s name of the original post (in the source language), your name and blog URL, the URL and title of your translation.

Technorati-tagging? Like so: add this code to the end of your post, and I’ll automatically see it:

<a href="http://www.technorati.com/tag/carnivalofblogtranslation" rel="tag">carnivalofblogtranslation</a> or, if you prefer,
<a href="http://www.technorati.com/tag/carnival_of_blog_translation" rel="tag">Carnival of Blog Translation</a>

The deadline is

Sunday, the 32nd of June 2006 at 23:99

(whichever your time zone).

Update 2:Liz Henry herself has come through wonderfully. Read her translation of Yuyu’s post Tormentas de verano: Music, roses, and thunderstorms. To be read while listening to Paula and Odile’s very beautiful Coplilla de la rosa amarilla.

But in fact, I’ll post whatever comes in, even later. I’ll do two translations myself, to make up for my tardiness. And if I fail to give satisfaction as a hostess, I’ll accept 100 lashes with a Unicode string as a punishment.

My friend and resident Unicode advisor Patrick Hall, when not busy getting the blogosphere on the road towards mutually translating itself, has branched out into the comic strip genre.

I fully admit that I lent a hand (or rather, a few brain cells) in the naming process, but the idea is all his: three-panel strips that feature glyphs from the vast set covered by Unicode and named the way Unicode characters usually are: “U+” plus the hexadecimal number of the character’s code point.#[1]

So check out Loonicode. And badger Pat not to stop at the third instalment!

(What does it say about my geekiness level that these comics give me uncontrollable fits of giggles?)

[The spell-checker didn’t know: geekiness.]

Note:

[1]: On my Gnu/Linux system with a Gnome desktop, the code point allows me to enter the character: I hold down SHIFT plus CTRL at the same time, type the hex code, and release the two keys. If I have an appropriate font installed, the character appears. Here’s U+1DC2 COMBINING SNAKE BELOW, enlarged a bit: ᷂. I sometimes use this feature for entering IPA. Our good friend LATIN SMALL LETTER SCHWA (ə), for example, is U+0259.

What about Gold silver lotus root silk fries shrimp fucks? Carbon burns black bowel? Maybe Benumbed hot Huang fries belly silk? Or a Good to eat mountain?

It’s like Patrick Hall said: the worst-translated restaurant menu ever. (The link comes with a health warning — it can bring on an asthma attack if you are asthmatic.)

P.S.: One of the commenters provides valuable insight in how things can get that wrong:

Oh, this is so not made up. I’ve travelled to China for 20 years and this is TYPICAL, though I must admit it’s a classic example. If you read Chinese (as the previous commenter clearly doesn’t), you can see exactly how each of the errors was made. They’re all perfectly logical, even if the result is unintentionally hilarious.

Take #1313, “Benumbed hot vegetables fries fuck silk.” It should read “Hot and spicy garlic greens stir-fried with shredded dried tofu.” However, the mangled version above is not as mangled as it seems: it’s a literal word-by-word translation, with some cases where the translator chose the wrong one of two meanings of a word:

First two characters: “ma la” meaning hot and spicy, but literally “numbingly spicy” — it means a kind of Sichuan spice that mixes chilies with Sichuan peppercorn or prickly ash. The latter tends to numb the mouth. “Benumbed hot” is a decent, if ungrammatical, literal translation.

Next two: “jiu cai,” the top greens of a fragrant-flowering garlic. There’s no good English translation, so “vegetables” is just fine.

Next one: “chao,” meaning stir-fried, quite reasonably rendered as “fries” (should be “fried,” but that’s a distinction English makes and Chinese doesn’t).

Finally: “gan si” meaning shredded dried tofu, but literally translated as “dry silk.” The problem here is that the word “gan” means both “to dry” and “to do,” and the latter meaning has come to mean “to fuck.” Unfortunately, the recent proliferation of Colloquial English dictionaries in China means people choose the vulgar translation way too often, on the grounds that it’s colloquial. Last summer I was in a spiffy modern supermarket in Taiyuan whose dried-foods aisle was helpfully labeled “Assorted Fuck.” The word “si” meaning “silk floss” is used in cooking to refer to anything that’s been julienned — very thin pommes frites are sold as “potato silk,” for instance. The fact that it’s tofu is just understood (sheets of dried tofu shredded into julienne) — if it were dried anything else it would say so.

Ce billet est une contribution à la première édition du « Carnaval de la traduction » initié par Liz Henry. J’ai choisi de transposer dans un français j’espère à peu près compréhensible un billet du professeur Ed Felten de l’université de Princeton aux États-Unis. Son blog, Freedom to Tinker (cela donne « La liberté de […]

Via Language Hat, I just read about a brilliant initiative launched by Liz Henry at ALTAlk Blog: a Carnival of Blog Translation. A blog carnival is, as Liz puts it, “sort of like a travelling signpost that points to a bunch of magazine articles. It is a post that contains links to other posts written […]

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