Nov. 17th, 2006 04:54 pm
Six feet and rising
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Incidentally, the title of my previous post is apparently the name under which Six Feet Under was broadcast in Spanish-speaking countries. Since the English original is an idiom, I was curious how it was translated into other languages. According to the Font of All Knowledge, for the most part, it wasn't; rather, it was left in the original form in many countries.
Exceptions include Portugal (Sete Palmos de Terra) and Brazil (A Sete Palmos). I find the choice of palmo interesting since a span is somewhat less than a foot and somehow I doubt Portuguese speakers bury their dead roughly one-and-a-half feet shallower than Americans. In the first case, the choice might have something to do with the use of the phrase palmo de terra in such expressions as não se vê um palmo de terra "you can't see a foot in front of you", but that's merely a guess. Finnish avoids the question of equivalent measures entirely by settling for the stripped down Mullan alla "Under the earth". Russian does, too, but by ingeniously playing on another idiom entirely with Клиент всегда мёртв "The customer is always dead". There's a certain affinity between this and the German version, Gestorben wird immer, which means--
Actually, I can't find a good translation. Discussions of intranslatability always seem to focus on particular words, which strikes me as silly. First of all, as a wise linguist once told me, "Words don't have translations; phrases do." That is, there is practically never a case where a particular lexical item is invariably the best translation of another; you always have to consider the context. Second of all, "lack" of a word is one of the easiest problems to solve. English doesn't have a word for gemütlich or Schadenfreude? Fine, we'll take the German ones. Those languages which don't borrow phonetic loans freely still have productive derivational processes which they can rely on to create native equivalents (e.g. Czech škodolibost < škoda "harm" + libost "pleasure").
It's morphosyntax which translates most poorly. Different language simply work differently and a construction which is utterly typical in one is rare, has a divergent meaning, or doesn't exist at all in another. This German passive form is a case of the last of these. Like the English passive, it demotes the subject, but unlike that construction, it doesn't do so by promoting the object. That's how it can be used with intransitive verbs like sterben "die".
But this will be easier to explain with the help of examples. First, a transitive expression: Er tötete meinen Hund "He killed my dog". In both languages, forming the passive consists of (1) making the object the subject and (2) replacing the predicate with an auxiliary + past participle construction. (For German, the auxiliary is werden "become"; for English, be or--colloquially--get. But this is a relatively minor divergence.) Thus we have:
Er tötete meinen Hund > Mein Hund wurde getötet.
He killed my dog > My dog was killed ~ My dog got killed.
Now for the intransitive example: Mein Hund starb "My dog died".
Mein Hund starb > Es wurde gestorben.
My dog died > *It was died.
English can't do anything with this, but German can. Note that the es you see there isn't a replacement for Hund. (Hund, being masculine, is referred to with the masculine er, not the neuter es.) It's a >dummy subject like the "it" in "It rains", there merely because German syntax demands that the subject slot not be left empty. If this can filled with something else, like an adverb, the dummy subject will drop out, e.g. Gestern wurde gestorben.
Gestorben wird immer is just like that last example only with a construction that's peripheral in English but unremarkable in German, namely fronting of the main verb. The adverb is immer "ever; always", so the meaning is something like "There's always dying". But I'm unhappy with this translation because (a) the use of a gerund rather than a participle makes it sound less active and (b) there's a closer German equivalent to it, namely Sterben gibt es immer. There is just no way to translate the German phrase into English without either nominalising the verb (e.g. "Dying is always happening") or supplying a subject which is only implied in the original (e.g. "People are always dying").
But, of course, it's the Chinese version that has me completely baffled. It comes out as 六呎風雲 or, literally, "six feet wind cloud". The latter half is one of a seemingly endless number of Chinese idioms featuring one or both of these elements; my dictionary glosses it as "(1) wind and clouds (2) unpredictable changes (3) high-positioned; high and exalted; imposing". I guess (2) is most applicable in this case, given that the death at the beginning of each episode is almost always unforeseen. But what do the two halves have to do with each other? "Six feet of unpredictable changes"? What on earth makes this preferrable to the duly literally 六呎之下? No wonder I never made much progress in Chinese.
Exceptions include Portugal (Sete Palmos de Terra) and Brazil (A Sete Palmos). I find the choice of palmo interesting since a span is somewhat less than a foot and somehow I doubt Portuguese speakers bury their dead roughly one-and-a-half feet shallower than Americans. In the first case, the choice might have something to do with the use of the phrase palmo de terra in such expressions as não se vê um palmo de terra "you can't see a foot in front of you", but that's merely a guess. Finnish avoids the question of equivalent measures entirely by settling for the stripped down Mullan alla "Under the earth". Russian does, too, but by ingeniously playing on another idiom entirely with Клиент всегда мёртв "The customer is always dead". There's a certain affinity between this and the German version, Gestorben wird immer, which means--
Actually, I can't find a good translation. Discussions of intranslatability always seem to focus on particular words, which strikes me as silly. First of all, as a wise linguist once told me, "Words don't have translations; phrases do." That is, there is practically never a case where a particular lexical item is invariably the best translation of another; you always have to consider the context. Second of all, "lack" of a word is one of the easiest problems to solve. English doesn't have a word for gemütlich or Schadenfreude? Fine, we'll take the German ones. Those languages which don't borrow phonetic loans freely still have productive derivational processes which they can rely on to create native equivalents (e.g. Czech škodolibost < škoda "harm" + libost "pleasure").
It's morphosyntax which translates most poorly. Different language simply work differently and a construction which is utterly typical in one is rare, has a divergent meaning, or doesn't exist at all in another. This German passive form is a case of the last of these. Like the English passive, it demotes the subject, but unlike that construction, it doesn't do so by promoting the object. That's how it can be used with intransitive verbs like sterben "die".
But this will be easier to explain with the help of examples. First, a transitive expression: Er tötete meinen Hund "He killed my dog". In both languages, forming the passive consists of (1) making the object the subject and (2) replacing the predicate with an auxiliary + past participle construction. (For German, the auxiliary is werden "become"; for English, be or--colloquially--get. But this is a relatively minor divergence.) Thus we have:
Er tötete meinen Hund > Mein Hund wurde getötet.
He killed my dog > My dog was killed ~ My dog got killed.
Now for the intransitive example: Mein Hund starb "My dog died".
Mein Hund starb > Es wurde gestorben.
My dog died > *It was died.
English can't do anything with this, but German can. Note that the es you see there isn't a replacement for Hund. (Hund, being masculine, is referred to with the masculine er, not the neuter es.) It's a >dummy subject like the "it" in "It rains", there merely because German syntax demands that the subject slot not be left empty. If this can filled with something else, like an adverb, the dummy subject will drop out, e.g. Gestern wurde gestorben.
Gestorben wird immer is just like that last example only with a construction that's peripheral in English but unremarkable in German, namely fronting of the main verb. The adverb is immer "ever; always", so the meaning is something like "There's always dying". But I'm unhappy with this translation because (a) the use of a gerund rather than a participle makes it sound less active and (b) there's a closer German equivalent to it, namely Sterben gibt es immer. There is just no way to translate the German phrase into English without either nominalising the verb (e.g. "Dying is always happening") or supplying a subject which is only implied in the original (e.g. "People are always dying").
But, of course, it's the Chinese version that has me completely baffled. It comes out as 六呎風雲 or, literally, "six feet wind cloud". The latter half is one of a seemingly endless number of Chinese idioms featuring one or both of these elements; my dictionary glosses it as "(1) wind and clouds (2) unpredictable changes (3) high-positioned; high and exalted; imposing". I guess (2) is most applicable in this case, given that the death at the beginning of each episode is almost always unforeseen. But what do the two halves have to do with each other? "Six feet of unpredictable changes"? What on earth makes this preferrable to the duly literally 六呎之下? No wonder I never made much progress in Chinese.
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Or maybe taking it even far from a literal translation - "Death is a constant."
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"Someone's always dying" could work, though for some reason I parse the German as referring more to the future than the present, i.e. "Ah, Leichenbestatter, das ist ein Beruf mit Zukunft! Gestorben wird immer, gel?"
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Der Satz ist etwa so hemdsärmelig wie "Schwund ist immer"....
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Indeed. Those two constructions were the ones that came to my mind when I tried to translate it into English. (Though I also had "Someone's always dying" rather than "People are always dying" -- though since the subject is not mentioned in German, either would probably work.)
En España...
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