The difficulty of translating between languages

[snousle]

I kinda knew this, but the way it's explained here really brings it home. You can't just translate sentences in isolation. Instead, you pretty much have to know the whole story behind the sentence before you can convey it accurately in another language. It makes me wonder how those simultaneous translators at the UN can function at all.

Let me

Comments

[bikerfuk]

Growing up most of the adults on my father's side spoke Italian, when I got a little older I found out they spoke pigeon, fragmented Italian and English. When I turned 18 I went to Italy and thought I would have no problem with the language and it turned out I had a lot difficulty understanding people and being understood.

[muckefuck]

Standard Italian may go back to Dante, but only a small percentage of Italians were conversant in it when Italy first became a country. Everyone else spoke dialect at home. It's only really since the Second World War that that situation has changed significantly.

One of my partner's friends grew up in an Italian household. But his family was from near the French border, so what they spoke was some variety of Piedmontese or maybe even Provençal. His only exposure to the standard language was through opera. So when he finally went to Rome, he tried communicating in a mashup of dialect and operatic Italian, supplemented by his knowledge of Latin. Needless to say, the Romans thought it was hilarious.