2 ms·

I feel that I am very sensitive to "translations sounding like translations". A feeling of "that isn't quite how a native person would say that, but I can't rea

by wkjagt 2y ago

I feel that I am very sensitive to "translations sounding like translations". A feeling of "that isn't quite how a native person would say that, but I can't really identify what's wrong". My mother tongue is Dutch, and the strange thing is that with the strong influence of the English language, even a lot of content written in Dutch today sounds like it was translated from English. I find it really hard to explain it clearly though. Does anyone else feel the same and maybe knows what causes it?

numpad0 2y ago
Universal grammar theorists freak out whenever this is said, but I think that's because those translated sentences and possibly even logic beneath it just aren't valid in that language and culture, in your case Dutch. Else everything should perfectly translate between any arbitrary languages without adding unnatural or uncomfortable components.
adelie 2y ago
'translationese' is a pretty common term for it. when you translate, it's really easy to mirror the source structure/syntax even when there's more idiomatic ways to say it in the target language.
- lampiaio 2y ago
  Exactly. One simple example that I see all the time comes to mind: In English, "dozens of ____s" is a very common expression, particularly in news articles. In my local language, even though we do have a word for "dozen", it's much more common to say that in the form of "tens of ____s". Most of the "dozens of ____s" I see written in my language are from news articles that were (badly) translated from English.
  - lucb1e 2y ago
    English uses "dozens" in more situations than Dutch uses "tens", also because "tens" in Dutch is a three-syllable word. It's often just not idiomatic I often find myself having started a sentence in Dutch that I can't finish without borrowing something from English, and I remember a recent example actually involved the word "dozens" (although I forgot what the sentence was about so I can't reproduce it here). That sentence should have been constructed entirely differently, but I now use English in my day-to-day communications at work, at home, and also most online ones so some stuff slips through. It blew my mind some months ago when I used an English saying, perfectly translated (no loan words, good sentence structure), but entirely nonexistent in Dutch. I can't ever have heard anyone said it but it came out without any thought. The person I was talking to is also proficient in English and understood what I meant, but whether or not their face gave something away, it took me five seconds to realize what I had said. I guess the brain stores words in a form of meaning that transcends language, and just calls upon the language neural net to convert that into muscle movements for speech? Actually, no, then you'd have gotten the word-for-word translation; it must be storing more than single words in some sort of language lookup center, or maybe something that converts between the two structures if you do enough translating between a given language pair? Either way, mind-boggling stuff
bojan 2y ago
I'm a non-native Dutch speaker and even I catch it, a sentence that looks like a 1-on-1 translation from English and than I have to think, no, this can't be proper Dutch. Exectly the same thing happens to my native language. What causes it? I guess the overwhelming viewership of English spoken to control, so people actually start thinking in English, and translate their thoughts badly when they need to express themselves in their native languages.

by wkjagt 2y ago

numpad0 2y ago

Universal grammar theorists freak out whenever this is said, but I think that's because those translated sentences and possibly even logic beneath it just aren't valid in that language and culture, in your case Dutch. Else everything should perfectly translate between any arbitrary languages without adding unnatural or uncomfortable components.

adelie 2y ago

'translationese' is a pretty common term for it. when you translate, it's really easy to mirror the source structure/syntax even when there's more idiomatic ways to say it in the target language.

lampiaio 2y ago
Exactly. One simple example that I see all the time comes to mind: In English, "dozens of ____s" is a very common expression, particularly in news articles. In my local language, even though we do have a word for "dozen", it's much more common to say that in the form of "tens of ____s". Most of the "dozens of ____s" I see written in my language are from news articles that were (badly) translated from English.
- lucb1e 2y ago
  English uses "dozens" in more situations than Dutch uses "tens", also because "tens" in Dutch is a three-syllable word. It's often just not idiomatic I often find myself having started a sentence in Dutch that I can't finish without borrowing something from English, and I remember a recent example actually involved the word "dozens" (although I forgot what the sentence was about so I can't reproduce it here). That sentence should have been constructed entirely differently, but I now use English in my day-to-day communications at work, at home, and also most online ones so some stuff slips through. It blew my mind some months ago when I used an English saying, perfectly translated (no loan words, good sentence structure), but entirely nonexistent in Dutch. I can't ever have heard anyone said it but it came out without any thought. The person I was talking to is also proficient in English and understood what I meant, but whether or not their face gave something away, it took me five seconds to realize what I had said. I guess the brain stores words in a form of meaning that transcends language, and just calls upon the language neural net to convert that into muscle movements for speech? Actually, no, then you'd have gotten the word-for-word translation; it must be storing more than single words in some sort of language lookup center, or maybe something that converts between the two structures if you do enough translating between a given language pair? Either way, mind-boggling stuff

bojan 2y ago

I'm a non-native Dutch speaker and even I catch it, a sentence that looks like a 1-on-1 translation from English and than I have to think, no, this can't be proper Dutch. Exectly the same thing happens to my native language. What causes it? I guess the overwhelming viewership of English spoken to control, so people actually start thinking in English, and translate their thoughts badly when they need to express themselves in their native languages.