In the Loss of Translations

In German a couple of days ago, Frau Boyle handed back a short writing assignment that we had done several days earlier. She was going over some common errors, and she pointed out that we can't just look up a word in the dictionary and thoughtlessly insert it into our sentences. We must consider the part of speech, and look at the word to make sure it has the meaning we intended. She gave us an example or two of when someone had used the wrong word, explaining that in order to figure out what the person had meant she often found herself translating word for word back into English, and a reason for the mistake will usually make itself clear. "For example," she said, walking over to the board, "Once I had a student write this in an essay." She wrote the words Ich will nicht würfel (ich* vill nich*t vü­­­°rfuhl, *ch is either like the Spanish letter j or like English sh, take your pick, °I have no idea how to transliterate the Ümläüt Mönster...be kreativ) on the board, then stepped back so we could see. Ich will nicht is a phrase we know, meaning "I don't want to." But würfel? We'd never seen that before. Frau Boyle explained that this example came to mind because it had really confused her, and it had taken a while to figure it out. She was familiar with the word, but could not understand how it had ended up there; a würfel is a small object used in board games. She had gotten out the dictionary and looked it up, to see if there were any English translations that she hadn't thought of. Bingo! It means 'die,' as in the singular of 'dice.' Appearantly, the student had been trying to say "I don't want to die," and upon looking up "die," found the word for the small cube with sides marked from one to six. Understandable, I suppose, except for the fact that every infinitive verb in German ends in -en, with several exceptions: sein and tun, ending in only -n, and a few others ending in -ern or -eln.

And if you're wondering about the title: I was going to call this post "Lost in Translation," but decided that that had been done and was unoriginal, so I typed "Lost in Translation" into Babel Fish and took it through as many languages as I had the patience for. The most significant changes came through Chinese and Russian, and Greek wasn't bad either. Some other favorites of mine were, "To Transfers the Loss," "Loss of Movement," (thanks there to Japanese,) and "To the Translation Loss" (a shout-out goes to Dutch). In the end, I went with the one I did because I liked how the major words are similar, how it has a meaning, and how that meaning is totally different from the original.