Solid Block of Ise

Two days ago I decided to change blogging languages. I was tired of blogging in Swedish, and I felt that some kind of renewal was needed. I’d been kicking around the idea of switching languages since the early summer at least.

Originally I had planned the language-change to coincide with me and Ann-Sofie moving to Jokkmokk. This move has been indefinitely postponed due to various more or less complicated reasons. It felt kind of stupid then not to switch languages until we’d moved, since that move might take a lot longer than originally planned.

It’s interesting forming my thoughts in a different language now. I’m a pretty decent english-speaker, and even though I’m pretty good at using the english language I’ve realized these last two days that I suffer from something that most people who know a language yet don’t use it on a daily basis suffer from: lack of vocabulary.

I’m a bit of a grammar-nazi, and I can also be really arrogant when it comes to languages. I learned to speak english pretty much at the same time I learned Swedish. This explains my cocky demeanor when I speak english, and whenever I have to stop and think of a word I mentally kick myself for not knowing the word beforehand.

(And in case you haven’t noticed it yet, I have a tendency to be rather stuffy when writing in English. I blame all those british comedies which I so dearly enjoy)

So, this has opened up a new adventure for me: restocking my vocabulary. Finding not only the dictionary equivalents to what I use in everyday Swedish, but also the very essence of what a word means.

I find that there are a lot of subtle nuances to most words. I notice this most clearly when I’m watching a movie. I usually don’t watch english-language movies with subtitles, but due to my lovely girlfriend who’s not quite as good at english as me the DVD-player is usually set to show subtitles. It’s painfully obvious when the subtitler knows the language - but doesn’t know the cultural frame of references the word is used for.

Case in point: We just finished watching Minority Report. Absolutely excellent movie despite Tom Cruise being in it. Dystopian future, food for thoughts, great special effects and a pumping DTS-soundtrack. All the things I like with a movie, essentially. But the subtitles were at times absolutely dreadful.

At one point one of the characters suggest that Tom Cruise take another person to Radioshack. This was subtitled with “Ta henne till en radioaffär!”, essentially “take her to a TV-retailer” or something. Sure, the translation works, but this is where my own language-nazi woke up and got annoyed. In my opinion the proper translation would’ve been “Ta henne till Elgiganten!”. Elgiganten is a large Swedish home electronics-supplier very similar to Radioshack.

Sure, it’s a minor example but none the less these things annoy me. And now I face a similar problem with my own blog - finding the proper frame of reference for words, the skeleton from which to hang a sentence without just grabbing random words from the whirlpool that serves as my brain.

(Actually, while watching Minority Report I sat and wondered what it would be like to work as a subtitler. I’m pretty certain though that a majority of the sloppy translations stem from a lack of time - I bet people doing that work are under very, very tight deadlines and don’t have the elbow-room to lean back and muse about the wording of a sentence. After all, they’re essentially Google Translate but made of meat sitting in cheap chairs.)

Speaking of translations, I’m now going to fire up a text-editor and take a poke at translating another one of the static pages here. Hopefully I’ll finish it. I finished the About-page and it turned out pretty decent.

Technorati Tags: english, languages, swedish, translations, words, writing, blogging

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