Re: Making money from Java

"Pete Dashwood" <dashwood@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:3vqqidF16g774U1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>
> ("...sometimes difficult, perhaps even impossible to express *exactly* the
> same statement in two languages." Yet, people make a living from doing
> this every day.)

Maybe I'm taking this quotation out of context here, because I don't
really understand this Greek/Aramaic "read" verb argument surrounding it,
but...

I actually believe Judson's statement that you quoted here is correct.
It is sometimes "difficult", by some objective measure of difficulty, to
express the same statement in two different languages.

It is not sufficient to prove Judson's statement to be false by a
counter-example (e.g. showing an "easy" translation for the English
statement "Bull***!"), because the claim wasn't that ALL statements are
hard to translate; it was simply that there exists some statements are hard
to translate (and perhaps the Greek/Aramaic "read" is one of them).

To show that this is false would require some intricate proof that gives
a mapping for every statement in every language to some statement in every
other language. Probably not feasible.

To "prove" that the statement is true, one would only need to give an
example of a statement that is (objectively) difficult to translate from one
language to another.

In Japanese, there are multiple pronouns for the first person singular.
I haven't figured out all the subtleties behind this, but for example
"watashi" is in theory gender neutral and formal, but considered "girly" in
non-formal situations. A (male) newscaster might refer to himself as
"watashi". "atashi", AFAIK, is girls only, and in a sitcom, you might have a
homosexual male character refer to himself as atashi to emphasize the fact
that he is gay. I was told by a friend that, given my personality, I should
refer to myself as "boku". I don't even know what that implies. There's also
"ore" for arrogant people or tough biker gang type personae.

So I was watching this animation which features a wimpy male character
who refers to himself as "watashi". His older girlfriend who takes care of
him is going to leave him, so she tells him he has to toughen up and take
care of himself from now on. In his next line of dialog, he refers to
himself as "boku" and the girl starts laughing, and says "'Boku'? That
doesn't suit you at all..."

Given all this explanatory context, you can understand the original
Japanese semantics, but to actually give a direct translation of the dialog
in English would be very difficult, I think.

- Oliver


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