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Davvero possibile perdere di vista l’oggetto del prodotto che si tenta di vendere?

Possibile che l’azienda non abbia voluto o potuto verificare l’esattezza della traduzione?

A questo punto mi auguro che non sia stato interpellato alcun traduttore.

Perché sarebbe davvero un traduttore (o una traduttrice) che lavora con i piedi in tutti i sensi.

Leggendo questo poster pubblicitario che tappezza un po’ ovunque la città, mi verrebbe da dire: domina l’italiano prima di avventurarti in altre lande.

Sottomettititi i suoi phrasal verbs? Un po’ sgrammaticato. Forse si sono persi una a in ai. Ma avrebbe senso? Controlla la sua grammatica? Nel senso di verifica la sua grammatica? O forse intendevano dire ‘averne il controllo’? Padroneggiare? Il listening? Siamo sicuri che sia maschile in italiano? Il listening cosa? In inglese listening si accompagna sempre a qualcosa come task o skills.

Infine, vieni in Berlitz. Ci piace poco quella preposizione in. Forse vieni alla Berlitz se intendiamo una scuola oppure al Berlitz se intendiamo l’istituto o il centro linguistico. Poi non è dato sapere perché Domina rimanga maiuscolo senza interpunzione precedente.

Insomma, molto accattivante la grafica e la metafora soggiacente. Lascia un po’ a desiderare la poca precisione linguistica dimostrata da chi le lingue dovrebbe insegnarle a parlare e a scrivere.

I nearly spat out my coffee the other morning as I was reading the news: a company based in northern Italy had just trialed a new coronavirus swab test that’s sure to give results in a matter of hours.

Problem is that they chose to name it Daily Tampon. Regardless of the fact that most men would have a problem with this name or orifice to be used, the company still chose to go ahead with it and the new brand name made the papers, including the prestigious Il Sole 24 Ore.

I’m not privy to the reasons why the marketing department opted for this name but it’s misleading on two grounds: it’s not a tampon and it doesn’t need to be taken on a daily basis. Enough said.

It is interesting to note how languages may differ even in their more tangible form, like materials used or layout. Not just in terms of actual content.

Blue plaques are ubiquitous in London and other parts of the UK. They are part of British culture and its smart way of stylishly celebrating its heritage. They are blue, an unoffending color, which sets off the white letters and numbers quite nicely. They are modern-looking, unassuming yet eye-catching.

Things are quite different in Italy. And tellingly so. There are no blue plaques to rivet your gaze or pique your curiosity. That’s because Italy, in its cloyingly pompous and bureaucratic style, has opted for the austere-looking beige slab of marble. To match the equally drab street signs. Nothing stands out to help tourists or passersby pause and reminisce. Indeed, over time, these slabs tend to turn sooty and gray and the chiseled letters become harder to make out.

In addition to their headstone resemblance, the Italian targa commermorativa tends to come across as officious with its use of escutcheons and heraldic charges. It speaks – like a gravestone – of a past that has ceased to be. And dust and soot will take care of the rest.

The other morning I was saddened to read about the unexpected and inexplicable death of hundreds of elephants in Botswana. No one seems to know what culled the local population of elephants in this part of the world.

While reading the article published in the Guardian, an annoyingly intrusive word soured my mood.

Local witnesses say some elephants were seen walking around in circles, which is an indication of neurological impairment. “If you look at the carcasses, some of them have fallen straight on their face, indicating they died very quickly. Others are obviously dying more slowly, like the ones that are wandering around. So it’s very difficult to say what this toxin is,” said McCann. Excerpted from: Hundreds of elephants dead in mysterious mass die-off – The Guardian 01 July 20

Against this bleak backdrop of death, why add this irksome adverb, which adds nothing to the description and whose nonsensical presence inflates the style while deflating the gravitas of the alarming message being conveyed? ‘Other elephants are obviously dying more slowly?’ What is so obvious about all this? Nothing. ‘Like the ones that are wandering around’ the sagacious interviewee goes on to say. A flawlessly logical conclusion indeed.

In linguistics, words like ‘obviously’ are often referred to as dogmatic words or weasel words. Like a weasel, obviously sucks the essence out of a text leaving it as an empty, meaningless shell. Abstaining from interspersing your writing or speech with this hollow word will not help bring back these gracious animals, but will certainly make you sound like a sensible and sensitive writer.

The other day I was contacted by a friend asking what binnacle meant in ‘security binnacle’. I must say I had never heard of the word and promptly verified whether – peradventure – the word she was looking for was instead ‘pinnacle’. It did not make much sense in that context either, so I asked for more content and details about the translator, a Mexican engineer who had been asked to translate from his native Spanish into English.

Intrigued and eager to solve the mystery, I looked up binnacle in Spanish and found bitácora. However, it turns out bitácora not only means binnacle, but it also means logbook. Now ‘security logbook’ does ring less nonsensical in this phrase. Was this, perhaps, the word the Mexican engineer had in mind?

Now I’m sure you’re all dying to find out what a binnacle is in English. These pictures should help.

So where does this word hail from? According to some dictionaries: 1. “wooden box for a ship’s compass,” 1738, corruption of bittacle (1620s), which is probably from Spanish bitacula or Portuguese bitacola, both from Latin habitaculum “little dwelling place,” from habitare “to inhabit” 2. alteration of Middle English bitakle, from Old Portuguese or Old Spanish; Old Portuguese bitácola & Old Spanish bitácula, from Latin habitaculum dwelling place, from habitare to inhabit.  Makes sense.

In older Italian the word for this used to be abitacolo, but it has since been replaced by chiesuola and the Spanish cuaderno de bitácora is known as giornale di chiesuola . Would this be the same as diario di bordo? Not a clue. I guess I’m all at sea when it comes to nautical terminology.

From the sound of it, one would think that a bellicose neighboring state like New York, Pennsylvania or perhaps even the diminutive Delaware were about to take up arms and drive their tanks across the border in an attempt to invade the Mid-Atlantic state.

In fact, what readers or viewers often come across in the Italian media are sentences like: tir sfonda il new jersey sulla 336 or camion sfonda i new jersey e perde carburante sul raccordo.

So why does this foreign-sounding word crop up in Italian? In English, this is simply known as a ‘jersey barrier’ or ‘jersey wall’ (technically, the New Jersey median barrier, because it originated in New Jersey in the 1950s), but the key word was and still is ‘barrier’.

Italian – and other Romance languages – tend to preserve the first word in compound nouns borrowed from English. Therefore it makes sense that ‘New Jersey’ has stuck, but ‘barrier’ is often omitted.

There are plenty of examples including ‘smoking’ for ‘smoking jacket’ (e.g., ha comprato uno smoking per il gala), ‘night’ for ‘night club’ (Roma pullulava di night durante la Dolce Vita), ‘British’ instead of ‘British Council’ (e.g., vado al British) and so on and so forth.

Non amo criticare l’operato di altri traduttori. Quando incappi però in un libro di poesie con traduzione a fronte, è inevitabile che l’occhio vaghi e raffronti l’originale con la versione tradotta. Quando poi l’autore è uno dei massimi poeti nicaraguensi, il poeta ‘pazzo’ Alfonso Cortés, non si può tacere.

Taccio invece il nome del traduttore o della traduttrice, primo perché non sono a me note le motivazioni che hanno portato alle numerose e spesso gravi distorsioni nella versione italiana e, in secondo luogo, perché non avrebbe diritto a una replica in questo mio articolo.

Non vedo tuttavia nessuna ragione per non tentare di rimettere a fuoco le falle presenti nell’edizione di 30 Poemas de Alfonso uscita nel 1990. Premetto che non sono un ispanista e raramente lavoro con lo spagnolo. Tuttavia, credo un qualsiasi traduttore con una buona conoscenza delle due lingue noterebbe queste lacune.

Già dalla prima poesia, forse la più celebre di Cortés, Ventana, si apprende che:

…yo siento que allì (sic) vive, a flor del éxtasis feliz, mi anhelo.

Viene reso in:

…io sento che lì vive, un fiore dell’estasi felice, il mio desiderio.

Cosa ha indotto il traduttore o la traduttrice a trasformare una locuzione in un fiore? Non è dato sapere. Va detto che un lettore italiano senza alcuna conoscenza del castigliano si fiderebbe della resa. Un peccato davvero.

In La Canción del Espacio, si legge che a vivir con los astros in italiano è a vivere con gli altri; pensar que todavía diventa pensare che tuttavia.

In Desde la orilla, pájaro è reso con passero. in Sueño, la Ninfa al borde ahita è tradotto come la Ninfa al bordo stanco . In Aire congojas è così riportato: cogojas. In Angelus, locura è scritto lecura. Ma è forse in Ocaso che si raggiunge il limite della tolleranza.

Y en ese cielo de tiempos pasados, hacia los horizontes va bajando una sombra de cuerpos ignorados…

E in questo cielo di tempi passati, verso gli orizzonti va abbaiando un mucchio di corpi ignorati…

Non mi so spiegare la mancanza di cura nel riportare fedelmente l’originale né l’allontanarsi così clamorosamente dal castigliano. Un’edizione che non fa onore alla (defunta?) casa editrice che lo ha pubblicato (Edizioni Amadeus), ma che spesso travisa l’opera di un poeta, creando un caos inutile.

Una bellissima parola danese che letteralmente significa ‘affamato di pelle’, nel senso di una mancanza di contatto o vicinanza fisica. Una parola in circolo da una trentina d’anni in Danimarca, ma che sembra solo da poco tempo emergere su siti web in lingua italiana.

In danese è possibile chiedere se uno ‘lider af hudsult’, ossia se ‘soffre di carenza di contatto fisico’. In inglese si trova ‘skin hunger’ e ‘touch starvation’. In italiano sembra venire tradotto con un’espressione dal sapore clinico ‘astinenza da contatto fisico’.

In tempi di coronavirus e distanziamento sociale, chissà se nasceranno altri termini in altre lingue per descrivere questa sensazione.

These recent days have been marked by the coronavirus disease – sometimes verging on the scaremongering. This has also brought on some travel restrictions, which have made me rethink how we often take for granted that we can travel freely and easily between major cities. Major cities like Milan and New York, for example.

After learning that a couple of US legacy airlines have chosen to stop serving Milan as a consequence of the virus spread, and while reading a whole host of soundbites from either side of the Atlantic, two homophones have emerged to form a – quite personal – mental connection between these two cities.

As I was reading an Italian newspaper earlier today, I was bemused to learn that churchgoers should steer clear of stoups – or acquasantiere in Italian – to avoid catching the dreaded virus. I was bemused because I thought this practice was a thing of the past. Who in their right mind – I pondered – would want to dip their hands in a communal washbowl regardless of any potential virus lurking in these shallow hallowed waters?

The sound of this rarely spoken word instantly brought me to its homophone (though not a homograph): the omnipresent New York stoop.

So where did these two words originate from? Are they somehow related? They both share Germanic roots: stoup stems from the old Norse and Icelandic meaning flagon or beverage container. By contrast, stoop comes from Dutch steop meaning step. Interestingly, stoop also means pitcher or jar in some southern Dutch and Flemish dialects.