I began my BlogScans nearly a year ago, with the chance discovery that many blog-posts centered on a "wandering" theme. I feel as if I've come full circle to discover that many more contain a complaint that someone or some idea is "lost in translation."
This was triggered, perhaps, by a reasonably clever Blogcritics.org post examining how The Simpsons might survive translation to suit the Arab world. (They don't.) And Homer's translation to a sober, wise patriach in a series bereft of beer, bacon, Bart's backtalk, and Lisa's self-conscious feminism is a parallel for other such losses in international and trans-Web communication.
For a 180-degree twist on this concept, I read John "Vampire Slayer" Blyler's complaint on JB's Circuit that his studies of vampire bloggers and dead kittens had been taken out of context. I never knew that dead kittens were a trick to trace vampire bloggers (parasitic denizens of the cyberworld that suck original ideas out of the blogs of others). But The Bay Area Is Talking had the rest of the story. Just Google the phrase "Bloggers kill kittens" and you'll find ample evidence of the propagation of an absurd idea through the Web.
But that isn't so much lost in translation as stolen. For a look at an absurd idea both lost in translation and propagated freely, check out respectful of otters, where they repair a fractured news item purported to be from ZDF News (a highly-respected Dutch news program). Did President Bush visit a specially-built food-supply depot in New Orleans after Katrina, only to have it torn down after he left? No, the bloggers conclude; the initial translator missed a segue from the story about the Presidential visit to one city with news about different day's visit to a completely different state.
According to Michael Yon: Online Magazine, the Yehzidi, a little-known, reclusive Kurdish tribe, had their religious beliefs mistranslated as devil worship by Saddam Hussein.
Some believe Yezidism is over 5,000 years old... Some tenets of Yezidism are readily understandable to westerners: Yezidis worship one God... They recognize and respect both Jesus and Mohammed, but as men of faith, not prophets. Where the doctrine starts to become hazy is when the angels appear... [W]hen this seventh Angel, most beloved of God, fell from grace, he was the most powerful angel in Heaven and on Earth. He rose as the Archangel Malak Ta'us... [T]he name, Malak Ta'us, literally means, "King of Peacocks."
Article comments
1 - DrPat
Still playing with Babelizer:
becomes
Or:
which is rendered