Monday, September 17, 2012

Chapter 15, Page 13 No translation

Translation please?

Actually, I will provide a translation.

Panel 1: Passport.

Panel 2: Welcome.

Panel 3: Parking is straight ahead. Follow the signs to customs.

-----

I am so sorry! I'm sure it's purely coincidental that I've been having so many technical difficulties with page 13. Very sure. Yeah.

Anyway, I'm tired of having to rearrange my desktop, including aspect ratios which don't always work and preferences that get reset for no reason I can think of, every time I want to use my tablet. So I got the parts and had my brother put together a computer rig specifically for my tablet. One problem. *Every time* I try to put the Photoshop installation CD into the computer the tablet goes out of sync and shuts down. Can't really install something if I don't have a monitor to see what I'm doing. GAAAA! And this rig is totally useless if I can't get Photoshop onto it! I have a ten-pound paperweight! *bangs head on desk* I wonder if my brother has a spare monitor I can borrow for a little while.

27 comments:

Tenacious-K said...

Well, I'm glad YOU'RE feeling better at least! :D

I will be praying for your hardware issues. As an IT tech I know it can be maddening at times getting all the parts to talk to each other.

Hang in there! And, hey, Autumn's coming - pretty leaves! Yea!

Journo-SEAL said...

@Brigid: Was this somewhere in Germany or one of the Scandinavian countries? 0_0

Brigid said...

@Tenacious: I am, my tech isn't. Hoo boy. You know it's bad when you ask your resident computer geek about a problem and his response is, "... That's weird."

Autumn's here. Release the mold spores!

@Journo: It was in northern Minnesota, but the camp was set up so it was kinda like entering another country. In this case, Norway.

Journo-SEAL said...

@Brigid: Wow, they purposely spoke Norwegian? Was it supposed to be a Norwegian culture retreat or something?

Brigid said...

@Journo: Sort of, it was one of the Concordia language villages. They have camps during the summer to teach various languages to kids, and make it fun.

Journo-SEAL said...

@Brigid: Wow, you learned Norwegian there?

Brigid said...

@Journo: Some, yeah. Enough to realize that, as complicated as English is, I'm so glad we don't have to deal with gendered nouns. (The Norwegian words for 'eye' and 'island' are the same but different genders, so the only way to tell them apart is by the article used with them. And then there's the funky way they have of telling time.)

Croatoan5376@Yahoo.com (Dan) said...

And then you have languages that like to assign words different genders depending on how they're being used and who is speaking or being spoken to/about: male, female, and neuter nouns and verbs...give me a headache. (In particular I'm thinking of my less-than pleasant memories of high school Spanish).

Brigid said...

@Dan: Hoo boy. The only complete sentence I can say in Spanish is 'Como estas?' Which I already knew before taking high school level Spanish.

Croatoan5376@Yahoo.com (Dan) said...

You're doing better than me. I'm pretty much limited to "Que?" and "Habla Englais?", and I know that Disney had to change the name on the international release of "Castle in the Sky" because "Laputa" has some, ah, unfortunate connotations in Spanish... '^_^

Brigid said...

@Dan: Had to look that last one up. Oh. Oh dear. That was not nice, Mr. Swift.

Journo-SEAL said...

@Brigid: Good thing you didn't learn French or Arabic, then. Sometimes, it's not so straightforward, particularly in French when the word starts with a vowel.

I heard about the Castle in the Sky thing as well. It's still not sure if Swift really intended to be so dirty. Then again, from what I've heard, the book is quite scatological.

Brigid said...

@Journo: Not to mention the weird spelling system. Silent vowels, silent consonants, silent *syllables*...

Considering Swift was fluent in Spanish, it would be strange if he wasn't at least aware of the similarity.

Journo-SEAL said...

@Brigid: Silent syllables, huh? That's a first for me.

I see we've both been reading the same encyclopaedia entries about Jonathan Swift =P

Brigid said...

@Journo: How else do you explain 'Sioux' being pronounced 'soo?'

Quite possibly.

Journo-SEAL said...

@Brigid: Don't rightly know. I could never figure out how it was pronounced until you just told me.

Brigid said...

@Journo: Ah. I guess that wouldn't necessarily be common knowledge outside this part of the American Mid-West.

Croatoan5376@yahoo.com (Dan) said...

@Brigid: not common knowledge, except for anyone who's seen "Dances With Wolves"... ;P

Brigid said...

@Dan: Yeah, that involved the Sioux, didn't it?

EdorFaus said...

*grin* I'm from Norway. And I can't seem to stop myself from offering some corrections... ^_^'

I kinda wonder if the greeter at that camp wasn't very good at Norwegian, or if it's just your translation for the comic that didn't quite catch the nuances - as a couple of the words aren't quite right.

Better would be "Parkeringsplassen er rett frem. Følg skiltene til tollen." or maybe just "Parkering er rett frem." for the first sentence, as that's closer to your translation.

Just in case anyone's interested:

"En parkeringsplass" means "a parking space" (or replace "space" with "area", I guess, if there's room for many cars), while "parkeringsplassen" means "the parking space" (or, again, area). "Parkering", meanwhile, is "parking" (without the "space" qualifier) - I'm not really sure if one is more likely to be used than the other though.

On the other hand, "skilter" is wrong in two ways. First off, it's using the wrong plurality rule, and second, it's using the non-specific form (like above). :P (Of course, fixing the latter also fixes the former.)

Et skilt, flere skilt, skiltet, skiltene == a sign, more signs, the sign, the signs.

However:

En bil, flere biler, bilen, bilene == a car, more cars, the car, the cars.

So the plurality rule mistake is an understandable one for someone who didn't grow up with the language. It's not always easy to know which word has what gender.

(I think the gender is the main determinator for which words use what rule, but Norwegian wasn't my best subject in school (and that was some time ago), so I'm not 100% sure - and there are probably some irregular words anyway.)

As for "eye" vs "island", well, they're similar but not quite the same: "øye" vs "øy". However, it is correct that the former is neuter while the latter is female: "et øye" vs "ei øy" ("an eye" vs "an island"),

Of course, that's discounting dialects - we have quite a few of those, that can be quite different from each other - so I think it's plausible that someone would pronounce them basically the same way.

Additionally, even discounting our three extra letters (æøå), the words aren't pronounced the way you'd likely think by reading them - as many of the vowels are pronounced differently. :P

Oh, and all of the above is using the bokmål variant of the written language, which is the one I'm most familiar with - though the nynorsk variant is quite similar, just replaces some words and shuffles a few of the rules (like some of the endings).

(Yes, I had to learn both in school. And yes, that's pretty crazy. The similarities make them feel like the same language, so that I mix them up in my head, while the small differences between them trip me up... So I actually had an easier time in English class.)

Brigid said...

@EdorFaus: And this is why I *still* can't hold even a short conversation in any language other than English. @.@ I will make note of your corrections and may get around to editing this strip.

Uff da. And this is why using Babelfish and an English-Norwegian dictionary is no substitute for actual fluency.

EdorFaus said...

@Brigid: Well, from what I've heard Norwegian is one of the harder languages to learn (for non-natives) - which doesn't really surprise me, considering how much trouble I had as a native. I figure the only reason I know as much as I do is the immersion I get by living here. (OTOH, I'm weird, so not really a good example.) So it might be easier to start with some other language. Or, if you were referring to the depicted experience as the reason you haven't really tried any other ones, well, I can understand that. Not the best way to be introduced to learning a new language.

And yes, machine translation is no proper substitute for fluency. For any language, really.

Of course, sometimes fluency is not an option, and then a machine translator is the best option available... A game I've heard is fun is to take some sentence, pass it through a translator, and then pass the result to a reverse translator (translating it back into English) - the result can be rather different, especially if you include a few more steps before returning or use different translators. :)

(Btw, just to make sure you know: my corrections were not meant as a complaint of any sort (except, perhaps, at my own inability to not offer them); in fact, I commend you for taking the effort to at least try to get it right - some would simply have inserted random gibberish. So feel free to ignore me.)

And, sorry I'm so verbose - I have a hard time extracting the essence to condense my thoughts into brevity. :P

Brigid said...

@EdorFaus: Actually, this camp was a lot more fun than the Spanish learning software I had use. The equivalent of a two-year high school course and all the Spanish I know is still what I picked up from the old Disney Zorro TV show.

Dad had some fun with that machine translator game. He came up with some really weird stuff.

I know. And I'm really glad you pointed it out.

lol You aren't the only one! ^_^

Croatoan5376@yahoo.com (Dan) said...

I was using a machine translator for English --> French recently. Not really happy with the results. Especially since, in an ideal world, I would have preferred not only a translation that a fluent speaker would find acceptable, but also a regional/dialectic translation (even if it differed only slightly from "high school" French; in the words of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, "God is in the details"). Guess I'll have to go on Yahoo Answers and find a native speaker.

Brigid said...

@Dan: Gotta love the internet. Of course, you still have to decide with offered translation to use and not knowing the language will make that task tricky at best.

Croatoan5376@Yahoo.com (Dan) said...

True. I've heard horror stories about people getting a Chinese or Japanese character as a tattoo because they think that it's "cool" to have an exotic character for "courage" or "strength" or whatever plastered all over their shoulder or wherever. Apparently, though, there have been more than a few, shall we say, jokes played on the unsuspecting. Tattoo artists have been known to place characters with obscene or offensive translations on people who don't know any better. So if I can find someone to provide a translation for me, I'll be sure to run it through a machine translator before I go public with it (or better yet, find more than one person to translate stuff for me).

Brigid said...

@Dan: Worse is when no prank is being played at all. True story. Can't remember what the relation was, but he was with a Chinese lady and another woman walked by with some Chinese characters on her shirt. The Chinese lady started giggling and explained that the other lady had probably seen the symbols in a store window and thought they were cool so had them put on a shirt. The translation? "Good stuff inside. Cheap."