Feedback sheet assignment #3 (FeedSheet3) §1 “Når du som ugift kvinde får barn”
There is one word in English that makes translating this simpler than it seems – namely “wedlock”. When you have a child with someone you are not married to, you have a child out of wedlock, so you could go with “if you have a child out of wedlock”.
§2 “Får du barn med en mand” There are a couple of issues here:
• cause-effect: the entire sentence “Får du barn med en mand, du ikke er gift med, kan du indlede sagen om faderskab allerede inden, dit barn er født” expresses a cause-effect, or condition-consequence, relation in which “Får du barn med en mand, du ikke er gift med” represents the cause and “kan du indlede sagen om faderskab allerede inden, dit barn er født” represents the effect, or consequence. That is, what the sentences says is “hvis du har fået barn med en mand, du ikke er gift med, så kan do indlede sagen of faderskab inden dit barn er født”. This means that the underlying relation, is an if-then relation. There are at least two ways to express this in English
◦ if-then construction: this is quite straightforward
◦ conditional “should”: you can use “should” to express hypothetical cause-effect relationships, as in “Should you have a child with a man to who, you are not married, then you can...” - this is almost like the if-then construction, the difference being that “should” indicates that we are dealing with a hypothetical situation, which is not necessarily the case with “if-then”.
• “få barn”: in english you cannot leave the article out, and so “*have child” or “*get child” would be incorrect. You should insert an “a”.
§3 “sagen om faderskab”
This calls for a shift in grammatical structure, since “*the case about paternity/fatherhood” does not work. You can transpose the structure into a nominal compound like “paternity case”.
§4 “statsforvaltningen”
If you look it up in the Gyldendals dictionary, you will see that you can translate it into “the public administration”.
§5 “indkalde”
There are a couple of options here:
• “call in”: this certainly means that you tell someone to come in for a meeting, but this is a generic and informal term.
• “summon”: this is used in legal contexts, and since the text deals with law-related topics, “summon” is an appropriate translation
• “invite”: this is probably too “weak” - technically, the man in question is more or less forced to participate in the meeting, so it is not really an invitation
• “call up”, “draft”, “induct”: these are translation of another meaning of “indkalde” – namely the sense of being called up for military duty. These are not relevant here.
§6 “dine oplysninger”
Since “information” is uncountable in English, you cannot translate this into “your informations”. You have to use the singular.
§8 “retsgenetiske undersøgelser”
§9 “seksuelt forhold til mere end én mand”
The distributive plural comes into play here. If you translate it into “sexual relationship with more than one man,” you are actually suggesting that the reader of the text has had an orgy with a bunch of men at the same time. You have to pluralize “relation” or “relationship” in to “sexual relations/relationships with more than one man” in order to specify that reference is made to a number of individual sexual relationships.
§10 “ændres”
Although “change” is possible, more law-oriented terms like “undo” or “reverse” are both more appropriate and more precise in terms of the nature of the change.
§11 “det løbende børnebidrag” • “løbende”
This one can be tricky. Here are some of your suggested solutions:
◦ “running”: this does not work that well, since it typically refers to actual physical running, like “running people”, “running water” etc.
◦ “current”: the problem here is that if you use “current” in relation to child maintenance, it means the child maintenance that you are currently paying.
◦ “continuous”: this is probably better than the above
◦ “regular”: it is a translation of “løbende” but it is more along to lines of “on a regular basis”
◦ “pending”: this means a case or a job or a task that awaits closure • “børnebidrag”
Some of you went with “alimony”, but that means “underholdsbidrag” or “ægtefældebidrag”, and it is not the same thing as “børnebidrag”. Alimony is what Alan from Two and a Half Men pays his ex-wife; that is, it is money that a divorced husband pays his ex-wife. “Børnebidrag” is called “child maintenance”, “maintenance payments” or just “maintenance”.
§12 “where the President of the United States is holed up at his Prairie Chapel ranch, a few miles from the town of...””
• “holed up”: this is a phrasal verb. A phrasal verb is the combination of a verb and a directional adverb whose meaning is often more than the meaning of the verb and the adverb. Thus phrasal verbs are also idiomatic. In many cases, you cannot translate phrasal verbs word for word. For instance “hvor præsidenten er hullet op” makes no sense. You have to translate the idiomatic meaning of the phrasal verb. “Hole up” may be translated into “lukke sig inde”, “gemme sig”, “søge tilflugt”, “forskanse sig” or “være indespærret”. Given that the president is on vacation, it makes sense to use either “hvor præsidenten søger tilflugt” or “hvor præsidenten har forskanset sig”.
• “his”: when you translate this into Danish, you have to use the reflexive “sin”, because if you use “hans”, then it means that he is holed up in some other man's ranch.
• “The President of the United States”: there are two things that cause problems here, both of which relate to the 'of'-genitive:
◦ Some translate this word-for-word into “Præsidenten af de Forenede Stater” - while the reader of the Danish target text will possibly understand this, there is a way of doing it which has a slightly higher level of naturalness. Firstly, in Danish, the expression “De Forenede Stater” is not used that often, as Danes tend to use just “USA”; secondly, instead of using the 'af'-genitive in Danish, you can use the local translation strategy of transposition (see the lecture notes for week 5) and use a genitive instead as in “USAs
præsident” - it's more correct and it's more economical.
◦ A lot of those students who go with the transposition into the genetive, tend to insert an apostrophe in front of the 's' in “USA's”, but that is incorrect in Danish. While this is how it would have been done in English, Danish does not make use of genitive apostrophes (only if the genitivized noun ends in an 's'), so it's “USAs” with no apostrpohe.
• “a few miles”: it is true that “miles” translates into “mil” in Danish. However, Danes rarely use the term “mil” when talking, and thinking, about distances. Danes use “kilometer” as part of their everyday language, because the metric system is so entrenched in Danish culture. Therefore, it is likely to be difficult for the reader of the Danish target text to relate to the expression “nogle få mil”. This is one of those instances where you have to consider pragmatic equivalence (that is, equivalence which takes into account the context and culture of the target text reader and how that may influence the reader's understanding of the content of the text.
§13 “middle-aged”
Do not use “middelaldrende” here, because that refers to the Middle Ages, or the Medieval Times (kind of, because “middelandrende” does not even exist as a word in the Danish language – the closes possible word is “middelalderlig”). The word you are looking for is “midaldrende”.
§14 “Obedient to the tradition that an American President must be covered 24 hours a day” This is a verbless clause serving as a fronted adverbial. Hold on. What about “must be covered” is that not a verb phrase? Yes it is, but that is within “that an American president most be covered 24 hours a day...” which is a postmodifying sucblause of “the tradition”. If you look at the entire adverbial clause, it has this structure:
| (being) |Obedient to the tradition that an American President must be covered 24 hours a day... | V/ø SC/AdjP
| | A/Clause
Then, you can, of course break it down further:
| Obedient | to the tradition that an American president must be covered 24 hours a day... |
H/Adj PoM/PP
| to | the tradition that an American president must be covered 24 hours a day... | P PC/NP
| the | tradition | that an American president must be covered 24 hours a day... | D H PoM/Clause
So, as you can see, the clause with “must be covered” in it is embedded several levels within this fronted adverbial.
Anyway, fronted verbless work fine in English, but not always so in Danish. A wording like “?lydige imod traditionen at en amerikansk præsident skal dækkes i alle døgnets 24 timer hele året rundt, bliver en flok journalister nødt til at ...” just does not seem natural in Danish, and “*adlydende imod traditionen at en amerikansk præsident skal dækkes i alle døgnets 24 timer hele året rundt, bliver en flok journalister nødt til at ...” is even worse.
What you have to do here is to either turn the verbless clause into a clause with a verb in it, or you have to rephrase it more drastically, perhaps using expressions like “som følger af”,
“traditionen tro” or something similar, to create a natural-sounding Danish target text.
§15 “dozens of White House reporters are having to spend this sweltering August on the plains of central Texas”
• “dozens of White House journalists”: “Dusiner af journalister” does not work. You can go with “snesevis” or perhaps forget anything about measure units and go with “en flok”, “en gruppe” or something like that.
• “sweltering August”: two things here
◦ “sweltering”: “swelter” as a noun means “overwhelming heat”, and as a verb it means “to almost die from the heat”, so it has to do with heat. A lot of you translated “sweltering August” into “kvælende august”, which is okay, since it adds a bit of drama. However, I would add something about the heat (as in “kvælende varme augist” or, through transposition, “denne augusts kvælende varme”) so as to really spell out wht it is about that August which is “kvælende”.
◦ “August”: this is “august” in Danish with no upper case letter in the beginning.
• “central plains”: sometimes students translate this into “centrale fly” or “centrale flyvemaskiner”, which is a grave mistake. “Plain” means “slette”, while “plane” means “flyvemaskine”. This could have been avoided through use of a dictionary. It should be mentioned that a mistake of this sort could result in one failing the entire translation exam, depending on how strict the examiners are.
§16 “odd”
Note, “odd” does not mean “mærkelig” or “underlig” here. Nor does it mean “umage” or “ulige”. It expresses another sense of “odd” – namely, “random” or “rarely occurring”. So, perhaps “lejlighedsvis” or “sjælden” or something like that.
§17 “manna has descended in the desert”
What the hell does this mean? Well, this is a reference to the Bible. The Old Testament tells of the Israelites wandering in the desert, and their main source of food was manna that miraculously appeared in the desert. This is an ingenious use of metaphor, because it fits very well into the whole framework of there being no news available to the journalists, and suddenly what seems to be a good story appears. In fact, “manna” is quite often used in English with reference to something good that happens unexpectedly. The question is should your Danish translation retain this metaphor or not?
Chances are that, if you retain it, most Danes would not understand the reference to manna in the desert. However, you could replace the manna reference with a reference to a miracle or you could play around with the Danish expression “agurketid” which is when the Danish parliament is on vacation and nothing interesting really happens.
§18 “On one level, the attention generated by 48-year-old Cindy Sheehan - from the hitherto obscure town of Vacaville, an hour's drive north-east of San Francisco - merely proves the old adage that, like nature, the news business cannot tolerate a vacuum.”
• “one one level”: many translate this into “på den ene side”, but that is not a correct translation. Firstly, when you use “på den ene side” in Danish, a “på den anden (side)” typically follows. This is because “på den ene side … på den anden (side)” is an expression which weighs two often opposing factors that relate to the same issue. Since that is not really what happens in the target text, “på den ene side” is incorrect (besides, the English equivalent of “på den ene side … på den anden (side)” is “on the one hand … on the other hand”). “On one level” in this text expresses that in a certain perspective, or in a way, the attention generated by Cindy Sheehan's, proves the old adage. Thus a better translation would be “på en måde” or, if you want to sound 90ish “et eller andet sted”, or something like that.
• “proves”: there's a general tendency to translate this into “bevise”, which certainly is a valid translation of the word in other contexts. However, you cannot “bevise” a “gammel talemåde”, but you can “bekræfte” it.
• “the news business”: sometimes this is translated into “moderne handel”. This is a case of the source text having been misread (or not having been read at all prior to the commencement of the transfer phase). “News business” is a compound noun, consisting of “news”, which means “nyheder” (note that there's an 's' at the end of the word “news”) and “business”. This compound noun translates into “nyhedsbranchen”. Note also that, even if your knowledge of the English language is not sufficient enough for you to know what “news” means, the source text is not about business at all, so it wold be very strange indeed to suddenly start talking about modern-day business, wouldn't it?
• The entire sentence: this sentence is a very complicated one, because of the insertion of “from the hitherto obscure town of Vacaville, an hour's drive north-east of San Fransisco”, and quite often this results in target text sentences that are completely messed up, simply because it students who translated them lost track of the sentence. With a sentence like this, you should read through your own translated version a couple of times to make sure that it is okay or to see if you can simplify it in one way or another.
§19 “Ms Sheehan”
The use of titles like Mr and Ms is common in a lot of English language news media. However, if you think about it, Danish news media rarely use the corresponding Danish titles. Instead, they use the full names. That is what you should do here, too.
