Moving in the Breeze: How to Translate Untranslatable Words (Words, Words, Words 17)

Young Heretics

Spencer Klavan

Society & Culture, Education

4.9 • 4.5K Ratings

🗓️ 12 July 2024

⏱️ 34 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

I know you've been waiting with bated breath...at long last, it's the much-anticipated conclusion to our two-part episode on what happens when a word just doesn't want to be translated. I've covered some bad options here, now I'm proposing a few good ones. These will help not just if you want to write a translation of your own, but if you're not interested in any of that noise and just want to pick a good English version of a book you've heard rules in the original. Plus I sing in this one, so I'm pretty sure that's more than enough podcasting for one day.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Untranslatable, that's what you are.
0:10.0	Untranslatable. Untranslatable or near or far.
0:20.0	Okay, somebody has to bring in the theme music, right?
0:21.7	I'm just going to keep going.
0:23.2	I think it's probably time for me to call it quits. That's enough
0:34.4	podcasting for one day. I promised myself, my friends, my families, my
0:38.4	loved ones that have I ever started singing on the show they could reel me in, bring out the hook and pull me off the stage.
0:47.0	But I couldn't help it because we're talking about untranslatable words again.
0:52.7	At long last, concluding this two-part discussion
0:56.8	of what to do with words that just resist translation
1:01.1	into other languages. It feels like it's been a minute. It maybe has not been as long as I'm thinking, but it feels like we had the 4th of July and sort of other episodes in between the first episode that I did about this.
1:15.6	So just to catch you up and bring you up to speed if you don't remember, I had gotten on this
1:20.9	discussion because a listener wrote in and his name was Jonathan
1:26.2	and he had this really cool idea for a program.
1:30.0	And by the way Jonathan after I talked about this program, this idea, Peter Graziano,
1:36.7	another listener who writes into me from time to time, mentioned that if you haven't yet shared it somewhere this program if you were able to make it
1:45.2	available somehow to listeners that would be really cool because I think a lot of people might be interested in it
1:50.3	you can DM me again on sub stack if you are hearing this or maybe I can
1:54.3	DM you just this program sounds like something that people who like this
1:58.6	show and like are like me and like to nerd out about languages.
2:03.4	This could be really cool because what the program does
2:05.4	is it basically takes certain words in a text,
	...

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