Lost in translation
Grandad August 21st, 2011
I keep forgetting how international this Interweb thing is.
I try to write in a way that most English speaking people can read. I’m not always successful in that endeavour but fuckit, I try.
It is somewhat strange then to come across references to this place in a language that is quite frankly foreign to me.
One of the sites that links here is Weirdo. Now it looks interesting but I can’t understand a single word, as it’s all in Welsh. I always thought that the Welsh language had a particular beauty, but I think it’s a bit late to learn it, considering that I’m still struggling with English.
Recently another site wrote an entire piece about this place, and I haven’t a fucking clue what they are on about as the whole thing is in Russian. My Russian is [to put put mildly] a tad on the rusty side, and Google Translate isn’t much better, so I’ll just have to hope that what they wrote is reasonably positive.
I received my first Russian comment the other day. I’m not counting those ones from people who call themselves “Get a cheap mortgage” or whatever and then try to flatter me into posting their link. No. I’m talking about a short succinct comment that was aimed directly at me. Unfortunately their link was one of those casino sites, so under my rules that does in fact class them as spam. And what did they say?
“Давай, дедуля жги еще!”
According to Google, that means “Come on, Grandpa still burn!“. I’m still not quite sure what to make of that. Maybe something got lost in translation? Anyway, thanks Max. I think.
Just out of interest, I tried taking the fist sentence of this scribble and translating it into Russian. Apparently it is “Я все время забываю, как международные этом межсети вещь.”. Now that means nothing to me so I translated it back again. “I keep forgetting how international this interweb thing.” I’m impressed. But it has missed out on the last “is” which subtly changes the whole meaning. In fact it doesn’t really make any sense at all. So I then wonder what my musings come out as when translated into other languages?
Fuckit.
I think I’ll stick with English.








