From robin@BILKENT.EDU.TR Thu May 09 04:33:30 2002 Return-Path: X-Sender: robin@bilkent.edu.tr X-Apparently-To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Received: (EGP: mail-8_0_3_2); 9 May 2002 11:33:29 -0000 Received: (qmail 64529 invoked from network); 9 May 2002 11:33:29 -0000 Received: from unknown (66.218.66.218) by m6.grp.scd.yahoo.com with QMQP; 9 May 2002 11:33:29 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO manyas.bcc.bilkent.edu.tr) (139.179.30.24) by mta3.grp.scd.yahoo.com with SMTP; 9 May 2002 11:33:28 -0000 Received: from there (neo.fen.bilkent.edu.tr [139.179.97.69]) by manyas.bcc.bilkent.edu.tr (Postfix) with SMTP id 83C3112A71 for ; Thu, 9 May 2002 14:33:23 +0300 (EEST) Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Organization: Bilkent University To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Subject: Re: [lojban] R. Seress's "Gloomy Sunday" etc. Date: Thu, 9 May 2002 14:31:08 +0300 X-Mailer: KMail [version 1.3.1] References: In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Message-Id: <20020509113323.83C3112A71@manyas.bcc.bilkent.edu.tr> From: Robin Turner X-Yahoo-Group-Post: member; u=810606 X-Yahoo-Profile: digambaranath X-Yahoo-Message-Num: 14236 On Sunday 05 May 2002 19:32, aolung wrote: > I've made up some pages on Rezsö Seress and his notorious song, > including a translation of one of his songs to Lojban. > > It's on: www.fa-kuan.muc.de/SERESS.RXML > > I also typed in an article of a Hungarian newspaper I got from a > dear friend about ten years back, and translated it into English. > To my great surprise, the translation's text is a good deal longer > than the original's!! Up to now, It always was my firm opinion that > with regard to conciseness, English was leading among other > European languages (first of all thinking of German, French, > Italian, Spanish, Dutch - but also Finnish etc.). Now that! I hope > it doesn't just depend on my awkward English style ;-) > > Robin-the-Turk, how is that with Turkish (compared to Hungarian)? > I imagine that also Mandarin, written in Pinyin, might be lenthy > enough. Maybe Hebrew (even romanized/vocalized) might be > pretty concise. What's your opinion? As I said before, it depends whether you're talking about number of words, number of phonemes, number of characters or whatever. On a number-of-words count, Turkish comes over as incredibly concise, but of course some of those words are very long, the famous example being c~ekoslovakyalIlas~tIramadIklarImIzdanmIydInIz Are you one of those whom we were unable to turn into a Czechoslovakian? (tilde here equals sedilla on the previous letter) Turkish's use of case makes it marginally more concise than languages which rely more on prepositions, and the lack of articles helps, e.g. eve to the house I think there is also the factor that translation frequently results in something wordier than the original, irrespective of the languages involved. One reason is, as I think I mentioned earlier, that if something is obligatory in L1 and optional in L2 (e.g. tense) we tend to put it in the L2 translation. Another is that ideas that can be expressed concisely in L1 need a wordy explanation in L2, simply because they are more common in L1 culture. I can translate "kan davasI" literally as "blood-feud" but transling "namüs davasI" as "honour feud" doesn't work - I'd need a whole sentence to get the idea across. robin.tr -- "Bravo Epictetus!" - Epictetus Robin Turner IDMYO, Bilkent Universitesi Ankara 06533 Turkey http://www.bilkent.edu.tr/~robin