The perils of bad translation
(I really ought to have a classics-related icon for posts like this. Any suggestions from the audience?)
There’s a scene in Diana Wynne Jones’ novel A Tale of Time City wherein Vivian, who is an ordinary girl from WWII England, is assigned to translate a text written in the “universal symbols” of Time City. She does an entertainingly bad job of it, and gets mocked by her tutor.
I probably wasn’t supposed to take that as inspiration, was I?
See, years ago, when kurayami_hime and I were taking Latin in high school, we were given Catullus 3 to translate, along with a vocabulary list to look up before we began. The first word on that list was passer, which, according to my dictionary, meant “sparrow” (the poem being a mock-eulogy for his girlfriend’s dead bird) . . . and also “flounder.”
Inspired by this, and also by the number of our classmates who had mis-translated a line of Ovid’s about “small things capture the minds of young girls” as “girls like to capture small animals” (they mistook anima for animal), kurayami_hime and I produced the following travesty, which our Latin teacher promptly stole, posted on the board, and only gave us photocopies of several years later; the original remains in her possession.
