Saturday, February 10, 2007

La Presse


link & pdf

In Jan. 31 issue of La Presse, there was an article briefly mentioned Hanzi Smatter:
"Et il y a bien pire. Tian, jeune blogueur chinois aujourd’hui installé en Arizona, s’amuse justement à répertorier les tatouages les plus ridicules. Et il n’en manque pas. Sur son site (www.hanzismatter.com), qu’il alimente depuis deux ans, il a collectionné 400 perles. Parmi elles, mentionnons le tatouage d’une Américaine : « folle diarrhée ». Aïe !"

Since I do not understand French, reader Dimitri translated the paragraph for me:
"There is worst. Tian, a young Chinese blogger, now living in Arizona is having fun documenting the most ridiculous tattoos. And there is no lack of it. On his site, on which he has been working for two years, he collected 400 gems. Amongst them, the tattoo of a young female American: "Crazy diarrhea". Ouch !"

6 comments:

  1. Even more interestingly:

    "s'amuse justement" should translate as "amuses himself appropriately", or "amuses himself justly".

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  2. In general, "justement" means "appropriatly", but its translation depends of the context. In this case, "justement" can be translated in French Canadian as a coordination of ideas between the sentence before ("and there's worst") and the current one. Translating word per word is tempting but dangerous. One must look at the larger context. I think Tian has enough examples here on his website :)

    Dimitri
    NB: the actual article is:
    http://www.cyberpresse.ca/article/20070131/CPACTUEL/70131028
    And its title translates as "Beware of Gobbledygook"

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  3. in this context "justement" is more like "actually". It doesn't means "exactly", it refers to the topic that have been introduced before "tatoos".

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  4. There is worst? :-) Other than that, the translation seems accurate enough (je parle un peu de français) but it's always interesting to see mistranslation examples I understand better. Alas, my knowledge of kanji is quite limited (I've been studying Japanese, not Chinese, obviously).

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  5. Weel... other than "worst" for "worse" (I'd have said something like "and there's worse yet" to get that emphatic "bien" in there), most of the differences of opinion about that translation are just that - though the punctuation leaves something to be desired. But why should "une Americaine" be "a young female American," rather than simply "an American woman" or "an American girl"? Good effort, though. Also, glad your site's getting noticed internationally!

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  6. Hey there! I saw this article in the newspaper which made me want to take a look at those messed-up tattoos, you should make a top ten section with the best picks!

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