Re: Common World Idioms
| From: | Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...> |
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| Date: | Thursday, February 5, 2004, 20:06 |
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En réponse à Steve Cooney :
>I disagree with Mark (was it) that "red handed"
>does'nt mean anything in say, Esperanto. Though
>Esperanto speakers come from an entirely different
>planet (different "planet"=idiom?:)), they can still
>make out the meaning of "the red hand" and "getting
>caught" with one.
And I agree with Mark and disagree with you here. Before I learned through
a book about idioms and their translations from English to French, I had no
idea what it meant (I didn't even know it had anything with actually being
caught. It's an idiom after all!). And even after I learned it meant: "être
pris la main dans le sac": "to be caught with the hand in the handbag", I
still couldn't imagine what logic would make it possible to guess this
meaning from such an idiom as "red handed".
Another idiom that mystified me for years was "to kick the bucket". I only
learned the meaning of this idiom a year ago, after more than 10 years of
English classes...
Idioms are about the most difficult things to translate from language to
language, any translator will tell you that. Using them in an international
means of communication is a bad idea. Metaphor is extremely culture-centric
ad thus not very fit for international communication, and common idioms are
for that reason extremely rare, and must be considered as coincidences only.
Christophe Grandsire.
http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr
You need a straight mind to invent a twisted conlang.
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