Untranslatability

Something I find rather awkward to translate from my language, rodeys, to
English, is a two-pronged approach to prepositions.  movement prepositions
are prefixes, position prepositions are suffixes, and they interact.  a pre-
and su-ffixed word must be translated using a great deal of circumlocution.
To make it more complicated,  suffixed prepositions may be used as adverbs.
For example:


poy ssa-tem-imid  zr~wm~b sr~
they through-house-behind wandered
[from my point of view] they wandered behind the house and came out the other
side.

fa ji-ssev hen sr~
you around-town will-drive
you'll drive around [the border of] the town.

fa ji-ssev-imind hen sr~
you around-town-middle will-drive
you'll drive around [within] the town.

reba sr~-tn~jram-imij prame sr~
workers to-bank-below sneak
the workers sneak [presumably by tunneling] to directly below [the lowest
point in] a bank.

sey-n da-sl-oyos-ov kole-ta
she's-about-to toward-tree-this-front jump-inside-ly
she's about to jump from in this tree [towards] in front of this tree. (she's
in this tree, and she is about to jump out of it towards, what is from my
point of view, in front of it.

Perhaps I simply haven't found the perfect way of rephrasing such sentences,
but as their meanings are more succinct and (usually) more precise than
standard English allows, I find it quite difficult to translate these
phrases.


Joe Mondello