Polyglottal Telephone 17 [done]

[Viktor77]

It was defintely a difficult text. Poplar had used many forms of obscure gerunds and those took me a while to look up, and then parse. The hardest part of the text for me was the "impossibly laden with struggling figures, moving as if unencumbered". bit or however it went. As well as "Its elbows were pinioned, so that its captives could not move." because I couldn't figure out how on Earth the character who just entered the warehouse was "chained" to himself and how this had an effect on his prisoners.

And Finlay mentions Poplar might have had a lazy translation leading to the entering of a third character, the Tailor, but the story had so many confusing characters that I might have not thought anything of it when I translated that character. I couldn't figure out if the Weaver and Isaac were one and the same or different. Now I know the Weaver was a giant spider, but I had no idea then and assumed they both were humans inside this warehouse.

Also, the whole part about flesh dropping to form the shape of scissors was such strange language that I kept second guessing myself on it.

[Rui]

My mistake: 肌肉 (generic muscle/flesh/meat) and 雞肉 (chicken meat) are both pronounced jīròu.

I was wondering where the chicken came from haha (so technically I wasn't at fault there, the Chinese text actually does say "chicken," treskro chose the wrong character )

The POW thing was from me (note how I just wrote it out in my English translation apparently I didn't, but could've sworn I did. Either way, my German translation says "POWs"), whoops...I thought it was funny also how apparently "delightful" got turned into "delicious" in the turn between Viktor and treskro. Translating out of Mandarin and into German is apparently really difficult for me, who has neither as a native language. Considering I'm learning Mandarin through English, I did struggle a bit to come up with good German translations. I was trying mostly to avoid English in the translation altogether, but sometimes it was hard. I do have an online German<>Chinese dictionary, which helped a lot but also probably contributed a lot to the "literal translation" thing.

(It doesn't help that half the time I can't even come up with good translations from Mandarin to English when I'm reading or whatever...and by good, I mean not overly awkward, unlike the last sentence of my translation)

All in all, though, I'm really proud of the fact that I managed to understand MOST of the Chinese text really well. *confidence boost* Except for that one sentence that I mentioned when I sent on my translation (last sentence of the penultimate paragraph)

[Lyhoko Leaci]

No wonder I had trouble translating out Dutch... there's parts that I would have trouble with even if I was just translating out of English!

And that was a really weird text to start out with, too.

[Raluv]

Bleh, I misread German "Weber" weaver as "Werber" advertiser--sorry for that one. Most of the other mistakes though I translated out of the awkward German, which became even more awkward in Mandarin lol.

I'm also of the opinion that the original text was a bit too out there to have any hope of being translated correctly. Then again, I thought we were all supposed to try and translate the fuck-ups as they're given to us so....

[finlay]

I almost feel like i was basically trolling y'all with that text. But y'know, when I was hard-pressed to find stuff i just picked up the last book i'd read and flicked through to find something vaguely interesting. Maybe next time I'll do something shorter. Anyway, I'm done for now, so if someone else wants to organize one, feel free, but I suggest actually giving ppl time limits.

[Rui]

I dunno, the time wasn't awful. It felt like forever, but actually it was only 45 days from start to finish, and with 11 people on the team, that's basically an average of 4 days. Which is just 1 day longer per person than the typical 3-day limit.

[Viktor77]

I thought it was funny also how apparently "delightful" got turned into "delicious" in the turn between Viktor and treskro.

Blame that on French. Delightful is translated into the false cognate "délicieux."

[finlay]

I dunno, the time wasn't awful. It felt like forever, but actually it was only 45 days from start to finish, and with 11 people on the team, that's basically an average of 4 days. Which is just 1 day longer per person than the typical 3-day limit.

Maybe, but that's only because some folks did it basically instantly. I think more to the point, I need to make a rule that we have email notifications for PMs on and that if you can't do it for any reason, just reply and say sorry asap (this only takes 2 seconds rather than the 2 hours or so that a translation tends to take), and that can be the end of it. Like, my PM to Emma is falling on deaf ears because it's still in my outbox, so she hasn't been checking.

[Cedh]

I thought it was funny also how apparently "delightful" got turned into "delicious" in the turn between Viktor and treskro.

Blame that on French. Delightful is translated into the false cognate "délicieux."

FWIW, the Dutch word "lekker" more or less combines both meanings in a single lexeme.

[hwhatting]

Looks like Hwhatting had some trouble with the translation.

Yep, some blunders here are entirely mine - not recognizing dual forms and overlooking the full stop between κόνεως and ἐλάχιστον, linking two separate sentences into one; not being able to identfy κατιοῦμενον "rusty". But Hallow's translation also has its gaps (e.g. leaving out "the floor" in "was slowly cleaning the floor below them of dust", making me cast about desperately for an object; leaving out "to whisper" in "when the head came close to whisper")and idiosyncrasies (which had me guessing at the intended word / form), and it is not exactly parallel to his English text. One point is that, trying to write good Classical Greek, he uses participle constructions that I then had to render again as dependent clauses, having to guess the logical relationship to the main clause, and getting it differently to the original text, or resulting in a shift of constituents between the main and the dependent clause. And the last thing is the goddam polysemy of Greek verbs and abstract nouns - there's often a whole score of different meanings to choose from, and when, as with this text, it's already hard to understand what it is all about, it often comes down to randomly selecting a meaning that seems to make sense.

[Emma]

I'm really sorry, guys. I honestly thought I would have time for this but I've been so busy work that I forgot about it completely. I know that's a rubbish excuse. :/

[finlay]

I don't really mind. Just maybe next time at least reply to the message (do you not have email notifications on?) and say "I'm sorry, I can't do it anymore". It's only a game, we'll understand. It's a little bit annoying if I can't contact you, though.