Israel Matzav

Friday, June 13, 2014

Worst translation evah!

I don't think you have to read Hebrew to realize how barbaric this translation (allegedly from the pool in Nes Harim - along the Jerusalem-Tel Aviv corridor) is.

Google? Bing?

Labels: humor, translations

Sunday, February 10, 2013

Log in to work

We here in Israel are so concerned with road safety that we now have installations along our highways where motorists can get off and log in to their work computers so that they won't feel rushed.

Actually... no.... This is a stupid mistranslation by the Highway Authority (Maatz), and what it really should say is "Entrance to work site." Unfortunately, our roads are full of mistranslations and misspellings like this one.

Well, maybe not unfortunately. It gives us bilingual people something about which we can laugh.

By the way, I am told that the sign is along Highway 75 in Northern Israel.

Labels: humor, translations

Tuesday, July 03, 2012

The color purple and the Hebrew language

Alice Walker's The Color Purple has already been translated into Hebrew. More on that at the end of this post.

Daniel Greenfield thinks we'd be better off without The Color Purple in Hebrew, so he's happy that Alice Walker has refused to 'let' her Pulitzer Prize winning novel be translated into Hebrew. In fact, if it was up to Daniel, a few more anti-Semites - including some Jewish ones - would refuse to allow their books to be rendered in the Hebrew language.

Alice Walker has joined fellow Hamas flotilla writers, Henning Mankell and Iain Banks in boycotting the Hebrew language and banning their books from being translated into the 4,000-year-old Zionist language. This move has gotten more attention, because, unlike Henning Mankell and Iain Banks, people have actually heard of Walker, if only because they were forced to read her in school.

As punishments go, preventing Israelis from reading The Color Purple seems more like a blessing than a curse. If only Amos Oz and David Grossman could be similarly convinced to follow through on their politics and begin boycotting the Hebrew language, the national IQ would be better for it.

Walker, Mankell and Banks (possibly the world's worst law firm) have every right to pick up their placards and boycott one of the world's oldest languages. When Wagner directed the work of Jewish composers, he reportedly immediately discarded the gloves that he wore during the onerous task. Perhaps Walker and the Gaza gang could do likewise, allowing the translation only so long as the laptop and printers that actually transform their words into the cursed Hebraic are swiftly thrown out afterward.

"We have to explain to ourselves the involuntary repellence possessed for us by the nature and personality of the Jews," Wagner wrote in "Das Judenthum in der Musik", "so as to vindicate that instinctive dislike which we plainly recognize as stronger and more overpowering than our conscious zeal to rid ourselves thereof."

Gaza is one of the ways that leftectuals like Walker, Banks and Mankell explain to themselves and their audiences that "involuntary repellence" that emanates for them from the Hebrew language, but not from Chinese, Turkish or Urdu. As committed progressives they may have to practice a conscious zeal to rid themselves of it, but the need of the left to express its Judeophobia is always stronger than its ability to control it.

Read the whole thing.

I said at the beginning of this post that Alice Walker's The Color Purple had already been translated into Hebrew. You can find out more about that here.

Labels: Jewish anti-Semitism, Leftist anti-Semitism, translations

Wednesday, May 30, 2012

Ha'Aretz lost in translation

The key to understanding the significance of this post is to maintain awareness that although Haaretz's English website gets a lot of traffic, its Hebrew newspaper and website are among the least read Israeli newspapers. I used to work in an Israeli government agency with a lot of Leftists, and we used to have to require companies to put legal notices in the newspapers. One of the Leftists once complained about the fact that companies were putting notices in Haredi newspapers. They were told by another Leftist to keep quiet, because the Haredi newspapers had higher circulation than Haaretz.

With that in mind, the significance of the fact that Haaretz 'loses' pertinent facts in translation from its Hebrew edition to its English edition should be obvious.

There’s Ha’aretz in Hebrew and then there’s Ha’aretz in English, and it’s not just language or circulation which sets them apart. (The Hebrew edition of Ha’aretz has a very low circulation in comparison to other Israeli newspapers; its influential English site is the go-to portal for Western journalists, policymakers, diplomats, and a vast public.)

Close reading of both print editions over the course of years has revealed an ongoing pattern. In preparation for the English edition, the Hebrew articles (most Ha’aretz stories are written first in Hebrew) are not merely translated – they’re often also whitewashed. In sometimes dramatic and sometimes subtle cases, time and again, information appearing in the Hebrew original concerning Palestinian militancy, violence and other Arab wrongdoing is downplayed or omitted entirely. In some instances, the English account is completely at odds with the original Hebrew.

For instance, on Jan. 11, 2011, Zvi Barel wrote in Hebrew about a plan by Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat to link the eviction of Jews residing in an illegal building in the neighborhood of Silwan to the eviction of Arabs also living in illegal buildings in the same neighborhood: “A house in which Jews live illegally will be exchanged for a house in which Palestinians live illegally.” (Emphasis added.) The Hebrew report was factually correct.

The English translator, however, whether intentionally or not, gave the sentence an entirely new – and false – meaning, rendering the “illegal” Palestinian house “entirely legal.” The English read: “A house in which Jews live illegally will be exchanged for a house in which Palestinians live entirely legally.” (Emphasis added.) Is this either an entirely innocent slip of the pen or perhaps subconscious editorializing on the translator's part? It's impossible to know, but the introduction of the word "entirely," which does not appear in the Hebrew original, suggests something perhaps more deliberate at play. (The English edition, online and print, was subsequently corrected after Presspectiva, CAMERA's Hebrew site, contacted editors. See "Presspectiva, CAMERA's Hebrew Site, Prompts Improvements," below.)

This case would be striking enough as a stand alone item, but unfortunately it is consistent with a clear trend, which CAMERA has begun to document on its blog (blog.camera.org) but which warrants an extensive published study.

Read it all.

Labels: CAMERA, Haaretz, translations

Sunday, January 23, 2011

A fine translation

Most Israelis think they have perfect English. Most of them do not. For an example, read the grape juice bottle label below, which is obviously translated from Hebrew (Hat Tip: Stanley R).