'translationese' is a pretty common term for it. when you translate, it's really easy to mirror the source structure/syntax even when there's more idiomatic ways to say it in the target language.
Exactly. One simple example that I see all the time comes to mind:
In English, "dozens of ____s" is a very common expression, particularly in news articles. In my local language, even though we do have a word for "dozen", it's much more common to say that in the form of "tens of ____s". Most of the "dozens of ____s" I see written in my language are from news articles that were (badly) translated from English.
English uses "dozens" in more situations than Dutch uses "tens", also because "tens" in Dutch is a three-syllable word. It's often just not idiomatic
I often find myself having started a sentence in Dutch that I can't finish without borrowing something from English, and I remember a recent example actually involved the word "dozens" (although I forgot what the sentence was about so I can't reproduce it here). That sentence should have been constructed entirely differently, but I now use English in my day-to-day communications at work, at home, and also most online ones so some stuff slips through.
It blew my mind some months ago when I used an English saying, perfectly translated (no loan words, good sentence structure), but entirely nonexistent in Dutch. I can't ever have heard anyone said it but it came out without any thought. The person I was talking to is also proficient in English and understood what I meant, but whether or not their face gave something away, it took me five seconds to realize what I had said. I guess the brain stores words in a form of meaning that transcends language, and just calls upon the language neural net to convert that into muscle movements for speech? Actually, no, then you'd have gotten the word-for-word translation; it must be storing more than single words in some sort of language lookup center, or maybe something that converts between the two structures if you do enough translating between a given language pair? Either way, mind-boggling stuff
lampiaio|1 year ago
In English, "dozens of ____s" is a very common expression, particularly in news articles. In my local language, even though we do have a word for "dozen", it's much more common to say that in the form of "tens of ____s". Most of the "dozens of ____s" I see written in my language are from news articles that were (badly) translated from English.
lucb1e|1 year ago
I often find myself having started a sentence in Dutch that I can't finish without borrowing something from English, and I remember a recent example actually involved the word "dozens" (although I forgot what the sentence was about so I can't reproduce it here). That sentence should have been constructed entirely differently, but I now use English in my day-to-day communications at work, at home, and also most online ones so some stuff slips through.
It blew my mind some months ago when I used an English saying, perfectly translated (no loan words, good sentence structure), but entirely nonexistent in Dutch. I can't ever have heard anyone said it but it came out without any thought. The person I was talking to is also proficient in English and understood what I meant, but whether or not their face gave something away, it took me five seconds to realize what I had said. I guess the brain stores words in a form of meaning that transcends language, and just calls upon the language neural net to convert that into muscle movements for speech? Actually, no, then you'd have gotten the word-for-word translation; it must be storing more than single words in some sort of language lookup center, or maybe something that converts between the two structures if you do enough translating between a given language pair? Either way, mind-boggling stuff