Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2017/04/26/sassy-trump.html
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God I wish Trump watched these-they would drive him absolutely crazy.
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If he’s the leader of the free world, I’m going to need reminding what is the value of freedom.
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Man, Barbie has better hair. The guy that coordinates his mop should get an award.
That’s just sarcasm. Obviously, Angela Merkel is leader of the free world.
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I consider referring to the US president as the “leader of the free world” to be one of the more offensive things that well-meaning Americans tend to say without thinking about what it actually means. I was annoyed by it long before Trump.
Funny you should mention Germany.
I cannot even think of a way to translate that sentence into German that isn’t either ridiculous or inappropriate. I blame the last guy who claimed to be the “Leader”.
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I’m so sick of Trump. Even Sassy Trump has lost its allure. I can’t even listen to NPR anymore because they bring up his name every five minutes. I need a break from Herr Cheeto.
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Very good. This might be a culturally appropriate translation*. Or it might be something else to say. It’s hard to tell the difference. Are you saying the same thing in a different language, or are you adapting to a different culture by saying something else from what you originally wanted to say?
That’s probably one of the unsolvable philosophical problems of translation.
So, maybe Trump just speaks his own language, and all that needs to be done is to translate what he says from “Trump English” to “Sane English”.
* Grammar correction:
Das meistrespektierte Staatsoberhaupt der freien Welt.
Or:
Das am meisten respektierte Staatsoberhaupt der freien Welt.
It’s bad enough coping with this while learning Russian where the cultural assumptions are so very different from English that translation of anything but the simplest most obvious text is a mine full of pitfalls. I have learnt my lesson. No more feeble attempts at German translation. I hang my head in shame and retreat into my burrow. From now on I shall support our leaving the EU, on the basis that as you Germans don’t think we are capable of communicating with us, there is clearly no point.
You did find a translation that at least comes close to what some people might mean by calling someone a “leader of the free world”, without violating any of the cultural rules associated with the language you’re using. No shame there. At all.
Just for the record, I’m not German, but Austrian - that’s a difference we care about, and if you ever find yourself incapable of communicating with the Germans, we’ll be happy to translate. As long as you don’t call us Germans ;-).
Any examples?
The only Slavic language that I know anything of is Croatian/Serbian, and there I find that the cultural assumptions are amazingly similar to Austria; in fact I’d be willing to defend the statement that the cultural differences between Zagreb and Vienna are less than those between Vienna and Berlin, although the latter two speak sort of the same language (in the same sense that Scotland and Texas speak the same language).
Having dug my ignorance into a deep hole, I am now stopping digging.
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