Originally published at: What a trailer park looks like in Switzerland | Boing Boing
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Pristine alps? We’re a bit late to the party for that.
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No. Nononono. Don’t let a Swiss person hear you.
Oh my. Lesser things led to terrible comment wars.
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I suspect that the term Trailer Park might have lost or gained something in translation.
There’s no information in the article, but this trailer park is probably a holiday destination for suburbanites who spend most of their lives living in regular apartments or houses. Like a Russian Dacha.
It’s almost certainly not a trailer park where poor people like Eminem and his mom Kim Basinger live.
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It definitely does have a lot more park than trailer.
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I came to say the same thing. “RV Campground” is not “Trailer Park”. We have RV Campgrounds in America that are very beautiful.
I lived in a RV campground for a couple of years, and it really was a lovely experience. I also lived in a trailer park growing up. It was a less lovely experience, though there were many lovely people there, too.
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Or my moms until 2016?
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Yeah, exactly not like that.
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Er…
Very nice indeed, but that last picture does not put me in a happy place AT ALL…
ETA: Also, don’t they ever have strong winds in Helvetica?
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Or, interestingly, people who are in a transitory situation and it’s a cheap easy accommodation. Ms. Splunge’s co-worker, who make a decent living, lives in a pretty run-down trailer park because she’s between houses and it was easy to do.
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Even apart from the Swiss German erasure the correct translation of Paradiesli would be small paradise,* not just paradise.
It continues to annoy me that there is no real way of translating a diminutive denoted by endings into English.
* From a purely grammatical perspective small paradises would be a correct translation as well, however in one of the images we learn that the campground is actually called s’ Paradiesli, which denotes the singular through the use of the (shortened) singular definite article.
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Just add “lil” to the word and there ya go… lil paradise.
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As a translator (though with no knowledge of German), I like to get creative with that kind of thing to get closer to how an English speaker would say such a thing to begin with, rather than the literal translation. I would go with something like “A Taste of Paradise” or a “Sliver of Paradise” here, but that’s just my personal translation style.
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Heh, that’s why I specified “denoted by endings”. I just want to be able to say paradise-lil rather than lil paradise.
English has recently become productive with endings in colloquial speech through the introduction of “-ish” in untraditional positions (such as substantives rather than adjectives), so maybe there’s still hope. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was at least one regional dialect somewhere that has a construction like this.
Edit: it seems Scottish English, probably influenced by Scots, uses productive diminutives (such as beastie). So does Aussie English, but I’d argue that those are more along the lines of shortening nicknames rather than specifically denoting small size.
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That would be a way to do it, yeah. Depends on the type of original text and the goals of the translation I suppose.
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Maybe it will catch on!
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There’s always Paradise-Lite and Paradise-Mini, though those sound a bit absurd in this case. .
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Nah, it’s just not the same… feels like something’s missing.
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I quite like it, and I’ve lived & worked in Switzerland for a while.
Just for the record, in the whole region of Alemannic-speakers, the original connotation of paradise - a garden - is still at least vibrating with the term, and maybe even consciously used.
As Thomas Mann noted, the alemannic languages/dialects seem rather old-fashioned to everyone else, which I can confirm. People around there are really conservative, in the literal meaning of the term (but most often also politically).
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Except in Freiburg where they’re green party voters but also somehow really conservative
(im Breisgau, I mean, not Fribourg)
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