No two languages, especially , belonging to different groups , can have a one to one correspondence.What I mean is that you can not translate word by word from one language under all circumstances and sometimes when you do it , you may say something absurd.
Now let us come to specifics. I take the example of English and French . In the course of a chat for practicing her English, she shocked me with the following pearls.
" I am a dog today"
Puzzled as I was , I was trying to understand this linguistic massacre on the part of my respected friend. It sounded very Kafkasque when a person in his story wakes up to find himself metamorphosed into a giant insect.
This is what happened. She had already learnt how to say her age in English.
" I am 27 years old "
In English , we use the verb " to be " for telling one's age. Age is a state of being .
But French has a different way of telling one's age. When a French sentence telling one's age is translated word by word into English ,it reads as follows:
" I have 27 years."
Ok. For the French people, it appears that age is a possession. In other words , they use the verb, " to have" to tell one' s age.
So my friend thought that the verb " to be " in English means " to have " in French . Why? Because in French ,they use " to have " for telling one's age.The mistake occurred because she thought that the English " to be" can be used for the French verb, " to have".
Therefore the French sentence ,
" I have a dog today" was translated as," I am a dog today". Hope you got the point.
In fact ,that day she got a new dog.
Hope you appreciate the difficulty of learning a new language .
One has to be extremely careful in expressing in another language different from his/her mother tongue.
Sayee Jayaraman
21/02/2015
Now let us come to specifics. I take the example of English and French . In the course of a chat for practicing her English, she shocked me with the following pearls.
" I am a dog today"
Puzzled as I was , I was trying to understand this linguistic massacre on the part of my respected friend. It sounded very Kafkasque when a person in his story wakes up to find himself metamorphosed into a giant insect.
This is what happened. She had already learnt how to say her age in English.
" I am 27 years old "
In English , we use the verb " to be " for telling one's age. Age is a state of being .
But French has a different way of telling one's age. When a French sentence telling one's age is translated word by word into English ,it reads as follows:
" I have 27 years."
Ok. For the French people, it appears that age is a possession. In other words , they use the verb, " to have" to tell one' s age.
So my friend thought that the verb " to be " in English means " to have " in French . Why? Because in French ,they use " to have " for telling one's age.The mistake occurred because she thought that the English " to be" can be used for the French verb, " to have".
Therefore the French sentence ,
" I have a dog today" was translated as," I am a dog today". Hope you got the point.
In fact ,that day she got a new dog.
Hope you appreciate the difficulty of learning a new language .
One has to be extremely careful in expressing in another language different from his/her mother tongue.
Sayee Jayaraman
21/02/2015
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