I had a wonderful 4th of July dinner at my friends Sharmon and Luis's yesterday. Hitched a ride down with their daughter, who knows Julia Child's secret - never hold back on the cream and butter - when making out-of-this-world shortcakes for the strawberry shortcake dessert. About twenty of the usual suspects were there, people in S&L's inner circle who have all been coming together to those dinners for so long that we've all become friends as well. That's a nod, in case you missed it, to that line in Casablanca where the police chief tells his men to round up all the usual suspects.
Taku, who believed he had to work on the fourth of July to get his new room put together with a new desk that goes up and down - which makes sense for folks, unlike me, who like to work standing up - decided to enjoy a little alone time after his travails. That included grabbing the opportunity to cook something his spouse won't eat. He has done all the cooking in the house for some time now that I have demonstrated, by putting an insufficient amount of salt in the pasta cooking water, that I'm not up to the task. So last night gave him an opportunity to cook clams and oysters - which I have no taste for.
I learned about this when I got back and opened up his Facebook page and read:
Fried up my favourite scallops tonight as my partner is out who doesn't like reptiles.
Reptiles?
Absolutely true, reptiles give me the creeps. But what does that have to do with anything?
It took me a minute to realize the problem was that Taku had written the message in Japanese and I was reading the automatic (mis!-) translation Facebook was providing me with, based, evidently, on my Caucasian features.
Here's the whole of Taku's original, for those of you who read Japanese:
今晩は貝類が好きではない相方が外出してるので、私が大好きなカキフライを揚げました。 アサリのパスタも作りたかったけど、それは次回。 ワシントン州産の生牡蠣は小ぶりで、9個で7ドル也。 こちらの調理用生牡蠣は瓶に入って売られています。
And here's the English translation Facebook provided:
Fried up my favourite scallops tonight as my partner is out who doesn't like reptiles. Wanted to make clam pasta too but that's next. Washington state ginger is tiny, 9 for $7 This cooking ginger is sold in jars..
Two comments here:
1. I refer to Taku as my "husband," because we are legally married and there's no reason not to. But gay liberation is not all that advanced in Japan, and with the traditional lack of gender equality in Japan, the words "husband" and "wife" are loaded. "Husband" is commonly rendered by 主人 shujin, the original meaning of which is "master." "Master of the house" is bad enough, but "my master" just doesn't hack it with English speakers these days.
There are other words. There is 旦那 - danna - which isn't much better. It carries the connotations of protector and keeper and "lord and master." The word 夫 otto is legalistic sounding, like male spouse, so that too doesn't serve the purpose.
So he uses the word for "partner," which is husband with all the nutritional value drained out of it.
Nobody ever suggested the road to gay liberation doesn't lack potholes.
2. I'm adding to my list of things I don't understand (like why would anybody vote Republican?), why it is that Facebook would translate カキフライ = kaki fry = fried oysters as scallops! Totally different animal. Totally different taste in the mouth. Who makes a mistake like that? What's next? Calling beef chicken?
And why would they translate 生牡蠣 = namagaki = raw oysters as ginger!?
And 小振り koburi simply means small in size. There's no reason to hyperbolize it with tiny.
But these bad translations are nothing compared to how it is that 貝類 could possibly have been translated "reptiles."
I mean look at it! The first character, 貝, is one of those few characters, like tree, sun, and mountain, 木 日 山, where you can, if you squint close enough, almost see the object from which the character is derived. Doesn't 貝 look like a shellfish to you?
Google Translate does a much better job than Facebook. If you run Taku's Japanese original through Google Translate instead of Facebook, you get
Tonight, my partner who doesn't like shellfish is out, so I fried my favorite fried oysters. I also wanted to make pasta pasta, but that's next time. Raw oysters from Washington State are small, and 9 pieces cost $ 7. This raw oyster for cooking is sold in a jar.
OK, so they messed up with アサリのパスタ (asari no pasuta = short-necked clam pasta), calling it "pasta pasta" for some reason. And then there's the ungrammaticality of "This raw oyster...is sold..." Win some, lose some.
Translating is an art. There's no reason to be surprised at an occasional unfortunate misstep. But here it's almost as if Facebook was determined to get it wrong at every possible turn.
OK, given that the Supreme Court is now into preventing the government from addressing climate change, Facebook's incompetence is not in the top ten of pressing issues, I suppose. But I saw a chance to rant and I took it.
And while we're on the subject of not trusting the robots which run your life, there's this nice little bit I saw on Facebook the other day. The important thing seems to be not to reject Facebook and Google out of hand, but to use them judiciously:
No comments:
Post a Comment