"Nice and" expression question.

[zanooda2]

--- In HPFGU-OTChatter at yahoogroups.com, "Carol" <justcarol67 at ...> wrote:

> By the way, I love your posts on the difficulties of translation. 
> It's funny (in the sense of odd, not amusing) how much we take 
> language for granted and how little we think about what it means 
> as we read it unless we encounter an unfamiliar term--an 
> American reader stumbling over British slang, for example. But 
> idioms, in most cases, just slide right by.



Well, Carol, *I* love your answers, because they are detailed and
supplied with examples :-). You are right, it is natural for a native
speaker to understand without thinking and analyzing, but for a
translator an idiom is not a friend :-). Some of them are especially
tricky - those which in some contexts can masquerade as something
normal and innocent, so if a translator doesn't know the expression,
he tends to translate it "as it is". 

"Nice and" is one of such idioms - its meaning seems so obvious to
less experienced translators, that they don't bother to do research on
it. Another example - the expression "small fortune". You can find
"small fortune" in dictionaries, but *they* don't look it up, because
the meaning seems so obvious: "small fortune" = "small amount of
money", what else can it be :-)? 

If they met this expression for the first time in a sentence like "She
spent a small fortune on her haircut", they might have suspected
something :-), but in PS/SS it's something like "There was a small
fortune belonging to Harry in Gringotts", which doesn't sound too
suspicious. As a result, in some amateur translations Harry has a
rather insignificant inheritance :-).

Anyway, I want to thank you and everyone else for your good advice.
Sometimes I need English-speakers' support so that I have more
authority when I try to correct someone's translation mistake :-).
It's a pity I can't do the same with our official translation - if I
was (were?) their editor, Neville would never have become the Potions
Master, LOL!


zanooda, very much behind in post reading ...