Reflections on the Untranslateable

As I get deeper and deeper into this language, it's been very interesting to get past the typical, everyday phrases and words that are pretty much the same in both English and German and to discover the really particular and nuanced aspects of both languages. I'm never just having a conversation nowadays. Every time I'm speaking with someone in German there's always a background process of analysis that's happening in the my head. When speaking in English it's just simple communication--something you don't ever pause to think about--but when speaking in a foreign language you have to pay so much more attention to individual words and sentence structure and grammar and phrasing. Same thing goes for music, movies, TV, books, anything. After enough time you come across the parts of a language that make it unique and distinct from other languages: phrases and ideas in one language that you can't quite adequately explain with the other, or ideas that only take a couple words in one language and multiple sentences in another.

I was watching a movie with Loic on TV the other day, The Last Action Hero with Arnold Schwarzenegger, one of my favorites when I was a little kid. The movie is equal parts satire and deconstruction of typical Hollywood action movies, full of both stereotypical scenes and variations on the genre. It's actually quite good, I highly recommend it, but I digress. In one fight scene, right before Schwarzenegger throws a greasy, leather jacketed bad guy through a wall, he says, "Don't quit your day job." In the German translation of the movie, "Bleib lieber bei deinem festen Job," a pretty literal translation. To translate it straight back into English, for the sake of demonstration, that's something like, "Better stay at your permanent job."

The line struck me as so strange, because you'd need to have a very specific cultural background to understand it, and to really properly translate it you'd have to find an equivalent phrase in German or just get rid of it/replace it entirely. The meaning of the idiom is immediately apparent to any English speaker: "Hey, bad guy, you're not very good at what you do, so I would try to find a different line of work." But it doesn't make a lot of sense in German:

[Better stay at your permanent job? But that's what the bad guy does; he's a criminal, that IS his permanent job. Furthermore, he's about to get killed. Why would he want to stay at his permanent job if he doesn't do that job very well in the first place? Wouldn't he want to switch to a different job? One where he isn't getting shot up and hurled through sheet rock by huge, musclebound Austrians?]

And through this convoluted series of thoughts and questions we finally arrive at the meaning of the phrase: something short, sarcastic, and simple. A meaning that clicks instantly in the mind of an English speaker, but one that takes a little more thought otherwise (presumably, at least. I can't find the German version of the phrase anywhere in Google). It's such a simple, small little thing, but I've literally been thinking about it for days now. And just this morning one class demonstrated to me how phrases and idioms can have really similar equivalents between languages. We were reading a text, and the phrase, "I know it like the back of my hand," came up. I asked them if they knew what that meant, and they told me that the German version is, "I know it like my jacket pocket." Which makes sense too; your inside jacket pocket is always really close to your body, so you'd know the pocket/whatever was inside it extremely well. If there's one thing I'm going to take away from this experience, it's going to be an appreciation of my own language, and a new look at the aspects of it that I never even stopped to consider before coming here.