Welcome again to everybody! Make yourself at home. Sit down in that chair over there. Take off your shoes, please. In the time-honoured tradition of our group, here is our weekly discussion thread!
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A little linguistic weirdness that has occurred to me recently and which I’d like to share for your thoughts.
So back in 2008, the war between Russia and Georgia was referred to in Russia as “принуждение к миру”. In Russian it sounds quite creepy and was, at the time, the source of many a concerned discussion. But trying to translate it to English, I get the relatively common term of “enforcing peace”. Hell, police in USA are called “law enforcement” - although it is never directly translated into Russian.
There’s no real point to this rant that I can properly formulate. Just an observation on the creepy innuendos that permeate our day to day language without anyone apparently noticing
Interesting, in Chinese one of our words for “to defeat” is 消灭, for example “苏联消灭了德军” “The USSR has defeated the German army”, but its translation in English is “mass extermination”
What the hey
Wonderful for anti-China libs translating Chinese history/works. “We have defeated the landlords!” can become “we have exterminated the small landowners!” if you want it to. Reminds me a lot of the deliberate mistranslation of Lenin wanting “prostitutes” killed – he meant political sellouts, not people in the sex trade. “Purge”, a very scary word, has also somehow mysteriously been translated from something like “show trial” in almost all English translated Soviet documents about the purges 🤔
Some guy actually told me that both the CPC and the KMT were guilty of “genocide” against Japanese people like what