Quotes

[resonant]

One of my co-workers is deaf in one ear. "We have a family saying," he told me: "If you say, 'Do you want some of this?' then I can hear you, but if you say, 'Give me some of that,' then I can't."

The kidlet and I got to talking about high school Latin, as one does, and I dug out my graduation memory book because I remembered I had written down some memories and quotes from Latin class. I was hoping I had recorded some of the intentionally bad translations that my hapless friends made instead of actually learning Latin ("Soldiers in the military never return your ducks"), but I hadn't. I had, though, recorded, without context, a footnote to something or other:

¹ With a strange and fierce viper-like monster.

I had forgotten that I received the Class Mars Award for Most Belligerent Student, but there it is, with signatures from the instructor, the president of the Latin Club, the Dictator of Rome, and Ronald Reagan.

Comments

[rheasilvia]

I LOVE bad Latin translations! I had a whole treasure drove of bad translations somewhere once. I must see if I can find them...

I do remember that a teacher at my school once evilly boasted he'd convinced his entire class they'd fallen prey to a bad translation - by having them translate a passage in which Caesar recounts how Germans hunt deer (by cunningly sawing the trunks of trees nearly all the way through, so that when the animals lean on them to sleep - as they do since they have no knees - the trees break, the deers fall down, and the hunters can finish them off at their leisure).

Ah, those Roman soldiers and their well-known duck-stealing ways. ;-)

ETA: It's probably obvious from context, but the bad translations I refer to were unintentionally bad translations. There was a lot of hilarity with those. ;-)

[aunty_marion]

No bad translations here (I could give you a couple from German...), but our grammar school Latin textbook had some utterly insane sentences to translate to/from Latin. "Why did that man swim to the middle of the river?" and "He forced his daughters to live on olive oil and sausages" are the two I remember most. (The best one from first year university Japanese was "Who is going to smell?" - and it didn't say whether 'smell' was transitive or intransitive!)

We also got appendices with songs in Latin. Which is why I can still sing, as party pieces, 'My Bonny Lies Over The Ocean', and 'My Darling Clementine' in Latin. We did NOT, however, get 'Senex Macdonald habeat fundum'...