Loss in Translation

One of the really difficult things that a translator can encounter is when you're faced with the task of having to translate terms or concepts in the source language that don't exactly exist in the language you're tranaslating into. There is a really interesting case about a language in the remote corners of Venezuela called Guaica. Apparently its really easy to find equivalent words for murder, stealing, lying, etc in English but the words good, bad, ugly and beautiful mean something completely different.

This is a list of things that are options for translating the concepts/terms of good, bad and violating tabbo:

GOOD: desirable food, killing enemies, chewing dope in moderation (chewing tabacco or coca leaves???), putting fire to one's wife to teach her to obey (what?), and stealing from anyone not belonging to the same band (tribe, ethnic group, etc).

BAD: rotten fruit, any object with a blemish or imperfection, murdering a person of the same band, stealing from a member of the extended family and lying to anyone

Violating Taboo: incest, being to close to one's mother-in-law, a married woman's eating tapir ( an animal that resembles a pig or anteater but belongs to the same family as horses and rinocerous) before the birth of the first child and a child's eating rodents

This is prime material for President Bush's compilation of items that fall within and outside his "axis of evil".

NOTE: I thought this chart in my course reader for translation studies 1 was some sort of silly fabrication to illustrate the point of loss and gain in translation, but I guess not.