(no subject)

[sigmaleph]

translations are fun because if you ask anyone who speaks both languages to translate the Spanish word "dedo" into English, almost invariably they will say "finger". Google translate certainly agrees.

But if you show a bunch of pictures to someone and say "Select all the fingers" and separately the same question in Spanish with "dedos" instead of fingers, and your pictures contain various human digits, you will get different answers in different languages. Thumbs are only ambiguously considered fingers, and toes definitely aren't, but they are all certainly dedos.

Does that mean that you should in fact translate "dedo" as "digit"? Well, no, because if you're talking about a finger and call it a digit that is not a neutral choice, you are conveying e.g. a technical setting, or that you're that guy in the intj meme who calls salt sodium chloride. It's like translating "a couple miles" as "3.2 km"; it's not actually what someone fluent in the target language would say in that situation.

the fact is there is no single word that accurately captures every shade of meaning and for most purposes "finger" is what you want, so that's what people will translate it as, absent further context that you're actually talking about a toe or something. That's not wrong! it's just an interesting thing that happens.

Comments

[yvannairie]

This is very interesting, I feel like if you look at ambiguous situations like this, you can probably find out a lot of neat context about why the culture the language originates from makes distinctions like that.