There's a famous story in Turkey of a restaurant owner who wanted to put up a "Rotisserie Chicken" advertisement. In Turkish, that's "Piliç Çevirme." Çevirme literally means "to turn over." But the language reforms that began in the 20s dictated that the many Arabic and Persian words required purging and replacement with true Turkic words. So the old word "tercüme" was now replaced with - you guessed it - çevirme. The restaurateur, who clearly could not have been expected to know about cross-referencing, looked up the word for rotisserie - çevirme - in a Turkish-English dictionary, found the first entry, and the now-legendary result was this:
So famous is this incident that the term "chicken translation" has become an inside joke among some translators; a term for a hopelessly botched translation. And I collect them.
Commercial products can be an abundant source of material. One day in the Eminönü plant market, I came across these seeds from the "Stella" company which, mysteriously, seems to have gone out of business:
The instructions on the back are enlightening:
1. This kind of production is meal ground semen without sing sticks.
2. This kind of production is can be using for the meal and semen pasta!
3. This kind of production is thick-peel. Also even this production became ripe it is still hard on it's bouth.
4. This kind of production is after set up seedling plant first reaping time necessary 70-75 days.
5. This kind of production is gave up first and end of early.
6. This kind of production is good attention condition for 1 aeres head, 6-7 ton it's given up produce!
8. This kind of production is: plant developmant strang and it's become branched. This kind of production is is leafs covered plant very good.
9. This kind of production are pfruits become round widh 8 cm. height 6 cm.
Mmmmm, semen pasta! Anyone with a little imagination can understand how the error came about; but would it have been so difficult there in the middle of tourist-land, to treat a native speaker to lunch and ask them to check it over? I actually did this for a pudding shop whose menu contained such delicacies as "milk pudding with thoraxic of hen" and "Turkish folded sweat pastry." But now they've gone ahead with a new version, and the pudding with chicken breast now has a sideline: "It's specialty being slightly burnt." Yum, can I get that with a side of cigarette ash?
Some of the trouble stems from the fact that Turkish and English are about as "opposite" as two languages can be in terms of grammar and syntax, and with a separate literary tradition, has a very different stock of cliches, expressions and references. But that alone is not sufficient to explain this gem, which I came across while "editing" (read: completely re-translating) a job done by a professional translation agency:
Throat which is the basis of Judaism belief starts by stating details of creation action for us people. According to this; “Water” being on of the four main factors of existence world is not only made existent with other three main factors, but also it has the situation of covering the whole earth. Separation of seas and lands is the next stage. Throat continues by telling about the story of Adam and Eve who are the first men.
So it was Adam and Steve after all!
More than just differences in structure and antiquated language teaching methods, I think the real issue is that people just don't ask. If the possibility of humiliation enters the minds of such people, it takes a firm second place to the fear of admitting to a boss that one does not know. I found almost mystical evidence of this in a set of complimentary coasters, each of which bore a different Turkish proverb. The translation of "Sormaz ki bilsin, bilmez ki sorsun" is proverbial in itself:
"He neither does not enquire to know nor does not know to enquire."
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"your-brother's attention my-doing its-being-necessary his-having-said man-from I-escaped." Which explains why I can read the back of the Stella Seed packages and understand most of what's there without much problem. ;)
Thinking your way through Japanese does require a certain ability to parse at the outset as well.
I met a Turkish karate instructor while living in Japan and he remarked on how easy it was for him to learn the language. Somehow I found German grammar very helpful when I started learning Japanese...
(This is utterly without internal structure but more a series of random thoughts on the subject...I hope you can string it all together.)
Afyonkarahisar - root
-lı- resident of (as in Chicago-an)
-laş- suffix indicating change into something
-tır- causative
-ama- negative ability
-dık- participle ending
-lar- plural
-ımız- of us, our
-dan- from/one of
-mış- indicates reported speech
-sınız plural second person ending
If the root ended in a high vowel, like "İzmir," then the world would be "İzmirlileştiremetiklerimizdenmişsiniz"
Parsing - if you are translating from English into Turkish, definitely! Of course that's true the other way around as well. And if you are still thinking in English and working from there to make a Turkish sentence, then it makes for lots of pauses. :) At first I thought, "How can anyone think this way?!" And then (a couple years later mind you) I found myself just doing it. But though the proscriptive grammarian "correct Turkish sentence" always funnels down toward the verb and then it's over, in speech it's not really so much that way; there are all sorts of tricks for keeping your phrases a bit shorter and tying it onto the next bit. :) Know what's really hard sometimes - translating jokes where the "key word" in the punchline should come at the end, but in a Turkish sentence it has to come earlier; you have to figure out how to avoid spilling the beans before the buildup!
BTW I wonder why it is that the headline and comments section have no trouble displaying odd characters like, ı ğ ş and İ (it even accepted Arabic script) but there's no way to get them in the main text?
Of course, Japanese learners of English comment that when learning to deal with the Roman alphabet, they in fact have to learn 4 alphabets (upper and lower case, block and cursive).