Slang "no brainer" -- a challenge for translators

Chris F Waigl chris at LASCRIBE.NET
Mon Oct 30 08:06:17 UTC 2006


Cohen, Gerald Leonard wrote:

>      It's sometimes possible to appreciate the wealth of British/American slang by seeing the difficulty of translating some of its items (with proper nuances) into other languages. One such item is "no brainer" which the German news program tagesschau.de was unable to translate with a corresponding German slang/colloquial expression.
>
>     In a recent interview, Vice President Dick Cheney was asked with respect to the interrogation torture-method known as "waterboarding": "Would you agree a dunk in the water is a no-brainer if it can save lives?". To which he reportedly replied: "Well, it's a no brainer for me".
>
>      The tagesschau.de translator had to find a roundabout way to render "no-brainer" in each instance. In the first one, he/she reported that Cheney was asked if he shares the view that a dunking (to save lives) is "nicht der Rede wert" [literally: "not worth talking about/mentioning."].  For the second instance the tagesschau item simiply reported that Cheny shares that view.
>
>    [...]

Very interesting translation problem. I don't think the Tagesschau's
choice ("nicht der Rede wert") was a good one. The problem is with
perspective: "no-brainer" is about making a decision about a future or
hypothetical course of action; "nicht der Rede wert" is about judging an
action after it has happened.

Googling through news articles, I find there are two more ways of
dealing with "no-brainer" here. The most widespread solution I've seen
was translating "a no-brainer" with "eine Selbstverständlichkeit" --
something that goes (lit. is understood) by itself. Well, it kind of
gets the sense across, but smells rather unidiomatic in German.

The most interesting, and probably best, approach was taken by the
Spiegel. They wrote "'Würden Sie zustimmen, dass es nicht schwer fällt,
sich für das Eintauchen in Wasser auszusprechen, wenn es Leben retten
kann?', wollte Hennen (sinngemäß) wissen," marked as a free rendering by
the parenthetical "sinngemäß". The literal translation is "Would you
agree that it isn't difficult to advocate dunking in water if it can
save lives?"

I can think of a way to render the sense of "no-brainer" rather well in
German, but it would require starting the sentence with a dummy subject
and therefore making a whole new subordinate clause out of "a dunk in
the water" -- thus making the sentence more cumbersome. It would be
several degrees more informal than "no-brainer", and in particular more
informal than German politicians let themselves be caught on TV.
("Stimmen Sie zu, dass es ja wohl keine Frage ist, dass man jemanden
untertaucht, wenn dadurch Leben gerettet werden können?")

I am unsure what this has to do with British/American slang in
particular. It seems to me that this is a general observation. At least
just about every language teacher I know keeps repeating that while it
is possible, after a suitable number of years of study and practice of a
language, to function with reasonable fluency in a limited number of
relatively formal registers, the endless variations and nuances of slang
would mark the difference between the competent non-native speaker and
the native speaker. For English this effect is amplified by the fact
that a greater number of varieties not only exist but are accessible,
world-wide, via television and other media.

A German friend the other day stumbled over the expression "busy-body"
having a rather precise equivalent in the regional dialect of the place
we (both) grew up in, but not in standard German. The variations are
endless.

On the other hand there *is* the old canard about English having so many
more words than any other language, huge sets of synonyms that are
marked for register, class of the speaker etc. pp. I've come to
disregard this claim most of the time, though there might be a grain of
truth in there somewhere.

Chris Waigl

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org



More information about the Ads-l mailing list