Humorous Tidbits

Look, I'm not poking fun at the translation. Rather, I admire it so much that I'm devoting a great deal of time to it. But that doesn't mean we can't have a little fun with it along the way:

a) Toward the end of Chapter 1, Doc is regaling Martin with the war stories of the frontier doctor. In one such story he says that he performed the first appendectomy in "this neck of the woods." In Japanese this came out to say that he did the operation at "the mouth of the forest." (Though translating into one's native language provides a better written document, typically, it does leave the translator vulnerable to missing some idioms. That's OK; I can help.)

b) Near the end of Chapter 2, Ira is sermonizing about the evils of smoking when he says "that 67.9 per cent of all women who go to the operating table have husbands who smoke tobacco." 

To this Cliff responds, "What the devil would they smoke?" In the Japanese translation this came out to be "What in the world was this tobacco they were smoking?"

c) At the beginning of Section 4 in Chapter 3 we meet Madeline who is taking a graduate course in English "to avoid going back home." The translator calls her an "exchange student" who is taking the graduate course to avoid "returning to her country." (Perhaps the translator had difficulty seeing that someone could be in their native US and still not be home?)

d) Toward the end of Section 6 in Chapter 3, in a religious argument with Ira, Martin has likened Gottlieb's laboratory work to prayer. To this Cliff volunteers "I'll bet I get the pants took off me ... if Pa Gottlieb catches me praying during experiment hours." Somehow this came out to be "I wouldn't complain if I got the pants taken right off of me."

More to come...