Quote:
Originally Posted by anaconda
is it 'light bulb' specifically or are you just using it as an example of poor translators?
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Both. The poor ability of the large majority aside, as weird as it may seem, we never learned 'light bulb' and a lot of other everyday word in our initial language school, and these type of things would never come up in stuff we would translate at work. I remember being in this advanced language class with two of the only pretty uber military translators I ever knew. We were translating all these really hard commie political writings, then the teacher brought some fun stuff in one day so we could have a break. She brought in some children songs, a few story books (like Little Red Riding Hood, The Three Little Bears, etc.) and a few other things. Just about every song and page in the story books had very simple things that they just had no clue about. All these things are just really simple things, yet here are these really great translators that wouldn't blink rattling off what Hu Jintao said in his latest keynote speech at a party conventions, but they lack a lot of basic vocab, like light bulb, witch, pineapple, sea turtle, bacon, etc because they've never been exposed to it.