THE ONION RING SYNDROME AND THE LOST-AND-FOUND IN TRANSLATION Ülle Leis
Conference interpreter, trainer and columnist
“Oh, onion rings! I wish I’d known; I would have ordered some, too,” my British friend said and looked wistfully at my plate. “I love onion rings!” He had taken his time reading the menu at a popular restaurant in Tallinn’s Old Town. How come he had overlooked his favourite dish? Well, he hadn’t. He simply had not recognised it, masked as Piirissaare onions baked in beer dough. The onion ring incident is a prime example of a translation completely lost on the foreign visitor that nevertheless looks like a good job to Estonians, many of whom would say that the English name is an “exact and correct” translation of the Estonian õlletaignas küpsetatud Piirissaare sibulad. It was a beautiful case of Lost-in-Translation (LiT), and ever since that fateful day I have used a code name for similar instances – the Onion Ring Syndrome (ORS, “Sibularõngaste sündroom ehk Tõlge Eesti moodi”). The ORS stands for a translation (written) or interpretation (oral) where the text user cannot recognise an onion ring (or something else) or where an onion ring is not really what the text user would call an onion ring. This may be a good time to ask yourself how you would grade Piirissaare onions baked in beer dough and onion rings if these were your students’ translations of õlletaignas küpsetatud Piirissaare sibulad. A LiT a day keeps the ORS away Avoiding the ORS, a source of considerable confusion, bitter disappointment and acute embarrassment, should be a key objective both when learning a language and when using it in a reallife situation. I believe that LiT incidents can be a handy language teaching tool to combat the ORS. Misunderstandings are gold dust, as Geoff Lindsey, a prominent phonetician and Honorary Lecturer in Linguistics at University College London, has said: “When I teach – always – one of the things that characterizes my teaching is grabbing hold of every misunderstanding that happens. They’re just gold dust. As humans, whenever we try to communicate using languages other than our mother tongue, misunderstandings arise, but instinctively we try to ignore those misunderstandings, we immediately try to rephrase, to repair the damage, we get embarrassed and we want to just simply step over the obstacle. Whereas I do the opposite. I immediately want to freeze time, hit the pause button, wind back and try to really examine closely, precisely what went wrong. Because every time you do that, you can be sure that you will learn something very significant about what matters. It will tell you what is important, what problems are the significant ones that arise in the interface between speakers of that language and speakers of English. Grabbing hold of errors, treating errors as a sort of gift from above, a gold dust that tells you what goes wrong.” LiT cases can teach us as much as textbooks, often more. They also stand a better chance of being remembered because they are usually interesting, visualisable, unusual, understandable and/or 19
