translation

Peace and goodwill

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Following sebmb1’s comment on my previous post, I investigated the Greek original and English translations of Luke 2:14. I am not a Greek scholar or theologian, but I do the best with what I know or can find. 

Bible Hub provides nine sources for the Greek text. Five read Δόξα ἐν ὑψίστοις θεῷ καὶ ἐπὶ γῆς εἰρήνη ἐν ἀνθρώποις εὐδοκίας (eudokias) and four read εὐδοκία (eudokia). Either way, it is a relatively rare word. There are 3 (or 4) occurrences of εὐδοκία and 2 (or 1) of εὐδοκίας. 

εὐδοκία can be nominative, dative or vocative singular, and εὐδοκίας can be genitive singular or accusative plural. To the best of my ability, the best options are either (most simply) (with εὐδοκία) on earth, peace; to all people, goodwill or (with εὐδοκίας) on earth peace, to all people of goodwill. The first would seem to include all people without distinction; the second would seem to indicate that there is a subset “all people of goodwill”. The task then is to discern who they (or we) are. ἀνθρώποις is most often translated men, but it clearly includes women (and children), because there are also ᾰ̓́νδρες and γῠναῖκες. 

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Some Sevit and GLZIPTEO

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Located at the southern end of Seoul’s Banpo Bridge is a recent development consisting of three linked floating structures with leisure, entertainment and related facilities. Its Korean name is transliterated officially as Some Sevit, which looks really strange, not least the ‘v’. Most sources give it as Sebitseom, which looks more reasonable. The Korean name is 세빛섬, which my level of Korean understands as three + light (‘not dark’, not ‘not heavy’) + island(s).

Located near the old city wall near Namsan is an establishment named GLZIPTEO, which I can only assume is an attempted transliteration of the Korean 글집터 (otherwise geul-jib-teo) which appears alongside it. 집 is usually house, but I can’t even guess at 글, 터 or the whole thing. Google and Bing translate 글집터 as writing site, and Papago as a collection of writings. Google finds no results for GLZIPTEO and various results (all in Korean) for 글집터, one of which is the registration for an e-commerce business.

ㅂ is often used to transliterate English v (as well as b) and ㅈ for z (as well as j), but the converse is rarely if ever used. Certainly these are the first times I’ve seen either.

(For possibly more than you want to know about the romanisation of Korean.)

Hell on earth

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Facebook’s auto-translator keeps giving. A Korean friend is travelling in Central Asia. One recent post appeared auto-translated as:

Let’s go to the 3,000-4,000 meter hell of the world for a week from Osh, Kyrgyzstan to Dusanbe, Tajikistan.

Plausible (even if “hell on earth” would be more idiomatic). The original was:

키르기즈즈스탄 오쉬에서 타지키스탄 두산베까지 일주일간 3,000~4,000 미터급의 세상의 지붕으로 가봅시다. 

Google translates this as:

From Osh, Kyrgyzstan to Dushanbe, Tajikistan, we’ll take you on a week-long journey to the roof of the world at 3,000-4,000 meters.

The key word is 지붕 (ji-bong, roof), not 지옥 (ji-ok, hell) (neither of which I knew before this). Even though they have one syllable in common, any auto-translator should be able to tell the difference.

When I told my friend about this, she replied:

hahaha~ That wasn’t entirely wrong. It was a truly difficult journey.

A lot has changed

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An esteemed Korean friend posted photos on Facebook with the text 귀촌한 지 11년, 많은 것이 변했다. The major online translators are in narrow agreement – Google: 11 years since returning to the countryside, a lot has changed; Bing (Microsoft): It has been 11 years since I moved to the countryside, and a lot has changed; Papago (Naver): Eleven years after returning to town, a lot has changed; Kakao: In 11 years, many things have changed.

My wife translated the sentence similarly and declared that there was no other possible meaning. Surely Facebook’s unidentified translator can’t mess that up …

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éclaircissement and other English words

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Earlier this week Faizan Zaki from Dallas won the 2025 Scripps National Spelling Bee, correctly spelling éclaircissement (the clearing up of something obscure: enlightenment). 

My first thought was “congratulations”. My second thought was “That’s not an English word …”. But there’s nothing on the Scripps website or in the official rules which specifies that the words in the competition will or must be “English”. The pool of words is drawn from Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary, which simply shifts the selection of “English” words to MW rather than Scripps. MWUD doesn’t specify “English” it is title, but is billed as “the largest, richest dictionary of American English”. 

What is an “English” word? Simply mentioning or even using (once) a foreign word in an otherwise English sentence doesn’t make it English. There must be some pattern of use as an English word. Some thoughts I have are: if a word is written with foreign spelling or diacritics, is pronounced in a foreign way, is only used in foreign contexts, either takes foreign morphology (noun plurals, verb tenses or adjective comparatives or superlatives) or doesn’t take English morphology, and is used with the same meaning as in a foreign language and has a perfectly good English equivalent, then it’s a foreign word. If it is written with English spelling (with no diacritics, obviously), pronounced in an English way, used in English(-speaking  country) contexts, takes English morphology and has a (if only slightly) different meaning, then it’s probably an English word. Obviously there’s a sliding scale, because some of those may apply but not others.

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Good way!

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One video on the Youtube channel Lisa and Josh shows another American couple walking the Caminho Português/Camino Portugués from Porto in Portugal to Santiago de Compostela in Spain. I had seen their previous video, in which they walked part of the Camino Francés (I can’t remember where they started; possibly from Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port) so I was familiar with the Spanish expression Buen camino! In the Portuguese video, their interactions with other walkers and the locals are sprinkled with Bom caminho!

A sign in one town lists the greeting/wish in eight languages:

BO CAMINO
BUEN CAMINO
BOM CAMINHO
GOOD WAY
GUTEN WEG
BON CHEMIN
BUON CAMMINO
DOBREJ DROGI

Clearly, five of these are related (Galician, Spanish, Portuguese, French and Italian, with French being the most different), two more are related (English and German), and one is very different (Polish, apparently). 

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condolences and other mis-autotranslations

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Facebook’s autotranslate continues to perplex (see here, here and here). A friend who is an Anglican priest in Korea wrote a book about Christian spirituality though the perspective of traditional Korean thought. He recently noted that it is now three years since it was published and “it has been 24 weeks in the bestselling religious general top 100. Thank you for your many condolences.” 

That’s just got to be wrong. The Korean original is 많이 애독해 주어서 감사합니다. 애독하다 (ae-dok-ha-da) means “enjoying reading; being widely read”. Condolence is 조위 (jo-wi), which is so completely different that no translator (human or auto) should confuse them. 

(Sensitivity warning: the following includes references to sexual assault.)

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“The land of the morning clam”

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The Korea Times has an article on a new movie titled The land of morning calm. It appears sometimes like that and sometimes as The land of morning clam. That might actually might be a suitable title, because it’s set in a fishing village, but what I found indicates that it’s a mistake.

The phrase The Land of the Morning Calm was coined by Percival Lowell in his 1885 book “Chosön [Joseon], the Land of the Morning Calm” (which I haven’t investigated – I’ve read some of the early accounts, which I might write a post about sometime). (Preliminary research: it’s available as a rare book, or on Google Books and the Internet Archive.) (Lowell is otherwise known for his speculations that there are canals on Mars, and founding the observatory from which Clyde Tombaugh identified Pluto.)

The article gives the movie’s Korean title as The morning sea gull is, which is clunky. The Busan International Film Festival Youtube channel has a trailer (not subtitled) giving the Korean title 아침바다 갈매기는, which Google translates as The seagulls of the morning sea, Bing as Morning sea gull and Papago as Sea seagulls in the morning.

Searching for The land of the morning clam finds three results, two of which are mistakes, but the blog Exile made easy has the subtitle Dispatches from the Land of the Morning Clam … err … Calm (The blog only has three posts from 2007.)

Overall calm is a far more common word than clam, and I would usually be able to type it without a problem, but once I got thinking about clam I kept typing it whether I wanted clam or calm.

Ah well, keep clam and carry on.

(For more about the various names of Korea through history, including Lowell’s choice of morning calm, see here.)

Tourist Korean, part 6

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This post is very long and slightly messy, but I have now finished the major part of this series. There are too many places to link to. Search and you will find.

Various parts of tourist Korean can be found in the names of some of the 768 stations on the Seoul metro network. Some of these words are also useful in other contexts. 

Most of the English names of Seoul metro stations are transliterations of the Korean name, but in the last post we found office, including Gyeonggi Provincial Government Northern Office and Seoul Regional Office of Military Manpower, which include translations. All the stations in this post contain an English word or words in the English name, and some an English loanword in the Korean name.

대학교 大學 daehakgyo university

대 dae means large, great and 학교 hakgyo means school, so daehakgyo means … university. There are 24 stations named after universities. Of these, 13 are simply Name University station in English, but the Korean names show variations, sometimes abbreviating the name, always abbreviating daehakgyo to dae (대 大) (compare abbreviating university to uni) and sometimes adding 입구 ib-gu entrance or 앞 ap in front of. Most famously, 홍익대하교 Hongik University is often abbreviated as 홍대 and its surrounding nightlife area is always called that. The station adds 입구 ib-gu, making 홍대입구역, but its English name is Hongik University station.  Full names are used in Gachon 가천대학교 and 가천대역, Hanyang etc, Inha, Korea, Kwangwoon, Myongji, Osan, Sogang and Sungkyunkwan University stations. Full names plus ibgu are used  in Hansung 한성대학교 and 한성대입구역 and Soongsil etc University stations. Abbreviated names plus ibgu are used in Dongguk  동국대학교 and 동대입구역 and Kunkuk etc University stations. 

The other universities and their stations have extra elements, with even more variations. Ehwa Womans University* 이화여자대학교 (이화 + 여자 + 대학교) becomes 이대역 (abbreviating 이화, omitting 여자 and abbreviating 대학교) while Sungshin Women’s University 숙명여자대학교 (숙명 + 여자 + 대학교) becomes 숙대입구 and Sungshin Women’s University 성신여자대학교 (성신 + 여자 + 대학교) becomes 성신여대입구. 여자 is most simply woman. Women’s could be 여자들의 but that is awkward. 

(*Wikipedia reports: “The university explains its unusual name by saying that while the lack of an apostrophe in ‘Womans University’ is unconventional, the use of ‘Woman’ rather than ‘Women’ was normal in the past.)

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