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Translation challenge

od uživatele Miland ze dne 26. února 2009

Příspěvky: 23

Jazyk: English

erinja (Ukázat profil) 28. února 2009 19:13:54

I wouldn't translate need-to-know as scibezona.

Scibezona means that you need to know something.

Need-to-know means that information is not meant to be distributed among a wide audience. This term is used for espionage, as someone has already mentioned. But it is also used with relation to classified documents and any kind of official secrets, whether government secrets or confidential corporate information. The term is used whenever you're talking about limiting the distribution of information only to a set number of people who truly need to know, so that the confidential information doesn't get out. I would not call that "scibezona". You might feel that you have a need for knowledge, but in a need-to-know situation, it is not you who decides that you need to know it; someone else decides that you need to know it.

I might translate the expression a little more loosely, perhaps as "La vivo estas operacio kiun regas laŭbezona scio."

(Life is an operation that is governed by need-to-know)

Miland (Ukázat profil) 28. února 2009 22:47:02

erinja:You might feel that you have a need for knowledge, but .. someone else decides that you need to know it.
This appears to confuse scivola with scibezona. The former is clearly subjective, but the latter is not. The objectivity of the need to know does not make scibezona inappropriate, and so does not affect the elegance of tommjames' solution.

tommjames (Ukázat profil) 1. března 2009 0:05:46

erinja:Scibezona means that you need to know something.
While that is clearly the most logical meaning I don't think it has to mean that, especially since this word hardly ever shows up in common usage (google/tekstaro search returns no results), so I don't think it necessarily has any consensus meaning attached to it. The precise meaning of adjectives is often an arbitrary affair, so I think it's fair to say it could also mean that the operation is characterised by the need to know, that is, people who take part in the operation need to know, rather than the operation itself needing to know. Although I guess it's kind of a moot point given that this isn't even what the original English phrase means, as was clarified by Miland and subsequently yourself.

But I agree that scibezona isn't a good choice, which is why I ditched it in favour of sci-laŭ-bezona which seems to me to convey the right nuance, even if it does take a bit of grammatical liberty. I think your more periphrastic attempt is a better translation in terms of getting the meaning across clearly, but it does seem a bit like dodging the challenge of coming up with an equivelant adjective to "need-to-know", which is (at least as I understood it) the essence of the challenge here.

jchthys (Ukázat profil) 1. března 2009 0:37:17

My du spesdekoj:
La vivo estas operacio scibezoneca.

tommjames (Ukázat profil) 1. března 2009 1:54:13

I've just noticed something odd.

The root bezon' is inherently a verb. As such, you would think that bezona means "in need", and that scibezona means "in need of knowing" or "needs to know", as previously suggested.

However it seems that the adjective form of bezon' actually means to be needed according to Reta Vortaro:

ReVo:bezona
Bezonata, mankanta sed necesa: por vino bona ŝildo (reklamo) ne bezona; 5 jaroj estis bezonaj por venki ilin
..presumably another one of Esperanto's annoying morphological exceptions. So this would seem to imply that scibezona has a meaning more like "needs to be known"!

Think I'm going to retract all my attempts and have another go later.

Miland (Ukázat profil) 1. března 2009 14:29:23

tommjames:Think I'm going to retract..
We have, in the PMEG, in the section A-vortoj el ne-ecaj radikoj ('Adjectives from roots not expressing an abstract quality'):
Kiam la radiko de A-vorto havas agan signifon, la A-vorto povas havi plej diversajn signifojn. Ĝi povas signifi “rilata al la koncerna ago” k.s.

I translate: 'When the root of an adjective signifies an act, the adjective can have the greatest variety of meanings. It can man "related to the concerned act" and similar interpretations.'

The same page of PMEG states earler in the same section: la signifo de tia A-vorto multe varias laŭ la kunteksto. I translate: 'The meaning of this kind of adjective varies much according to the context.'

Now bezona is capable of being related to the act of needing bezoni in more than one way. While the standard meaning of bezona is 'needed', this is not the only possibility. It could also mean 'needing' or 'in need of'.

Hence scibezona is capable of being interpreted more than one way in theory, but the context should make the matter clearer. The challenge that I intended was indeed to find a short way of translating the saying. In my view, I don't see anyone improving on your solution too easily.

tommjames (Ukázat profil) 1. března 2009 16:41:45

Miland: I translate: 'When the root of an adjective signifies an act, the adjective can have the greatest variety of meanings. It can man "related to the concerned act" and similar interpretations.' The same page of PMEG states earler in the same section: la signifo de tia A-vorto multe varias laŭ la kunteksto. I translate: 'The meaning of this kind of adjective varies much according to the context.'
Well yes, and this is what I meant when I referred to the arbitraryness of the exact meaning of adjectives, further up. The difficulty for me though, is do we really have a context within which scibezona can be relied upon to convey that which we're trying to get across. Clearly we don't have conventional usage to rely on, this construction not appearing anywhere in literature. As well as that we also have the alternate possible meaning of it, as highlighted by Erinja, which is in my view somewhat more logical.

I'll continue to think on another possible adjectivication of "need-to-know", for the moment I can only offer a few wordier attempts:

La vivo estas operacio en kiu oni laŭbezone ricevas scion.
La vivo estas operacio karakterizata de laŭbezona informiĝado.

erinja (Ukázat profil) 1. března 2009 16:57:21

If the point of the challenge was to come up with a single-word translation of "need-to-know", you should have said so. The way the challenge was worded, it sounded like the challenge was to elegantly translate the phrase, in a way that would also accurately transmit the meaning of the original English, and in a way would be understood by an Esperanto speaker who has never heard the English expression, and perhaps does not even speak English.

As we all know, frequently this involves translations that are not exactly word-for-word. As we have all discovered, the nuances of the term "need-to-know" are not necessarily known even by experienced English speakers. It took a paragraph or so even to explain the meaning of the original. I would classify "need-to-know" as a "fakvorto" - a word specific to a certain field, not necessarily understood completely by the general population. In translating such a word, I would expect that the translation might necessarily be somewhat more descriptive than an elegant translation would sometimes include.

Miland (Ukázat profil) 1. března 2009 22:39:41

erinja: it sounded like the challenge was to elegantly translate the phrase..
That was the aim, and not an easy one, as you indicate. As far as I am concerned, tommjames has found the best solution so far.

I believe I've seen the expression 'need-to-know operation' used on film, as well as in theology writings not written for spies, which should put it within the reach of many, quite possibly the majority, of well-educated people.

tommjames (Ukázat profil) 1. března 2009 23:38:11

How about if we used quote marks around the adjectivial construct, to somehow lessen the need to have it accord correctly with the grammar?

La vivo estas "bezono scii" operacio.

Would that be meaningful/permissable do you think?

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