He Knocked Them Out.

Portuguese:

e sua distração nas horas vagas era bater nas mulheres com uma bengala

Now he beats women with a stick

The Turkish, as translated by Coşkun Yerli…

“Whooton Okulu’ndayken bir kitap okumuştum, kitapta çok sofistike, kibar ve zampara bir herif anlatılıyordu. Mösyö Blanchard idi herifin adı, hâlâ hatırımda. Rezil bir kitaptı, ama bu Blanchard oldukça iyiydi. Avrupa’da, Riviera kıyılarında büyük bir şatosu filan vardı, boş zamanlarını da kadınları sopayla döverek değerlendiriyordu. Herif gerçek bir sapıktı, ama kadınlar ona bitiyorlardı.”

My Turkish isn’t good enough to tell if it’s a good translation. I think the first sentence about the stick/club is basically wrong, but the last (“women ended up on him”) seems okay.

The German does it!

“und verbrachte seine Freizeit damit, Frauen mit dem Stock zu verjagen. Er war ein richtiger Wüstling, aber die Frauen rissen sich um ihn.”

he spent his free time to chase away women with a stick. Was a real libertine, but women crawled at his feet.

German translation through Googlebooks (I’m assuming it’s the Heinrich Böll Translation) has:
“.. verbrachte seine Freizeit damit Frauen mit dem Stock zu verjagen. Er war ein richtiger Wüstling, aber Frauen rissen sich um ihn”

The first idiom doesn’t quite work in translation but he doesn’t hit anyone: the stick is used to frighten the women off. It’s pretty clear this must be figurative, although German would probably go for “sich massenweise Frauen vom Hals zu halten”. The second idiom is spot on.

Just saw that someone was a bit faster.

I also like Wüstling – it’s old-fashioned and conveys the right amount of scandalousness, I think.

The German did it, the Russian could have done too. Russian has a good word “otbivat’sya” – “to chase away, to beat off”, it could have been used here even adding the stick for dramatic effect, but it would have convened the meaning pretty well.

If the translator grasped that the meaning was not literal, the translation wouldn’t have posed him any difficulty.

so I’m not sure what’s going on with that sentence.

değerlendiriyordu here is part of expression “boş zamanlarını değerlendiriyordu” (spent his free time)

1. Perhaps “beats them off with a stick” could be an idiom also in other languages? Doubtful, sure, but possible?

It would certainly make sense in Russian to say (он от них) палкой отбивался or even (он их) палкой отгонял, though a more idiomatic translation would probably exclude the stick completely (while keeping the verb).

The stick versus club thing also illustrates a further difficulty in translating this. Besides Catcher in the Rye being full of idioms, Holden’s narration is loaded with malapropisms and near-malapropisms, including in the title. How to translate writing with numerous intentional solecisms and mis-formed idioms is a really interesting question.

This is related to a question that I was thinking about after reading the post on Proust. Editing or translating a work with numerous errors presents a special challenge. For a revered literary author such as Proust, I am not surprised that the continuity problems are just preserved, as is. However, sometimes editors attempt to fix things. For example, different editions of Titus Alone differ substantially in a couple chapters. The editorial note by Langdon Jones at the beginning of the first copy I checked out of the library pointed out that, by the time the problems with Mervyn Peake’s original text were noticed, it was too late to ask the author to fix them himself. (At the time Titus Alone was printed in 1959, Peake was already suffering from dementia, although it took about a decade to kill him.)

If you search the google books corpus you can find other published uses of “beat [women/men/them] off with a club” in this sense. I think “stick” is the more usual form, but “club” seems an adequately-attested variant, not a malapropism or near-malapropism. Whether Salinger was doing something deliberate by having two stock metaphors for male-female interaction in a row that are violent if taken literally is not clear to me. Maybe, or maybe that’s just the Etymological Fallacy because all of us use dozens of stock metaphors and idiomatic fixed phrases a day without thinking even subconsciously about what they would mean literally/compositionally to a foreigner who didn’t know them. (I think of the “knockout” metaphor as more commonly used to describe an attractive female and her effect on male onlookers, which maybe makes the OMG-literal-violence misreading harder to access by mistake?)

I wouldn’t be too harsh on the translators. As LH noted, everybody makes mistakes. What is interesting to know is how they thought the original says what they made it to say. It would be completely extraordinary if “beating with a stick” was the intended meaning. Haven’t they got it? Or were they surprised, but than just decided that however strange, that’s what Salinger wrote and they had no choice.

If translators somehow didn’t get that we see the world through the eyes of an awkward and insecure teenager who cannot do anything quite right including expressing himself, I am not sure they were in the right business. Which, of course, doesn’t mean that they were supposed to get every little detail of every idiom.

but women crawled at his feet.

but women metaphorically fought over him so violently that they metaphorically ripped themselves and/or each other to pieces.

‘Me, New York, and All the Rest’

Huh. I’m only familiar with it as the literal (and awkward) התפסן בשדה השיפון.

Here’s a 2018 tabloid headline from http://www.mirror.co.uk : “Boxing champ Anthony Joshua shows he’s a knockout as a dad and a fighter on holidays with son.” This is obviously wordplay involving the boxing sense (involving literal physical aggression) of “knockout,” but the wordplay only works if the readers also know “knockout” in its metaphorical sense as a positive compliment with no suggestion of violence (here not involving sexual/romantic desirability, to be sure).

I now wonder how the Japanese translated it…

I would be curious how many native English speakers under 30 can make sense of that Salinger passage. Using “knockout” as a metaphor for attractiveness strikes me as already obsolete ( like “va va voom”)

“Obsolete” is a huge overstatement. “Slightly dated,” perhaps. Searching the NYT, I find at least half a dozen uses of “knockout” to mean “extremely attractive or impressive” in the past two years, mostly in reviews of new (art, theatrical, TV) shows.

I’ve pulled out all the translations available in the InterCorp v11 parallel corpus. Only 8 of them, but most – 5 – are actually correct.

“Yeah. Anyone got a club?”

“punchable face”

My impression is that “knockout” is one of those words that is still current as artificial slang but which nobody actually says unaffectedly in real life.

—-

Staying as a teen with a French family, I was asked to translate the English slogan on their five-year-old’s T-shirt: “If I said you had a beautiful body would you hold it against me?” In my innocence I saw only the idiomatic meaning of “hold it against me”, a phrase I was as yet unable to translate. Later a cousin who spoke English arrived and translated the sentence literally. Awkward pause. I cleared my throat to chip in that the literal translation was incorrect when it dawned on me that oh god no it wasn’t. “No wonder you didn’t want to translate it”, said the mother.

As a general principle, if your translation doesn’t make sense (as is the case here) it’s probably wrong. (Admittedly not altogether a reliable heuristic when dealing with Holden Caulfield.)

In his generally serviceable English translation of Michel Launey’s Nahuatl grammar, Christopher Mackay renders Lisez à haute voix heading the pronunciation exercises as “Read in a loud voice.” You’d have thought it might have occurred to him that Launey was probably not advocating such antisocial behaviour, even though he was unfamiliar with the idiom.

I checked Arto Schroderus’s Finnish translation from 2004 and he actually got it right (p. 128):

Whootonissa luin ker­ran kirjan, jossa oli sellainen erittäin hienostunut, sulava, himokas mies. Sen nimi oli monsieur Blanchard, muistan sen vieläkin. Kirja oli surkea, mutta se Blanc­hard oli aikamoinen. Sillä oli joku iso linna Rivieralla Euroopassa eikä se kai muuta tehnyt kuin huitoi kepillä naisia pois kimpustaan. Se oli varsinainen elostelija, mutta naiset oli ihan lääpällään.

To translate this translation: “In Whooton I once read a book where there was a really sophisticated, suave, lustful man. His name was monsieur Blanchard, I still remember that. The book was terrible, but that Blanchard guy was something. He had a big castle in the Riviera in Europe and he probably wasn’t doing anything else than beating off women with a stick. He was a real rake, but women were still totally into him.”

Finnish does have a word for sexy, seksikäs, which is used almost identically, so it’s interesting how the translator uses the word for lustful instead. “Sexy” makes monsieur Blanchard the object, but then “lustful” gives him more agency…

Even in Soviet Union it was possible to write a letter abroad and, I suppose, some translators did with what they thought was the most necessary fragments. But this practice had obvious limitations. A protagonist in one of
Strugatskys novels writes such an explanation letter to a Japanese translator of his collection of stories (that is, it is backwards, someone in SU explains stuff to someone else outside). The expressions are like “get a banana” and “show a fig”

I would be curious how many native English speakers under 30 can make sense of that Salinger passage. Using “knockout” as a metaphor for attractiveness strikes me as already obsolete (like “va va voom”). The younger generation is also far more likely to understand an image of an entitled man doing violence to women literally, in the context of many recent heated public discussions on that very subject.

Alright, so I’m 32, but I can’t imagine many native speakers under 30 struggling with this. Besides, the “but” in the final sentence would surely nudge any unsure readers towards the right *sort* of understanding.

“Rake” does not, for me, contain any suggestion of physical attractiveness. As the OED says, “A man of loose habits and immoral character; an idle dissipated man of fashion.” A women is “attracted” to a rake, if at all, precisely because of the loose habits and immoral character. It works the other way around too, with men being attracted to dissipated women. Don’t ask me why, I didn’t invent sex (or is it gender ? I can never remember).

Strugatskys novels writes such an explanation letter to a Japanese translator of his collection of stories (that is, it is backwards, someone in SU explains stuff to someone else outside). The expressions are like “get a banana” and “show a fig”

Reminds me of essentially the same situation from another work, involving a translation from English this time…

(“Banana”, for the record, was a contemporary Russian slang term for a pair, as in a 2, as in an F, as in the mark… Strugatsky’s original had a similarly long explanation line, but I wasn’t able to translate it exactly.
“Show a fig” should be obvious to any Russian; a non-Russian, of course, would first be required to understand that the fruits of Ficus carica are not in any way involved. The idiomatic English is the just as opaque “flip the bird”.)

And to tie this nicely back to the beginning of the conversation, it means also “a cool guy” (in Italian)

@SFReader and Paul: in the old Motti version, sure, but I’d be very surprised if that hasn’t been fixed – along with a lot of other strange things – in the version Matteo Colombo did for Einaudi in 2014. (Can’t check because it’s not searchable online.)

Regarding the translations of “sexy”, I would say that the choices of the Russian and Finnish translators aren’t too surprising, because the meaning the word carries in Catcher in the Rye is slightly different to its usual meaning in English anyway. This always struck me as one of the oddest things about the book’s language when I read it, and I took it to indicate a subtle shift in the word’s meaning since the mid-twentieth century. The Finnish rendering in particular (“the word for lustful”) sounds like it could in fact be not far off the mark, at least in that context. Consider passages like this:

“I knew I didn’t have to get all dolled up for a prostitute or anything, but it sort of gave me something to do. I was a little nervous. I was starting to feel pretty sexy and all, but I was a little nervous anyway.”

“I can never get really sexy, I mean really sexy, with a girl I don’t like a lot. I mean I really have to like her a lot. If I don’t, I sort of lose my goddamn desire for her and all”

“Women kill me. They really do. I don’t mean I’m oversexed or anything like that—although I am quite sexy. I just like them, I mean.”

“all I ever saw him do was booze all the time and listen to every single goddam mystery program on the radio. And run around the goddam house, naked. With Jane around, and all. “Yeah?” Stradlater said. That really interested him. About the booze hound running around the house naked, with Jane around. Stradlater was a very sexy bastard.”

English speakers of today don’t usually seem to use “sexy” like that exactly. As Finländare noted above, in our understanding of the term today, “sexy” is normally used when describing someone else as an object of desire; it primarily entails objectification, not agency (“Sexy makes monsieur Blanchard the object, but then “lustful” gives him more agency”). In Catcher in the Rye, on the other hand, “sexy” is generally more a word of agency than objectification; it’s about how you feel, your general nature and attitude, how you are likely to act. Not a million miles away from the modern scope of the term, and there is certainly some overlap, but nevertheless it’s not quite the same. Arguably, translators who simply use the usual translation for English “sexy” may be making more of an error than those who do not.

Also “knock off”, as in den Skorpion vom Hosenbein abschlagen. When the action is less violent we have “brush off”: Ameisen vom Hosenbein abstreifen or (weg)fegen.

“Banana”, for the record, was a contemporary Russian slang term for a pair

*lightbulb moment*

Alles hat ein Ende, nur die Wurst hat zwei!

Not a million miles away from the modern scope of the term, and there is certainly some overlap, but nevertheless it’s not quite the same.

Looks like it meant “horny”, which is orthogonal to “sexy”, related only by accident or wishful thinking.

“sophisticated, suave, lustful”… I dunno, it’s possible, but it seems off to me.

Hugh Hefner in his heyday? Don Draper from Mad Men?

I think the only real stumbling block may be the word lustful, which is suggestive of censorious Baptist homilies and is not a Holden Caulfield sort of word. DM’s notion of updating it to “horny” works for me.

@David Marjanović, @Stu Clayton: The closest meaning to “beat off” would be “to fend off,” followed by “reject, deny,” but there’s also “to dismantle” and, as you say, “to chop off” and “to knock off.” In some cases, “abschlagen” is used in sentences such as “X cut down a tree.” From here, there’s only half a step to felling women with a club.

Anyway, it was a preliminary suspicion and not much else. My current hypothesis is that Rait was familiar with Rossi’s (Japrisot’s) translation.

Or Karl May who, in the late 19th century, wrote a heap of 500-page novels (or 400-page in another edition where the books are larger) set in the Ottoman empire or in the Wild West long before he visited either.

My guess is that it was a later shift, when 1 was very rarely used and 2 became *the* bad mark.

Reminds me of the extensive explanation of several varieties of 2 in one scene of Nikolai Nosov’s Весёлая семейка (literally, “Happy Family”), when the protagonist gets a 2+.

(The explanation finishes with “and then there’s 1…”, at which point it gets interrupted.)

I thought 1 was stake.

It is, or at least that’s a term I’m familiar with, but “banana” for 2 was before my time, and I mostly only know it from the Strugatsky quote; the only slang term I’m familiar with for 2 is the transparent “pair”.

DM: set in the Wild West long before he visited

Wiki: With few exceptions, May had not visited the places he described

I can’t see why everyone always dwells on this point about Karl May, poor man. When did you last see a western that was directed by someone from the wild west? Even now in 2019 George Lucas has never once been into space.

I’ve read somewhere that this system and names of the marks were copied from Germany back in Tsarist days.

5 was ‘ausgezeichnet’ originally, for example.

6 Nicht genügend.

Something of a paradox there. I’d expect the Germans to get the numbering the right way around.

Brett, you might enjoy Simon Blackburn’s contemplation of “the nose, the palate, the infinitely sensitive proboscis” required of evaluators for the UK’s Research Assessment Exercise.

I think we did this a few years ago; anyway, the old Danish grades were like that too. Bad, mediocre, rather good, good, very good, outstandingly good. But to make averages fun, Hans Christian Ørsted came up with an interesting numerical scale: slet = -23, mådeligt = -7, temmelig godt = 1, godt = 5, meget godt = 7, udmærket godt = 8.

From 1788 to 1805, the official scale was 0 (failed), non contemnendus, haud illaudabilis, laudabilis and laudabilis præ ceteris.

The U.S., as I suppose everyone knows from the movies, uses either numerical grades with 100 = perfect or else letter grades from A (high) to F (low), with E omitted. There are roughly ten percentage points per letter, and the letters can be modified with + or – to indicate the upper and lower thirds of the range, the middle third being unqualified.

The U.S., as I suppose everyone knows from the movies, uses […] letter grades from A (high) to F (low), with E omitted.

Everyone except Austria’s minister of education at the beginning of this century. As an attempt to make the grade scale at universities easier to compare internationally, she came up with the idea of changing it to A, B, C, D, E, F. The idea was quietly withdrawn within a few days. The poor minister had never seen a university from the inside.

numerical grades with 100 = perfect

This, on the other hand, is completely new to me.

There are roughly ten percentage points per letter

I guess that’s not the case at universities, where after all grade inflation is happening on a large scale?

In Austria, the difference between 4 and 5 is defined in that 50% gives you a 4 – in school. In university, the professors can do whatever they want. The other grades are not defined even in school.

I have been told that in M.A. and Ph.D. programs in some universities (and perhaps fields), a B essentially means you aren’t going to get the degree — the ultimate grade inflation.

In my structural engineering courses at an American university they were always going on about bell curves and plotting the point of failure not only of concrete or steel beams but of students’ exam papers. This was pretty sensible: you want 2/3 or 3/4 to pass, maybe 4/5, I don’t know the numbers, but you make a numerical assessment when the answers to exam questions are themselves numbers. When I was a teenager at school in England we were given baffling grades like β+++ (?-) but on the other hand we were answering essay questions and I suppose assessments were a bit more subjective.

I should have studied Mathematics. I thought you rounded up when you got halfway to the next number, at .5.

I should have studied Mathematics. I thought you rounded up when you got halfway to the next number, at .5.

That’s how rounding normally works, yes.

As far as grades in my university were concerned, it varied by course and by teacher, though I think always-up rounding was more common.
The really weird things started when grades were rounded up, then averaged, then rounded up again – I wrote a puzzle-ish thingy about one especially unusual case in May 2015…
 

Our grading system is, in general, very simple: the top grade is 10, then it goes down by integers until 4 is the lowest passing grade; however, intermediate grades in calculations can, of course, be lower, and the “problems” grade (which I will be talking about) is an intermediate figure (it’s averaged with the exam grade, and I think with something else as well).
We had two problem sheets this module (~half-semester), for a total of 60 problems. I solved 20. The scale is linear, and goes down to 0.
That means I got a 3, right?
Except it turns out that only 3/4 of the problems are needed for a full 10 grade. (And yes, if someone solves more, they get more than 10 – in the intermediate calculations anyway.)
Now, 3/4 of 60 is 45, 20/45 is 4/9, and 4/9 of 10 is 4.44 and change. So that means I got a 4, right?
Oh, almost forgot, we round all the grades up. So that would be a 5 then?
Not exactly.
You see, the numbers of solved problems are counted for the two problem sheets separately. Then the resulting grades are rounded up, then averaged, and then rounded up again (of course the average of two integers is an integer half the time, in which case it stays).
For my specific case, the figures came out such that the ultimate result was a 6. Yes, seriously. I didn’t believe my math the first time I figured that out either.
I’ll add that while the sheets did not have an equal number of problems, the larger one had less than twice as many as the smaller one, and that I solved more problems on the former than on the latter.

(Sadly, I don’t recall the numbers offhand any more – though I’m sure that the mathematicians here could probably work it out.)

Cattle are rounded up without consulting .5. All fractional cows are simply discarded. It would be more accurate to speak of rounding down cattle.

It’s only right that young mathematicians should use their new skills to juggle grades, as long as it’s lawful. English students can scan their references for what they believe might be typos. Art students can photoshop their mugshots and stitch gold braid on their graduation robes.

There are at least six ways to do integer division (of which rounding fractions is a special case): floor, ceiling, truncate, round proper, Euclidean, and balanced division. See this spec for explanations. The important bits are the first part of the Rationale section and the whole of the Specification section. An “inexact number” is one marked as inexact (often because it is a measurement) or computed using inexact (typically floating-point) operations.

@January First-of-May, I think the only solution is to answer 8 of 21 and 12 of 39 questions correctly: Grades of 5.08 rounded to 6 and 4.10 rounded to 5 then average to 5.5 and round again to 6.