Elephants, mackerel and twisted knickers: the joys of translating idioms

Imagine one day you're talking to an Italian woman and you say something insensitive. All of a sudden she turns on you, shouting 'I've got the devil for hair!' What are you supposed to think? Well, either her hair has actually been possessed by dark forces of evil or she's trying to tell you that she's very, very angry…and maybe translating just a tad too literally.

Ah, idioms. We use them all the time, despite the fact that they're often quite mad. What I find fascinating is that so many different cultures have managed to come up with their own bizarre images to express the same thing. If the person you'd upset was Japanese instead of Italian, he might tell you that the insects in his stomach won't settle. An angry Argentinean might say she's like a motorbike. A furious German might say he's sour while a cross Portuguese gentleman might just tell you to put yourself on a stick. None of these make a lot of sense when you translate them directly into English. So, what's a poor translator supposed to do?

Well, before you can even start you need to recognise that an idiom is an idiom in the first place. In most cases you can work this out from the context. For example, if someone translating from English read that Miss X had got her knickers in a twist, they probably wouldn't assume that the protagonist had suddenly found herself tangled up in her own underwear. This can be a problem though with unfamiliar language. I heard about someone taking an old O-level French exam who had to translate the phrase 'Il jeta un coup d'œil autour de la chambre'. Instead of saying that the protagonist glanced around the room, the student had him throwing a cup of oil around it instead… probably making the text a lot more interesting in the process.

So, once you've identified the idiom, what do you do about it? Despite the temptation to translate directly, keeping the element of wacky poetry that you love, it's often safest to find an equivalent expression in your own language - or even to leave the idiom out altogether. Otherwise you might end up confusing your readers. For example, I'd love to translate the Portuguese 'Estás armado em carapau de corrida' directly as 'You're armed like a racing mackerel', but I'd probably actually go for a more familiar English expression like 'You're getting too big for your boots'. Otherwise my readers might confuse a perfectly normal Portuguese character for a fish-obsessed raving lunatic.

It's a bit of a shame though. After all, one of the most exciting things about learning a language is the access it gives you to these colourful, unexpected images that reflect different ways of seeing the world. Some are lyrical, like the Japanese 'moon and turtle' (to describe two things that are very different). Some are philosophical, like the Nepalese saying, 'a cumin seed in an elephant's mouth' (when something doesn't live up to your expectations). And some are frankly bonkers. I'm a big fan of the Spanish expression, 'He's as lost as an octopus in a garage', reflecting a deep national obsession with seafood which started long before the World Cup and 'Pulpo Paul.'

What's more, some idioms neatly sum up a concept which we can't easily express in English, like the Colombian expression 'dar papaya'. This literally means 'to give a papaya' and translates roughly as 'to do or say something which makes it easy for people to laugh at you, deceive you or rob you'. And then there are idioms which offer a deep insight into the culture they come from. I mean, can you get much more English than 'That's not really my cup of tea'?

So, it's a shame that idioms sometimes get lost in translation - although translators often don't have much choice. Like most translators, I usually try to find a way of transferring the meaning across without completely losing the poetry of the original. However, as my Japanese friend might say, even monkeys fall from trees.