Trim my Foot!
This was actually taken from a sign board in Japan placed outside a beauty salon I suppose. The languages that appeared on the signboard were in English and Chinese. (I will try to post the picture). So the thing which caught my attention was the use of the word trim. Intuition tells me that trim is not primed to collocate with foot. Yet, I can understand why the word trim is used in this case. If you look at the chinese version: "xiu jiao" you realise that trim is the direct translation of "xiu" from chinese into English . I am not very proficient in my Chinese hence I do not know whether "xiu jiao" is even a correct way of saying it but let's just assume that it is correctly used. Obviously, the translator who is in charge of doing the translation have been unaware of the fact that when words collocate with another, there exists a sort of a natural "relatioinship" between them. Eg. When native speakers describe an orange, it would be unusual to say” The spherical orange” or “the sigmoid-shaped orange”. There is an unnatural relationship between sigmoid-shaped and orange when describing the shape of an orange. Instead ,most native speakers would say “the round orange”.
The problem with translations is that, unless you are a trained and professional translator, you are very likely to commit many errors in the process of translation simply because every language functions differently and which word collocates to which varies differently. Translators must be aware of this and must have sufficient knowledge of the way words are primed to collocate to generate meaningful sentences both in their native language and the language to be translated . Take for example the English word: Chocolate ice-cream. Suppose if we were to do a direct word-for-word translation: we would get something like: chocolat glace, which in this case is not only meaningless but violates the syntactic rules of the French language as well. The correct way of translating this is “glace au chocolat” . Notice that in French, the translation for ice-cream comes first. Next, the NP glace is primed to colloate withthe preposition a. The preposition a is then primed to collocate with the definite article “le” and lastly chocolat. Of course , this is only a very simple example. What about longer and more complex sentences? Sometimes, translations are not so straightforward as it seems as the above. What is being expressed in one language may be expressed differently in another. Let’s look at another translation from English to French.
Take the sentence: Frank’s father , a die-hard conservative, had first refused his offer. I wish to just focus on die-hard. In French, there isn’t an equivalent to this at all. The best that we can say is “ un conservateur pur et dur” (a pure and hard conservative).
So what makes one laugh upon reading the sign is the way the word trim is primed to collocate with foot. When we think of the word trim, our mental lexicon immediately activates words that are linked to trim such as hair, eyebrows, hedge.
Here is the definition of trim taken from the Collins cobuild advanced learners’s dictionary:
Trim (verb)
1.) To make something neater, smaller, better by cutting parts from it.
2.) To trim something off something –to cut away unnecessary parts from something
3.) To trim something with something-to decorate something especially around its edges
Trim (noun)
1.) An act of cutting a small amount off something especially hair
So going by this definition, we can easily understand why trim appears strange in this context. Unless you have a foot that has hair grown all over it or long untidy black nails that has not been trimmed for ages, you might want to consider going for a foot trimming! Otherwise, any normal individual with normal feet would not need to go for a foot trimming. I suspect the problem lies in the translation. As we can see from the other blogposts, translations done by poor translators seem to produce very unnatural, awkward and at times crude sentences.