Translation, I'm learning, is a funny art. It's not a matter of looking up the appropriate cross-language synonyms in a dictionary; even intellectually knowing this in advance, though, the fact of it comes as an enjoyable surprise.
I've been working on various short translation and editing projects--mostly tests--that may lead to regular freelance employment, which would be really nice. In the process, I've stumbled across a few of those little gems you may have read about, the sort that seem especially common on the border between English and Chinese or Japanese.
One of my favorites is a possible translation given to me for "Il n'y a pas de reponse a votre recherche," which, I gather, was supposed to be the default no-match response to a search-engine query.
The translation that I was provided with by the software I'm using (and which I wasn't supposed to change) was, I thought, startlingly philosophical:
"There is no answer to your search."
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