O hai, tattoo. Sorry about the failure quality, but when I uploaded them any bigger Blogger freaked out and distorted them. Also it may look a little rough because I took them the day I got it. (June 19 woot woot)
This little piece of nerd-dom came out of my French lit book last fall at VCU. I don't remember what the context was but I remember looking at it and going, "Wow." I wrote it in my notebook and forgot about it, and then would randomly turn back to that page and be all "Oh hey, I like this!" Pretty soon it just stuck with me. And I felt nerdy for liking it, but I think it's true.
So I'd been contemplating a tattoo for a long time but never been able to figure out what I wanted or where, and I wasn't going to be one of those people who gets a butterfly or a heart or something girly for the sake of just having a tattoo. I was sitting in my room in France one day doing something entirely unrelated to anything (probably playing games on Facebook) when suddenly I thought of this and was like "YES." Thus plans were made with the BFF to go get myself permanently scarred. Obviously it worked out. The one hangup was that I originally wanted it on my left wrist instead of my ankle. That wrist happens to be the one I sprained and was bothering me at the time, so I decided against it in case I was going to have to wear a brace or do something that would have irritated or ruined the tattoo.
Literally, it means "To translate is to betray." Moroccans here have said "Translation is treason." While more poetic, this is technically not right because trahir and traduire are verbs. (Nerd much?) The latter phrase was in a book (in English) that Liz was reading by some Japanese guy, I think? And the French phrase itself is taken from Italian ("traduttore traditore").
I know it doesn't make sense to a lot of people. But I like it, even though it's hard to me to articulate why. For one thing it's ironic because to me it sounds awesome in French, but when you translate it in English it just sounds stupid and no one understands. Beyond that, translating things and really preserving their meaning can be hard. I don't claim to be super awesome at it, but I've translated two musicals into English for Meghan and on many occasions I hit a wall where I knew perfectly well what the meaning was in French but couldn't put it into coherent English to save my life. That is an extremely frustrating feeling. But because of this it reminds me I need to get better at French because if I have to translate something I can at least try to make it as close as possible. It also reminds me why I want to learn so many other languages: instead of relying on other people to tell me what's going on, I want to know for myself. And if a bad translation has to be made, I'd rather I do it on my own and have no one else to blame. I don't know if this makes sense anywhere outside of my own head, but this is the rationale. So this isn't just a stupid frivolous tattoo. It means something, if only to me. And I'm okay with that.
If you're still confused, I like this person's answer (in French) on Yahoo! Answers. Enjoy.
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