Translating time expressions

[Eric]

Translating expressions of time accurately can be tricky.

For instance, parts of the day. In English we have "morning", while the expression "forenoon" is old-fashioned. I think we would say "[just] before lunch", when referring to the late morning. But in, for instance, Swedish "förmiddagen" is common.

English has "noon" and "midday" - which means the same thing. Once again in Swedish "middag" can mean "midday" or sometimes "afternoon".

And when we get to the evening in English, it is common, especially when announcing evening entertainment, to say "tonight", which means between about 19:00 and midnight. So "where are you going tonight?" really means "this evening". And a fish & chip shop that has the notice "frying tonight" may actually close at ten o'clock.

And so on.

With clock time, the colloquial "half seven" means "half past seven", not "half past six", as in many European languages.

With regard to the week, we can, at least in British English, say "Friday week" which means "the Friday of next week" as opposed to "this Friday".

And "last January" rather depends which month you're in now.

All these things and other similar ones make translating expressions of time a little more difficult than you would at first imagine.

[Loki]

I didn't know the expression "Friday week" (don't you British have "next Friday"?).

Also, I was suprised to discover that in English there exists the expression "in the small hours", which is exactly the same as the Italian "le ore piccole".

[Eric]

Yes we have, Loki. But imagine that it is Tuesday afternoon. "Next Friday" would imply the one in three days' time, while "Friday week" would imply the one in ten days' time.

I was going to mention earlier "in the small hours", which is rather a nice expression, as is the Italian. But I forgot. There's also another nice expression "at the crack of dawn", meaning when it just begins to get light.

[hdw]

Sw. "middag" can also mean "dinner". Presumably it originally referred to a meal in the middle of the day, but then they borrowed Eng. "lunch" to cover that one.
A weird Swedish expression is "i fjol", meaning 'last year'. God knows where that one comes from.

As for small hours, people sometimes say "in the wee small hours", using a Scots word for 'little' that is widely understood and used by English people too.

Maybe it's because I'm a Scot, but I would never say "Friday week". I would say "a week on Friday".

Harry

[Eric]

I was just thinking, before I saw Harry's posting, that I personally would never actually say "Friday week". I think I'd say "a week on Friday". But living abroad also means that you avoid expressions that are too idiomatic. I believe that the word "fortnight" is not common in the USA.

"Dinner " and "lunch" get mixed up in English usage, where "dinner" can mean a meal at lunchtime, or an evening meal, depending on region and class. "Lunch" used to be short for "luncheon", but I believe this latter word is almost extinct in normal speech.

[hdw]

In novels with upper-class types who belong to gentlemen's clubs, people say things like "Let me give you lunch". Whereas us plebs would say "Why don't we have lunch sometime?" or something of the kind. Then you can fight about who pays for what.

My wife used to dread going out for meals with a bunch of other teachers from work. When it came to divvying up the bill there were always some tightwads who would say "I didn't have a sweet!" or "I didn't have a coffee!" or "I only had one glass of wine!" making settling the bill a nightmare. I have a low irritation threshold and have always been in favour of a straight division of the bill by the number of people round the table and who cares who had what.

Harry

[Eric]

Upper-class (hence the "U") Nancy Mitford (sister of the unspeakable Unity) opined thus back in 1956:

"U-speakers eat lunch in the middle of the day (luncheon is old-fashioned U) and dinner in the evening; if a U-speaker feels that what he is eating is a travesty of his dinner, he may appropriately call it supper. Non-U-speakers (also U-children and U-dogs), on the other hand, have their dinner in the middle of the day. Evening meal is non-U."

At least one knew where one stood in those days.

[Loki]

Yes we have, Loki. But imagine that it is Tuesday afternoon. "Next Friday" would imply the one in three days' time, while "Friday week" would imply the one in ten days' time.

I was going to mention earlier "in the small hours", which is rather a nice expression, as is the Italian. But I forgot. There's also another nice expression "at the crack of dawn", meaning when it just begins to get light.

Ok, now I see. Still, it does sound weird to me. And "a week on Friday" even more!

As for lunch/dinner, I seem to remember that in Dickens's time what we would call "lunch" (or anyway, the meal we have at midday) they called it "dinner" (although they had it a bit later than midday). I may well be mistaken, because I remember it confused me.

[hdw]

Ok, now I see. Still, it does sound weird to me. And "a week on Friday" even more!

As for lunch/dinner, I seem to remember that in Dickens's time what we would call "lunch" (or anyway, the meal we have at midday) they called it "dinner" (although they had it a bit later than midday). I may well be mistaken, because I remember it confused me.

I hate to confuse you even more, but a lot of people, including most Scots, call the main family meal of the day - in the early evening - "tea". This can be a cooked meal with several courses. Not to be confused with "high tea", an old-fashioned meal around 4 p.m. which is becoming fashionable again - a tall cake-stand sits in the middle of the table with shelves covered in little sandwiches and cakes.

To make confusion worse confounded, some people still have a meal in the late evening and call it "supper". My wife and I get irritated by the cookery pages in the Guardian newspaper where the writer says, this dish would be perfect for supper. What do they mean by supper?

I remember once when some friends of ours invited us round for "supper". We assumed they meant drinks and a few little snacks, so we had a big meal before we went out - a chicken casserole. When we got to their house they had prepared for us - a chicken casserole!

Now, when we phone each other with an invitation to come round for "supper", we make a big joke out of it and specify that it will be a meal, or it will just be some snacks.

The moral seems to be that the Brits don't understand their own language.

Harry

[Loki]

One must be prepared for everything then! In Italy it doesn't seem to be this complicated: there may be some variations in the time of the different meals, but we have breakfast, lunch and dinner (colazione, pranzo e cena), nice and easy.

[hdw]

One must be prepared for everything then! In Italy it doesn't seem to be this complicated: there may be some variations in the time of the different meals, but we have breakfast, lunch and dinner (colazione, pranzo e cena), nice and easy.

Yes, but many Brits (this one, for example) are confused by the Italian system of primo, secondo and contorno. You have a small amount of pasta for a starter. In the UK, we eat a big plate of pasta as a main course, maybe the only course. Risotto too would be a main course for most of us, although it leaves you feeling that you need something else. In the UK, we serve the vegetables together with the meat course, or if you're in a restaurant, they may serve up the veg. in one of those kidney-shaped dishes.

My wife and I find on our visits to Italy, France and Spain that the Latin countries are very stereotyped about food. It's good to be proud of your national cuisine, but in Italy for example, everything comes down to tomatoes, basil, pasta, parmesan, it's so predictable, and you get funny looks if you ask for a cappucino late in the day (we drink it at any time). The Spanish eat late at night and make no concessions to tourists, so if you leave your hotel around six o'clock you can wander the streets, starving, for hours until you find somewhere serving dinner/tea/supper.

People make fun of the British and their food, but you can get cuisine from all over the world here and in the cities at least cafés and restaurants are open for most of the day, serving full meals. We went into a famous bar-restaurant in Seville around seven o'clock asking for a meal of some kind, any kind, and they looked at us as if we had escaped from a lunatic asylum. We were allowed to book a table for later that night, a couple of hours away, and had to stay hungry. I thought longingly of all the places I know in the centre of Edinburgh serving an "all-day breakfast".

Harry

[Loki]

Yes, that would be the basic system, but there are also people who prefer a single main course, and they have their meals in they way on a daily basis.
As for the cappuccino (in which the "u" almost disappears and a diphthong is added at the end in British pronunciation), we generally drink it only for breakfast, maybe because it is quite substantial, especially if it is well-done with the froth on top. I, for one, would never dream of ordering one at the end of a meal, but of course it is personal.

I've always heard that the Spanish eat quite late (at two or three for lunch and at nine for dinner), but I've never experienced that. The British, on the contrary, have dinner quite early in the evening, around six thirty or seven. We have dinner generally at eight p.m.

Going back to translating time expressions, in English there's this system of using a.m. and p.m. which we do not use: we would rather say "le diciotto" (six p.m.) in formal language, or just "le sei" in informal or neuter language. I'm not sure about the other major European languages though.

[Eric]

As Harry suggests in #9, the word "tea" leads to confusion. The expression "I'm going to eat my tea now", may make people wonder about English verbs and their meanings.

I too still regard "supper" as a little finish-off-the-day snack, rather than a three course meal, whatever Nancy Mitford might say, although she was somewhat equivocal about supper. One of the worst things is having eaten and not being able to summon up an appetite for what looks like a good meal.

If I remember rightly, "kolacja" in Polish (the "c" is "ts") is what we would call "dinner" in English.

On my only visit to Spain, in January 1977, I experienced that strange Spanish habit of eating at nine at night. We were in Madrid for teaching practice. The Atocha massacres took place while we were there and armed police stood at street corners and roundabouts here and there. But otherwise life was perfectly normal and pleasant. I remember rowing in the Retiro park in my ridiculous ankle-length winter overcoat.

[Flower]

In Danish you have;
Breakfast=morgenmad
The time between breakfast and lunch is called "formiddag"
Lunch=frokost (In Swedish I believe they say "lunch" also)
The time between lunch and dinner is called "eftermiddag"
Tea(den meal) could be=aftensmad
Dinner=Middag (which is more formal). You would never be invited to "aftensmad" but to "middag" at someone's house.

Strangely you would never say "middag" about lunch in Danish, even though you say "formiddag" (before midday) and "eftermiddag" (after midday).

[hdw]

In Danish you have;

Lunch=frokost (In Swedish I believe they say "lunch" also)

Yes, and to me, Sw. frukost means 'breakfast', although I've just checked my Sw.-Eng. dictionary and apparently it can mean breakfast, lunch or dinner. News to me.

Harry

[hdw]

.
If I remember rightly, "kolacja" in Polish (the "c" is "ts") is what we would call "dinner" in English.

Yes, and the Polish word is obviously related to Eng. "collation", which I think is only used in the phrase, a 'cold collation', a meal composed of cold meat, etc.

Harry

[Stiffelio]

I hate to confuse you even more, but a lot of people, including most Scots, call the main family meal of the day - in the early evening - "tea". This can be a cooked meal with several courses. Not to be confused with "high tea", an old-fashioned meal around 4 p.m. which is becoming fashionable again - a tall cake-stand sits in the middle of the table with shelves covered in little sandwiches and cakes.

To make confusion worse confounded, some people still have a meal in the late evening and call it "supper".

I thought I had the Brit eating habits pretty much understood but you have indeed confused me. I thought you always had tea (at 4ish) and more or less full dinner (at 7 or 8ish), plus an occasional snack for supper, unless you go out to, say, the movies or the theatre, in which case you'd skip dinner but would have a more substantial supper after the show. I also thought that high-tea was later than ordinary tea and it served the purpose of liasing tea & dinner for a lazy housewife who would not want to cook a proper meal on a Sunday.

In Argentina we follow the Spanish late-time eating habits, or even worse. On Fridays and Saturdays people go out for dinner at 10 pm or later.

[hdw]

I thought I had the Brit eating habits pretty much understood but you have indeed confused me. I thought you always had tea (at 4ish) and more or less full dinner (at 7 or 8ish), plus an occasional snack for supper, unless you go out to, say, the movies or the theatre, in which case you'd skip dinner but would have a more substantial supper after the show. I also thought that high-tea was later than ordinary tea and it served the purpose of liasing tea & dinner for a lazy housewife who would not want to cook a proper meal on a Sunday.

In Argentina we follow the Spanish late-time eating habits, or even worse. On Fridays and Saturdays people go out for dinner at 10 pm or later.

Add into the equation all the people who don't bother with conventional mealtimes any more, and who do little or no cooking at home. If you go into Marks & Spencer's food hall around 1 p.m. you see all these young professionals in their suits, on their lunch-hour from the office, grabbing a ready-made meal to heat up when they get home, and they'll probably eat it from a tray balanced on their lap as they sit watching TV. My sister does that - she doesn't even have a table to sit down at, and if she makes you a meal you have to sit in an armchair balancing the plate on your legs. When I phone to suggest we go through and see her at the weekend, I usually offer to take her out for a meal in a local restaurant or pub so we can at least sit down at a table and eat properly.

Harry

[Eric]

Let them eat from a tray - and get indigestion. They could always walk along the road doing multi-penny deals loudly into their mobile phones and eating a hamburger at the same time. With their third hand, they can drink a bottle of healthy flat water out of a carcinogenic plastic bottle. With their fourth hand they can scratch their bottom.

Another great pursuit that Harry hinted at is eating a meal sitting in a soft armchair - if there's plenty of gravy on the plate... At least the "indignados" on Peurte del Sol can sit cross-legged on the floors of their tents and enjoy a relaxed meal while someone else plays the guitar.

Yuppies and other quick-life merchants never seem to wind down. Life, and food, should be savoured, not gulped.

[RamonaQ]

Interesting topic! It starts with time expressions, and sidetracks onto meals.

I have come across this time-expression issue with some translations, and do remember having spent some time trying to figure out what to do about a sequence of events that had occurred from the moment the first light showed (break of dawn? daybreak? crack of dawn?), then continued through dawn, early morning, and then ended in the morning.

As far as meals are concerned - While growing up in the US, brunch, tea, and supper were considered British terms. Back then we ate breakfast, lunch (a sandwich etc. around noontime), and dinner (a complete meal in the evening, around 6pm). Here in Croatia, lunch – ručak – is the main meal of the day, and is eaten between noon and 16:00. In the evening, dinner – večera – is something light. Oftentimes in the coastal region of Croatia, sitting at the table for lunch (ručak) is an important social event.
So it's not quite the same as in the US. Then when translating lunch scenes where everyone is at the table eating, drinking, and talking, this may cause some confusion among the readers who aren't familiar with the fact that lunch in Croatia is more like dinner in the US.

Eric mentioned Spain - just recently I was in Barcelona, and did not have any problems with finding a restaurant that served early dinners! Maybe that was because Barcelona loves tapas, so restaurants lure tourists in with early tapas, late tapas, and all-you-can-eat-all-night-long tapas!

About ten years ago I had visited Paris and on Sunday needed to catch a train for Switzerland at 15:00. So I wanted to eat a decent meal at noon. Unfortunately, not one restaurant, not one store, not one shop was open, and I had to board the train hungry and thirsty. Last month I was in Paris again, but from Wednesday to Sunday morning, so I forgot to check if restaurants are now open on Sundays at noon or not.