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From day one, I've been dreading to find out how Croatian media will translate BLM. And they've opted for...
"the lives of blacks have some meaning"
At best, their translation reads "the lives of blacks mean something"
But both options show major issues. Let's explore. (1/10) https://twitter.com/shockingly_bobo/status/1269222330699583488
"the lives of blacks have some meaning"
At best, their translation reads "the lives of blacks mean something"
But both options show major issues. Let's explore. (1/10) https://twitter.com/shockingly_bobo/status/1269222330699583488
Black lives vs the lives of blacks:
The meaningful choice to use black as an adjective, not as a substantive, is one of the reasons why white people are often triggered to retort with all lives matter. By using black to modify life, the name makes "a black life" (2/10)
The meaningful choice to use black as an adjective, not as a substantive, is one of the reasons why white people are often triggered to retort with all lives matter. By using black to modify life, the name makes "a black life" (2/10)
*sound* distinct from "a white life", and that ruins the kumba ya optimism through which "a life is a life" and "we are all equal." While that is certainly true, one of the things BLM points to is the way the very concept of life (or lack thereof) gets valued differently (3/10)
when it "belongs" to a black person. The construction "black lives" is clunky even in English, if I understand correctly, in the sense that it is not the standard way you'd express the collective existence of black people, but that clunkines is what makes it resonate. (4/10)
It adds a split second of additional auditory processing, and thus requires the listener to (re)focus the words and attend to them. The closest serb/cro parallel that comes to mind is the wartime use of the archaism "življe" - a weird noun combining the adj "živ" (alive) (5/10)
with the epenthetic -lje suffix associated with collective nouns (grmlje, brodovlje). As far as I know, življe is only ever used today in phrases that suggest massacres over specific Balkan ethnicities - nationalists love phrases like "genocid nad [npr] srpskim življem" (6/10)
precisely bc življe allows for ethnicity (the property of an individual) to be attached to a life form,which points out that despite life's universality, these lives were targeted for their (ethnic) difference, for "daring" to live life as themselves. You lose that quality (7/10)
when you phrase "black lives" (crni životi) as "lives of blacks" (životi crnaca).
Now let's move on to mattering vs. meaning!
"To matter" is to be of significance.
"To mean" is to signify.
See the difference? Even when it signifies something important, "to mean" needs (8/10)
Now let's move on to mattering vs. meaning!
"To matter" is to be of significance.
"To mean" is to signify.
See the difference? Even when it signifies something important, "to mean" needs (8/10)
a complement, you must mean SOMETHING. this is perfectly captured by the clunky addition of "nešto" ("something") in the Croatian translation, which mistranslates "matter" ("vrijede") as "mean something" ("nešto znače"). (9/10)
This of course loses the succinctness of "black lives matter," a phrase which, again, deliberately stops there, and doesn't explain, justify, or complement that worth. They don't matter TO some people, or FOR some reason. They simply matter, period. (10/10)
