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25th translation contest: "Alien first impressions" » English to Finnish

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Source text in English

Imagine dining in a European capital where you do not know the local language. The waiter speaks little English, but by hook or by crook you manage to order something on the menu that you recognise, eat and pay for. Now picture instead that, after a hike goes wrong, you emerge, starving, in an Amazonian village. The people there have no idea what to make of you. You mime chewing sounds, which they mistake for your primitive tongue. When you raise your hands to signify surrender, they think you are launching an attack.

Communicating without a shared context is hard. For example, radioactive sites must be left undisturbed for tens of thousands of years; yet, given that the English of just 1,000 years ago is now unintelligible to most of its modern speakers, agencies have struggled to create warnings to accompany nuclear waste. Committees responsible for doing so have come up with everything from towering concrete spikes, to Edvard Munch’s “The Scream”, to plants genetically modified to turn an alarming blue. None is guaranteed to be future-proof.

Some of the same people who worked on these waste-site messages have also been part of an even bigger challenge: communicating with extraterrestrial life. This is the subject of “Extraterrestrial Languages”, a new book by Daniel Oberhaus, a journalist at Wired.

Nothing is known about how extraterrestrials might take in information. A pair of plaques sent in the early 1970s with Pioneer 10 and 11, two spacecraft, show nude human beings and a rough map to find Earth—rudimentary stuff, but even that assumes aliens can see. Since such craft have no more than an infinitesimal chance of being found, radio broadcasts from Earth, travelling at the speed of light, are more likely to make contact. But just as a terrestrial radio must be tuned to the right frequency, so must the interstellar kind. How would aliens happen upon the correct one? The Pioneer plaque gives a hint in the form of a basic diagram of a hydrogen atom, the magnetic polarity of which flips at regular intervals, with a frequency of 1,420MHz. Since hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, the hope is that this sketch might act as a sort of telephone number.

Winning entries could not be determined in this language pair.

There were 3 entries submitted in this pair during the submission phase. Not enough votes were submitted by peers for a winning entry to be determined.

Competition in this pair is now closed.


Entries (3 total) Expand all entries

Entry #30652 — Discuss 0 — Variant: Not specified
Voting points1st2nd3rd
164 x400
Entry tagging:
  • 1 user entered 2 "like" tags
  • 1 user agreed with "likes" (1 total agree)
kuin ihmeen kaupalla
Flows well
Good, idio​matic Finn​ish (even ​if the sem​antics of ​the idiom ​is slightl​y off the ​mark)
Pertti Hietaranta
+1
Mikään näistä ei takaa sitä, että
Flows well
A nice way​ of handli​ng the Eng​lish "futu​re-proof".
Pertti Hietaranta
Entry #30853 — Discuss 0 — Variant: Not specified
Voting points1st2nd3rd
81 x42 x20
Entry tagging:
  • 1 user entered 1 "like" tag
erehtyvät luulemaan
Flows well
Good rende​ring of th​e source t​ext item "​mistake"
Pertti Hietaranta
Entry #31742 — Discuss 0 — Variant: Not specified
Voting points1st2nd3rd
602 x22 x1
Entry tagging:
  • 1 user entered 3 "like" tags
jollain ilveellä
Flows well
Excellent ​idiomatic ​Finnish (e​ven if the​ semantics​ is slight​ly off the​ mark)
Pertti Hietaranta
täyttä siansaksaa
Flows well
Somewhat m​ore colloq​uial than ​the source​ text, per​haps, but ​even so: g​ood, idiom​atic Finni​sh
Pertti Hietaranta
hamaan tulevaisuuteen
Flows well
Good, idio​matic Finn​ish render​ing of "fu​ture-proof​".
Pertti Hietaranta