Translations

Sticker svin, a photo by Kristjan Wager on Flickr.

I am currently reading Is That a Fish in Your Ear?: Translation and the Meaning of Everything by David Bellos, which is about translations (NY Times has a book review of it here).

While reading the book, I couldn't help think of this sticker which I took a picture of some months ago (the black one), since it is a good example of the problems with translations.

The sticker was in a Danish bar, and translated into English it would be "klistermærke swine" - yes the first word would be the Danish word, since the word sticker is not Danish, but English.

Of course, translating the text would make absolutely no sense, because the whole point is to make a linguistic joke. "Sticker" sounds similar to the Danish word for snitch ("stikker"). Snitches are often referred to as "stikker svin" which means "snitch swine".

As people can see, the brilliance of the sticker text looses a lot in translation (well, all of it, really), but trust me, I laughed out loud when I saw it.

Can graffiti be art?

Like many other people I am not happy about most of the graffiti that is painted everywhere in larger cities. However, once in a while, it's possible to come across a piece of graffiti that's truly a piece of art.

An example of this, is a 1999 piece of graffiti in Copenhagen's Sydhavn, called "Evolution", which I saw for the first time today. I came across a reference to it a couple of days ago, and decided to go out and take a look at it.

I should probably add, that this is a completely legal piece of graffiti, and that there is talk about listing it, so it can be saved for future generations. I doubt it will happen though, and it's very likely the wall it's on will be torn down sometime in the next couple of years.



It's 170m long, and illustration evolution, starting with the big bang.

Due to the length of the piece, I took 31 pictures of it, to get the full piece. They can be found at my flickr account here.