Omniana/Volume 2/Mistranslations
218. Mistranslations.
A curious collection might be made of the mistranslations in our language, not those which have grown out of an idiomatic expression, like La derniere chemise de l'amour, for love's last shift, but those which have proceeded from the ignorance of the translator. Thevenot in his Travels speaks of the fables of Damné et Calilve, meaning the Heetopades, or Pilpay's fables. The translator, however, calls them the fables of damned Calilve. In the compilation from the Mercurio Peruano, which was published some years ago, under the title of The Present State of Peru, P. Geronymo Roman de la Higuera, a name but too well known in Spanish literature, is translated, Father Geronymo, a Romance of La Higuera. There is another such instance in the Appendix to Mr. Pinkerton's Geography, but whether it rests with him or M. Barbié du Bocage, I know not. The Memoir speaks of "Don Michael de Sylva, Bishop of Viseu, Secretary of La Pureté, favourite of the King of Portugal." The Bishop was Escrivam de poridade, that is, confidential secretary, by which name the efficient ministers were at that time called.
The translator of Thunberg has made some strange blunders. He makes the traveller say, "On one side of the mountain was a fine cascade that fell down a perpendicular precipice, under which there was a hollow in the mountain filled with several bushes. My inclination called me thither, and I must have gone a very round-about way to it, had I not ventured to take a leap of about twenty or twenty four yards in height, which I did without being hurt in the least, the bushes preventing me from making a hard fall." What the original may be I know not, but the translator does not appear even to have admired the jump, much less to have suspected his own accuracy. In another place a Linnæan name saves him from a more portentous blunder. "Dragons, he says, flew about the environs of Batavia in great numbers during the heat of the day, like bats in a summer's evening in Europe, without injuring me, who sometimes caught them in their flight." The reader would suppose Thunberg to be outdoing St. George or Baron Munchausen, if the translator had not luckily explained his own English by inserting the name Draco Volans..that is, the flying lizard,..in the text.