It's raining female trolls

As a native English speaker, I claim to have a perfect command of my mother tongue but I must admit, sometimes it leaves me stumped.

Most recently I was reaching for my dictionary upon encountering the expression "run the gamut" in a text translated from Norwegian. (I know half of you are scratching your heads in disbelief that this expression could have passed me by but for the other half of you, to run the gamut means to cover a wide range, from one thing to another).

I like to think it is not just me and that this happens to us all once in a while, you hear an expression that you've never heard before and its meaning is entirely lost on you, you are momentarily perplexed. You have just met a new idiom.

It seems unlikely that during the course of a lifetime, anybody would encounter all of the idioms of their language, not least because new ones are established over time. I can't say I've checked the records but I think it is safe to say the idiom dead as a dodo wasn't around in the dodo's day. Nowadays new idioms sneak into our language from popular culture; you don't need to have seen the film Fatal Attraction to be familiar with the idiom it created, bunny boiler.

There is also a bounty of archaic idioms which are especially opaque as their relevance is lost in the modern day. An example of this is carrying coals to Newcastle, meaning to waste time/effort on a futile activity, an idiom which would have been much more readily understood when Newcastle was still a major coal exporter. Of course some idioms must die out, in particular those which are usurped by a more modern alternative, but others, like this one, live on and become a kind of linguistic time capsule, documenting historical fact to future generations.

It goes without saying that idioms present quite a challenge to the language learner and they can present a bit of a challenge in translation too. The translator, after having successfully identified the idiom and unlocked its meaning, must then try to recreate the effect in their target language. With a bit of luck, this might in fact be more straightforward than it seems.

There is, rather surprisingly, a good deal of common ground between major languages and the way they use idioms; in some cases there will be an idiom with the exact same meaning at the translator's disposal. You might be surprised to hear this, I certainly was. Taking the common English idiom it's raining cats and dogs as an example I contacted a number of our translators to see if their languages also had an idiom for heavy rain.

The Japanese say it is raining cane, the Turkish it's pouring out of a glass, Arabic has at least seven options to boast and Russian has something very close to the English it’s bucketing down but also an idiom reserved for particularly grotty weather, a master wouldn't let his dog out. My absolute favourite is the Norwegian it's raining female trolls which I intend to adopt and embed into the English language, who's with me?

If you'd like to know more, please give us a call on +44 (0)1727 862722 or drop us an e-mail.

The Language Factory: Taking Language Further for you and your business.