Obvious, really
Sir: In her splendid piece on the absurdities of Japanese translation, (The garbled phrase as frozen music', 4 January), Debo- rah Boehm admits to being particularly baf- fled by the incomplete French line, 'Petits Battements Sur et De Pied . . .', which she spotted on a little girl's hatband while tak- ing tea at an outdoor restaurant, and inter- preted to mean 'Small Palpitations On and Of the Foot'.
I fear Miss Boehm has given herself unnecessary trouble here by being overly literal in her translation. 'Petits Battements De Pied' means 'foot-tapping' or 'twitch- ing', as in the familiar gesture of impa- tience. In this context 'Sur et' indeed makes no sense at all, until one realises that a printing error must have occurred during the hatband's manufacture and that what was intended was not 'Sur et' but 'Surd', which means 'tart'. Once that is under- stood, sense quickly emerges; for even with- out knowing the rest of the message it becomes clear that as a joke, or perhaps in response to a dare, the little girl had put on a hat of the sort traditionally worn by Japanese streetwalkers when standing in doorways waiting impatiently for some trade to come along.
The only other possible explanation of the hatband's message — though this one does require guessing at its conclusion — allows 'Sur et' to stand as printed, but translates 'Sur' as 'sour', not 'on', and assumes the omission of a comma before 'et'. In this form the message would read 'Petits Battements Sur,' which translates
LETTERS
quite happily as 'sour little rumblings', fol- lowed by (e.g.) 'et De Pied on se precipite aux cabinets': 'and one makes a run for the toilet'. Fractionally less plausible, perhaps, but a message that might well be sported by any number of people who frequent out- door tea-and-sweet-dumpling shops in downtown Kyoto.
G.R. Kimball
8/9 Brock Street, Bath, Avon
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