"Я работаю как лошадь."
Translation:I work like a dog.
188 CommentsThis discussion is locked.
Dave, well... hehehe
it depends a lot on the region you live, actually... Possibly we say mule here because of Italian origins.
BTW, "mulato" (a son of a black person with a white one) comes from "mula" (mule). They were kind of bred like mules for the slavery business back then.
Edit: why am I getting negatives on this one? it is true. I said it for people being careful when saying like "the Brazilian mulatas are beautiful", because it is actually offensive. BTW, translating what Dave was trying to say, in his region of Brazil they say "I work like a ❤❤❤❤❤❤".
don't agree with jeffereythu1. In french we say "c'est un travail de chien" (it's a dog's work) meaning it's a hard, painful, unrewarding, and unpleasant job. each language has its idioms. And in many countries around the world, dogs aren't seen as positively as in the US or Europe meaning they often have a miserable life. "Avoir une vie de chien" (to have a dog's life) means to have a really miserable life. We have this saying in Arabic too. Tambien creo que se dice en castellano...
2666
Wrong. Check out the lyrics of the famous Beatles song: "A Hard Day's Night": http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/beatles/aharddaysnight.html
I know pop songs sometimes use nonsense lyrics just to make them rhyme or fit the tune, but in this case, it wasn't chosen only for the rhyme, but because it was (and is) a common idiom.
Not all Beatles songs make sense ("I am The Walrus" sounds like something from the Duolingo Dutch course), but this one does - perfectly.
1524
You don’t say that in German. You actually work like an animal („Arbeiten wie ein Tier“), while sweating like a pig. We never work like an individual horse/mule/dog. Interesting, it‘s the generic “animal” in German.
Beatles said work like a dog and sleep like a log. It's been a hard day night.
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With great respect to the Beatles, and as a Brit English speaker, I'm not sure I would naturally use "work like a dog". After all, dogs don't generally work - not strenuously at least. Mules, donkeys and horses all seem to make for a better idiom.
Granted, in many countries, many of these animals' former jobs have been taken over by machinery. There's a few exceptions, like arctic dogsledders, herders with their sheep-dogs, cowboys and ranchers who still oversee their livestock from the saddle, and police with both mounted units and K9 officers, but I'd bet the majority of both the dog and the horse populations are pets nowadays.
As a fellow Brit, I'd add that to work like a dog and to work like a horse have slightly different connotations. To me 'work like a horse' means to work steadily and strongly without signs of tiring; whereas 'to work like a dog' implies to work beyond what could reasonably be expected- i.e. it implies an element of exploitation. On a more general point, Duolingo seems to favour literal translations, I find this helpful when I am trying to remember what the Russian word would be.
Modern theories of translation argue that you should translate with "what a native speaker of the target language would actually say", whilst sticking to the actual words used as closely as possible. For example, we translate "Goodbye" as до свидания, since those are the words that one usually says on leaving in the respective languages; even though the English has its roots in the phrase "God be [with] ye" and the Russian in "until [our next] meeting". However, since "working like a horse" IS an English idiom as well as a Russian one, I can see a good argument for preferring it here, over the more common English idiom.
However, as I have written many times on this site, we are not here to learn how to be translators, but how to speak languages. They are separate skills. Even if "working like a horse" were not an English idiom, it should be translated as such here, because that will teach us more about the language.
The situation is different with phrasal verbs, syntax, and the like (nobody in their right mind would teach a phrase like "At me is a horse") , but I firmly believe that, where grammatical, a literal translation should be given.
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English has the expression: "dog-tired", which means very tired - usually from hard physical work.
1004
in Chinese, we use "i work like a dog | donkey" to express an ironic meaning, while using "a (willing) ox" to express a possitive meaning.
I actually hope they don't. It seems like they're trying to lay a framework for handling differing idioms down the road. This particular one seems obvious, I'm sure there are many that will not.
Both answers (dog and horse) seem like they're acceptable but the alternate answer, in my opinion, doesn't confuse but relates/equates.
But I could be wrong, I'm not that far into the course.
It's not possible to learn idioms this way long term. Idioms often lack counterparts in other languages. So when you start learning more abstract idioms that don't have English counterparts you're going to get stuck. That's why it's better to learn an idiom literally while also learning about the cultural context surrounding it, which the course creators can do by adding a sentence explaining the idiom in the tips and notes section. It's too confusing for beginners to see words being used incorrectly like this, this is evident by this comment section which already has several comments from people confused about the use of the words собака and лошадь.
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Could you say Я работаю как собака and have the same message get across, or is this idiom strictly used as is?
I thoroughly enjoyed the whole discussion here learning about the "working hard" idiom from all around the world. That's why I love Duolingo!
So far looks like horses, oxes and mules are winning over dogs ;-)
One more point for horse - in Czech we also say "Dřít jako kůň" as well as "makám jak barevnej" = I work like a colored (man)
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Strange that nobody still did not remembered an our (russian) more expressive idiom: Я работаю как иша́к (donkey, but a bit wild, I found only this strange funny name "ass" O_o). We even created a verb - "иша́чить" - "Я иша́чу на трех работах". And also in the first idiom with a horse we are using rarely the word "работаю", usually we're using "пашу́" (plow) from the infinitiv "паха́ть".
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Of course, you're going to have some people here claiming you can't say "donkey" in Persian because the idiom uses "horse" in Russian.
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Yes. In the tips and notes they even gives examples similar to
"Я ви́жу, как она́ танцу́ет. = I see her dancing."
Which matches perfectly with Spanish:
"Veo como ella baila."
154
In Past usually dogs worked as shepherds or guards. I think for people now it is the laziest work )) But horses work really hard.. It is no coincidence that we measure productivity exactly in horsepower.
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Haha, im doing this on mobile, so they give us a list of ten or so words to arrange into the translation sentence. They gave me the word 'dog', but no horse. Boy was i confused for a mo'.
This is not a good question. Work like a horse and work like a dog mean two different things in English. Both convey hard work, but one has positive connotations and the other negative. It's not clear whether we are supposed to be learning the literal translation (which isn't even offered on the mobile app) or an equivalent idiom.
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Horse does fit in perfectly in the russian idiom, however in Hindi it's गधे की तरह काम करना (ghadey ki tara kaam karna ) to work like a donkey. Donkey is considerd to be a hard working animal in India also a stupid one.
Horses and dogs both are working animals, and in consequence not one but two phrases can be derived from this. Both phrases exist and both are correct. I am inclined to match the word "horse" rather than relying on the idiomatic equivalent and using "dog". After all this is teaching course and it is not fair to confuse the student!!
925
Interesting: you want to avoid using an idiomatic expression to translate an idiomatic expression. Learning idioms an essential part of learning any language.
Ridiculously confusing, because earlier in the course, it was translated "work like a horse" and also because it's way more common, in my broad experience of American English, for the speaker to state that he worked like a horse all day than to say he worked like a dog. Actually, I've noticed that when a dog is the referent, it's usually a sentence about someone else (i.e. not "I" work like a dog, but "he" does).
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I find this quite annoying. The literal translation is an idiom in the UK and Ireland but the accepted translation isn't one. I don't have the option of submitting work like a horse.