John Lennon tribute: "War is Over!" crowd-sourced translations

Today, December 8, marks the anniversary of the death of John Lennon. In tribute, Yoko Ono and the Imagine Peace team are crowd-sourcing translations of the famous John & Yoko "WAR IS OVER!" poster for people to print and share over the holiday season as cards or posters.

Simon from Imagine Peace says,

If any Boing Boing readers would like to contribute and don't see their language included, then please ask them to send us a translation so we can make a poster for their language. If they could format it like this (below), that would be most helpful:

WAR
IS
OVER!
IF YOU WANT IT
Happy Christmas from John & Yoko

Yoko Ono also invites tributes and memories here. After the jump, video with John and Yoko: WAR IS OVER (if you want it).

• [Anonymous]

  In Irish

  War is over (if you want it)

  “Tá cogadh déanta (má’s mian leat é)

• [Sork]

  Many of the translations have articles like “La Guerre” or “Der Krieg” which would translate to “the war”. This is because many languages don’t have war in indefinite form. In swedish the direct translation would be “krig är över” but that would be incomprehensible. “kriget är över”, the war is over, or “krigen är över”, the wars are over, would be the only correct translations that could be used. Possibly also “krigandet är över”, the war-faring is over, would be closer to Lennon’s intentions.

• [cmacis]

  I sent in the lojban translation. Some mistakes because I did it at 3am, but none of the other jbopre volunteered to do it at that time.

• [leehenderson.sf]

  WAR IS OVER!  (If You Want It) | An Open Letter

  In late 1969, John Lennon and Yoko Ono rented billboards in cities around the world (including New York City, Los Angeles, London, Tokyo, Rome, Athens, Amsterdam, Paris, Berlin, and Toronto) that read:  “WAR IS OVER! (If You Want It) Happy Christmas from John & Yoko.”  These billboards served as a protest of the then- ongoing Vietnam War.  The message was, as John Lennon explained, “We’re selling it (peace) like soap.  And you’ve got to sell, and sell, until the housewife thinks, ‘Oh, well, there’s peace or war.  Those are the two products.’”  

  Thirty years later, I propose we this revisit this paean for peace.  

  The wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq that President Obama inherited are raging as I write this.  Concurrently, the anti- war movement in this country seems to have been largely lulled to inaction since his inauguration.  Certainly the American people writ large have had no discernible voice on these matters.  

  I’d like to see that change. 

  The idea is simple:  Go to http://war-is-over-if-you-want-it.blogspot.com and download the “WAR IS OVER!” image.  Then, go to Google and type in “Poster Printing” and the name of your town.  Find a local print shop, take the image there, and ask them to print up a poster sizable enough for your front window.  Display your new poster proudly for your friends, neighbors, letter carriers, etc.  (This same idea could be applied to t- shirts or bumper stickers.)  

  Remember, the guiding principle is to advertise peace– just like advertising soap.  Also, a nice ancillary benefit is that you are doing a little part for your local economy.

  Make no mistake about it, this idea is directly influenced by Shepard Fairey’s iconic Barack Obama/ “Hope” poster and the viral phenomenon that it became.  It is indisputable that that image– the original of which now hangs in the Smithsonian Museum’s National Portrait Gallery– became a cultural touchstone, cementing intangible yet resonant themes about then- candidate Obama, galvanizing voters in the process.  

  Cynics will say that such galvanization comes store- bought and commodified, and they’re not entirely wrong.  That is no matter.  Barack Obama won handily in the 2008 election, due largely in part to this amorphous and ever- evolving advertisement– and the narrative that went with it– for “hope” and “change.”  

  Moreover, iconography matters, regardless of its accompanying commercialization.  It is my dream that the “WAR IS OVER!” image will be emblazoned on telephone poles, car bumpers, in storefront windows and in people’s homes not just in San Francisco and New York City but in Anchorage, and Montpelier, and Tucson, and Atlanta, and that its personification of the anti- war movement be once and for all as universally recognized as the pink ribbon has become for breast cancer awareness.  

  Perhaps then our leaders in Washington will finally put a vivid face to the until- now timid voice of disapproval that the American public feels towards both wars (over 50% in each case).  The nature of mainstream politics and our news media today would certainly have to finally recognize such sentiment– that it’s not just the most strident leftists among us who are against the wars and willing to say so, but Americans from all walks of life– were this idea to take off.  And maybe then this grassroots pressure could begin to provide the political cover necessary to allow our brave servicemen and women to come home.  

  Mr. Lennon and Ms. Ono were cultural revolutionaries, way ahead of their time.  A similar revolution is needed today.  With the ease the internet provides, there is absolutely no reason that one who shares their sentiment– and mine– could not take an afternoon and make their voice heard.  For all we are saying, of course, is give peace a chance. 

  ~lee.

  P.S. Additionally, I’ve started a Facebook page that I invite any and all to join: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?v=wall&ref=nf&gid=179882080924. Thanks and be well.

• [kslaboca]

  December 8 marks the day John Lennon was assassinated. Please, don’t do any more violence to the man’s memory and refer to the date as the “anniversary of his death.” He pulled no punches in his writing and would not want what happened to him sugar coated.

  • [Brainspore]

    That depends on what you’re trying to emphasize: the way Lennon died or the way he lived. The post would appear to be focusing on the latter.

• [MrJM]

  War
  Ain’t
  Over!
  Guess We Want It.
  Happy Christmas from MrJM

• [The Chemist]

  The “Arabic” version is wrong. It’s backwards and not a good translation. It says “The War will be over”. Likely the product of someone with a dictionary who know nothing about the language.

  I saw the same thing in the move “Gamer” where the name “Cable” was spelled backwards on the Egyptian pyramid. Seriously? Is it that hard to know some languages are right-to-left? Don’t get me wrong- I’m not so much worked up over it than amused and surprised.

  • [apatheticus]

    The “Arabic” version is wrong. It’s backwards and not a good translation. It says “The War will be over”. Likely the product of someone with a dictionary who know nothing about the language.

    The Japanese one says the same thing. And this project is run by YOKO ONO.

• [The Chemist]

  Oy vey, it looks like they made the same blunder with Hebrew (I’m guessing from punctuation, my Hebrew is nil). Also right-to-left people. At least the Jews and the Arabs are equally perplexed.

• [anomalousclouds]

  I remember in high school my friend (who got a 1600 on his SAT and has been rocking the academic scene ever since) wrote a very interesting paper that on the surface wouldn’t seem very interesting…

  It juxtaposed John Lennon’s “Imagine” with Megadeth’s “Peace Sells but Who’s Buying?” – claiming that although John Lennon’s tune has decent artistic merits and what not, it is grossly overrated for what it actually is: an unrealistically aloof song with the intentions more along the lines of a larger-than-life artist masturbating his blown ego.

  I love the Beatles as much as the next person, and I enjoy Lennon… but I do agree with my friend that the way the song is perceived as gospel is a pretty silly.

  • [anomalousclouds]

    Ahhh! There are bourbon-induced typos in this. Please excuse! Puhleeease!

• [Xeni Jardin]

  Regarding the typos, the folks organizing the translation project are aware that they’ll likely receive some information from the cloud/crowd which contains errors, and ask for help correcting that. Please email corrections to simon at imaginepeace.com.

  • [The Chemist]

    I sent them an email, though I’m not much help with the Hebrew. All I could say was I was almost sure it’s backwards.

  • [Shunra]

    I don’t think “some errors” express the scope of this crowdsourcing fiasco. In programming, it’s like having a word processor that won’t process words, or a calculator application that puts up random numbers when you click its keys: the goal of having “words that look sort of foreign” is achieved. The goal of “obtaining an elegant translation for an important line of poetry” falls as flat on its face as the termination of war has.

    One of the things translators like myself battle daily is the perception that what we do is somehow easy or automatic. It is not. And when people wish to convey a message in a language they do not speak without giving the form and traditions of that language due respect come out as foolish as, well, any of those “Egrish” translations you see on popular websites.

    • [Pendrift]

      I agree. We’ve been discussing this on a translation mailing list, and for French alone there have been at least 5 suggestions. Questions of style and elegance aside, everyone agreed that the current version confuses a general concept (“war”) with a specific one (“the war”). Similar criticism has been leveled at other language versions. Many of them are straight word-for-word substitutions that have neglected the general vs. particular aspect.

      When a translation isn’t wrong (lines written backward, or a translation that actually means “The war is over” or “The war will be over”, or an outright contradiction of the original), it’s often tone-deaf. Would-be translators—amateurs and professionals alike— often forget one of the cardinal rules: translate the meaning, not the words.

      The posters look cool. Actually, the whole thing reminds me of someone getting a tattoo in a non-Latin language because it looks nifty, without realizing it actually reads cooking oil.

      • [[e-mail]]

        Dear Pendrift

        The following three:
        LA GUERRE EST FINIE! SI VOUS LE VOULEZ
        DER KRIEG EST AUS! WENN DU ES WILLST
        E FINITA LA GUERRA! SE VOI LE VOLETE
        were the exact wordings of the European billboards approved by the Lennons and famously posted in Paris, Berlin and Rome in 1969.
        Although they may have translational inaccuracy, they are historically authentic.
        I’m sure you would agree in these three cases, it would seem inappropriate to now retranslate what the Lennons originally approved at the time.

        The remaining posters on Flickr are by no means final.
        http://www.flickr.com/photos/yokoonoofficial/sets/72157622834909233/
        They are being continually updated at the kind suggestions of the many contributors. This will continue as the project grows.

        We would love to hear from the cunning linguists on your translation mailing list.
        If they haven’t already, they can email us or comment on the Flickr pages. The discussion generated will refine the most appropriate meaning and the posters will be amended until the very best meaning is reached.

        This is an ambitious and creative endeavour.
        The crowd-sourcing is deliberate: to promote involvement and refinement.
        We knew we would start with some inaccuracies – it happens in all creative endeavours. We come together by getting better together.
        And that’s really the message, isn’t it? We can work it out.
        War is over if you want it.

• [Joe in Australia]

  I think they ought to have done their homework before releasing something so full of errors. As someone else said, the Hebrew is backwards. And it it actually says the war is over, which is quite a different thing. I suspect some of the other translations have a similar confusion between “the end of a war” and “the end of war”.

• [Cefeida]

  What an awesome project. Though the Polish translation was wrong also, saying ‘War will be over’. I sent in a correction.

  The power of John and Yoko’s “War is Over” is, in my mind, that one can’t look at the poster and agree with it. No, war is not over. It’s painful not to be able to celebrate this, it seems insulting to try. And then we see the small print.

• [mondojohnson]

  I sent in the Klingon translation; I can’t believe I’m the first…. ;)

  veS
  ‘oH
  ghoSta’!

  chugh SoH neH ‘oH!

  Quch QISmaS vo’ John ‘ej Yoko

• [License Farm]

  I’m just curious: Does the Hebrew translated version also include the words “Happy Christmas”? Not that there are no Hebrew-speaking Christians, but…

• [Joe in Australia]

  Although they may have translational inaccuracy, they are historically authentic.
  I’m sure you would agree in these three cases, it would seem inappropriate to now retranslate what the Lennons originally approved at the time.

  No, actually, no I wouldn’t. The Lennons weren’t fluent in these languages. Their “approval” is a historical datum, but I’m sure they would have used a better translation if they had known about it.

  • [[e-mail]]

    OK, no problem – let’s do both.

• [Avram / Moderator]

  The font choice on the Hebrew is pretty bad, too.

• [Anonymous]

  So this is Xmas
  And what have you done
  Another year over
  And a new one just begun

  Always makes me think
  We can all do more
  We should all do more

  peace

• [Anonymous]

  From a technical standpoint the Swedish translation is kind of correct. You can’t get that kind of vague language in Swedish, Swedish is not as Newspeaky as English. You can show uncertainty better in Swedish than English (it’s more precise in expressing what is uncertain), but not create sentences that are so deliberatly obfuscated.

  But I don’t think the translation means what Ono and Lennon meant. I would translate to Swedish as “Krigen är slut — när du bestämmer det”. Which Google Translate translate back to English, kind of correct, as “The wars are over – when you decide (it)” (my paranteses around “it”).

• [Shunra]

  The badly-translated Hebrew is written backwards.

  Like this:
  Raw si revo.

  Except instead of saying “War is over, if you want it, Merry Christmas from John & Yoko”, it says “the war is over”, rather than the entire concept of war. And the “if you want it section” implies that the object of desire is the war, not the termination of war.

  Oh, and it wishes the reader a happy Chanuka, which is quite misplaced, considering the fact that Chanuka celebrates war (a successful uprising in a province of the Roman empire, dedicated to keeping all things western and modern OUT of the lives of the hereditary elite, and squash all Greek and Roman practices among the illiterate plebes (oops).) The war didn’t end too well (see: Masada.)

  Other than the season of the celebration and the initial letter when the Hebrew is properly transcribed, Christmas and Chanuka have nothing in common.

  FWIW, you can certainly wish people a merry Christmas in Hebrew: ×—×’ מולד שמח would be the correct phrasing. I’m not sure about “War is over”, though. Maybe you’d want to riff on the foundational statement of Modern Hebrew, אם תרצו אין זו אגדה – and say אם תרצו, ×–×” הקץ למלחמה? I don’t know. It’s kind of a hard concept to imagine in that language. Straight translation would not fly, in any event. (And the backwards-spelled one is good enough for using as street-cred for another language. No one is reading it for content, are they?)

  • [YS]

    I agree, the Hebrew is definitely tricky. What about הקץ למלחמה / אם תרצו אותה? It conveys the meaning, more or less, and keeps the form of the original.

  • [The Chemist]

    Yeah, I didn’t bother trying to think of a straight translation of the Arabic for “War [the concept] is over.” I just sent them a correction of what was already written. War just doesn’t act unambiguously in the role of a conceptual noun. Technically, saying “The [concept of] war is over” would be correct with the meaning implicit, but it could easily mean a particular war and needs more information to disambiguate. At that stage I lacks the sort of dramatic turn inherent to the original English. I wasn’t about to think up something more compelling, it was hard enough piecing words together without an Arabic language keyboard just to send it to them in the right order. I don’t type enough in Arabic to know where the letters are in the dark.

    (Though I will say that Arabic does seem to have a much more intuitive key layout than English, with common letters and letter combinations close together and closer to the index fingers. Meanwhile the most common English letter is frequently typed with the middle finger on a QWERTY keyboard. One drawback with the Arabic keyboard is that aside from two extra letters, it has a number of important characters and variations that can’t be expressed in just 26 keys and you end up with a letter taking up the tilde key. Compounding the issue, Arabic is a phonetic language, and you can’t create dipthongs and digraphs that have rendered many English letters much less frequently used than others (“X”, especially at the start of a word- no offense to Boinger Xeni Jardin. “Q”, which seems to be exclusively for denoting a “kw” sound though it formally acts as a “K”. It doesn’t even take up less room to write “kw” since “Q” is always followed by “U” to make the same sound.) This means that no matter which letter is forced into doubling up with the tilde- it would be one that’s fairly frequently used.

    Also, yes I believe my wall of text is officially me geeking out. And ooh! Nested parentheses!)

• [Anonymous]

  The Hebrew translation is very bad. “The war” is written המלחמה. With “is over” part we have a problem, because in Hebrew “over” should carry the “is”, and we have no direct correlating phrasing. נגמרת means is finishing, עוברת means is passing, מסתיימת means is ending.

  The best thing in this particular instance, I think, is not to try to force the original phrasing, and just say something like המלחמה תסתיים, which is “War will end”.

  Or something.

• [steveokeefe]

  Ahhh, the joys of crowdsourcing. All we are saying is anything that fits.

  I’m hawking an excerpt from the new book, “The Cynical Idealist: A Spiritual Biography of John Lennon,” just published by Quest Books. The excerpt is on the Amazon page and ponders “What Would John Lennon Do?” in reaction to current events. Certainly, he deserved a Nobel Peace Prize more than some recent recipients.

  Do you think John Lennon might one day be remembered more as a prophet of peace than a musician?

  STEVE O’KEEFE

• [Anonymous]

  Eerrmm,not trying to be nagging but the Bulgarian version is wrong,in terms that whoever created this poster didn`t know that we write in Cyrillic ONLY,not in Latin…So good effort but it should look like this:

  “Войната свърши!Ако вие поискате.Честита Коледа от Йоко Оно.”

  Ditto :-)

• [[e-mail]]

  Dear Xeni & BoingBoing readers

  Thanks for all your comments and suggestions.
  The response has been amazing.

  We have been working round the clock, conversing on email with hundreds of kind and helpful contributors who have been helping us to continually refine each translation to closer define John & Yoko’s original intention. Special thanks go to those from Oxford University & the European Parliament who have helped out enormously.

  We now have translations in Afrikaans, Albanian, Arabic, Armenian, Belarus, Brazilian Portugese, Bulgarian, Burmese, Catalan, Chinese-Simplified, Chinese-Traditional, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Esperanto, Estonian, Farsi, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hawaiian, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Klingon, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Lojban, Luxembourgish, Maltese, Marathi, Norwegian, Polish, Portugese, Romanian, Russian, Slovakian, Slovenian, South Sotho (South Africa), Spanish, Swedish, Swiss German (Rheintaler), Tagalog, Thai, Turkish, Urdu, Vasc & Welsh.

  We still need some help with some of the non-Latin scripted languages, as they often don’t copy and paste well, and the correct formatting & layout of these scripts can be very tricky to the uninitiated eye.

  If there’s any designers that have script fonts that look closer to the original (Franklin Gothic) and can email us a similarly laid-out 3000×4000 pixel pdf, that would be fantastic!

  We received the Burmese translation this way – as a preformatted pdf file – so thrilling as we are especially concerned about the plight of Aung San Suu Kyi and the struggle in Burma, and have been campaigning for her release at http://www.IMAGINEPEACE.com.

  We would particularly like to find Dari (persian), Pashto, Kurdish, Aramaic & Turkmen.

  We’re also looking out for Amharic, Assamese, Azerbaijani, Bengali, Bhojpuri, Cantonese/Yue, Cebuano, Fula/Fulfulde, Gan, Georgian, Gujarati, Hakka, Hausa, Igbo, Inukitut, Javanese, Kannada, Khmer, Madurese, Maithili, Malagasy, Malay, Malayalam, Marathi, Min, Nepali, Oriya, Oromo, Punjabi, Serbo-Croatian, Shona, Sindhi, Sinhalese, Sunda, Swahili, Tamil, Telugu, Tibetan, Ukrainian, Urdu, Uzbek, Vietnamese, Wu, Xiang, Yoruba & Zhuang and many others.

  We were very happy to receive Klingon and Lojban and welcome more esoteric submissions.

  Also great to have Handsigns & Braille, Morse, Semaphore & Flags.

  We hope this project will continue to evolve and grow worldwide in the spirit in which it was first intended by John & Yoko in 1968. Yoko said yesterday: “This is what we wanted to do, and did, in a way at the time. John would have been delighted.”

  The main page to follow for progress is here.
  http://www.flickr.com/photos/yokoonoofficial/sets/72157622834909233/

  Please keep sending in your contributions & refinements to admin [at] IMAGINEPEACE [dot] com

  Special thanks to the following essential contributors: Alexandra, Amelie, Anna, Anne, Antonia, Arabella, Ashwin, Ashwin, Aung Moe Win, Berm, Bermlee, Brainspore, Canoben, Cara, Carlo, Cefeida, Chris, Creede, Cristina, Denis, Dennis, Dori, Ed, Emily, Emur, Enkel, Fyodor, Gabriel, Ian, Ian, Ibrahim, Isaiah, Jaeyoon, James, James, James, Jason, Jennifer, John, Jordana, Jordi, Jordi, Jorge, Kalinka, Khalil, Khalil, Kiryl, Lynne, Lucienne, Madzia, Maralalala, Mark, Marta, Mikaela, Moti Z, Muffin, Nevide, Nicolas, Pamela, Peppa, Peter, quifengguoer, Ramey, Ramey, Robert, Ruth, Sarune, Simon, Steven, Susan, Svanhildur, Tetsuo, TetsuRo, Tiffany, Tina, Tumi, Tumid, Victor, Yanit & Yonit.

• [fakeman]

  The Dutch version, top left in the poster, reads “Oorlog is oor” which means “War is ear” :)
  The word “over” is the same in Dutch as it is in English so I really don’t understand how this came to pass.

  OORLOG IS OVER!

  • [fakeman]

    Okay, my humble apologies. That was not a Dutch entry but a South-African one… although South African originally evolved from Dutch it is an independent and in many ways different language. I have no idea if “Oorlog is oor” would be correct in South African.

• [MrJM]

  Translation into Wrestling Lingo:

  War
  Is
  Accepted or respected by the audience, within the context of the industry, as indicated by either cheering or booing
  – Happy Christmas from Face & Heel

• [Joe in Australia]

  Now that I’ve seen more comments I’ve switched from thinking that this was a pretty boring post (badtranslationslol, domyhomeworkfilter, seehowcooliam) to thinking that this is a really interesting one. A number of people have commented that it’s easier to make a slogan like this in English than in other languages. I had never thought of English as being different in this way, and now I’m wondering if it affects the way we think about other abstractions.

• [badger500]

  If you have to explain…