Archives for December 2013

I’m glad Lynn Visson’s LRB Diary about being an interpreter is available even to nonsubscribers, because otherwise I’d be tempted to quote the whole thing. As it is, I’ll just pick out enough morsels to intrigue you into following the link:

The six booths correspond to the UN’s six official languages: English, French, Russian, Spanish, Chinese and Arabic. International organisations such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund also use these languages at their conferences. But the most important language in most international organisations has no name: it is the institution’s own bureaucratese, its linguistic Esperanto. We never do something, we implement. We don’t repeat, we reiterate and underscore. We are never happy, we are gratified or satisfied. You are never doing a great job: you are performing your duties in the outstanding manner in which you have always discharged them. There is no theft or embezzlement, but rather failure to ensure compliance with proper accounting and auditing procedures in the handling of financial resources. This is a language the interpreter must master very early on.

…Some colleagues play tic-tac-toe with each other out of sheer boredom. Delegates too sometimes get bored. Instead of beginning his speech with the usual ‘Thank you, Mr Chairman,’ a Russian delegate for whom I was interpreting launched in with ‘O my lost youth, my lost youth,’ and proceeded to reminisce about the mosaics in the main cathedral in Sofia, including one figure in the cupola that reminded him, as he put it, of ‘Christ in a space suit’. Several delegates turned towards the English booth with puzzled looks, undoubtedly wondering if I had gone mad. Going on automatic pilot can be dangerous. You can never be sure that a statement you’ve heard a thousand times won’t turn out differently the next time you hear it. You translate the statement you expected to hear and find yourself congratulating the chairman on his excellent work when in fact the speaker was expressing condolences to the chairman’s country on the losses suffered during a major earthquake. In a second you switch gear: ‘Therefore, I congratulate the distinguished delegate … on the extraordinary way his country has coped with the disaster which has struck the nation.’

…When the interpreter has absolutely no idea of the meaning of a sentence, the solution is, short of shutting off the microphone and bursting into tears, to stay neutral. Most people tend to repeat themselves, and there is a good chance that in the next sentence the speaker will repeat the idea in a more intelligible manner. Specialised knowledge too is a problem. A UN interpreter is lost if he hasn’t kept up with the latest developments in international affairs, but he also has to have a broad knowledge of subjects ranging from climate change and oil and gas investments to international trade law, terrorism, Aids, stem cells and human rights, and the new terminology these fields acquire daily. For the interpreter into English the responsibility is even greater, as this is the language most frequently picked up by the media. Idiom is another issue. The English until hell freezes over comes out in Russian as after it rains on Thursday, and I had egg on my face as I sat down in a puddle. Confronted with a completely incomprehensible saying, the interpreter does well to say: ‘And in my country we have a proverb appropriate to this occasion.’

And don’t miss the “misgivings” story!

Also, for those who might be interested: Harrassowitz is having a sale.

Almost forty years ago, William E. Cooper and John Robert Ross wrote a paper called “World Order” that starts “We began the present study by asking, as some linguists have asked before us, why the ordering of certain conjoined elements is fixed.”  Why do we say “bigger and better,” “fore and aft,” “kit and caboodle,” in that fixed order? (The paper calls such expressions “freezes.”) It is available online as a pdf, and I commend it to your attention if the topic intrigues you. I got the link from this excellent MetaFilter post, which includes various other interesting items like this Idibon post about how “both X and Y” constructions have changed over the last century:

During the 1800s we really only said ‘both father and mother’. Throughout the 1900s the mothers staged a comeback, and now we’re at the point of equality where ‘both father and mother’ and ‘both mother and father’ appear equally. This trend is also seen with ‘both maternal and paternal’, showing that the pattern is broader than simply the words themselves, and really is an indicator of social change. We used to almost exclusively say ‘both going and coming’, which sounds odd to me, but now we can see that ‘both coming and going’ is more popular. Another construction that sounds odd, ‘both able and willing’ was once more popular than ‘both willing and able’. I was surprised to see that people actually use the ‘able and willing’ variation about 40% of the time—is this just my perception or do you use this?

They give the top 30 such constructions, ordered by how much they have changed over time. Amazing what you can do with the Google Books Ngram dataset.

A reader sent me a link to this series of lists of “rules” for literary translators, which I started to read with interest and which I recommend to your attention. When I got to Becka McKay’s list, I was struck by her first “rule”:

1. Make them believe in the necessity of translation. On the first day of the first graduate translation workshop I taught, I gave them Translate This Book!, a remarkable document produced by The Quarterly Conversation consisting of dozens of recommendations by writers of works yet to be translated into English. Peering into that vacuum of inaccessible literature, presented in such a striking way, galvanized many of them into taking the first step.

Naturally, I clicked the link, and immediately was swept away — what a collection of tantalizing descriptions! Some of them I knew about, most I didn’t… and then I got to this:

Tina Kover on Spiridion by George Sand

There is a book I’ve longed to translate for years, a novel called Spiridion by George Sand, which is a far-ahead-of-its-time work about a haunted monastery, an aged monk who is the guardian of handed-down religious secrets, a young, innocent protégé, ghosts emerging from paintings on the ancient walls . . . sounds intriguing, doesn’t it? I haven’t been able to rouse enough interest in any of my publishers yet but I think it has an almost Harry Potter/Da Vinci Code quality that could be very, very successful and appealing to today’s readers if marketed the right way.

That’s the very book I’m in the middle of reading now! And yes, it should definitely be translated; it’s tremendous fun (and was an influence on Dostoevsky, which is why I picked it up — parts of it definitely remind me of the Brothers K).  So check out both the translation rules and the translation suggestions, and I thank you for the link, Bruce!

The indefatigable Songdog has been working on some of the issues that have concerned us and many of you; he has shrunk the post titles by 1/3, added space at the margins, and darkened the comment box text (if those of you who were bothered by light text would like it still darker, say so — he says “I can darken it all the way to None More Black”).

On the downside, all pages except the home page seem to be returning a 404; he has opened an urgent ticket with the hosting service and will report back.  We apologize for the inconvenience and hope all will be restored to normal soon.

While we wait, a bit of comic relief: forensic semiotics. As my mother used to say, I never thought the subject would come up. (Thanks, Paul!)

A nice short piece by Ian Monk on the perils of translating your own writing:

…And what good company I was now in—I thought at once of one of my all-time favorites, Samuel Beckett, and how he had continued to write in both English and French, before self-translating his work one way or the other, as required. It was a dream come true. I got down to work…

And what a pain it turned out to be. The further I got stuck into the two texts in question, the more my translations seemed utterly limp and lifeless. And the more I worked over them, the more I felt like some kind of Dr. Frankenstein, with a monster on the slab which was staying stubbornly dead, no matter how many lightning flashes were aimed at its heart. I quickly came to the conclusion that my existence as a writer was never going to be like Beckett’s (for this reason, among a few others…) and if I went on writing in these two languages, then the job of translating them, one into the other, should preferably go to someone else.

(Via the indispensable wood s lot.)

There’s probably a limited audience for the Middle East and North Africa Special Area Collection of the Universitaets- und Landesbibliothek Sachsen-Anhalt in Halle, so I’ll tack it on here rather than making a separate post of it, but man, if you’re interested in old Arabic texts, Syriac dictionaries, and the like, check out the list of what’s available online! (Via bulbul’s Facebook post.)

In addition to reading my way through Russian literature, I’m also sampling European authors who had an influence on Russian writers, which gives me a chance to acquaint myself with some important authors who had been only names to me. One such is Balzac, who was omnipresent in the 1830s and 1840s but who I’d never read. I decided to try La Peau de chagrin (The Wild Ass’s Skin, 1831), which is one of his more famous and had an intriguing premise (the titular piece of skin grants wishes but shrinks with each one, and when it’s gone, so is the possessor). Alas, I found it quite silly and badly written; I realize Balzac was constantly in debt and scribbling away to sell as much and as fast as he could, but still, I wasn’t impressed. (I’ve since gone on to George Sand, whose Spiridion [1839] I’m greatly enjoying.) However, I was amused and intrigued by one feature of the book: the beautiful but cold-hearted woman who lures and finally rejects our protagonist (who loves her and would do anything for her! how could she!) rejoices in the name of Fœdora. Here is how she is introduced:

Demain soir tu verras la belle comtesse Fœdora, la femme à la mode. — Je n’en ai jamais entendu parler. — Tu es un Cafre, dit Rastignac en riant. Ne pas connaître Fœdora ! Une femme à marier qui possède près de quatre-vingt mille livres de rentes, qui ne veut de personne ou dont personne ne veut ! Espèce de problème féminin, une Parisienne à moitié Russe, une Russe à moitié Parisienne !

Which is rendered in this online translation thus:

To-morrow evening you shall go to see that queen of the moment – the beautiful Countess Foedora…

” ‘I have never heard of her…

” ‘You Hottentot!’ laughed Rastignac; ‘you do not know Foedora? A great match with an income of nearly eighty thousand livres, who has taken a fancy to nobody, or else no one has taken a fancy to her. A sort of feminine enigma, a half Russian Parisienne, or a half Parisian Russian.

Now, where on earth did Balzac get this name, with its bizarre spelling? I’m guessing it’s based on Feodora, thought to be a feminine version of Fedor/Fyodor, which used to be written Feodor in Latin transcription, but the transposed and conjoined vowels make it an enigma indeed. The correct feminine form is Fedora, about which I wrote last year; Sashura has a nice post on “the real Fedora” (in reference to a Kornei Chukovsky poem).

From popsci.com:

Data interpreter/designer Terrence Fradet created this lovely interpretation of colors through the filter of language. At the Fathom Information Design site, he has a more expansive history on color and language, but this is a short version.

Some languages explain the entire color spectrum in two or three words–eschewing everything except maybe “light” or “dark”–while others might classify more than 60 relatively obscure colors. The World Color Survey is a global database of color names and interpretations, and Fradet mined this data for his infographic. The results are grouped by geographic area and show the most-used words nearest to the center, reaching out to the most obscure variations at the end.

Of course one wishes there were more languages — maybe even a couple of familiar ones for comparison — but man, what a gorgeous thing. Click on the image to see it up close, hit the hyphen key to pull back.

Yesterday I got an e-mail from a a producer at KPCC, the NPR affiliate in Los Angeles, which said:

We are doing a fun, little segment inspired by this article in this month’s Atlantic called “In Praise of Fancy Words.” … I am wondering if you might be interested in coming on our show for a live, phone interview TOMORROW, DEC 4 between 2:40p to 3:00p EDT to talk about the topic. The conversation is going to be about the enjoyment of coming across and using big words, and what our culture of instant communication has done to our diction. Also, when we lose these vocabularies, what else do we lose along with them? [It will be] a call-in show and we are expecting the conversation with Mr. Bowden would generate a lot of listener comments on which their favorite fancy word is.

It looks like it’s going to happen; anyone wanting to listen can do so at KPCC’s website. Start time is 2:40 PM Eastern (US) Time, which is 11:40 AM on the West Coast; I’ll let you work out the appropriate time for wherever you are. Bowden’s Atlantic piece was linked and discussed at this recent LH post.

Update. Just finished the call-in show; it was a lot of fun, and I was delighted that Geoff Nunberg was the other talking head (if that term can be applied to the radio). I was surprised it was over so soon (subjectively). If I’d had a chance to say one more thing, it would have been: “Once again, I must disagree with the estimable Geoff Nunberg; he has no idea whether ‘sixty or seventy percent’ of English speakers know any given word. If there’s one thing I’ve learned running a language blog, it’s that intuitions on that are worthless; I frequently learn that something I thought was vanishingly rare is in fact quite common, and vice versa. I found an online post by somebody who thinks vex, sentinel, erudite, and loquacious are ‘archaic, unusual words.’ People should use the words they like and let the chips fall where they may!” Oh well, perhaps I’ll get another chance to bloviate on the air one day. The show should be available here by 2:00 PM PST (5 PM Eastern).

Gretchen McCulloch is a linguistics grad student at McGill University, and I have just discovered her delightful blog, All Things Linguistic (“All the linguistic things, all the time. Well, a lot of them, daily”). I discovered her via this MetaFilter post, which links to her post on “What makes an effective synonym for Benedict Cumberbatch?” and her article for The Toast on the same subject:

But how is a normal internet citizen supposed to know, when they hear someone say “I just can’t stop looking at gifs of Bombadil Rivendell” that this person isn’t talking about some other actor with a name and a voice and cheekbones? Or in other words, what makes for a reasonable variation of the name Bendandsnap Calldispatch?

I’m a linguist, and that means that I’m interested in the subconscious patterns that emerge from the way people use language. Based on the fact that fans tend to respond to synonyms of Anglerfish Gigglesnort with a laugh of recognition and not a blank stare, I think there are patterns here too, even if we’re not aware of them. So let’s approach this question scientifically, by generating a range of hypotheses from the general to the specific, and trying to disprove them.

Posts before that include A detailed explanation of Sonorants, Obstruents, and Sonority, Because Internet, and More on writing systems: Canadian Aboriginal syllabics, which will give you an idea of the range of topics discussed. I’m adding it to the sidebar forthwith.

(Warning for those who, like me, find Tumblr blogs mildly annoying: it’s a Tumblr blog. But the content is worth a little mild annoyance.)

C. Max Magee of The Millions has an annual tradition of asking people to talk about books they’ve read and enjoyed during the previous year, and he has once again begun the series with my contribution; here it is, featuring my recommendations of Tessa Hadley’s The London Train (P.S.), Karl Schlögel’s Moscow, 1937, discussed on LH here, and the Muireann Maguire books discussed here and here, along with a plug for my man Veltman. Check it out.