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The indefatigable Bathrobe has sent me a couple of good links I hereby share with you:

1) Arthur Waley’s “Notes on Translation” (The Atlantic, November 1958; archived) has lots of discussion of translations, both his and others; some samples:

Almost at the end of the Bhagavad Gita there is a passage of great power and beauty in which, instructed by the God, the warrior Arjuna at last overcomes ail his scruples. There is a war on, he is a soldier and must fight even though the enemy are his friends and kinsmen. This is what various standard translations make him say:

1. O Unfallen One! By your favour has my ignorance been destroyed, and I have gained memory (of my duties); I am (now) free from doubt; I shall nowdo (fight) as told by you!

2. Destroyed is my delusion; through Thy grace, O Achutya, knowledge is gained by me. I stand forth free from doubt. I will act according to Thy word.

3. My bewilderment has vanished away; I have gotten remembrance by Thy Grace, O NeverFalling. I stand free from doubt. I will do Thy word.

4. My bewilderment is destroyed; I have gained memory through thy favour, O stable one. I am established; my doubt is gone; I will do thy word.

In addition to being totally without rhythm No. 1 has the disadvantage of a pointless inversion of word order and of quite unnecessary explanations in brackets. If any reader has got as far as this in the poem and yet still needs to be told what it is that Arjuna now remembers and what it is that he proposes to do, he must be so exceptionally inattentive as not to be worth catering for. No. 2 is better; but as the title Achutya will convey nothing to the mind of the reader, it seems better to translate it, as the other three translators have done. And is there any point in trying to preserve, as all the translators do, the Sanskrit idiom “get memory” for “to remember”? In No. 3 the rhythm would be better without the “away” after “vanished,” and “away” adds nothing to the sense. But I think No. 3 (by Professor Barnett) is the best of the four. No. 4 is spoiled by “I am established,” which, though a correct etymological gloss on the original, is not a possible way of saying “I have taken my stand” — that is to say, “I am resolved.”

After examples from The Tale of Genji and a No play (“I must confess that when recently I read Sam Houston Brock’s translation of Sotoba Komachi […] I felt at once that my translation was hopelessly overladen and wordy and that it tried in a quite unwarrantable way to improve upon the original”), he goes on:
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Some interesting words I’ve run across recently:

1) I was watching Jia Zhangke’s movie Ash Is Purest White, about a couple involved in the (pretty petty) underworld milieu of Datong, and was intrigued to note that the subtitles didn’t translate the word jianghu (e.g., “You’re no longer in the jianghu”). I paused the movie to look it up and discovered it’s such a complex concept the choice to leave it in Chinese made sense:

Jianghu (江湖; jiānghú; gong¹wu⁴; ‘rivers and lakes’) is a Chinese term that generally refers to the social environment in which many Chinese wuxia, xianxia, and gong’an stories are set. The term is used flexibly, and can be used to describe a fictionalized version of rural historical China (usually using loose influences from across the ~1000 BC–280 AD period); a setting of feuding martial arts clans and the people of that community; a secret and possibly criminal underworld; a general sense of the “mythic world” where fantastical stories happen; or some combination thereof.

See the Wikipedia article for the derivation from Zhuangzi and various interpretations and uses. The Chinese title of the movie is 江湖儿女 ‘Sons and Daughters of (the) Jianghu,’ which certainly gives the prospective viewer more of a heads-up than the mysterious English one.

2) I forget where I ran across the French word bistouri ‘scalpel,’ but it’s got an interesting history; Wiktionary:

Borrowed from Italian pistorese or pistorino (“from Pistoia”, see Latin Pistōrium); the city of Pistoia was once famous for the manufacturing of blades.

It was borrowed into English as bistoury /ˈbɪstəɹi/, of which the OED (entry from 1887) says “Surgery. A scalpel; made in three forms, the straight, the curved, and the probe-pointed (which is also curved).” The etymology, after deriving it from French, adds “Said in some books to be < Pistorium, now Pistoja; but this is merely a conjecture from the similarity of the words.” I hope Xerîb will have something to say.

3) In Alaina Demopoulos’s Grauniad thumbsucker “Is it OK to read Infinite Jest in public? Why the internet hates ‘performative reading’” (archived), I was baffled by the first noun in “And maybe there’s still some steeze that comes from flexing an ‘important’ book.” Turns out steez(e) (which has not made it into the OED) means ‘a person’s distinctive and attractive or impressive style of dress or way of doing things’; Green says [SE style + -ɪᴢ- infix] and takes it back to 1990 (Run-DMC ‘Bob Your Head’ 🎵 Weave with ease and please the steez with G’s). The ever-hip NY Times was onto it by 2007 (Anne Goodwin Sides, “Snowbound Neverland in Colorado“: “‘Right now I’m learning to pop off of jumps with steeze’ — style”), but it had somehow eluded me until now.

Jonathan Law writes about misprints in editions of poetry; he is either way too fond of such typos or is pretending to be for the purposes of pleasing his audience, but it’s a fun read. After reporting on Frank Key’s (frankly silly) suggestion that Sylvia Plath’s “a bag full of God” (from “Daddy”) is a misprint (“I am as sure as eggs is eggs that what Plath originally wrote was ‘a bag full of Goo’”), he continues:

Given Wilde’s dictum that ‘a poet can survive anything but a misprint’, you’d think that printers and publishers would take fierce pains to avoid even minor errata in poetry: but this just isn’t the case. If anything, radical, outrageous, sense-subverting typos are more common in verse than in the workaday medium of prose.

I suspect there might be two reasons for this. In the first place, many poems make their debut in tiny, no-budget magazines that can’t afford proof-readers and don’t send page proofs to the author; this is true even of new work by the Big Beasts of the poetry world. Errors introduced here are often perpetuated in later editions and can easily end up enshrined in the big posthumous Collected unless there is a thorough check of printed texts against MSS. Secondly, and much more interestingly, there’s something about the language of poetry that makes it strangely pervious to error.

In prose, any half-decent editor will query an incongruous word or a phrase that doesn’t seem to stack up in the ordinary way; some mistake surely. But in poetry, where odd collocations abound and everyday meanings get stretched and twisted like Blu-Tack? As long as a word passes spellcheck, then who’s to say that it’s (certainly) wrong? […]

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Zach Helfand’s “The History of The New Yorker’s Vaunted Fact-Checking Department” (archived) is an excellent read and scratches an itch I’ve had for years (“how does that work, anyhow?”); it begins:

I turned in this piece with seventy-nine errors. Anna, the fact checker who fixed them, has been a member of The New Yorker’s checking department for six years. I enjoy working with Anna, which is good, because being checked by Anna involves maybe a dozen hours on the phone. We talk mainly about facts, and occasionally about foraging for chanterelles, which is her passion. People sometimes ask Anna if she finds many errors. In the eighties, one checker found that an unedited issue of the magazine contained a thousand of them. (This figure itself wouldn’t survive a fact-check, but never mind.) My contribution to the trash heap, in this piece alone, included misspelling several proper nouns (Colombia, alas, is not Columbia), inventing, it seems, a long-ago interaction between a fact checker and the deputy Prime Minister of Israel, and writing about a bird’s kidney when I should have been writing about its liver. I’m sure no errors remain, but I won’t declare it categorically. That kind of thing makes a checker squirm.

I’ve never encountered a complete description of what the magazine wants its checkers to check. A managing editor took a stab in 1936: “Points which in the judgment of the head checker need verification.” New checkers, upon receiving their first assignment, are instructed to print out the galleys of the piece and underline all the facts. Lines go under almost every word. Names and figures are facts; commas can be, too. Cartoons, poems, photographs, cover art—full of facts. Opinions aren’t facts, but they rely on many. Colors are facts. Recently, a short story by Clare Sestanovich made a passing reference to yellow bird poop. The checker consulted ornithological sources. Would a bird poop yellow? Maybe, if it had a liver problem.

Fiction is full of facts—sometimes too many. Dates are facts, clothes are facts, actions are facts. Quotes are facts, and they contain them; facts can be nesting, like a Russian doll. A decade ago, Calvin Tomkins wrote about an artist who said he was getting married on June 21st, the summer solstice. The checker, David Kortava, called the artist, congratulated him, and alerted him that the solstice would be on the twentieth that year. The artist moved the wedding date.

Actually, however, he turned in the piece with at least eighty errors. Here’s a letter I sent to the magazine (since I’m sure they won’t print it, I might as well share it myself):
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1) From Hua Hsu’s New Yorker piece “The Otherworldly Ambitions of R. F. Kuang” (archived):

As [Rebecca] Kuang stirred a pot of pasta, I asked Eckert-Kuang [Kuang’s husband] about his dissertation. He paused, with a look familiar to any academic: Do you really want to know, or are you just asking out of politeness? Kuang poured me a glass of wine. I listened as Eckert-Kuang enthusiastically began talking about Kant, adjusting his glasses and grinning to punctuate ideas he found particularly stimulating. Kuang sipped from a mug that listed three check-box options: “Single,” “Taken,” and “Mentally Dating Immanuel Kant.”

“We end up hosting a lot of his department parties,” Kuang told me. “It’s really fun to be surrounded by people in a field of which you have zero knowledge. While I was writing ‘Katabasis,’ I would go around and ask people, like, ‘Can you teach me logic?’ And they were so excited.”

2) From Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love, which I am currently reading to my wife at night:

Lord Merlin wandered round with his tea-cup. He picked up a book which Fabrice had given Linda the day before, of romantic nineteenth-century poetry.

‘Is this what you’re reading now?’ he said. ‘ “Dieu, que le son du cor est triste au fond des bois.” I had a friend, when I lived in Paris, who had a boa constrictor as a pet, and this boa constrictor got itself inside a French horn. My friend rang me up in a fearful state, saying: “Dieu, que le son du boa est triste au fond du cor.” I’ve never forgotten it.’

(The quoted line is the end of Alfred de Vigny’s “Le cor.”)

3) I hadn’t thought of Arthur Guiterman in ages, but I quoted the last line of this to my wife, found and read to her the whole poem (which I loved in my long-ago youth), and thought the assembled Hattery might enjoy it:
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Michael Idov (“a Latvian American novelist and screenwriter”) has a NY Times piece (archived) on a subject that has often exercised me: the terrible names English-speaking authors come up with for foreign protagonists.

[…] Spy stories remain one of the most popular windows onto the way the world works.

Too bad the glass in that window is pretty wavy. Let me illustrate. The Italian composer Giacomo Puccini’s 1904 opera “Madama Butterfly,” which gets rightful flak for its bumbling Orientalism, is almost as hilariously clueless about the United States. The villain’s name is Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton — the modern-day equivalent would be something like “Ronald Reagan Microsoft.” Americans may not be used to this kind of naïveté about their own culture, but it’s exactly the level of thought many Western writers of spy novels and films bring to their attempts at naming Eastern European and Baltic characters.

The 1984 novel “The Hunt for Red October” is a classic for a reason, and Tom Clancy’s geopolitical research is rock solid, but trust me when I tell you that no Lithuanian has ever been named Marko Ramius. The word “ramus” means “peaceful,” which fits the character, but the only remotely common name in which it shows up is Ramintas. Arkady Renko, the protagonist of Martin Cruz Smith’s “Gorky Park” and its sequels, sounds as if he lost the first half of a Ukrainian surname (Titarenko? Limarenko?) in a gruesome accident. His journalist lover is often referred to as Tatiana Petrovna, a case of patronymic misuse that makes it sound as though he’s dating his schoolteacher.

Then there are lesser sins — names that aren’t wrong, per se, just odd. The parents of Dominika Egorova, the main character in Jason Matthews’s “Red Sparrow” trilogy, have certainly made a bold choice for their daughter’s name. (In Russia the film’s dubbers changed it to the more traditional “Veronika.”) In 2002’s “The Bourne Identity,” Bourne’s Russian alias is Foma Kiniaev. Foma is a more traditional name than Dominika — so traditional, in fact, that it is mostly associated with 19th-century peasants. Imagine, in a serious spy film, a foreign agent producing a passport in the name of, say, Jebediah Hoggs. (The Cyrillic characters in the same passport transliterate to “Ashch’f Lshtshfum,” but that’s for the film’s prop master to live down.)

He has a simple remedy: “Consult native speakers. Every time.” The thing is, I don’t think his examples are very good. Pinkerton is a perfectly normal English surname — I have no idea why he thinks it’s comparable to Microsoft — and Americans in the 19th century were very fond of naming their kids after founding fathers (I myself have an ancestor named George Washington Dodson). It may well be that Ренько/Renko is not an actual Russian/Ukrainian surname, but I’ve seen far sillier ones in English novels. (I don’t know whether the same is true of Ramius; Lithuanian-speakers should feel free to wade in.) I wish I could locate some of the truly absurd cases I’ve seen, but it’s definitely a real problem, and I wish authors would, as Idov suggests, consult native speakers.

Andrew Van Dam of the Washington Post decided to investigate the question What are the most American and most British words? (archived). After a long thumb-sucking introduction (“And for columnists with more curiosity than sense, Google offer lists of millions of words, sorted by year, language and (sometimes) country of publication”) and a fairly tedious excursus on spelling (“colour,” “centre,” “behaviour”: “Much of it goes back to Webster”), he moves on to a list of “Most distinctive words in each dialect, based on how common they are in books published in each country in the 2000s” (top US words File, Schedule, Mail…; top UK words Aim, Inquiry, Catalog…), and then gets more interesting:

In search of deeper differences, we returned to Google Books’ true superpower: time. All our metrics show the two Englishes looked quite similar in the early 1800s but diverged as Webster worked his magick. The gap grew as English immigrants to the U.S. were replaced by other nationalities and the U.S. expanded farther and farther from the Atlantic, Murphy said.

The divergence halted around when World War II’s global mobilization and cooperation increased verbal cross-pollination between the two countries, she told us, “and then the explosion and export of U.S. popular culture and mass comms increased contact.”

You can see this in words such as forever, which used to be a distinctly American spelling of “for ever.” After a rapid rise in the U.K. in the 20th century, it’s just about equally popular in the two dialects. Ditto for payroll, driveway, passageway and viewpoint. Even locate and location, once derided as tasteless and improper Americanisms, have burrowed deep into both dialects.

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This morning our local paper had a headline “City bans sale of synthetic kratom” that set my wife and me back on our heels: what the hell was “kratom”? A quick googling took me to the Wiktionary page, which explained that it was:

1. A tree, Mitragyna speciosa, endemic to Southeast Asia.
2. The dried leaves of this tree, used in traditional medicine or recreationally for their stimulant and analgesic effects.

The second definition made pretty clear why it was subject to bans, and the etymology was interesting: “Borrowed from Thai กระท่อม (grà-tɔ̂m),” which itself is:

Borrowed from Pre-Angkorian Old Khmer កទម្វ (kadamva), កទំ (kadaṃ), from Sanskrit कदम्ब (kadamba), कदम्बक (kadambaka). Cognate with Khmer ក្ទម្ព (ktɔɔm), Lao ກະທ່ອມ (ka thǭm), Pali kadamba.

My uninformed guess is that the -r- in Thai is a hypercorrection, since spoken Thai tends to reduce etymological /kr/ to /k/. In any case, I was happy with all of that, but bothered by the pronunciation, which is given as [ˈkɹeɪ̯təm] (like “crate ’em”). That sounds like a parody of dumb anglicization to me, the way we used to call the baseball player Pedro Ramos “PEE-droh RAY-mohs.” Obviously if people say it that way, it’s a real pronunciation, but surely it’s not the only one? So I investigated further, and found that though it’s not in AHD, the OED added the word in 2023:

A tropical evergreen tree native to Southeast Asia, Mitragyna speciosa (family Rubiaceae), having large glossy ovate leaves and clusters of globular yellow flowers. Also (as a mass noun): the dried leaves of this tree or a preparation made from them, which is ingested or chewed as a stimulant. […]

The use of kratom as a recreational drug is illegal or controlled in many countries. It is also used medicinally, esp. to relieve pain or manage opioid withdrawal.

1926 ‘Kratom’ leaves from Mitrogyne speciosa are widely used for chewing purposes in Peninsular Siam and to a certain extent in Bangkok.
Record (Siam Ministry Commerce) January 155/2 […]

And it gives multiple pronunciations: British English /ˈkreɪtəm/ KRAY-tuhm, /ˈkratəm/ KRAT-uhm; U.S. English /ˈkreɪdəm/ KRAY-duhm, /ˈkrædəm/ KRAD-uhm. But I don’t like the secondary ones much better — what I want to say is /ˈkrɑdəm/ KRAHD-uhm, which seems to me the natural way to say a Thai loan in English. Does nobody really say it that way? If you know and use this word, how do you say it? (Incidentally, I looked up กระท่อม in Mary Haas’s Thai-English dictionary and discovered she doesn’t have this sense, only ‘hut, cottage.’)

I recently watched the charming 1989 “crime comedy” Breaking In (directed by Bill Forsyth and written by John Sayles — how could it be bad?), in which Burt Reynolds is an aging safecracker showing young Casey Siemaszko the ropes. The climactic robbery is of an old safe at an amusement park, and when they get to work Reynolds pulls on that big heavy cylindrical thing that you normally need a combination for and it pulls right out. He says “Hey, the hitch is open!” and they admire the piles of cash for a minute until they hear voices and hide; it turns out the park workers had just left it open for a minute while they went to get more sacks of cash. When they’ve put the cash in, of course they spin the combination lock, so now our heroes will have to use their explosives after all. Today I watched it with the commentary track (with Forsyth and Sayles), and Sayles said he’d done research into safes and safecracking and it turns out people fairly frequently don’t bother locking them, they just shove the hitch closed so that on Monday it will be easier to open up; in fact, experienced safecrackers routinely try just pulling it open, because some percentage of the time it works. All of which is interesting, but what’s this word hitch? There’s no such sense in the OED (entry updated just this year) or anywhere else I can find, and I have no idea whether it’s an established term that’s just too niche for dictionaries or whether it’s some bit of ephemeral slang that happened to be used in the late ’80s. Anybody know?

Victoria Livingstone writes about the ever-more-pressing issue of using machine-translated texts to save money:

I lived in Latin America for several years and I speak Spanish fluently, but I am not a native speaker. I proofread translations into English and my co-worker, who was a native speaker of Spanish, proofread Spanish. Together we were in charge of quality control for that language pairing.

We once received a machine-translated document that included the phrase, “HIP’s asthma program.” HIP was an acronym for “Health Insurance Plan,” but Google Translate (in a document sent by one of our clients) rendered the phrase as the colorful and absurd “asma de la cadera” (quite literally, “asthma of the hip.”) Machine translation has greatly advanced since then. I just put the same phrase into ChatGPT and even without the full context of the insurance plan brochure, the model returned “el programa de asma de HIP.”

What about more culturally charged phrases? My co-worker and I were once tasked with translating text into Spanish for a televised notice on water pollution. “Imagine water pollution as rubber duckies,” the ad began. It was accompanied by an image of thousands of swirling yellow ducks. My colleague pointed out that rubber duckie is a culturally charged term. It is iconic as a toy in U.S. culture. My co-worker was from Mexico City, and to her ear, using “patito de hule” (or something similarly literal) as a central analogy was bizarre. This was years ago, but I believe we translated the term more generally as “juguetes” (“toys”). Today I prompted ChatGPT to translate the phrase, and it returned “Imagina la contaminación del agua como patitos de hule” (a grammatically correct but uninspired rendering of “imagine water pollution as rubber duckies.”) The AI-generated translation, then, worked well with the asthma program but not with a culturally charged metaphor.

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