languagehat.com

Robyn Berghoff and Emanuel Bylund at The Conversation discuss a problem of mismatch; after pointing out that multilingualism is important and has consequences, they say:

The problem is that much of the published research about multilingualism is not conducted in the world’s most multilingual societies. For example, the African continent is home to some of the most multilingual countries in the world. Cameroon has a population of around 27 million people; over 250 different languages are spoken as first languages, often alongside English and French or both.

Studies of African multilingual contexts are almost non-existent in high-impact scientific journals, however. This matters because it is research published in these journals that receives the most attention globally and is therefore most likely to shape people’s understanding of multilingualism.

Our recent study provides new empirical evidence of the geographic bias in multilingualism research published in high-impact scientific journals. We show that the regions most commonly studied are not particularly multilingual. The reverse is also true: the most multilingual regions are massively understudied in research on multilingualism.

A pair of maps provide a very clear illustration of the problem; they continue:
[Read more…]

Daniel Hahn’s piece on translating children’s books (archived) in the special issue of the New York Times Book Review on translation I wrote about here starts with one of the best examples of what a translator should be able to deal with that I’ve seen:

In “Where the Wild Things Are,” the boy Max finds himself sailing off, in a private boat, “through night and day / and in and out of weeks / and almost over a year,” to the eponymous land. There are about a thousand little components that combine to make “Where the Wild Things Are,” for me, one of the greatest of American books, and among them is that brief phrase “in and out of weeks.” It is entirely new, yet comprehensible, positioning the reader right in the middle of that experience of time passing.

Another writer might express a roughly similar idea in more predictable terms, of course. But Maurice Sendak was a genius, and any paraphrase will always diminish him.

Over its 60 years, “Where the Wild Things Are” has been translated into several dozen languages. I’ve looked at many of the translations, and I have yet to find one that makes that line as interesting as Sendak’s. The translators seem to assume that dull simplicity is good enough (it’s only a children’s book, after all), that “in and out of weeks” is essentially no different than “for several weeks” and that, in short, blunt meaning trumps everything.

The inadequacy of the world’s “Where the Wild Things Are” translations is one of my pet peeves. (We translators can be demanding.) Sendak’s book is marvelous across so many dimensions, and I feel the losses keenly — more keenly than is perhaps reasonable. But I believe my job as a translator is to preserve all the dimensions of a book, not just one of them. When I find complexity, my job is to keep complexity, or more accurately to reconstruct it. And some of the most complex books I’ve reconstructed have been children’s picture books.

He goes on to give examples from his own experience, including an extended discussion of a passage from Brazilian (Roger Mello’s picture-book João by a Thread), but I really like that Sendak example. If you render it as if it were “for several weeks,” you’ve failed the test.

I checked a couple of Russian versions: Maria Blinkina-Melnik has “неделю за неделей” (‘week after week’) and Timur Maisak has the slightly more marked “от недели к неделе” (‘from week to week’). I don’t know if there’s a good way to produce an equivalent to “in and out of weeks” that would be similarly enstranged, but I wish they’d tried harder.

Another new slang term I was unaware of, via Ben Yagoda’s website Not One-Off Britishisms:

It’s not in the OED or Green’s Dictionary of Slang, but an Urban Dictionary post from 2010 has it as one of nine (count ’em, nine) “hoover” definitions:

v. colloquial Being manipulated back into a relationship with threats of suicide, self-harm, or threats of false criminal accusations. Relationship manipulation often associated with individuals suffering from personality disorders like Borderline Personality Disorder or Narcissistic Personality Disorder.

The next example I could find was in the title of a 2017 book by (American) Amber Ault: Hoovering: How to Resist the Pull of a Toxic Relationship & Recover Your Freedom Now. And the word seems to be very much still out there, as witness 2022 articles in Psychology Today and Bustle. Those are both American publications, which leads me to suspect that psychological hoovering is an American coinage. But I’m not sure and would be interested in evidence either way.

I too am interested; I can’t say I care for the term, but that of course is an entirely predictable and meaningless reaction to the new and unfamiliar. A commenter at Ben’s site also dislikes it, but in an amusingly over-the-top peeverish way: “an absurdity in which mentally lazy people join the vast hordes of mentally lazy people […] Every time that I provide a simple comment about language, someone indignantly defends, by denying, the deterioration of language.”

By the way, while I have your attention, I ran across the term полярный торт in a Russian text (it literally means “polar cake”), and when I googled it and saw the images, I said “Oh yeah, that’s…” but couldn’t think of the term. I asked my wife and she said “vanilla wafers,” and that sounds right, but I wonder what my readers call such things.

A report from Heritage Daily:

A team of archaeologists and computer scientists have created an AI program that can translate ancient cuneiform tablets instantly using neural machine learning translations. In a paper published in the journal PNAS Nexus, from the Oxford University Press, the researchers have applied the AI program to translate Akkadian texts with a high level of accuracy. […]

According to the researchers: “Hundreds of thousands of clay tablets inscribed in the cuneiform script document the political, social, economic, and scientific history of ancient Mesopotamia. Yet, most of these documents remain untranslated and inaccessible due to their sheer number and limited quantity of experts able to read them.”

The AI program has a high level accuracy when translating formal Akkadian texts such as royal decrees or omens that follow a certain pattern. More literary and poetic texts, such as letters from priests or tracts, were more likely to have “hallucinations” – an AI term meaning that the machine generated a result completely unrelated to the text provided.

The goal of the neural machine translation (NMT) into English from Akkadian is to be part of a human–machine collaboration, by creating a pipeline that assists the scholar or student of the ancient language. Currently, the NMT model is available on an online notebook and the source code has been made available on GitHub at Akkademia. The researchers are currently developing an online application called the Babylonian Engine.

Nice to know that AI is good for something, although one does worry about the hallucinations… (Thanks, Bathrobe!)

I was reading this MetaFilter post, which begins:

“The whole story of why we’ll never get an LBD movie.” Over a year ago, Ashley Clements started producing The Look Back Diaries. After all of the episodes were discussed, she’s started discussing the behind-the-scenes tea […]

At this point I was distracted from wondering what the Look Back Diaries might be and started wondering about this use of “tea.” Fortunately, Google was at hand, and the first hit was this Later page:

In slang, “tea” is a term used to refer to gossip or inside information. It is often used in the phrase “spill the tea” or “serve the tea,” which means to share juicy or exclusive details about a situation or person.

In African American Vernacular English (AAVE), “tea” is used as slang to refer to gossip, news, or personal information. The origin of the term is uncertain, but it is believed to have originated in the LGBTQ+ community and then spread to other aspects of African American culture before being adopted by mainstream culture. The term “spilling tea” is often used to describe the act of sharing gossip or revealing personal information.

It goes on to share some idiotic ideas about where the term might have originated (yes, the word “acronym” crops up), but I get the idea, and once again am grateful for the instant knowledge available at the touch of a keyboard. Surprisingly, this sense is not in Green’s, and I wonder if my readers are familiar with it.

Bernhard Warner reports from Dublin for the NY Times (archived):

Like Henry Higgins, the phonetician from George Bernard Shaw’s play “Pygmalion,” Marius Cotescu and Georgi Tinchev recently demonstrated how their student was trying to overcome pronunciation difficulties. The two data scientists, who work for Amazon in Europe, were teaching Alexa, the company’s digital assistant. Their task: to help Alexa master an Irish-accented English with the aid of artificial intelligence and recordings from native speakers.

During the demonstration, Alexa spoke about a memorable night out. “The party last night was great craic,” Alexa said with a lilt, using the Irish word for fun. “We got ice cream on the way home, and we were happy out.” Mr. Tinchev shook his head. Alexa had dropped the “r” in “party,” making the word sound flat, like pah-tee. Too British, he concluded.

The technologists are part of a team at Amazon working on a challenging area of data science known as voice disentanglement. It’s a tricky issue that has gained new relevance amid a wave of A.I. developments, with researchers believing the speech and technology puzzle can help make A.I.-powered devices, bots and speech synthesizers more conversational — that is, capable of pulling off a multitude of regional accents. […]

[Read more…]

Jack Morava sent me a clip of Jorge Luis Borges talking about the English language; it was on Instagram, and looking around for a more accessible place to send people, I found Jordan M. Poss’s blog post, which has not only the clip (it turns out to be from a 1977 interview with William F Buckley Jr on “Firing Line”) but a partial transcript and Poss’s thoughts on it all. The transcript starts:

Borges: I have done most of my reading in English. I find English a far finer language than Spanish.

William F Buckley: Why?

Borges: Well, many reasons. Firstly, English is both a Germanic and a Latin language. Those two registers—for any idea you take, you have two words. Those words will not mean exactly the same. For example if I say “regal” that is not exactly the same thing as saying “kingly.” Or if I say “fraternal” that is not the same as saying “brotherly.” Or “dark” and “obscure.” Those words are different. It would make all the difference—speaking for example—the Holy Spirit, it would make all the difference in the world in a poem if I wrote about the Holy Spirit or I wrote the Holy Ghost, since “ghost” is a fine, dark Saxon word, but “spirit” is a light Latin word. Then there is another reason. The reason is that I think that, of all languages, English is the most physical of all languages.

The whole thing is transcribed, if in a rebarbative format, here. Of course it’s easy to poke holes in his linguistic analysis, but he’s not a linguist, he’s a writer talking enthusiastically about a language he loves, and I enjoy it — not to mention that it’s great to hear him speak. (I met him back in 1969, but my memory is not like Funes’s.) Thanks, Jack!

Katherine J. Igoe writes about this week’s special issue of the New York Times Book Review (archived):

The art of translation was on Gregory Cowles’s mind. It was the beginning of 2023, and Mr. Cowles, a senior editor on The New York Times Book Review, noticed the section was assigning more reviews of translated books than usual. […] He approached Juliana Barbassa, the deputy editor for news and features on the Books desk. “There’s this whole question: What is translated? Who decides that? Are we getting a full picture of what’s out there?” Mr. Cowles said.

Both editors saw the potential for a project that would bring attention to the craft in a new way. The first part of their monthslong effort appears as a special issue of The New York Times Book Review this weekend. In it, readers get a glimpse of the world of literary translation.

“For a very long time, translators were very much secondary characters. Their names weren’t on the cover, there was little recognition, they had few rights over the work. The pay was, and remains, not great,” Ms. Barbassa said.

[Read more…]

Language Documentation and Description (LDD) “is an international journal that publishes peer-reviewed research on language documentation, language description, and language support, broadly conceived”; at a Nick Nicholas Facebook post, Peter Austin commented:

There’s a bunch of interesting papers in this issue of LDD about the social lives of linguistic materials and the need to study the various “versions” of published “final” documents.

It does indeed look interesting, with titles such as “Philology in the folklore archive: Interpreting past documentation of the Kraasna dialect of Estonian” (Tobias Weber) and “Legacy materials and cultural facework: Obscenity and bad words in Siouan language documentation” (Saul Schwartz).

A public service notice: Globus Books is having a two-day online sale (20% off on orders of $40+) on July 3rd and 4th. If you want to buy some Russian books, now’s a good time.

And a personal note: today is my birthday, and I’ve already gotten some presents of Hattic interest, notably (from my generous wife) Keys to the “Gift”: A Guide to Vladimir Nabokov’s Novel, by Yuri Leving, which I’m extremely excited about — it’s my favorite Nabokov novel, which means it’s one of my favorite novels, period. On the sf front, I got This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, which got great reviews, and on the cop-show front, All the Pieces Matter: The Inside Story of The Wire, by Jonathan Abrams, which comes at the perfect time, since I just finished the fifth and final season of The Wire, which I continue to think of as the best TV show in existence. (Some people think the last season is the best, others the worst; I can understand both points of view, because the development of the earlier story arcs and characters was fantastic, whereas the newspaper stuff was disappointing by comparison to the general excellence of the show: dogged reporter Alma and honest, professional editor Gus vs. bad editors whose names I don’t even remember, which shows you how cardboard they are.) Tonight I’ll be dining on the traditional chicken curry, with lemon meringue pie for dessert. My wife knows how to keep me purring contentedly.

Helen DeWitt writes me as follows:

A reader, Scott Prater, bought me some coffees and wrote me a nice email about my latest book, and he also added the following:

I offer you a linguistic curiosity: the Valencian/Spanish expression, “me la bufa la gamba”. It’s only used in the Valencian region of Spain (the verb “bufar” is Spanish, but it has some additional connotations in Valencian), and its provenance seems to be murky, as is its literal meaning and grammatical construction. It means “I couldn’t care less”, a close relative to the more widespread Spanish “me importa un comino”; one could imagine Rhett Butler, at the end of Gone With the Wind, telling Scarlett O’Hara, “Frankly, my dear, me la bufa la gamba”.

I can’t figure out the role of “la gamba” in the expression, nor what the direct object “la” refers to in “me la bufa”. Does “la” refer to “la gamba”, in which case, who is doing the bufa-ing? Or is “la gamba” the subject of the sentence, and the “la” direct object refers to some (possibly pornographic) entity off-screen, one closely linked to “me”, the indirect object? And why a gamba? I’ve asked my Spanish linguist friends, it makes for great party conversation, but no one has been able to shed any light on either the etymology or the syntax of the expression.

I thought the knowledgeable readers of languagehat might have some ideas (Scott has agreed to my passing this on to you).

So: thoughts?