| Pages in topic: < [1 2] | Does translation make one a language conservative? Thread poster: Kevin Lossner
|
|---|
| the "decline and fall" has been happening for a long time | Oct 31, 2008 |
English with German syntax and other horrors
But why *is* it a horror?
I mean, this English itself that you wish to preserve--what is it but a bunch of borrowed French verbiage set to the tune of a watered-down grammar of Germanic origin, and uncomfortably codified using rules better suited to Latin? It's really quite a mongrel tongue to begin with.
| | | | Stuart Dowell 
Poland
Local time: 11:18
Member (2007)
Polish to English
+ ...
| Natural process of language change | Oct 31, 2008 |
The fact that language changes is a challenge for translators.
In my translations I try to produce text that is regarded as correct by the target audience, which most of the time is the standard UK that I am used to using.
The difficulty is that language change is driven by laziness whereby users try to save effort by contracting and merging (think about UK teenagers use of ""innit". This driving force also produces a lot of the forms that we now think of as being stan... See more The fact that language changes is a challenge for translators.
In my translations I try to produce text that is regarded as correct by the target audience, which most of the time is the standard UK that I am used to using.
The difficulty is that language change is driven by laziness whereby users try to save effort by contracting and merging (think about UK teenagers use of ""innit". This driving force also produces a lot of the forms that we now think of as being standard, such as "not".
The second force of change is that users get bored of certain words and phrases and want to emphasise what they say, for example "now" becomes "at the present moment in time".
These two factors have driven language change throughout history.
Therefore, I'm quite relaxed about a lot of the borrowings, lazy forms and so-called bad grammar creeping into my variant of English.
Bear in mind that Oxford English would have 19th century folk falling on their swords! ▲ Collapse
| | | | | Dylan Thomas | Oct 31, 2008 |
Anne Gillard-Groddeck wrote:
Dylan Thomas was not an American. Nor was he a "Brit".
Hwyl fawr
Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard
Dear Mrs O-P,
While agreeing with you that DT (what appropriate initials ...) was indeed as Welsh as Welsh could be, he WAS a "Brit" in the sense that, to our great benefit, Wales is part of Britain, is it not?
As to English usage, yes of course it evolves, as all languages do, and there's little point in fighting against that, but I'm personally unhappy when a word becomes virtually unusable in its true sense because it is so often misused. "Disinterested" springs to mind. Nowadays it is all too often used to mean "not interested" rather than "unbiased" or "impartial", which is what it originally meant, with the result that I, at any rate, avoid using it at all because it's likely to be misinterpreted.
By the way, I trust you're making sure the pyjamas continue to be kept in the drawer marked "pyjamas" ...
Best wishes,
Jenny.
| | | | | Yes! And getting worse... | Oct 31, 2008 |
Kevin Lossner wrote:
Has anyone had similar experiences? How do you cope with this phenomenon?
Yes, same situation with me. And I am not coping with it. I just take it as it comes. Of course I don't chase people for correctness writing and speaking (let it be) outside of my work, but I "suffer in silence" when I read a poor translation (the kind of translation in which you can clearly see the sequence of decisions the translator made and what went wrong...).
Today I am reading a Spanish translation of Wolfgang Jeschke's "Der letzte Tag der Schöpfung", 2008, Viamagna Ediciones.......... and suffering A LOT! :-/
| | |
|
|
|
I'm not sure letting such work influence my translations of business reports and chemical procedures would do much for my reputation, but it would be fun at least
Well, Dylan was, apparently, commissioned to write a script for a "prestige" film by such a revolutionary body as the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (later to become BP), but I suppose your clients are a little more conservative in their tastes and always put their pyjamas in the proper drawer.
Mrs O-P
| | | | Kevin Lossner
Portugal
Local time: 10:18
German to English
+ ...
TOPIC STARTER | Failed communication | Oct 31, 2008 |
Kathryn Litherland wrote: English with German syntax and other horrors But why *is* it a horror? ... English itself ... [is] really quite a mongrel tongue to begin with.
From a historical/anthropological perspective you are right of course, but in truth that applies to most languages I suspect, regardless of what some nationalists might have to say about the matter. (Oops! Am I getting political? Can I expect a heavy-handed slap from the moderators for that remark?) Just look at all the loan words from Russian in French and German that are the legacy of the October Revolution or earlier contacts. All of us can probably come up with zillions of examples for our language pairs, some of them not even politically charged
However, my concern is this: I see my role as that of a communication facilitator, not an archivist or linguistic historian and also not an avante garde writer. (I lack the talent for the latter even if I wanted to play that role.) As such, it is important for me to choose words, expressions and atmospheric overtones that make the intended meaning clear in an efficient way.
English with German syntax is good for comedy but not much else. The use of German terms like "mobbing" and "handy" by expatriates who have been in Germany too long is very confusing to people who have no contacts here. When my other half talks on the phone to her parents I have to do simultaneous interpretation of her "English", because shut up in their upscale coastal enclave in California they have no idea what she is trying to say much of the time. (Her written English, fortunately, is free of such influences.) The "provincialism" of some Americans was very apparent to me on a recent visit to Berlin of my high school German teacher who left the city as a child of 12 or 13 and has lived in the US since the early 1950s. I referred to a "mobile phone" in English, and she had no idea what I meant by that term. She had two of them in her purse, but for her they were "cell phones". So much for "international English" in that case.
Experiences like these make me very conservative in my choice of words in many cases. As I become better acquainted with British, Australian and Irish variants of the language, I become far more aware of the truth of Shaw's comment about being divided by a common language. Even the homogenizing effect of modern communications has not changed this; if anything I think it has changed the patterns of language mutation and made them perhaps more generational than regional, but there remain far more differences than most of us suspect. I often cringe when I am asked to produce "international" English for texts that clearly call for localization to be effective.
[Edited at 2008-10-31 12:11]
| | | | 952313 (X)
Local time: 19:18
English to Japanese
+ ...
| Feeling like a dinosaur in my own language | Nov 2, 2008 |
As my maternal language (Japanese) is notoriously quick to adopt and corrupt foreign words and forget Japanese words for them, I sometimes feel like a dinosaur speaking and writing a correct version of Japanese (according to me, my contemporaries, and my family members.)
When I started working as a college graduate 20 years ago, my Japanese was too childish and unprofessional and my boss who was about 15 years senior told me to read books. 20 years later, I am told that my Japanese... See more As my maternal language (Japanese) is notoriously quick to adopt and corrupt foreign words and forget Japanese words for them, I sometimes feel like a dinosaur speaking and writing a correct version of Japanese (according to me, my contemporaries, and my family members.)
When I started working as a college graduate 20 years ago, my Japanese was too childish and unprofessional and my boss who was about 15 years senior told me to read books. 20 years later, I am told that my Japanese sounds rather old. What am I supposed to do? The agency employees who give me the jobs are about 10 years younger than myself, and they seem to speak and write a completely different version of Japanese. When they send me email, I cringe at their loose grammar. And yet, they come back to me to tell me that the clients complained about my oldish Japanese. Apparently I use too many kanji letters that they cannot read, and too many Japanese words, when the English words in their corrupted versions have been accepted in the mainstream Japanese language. This is the country where post-production work becomes posupuro and PowerPoint Presentations become pawapo. I really don't know how much longer I can hold on to my profession as a professional.
And my kids and their generation of Australian English speakers have lost the distinction between first person singular and plural. When one of them says,"pick us up", he is normally waiting for me alone. When I ask him where his friends are, he seems confused, and I have to explain that he said "pick us up" on the phone. Then he says "Does that matter? Pick me up, pick us up, it's the same." It's not only my kids. Their generation of people all do this. Is this happening elsewhere?
Also, since when has "action" become a verb? In Australia, quite frequently, a business email asking for a quick response ends with this sentence. "Please action! Thanks!" Is this happening elsewhere? Or was action alway a verb and I did not know it? English is not my native language, so I can never be sure.
[Edited at 2008-11-02 08:32] ▲ Collapse
| | | | Kevin Lossner
Portugal
Local time: 10:18
German to English
+ ...
TOPIC STARTER | Sounds too familiar | Nov 2, 2008 |
yonyon wrote:
I sometimes feel like a dinosaur speaking and writing a correct version of Japanese....
This is the country where post-production work becomes posupuro and PowerPoint Presentations becomes pawapo. I really don't know how much longer I can hold on to my profession as a professional.
I could sing the same song for German sometimes. Certain groups use so much corrupted English that a page looks like badly written English strung together with German prepositions and the occasional verb. I neither I nor most of the "older" Germans (40+ as far as I can tell, maybe older "Wessies" are hipper) can understand very much of it. As you pointed out in your example of picking up your son, this isn't helpful in communication. Imagine communicating like that in peace negotiations or in an important business deal. Oh no... I'll stay with the elite snobs until I stop breathing, thank you. If only because I can actually understand what they are saying.
My conservatism carries over to my second language as well now. If you can call it that. As a young man, I delighted in the dialects (well, these are older, so maybe they are more conservative) and gleefully noted differences in regional grammars. I became proficient enough at an odd blend of Palatinate and dialects from the Saarland so that I could pass myself off as a native of the region if I didn't want to be identified as a prissy, over-educated fool (good for getting proper service in bars and shops). Now that I have to function professionally with German and my day-to-day contacts with Germans mostly consist of neighbors speaking awful German, I get worried about it rubbing off on me. Now from a professional standpoint, a little of that is actually a good thing, because I frequently get documents for which only an understanding of regional dialects will provide the key to understanding their content. But I do miss the sight and sound of good, crisp High German, not the bastardized language or the amorphous vagaries of bureaucratic babble. Whenever I see a source document that meet that criterion, it's a thrill, no matter what the subject.
| | |
|
|
|
Tom in London
United Kingdom
Local time: 10:18
Member (2008)
Italian to English
| Language is power | Nov 2, 2008 |
Being able to use language(s) correctly is empowerment. Would you trust a brain surgery manual written by someone who doesn't know the difference between "it's" and "its" or "momentarily" and "in a moment"?
There has been much talk recently of a "return to illiteracy"; after a century or so, in the western world, of universal education to teach everyone reading and writing, there is now a reversion; as we can all easily observe, a growing number of people are unable to read and writ... See more Being able to use language(s) correctly is empowerment. Would you trust a brain surgery manual written by someone who doesn't know the difference between "it's" and "its" or "momentarily" and "in a moment"?
There has been much talk recently of a "return to illiteracy"; after a century or so, in the western world, of universal education to teach everyone reading and writing, there is now a reversion; as we can all easily observe, a growing number of people are unable to read and write to anything like a reliable standard. This makes them unable to function in any serious role.
They're the losers (or as they would write: loosers). If you make an issue of it with them, they excuse themselves by saying that linguistic accuracy doesn't matter.
Such people will find it impossible to rise very high in any line of work.
Maybe that's how it's supposed to be. There are those who contend that it is now deliberate policy by governments and the powerful to ensure there are not people out there, on the loose, who are able to read, write, elaborate ideas and critiques, and communicate them to others.
To be literate and able to communicate is a threat. At least, I hope it is.
(anguish a few moments later: should that have been "a growing number of people *is* unable"?)
[Edited at 2008-11-02 14:05] ▲ Collapse
| | | | | Just for info | Nov 2, 2008 |
yonyon wrote:
And my kids and their generation of Australian English speakers have lost the distinction between first person singular and plural. When one of them says,"pick us up", he is normally waiting for me alone.
This has been a variant in the UK since I was at school in the 1970s.
I use it myself from time to time - not in translations, of course - usually, as in your example, in the imperative.
Also, since when has "action" become a verb? In Australia, quite frequently, a business email asking for a quick response ends with this sentence. "Please action! Thanks!" Is this happening elsewhere?
Again, I can report this was certainly in use in UK offices in the 1990s, and I imagine, since much corporate-speak originates over the herring pond, in the good ol' US of A before then.
Not a verb I have taken to using.
| | | |
Tom in London wrote:
They're the losers (or as they would write: loosers).
That's one that does my nut in!
Agree with Charlie though - "us" in the place of "me" has been around for at least 30 years in GB English. "Go on, give us it"...
However:
Also, since when has "action" become a verb? In Australia, quite frequently, a business email asking for a quick response ends with this sentence. "Please action! Thanks!" Is this happening elsewhere?
Again, I can report this was certainly in use in UK offices in the 1990s, and I imagine, since much corporate-speak originates over the herring pond, in the good ol' US of A before then.
I think you're wrong there though Charlie - there was a recent furore on an IT-EN mailing list when "please action as appropriate" was suggested as a translation for a horrid piece of Italian bureaucratese. The entire US contingent claimed that "to action" simply didn't exist in English, while the GB members thought it completely normal. It seems to be one noun that has only been verbed in British English (and apparently Australian English too).
| | | | | fair enough :-) | Nov 3, 2008 |
Marie-Hélène Hayles wrote:
I think you're wrong there though Charlie - there was a recent furore on an IT-EN mailing list when "please action as appropriate" was suggested as a translation for a horrid piece of Italian bureaucratese. The entire US contingent claimed that "to action" simply didn't exist in English, while the GB members thought it completely normal. It seems to be one noun that has only been verbed in British English (and apparently Australian English too).
'Twas an assumption on my part, entirely unsubstantiated
Hence the "I imagine..."
I have now tasked myself with indulging in a good deal less imagining, incentivized by a paradigm shift in the entire conceptualisation of end-of-calendar-year self-giftage and characterised by a blue sky approach to the enabling of conversationalised online non-real time interchanges.
Or, if I manage to talk less crap on the forum, I'm gonna get meself something nice fer Crimbo.
| | |
|
|
|
| You stand corrected, Charlie, but... | Nov 3, 2008 |
Charlie Bavington wrote: Marie-Hélène Hayles wrote:
I think you're wrong there though Charlie - there was a recent furore on an IT-EN mailing list when "please action as appropriate" was suggested as a translation for a horrid piece of Italian bureaucratese. The entire US contingent claimed that "to action" simply didn't exist in English, while the GB members thought it completely normal. It seems to be one noun that has only been verbed in British English (and apparently Australian English too).
'Twas an assumption on my part, entirely unsubstantiated Hence the "I imagine..." I have now tasked myself with indulging in a good deal less imagining, incentivized by a paradigm shift in the entire conceptualisation of end-of-calendar-year self-giftage and characterised by a blue sky approach to the enabling of conversationalised online non-real time interchanges. Or, if I manage to talk less crap on the forum, I'm gonna get meself something nice fer Crimbo.
...please continue to talk all the crap you want on the forum! What's life without fun (and what a delicious elitist feeling to be able to laugh esoterically about language).
Jane
| | | | | Not really... | Nov 3, 2008 |
My answer to the original question: Not necessarily. Not in my case, anyway.
Linguistic prescriptivism has always annoyed me - I definitely fall into the descriptivist school of linguistics...
Or, as Kathryn said -
Kathryn Litherland wrote:
People who play grammar or spelling police on Internet forums bug me far more than people who make the grammar or spelling mistakes in the first place.
Obviously, that doesn't mean that I don't use standard, correct language in my translations - I just don't get my knickers in a twist about how other people use language (barring some very extreme cases, of course). And I'm not talking about clear spelling mistakes or other clearly incorrect language, but just usage that breaks some norms set out in prescriptive grammar books but which people actually use all the time.
Tom in London wrote:
They're the losers (or as they would write: loosers). If you make an issue of it with them, they excuse themselves by saying that linguistic accuracy doesn't matter.
Such people will find it impossible to rise very high in any line of work.
I'm not so sure about that - I've come across such people (not illiterate, but having some clear spelling issues) in all kind of positions... And if the job doesn't involve much writing, there doesn't seem to be a problem, for most.
(What bugs me is that many such people (as employees) are actually earning more than I am as a freelancer (and meticulous speller))
| | | | Kevin Lossner
Portugal
Local time: 10:18
German to English
+ ...
TOPIC STARTER
Tom in London wrote:
They're the losers (or as they would write: loosers). If you make an issue of it with them, they excuse themselves by saying that linguistic accuracy doesn't matter.
Such people will find it impossible to rise very high in any line of work.
Melina Kajander wrote: I'm not so sure about that - I've come across such people (not illiterate, but having some clear spelling issues) in all kind of positions...
Yes, I have one friend who graduated summa cum laude from the same elite private College that Obama got his academic start at, then went on to get his Ph.D. in chemistry in record time at Princeton (3 years I think it was - very rare in the US), and after that he was first in his class at Columbia Law School until he got bored and took a break, then finished elsewhere... and the guy can hardly write a single sentence without mistakes of every kind. Yet it has proved no barrier to him professionally at all, because he's bright enough to use good proofreaders wherever possible. And many of the senior scientists and executives I've known were less than what I consider fully competent with their native languages. Although I can't say the markets reward mediocrity, they certainly tolerate linguistic mediocrity in very many cases, probably because the majority are unable to tell the difference most of the time.
| | | | | Pages in topic: < [1 2] | To report site rules violations or get help, contact a site moderator: You can also contact site staff by submitting a support request » Does translation make one a language conservative? | Trados Business Manager Lite | Create customer quotes and invoices from within Trados Studio
Trados Business Manager Lite helps to simplify and speed up some of the daily tasks, such as invoicing and reporting, associated with running your freelance translation business.
More info » |
| | Trados Studio 2022 Freelance | The leading translation software used by over 270,000 translators.
Designed with your feedback in mind, Trados Studio 2022 delivers an unrivalled, powerful desktop
and cloud solution, empowering you to work in the most efficient and cost-effective way.
More info » |
|
| | | | X Sign in to your ProZ.com account... | | | | | |
Login to reply/comment 
