The International Day of Sign Languages is one of the most recent arrivals in the annual procession of official days, having been introduced by the United Nations as recently as 2017. It is now celebrated annually on 23 September, and aims to recognise and promote the importance of sign languages as essential to ensuring the human rights of deaf people.

The reason the day is on 23 September is that this was the day that the World Federation of the Deaf was founded in 1951.

For individuals and companies working in language, translation or accessibility, International Sign Language Day is a reminder of the importance of embracing all forms of communication and ensuring that language services are inclusive of people of all abilities.

The global importance of sign languages

There are over 300 different sign languages in use today, spoken by approximately 72 million deaf people worldwide. The total number of seriously hearing-impaired people is estimated by the WHO as being about 430 million, or over 5% of the world population. This number includes a large proportion of elderly people of course, whose hearing deficit may be better and more simply supported with hearing aids.

Sign languages are full, natural languages with their own syntax, grammar and lexicon, and like spoken languages, they vary from region to region, and country to country. American Sign Language (ASL), British Sign Language (BSL), French Sign Language (LSF) and Chinese Sign Language (“中國手語”, or ZGS)  are among the more widely used sign languages, but most countries have their own unique form of sign communication.

Is there a Universal Sign Language?

This is probably the most commonly asked question about sign language. The answer is a resounding NO. There are at least 300 different sign languages in the world, with most countries having their own language or even languages. Even countries where the same language is spoken, such as English, different sign languages have developed.

This has sometimes been lamented as a great missed opportunity, an area where deaf people could have gotten ahead, but that was always an unreasonable wish, akin to, say, imagining that everybody on Earth should “simply” learn Esperanto, and we can all communicate with one another.

Why are ASL (American Sign Language) and BSL (British Sign Language) so different?

Sign languages have developed from conversations between people in, not based on the spoken language of a country.  ASL and BSL have actually developed from different sources, and are therefore part of different sign language trees.

BSL developed from existing British sign languages, and as such was a creation of the British deaf community.  Written records of the use of signing as a means of communication go back to the 15^th century in the UK.

ASL, by contrast, is most closely related to French Sign Language (LSF). In fact, researchers have traced the development of ASL back to the American School for the Deaf (ASD), founded in 1817 by Thomas Gallaudet, who had previously studied French Sign Language in Paris at the Institution Nationale des Sourds-Muets (National Institution of the Deaf-Mute). Back in the US, at the school that Gallaudet founded, he introduced that methodology, and ASL gradually developed, through language contact with local village sign languages and home sign languages.

For those interested in how sign languages develop in relation to surrounding oral languages, an earlier blog post introduced the important work by Annelies Kusters, and in particular the concept of translanguaging that she applied to sign language users.

The Role of Sign Language in Cultural Identity

Sign languages are so much more than just modes of communication! They are absolutely central to the cultural identities of deaf communities around the world. For many deaf individuals, sign language is the primary means through which they express themselves, form social bonds, and pass down traditions – and it’s a truly wonderful thing to behold!

Deaf communities have rich, vibrant cultures that are expressed through unique forms of storytelling, art, and performance. By recognising and promoting sign languages, we can help to preserve these cultural practices and ensure that they continue to thrive across generations. Furthermore, promoting sign languages fosters greater inclusivity in the global community. By embracing the linguistic and cultural contributions of deaf people, we can work together to break down barriers and create environments where everyone can fully participate.

How can Sign Languages be supported by modern Technology?

In today’s digital age, technology is playing an increasingly important role in supporting communication through sign languages – and it’s an exciting time! It’s amazing to see how innovations like video relay services (VRS), speech-to-text applications, and AI-powered sign language translation tools are making it easier for deaf individuals to communicate with hearing people, both in personal and professional settings!

Video platforms have been a game-changer, opening the door to greater access to sign language interpretation during important events like political speeches, public health updates and educational webinars. It’s a revolution in accessibility!

There’s no doubt about it: businesses that leverage technology to incorporate sign language into their services are not only ensuring compliance with accessibility laws, they’re also demonstrating a commitment to inclusivity and customer satisfaction.

Language service providers have an incredible opportunity to expand their offerings by integrating sign language interpretation into their translation and localisation services. This can enhance their marketability to organisations that require accessible content, such as government agencies, educational institutions, and healthcare providers.

How Individuals and Businesses Can Support Sign Language on the International Day of Sign Languages and beyond

• Learn Basic Signs: Take the opportunity to learn some basic signs in your local sign language. Apps, online tutorials and local classes can help you get started. Understanding even just a few common phrases like “thank you” or “hello” shows respect for the deaf community and can break down communication barriers.
• Engage with Deaf Culture: Attend performances, art exhibitions or film screenings created by deaf artists and filmmakers. Many events take place online or in major cities around the world. These cultural experiences provide insight into the role of sign language in shaping cultural identity, and highlight the creativity and expression of the deaf community.
• Support Deaf Creators: Check out content creators, educators and influencers who use sign language on their platforms. By following and supporting Deaf creators on social media, you’ll not only learn more about their experiences, but also amplify their voices and reach.
• Become an Advocate: We can all make a difference! We can spread the word about the importance of sign language interpreters in our workplaces, schools and social circles. Together, we can make communication accessible for all!

• Offer Sign Language Training: Provide sign language training to employees, especially those in customer-facing roles. Give your staff the tools they need to communicate effectively with deaf customers and show your commitment to accessibility.
• Ensure Website Accessibility: Businesses can audit their digital platforms and ensure they are accessible to the deaf community. This could include adding subtitles and sign language interpretation to video content, as well as ensuring that navigation and service options are easy to use for all customers.
• Hire Deaf Talent: Companies should explore opportunities to hire deaf people in a variety of roles, not just in accessibility or sign language services, but across all departments. Providing a supportive work environment for deaf employees – including access to sign language interpreters and assistive technology – promotes an inclusive workplace culture.
• Partner with Accessibility Providers: Partnering with companies that specialise in sign language interpreting or captioning services (such as Rosetta Translation) can enhance a company’s ability to provide fully inclusive services. This is particularly important for events, conferences and webinars where companies want to reach a diverse and inclusive audience..

The Future of Sign Language and Accessibility

Looking ahead, the use of sign language is expected to grow as more people and businesses recognise its value in fostering inclusivity. The integration of AI and digital tools into sign language interpretation will likely make communication even more seamless, but it’s important to remember that these technologies must complement human interactions, not replace them.

For the deaf community, continued advocacy and awareness-raising efforts are essential for ensuring that sign language is respected and integrated into all areas of public life. Businesses, organizations, and individuals must continue to support these efforts, not just on International Day of Sign Languages, but throughout the year.

The International Day of Sign Languages is a powerful reminder that communication is a fundamental human right. Whether you are an individual learning a few signs or a business offering fully accessible services, embracing sign language is a meaningful way to promote inclusivity and equal access for all. By celebrating and supporting sign languages, we contribute to a world where everyone can communicate, connect, and thrive, regardless of their abilities.

About the Author

Eric Fixmer

Eric is the Managing Director and founder of Rosetta Translation. Originally from Luxembourg, he holds a PhD in phonetics from Cambridge University and he started Rosetta in 2004, leading the company from his living room to being a leading international provider of language services with offices in Europe, Asia and America… Read Full Bio

The post International Day of Sign Languages appeared first on Rosetta Translation.

O’Sullivan begins with the mysterious and heartbreaking case of the hundreds of children of refugee families in Sweden, who have fallen into a sleep-like state, sometimes for months or even years. The common factor which seems to unite these sleeping children is years of stress and anxiety, living in a country from which you may be banished at any point. O’Sullivan is also quick to understand how the children often act as a linguistic conduit for their parents while the protracted asylum process runs its course. If and when bad news is received “the children are the ones who open the letters.”

A recurrent theme in the book is the question of who gets to define what is and what isn’t an illness. Having taken a tour from the sleeping refugee children in Sweden, to the victims of ‘Havana syndrome’ in Cuba, to the mystery sickness afflicting a town in Kazakhstan, O’Sullivan sets about scrutinising the Western medical model that her readers will be most familiar with. She describes the importance we place on naming and labelling symptoms, pointing out how keen people are “to get a disease label that will earn them the help and respect they are asking for”.

Grouping and then attributing labels to symptoms is a branch of medical science in its own right. Nosology tackles the classification of diseases, and should involve some understanding of the cause or origin of the complaint, while nosography focuses primarily on applying a label to a symptom. The problem, as O’Sullivan put it, is that “the body offers an ever-present potential symptom pool. There are numerous reasons why someone might start to pay undue attention to their body and, out of the white noise, pull one sensation to the fore, starting a medical hunt.”

We place immense faith in the labelled entities that our particular culture has defined as an illness, but are quick to spot the cultural influences that have shaped symptom classification elsewhere. Notably, the previous version of the US Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), “only specifically names culture-bound syndromes belonging to communities that do not have English as their first language”. The more recent DSM-V attempts a more nuanced approach to account for the fact that “different cultures and communities exhibit or explain symptoms in various ways.”

The fact remains that a diagnostic label such as jambes lourdes (heavy legs) — which afflicts a disproportionate number of French people while being virtually unknown elsewhere in Europe — “would not be referred to as a folk illness or culture-bound syndrome in France, because these are terms more often used to label people outside of one’s own cultural community.” O’Sullivan’s message is that the label itself has the power to fuel illness, “the embodiment of illness labels by the classification effect makes new people, and, if the label is powerful enough, it will make new disabled people.”

About the Author

Alison Tunley

Alison is a seasoned freelance translator with over 15 years of experience, specialising in translating from German to English. Originally from Wales, she has been a Londoner for some time, and she holds a PhD in Phonetics and an MPhil in Linguistics from the University of Cambridge, where she also completed her First Class BA degree in German and Spanish… Read Full Bio

Image: Pixabay

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This prompted a Dutch follower to comment that they have the same phrase, hondamoe (hond=dog, moe=tired). And since German and Dutch are closely related, I was not surprised to find that German has the equivalent hundemüde.
My natural etymological curiosity, combined with an overwhelming desire for an excuse to sit down, set me off on a little computer-bound research to investigate the origins of this phrase. The first claim you find for the English phrase is a fabulous tale involving Alfred the Great and his two sons, Athelbrod and Edwin, who he would supposedly send out hunting with his extensive packs of dogs, rewarding whichever son returned home having achieved the greatest hunting success.

This is a great little yarn, and in true internet fashion, you will find it in various forms all over the place. But does it really make sense? I’m sure hunting all day is pretty exhausting, but it just seems a little contrived that they would have settled on “dog tired” for that reason alone. My initial instinct was that if the phrase was used at all with reference to Athelbrod and Edwin, it was more likely because it was already in common parlance. But dictionary.com offers an even more sceptical stance, suggesting the phrase didn’t emerge at all until much later. Evidence of the phrase dog-tired apparently only goes back to the 1770s, although Shakespeare deployed the very similar dog-weary in The Taming of the Shrew in the late 16 th century.

The German and Dutch sources I tracked down have a more pragmatic explanation for the phrase: dogs need a lot of sleep and so spend a lot of the day slumbering, hence the natural comparison ‘as tired as a dog’. But the preeminent German language dictionary Duden has another intriguing suggestion, which is that ‘hund-’ can be used as an intensifying prefix to reinforce the sense of whatever word it is attached to. So German, for example, has hundekalt (dog + cold), hundeelend (dog + miserable), hundsgemein (dog + nasty) etc.

There is no implication here that dogs are characteristically cold, miserable or nasty, the dog prefix is simply a way of adding emphasis. Although Duden notes this role can only be “verstärkend für etwas Schlechtes” – reinforcing something bad. I don’t know what man’s best friend did to deserve such a negative linguistic function but if I was in PR for dogs I would be working on some dog + fabulous neologisms.

About the Author

Alison Tunley

Alison is a seasoned freelance translator with over 15 years of experience, specialising in translating from German to English. Originally from Wales, she has been a Londoner for some time, and she holds a PhD in Phonetics and an MPhil in Linguistics from the University of Cambridge, where she also completed her First Class BA degree in German and Spanish… Read Full Bio

Image: Pixabay

The post Dog-tired and other doggie expressions appeared first on Rosetta Translation.

One distinctive difference between English and German is the greater flexibility over word order and sentence structure in the latter language. German is described as having a V2 word order “which allows any constituent to occupy the first position as long as the second position is occupied by the finite verb.” This allows Germans to swap the order of subject and object, helped along the way by the case system to indicate which is which. For example, German can have “Ich sehe den Mann jeden Tag” (I see the man every day), “Den Mann sehe ich jeden Tag” (The man see I every day) or “Jeden Tag sehe ich den Mann” (Every day see I the man). By contrast, English is much more likely to insist on a subject-verb-object (SVO) structure: “I see the man every day”. Crucially, English has limited scope when it comes to inverting the subject-verb order, particularly where the lack of a case system might create confusion about which noun is the subject in a sentence.

This obviously brings us to the topic of predicate nouns and examples of sentences where they may not agree with the subject in terms of number (by now, you may have realised we don’t shrink from nerdy grammatical topics, such as proximal and distal demonstratives). The Grammar Girl blog has a neat description of what they call a “distracting predicate noun”, which results in a verb being sandwiched between singular and plural nouns, with the potential to confuse the issue of subject-verb agreement. E.g. “The star attractions at the museum are the art” (where plural “attractions” relates to the singular “art”).

This phenomenon creates a particular problem for translators if German puts a predicate noun at the start of a sentence and this noun does not match the subject in terms of singular or plural form. This gives us examples like “A special feature of product X are the adjustable LED spotlights”. At least to my native ears, that sentence structure is jarring because we read “A special feature” (singular”) and expect a corresponding singular verb “is”, only to encounter the unlikely plural “are”, at which point you have to reparse the whole thing to figure out that the subject of the sentence is “the adjustable LED spotlights”. These mental gymnastics can be avoided by re-ordering the English to put the subject first “The adjustable LED spotlights are a special feature of product X”.

The wisdom of this re-ordering is described in the Wikipedia account of “copular inversion”, where “a predicative nominal switches positions with the subject”. For what it’s worth, Wikipedia decrees that “where there is a difference in number, the verb agrees with the noun phrase that precedes it”. So the sentence “Jack and Jill are the problem” becomes “The problem is Jack and Jill”. In the latter, Wikipedia argues that the verb agrees with the apparent predicate, although presumably you could equally claim that “the problem” has simply become the subject of the sentence thanks to the new word order.

If you are not already confused, some of the non-matching singular and plural subject-predicate noun examples in the Grammar Girl blog strike me as unwieldy even setting aside word order. For example, she approves the grammaticality of the sentence “The real draw of this restaurant is the desserts”, pointing out that the verb matches the singular status of the subject “the real draw”. Personally, I would still prefer to bring the predicate noun into line too by rephrasing it “The real draw of this restaurant is the dessert menu” or changing the focus with “The desserts are the real draw of this restaurant”, just don’t ask me why that singular-plural mismatch is less awkward than the original!

If you have read this far, you obviously found this plural-related topic interesting, so you may also like our blog on the preferred plural form of kohlrabi (and plural forms of loan words in general).

About the Author

Alison Tunley

Alison is a seasoned freelance translator with over 15 years of experience, specialising in translating from German to English. Originally from Wales, she has been a Londoner for some time, and she holds a PhD in Phonetics and an MPhil in Linguistics from the University of Cambridge, where she also completed her First Class BA degree in German and Spanish… Read Full Bio

Image: Unsplash

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How Tiktok can influence mainstream language

“This is why you need to go on TikTok mum, you are missing out on quality content for your blog”. That was the advice of my middle daughter after she had patiently translated her reference to “the cozzie livs guy”, which had left me baffled. Now that cozzie livs has achieved the coveted status of Word of the Year (according to Macquarie Dictionary), the TikTokers will presumably have moved on to more novel linguistic innovations. But if you’ve somehow missed out on this phrase’s rapid rise to fame, I can explain that cozzie livs refers to the cost of living crisis, and the cozzie livs guy is apparently “some dude” on social media who offers advice on navigating the aforementioned fiscal challenges. When slang migrates from Tiktok to everyday language, a lot of us native speakers can be caught rather flat-footed.

Having previously written about the Australian penchant for slang, and with its WOTY nomination from Australia’s leading dictionary publisher, I naturally assumed that cozzie livs was a classic Australian coinage. But apparently not. Macquarie report that the word first emerged in the UK before being eagerly adopted in the Antipodes. Cozzie livs thus joins a long list of proud UK slang exports now used by Australians, including snog, wally and sprog (if ChatGPT and a quick Google are to be believed!).

Examples of when slang migrates from Tiktok

There’s a rather pleasing balance in the way monosyllabic cost becomes cozzie while the bisyllabic living becomes livs. And the Macquarie WOTY Committee note a similar pattern to the Aussie colloquialisms menty b (mental breakdown) and locky d (Covid lockdown). And the UK is not too shabby in deploying much the same formula to neologisms such as Platty Joobs (for the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee in 2022) and Corrie Nash (for the King’s Coronation in 2023).

In fact the Coronation provided rich pickings for fans of colloquialisms with Chazzle Dazzle and Corriebobs being among my favourites. The addition of the suffix ‘-bobs’ also intrigued me as this is a mechanism my own TikTok-viewing daughter applies to all sorts of items. For example, nutrishy bobs refers to stuff relating to nutrition. Despite concerted searching, I’m yet to find any references to the emergence of ‘-bobs’ as a productive new suffix. Although the term holibobs was voted the second most annoying word in a 2023 poll (pipped at the post by amazeballs, in case you were wondering).

So, if -bobs becomes the new go-to suffix for neologisms in 2024, you heard it here first! Meanwhile, I’m off to do some sociolinguistic research, or what might more accurately be described as scrolling through Tiktok.

About the Author

Alison Tunley

Alison is a seasoned freelance translator with over 15 years of experience, specialising in translating from German to English. Originally from Wales, she has been a Londoner for some time, and she holds a PhD in Phonetics and an MPhil in Linguistics from the University of Cambridge, where she also completed her First Class BA degree in German and Spanish… Read Full Bio

Image: Pixabay

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The need to translate English into English is more common than you might imagine, where phrases of English are deployed in a foreign language and have taken on an alternative meaning that isn’t appropriate in actual English text. There are lots of examples where the meaning has diverged completely from the original and becomes metaphors, but sometimes the distinction is more subtle and I recently came across a new example in a German text that prompted not just careful contemplation of the correct translation, but a fascinating etymological tour of discovery. The text involved marketing materials describing customers’ “Bucketlist für den Frühling” literally bucket list for spring.

The first thing that struck me was amusement that this rather English term had infiltrated German vocabulary. A quick search of German websites dug up a fair few examples, and the term has its own Wiki entry explaining its origins. This definition captures the original two-word phrasing and correctly points out the link with the English phrase kick the bucket, meaning to die. The phrase bucket list is intended to capture things an individual wants to do or achieve during the rest of their life, i.e. before they kick the bucket.

In English, a bucket list can certainly be used in a fairly frivolous way to describe a list of things you want to do, but it also has a definite sense of “life goals” rather than “stuff I fancy doing in the next few months”, which is why I found the idea of a “bucket list for spring” rather odd. I came to the conclusion that German readers must not have the same association between this phrase and impending demise, leaving them instead with something much closer to the simple English “wish list”. And indeed that was the translation I ultimately settled on.

Like all the best translation deliberations, this one led to a couple of intriguing etymological investigations. Firstly, we have a range of competing and disputed theories about the origins of kick the bucket. One gruesome suggestion is that bucket refers to the beam from which slaughtered pigs were suspended, and that kicking the bucket describes the pig’s ensuing struggle while in its death throes. A barely less grisly explanation is put forward in a 19^th century slang dictionary describing a bucket being kicked away during the process of someone hanging themselves.

Perhaps even more intriguing is the German equivalent “Löffelliste” (spoon list), derived from the German phrase “den Löffel abgeben” (to hand in your spoon). I found one source claiming that Löffelliste is a calque of the English bucket list, but since a calque usually describes the translation of a phrase word for word, it isn’t clear why bucket has been replaced by spoon here. As so often in etymology, competing theories are readily available. A German wiki entry claims that in the Middle Ages, having your own spoon was an essential accessory, so would have been carried everywhere with you, hence giving up your spoon meant giving up on life itself.

Whatever the phrase’s origins, I am rather charmed by the whole spoon metaphor, so I plan to work on my own calque and start deploying the English version “to hand in your spoon” at every opportunity.

About the Author

Alison Tunley

Alison is a seasoned freelance translator with over 15 years of experience, specialising in translating from German to English. Originally from Wales, she has been a Londoner for some time, and she holds a PhD in Phonetics and an MPhil in Linguistics from the University of Cambridge, where she also completed her First Class BA degree in German and Spanish… Read Full Bio

Image: Unsplash

The post Buckets and spoons: an etymological tour of death metaphors appeared first on Rosetta Translation.

The topic of false friends comes up regularly in translation, and this week’s collection of translation glitches are similar but perhaps better described as “friends that might lead you astray”. All the examples we discuss here have what seems to be an obvious solution in the target language, but this initial translation turns out to be misleading, or at least not the choice a native speaker would have made. Apologies to non-German readers, the examples come from working on one specific language, but the thought process behind fixing these potential errors is common to all translation work.

Let’s begin with a physiotherapy text describing treatment protocols for sports injuries and other conditions. The term Schmerzprojektion translates literally as “pain projection” or perhaps “projected pain”, both of which make some sense in English. However, anyone familiar with clinical terminology will know that the standard English term for the phenomenon of pain experienced in one part of the body where the cause is located elsewhere is “referred pain”. As in many instances, a quick online search confirms this hunch, revealing 70 times the number of hits for “referred pain” compared with either of the other options.

A bit of technical expertise, or the ability to do some research is indispensable. Our second example involves a mistranslation that could result in a misunderstanding. The term Spülmaschinenkorb consists of the words “dishwasher” + “basket”. This time a Google image search is the most helpful way to establish that what is intended is what English would describe as a “dishwasher rack”, i.e. the main section where plates, bowls etc. are loaded rather than the (cutlery) basket, which German would usually describe as the Besteckkorb.

Sometimes an item of vocabulary can be made up of easily intelligible component parts but identifying the correct equivalent in the target language requires some additional thought. For example, German interior designers might refer to a Wohnküche, a “living kitchen”, or combined kitchen and living area. Lots of dictionary suggestions include slightly convoluted phrases involving living/kitchen area or eat-in kitchen, which misses the point as it would not be exceptional in the UK for a kitchen to have a dining table in it. The best solution I have found is open-plan kitchen, which seems superficially to be slightly different (referring primarily to the fact that the kitchen opens up onto the rest of the house) but is the closest we have to capturing the sense of a shared dining/cooking/living space.

Finally, I recently came across the term Haifischkragen translated literally as a “shark collar”. I had never heard that term, so the first thing I ask in a situation like this is “does anyone actually say this in English?”. You’ll certainly find some search engine hits, but a suspicious number are German or European sites that have been translated with varying degrees of success. More helpfully, you will also find German sites describing the precise style of the Haifisch collar, in which the points of the collar are wide apart and pointing outwards rather than straight down. A bit of research into collar design reveals this is in fact called a “cutaway collar” in English. Suddenly the hit results are up to well over a million from a few tens of thousands for the shark choice, and an image search confirms we have identified the correct style. Another great example of how some decent research can pay dividends for the quality of your translation.

About the Author

Alison Tunley

Alison is a seasoned freelance translator with over 15 years of experience, specialising in translating from German to English. Originally from Wales, she has been a Londoner for some time, and she holds a PhD in Phonetics and an MPhil in Linguistics from the University of Cambridge, where she also completed her First Class BA degree in German and Spanish… Read Full Bio

The post When the obvious translation isn’t right appeared first on Rosetta Translation.

Previously, this blog touched briefly on the importance of punctuation when reviewing translation work, especially the need to adapt punctuation style from the source language style to your target language. But this topic is worth revisiting in greater depth as it seems quite a few translators regard the typographical symbols in between words as outside their scope of work. But getting the punctuation right is essential for producing a high-quality translation.

There is no need to dwell long on straightforward orthographic punctuation differences. No translator is going to forget to convert the inverted question mark or exclamation mark used in Spanish to introduce a ¿question? or ¡emphatic statement! into the preferred style for their own language. Similarly, a translator working in English should be familiar with converting the guillemets used in some languages to mark «quotations» into the more standard “double quotation marks” or ‘single quotation marks’. In fact, entire treatise have been written on the issue of double versus single quotes, but that’s a subject for another day. And translators working on German texts will be well used to replacing the characteristic low-high quotation style „…“ with their own language’s preferred style. More subtle orthographic details such as curly versus straight quotation marks can often prompt heated typographic debate, suffice to say ensuring you adopt a consistent style within a particular text is a non-negotiable basic benchmark.

A thornier issue for the translator is the use of familiar punctuation marks in different ways between languages. And in this context, my review work suggests that translators are less confident in tinkering with the choice of punctuation. A recent flurry of German commercial and marketing texts in my inbox reveals a great fondness for breaking up sentences with an en dash or em dash, often rendered inaccurately in English with the similar-looking hyphen. This choice of punctuation is particularly common in headings „Unsere Produktneuheiten – tolle Schnäppchen“, which might be rendered in English with an intervening em dash, or just a simple colon “Our latest products — great bargains”, “Our latest products: great bargains”.

But German copywriters do not just deploy this punctuation style for dramatic, attention-grabbing headings, they sprinkle it throughout the text in a way that would not be found in an equivalent English text. The same is true for German use of the colon, which is used liberally to introduce new statements or to create an impact by breaking up the text. In most standard text, these bold punctuation breaks are best translated into English not even with an abrupt colon but with a mild-mannered comma. For example in the structure „Ob x oder y:“ followed by a main clause, English might well prefer “Whether it’s x or y, <main clause>”

Machine translation is particularly poor at handling these subtleties. In fact, in a recent passage I reviewed there were regular glaring punctuation faux pas that fell into the outright ungrammatical, such as a rogue comma introducing the words “to make your life easier” which had clearly slipped in due the German requirement to have a comma preceding “um zu” (meaning in order to). Machines should really be getting this stuff right, but the nuance of when an em dash might be better translated with a colon or comma is likely to require a human eye for a while yet.

About the Author

Alison Tunley

Alison is a seasoned freelance translator with over 15 years of experience, specialising in translating from German to English. Originally from Wales, she has been a Londoner for some time, and she holds a PhD in Phonetics and an MPhil in Linguistics from the University of Cambridge, where she also completed her First Class BA degree in German and Spanish… Read Full Bio

Image: Pixabay

The post Translating punctuation: an overlooked detail appeared first on Rosetta Translation.

Language — or rather text — played a key role in the recent high-profile departure of the president of Harvard University, Claudine Gay. The simple story is that Gay was found to have plagiarised other scholars’ work on multiple occasions both in her doctoral dissertation and in several published articles during her academic career. As the head of an institution that instructs students to “take great care to distinguish their own ideas and knowledge from information derived from sources”, once Gay’s failings on this count were uncovered, her position became untenable. But there is a more complex story that explains why this rather niche academic transgression made headline news around the world.

The story has its roots in a congressional hearing about antisemitism on US college campuses following the October 7 attacks on Israel by Hamas. In what rapidly became a viral video clip, Claudine Gay was one of three university presidents who declined to provide a simple yes/no response to a question from Republican congresswoman Elise Stefanik as to whether calling for the genocide of Jews would violate their codes of conduct on bullying and harassment. This 3-minute section of a hearing that lasted several hours prompted heated debate about antisemitism, free speech and the US First Amendment. The tone of Stefanik’s questioning made clear that she felt the responses she got were unacceptable. Others were keen to point out the hypocrisy of university policies that state “using the wrong pronouns qualifies as abuse” while arguing that “calls for genocide” required additional context to determine whether this would constitute a breach of their speech codes. Others took the opportunity to highlight the dangers of censorship and set out legal arguments in favour of free speech absolutism, essentially defending the line taken by the university presidents while not letting them off the hook on the need for consistency.

But after a flurry of interest in the boundaries of free speech, the focus shifted to another linguistic hot topic: how similar do two texts have to be before an author can reasonably be assumed to have purloined their work from someone else? In Gay’s case, amateur plagiarism experts were soon at work on various social media platforms, comparing and cross-comparing texts, but generally reaching conclusions that aligned with their own personal or political instincts. As Jonathan Bailey at Plagiarism Today wrote “the scandal quickly becomes less about the actual plagiarism, and more about judging the person who is accused of it.”

The partisan assessment of Gay’s alleged text borrowing is also reflected in the coverage of her eventual resignation. The Daily Telegraph declared her plagiarism to be evidence of “a mediocre mind trying to conjure the appearance of scholarship”. By contrast, The Guardian described the whole episode as a further example of the “rightwing’s assault on education” and suggested a “racist subtext” behind the allegations.

Politics and the culture war undoubtedly added fuel to the fire in Claudine Gay’s situation, but most instances of plagiarism (particularly in academia) play out behind the scenes. Identifying and evaluating instances of plagiarism is a slow, painstaking task. If the Claudine Gay episode has whetted your appetite for further linguistic intrigue in this area, you should check out the work of self-appointed plagiarism super-sleuth Michael Dougherty. Interestingly, he suggests that academic plagiarism is typically a recurrent habit. The cases he discovers tend not to occur in isolation. Once tempted down this path, it is apparently somewhat addictive. And when not being used as a battering ram in the culture war, Dougherty makes a compelling case that caring about plagiarism really matters if we are to develop a “trustworthy body of published scholarship”.

About the Author

Alison Tunley

Alison is a seasoned freelance translator with over 15 years of experience, specialising in translating from German to English. Originally from Wales, she has been a Londoner for some time, and she holds a PhD in Phonetics and an MPhil in Linguistics from the University of Cambridge, where she also completed her First Class BA degree in German and Spanish… Read Full Bio

The post Plagiarism: when language and politics collide appeared first on Rosetta Translation.

In 2014, the BBC’s Panorama programme reported on what was described as widespread cheating in English language tests that formed part of the international student visa approval process by the UK Home Office. This complex legal immigration story has been back in the news recently as new evidence has been put forward by people who say that they have been falsely accused of fraud in the tests.

The Guardian has a useful explainer on the backdrop to the case, which involved roughly 35,000 students having their visas revoked, 2,500 being deported and a further 7,200 leaving the UK after being told they faced arrest or detention. Most of the others were unable to complete their courses, resulting in the loss of many thousands of pounds paid in student fees.

There is no question that some cheating did occur. The original Panorama programme obtained undercover footage of an East London test centre providing candidates with “a paid cheat or proxy, who spoke good English”. Evidence was presented in court of financial bribes paid by some students to people working at test centres, and several people served prison sentences for facilitating fraudulent test submissions.

However, campaigners have always claimed that the alleged scale of the problem involves numbers that are simply implausible. A review by the company who administered the tests identified a deception rate of 58% in the spoken part of the test, with a further 39% of tests identified as ‘questionable’. In other words, 97% of spoken tests were flagged as suspicious. As the BBC reported in 2022, “If that had been accurate, it would have represented the largest exam cheating scandal in British history.” Labour MP Stephen Timms has described unfounded allegations of fraud as “a grave injustice” and criticised the Conservative government for failing to act when doubts about the evidence of cheating emerged.

The problems with the evidence of cheating are interesting from a linguistic perspective because the company used voice recognition technology (with some additional reviews by human listeners) to analyse the spoken test data and flag potential cases of fraud. The Home Office appears to have taken this evidence at face value – anyone whose test was flagged as ‘invalid’ (58% of all tests) could expect to have their visa cancelled. But the government’s confidence in the evidence of cheating has not always withstood closer scrutiny. Several thousand people have won immigration appeals, and in 2019 immigration barrister Paul Turner was reported as saying “the courts are finding that an awful lot of people did not cheat”.

A 2019 report by the National Audit Office found that the Home Office lacked the “expertise to validate the results” and failed to get an “expert opinion on the quality of the voice recognition evidence”. In some cases, candidates may have taken the spoken test in person only to have their legitimate test recording subsequently replaced by a different recording, without any awareness of this deception taking place.

The government insist it is vital to “allow these legal processes to run their course”. However, the recent spotlight on miscarriages of justice in the Post Office scandal means there is mounting pressure on the Home Office to expedite a resolution for those whose visa status is still under dispute.

About the Author

Alison Tunley

Alison is a seasoned freelance translator with over 15 years of experience, specialising in translating from German to English. Originally from Wales, she has been a Londoner for some time, and she holds a PhD in Phonetics and an MPhil in Linguistics from the University of Cambridge, where she also completed her First Class BA degree in German and Spanish… Read Full Bio

Image: Unsplash

The post The great English test scandal or another miscarriage of justice? appeared first on Rosetta Translation.

This blog previously described the pleasure a translator can find in perusing multilingual instructions for a new domestic appliance, which often feature some entertainingly dismal translations. Having said that, the consequences of attempting to dodge translation difficulties by providing an illustration-only user manual suggest manufacturers are best advised to stick with providing written  instructions even if that incurs an additional cost. At any rate, the recent sudden demise of our dishwasher (apparently after being chewed beyond repair by a mouse) meant the arrival of a full set of translated instructions for the new machine. Even better, the replacement was a Bosch appliance, so the source content would have been written in German, the language I know from my everyday translation work. I settled down with a mug of tea and a couple of biscuits to enjoy the user guide. So imagine my surprise — and a certain amount of disappointment — as page after page was presented in pretty much impeccable English.

Hats off to the manufacturer, I scoured the text for the usual signs of sub-par translation and tell-tale traces of the original language, but there was virtually nothing even a picky proofreader could pounce on. The sole translation-related entertainment for my afternoon tea break came late on in the user guide, where there was a temporary lapse into Germanified English with the advice: “It is recommended adding less detergent to the detergent dispenser than for a full machine load.” Grim garbled syntax and unnatural phrasing. But slim pickings in terms of my hoped for round-up of translation bloopers. I scoured the text again and had a brief chuckle at the unfortunate double meaning of “may” (as in “have the potential to” versus “are permitted to”) in “Children may put packaging material over their heads or wrap themselves up in it and suffocate”.

At this point, I had to admit defeat and instead turned to a little list I’d been keeping of other unfortunate ambiguous turns of phrase. And that’s how I’ll round up this week’s blog. First, we have the delightfully macabre potential of misinterpreting a sign next to a body of water informing people:

CROCODILES
DO NOT SWIM HERE

With thanks to Jonathan Brown on X/Twitter for flagging that up as an entertaining example for a statutory interpretation class, although clearly you don’t need to be a lawyer to enjoy the semantic possibilities thrown up here. And finally, since lawyers obviously have an eye for this kind of linguistic slip-up, we have an absolute gem from Scott Wortley citing a US statute containing the edict: “No-one shall carry any dangerous weapon upon the public highway except for the purpose of killing a noxious animal or a policemen in the execution of his duty.”

About the Author

Alison Tunley

Alison is a seasoned freelance translator with over 15 years of experience, specialising in translating from German to English. Originally from Wales, she has been a Londoner for some time, and she holds a PhD in Phonetics and an MPhil in Linguistics from the University of Cambridge, where she also completed her First Class BA degree in German and Spanish… Read Full Bio

Image: Unsplash

The post Dishwashers and double meanings appeared first on Rosetta Translation.

One of the greatest pleasures in working with language every day is the appreciation you develop for neat turns of phrase or vocabulary possibilities in your non-native language, so this week’s blog brings you a little collection of “Germanisms” that have recently brought me delight.

We begin with the application of “Wolf” as a suffix in various contexts, usually denoting some kind of machine presumably attributed with wolflike properties and engaging in wolfish tasks. Where an English office might be equipped with a mundane paper shredder, its equivalent in Germany offers up a Reißwolf, Papierwolf or Aktenwolf (literally, a ripping, paper or document wolf), although a less a dramatic option is also available to Germans in the form of the prosaic Aktenvernichter (document destroyer). In the kitchen, you might find yourself using a Fleischwolf (meat wolf): how infinitely more exciting than deploying a mincer to shred the beef for your lasagne or burger. And if we head out to a construction site in Germany, there might be the need for a Steinwolf (stone wolf), used to lift and move heavy stones into position, and referred to somewhat mysteriously in English as a lewis.

As well as granting lupine characteristics to various bits of equipment, German gives us the incredibly vivid Hautwolf (skin wolf) to refer to skin chafing. And, although not a standard dictionary entry, I enjoyed the image conjured up by Sofawolf — to refer to a dog with a tendency to be something of a couch potato. By contrast, the German Leitwolf (lead wolf) is a common term for the leader of the pack, not just out in the wilderness but also more figuratively in sporting jargon when referring to an alpha leader. And taking us full circle to combine sport and machinery, the top hit if you enter Leitwolf in a search engine is a massive snow machine, which in turn lead to the discovery of the hitherto unknown to me English terms snow groomer and piste basher. Once you start looking, there are lexical delights to be discovered everywhere!

On other occasions, the pleasure to be found in particular turns of phrase is derived from the gap they highlight in your own language’s lexical possibilities. Why doesn’t English have an equivalent to drehfreudig (turn + happy) to conjure up the joy of being able to execute turns, rotations or other twisting movements? In the text I happened to be working on, this word was neatly deployed to describe the delightful manoeuvrability of a “turn-happy” surfboard. Despite my best efforts, the English translation was nowhere near as pithy or evocative.

Similarly, I found myself marvelling at German kurzweilig (short + while), another of my favourite turns of phrase, which means entertaining or amusing, because of the way it contrasts so beautifully with its antonym langweilig (long + while), meaning boring. Nothing in English quite so neatly captures the way time flies when you are having fun and drags when life is dull. This also reminded me of the time my brother was staying with a German exchange family and, while urging them to speak more slowly so that he had some hope of following the conversation, muddled the German for slow (langsam) with the word for boring (langweilig) and spent an evening repeatedly telling his bemused hosts that they were langweilig. It’s a good job he didn’t go into the diplomatic service.

About the Author

Alison Tunley

Alison is a seasoned freelance translator with over 15 years of experience, specialising in translating from German to English. Originally from Wales, she has been a Londoner for some time, and she holds a PhD in Phonetics and an MPhil in Linguistics from the University of Cambridge, where she also completed her First Class BA degree in German and Spanish… Read Full Bio

Image source: Pixabay.com

The post Delightful turns of phrase appeared first on Rosetta Translation.

We’ve had a New Zealand visitor with us for the last few months, which has provided a great opportunity to revel in regional linguistic differences, in the guise of New Zealand slang. In the UK, our main exposure to dialectal variation is through interactions with US media and culture. So, although I was familiar with the different accent in New Zealand English, I was much less aware of a whole array of vocabulary differences.

Perhaps the most obvious feature was our guest’s tendency to end sentences with ‘eh’, an utterance roughly equivalent to UK ‘right?’ or ‘isn’t it?’. This is what is described as a sentence-final particle, words or phrases that occur at the end of a sentence and do not really carry any meaning but are primarily used to mark the end of the utterance. Although there’s potentially an invitation for the other person in the conversation to dive in and offer enthusiastic agreement (or disagreement), this isn’t necessary or even common. If anything, my sense is that the New Zealand ‘eh’ is even less of an invitation to respond than its UK equivalents. This hunch is supported by a 1994 study by Miriam Meyerhoff, suggesting that this word does not generally function as a clarification device. (There is also apparently a heated debate over the correct spelling, but that is a whole other story.)

Before the arrival of our Kiwi house guest, I had come across the word ‘smoko’ referring to a cigarette (or ciggy) break but I had never heard it used for a work break in which no nicotine products are consumed. Again, this turns out not to be a linguistic quirk peculiar to our visitor, but is indicative of a broader application of this term among young New Zealanders to refer to any work break, even if all you consume is a cup of tea.

And while we are on the topic of idiolects (an individual’s use of language), for a long while I assumed that our guest’s liberal use of the word ‘wee’– meaning small and applied to anything and everything from naps and snacks to trips and walks —was most likely a one-off personal habit mysteriously acquired from the Scottish. Then I came across a second New Zealander being interviewed on a podcast and she did the same thing. Sure enough, a quick online search revealed this is another widespread Kiwi-ism.

Mealtime conversations are now studded with utterances like ‘sweet as’, a generic term indicating approval, or describing something in glowing terms, or a stand-alone expression to say: ‘that’s fine with me’. Then there is ‘stoked’ to show excitement or happiness. But my absolute favourite bit of New Zealand slang is undoubtedly the ‘wop-wops’ meaning remote countryside, or as we would put it far less poetically in the UK ‘the back of beyond’.

About the Author

Alison Tunley

Alison is a seasoned freelance translator with over 15 years of experience, specialising in translating from German to English. Originally from Wales, she has been a Londoner for some time, and she holds a PhD in Phonetics and an MPhil in Linguistics from the University of Cambridge, where she also completed her First Class BA degree in German and Spanish… Read Full Bio

Image: Pixabay

The post Stoked about New Zealand slang, eh appeared first on Rosetta Translation.

One of the benefits of doing regular review work as a translator is that it offers useful reminders of things to watch out for in your own translation tasks. It is always easier to spot errors or stylistic glitches in someone else’s work, so this is a great opportunity to draw up a generic checklist of potential pitfalls to avoid. Most of these are obvious but having them listed explicitly in a proofreading checklist makes them easier to spot when reading through text that you have worked on yourself. In Part I the focus is on vocabulary choices; Part II will delve into grammatical and stylistic flaws to look out for.

Ditch the dictionary

Most words offer a variety of translation options. The crucial question to ask is does the chosen word make sense in this context? It’s surprising how often a translation choice is made that is completely illogical, and often the fault can be traced back to an over-reliance on dictionary definitions. A text involving promotional materials for a conference, for example, translated the German Einspieler as interludes, which is likely to baffle the reader when what was meant are film clips or short videos. Similarly, the description of a conference session in German as überzogen requires the translator to go beyond standard dictionary options such as overdone, excessive and overblown because what was meant in this particular context was a session that overruns, i.e. fails to stick to the schedule.

Don’t be fooled by false friends

These overlap with the need to ditch the dictionary but are so common they deserve a checklist item of their own. Overly literal vocabulary choices are sometimes difficult to spot in your own text when you are familiar with the source language, but these are usually glaringly obvious to a native speaker reading the text in isolation. This blog has touched previously on my personal bugbear about the translation of German Variant with English variant, a seemingly endless source of clunky translation examples. Consider the phrase “Dazu bieten wir viele Varianten an”. The meaning might be clear if translated as “We offer many variants for this”, but a much more elegant phrasing would be something like, “We offer lots of options with this in mind”.

Once again, context is everything when it comes to vocabulary choices. While the German Podium might often be translated entirely appropriately as English podium, in the context of a conference panel discussion (Podiumsdiskussion) the association with an Olympic medal ceremony is distracting.

One word or two

Let’s be honest, we all struggle at times with these, and for good reason. There is a natural evolution from two separate words to one (often via a hyphenated option). Check out the Google ngram viewer for hair dryer and hairdryer (the latter has been rising steadily over the last couple of decades, recently overtaking the two-word option). The best approach for the one-word versus two-word dilemma is often an internet search or ngram to see which option is prevailing. A recent review task had goose bumps as separate words, but a quick internet search suggests almost ten times as many hits for the single word variant goosebumps.

Proofreading Checklist Part II: Grammatical Glitches

In Part II of our proofreading checklist, we run through some obvious grammatical glitches that can afflict translated text.

Word order

Sticking ruthlessly to the word order in the source text can result in stylistic oddities. A text I recently reviewed contained the German phrase emotionale Negativmomente, and my instinct was that the phrase sounds rather odd when translated as emotional negative moments and is better reordered as negative emotional moments. A quick Google search confirms that hunch, with zero hits for the former compared with a couple of thousand for the latter. Grammatical order is not always explicable or logical, but in this case my hunch is that while you can clearly have an emotional moment that is either negative or positive, I am not sure how you could have a negative moment that does not involve emotion. (The same logic does not appear to apply to the German!).

Clunky phrasing as part of your proofreading checklist

Jarringly inelegant phrasing is usually a sign that the translator has been overly influenced by the source language. For example, the German “Der Austausch zwischendurch ist goldwert” rendered as “The exchange in between is worth its weight in gold” rather than a more idiomatic rephrasing such as “Occasional conversations are worth their weight in gold”. These are perhaps best captured by repeatedly asking yourself whether a native speaker would ever express themselves this way. Another good trick is to explain out loud whatever message is being communicated, often that forces you to focus on the substance of the text without the tell-tale unorthodox phrasing.

Definite/indefinite articles

This is a common difference between languages and a surprisingly common stylistic flaw in translation given how easy it is to fix. For example, the German “Ein gelungenes Lichtdesign” sounds odd when translated literally as “A successful lighting design” and is much more likely to be written in English without the indefinite article, “Successful lighting design”.

Avoid tautology, even if they do it in the original

German seems to tolerate repetition within a sentence in a way that English does not, commonly throwing in a redundant auch (also/too) following another word with essentially the same meaning, e.g. zudem. Another good example of this cropped up in a recent review where the German sentence described the importance of “sorgfältige Planung …. in Vorfeld” which translates literally as “careful planning in advance”. This begs the question what kind of planning is not done in advance? Once planning is mentioned in English, the information provided by in advance is redundant and is best removed. Translated content should be subject to the same stylistic standards that would apply to any text, and meaningless repetition is unlikely to slip past an eagle-eyed editor.

Punctuation as part of your proofreading checklist

Languages differ in their punctuation style, and it is easy for the translator to be overly influenced by the source text. The proofreading phase is a chance to eradicate “foreign” punctuation influence. In German texts, it is common to find excessive use of the em dash, where English might prefer a simple comma. German paragraphs also sometimes end with a colon to indicate that what follows is linked to the previous text. This looks odd in English, where a full stop is generally expected if there is an intervening paragraph break.

Using reviewing tasks as a chance to build up your own personal proofreading checklist is an invaluable way to improve the quality of your translation and make sure you always deliver the most professional translation services possible.

About the Author

Alison Tunley

Alison is a seasoned freelance translator with over 15 years of experience, specialising in translating from German to English. Originally from Wales, she has been a Londoner for some time, and she holds a PhD in Phonetics and an MPhil in Linguistics from the University of Cambridge, where she also completed her First Class BA degree in German and Spanish… Read Full Bio

Images: Unsplash  Unsplash

The post Proofreading prompts appeared first on Rosetta Translation.

One of the first things I noticed many moons ago when working as an au pair in Germany, was the way the definite article was frequently stuck in front of people’s names “Die Petra …”, “Der Klaus …” etc. With certain regional variations, this definite article plus name formulation crops up frequently in spoken conversation and has an informal tone. This distinctive usage sounds very odd or even amusing to English ears, but until recently I did not know it had a name. Use of the definite article in this way is called the onymic article and its usage is broader than simply referring to third-party individuals.

Earlier forms of German applied an article (and different genders) to the names of countries, so Deutschland would have been das Deutschland, and Dänemark would have been die Dänemark. Today, most of these articles have vanished, although there are a few notable exceptions as in die Schweiz (Switzerland), der Irak (Iraq), and die Ukraine (Ukraine).

The difference in functional application of definite articles between languages — and the perils of getting it wrong — is the theme of an article by Mirjam Schmuck, who describes how Donald Trump’s use of the definite article before the phrase “African Americans” prompted accusations of racism for a usage that “would probably have gone unnoticed in German”. Such was the outrage in the USA that screenwriter and author Shonda Rhimes did not even need to reference Trump in a tweet to her 1.9 million followers saying, “I REALLY need him to stop calling me ‘THE African-Americans’ because ARE YOU KIDDING ME?”

Returning to the use of definite article with individual names, Schmuck suggests the usage is most common in southern German dialects, including Swiss German and Austrian-Bavarian. By contrast, she suggests that use of the definite article with a name might have a “derogatory connotation” in the north and remains uncommon, with central German representing a transitional area between these two preferred styles. The definite article can also be used with someone’s full name, as demonstrated in an article documenting different usages by the Leibniz-Institut für Deutsche Sprache. One example they provide includes a passage of reported speech in the newspaper Mannheimer Morgen, in which the German prime minister is referred to with a preceding definite article, “wir gehen davon aus, daß die Angela Merkel ihr Weisungsrecht nutzen wird” (“we assume that [the] Angela Merkel will exercise her right of instruction”).

Why is this feature not simply referred to as a definite article with an unusual function? Damaris Nübling offers an explanation “As names are always inherently definite, the function of this article cannot be to mark definiteness”. Instead, the onymic article is regarded as being part of the name: in some cases, it is obligatory, in other cases — as with personal names — it is more of a regional quirk.

About the Author

Alison Tunley

Alison is a seasoned freelance translator with over 15 years of experience, specialising in translating from German to English. Originally from Wales, she has been a Londoner for some time, and she holds a PhD in Phonetics and an MPhil in Linguistics from the University of Cambridge, where she also completed her First Class BA degree in German and Spanish… Read Full Bio

Image: Unsplash

The post Definite articles and personal names appeared first on Rosetta Translation.

My ever-expanding list of language topics I should know more about has long since had sign language on it, and my interest increased when my middle daughter selected a university credit in British Sign Language as part of her liberal arts degree. So I was primed to notice a recent headline about the UK’s first deaf scholar in the field of deaf studies and sign language studies.

Annelies Kusters is now a professor at Heriot-Watt University’s department of languages and intercultural studies. She has been studying the everyday interactions of deaf people all around the world for almost two decades, with research projects taking her to a variety of countries in Europe, South America, India and Africa. Her PhD examined a community in Ghana, where a high rate of hereditary deafness has prompted the creation of a new sign language to facilitate communication between deaf and hearing people.

This interest in pragmatic language creation ties in neatly with some of her subsequent work on what she describes as ‘multimodal languaging’, a range of techniques used to overcome communication barriers between deaf and hearing people, and to accommodate varying degrees of fluency in a shared language such as sign language. The concept of translanguaging was originally applied to spoken language and captured the way ‘bilinguals and multilinguals use their linguistic resources to make sense of and interact with the world around them’.

It is not surprising that the concept of translanguaging has been so readily applied within sign language studies because deaf people regularly have to tackle spaces where their own language is not understood or available as a means of communication. A fascinating blog post at Mobile Deaf suggests there may be a need for caution if the concept of translanguaging is exploited to inhibit the promotion and protection of fully-fledged signing languages. The descriptive power of the translanguaging concept is not denied, it is acknowledged that ‘translanguaging is central to the deaf experience’. But the blog explores how translanguaging approaches could be counterproductive particularly in educational or legal settings if used to legitimise mixed modes of communication, some of which may simply be inaccessible to someone with hearing loss. The result could be ‘deaf people growing up with limited natural language input and perpetuating the use of non-fluent signers in deaf education settings’. As an example of such a threat, the blog cites the use of a non-fluent signing teacher who complements her limited signing with spoken language or other modes of communication. As well as potentially deploying strategies that are inaccessible to the deaf students in the class, the non-fluent teacher deprives students of exposure to a fully developed, rich sign language.

In other words, the authors suggest there is a tension between the ‘messy’ reality of everyday communication adopted for pragmatic reasons and the need to advocate for protection of minority languages such as sign language.

It would be wrong to end this post and not refer to the great work done for raising awareness for sign languages and deaf communities by the International Day of Sign Languages, celebrated each year on 23 September.

About the Author

Alison Tunley

Alison is a seasoned freelance translator with over 15 years of experience, specialising in translating from German to English. Originally from Wales, she has been a Londoner for some time, and she holds a PhD in Phonetics and an MPhil in Linguistics from the University of Cambridge, where she also completed her First Class BA degree in German and Spanish… Read Full Bio

Image source: Pixabay.com

The post Sign language and translanguaging among deaf signers appeared first on Rosetta Translation.

Back in 2018 Rhodri Williams, the outgoing director of Ofcom Wales, warned that the growth of streaming services such as Netflix could have a detrimental impact on original language content aimed at a “geographically-specific audience”. The power of the market means that global players are most interested in content that is accessible to the widest possible audience, and Williams noted that this would “obviously […] be in English.”

This warning from five years ago is echoed in a report on Broadcasting in Wales, published this year by the Welsh Affairs Committee. The threat to public service broadcasters posed by on-demand streaming services has a particular resonance in Wales because of the prominent role played by the Welsh language television channel in revitalising the language since its launch in 1982. A review produced by the TV station reported a 10% rise in the number of Welsh speakers in Wales since it began broadcasting, and although it is hard to quantify the precise contribution made by the channel, there is no doubt that the availability of entertainment and information in Welsh has played a part in ensuring this is an “active, vital, everyday language”.

As someone living in England with minimal access to Welsh language resources, it is pleasing to see the Welsh Affairs Committee report emphasise the importance of retaining sports coverage with Welsh commentary on free-to-air services. Tuning in to watch the Wales football team’s international fixtures is one of my regular forays into Welsh language content. My rusty Welsh skills struggle to keep pace with the commentators, but occasional stock phrases pop up and my husband now also enjoys shouting “chwarae teg” — fair play — at the television. And the team’s recent momentous win against Croatia has cemented the words “cadw eu gobeithion yn fyw” — keeping their (Euro qualification) hopes alive — in my expanding mental Welsh lexicon.

The commercial incentives driving language content on streaming services are also reflected in the relatively limited language choices offered by the voice-activated devices increasingly used to navigate the digital world. In written evidence to the Digital Culture, Media and Sport Committee on ‘The future of public service broadcasting’ in 2020, Dr Caitriona Noonan notes that “the digital ecology is overwhelming anglophone and this has direct implications for the discoverability of non-anglophone content, especially minority languages”. Her statement references a 2020 survey of the most popular smart speakers on the market, revealing that Siri at that time offered the highest number of languages (21) while Amazon’s Alexa offered just 8.

Finally, although Duolingo often offers a proud reminder of its courses in minority languages when you log in to the app, this may ring somewhat hollow if its recent decision to ‘pause’ its Welsh language content is anything to go by. Welsh language learners don’t need to panic just yet as the app will continue to offer a course in Welsh, but with no updates to the teaching materials planned this minority language will inevitably end up playing second fiddle to more popular options.

About the Author

Alison Tunley

Alison is a seasoned freelance translator with over 15 years of experience, specialising in translating from German to English. Originally from Wales, she has been a Londoner for some time, and she holds a PhD in Phonetics and an MPhil in Linguistics from the University of Cambridge, where she also completed her First Class BA degree in German and Spanish… Read Full Bio

The post Market forces and minority languages in the Welsh digital landscape appeared first on Rosetta Translation.

Every translator understands that dictionaries have their limits when it comes to selecting the right word. A fascinating example of this cropped up recently in a piece I was working on for a German financial services company. The topic was cryptocurrencies and particularly the evolving technologies in this rapidly changing field. At one point, the text referred to the “Adaption neuer Technologien” and the context seemed to suggest that the intended meaning was the “adoption of new technologies” but the usual translation for the German word Adaption is adaptation or adaption. And that would give the text a very different meaning, suggesting the modification or adjustment of new technologies rather than their take-up or use. So I began to dig a bit deeper.

The first thing I did was to check all the dictionaries I could find to see if the German word Adaption had a less common, alternative meaning denoting adoption. None of the usual online resources (dict.cc, Linguee, Reverso, Duolingo) suggested any such additional sub-definition. So I grabbed my dusty Collins hardback off the shelves, but again the sole suggested meaning for German Adaption is the English word adaptation. This dictionary also notes the common alternative spelling Adaptation, and my edition of the monolingual German dictionary Wahrig also notes this as an alternative spelling of the same word. And once again, the explanatory definitions in German are all to do with Anpassung (adjustment) or Umarbeitung (reworking), with not a hint that the word could also have an additional meaning.

At this point, I decided that the most likely explanation for the German text was a simple typographic error. A finger fumble inserting an ‘a’ instead of an ‘o’ could easily account for the appearance of Adaption rather than Adoption. But then I came across the same ‘typo’ a second time. The likelihood of an identical mistake slipping through twice in an otherwise flawless and carefully proofed document seemed remote. So I resumed my hunt for an explanation with various search strings specifically looking for uses of this term in the financial sector. This led to a somewhat helpful blog post explaining the difference between Adaption and Adoption in German, complete with references to the authoritative German dictionary Duden. The trouble is that this simply underscored the fact that these words do have different meanings in German, entirely in line with my own dictionary research.

But the fact that such an article existed to clarify the difference between these words was the first clue that there might be some confusion here. And a second article confirmed those suspicions. In the realm of cryptocurrency particularly, much of the terminology is dominated by English, including use of the word adoption to refer to the take-up or use of new technologies. Strictly speaking, German should use the same word, but perhaps the equivalent German word Adoption has stronger connotations with the sense of adopting a child. Admittedly, Duden gives a more figurative example of usage “die amerikanische Lebensform adoptieren” (adopting the American lifestyle), but perhaps such usage is relatively rare. Whatever the reason, it seems pretty clear that this particular linguistic borrowing from English is being routinely mangled in the cryptocurrency context.

All of which led to the reassuring conclusion that my initial instincts about the intended meaning of the word were correct. And strictly speaking the German text did contain an error. Perhaps at some point the error will be so widespread that dictionary definitions will be updated to reflect this new usage.

About the Author

Alison Tunley

Alison is a seasoned freelance translator with over 15 years of experience, specialising in translating from German to English. Originally from Wales, she has been a Londoner for some time, and she holds a PhD in Phonetics and an MPhil in Linguistics from the University of Cambridge, where she also completed her First Class BA degree in German and Spanish… Read Full Bio

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Words do not have neat one-to-one mappings between languages. You do not need to be a very advanced language learner to be aware of that phenomenon, so it’s surprising how often this seems to trip up the unwitting translator. For example, German legal documents frequently distinguish between Schriftform and Textform, both of which refer to written texts of some kind. Both terms are often translated simply as “written form” in English, or alternatively as “text form”, which has pretty much the same meaning. But at least in some contexts, the German terms have a distinct sense that is important to convey.

An article by German legal firm adjuga makes this distinction clear, explaining that while the legal requirement for an instruction to be conveyed in Schriftform precludes the use of photocopied, fax or email instructions due to the absence of an in-person signature, a reference to Textform encompasses any non-verbal forms of communication. In other words, in a legal context Schriftform has a narrower sense than the English written form, which encompasses anything in writing. The common literal translation text form for Textform also fails to convey the intended distinction.

In German texts which specify both these options as legitimate forms of communication e.g. in a contract permitting changes to be made “schriftlich, mündlich, in Textform (E-Mail, Fax …)” the two terms can simply be combined in the English translation, for example by translating the text as “in writing (including email or fax), verbally …”. Here, two lexical items in German map onto one in the English. There is simply no need in English to find a second word in order to have the same number of items in the list as the German. The correct meaning is conveyed with the single item “written form”, helped along with the clarifying context in brackets.

On the other hand, if the intended purpose of the German text is to make different provisions depending on the nature of the written communication, the English will likely need to add explanatory text to ensure the reader understands precisely what forms of communication are permitted. Just because a translation works in one context does not make it acceptable in another. In fact the issue of whether written form could be construed as requiring some form of paper record or personal signature has helpfully been tested in the UK High Court (in C&S Associates v Enterprise Insurance). In this case, the contract stated that changes would only be effective if “made in writing and signed by or on behalf of each of the parties”. The judge ruled “I see no reason […] why documents in electronic form, in particular an exchange of emails, signed on behalf of both parties should not satisfy the requirements of the clause”.

In other words, “in writing” can include emails. And “signed” can include electronic email signatures. Since English does not have an equivalent to the pithy German Schriftform, you will need to spell this out explicitly if the intention is that writing should not include email or that signature refers to a physical manuscript signature, company seal or similar.

About the Author

Alison Tunley

Alison is a seasoned freelance translator with over 15 years of experience, specialising in translating from German to English. Originally from Wales, she has been a Londoner for some time, and she holds a PhD in Phonetics and an MPhil in Linguistics from the University of Cambridge, where she also completed her First Class BA degree in German and Spanish… Read Full Bio

Image source: Pixabay.com

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So, when a German text describes the same outfit in consecutive sentences as hauteng, körperbetonend/körperbetont, körpernah and eng anliegend, the English translator should have no qualms about the fact that figure-hugging, skin-tight and close-fitting are not exactly adding anything new to the consumer’s understanding of the garment.

Similarly, German fashion texts like to tell you in as many ways as possible that the clothing you are contemplating buying is comfortable. The marketeers throw in words like bequem, komfortabel, angenehmes Tragegefühl, and Tragekomfort. Here the English translator is at a definite disadvantage and clumsy attempts to describe a “pleasant wearing feeling” are not going to win you any translation plaudits. One garment in a recent project was described in a single sentence as both “bequem und komfortabel” and I’m not convinced a German speaker could tell you what specific additional information is being conveyed by having two adjectives rather than one.

While we are on the subject of comfort, when translating the German phrase “fühlt sich weich auf der Haut an”, it is usually sufficient in English to say that something “feels soft”. Adding “against the skin” is ridiculous; after all, where else would it feel soft? Maybe Germans can detect softness in some other way, but I doubt it. At any rate, if you see the phrase “feels soft against the skin” there is a good chance it has been translated from German.

Sometimes it feels as though the copywriter has been tasked with hitting a word count rather than capturing novel product characteristics. Repeated references to a garment being lässig, leger, relaxt, sportiv essentially just tell the reader this is something designed for relaxed or informal wear. And it’s worth noting again that garments described in German as sportiv often have absolutely nothing to do with athletic activity or technical sports gear.

And finally, a plea to English translators, the phrase “tone in tone” is worse than vacuous repetition; it is meaningless to an English-language consumer. The German “Ton in Ton” refers to a monochrome look, often playing with subtly different shades of the same colour. There is no direct equivalent phrase in English, so the way you convey the intended meaning will depend on context. Sometimes monochrome is a good choice, but if the emphasis is on contrasting shades within the same colour family, a longer description may be necessary.

About the Author

Alison Tunley

Alison is a seasoned freelance translator with over 15 years of experience, specialising in translating from German to English. Originally from Wales, she has been a Londoner for some time, and she holds a PhD in Phonetics and an MPhil in Linguistics from the University of Cambridge, where she also completed her First Class BA degree in German and Spanish… Read Full Bio

Photo by Burgess Milner on Unsplash

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A few years ago, my eldest daughter and I set ourselves the task of hiking the North Downs Way, a long distance trail which takes walkers from Farnham to Dover via the Surrey Hills and over the Kent Downs. The aim was to do a couple of days at time, gradually covering the 153 miles over a period of years. Our project got rather abandoned during Covid but was finally picked up again this autumn and, as we pottered down to our starting point, I found myself wondering aloud why it is called the downs when the key feature is the very opposite, namely a ridge of hills. The answer should have been obvious to someone fascinated by etymology. The word downs is derived from Old English dūn, meaning “hill”.

This discovery prompted another penny drop moment, namely that the English word dune has similar origins. In this case, the historical lexicology suggests the word may be in part a dialectal variant of down and partially a linguistic borrowing with roots in Old French (dune), Middle Dutch (dūne) or Middle Low German (dûne), all of which ultimately go back to Proto-West Germanic *dūn, probably derived from Gaulish dunum (“hill”), from Proto-Celtic *dūnom (“stronghold, rampart”). This immediately took me to the modern-day Welsh word dinas, meaning “city” derived from din, an obsolete word for fort or stronghold (and yes, derived from the same Proto-Celtic root *dūnom). In the space of just a couple of minutes it was like uncovering an epic linguistic puzzle. Suffice to say my daughter did not quite share my enthusiasm and was almost relieved when Box Hill hoved into view to save her from my lecture on the treasure trove of historical linguistics.

As we puffed and panted our way up the aforementioned hill (which by the way apparently owes it name to ancient box woodlands rather than rectangular crates or other packing), another thought occurred to me, which is the way geographical locations tend to hang on to their names while language and culture shifts around them. As a result, the names of places and physical features offer a kind of etymological treasure trove where remnants of long-lost linguistic features linger on.

We finished that day’s walk in the historic village of Merstham, now bordered by the rather modern features of the M25 and M23. The classic -ham suffix that features in so many British place names has a dual etymological origin reflecting the convergence of two Old English terms: hām meaning “home, farm, estate” and hamm meaning “enclosure”. A reference to ‘Mearsoetham’ can be dated back to AD 947 and is translated rather poetically as ‘dwelling of the people of the marsh’. There was no evidence of marshland as we trotted in and out of the village for much needed food supplies, but how lovely to have the original landscape captured in the name even as the surroundings have changed beyond all recognition in the intervening centuries.

About the Author

Alison Tunley

Alison is a seasoned freelance translator with over 15 years of experience, specialising in translating from German to English. Originally from Wales, she has been a Londoner for some time, and she holds a PhD in Phonetics and an MPhil in Linguistics from the University of Cambridge, where she also completed her First Class BA degree in German and Spanish… Read Full Bio

Photo by GeoJango Maps on Unsplash

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Yorkshire dialects are an endangered species

In the grand tradition of “things aren’t what they used to be”, discussions of globalisation and an increasingly mobile and interconnected world regularly bemoan the detrimental impact on linguistic diversity. The negative ramifications range from the annihilation of entire languages, allegedly “disappearing faster than species” to the loss of individual dialects, leading to journalists warning “northern children of the future will speak like reet southern softies”. The common theme in these  analyses is the loss of local identity & culture and thus a decline in diversity, so it is heartening to see recent coverage of an attempt to combat this linguistic homogenisation by supporting Yorkshire dialects.

Recent efforts to preserve Yorkshire dialects

In September/October this year, the Yorkshire Dialect Society ran a six week course called “Let’s talk Tyke” (where Tyke indicates a person from Yorkshire) aimed at exploring and helping preserve Yorkshire dialects. The Guardian dispatched its North of England correspondent to find out what motivated participants to attend. The course organisers admit most of their clientele are older, although they are also thinking about hosting weekend classes that might be more accessible to a younger cohort. So there is an understandable sense of nostalgia about the enterprise, an attempt to retain a link to previous generations and preserve their way of speaking before it is lost forever.

Local dialects used to be looked down upon

Perhaps there are some similarities here to the appeal that genealogy and mapping family histories holds for older people. Learning your ancestral dialect offers a link to the past that may be most appreciated as you grow older yourself. One of the participants reflects on how speaking in local dialect was discouraged when she grew up “… it was drummed out of us and it was all Queen’s English.” This idea that you must speak in a particular way in order to succeed seems so at odds with our 21^st century appreciation of diversity and the richness of our cultural heritage, it is hard to imagine the impact these attitudes will have had on a whole generation who might otherwise have inherited and then passed on their parents’ way of speech. Researchers comparing data from the 1950s and a 2016 English Dialect survey suggest this dialectal loss is very real, concluding that “children in the north are increasingly using southern pronunciations”. This trend is undoubtedly true for Yorkshire dialects.

Researching local dialects can be rewarding

For linguists, an intriguing aspect of dialect is the insight it gives us into the origins of our current way of speaking. In the case of Yorkshire dialect, there are close connections with its Old Norse roots, and this in turn reflects modern Scandinavian languages in many cases. These historical echoes are most evident in items of vocabulary, barn (barn) – child, beck (beck) – stream, lug (lugge) – pull/carry. But a few have transferred into a grammatical structures, such as the retention of earlier forms of English in some past tense formations gat/getten (got) and putten (put). And if your appetite has been whetted for some Yorkshire-isms, the Yorkshire Evening Post has a delightful interview with course tutor, Rod Dimbleby, in which he give examples of the kinds of phrases his students will be learning.

About the Author

Alison Tunley

Alison is a seasoned freelance translator with over 15 years of experience, specialising in translating from German to English. Originally from Wales, she has been a Londoner for some time, and she holds a PhD in Phonetics and an MPhil in Linguistics from the University of Cambridge, where she also completed her First Class BA degree in German and Spanish… Read Full Bio

Image source: https://pixabay.com/vectors/yorkshire-rose-county-england-2365926/

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Duolingo: an addictive language learning tool

I have a track record with new technology: phase one involves scepticism and refusal to engage, phase two is full-blown addiction and obsession (a third phase of disengagement often follows during which I wonder what all the fuss was about). Whether it’s Facebook, Twitter or Strava, the pattern has been identical. So my newfound relationship with Duolingo is unsurprising: the diagnosis is Duolingo addiction.

Learning Welsh with Duolingo

After a prolonged period of slightly snooty indifference, my eldest daughter succeeded in luring me in. She had embarked on a year-long mission to learn Welsh through the app. Having never lived there herself or received any formal teaching, she took to texting me in Welsh and expecting a coherent response. My own knowledge of Welsh was acquired from nursery school through to O level, combined with immersion in a community where Welsh was spoken all around me. But decades of living in England means my Welsh capabilities are best described as severely rusty and (let’s be honest) in danger of being surpassed by very non-Welsh daughter.

Duolingo addiction has much to do with successful gamification

Forty-five days into my Duolingo experience, and what have I learned? Possibly not a whole lot of Welsh, but most definitely a reminder of my susceptibility to gamification! Give me a league table of any kind — points, virtual rewards, kudos, gems — and I’m a sucker for hoovering up anything I can get. My far less gullible husband has downloaded the app to brush up his French and calmly does a 10 minute lesson each day then puts it away. Meanwhile, I’m stalking the latest points tally on my leaderboard to plot my best promotion strategy, wildly racing through lessons in pursuit of more XP (experience points), and zealously defending my daily streak.

Commercial success of Duolingo

So, is Duolingo addictive? If your brain is wired a particular way it seems it is. And maybe my chilled-out other half is the exception here, with 500 million registered users, 74 million monthly active users and 44% revenue growth in the second quarter of 2023, the app appears to be going from strength to strength.

Does Duolingo work for learning a language?

The more interesting question for a linguist is: does it work? Criticisms of the app include its simplistic parrot learning with lots of “fill the gap” type tasks and no in-depth study of syntax. The spoken aspect of the app is also limited, although as someone who works exclusively with written texts, I’m quite happy with that design. There is an emphasis on comprehension and translation from the foreign language into English, which means you can progress rapidly with a bit of educated guesswork. Genuine tests of your foreign language skills with free written text are sporadic at best. Instead, the drag-and-drop, multiple-choice format allows you to gloss over vocabulary learning and accurate spelling.

Research is inconclusive

Evidence about the effectiveness of Duolingo for language learning is contradictory. A much touted 2022 study found that “participants that completed a course had similar reading and listening proficiency to university students after four semesters of study.” An equally infamous counter to this claim comes from languages professor Stephen Sacco, who took a Duolingo Swedish course before proceeding to fail a standardised elementary exam in the language.

Duolingo addiction is at least conducive to engaging with language work

So does gamification undermine learning? Would the same time be better spent on more focused learning? Possibly, but if the reality is that you wouldn’t be engaging in language learning at all without  the lure of XP and gems, Duolingo is better than nothing. You just need to be realistic about the level of proficiency you might achieve. And guard against getting sucked into pointless competition. As this cautionary tale reminds us “I stormed to a first place finish in the Diamond league. I got a little achievement for it. Is the badge nice? Yes. Is my Japanese any better? No.”

About the Author

Alison Tunley

Alison is a seasoned freelance translator with over 15 years of experience, specialising in translating from German to English. Originally from Wales, she has been a Londoner for some time, and she holds a PhD in Phonetics and an MPhil in Linguistics from the University of Cambridge, where she also completed her First Class BA degree in German and Spanish… Read Full Bio

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The allure of the smartphone makes it difficult to focus on reading an old-fashioned book. Even with notifications turned off, the tantalising prospect of the latest Twitter updates or WhatsApp messages easily win out over the printed word. In a bid to spend more time reading actual books rather than the latest hot-take, I’ve taken to removing my phone from the room completely. But this has come with an unexpected downside — the inability to look stuff up immediately, particularly new or unusual words. So I’ve taken to scribbling intriguing items of vocabulary in a notebook for later investigation and the result is that I am gradually creating a catalogue of lexical curiosities. Here’s a brief tour of some recent discoveries.

Moiling: requiring hard work, violently agitated
A Google search (which uses the dictionary provided by Oxford Languages) has the verb moil marked as archaic / dialect, and most delightfully gives us the etymology from Old French moillier, to paddle in mud or moisten. Wading through mud as a metaphor for a laborious task immediately springs to mind, as does the phrase toil and moil, which was the only context in which I had previously encountered this lexical item.

Conniption: a fit of rage, hysteria, or alarm
The North American origin of this term had never been apparent to me. Nor had I realised it was a relatively recent coinage, with roots going back only to the 19^th century when it is thought to have been invented. Pleasingly, the historical use of this word trundles along quite calmly from its first appearance until around the year 2000 when it spikes sharply upwards, perhaps finding its true purpose in the modern era of outrage culture.

Panopticon: a prison with cells arranged in a circle, so that the people in them can be seen at all times from the centre
This is another word with a recent spike in its Google ngram graph. First coined in the late 18^th century by philosopher Jeremy Bentham, it describes a system of surveillance in which those being watched cannot possibly know if they are currently under observation and thus must behave at all times under the assumption that they are. The Guardian explains the word’s rise in popularity in the late 20^th century as a metaphor for the “surveillance tendencies of disciplinarian societies”. Its continued rise in the digital age suggests ongoing relevance, but the key characteristic of the subject knowing that they may be being observed is often forgotten. As The Guardian puts it “state surveillance on the internet is invisible”, which means panopticon isn’t entirely appropriate in this context.

Promulgate: to promote or make widely known
This term has a similar meaning to promote but is more formal in tone and largely confined to legal or regulatory language, where it has the sense of enacting or putting into effect a law or decree (via a proclamation of some kind). Having said that, a tweet from Donald Trump in 2018 bemoaning the evil of “Fake News so easily promulgated by fools” caused this overlooked word to be one of Merriam Webster’s top lookups that month. After a brief moment of glory in the mainstream, however, promulgate appears to have reverted to its more esoteric reputation.

About the Author

Alison Tunley

Alison is a seasoned freelance translator with over 15 years of experience, specialising in translating from German to English. Originally from Wales, she has been a Londoner for some time, and she holds a PhD in Phonetics and an MPhil in Linguistics from the University of Cambridge, where she also completed her First Class BA degree in German and Spanish… Read Full Bio

Image: Pixabay

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Typos and misspellings: the bane of a writer’s existence

Typos send a chill down the spine of any translator or proofreader. Catching an unintended slip-up at the last moment before submitting a project always combines an element of relief with a sense of dismay at nearly allowing an embarrassing mistake to slip through to publication. I am still slightly haunted by my recent near miss, which involved spotting in the nick of time a reference to “bras bands” with associated imagery of trumpeters in raunchy lingerie. But intentional typos or intentional misspellings are a different matter altogether.

Can intentional typos or intentional misspellings actually be a boon?

Indeed, could intentional typos have a positive side that a writer might harness? Several years ago, US academic and author Yascha Mounk, hypothesised on Twitter: “I have a theory that I inadvertently test at regular intervals: Small typos in tweets increase engagement because people stumble over them as they scroll their news feed, which makes them look at the tweet more closely. Do any linguists on here know whether this is plausible?”. The tweet has long since vanished, so maybe Mounk thought better of his idle speculation, but the premise was jotted down in my ever-expanding list of linguistic curiosities to investigate. Could this be why viral tweets so often have typos? Or is that simply a reflection of the high proportion of tweets of any variety that contain typos, viral or not? I suspect the latter might be closer to the truth but hard data on this seems difficult to come by.

Hard to track in practice

I set about researching whether deliberate typos might be a thing and whether accidental typos might boost audience engagement, but pinning down any evidence is fiendishly difficult, not least because almost every search strategy brings up articles on how to avoid spelling mistakes. In between endless tips on improving your proofreading skills, the few articles I could find on misspellings as a way to lure in the reader provided unsubstantiated claims such as “if you want an engaged audience and you use them sparingly, typos and misquotes can really draw your readers in.”

Advertising is a goldmine for deliberate misspellings

Advertisers are known to play with text for greater impact. A response on the English Language and Usage forum contrasts ad spelling and normal spelling to describe examples such as the brand “Froot Loops”, where fruit is rewritten to mirror the word loops and reflect the shape of the cereal itself. Wikipedia notes the term sensational spelling for precisely this kind of marketing strategy, perhaps epitomised by the infamous French Connection UK “FCUK” ad campaign that resulted in the Advertising Standards Authority branding the company “irresponsible” and declaring it would be vetting future promotional materials.

Stirring up a social media storm with intentional typos

But inventive wordplay is not quite what Mounk hinted at in his speculation about intentional typos. A better example comes from a Colorado-based telecoms company that put out ads offering “unlimited messages, minutes and data” then deliberately tweaked the spelling in a subset of these promotions to read “unlimited massages”. The spelling police on social media had a field day reporting the company’s supposed proofreading faux-pas and unwittingly fuelling engagement with the ads. The result was massive hype for the company’s carefully planned free massage party in Denver and a media buzz about their mobile phone service.

So a typo can apparently reap dividends in the commercial sector. Whether or not more mundane slip-ups are associated with increased reader engagement is up for debate and not likely to be a strategy your average language content professional will be pursuing just yet.

About the Author

Alison Tunley

Alison is a seasoned freelance translator with over 15 years of experience, specialising in translating from German to English. Originally from Wales, she has been a Londoner for some time, and she holds a PhD in Phonetics and an MPhil in Linguistics from the University of Cambridge, where she also completed her First Class BA degree in German and Spanish… Read Full Bio

Image: Pixabay

The post Intentional typos — can misspellings ever be a good thing? appeared first on Rosetta Translation.

Pinker begins his treatise on good style with an analysis of several pieces of his favourite writing. He revels in “the effective use of words to engage the human mind”, arguing that “a crisp sentence, an arresting metaphor, a witty aside, an elegant turn of phrase are among life’s greatest pleasures”. The four passages Pinker selects to illustrate these points could not be more different in style or content. But all are united by the way they draw in the reader. Pinker suggests that “good writing can flip the way the world is perceived”. The example chosen to highlight this comes from Richard Dawkins’ Unweaving the Rainbow, which begins “We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones.” The apparent contradiction created by that sentence is immediately resolved by the second line “Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born”. The reader is already curious. Preconceptions have been subverted, and the urge to continue reading is almost irresistible.

Dawkins does not disappoint. And nor does Pinker. You might imagine picking apart a text to analyse its stylistic merits would make a dry read, but there are constant treasures to delight over. Pinker has an inestimable appreciation for language, and perhaps more importantly its power to make us think. He is just as likely to extol the virtues of simplicity as complexity, picking out a passage by his wife, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, which prompts profound existential questions with the simple description of an old photograph: “That child is me. But why is she me?”.

Rather more sophisticated linguistic trickery is at play in Pinker’s account of an obituary describing Maurice Sendak’s books as “Roundly praised, intermittently censored, and occasionally eaten”, which he cites as a splendid example of a zeugma, the “intentional juxtaposition of different senses of a single word”. Here the word “book” is evoked both in its conceptual sense as a narrative text, and its physical sense as a bundle of pages. The reference to eating may also remind readers of a famous Sendak anecdote. Having sent a card to thank a child who had written in appreciation of his books, Sendak received a reply from the child’s mother “Jim loved your card so much he ate it.” Sendak’s reaction was emphatic “That to me was one of the highest compliments I’ve ever received. He didn’t care that it was an original Maurice Sendak drawing or anything. He saw it, he loved it, he ate it.”

Reference: Stephen Pinker’s Sense of Style was published in 2014 by Penguin Random House

About the Author

Alison Tunley

Alison is a seasoned freelance translator with over 15 years of experience, specialising in translating from German to English. Originally from Wales, she has been a Londoner for some time, and she holds a PhD in Phonetics and an MPhil in Linguistics from the University of Cambridge, where she also completed her First Class BA degree in German and Spanish… Read Full Bio

Image:  Aaron Burden on Unsplash

The post Stephen Pinker and The Sense of Style appeared first on Rosetta Translation.

This week’s blog will boost the spirits of any translator feeling demoralised at the growth of machine translation by reminding us that a bit of human intervention goes a long way when it comes to quality.

Machine translation struggles with passages of text that are amenable to literal translation but would benefit from rephrasing. For example, the German “hoch erhitzbare Öle” can be rendered in English as “highly heatable oils”. This is perfectly comprehensible and there is no reason we shouldn’t say this in English, but the reality is we do not. A native English speakers would likely write something like “oils that can be heated to a high temperature”.

Sometimes the error is more serious or even comedic. The German idiom “Die Seele baumeln lasseln” emerged from one machine translation process as the magnificent “let your soul dangle” rather than the intended instruction to “relax” or “chill out”! Machine translation tools also often struggle with tone or appropriate levels of formality or technicality. A device with a “feuerfester Griff” is rendered in English as having a “refractory handle”. I am not convinced your average non-technical consumer looking for a kitchen utensil would understand what refractory means in this sense — i.e. a “material that is resistant to decomposition by heat, pressure, or chemical attack, and retains strength and form at high temperatures” (Thank you, Wikipedia). Instead, the everyday reader may be more likely to recall the unfortunate connotations the word refractory has with stubbornness or unmanageable behaviour and a resistance to authority. Not the desired effect at all. The simple term “fireproof” is a much better option here.

Another problem for machine translation is where a word has several closely related meanings with a subtle shift in emphasis. So the German word ereignisreich (which literally translates as event + rich) is usually translated as eventful. But this term has distinctly negative connotations in English, implying not just that there were lots of events but that they were of an undesirable nature. This is not at all the intended impression when describing a holiday destination or fun tourist attraction, where the adjectives exciting or action-packed have a more positive vibe.

One of my current fixations with machine translation is the frequent inability (or failure) to configure it to British English rather than US mode. In addition to the constant need to fix spelling and vocabulary issues such as colour-color, eggplant-aubergine etc., every so often you encounter something even more impenetrable. My French is virtually non-existent, which is why encountering the term “chignon” in a recent PEMT task sent me scurrying for the dictionary. This turned out to be what Brits would call “wearing your hair in a bun”.

Finally, let’s finish this week’s machine translation round-up with my latest favourite mixed metaphor. The German marketing materials for a skincare product contained the claim that the relevant product would produce “butterweiche Füße” or “buttery soft feet”. I can’t judge what impact the original phrase makes on a native German speaker, but the English somehow conjures up an unpleasant image of greasy and potentially smelly feet! The less poetic “beautifully soft feet” feels like a safer bet in this context.

About the Author

Alison Tunley

Alison is a seasoned freelance translator with over 15 years of experience, specialising in translating from German to English. Originally from Wales, she has been a Londoner for some time, and she holds a PhD in Phonetics and an MPhil in Linguistics from the University of Cambridge, where she also completed her First Class BA degree in German and Spanish… Read Full Bio

Image source: pixabay.com

The post A helping human hand for machine translation appeared first on Rosetta Translation.

Attitudes to corporate language policies might best be summed up by the quote attributed to John Lydgate, “You can please some of the people all of the time, you can please all of the people some of the time, but you can’t please all of the people all of the time”. There is no doubt the Diversity and Inclusion market is booming, and much of this work involves well-intentioned recommendations around inclusive language. However, agreement about specific linguistic change is rather more elusive, hence the much-discussed recent tussle over Roald Dahl’s books.

Corporate declarations about inclusive language can be notoriously vague. Adobe InDesign promises “to better reflect core Adobe values of diversity and inclusion [by] replacing non-inclusive language and reference imagery in Adobe InDesign.” Who wouldn’t want to be more diverse and inclusive? But the devil is in the detail, as revealed by a spat on the user forums over the renaming of “Master pages” to “Parent pages” under this D&I scheme. Senior Lead Software Engineer, Sanyam Talwar, defends Adobe’s decision, arguing “Words paint pictures that speak loudly. The use of words with racist, sexist, oppressive connotations, overtones, or history can make the reader feel hurt, traumatized, or unwelcome.” Suffice to say, not all users were convinced that the previous nomenclature could be described as causing hurt or trauma.

Other institutions have taken to issuing labyrinthine language policy recommendations. The 2021 Ministry of Defence “Inclusive Language Guide” included an infographic with five levels of questions to negotiate in order to determine appropriate language around race and ethnicity. In light of this complexity, it is perhaps ironic that the same guide then advocates caution around “language that can deliberately exclude others: such as excessively complex wording or speaking in another language”. The ensuing uproar over exhortations to avoid phrases such as “crippled with debt” or “blind drunk” that could be offensive to those with disabilities resulted in the guide being withdrawn from the MOD website. Two years later and similar language policies are still dividing responses, as Oxfam recently discovered. It is also worth considering the concept of linguistic reappropriation in this context, as many corporate language policies seem to be doing something very similar.

Many of these linguistic disputes cover familiar territory from previous iterations of social justice movements that harnessed language to drive change. But some suggest there is a difference in the current bid to embed specific political beliefs by policing language. The authors of the American Medical Association’s Advancing Health Equity: A Guide to Language, Narrative and Concepts urge the avoidance of “adjectives such as vulnerable, marginalized and high-risk” because these terms can be “stigmatizing”. Instead, phrases such as “groups that are struggling against economic marginalization” are preferred because this acknowledges the “causal factors” for the group’s characteristics. The guide suggests “conventional (well-intentioned) phrasing” such as “low-income people have the highest level of coronary artery disease in the United States” could be improved as follows, “People underpaid and forced into poverty as a result of banking policies, real estate developers gentrifying neighborhoods, and corporations weakening the power of labor movements, among others, have the highest level of coronary artery disease in the United States”.

Harnessing language policy in this way certainly seems different in scope and style to historic campaigns to replace “chairman” with “chairperson” and so on. The extent to which corporate language policies of this kind will be broadly accepted or achieve genuine language change remains to be seen and will provide fascinating research opportunities for future historical linguists.

*Photo by Scott Graham on Unsplash

About the Author

Alison Tunley

Alison is a seasoned freelance translator with over 15 years of experience, specialising in translating from German to English. Originally from Wales, she has been a Londoner for some time, and she holds a PhD in Phonetics and an MPhil in Linguistics from the University of Cambridge, where she also completed her First Class BA degree in German and Spanish… Read Full Bio

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Early translations of the stone’s inscriptions focused on heroic battles fought by Viking kings. But in 2016, Per Holmberg, professor of Scandinavian Languages at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, suggested a more prosaic interpretation. He proposed that much of the stone’s text is simply self-referential – it contains information about the stone itself and how it was carved. This would make it more like other runestones from the Viking Age. In Holmberg’s interpretation, the riddles on the front of the stone are said to refer to the daylight necessary to read the runes, while the rear of the stone contains information about the runic alphabet and how the runes were carved.

He blames earlier ‘misinterpretations’ on a minor reading error combined with a dose of nationalistic wishful thinking that influenced scholars into finding tales of heroic battles and tales of honour and vengeance. All of which shows that even translators need to guard against external factors that can prejudice their choices.

Holmberg is also involved in the latest study on the Rök stone, which brings together experts from philology, archaeology and the history of religion. Hopefully these scholars are not falling prey to a similar contextual bias and being overly influenced by the understandable current climate fixation in their new interpretation of the inscriptions.

The stone’s creators certainly didn’t intend to make interpreting its text straightforward. In addition to encrypting the text using ciphers, the reading order of the lines is hotly disputed, with Holmberg describing a “labyrinth principle” where the reader is taken from a starting point at the lower left side of the stone then guided to find the next line from the beginning or end of the previous one until they reach the end of the inscription.

One thing is for sure: if you find translation mysteries intriguing, the Rök stone is one of the world’s finest. If you are up for more, read our blog about the as yet undeciphered Voynich Manuscript.

About the Author

Alison Tunley

Alison is a seasoned freelance translator with over 15 years of experience, specialising in translating from German to English. Originally from Wales, she has been a Londoner for some time, and she holds a PhD in Phonetics and an MPhil in Linguistics from the University of Cambridge, where she also completed her First Class BA degree in German and Spanish… Read Full Bio

The post When translators are defeated – The Rök stone appeared first on Rosetta Translation.

Certain Molesworthian phrases have entered common parlance and retain their charm, even though the world he inhabited has long since vanished. Such is my obsession with Molesworth, as soon as I started typing “as any” into Google, the all-knowing search engine immediately offered me the complete phrase “as any fule kno”. This classic Molesworth appraisal even has its own Wikipedia entry and has often been cited in the British press.

Molesworth’s wayward spelling, slapdash grammar and comedic interjections are interspersed with unexpectedly formal and correct phrasing to create a unique writing style.  He uses these contrasts to great effect, starting a sentence with “you hav various swots, bulies, …” then offering the correct pronoun declension and orthodox word order “with whom i am forced to mingle”, before finishing off with a trademark “hem-hem” for a distinctive Nigel Molesworth pronouncement.

The text is peppered with asides, often incongruously introduced with an “n.b” or “e.g.” as in the opening line of Down with Skool, which begins “This is me e.g. nigel molesworth the curse of st custard’s”. He often deploys parentheses to deliver his own verdict on events. In the headmaster’s speech at the start of term, when the “sour-faced boys xsembl in school hall”, Molesworth uses brackets to track the “hearty larff” from the headmaster attempting to rouse his reluctant audience, escalating to “fits of larffter” followed by Nigel’s ultimate parenthetical verdict “he is going to die it is not good for him to larff so much”.

Other distinctive stylistic features include asterisked footnotes and numbered side notes. These are used on the headmaster’s speech to provide a “crib” to the headmaster’s “reel thorts”. The warm welcome offered to students is undercut with the side note “so they are back agane the little beasts”. And a darker subplot is hinted at when the headmaster’s announcement “I would like to introduce a new master who hav joined us in place of mr Blenkinsop who left suddenly” is footnoted with the reflection “who would hav thort it he semed so nice”.

Nigel is unconvinced of the value of any lessons but is quick to dispense advice such as “n.b. a good roare of larffter will cut the lesson by two minits six seconds”. French lessons feature Armand, who Molesworth decides “Papa is only taking […] to Dieppe in order to drown him”. Meanwhile, English masters are “trying to read your inmost thorts heaven help them”. Molesworth’s aversion to Latin has been covered previously in this blog, and linguists will delight in his tactic of asking the schoolmaster a fiendishly tricky grammar question to distract from the lesson “e.g. gerunds … are always tricky and shifty”. I think we can all agree he is correct on that one.

The post The Nigel Molesworth guide to grammar and spelling appeared first on Rosetta Translation.

Recently I have done several projects which involved translating recipes. On the face of it this seems like a simple task: take the list of ingredients and convert into the target language; then simply do the same for the recipe method. Recipes tend to be very well structured, written in a series of simple to follow logical steps and specifically designed to avoid any possible linguistic misinterpretation which might result in a culinary mishap. I even naively thought that the repetitive nature of recipes might make this a dull process. In fact, the task was neither as simple as I’d imagined nor was it at all monotonous. Food is so culturally specific; the translation process was full of wonderful culinary and linguistic discoveries!

Ingredients

It comes as little surprise that availability of the basic raw materials is challenge number one in translating recipes. While “quark” may be ubiquitous in German supermarkets, it’s much harder to track down in the UK and just try locating “halloumi” in a French supermarket. Then there’s the question of how finickity to get over little details. Purists may debate whether “Strudelteig” (strudel pastry) is different to “filo” pastry (the former is slightly thicker, apparently), but for many standard recipe books either can be substituted depending on availability. Ultimately the food editor will have to advise and make a decision.

Then there are the items which seem straightforward but which open up all sorts of questions. German recipes might specify “Sahne” –  easy, “cream” in English. But which kind of cream do they mean? English recipes would let you know whether single, double or whipping cream is required. And the German cream varieties found in most supermarkets don’t map straightforwardly onto UK categories in terms of their fat content. Similarly several of the German recipes I worked on were content to refer to “Zucker” (“sugar”) with no hint as to whether this might be caster, granulated, icing or any of the myriad brown, muscovado, demerara varieties on offer.

Flour is another minefield in translating recipes, where country-specific knowledge is invaluable. The Italian “farro” is often translated simply as “spelt”, but this conceals all sorts of other possibilities. For a start, there is “farro piccolo”, “medio” or “grande”. The latter is indeed spelt, while the first two would usually be translated as “Einkorn” and “Emmer”. Several European countries use flour numbering systems for clarity, although with different countries using different numbering systems and with the UK preferring textual flour descriptors the translator is often left having to undertake careful research before deciding on their translation. And once you’ve decided on a precise definition, you hit the question of availability again – the Italians and Germans are passionate about their flour and a wide choice would be available even in smaller shops. Here in the UK you are dependent on a really large supermarket, specialist flour producer or health food store for equivalent options. I have found reference to at least eight types of German rye flour, and one cookbook I tackled used three types: 1150 (medium rye), 997 (sifted light rye) and 815 (an almost white rye which is even more highly refined than 997). Here the translator’s task is to provide sufficient information to enable the food editor to determine the best local choice in each case, balancing availability of ingredients against a desire for authenticity.

After looking at the challenges of converting the ingredients used in a foreign recipe into your target language, I’ll now be discussing some of the other issues that arise when translating recipes, especially when it comes to availability and different cooking traditions.

Ready made products

A tricky challenge in the translator’s ingredients obstacle course are products which are available in ready-made form in some countries, but which will require detailed instructions on how to make them from scratch in other locations.

The domestic German baker can readily acquire “Tortenguss” (a glaze) to conjure up one of those beautiful, gleaming fruit-topped tarts or cakes you see in the Konditorei window as you take your Sunday afternoon stroll. The English home cook attempting to replicate this will have to be more resourceful and will need to make this product from scratch, perhaps using gelatine or arrowroot as the gelling agent.

Similarly, it is by no means frowned on in Germany to resort to shop-bought lebkuchen spices when rustling up your Christmas cookies. The English cook will need a well-stocked spice cupboard and some guidance on the relative proportions of cinnamon, cloves, allspice, nutmeg, coriander, cardamom, ginger, mace and star anise to use.

Once again we step outside the translator’s immediate remit but the food editor may need assistance when it comes to giving instructions on how to create a good homemade option in these cases.

What makes an ingredient exotic?

Occasionally you will find ingredients which require detailed description in the source language because they are considered exotic or unusual, when they are absolutely commonplace in your target country. For instance, one German recipe I tackled went into great detail explaining what garam masala was and how you could go about obtaining this “obscure” ingredient.

That whole section of text was translated but then flagged up as redundant for the book editor to delete as superfluous for the average UK home cook. This in turn had repercussions for the graphic designers as the page layout had been built around an information box containing this information.

Health and Safety when translating recipes

Not only do cooking traditions vary between countries, health and safety advice can be very different too. I worked on a series of German recipes, which specifically instruct the reader to wash the chicken before cooking, a practice which the UK Food Standards Agency explicitly warns against due to the risk of spreading campylobacter.

Recipe books also often offer advice for pregnant women when it comes to eating things like raw egg, mould-ripened cheeses and so on. The guidelines in this area are well known to be very country-specific with French expectant mothers quaffing wine and consuming camembert to their heart’s content, where their US counterparts are warned off such delights.While the translator may not be expected to be au fait with all such regional discrepancies, it certainly helps the editor if these can be flagged up early on in the translation process and the text amended accordingly.

While the translator may not be expected to be au fait with all such regional discrepancies, it certainly helps the editor if these can be flagged up early on in the translation process and the text amended accordingly.

In the last part of this blog on translating recipes, I tackle the vexed issue of quantities and measurements and then the more delightful experience of culinary exploration.

Quantities

Even countries which share a common language offer a baffling array of kitchen measuring methods. Younger British cooks who are versed in the metric system are also used to having to deal with granny’s hand-me-down family recipes in imperial measures. As a consequence, many of our cookbooks offer metric-imperial conversion tables as standard.But even the flexible Brits throw their hands up in dismay at the Americans and their cup measurements. How imprecise! And then there’s the fact that a US cup is not exactly the same as an Australian cup. Then again, when you use these kinds of measure, maybe you have to develop a true feel for what is right in a recipe, how many professional chefs truly weigh out their ingredients I wonder.

But even the flexible Brits throw their hands up in dismay at the Americans and their cup measurements. How imprecise! And then there’s the fact that a US cup is not exactly the same as an Australian cup. Then again, when you use these kinds of measure, maybe you have to develop a true feel for what is right in a recipe, how many professional chefs truly weigh out their ingredients I wonder.

When translating, you discover all sorts of measures which are similarly vague. It seems clear that German “Prise” can be translated as English “pinch”, but then how to tackle “Msp: Messerspitze” (literally a “knife tip”). It’s easy to visualise a dry ingredient on the tip of the knife, and it sounds similar to a “pinch” in quantity.But could it be a bit less, or a bit

But could it be a bit less, or a bit more. And what about if a single recipe refers to both “Prise” and “Msp”, is there really any difference!? Perhaps only the original recipe writer will know.

Both German and French baking recipes seem to have a fondness for using small sachets of crucial ingredients such as baking powder, vanilla sugar etc.So, where a German cake might require 1 sachet of baking powder, the converted English recipe needs a reference in tsp. Muddying the waters still further, German brand Dr. Oetker sell 16g sachets of baking powder in Germany but in the UK Tesco offer a 5g sachet by the very same brand.

So, where a German cake might require 1 sachet of baking powder, the converted English recipe needs a reference in tsp. Muddying the waters still further, German brand Dr. Oetker sell 16g sachets of baking powder in Germany but in the UK Tesco offer a 5g sachet by the very same brand.

Personal culinary and linguistic discoveries in translating recipes

It’s been a while since I lived in Germany and explored the full delights of the “Kaffee und Kuchen” (coffee and cake) culture, so these days I am excited when my work projects introduce me to new baked treats. The Dresdner Zuckerkuchen might be simple, but often the best things are – just a plain yeasted cake which is sprinkled with sugar. As the name suggests, a speciality of the town of Dresden.

With apologies to all the “Mett” fans out there, I for one had never come across this German delicacy until I was required to translate a recipe for it (apparently it’s a thing in Belgium and the Netherlands too). There’s no gilding the lily here – it is basically a plate of raw pork mince with a bit of salt and pepper thrown in, and possibly some onion or garlic if you’re feeling fancy.

A friend who used to work in the food industry refused to believe that raw pork could be served in this way (we’re back with cross-cultural health and safety concerns here), but it has its own wiki page to prove its existence. In fact the wiki page is worth checking out for the “Mettigel” (Mett hedgehog) complete with raw onion spines and olive eyes, which is a buffet bar staple. So, my culinary translation adventures brought me some new recipes to try, and some recipes which I’m yet to be persuaded by, and these have been fun projects to work on.

So, my culinary translation adventures brought me some new recipes to try, and some recipes which I’m yet to be persuaded by, and these have been fun projects to work on.

About the Author

Alison Tunley

Alison is a seasoned freelance translator with over 15 years of experience, specialising in translating from German to English. Originally from Wales, she has been a Londoner for some time, and she holds a PhD in Phonetics and an MPhil in Linguistics from the University of Cambridge, where she also completed her First Class BA degree in German and Spanish… Read Full Bio

Reference

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/expat/expatlife/10718888/The-Germans-love-minced-meat-just-a-little-too-much.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mett

The post Translating recipes appeared first on Rosetta Translation.

Obsession with the marathon

This blog post on the language of the marathon is shamelessly influenced by your blogger’s obsession with running!

April is the month when Londoners and Bostonians turn out in their droves for two of the finest city marathons. And this year I will be attempting to run both, a total of 52.4 miles with just six days in between. Looking for inspiration I delved a little into the etymology and origins of the marathon – this feat of athletic endurance.

Etymology of the marathon

The story goes that in 490 BC the Greek soldier Pheidippides ran from Marathon to Athens to deliver news of military victory against the Persians, whereupon he collapsed and dropped dead of exhaustion. In honour of his achievement the modern distance running event takes its name from the site of the military battle: “Marathon”, which is itself derived from the Greek word for “fennel” which grew in abundance in the fields around.

No doubt there is a fair bit of artistic licence in this original marathon legend, but what is true is that the Greek army in those days used so-called hemerodromoi or ‘all-day running couriers’ to ferry messages back and forth. Some suggest that Pheidippides’ name itself means “to spare the horse” (from pheido “thrift” and hippos “horse”) – a reference to the fact that runners could outperform horses on this tricky terrain. It is also possible that Pheidippides may, in fact, have achieved a far greater feat than a mere 25 mile trot from Marathon to Athens. Fifth century historian Herodotus reports that, prior to the Battle of Marathon, Pheidippides was sent to Sparta to ask for assistance. He is said to have completed the run of around 153 miles in two days before running back to Marathon bringing mixed news. Yes the Spartans would help, but not for another 6 days as superstition meant they had to wait for a full moon before going into battle!

We have a linguist to thank for the invention of the modern marathon. French philologist Michel Bréal (often regarded as the founder of modern semantics) was a friend of Pierre de Coubertin who instigated the nineteenth century revival of the Olympic Games. Bréal was perhaps inspired by Robert Browning’s poem and its romanticised retelling of the Pheidippides story:

He flung down his shield
Ran like fire once more: and the space ‘twixt the fennel-field
And Athens was stubble again

At any rate, Bréal suggested the inclusion of a 25 mile running event in the programme for the first modern Olympics in 1896. The race would be named in French “marathon” after the Greek “Μαραθών”.

Language of the marathon: Google Ngram

Language usage also reveals something about the history of this event. Just take a look at Google’s Ngram graph plotting usage of the word “marathon” between the late 19^th century and today. A steady increase in use can be seen from the first Olympic marathon up to the 1960s at which point the trajectory tilts steeply upwards through the running boom of the 1970s and 80s before plateauing out somewhat at the millennium.

If this analysis of the language of the marathon suggests that marathon running may have reached its peak – what could be next? Well, some say that hard-core runners have already moved on, setting their sights in increasing numbers on the “ultramarathon”: any race which is longer than 26.2 miles in length. And, some would argue, rather closer in definition to Pheidippides’ original undertaking. Indeed the modern day “Spartathlon” is a 153 mile race held between Athens and Sparta in his honour. I’m not sure whether that’s inspiring or horrifying.

Rosetta Translation is a full-service translation agency in London, specialising in contract translation, court interpreting and Chinese translation.

About the Author

Alison Tunley

Alison is a seasoned freelance translator with over 15 years of experience, specialising in translating from German to English. Originally from Wales, she has been a Londoner for some time, and she holds a PhD in Phonetics and an MPhil in Linguistics from the University of Cambridge, where she also completed her First Class BA degree in German and Spanish… Read Full Bio

The post The language of the marathon appeared first on Rosetta Translation.

Most of the world’s alphabets are at least a thousand years old and we often take them for granted. The first alphabet is thought to be the Proto-Sinaitic script, which is the ancestor of most modern alphabets including Arabic, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew and Latin. An article published in 2016 in The Atlantic describes the unusual story of how Adlam, a new alphabet, was born in the late 20^th century and may have played a key role in the flourishing of the Fulani language.

Different sources suggest the language of the Fulani people of West Africa (also referred to as Pulaar) is spoken by 25 million or even 40 million people. At any rate, the language has a healthy future in terms of being widely spoken, what it lacked for much of its history was an alphabet. Devising a new alphabet is a significant linguistic challenge in itself but getting it to catch on and become widely used is another matter entirely. So the story of Abdoulaye and Ibrahima Barry — two brothers from Guinea — and the success of the alphabet they devised for Fulani has a certain romantic appeal.

As children, the Barry brothers were taught to read and write Fulani using the Arabic alphabet. But this system was imprecise due to the lack of symbols for certain sounds specific to Fulani. The result was an inconsistent spelling system that frequently caused confusion. It also meant a large proportion of the population was functionally illiterate, and the boys were regularly put to work reading or writing correspondence for adults who could not master the Arabic script. At the ages of just 10 and 14, Abdoulaye and Ibrahima decided they could do better and began crafting shapes that would make up a new alphabet, custom-designed for the Fulani sound system.

The method by which the brothers sought to propagate their alphabet is simple and ingenious. They began by teaching their friends and family, then asked each student to teach three others. They transcribed schoolbooks and managed to spread word of their writing system via a popular radio show. Having devised the alphabet Adlam in 1990, just 5 years later they describe walking into a market in a new part of Guinea and seeing people using their alphabet. They credit nomadic farmers and traders with helping pass on the new system.

Fast forward to the 2000s, and the brothers were now in America and realised that the era of smartphones and the dominance of the internet meant their alphabet would have to evolve to survive. They worked to save enough money to develop a keyboard and font for their alphabet, by now known as Adlam. But the big breakthrough came with the alphabet’s inclusion in the Unicode 9.0 release in 2016, and in 2019 it was implemented in the Windows update. This is a key breakthrough, as it is making it possible for Adlam to be used for international communication. Thus, it can be included in online translation services, and in turn, this will encourage the use of Adlam in legal translation or technical translation.

The brothers admit they could never have imagined the success their alphabet has achieved. The impact has been international and has facilitated connections between Fulani speakers from different countries. A 2018 convention for the alphabet system attracted guests from 34 countries. As Ibrahima Barry concludes “The writing has connected people”.

About the Author

Alison Tunley

Alison is a seasoned freelance translator with over 15 years of experience, specialising in translating from German to English. Originally from Wales, she has been a Londoner for some time, and she holds a PhD in Phonetics and an MPhil in Linguistics from the University of Cambridge, where she also completed her First Class BA degree in German and Spanish… Read Full Bio

The post Adlam – the story of a new alphabet appeared first on Rosetta Translation.

The trouble with being a linguist is that your familiarity with the source language can sometimes distract you from conventions in the target language. Or at least that’s my excuse when faced with translating place names. I instinctively want to resist removing the umlaut on Zürich to create a more anglicised version, and I’m never convinced by converting Rheinland-Pfalz to the English Rhineland-Palatinate, or Nordrhein-Westfalen into North Rhine-Westphalia.

The original foreign names seem more elegant to me, but translation clients may disagree. Sometimes there is a very well-established anglicised name that makes the translator’s decision straightforward. Only the truly pretentious would render Copenhagen as København or Gothenburg as Göteborg, and clearly Munich is a much more standard choice in English texts than the original München.

But the examples I gave initially are not so clear. How many English readers have any familiarity with Rhineland-Palatinate? And when it comes to choosing between Zürich and Zurich, for example, the Guardian has the umlauted version in an article about urban swimming and the anglicised non-umlauted spelling in a piece about Switzerland’s “chocolate capital”. Anything goes it seems!

Then there are places that have two or three names, such as the German, French and Italian options in some Swiss locations. Sometimes the English translator is faced with a situation where the French name is arguably more common in English than the German. For example, Lucerne is probably more widely used in English texts than the German Luzern. At least these two choices are mutually intelligible; more caution is required for tourism texts where the hapless visitor might arrive at their destination blissfully unaware that Bodensee and Lake Constance refer to the same body of water. Often the best solution is to provide the original and a translation.

And in multilingual locations, the translator may have to choose which of the local languages to favour, or whether to list all the possible options a tourist might encounter. A recent tourism project promoting the joys of the Dolomites featured double options for almost every location in Italian and German, with places such as Bolzano/Bozen, Bressanone/Brixen, Castelrotto/Kastelruth and Europe’s highest alpine meadow Alpe di Siusi/Seiser Alm. Just to spice things up even further, some places have an additional name in the local Ladin language, a Romance language still spoken by about 30,000 inhabitants in the region. Fans of the BBC’s long-running Ski Sunday program may be familiar with the popular Dolomite tourist destination known in Italian as Val Gardena, which becomes Gröden in German and Gherdëina in Ladin. Whatever option you choose whether translating place names or leaving the original, wanderlust is guaranteed.

About the Author

Alison Tunley

Alison is a seasoned freelance translator with over 15 years of experience, specialising in translating from German to English. Originally from Wales, she has been a Londoner for some time, and she holds a PhD in Phonetics and an MPhil in Linguistics from the University of Cambridge, where she also completed her First Class BA degree in German and Spanish… Read Full Bio

The post To anglicise or not: translating place names appeared first on Rosetta Translation.

In his book The Signal and the Noise, Nate Silver talks about the proliferation of information following the invention and history of the printing press and the potential for misinformation and errors. One example he picks out is a 1631 edition of the Bible containing the unfortunate typo “Thou shalt commit adultery”. As mistakes go, it is a proper humdinger, and undoubtedly one of the worst typos in history. The rogue edition became known as the Wicked Bible, the Adulterous Bible or the Sinners’ Bible and the Archbishop of Canterbury weighed in to express his anger at the error.

The same publication is also alleged to have contained a second misprint with the word “greatness” printed as “great-asse”, so that a sentence in Deuteronomy 5 reads “Behold, the Lord our God hath shewed us his glory and his great-asse”. Most copies of the Wicked Bible were destroyed as soon as the Ten Commandments error was discovered, and no copies containing the second error appear to have survived, which has led some to doubt whether it really occurred. At any rate, if you can get your hands on one of the few private copies of the Wicked Bible that are not owned by a museum, university or public library, it could earn you upwards of $40,000 judging by the last-known sales at Bonhams and Sotheby’s in 2015 and 2016. Such owners may dispute the idea that these were amongst the worst typos in history; they certainly aren’t for them.

And the omission of that innocent word “not” is far from unusual. Wikipedia notes that until 2004 the Associated Press style guide recommended using “innocent” rather than “not guilty” to avoid exactly this type of mistake when describing acquittal judgements.

Pity poor Robert Barker, the printer who produced the Wicked Bible, his print shop had prior form for unfortunate errors having previously created an edition of the Bible that confused Judas with Jesus. This rogue edition; contains the text “Then Judas said to the twelve …”, where it should say ‘Jesus’. In many editions, the error has been fixed, apparently by the printers themselves, by means of a piece of paper pasted over the incorrect name, or simply with the name inked out and corrected underneath. A rare uncorrected edition is owned by the University of Illinois.

Anyone who regularly produces written content will recognise that sinking feeling when you spot a typographic error in your text after you have submitted it. In fact, similar levels of anxiety can be achieved even when you do spot errors in good time, as your brain races to imagine all the locations where you might have missed humiliating gaffes. My brother jokingly refers to “erotic spelling” instead of “erratic spelling”, which I sometimes forget is not immediately understood to be a humorous play on words by those outside my immediate family. A similarly unfortunate error blighted the entry for a travel agency in Yellow Pages, suggesting they offered “erotic” rather than “exotic” holiday packages. That one little letter is said to have cost Yellow Pages $18m after the agency lost 80 percent of its business, and thus undoubtedly also qualifies as one of the worst typos in history.

About the Author

Alison Tunley

Alison is a seasoned freelance translator with over 15 years of experience, specialising in translating from German to English. Originally from Wales, she has been a Londoner for some time, and she holds a PhD in Phonetics and an MPhil in Linguistics from the University of Cambridge, where she also completed her First Class BA degree in German and Spanish… Read Full Bio

The post Worst typos in history appeared first on Rosetta Translation.

“To err is human, to forgive divine” and that is the spirit we will adopt for this week’s blog post, which delves into some decidedly second-rate translations. We all have bad days, but some of the examples of human translation errors here crop up sufficiently often or are so clunky, you wonder what kind of quality control was going on before the final translation was approved. In the spirit of forgiveness, mistakes are there to be learned from, so let’s resolve to weed out awkward phrasing of the kind described below.

Overly literal translation

Overly literal translations are probably the number one culprit in poor quality translations. The fact that they are not hard to find suggests either a lack of careful proofreading or a tin ear for unidiomatic phrasing on the part of the proofreader. German clothes are sometimes described as having “hervorragende Trageeigenschaften”, and it is not hard to find translations rendering this simply as “excellent wearing properties”. Without wishing to be too harsh, let us just say this is not a phrase a native speaker would ever naturally use to describe the quality of a pair of trousers. The problem is that the German noun Trageeigenschaft does not have a direct equivalent in English. The meaning is roughly a “characteristic offered by a garment when it is worn”. This usually relates to how comfortable the clothing is or how well it fits, so a more elegant English translation might refer to the item offering “exceptional fit and comfort”.

Nouns can be troublesome to translate

Nouns are not the only troublesome parts of speech that can trip up the translator. If we remain in the world of fashion, German often uses “überzeugt mit … ” to describe impressive features offered by a garment. Once again, the cumbersome literal translation “this garment convinces with …” is all too common. Finally, in a feat that combines poor translation choices for both noun and verb, we have the dubious wording “make a good figure” for the German “eine gute Figur machen”. A native speaker might be more likely to express this simply by saying something “looks fantastic” or is “very stylish”.

Fashion translation is perhaps particularly prone to producing some of the worst translation errors because it often involves bulk product descriptions, some of which may even have been done using machine translation. Good post-editing should weed out the kind of examples described above, so either the human checking stage of the process is being skipped altogether, or the quality control standards are insufficiently stringent. But fashion is not the only domain susceptible to such flaws. I recently came across a translation for a wine producer, in which the German “Edler Tropfen” was translated as “noble drop” (rather than the more idiomatic “fine wine”). Indeed, the Linguee online dictionary, which uses webcrawlers to identify bilingual texts, suggests “noble drop” alongside “fine wines” in its definitions, giving this phrase a status it certainly does not deserve. This definition seems to have slipped through the Linguee QC system offered by its human-trained machine-learning algorithm (which estimates the quality of the paired translations) and the manual ratings submitted by users.

Worst machine translation errors

So far, we have gone on a tour of some rather shameful translations that seem to have either been created by a human or, at the very least, slipped past whoever was responsible for the quality-control process in post-editing a machine translation. To cheer ourselves up, we will now look at some errors that can be blamed on machines, including several that are uniquely the result of not having a human involved in the process. Some of these machine translation errors boost the spirits of any translator involved in PEMT tasks because they are so easy to spot, and the source of considerable entertainment.

Mistranslations of abbreviations

Top of the list is the magnificent machine translation describing the dimensions of a dinner plate, where the German abbreviation “BH” representing “Breite x Höhe” (width and height) has been confused with the same abbreviation meaning “Büstenhalter”, a bra. So the phrase “Dinnerteller BH 27 x 2 cm” is translated as “Dinner plate bra 27 x 2 cm”. Context really is important when figuring out abbreviations!

Errors in the source text can lead to translation errors

This blog has previously tackled the way spelling mistakes in the source text can lead the unwitting translator astray. In general, however, humans are much better at coping with spelling mistakes than computers because of our ability to contextualise and accurately guess what the intended text should say. I came across a great example of this recently, where the typo in the source text would undoubtedly have been spotted by a human translator but had flummoxed the MT system. The German text was rendered as “Italienischer Obestoff”, with a crucial ‘r’ missing from Oberstoff, which means outer fabric or similar. Lacking the ability to make this sensible correction, the MT system had translated this as “Italian obesity fabric”!

Unusual words are another stumbling block for MT systems, which sometimes even fail to translate the same word consistently within a single text. A recent PEMT task involving the word Samtschrecken, contained one sentence where this was translated as a velvet grasshopper, and another where the computer had settled on the delightful choice of velvet scarecrow. The human proofreader should always be suspicious of such unlikely collocations when trying to spot machine translation errors. Indeed, the intended reference here was to stick insects (specifically the species Peruphasma schultei).

Machine translation often lacks context cues

In another demonstration of the superior contextual interpretation offered in human translation, a PEMT project included a description of a proposal of marriage, where the MT system had simply plucked out the dictionary definition ‘genuflection’ for the German Kniefall, resulting in an entirely inappropriate description of the romantic moment where someone gets down on one knee to pop the question. The same text rendered the word Antrag as an ‘application’, making it sound more like a soulless job hunt than a romantic proposal of eternal partnership.

Let us finish revelling in the shortcomings of machine translation with the splendid technical translation of Bauchfrei as ‘belly free’ in reference to a cropped top! Human involvement in translation is not totally redundant yet.

About the Author

Alison Tunley

Alison is a seasoned freelance translator with over 15 years of experience, specialising in translating from German to English. Originally from Wales, she has been a Londoner for some time, and she holds a PhD in Phonetics and an MPhil in Linguistics from the University of Cambridge, where she also completed her First Class BA degree in German and Spanish… Read Full Bio

The post Worst translation errors by humans and machines appeared first on Rosetta Translation.

As the data collected in the 2021 census is gradually processed and released by the Office for National Statistics, interesting patterns are emerging about the changing linguistic landscape in the UK. Covid caused the Scottish census to be delayed by a year, so the findings reported here focus exclusively on England and Wales.

For the second time since 2011, the census included a question on the language spoken by respondents, asking “What is your main language” as well as collecting information on other languages spoken. A key reason for requesting this information is to facilitate local service providers in identifying where there may be a need for language services. NHS users might need translation and interpretation services, for example, and a local authority might need to lay on additional English language lessons for non-native speakers.

The proportion of UK residents who speak English as their main language (or in Wales, English or Welsh as their main language) has fallen slightly from 92.3% in the 2011 census to 91.1% in 2021. In other words, 8.9% of people in England and Wales speak a language other than English or Welsh as their main language — this equates to roughly 5 million people.

A report in The Conversation suggests this may be an underestimate, citing official government figures published in June 2022 from UK schools that record 19.5% of pupils as having a first language other than English. A potential source of this discrepancy may be way the census question is phrased. The census requires respondents to select a “main language”, so a young person using English in their educational setting might feel that was their “main language” even if the language they first acquired and continue to use as their main mode of communication at home is not English. People who reported English as their main language were not able to list any additional languages that they spoke.

The most common main languages, other than English (or Welsh in Wales), were: Polish (1.1%), Romanian (0.8%), Punjabi (0.5%) and Urdu (0.5%), with the largest increase in speakers being for Romanian (rising to 0.8% from 0.1% in 2011). Data showing regional variability can be viewed via the interactive census maps, which also offer a wealth of other local data. The North-East of England had the highest proportion of people reporting English as their main language (96.5%), whereas London had the lowest proportion (78.4%).

In addition to spoken languages, the 2021 census shows a 40% increase in respondents citing British Sign Language as their main language. And in recognition of the number of households that do not have English as a main language, assistance in completing the census questionnaire was provided via interpretation services, with translation leaflets available in over 50 languages.

For the first time, the 2021 census also looked at the use of different languages within individual households. Of UK households consisting of more than one person, 63% speak the same language. One of the interesting forthcoming studies promised by the ONS as part of its ongoing analysis of the data will be a more detailed analysis of the Welsh language household data. This should shed light on patterns of Welsh language transmission and retention between the generations. Another study promises to explore the intersection of ethnicity, language, national identity and religion. It seems there will be plenty more to pique linguists’ interest for some time.

About the Author

Alison Tunley

Alison is a seasoned freelance translator with over 15 years of experience, specialising in translating from German to English. Originally from Wales, she has been a Londoner for some time, and she holds a PhD in Phonetics and an MPhil in Linguistics from the University of Cambridge, where she also completed her First Class BA degree in German and Spanish… Read Full Bio

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Who can resist a new gadget? The shiny box, the gleaming device, the prospect of some cool new technology to play with. But for translators there is an additional thrill in the form of the instruction manual or user guide, inevitably translated into multiple languages with varying degrees of success. So the recent arrival of a new cooker hood in our house saw me settle down with a mug of coffee to enjoy the “Installation and user’s manual”. My only sorrow is that my enjoyment was restricted to the English version of the 15 languages on offer. I am sure there were mistranslation treats on offer elsewhere and it occurred to me that a fun game for a group of linguists might be “guess the source language”. Without further ado, let’s proceed to the weird and wonderful world of user guide translations.

On opening the user guide, it did not take long before I was immersed in what I’m going to call “manualese”. The English text managed one entire sentence before the classic signs of poor proofreading and dodgy translation were already apparent in the instruction “In order to operate the unit correctly and safety”. A long list of safety precautions were then listed under a title using the singular “safety precaution” in what is one of the most common user guide errors, the mistranslated plural. Almost immediately another classic error crops up, this time in an incorrect deployment of the definite article in the instruction “Do not let the children operate the machine”. Verb declensions are also apparently beyond the average user manual translator, so we are told “the cooker hood should be clean regularly”.

Unsurprisingly, many of the errors are simple typographic mistakes suggesting that proofreading was beyond the manufacturer’s budget or perhaps deemed unimportant. For example, “This appliance if not intended for use by” and at one point a random bit of text from the Dutch manual, “Voor Schuine modellen”, appears in the middle of the English translation. As for correct comma placement or spacing before parentheses, such niceties are completely ignored.

But my favourite moments in any user guide are the weird translations that are either completely impenetrable or add an air of mystery to the instructions. My cooker hood guide contained the enigmatic advice “Forbid the direct baking from the gas cooker” and the delightful “Keep the kitchen room a good convection”. I also enjoyed “The button is with indicate backlit”, where the weird word order sounds as though Yoda was involved in this technical translation.

Given recent improvements in machine translation output, it is difficult to imagine that a computer can be blamed for the flaws here. The odd style and careless editing have all the hallmarks of a non-native speaker combined with a total absence of any quality control. It would be trivial to produce something less terrible, and yet I find myself hoping that future user guide translations continue in this quirky style that is so rich in linguistic entertainment.

About the Author

Alison Tunley

Alison is a seasoned freelance translator with over 15 years of experience, specialising in translating from German to English. Originally from Wales, she has been a Londoner for some time, and she holds a PhD in Phonetics and an MPhil in Linguistics from the University of Cambridge, where she also completed her First Class BA degree in German and Spanish… Read Full Bio

The post “Instruction manualese” – the deplorable yet delightful state of user guide translations appeared first on Rosetta Translation.

“Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That’s why it’s so hard.” Wise words from American popular historian and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner David McCullough. The challenge of marshalling your thoughts into lucid text will be familiar to anyone who wrangles with the written word for a living. Translators face the additional mission of having to second guess what the original author might have intended. Even if the meaning is not in doubt, a recent proofreading task was a salutary reminder of just how difficult it is to create text that reads smoothly. The less the reader is aware of the written medium as a barrier to processing the content, the better. Good writing should be imperceptible.

The relevant project consisted of several passages that had been cobbled together by a non-native speaker from existing partial translations for a client. It read like something that had been put through a mangle, with sentences starting coherently before trailing off into non sequiturs. The danger of a task like this is that it is almost impossible to judge how much work will be involved simply by scanning the text. It is only once you are immersed in untangling and correcting the text that the true scale becomes apparent. Occasionally a client will agree to pay an hourly rate to reflect the amount of time invested; but a fixed fee agreed in advance is more common and needs to be carefully considered given the potential for these projects to eat up more time than you could ever have anticipated.

My preferred approach for proofreading is akin to a multi-stage sifting process. I switch ‘track changes’ on in Word and rattle through the document, correcting egregious grammatical errors in a fairly swift first pass. Then I work through the text again, this time focusing on rephrasing and making the text sound like something a native speaker might have written. Finally, I switch to a document view where only the final text can be seen (no markup) and read through the entire piece again to catch any remaining awkward or inelegant phrasing.

It was in the midst of this time-consuming improvement process, that I was reminded of the origins of the Plain English Campaign, who have been “fighting for crystal-clear communication since 1979”. The group’s founder, Chrissie Maher, demonstrated her disgust at the lack of progress on plain English by shredding what she described as “gobbledygook documents” in London’s Parliament Square. As if to prove her point, the policemen tasked with removing her did so by reading the relevant section of the 1839 Metropolitan Police Act, a prime example of the kind of impenetrable legalese she was there to protest.

I recommend a visit to the Plain English website, if only to boost morale about your own writing and proofreading skills by playing with the splendid, and slightly addictive, gobbledygook generator. My very first click produced “We need a more contemporary reimagining of our parallel strategic programming” followed shortly by “We need to get on-message about our remote logistical flexibility.” The even wackier football gobbledygook generator had me roaring with laughter with the text “We’ve thrown the dice and gone from 4-4-2 to 3-4-3 with fifteen to go and the keeper narrows the angle brilliantly with minutes to go and it’s less of a case of squeaky-bum time going into the next game.”

About the Author

Alison Tunley

Alison is a seasoned freelance translator with over 15 years of experience, specialising in translating from German to English. Originally from Wales, she has been a Londoner for some time, and she holds a PhD in Phonetics and an MPhil in Linguistics from the University of Cambridge, where she also completed her First Class BA degree in German and Spanish… Read Full Bio

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Historical language shifts are easiest to describe after the fact when you can track how a particular usage has evolved over time. Spotting language change in action can feel like trying to capture lightning in a bottle due to the unpredictability of linguistic habits. A shift in usage might be adopted by a particular sub-group, only to fizzle out, having never gained widespread acceptance in the broader community. I often find myself wondering what the ultimate outcome will be for the use of “good” as an adverb in addition to its conventional role as an adjective. Currently the adverbial form is limited to informal interactions in fairly specific contexts, e.g. “How did it go?” “Really good!”. It is notable that in the full utterance “It went really …”, the speaker is much more likely to use the grammatically correct well, rather than good. So the acceptability of the adverbial usage is still limited.

Garner’s Modern English Usage has several fine examples of good being used as an adverb in spoken language, particularly from the world of sport: “We came out, threw the ball up the court good, passed good” and “Dixon ran so good last year, it was unbelievable”. Billy Bragg also makes use of this linguistic quirk to evoke the world of football in his song “Boy done good” (from his 1997 album of the same name). Even if informal use of adverbial good is widespread, the question is whether this usage will become sufficiently embedded to make the leap into more formal written language.

Garner also has a Language Change Index, consisting of five stages, which are used to categorise different words and phrases in the dictionary section of the book. The very first stage involves innovation, where a new form might emerge “among a small minority of the language community, perhaps displacing a traditional usage.” The final stage of language change is exquisitely described as follows: “The form is universally accepted (not counting pseudo-snoot eccentrics).” This is surely the stage that the verb decimate has reached in English, where only the most punctilious pedant will remind you that it strictly means reduce by one tenth rather than destroy in large numbers.

At any rate, Garner classifies adverbial good as being at Stage 2 on the Language Change Index. The relevant description for this stage is “The form spreads to a significant fraction of the language community but remains unacceptable in standard usage”. I wonder if adverbial good might even be inching towards being a candidate for Stage 3, which says “The form becomes commonplace even among many well-educated people but is still avoided in careful usage.” I’ve certainly become increasingly aware of very well-spoken individuals using good as an adverb in contexts such as “How are you?”, “Pretty good” and even “He did good” (rather than well). This is particularly true for younger age groups. But even in these groups, when it comes to written language, adverbial good is undoubtedly much closer to meeting Garner’s descriptive shorthand for Stage 2 of being “widely shunned”.

Interestingly the use of good as an adverb is a not a new phenomenon, The New Fowler’s Modern English points out that “[adverbial good] dropped out of standard use c1800 and now survives mainly in nonstandard use.” Time will tell whether that entry will one day need updating.

Rosetta Translation is a global provider of a full spectrum of language services, from certified translations, court interpreting services to specialised Chinese translation services.

About the Author

Alison Tunley

Alison is a seasoned freelance translator with over 15 years of experience, specialising in translating from German to English. Originally from Wales, she has been a Londoner for some time, and she holds a PhD in Phonetics and an MPhil in Linguistics from the University of Cambridge, where she also completed her First Class BA degree in German and Spanish… Read Full Bio

The post Capturing language change in action: the unknown fate of adverbial good appeared first on Rosetta Translation.

A recent project took me to the world of alpinism and the technical gear a mountaineer might take with them to tackle the peaks. Perhaps it is not surprising that English has borrowed heavily from other languages in this area given our relative lack of really challenging mountainous terrain. At any rate, one of my favourite translated German borrowings is the verb abseil, which few English speakers would be able to parse as the German prefix ‘ab’ (meaning down) and ‘seil’ (referring to the rope). American mountaineers meanwhile have borrowed from French in this context, opting for rappel to describe lowering yourself down a rock face on a rope. The German karabiner is sometimes used with the original spelling, sometimes anglicised to carabiner, and in informal contexts even abbreviated to biner. The full term is Karabinerhaken, which was a metal hook with a spring opening mechanism used by soldiers to attach their musket, or carbine, to a belt. And this takes us to the French carabinier and evidence that the European languages have exerted mutual influence over each other for centuries.

Discovering a previously unknown etymology is an unbeatable pleasure for a translator, even more so when it sneaks up on you unexpectedly. So, while wrestling with the instructions for building a model submarine and reflecting on the very strange and diverse translation tasks that cross my desk, I was idly typing out ‘anti-aircraft gun’ for the German Flugabwehrkanone when the penny dropped that this was the origin of the term flak. I’m not sure why it had never occurred to me before that this was a word with German origins; after all that final ‘k’ has all the hallmarks of just such a borrowing. There is an additional charm in the way English has adapted this term firstly to refer to the missiles (i.e. the anti-aircraft fire) rather than the gun itself and then to encompass a more symbolic meaning, which is now the more common usage, referring to strong criticism, censure or disapproval. The term is a favourite in contemporary politics, as in a Guardian heading from earlier this year “PM dodges MPs again as junior minister takes the flak”.

About the Author

Alison Tunley

Alison is a seasoned freelance translator with over 15 years of experience, specialising in translating from German to English. Originally from Wales, she has been a Londoner for some time, and she holds a PhD in Phonetics and an MPhil in Linguistics from the University of Cambridge, where she also completed her First Class BA degree in German and Spanish… Read Full Bio

The post Exploring etymology through English translation appeared first on Rosetta Translation.

Indian prime minister Narendra Modi has spoken passionately about facilitating access to technical and medical professions for those who might not be fluent in English. His argument is that these changes are rooted in the quest for greater social equality, “We aim to ensure that the children of poor parents become doctors and engineers even if they are not educated in English.”

The Hindi medical degree is set to be introduced in the state of Madhya Pradesh, with Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan describing this as a way to “break the shackles” of the English language.

The problem for the Indian government is that other regions, where Hindi is not so widely spoken, have been less enthusiastic about what they see as a move to impose Hindi as the main language of instruction in higher education. This disagreement has its roots in the 1950 Indian constitution, which originally envisaged the gradual phasing out of English in favour of Hindi over the next fifteen years. Opposition from non-Hindi speaking regions resulted in the introduction of the Official Languages Act in 1963, which allowed for the continued use of English alongside Hindi beyond 1965. The tussle over the status of Hindi continues today with many non-Hindi speakers suspicious of government moves that might grant this language special status over less widely spoken languages. India’s constitution lists 22 regional languages, and this language diversity in India has made official language policies a recurring political controversy. Just imagine the need for translation services if all of these languages were given more prominent status. One area of many that this would cause huge issues in is the legal system, where legal translations would have to be provided for all manner of documents for different parts of the country, with all the cost and delay that this would entail.

Although the Committee of Parliament on Official Language has suggested that local languages be given preference over English, the dominance of Hindi means that in practice this language may be given special status in the committee’s proposals for the country’s higher education system. In an article in University World News, a minister from the southern state of Telangana, Rama Rao, summarises the concerns of non-Hindi speakers, saying “India does NOT have a national language and Hindi is one among the many official languages. To impose Hindi […] is flouting the federal spirit.”

Claims by the Indian government that their language policies are aimed at the broader promotion of all India’s regional languages are somewhat undermined by dictums such as the recent instruction to civil servants in the Indian state of Maharashtra to avoid the English greeting “hello”. Instead, government employees are told they must use the greeting “vande mataram”, a phrase with origins in a national song which “deifies the country as a Hindu goddess” according to an article in The Times. Disagreements over the “Hinduisation” of public life look set to continue, with language playing a key role.

About the Author

Alison Tunley

Alison is a seasoned freelance translator with over 15 years of experience, specialising in translating from German to English. Originally from Wales, she has been a Londoner for some time, and she holds a PhD in Phonetics and an MPhil in Linguistics from the University of Cambridge, where she also completed her First Class BA degree in German and Spanish… Read Full Bio

The post Language diversity and the battle for political status in India appeared first on Rosetta Translation.

Some German yoga terms have direct and obvious equivalents in English. For example, a yoga routine might include the Berghaltung – Mountain Pose (Tadasana), Pflug – the Plough (Halasana), Delfin – the Dolphin (Shishumarasana), or herabschauender Hund – Downward-facing Dog, or Downward Dog for short (Adho mukha svanasana).

Other terms are sufficiently similar to be translated correctly as long as you are reasonably familiar with basic English yoga vocabulary. For example, Flankendehnung is not just a side stretch, as you might imagine from the German, but an extended side angle (Utthita Parshvakonasana), while the gedrehte Dreieckshaltung is not a twisted or rotated triangle, but a Revolved Triangle pose (Parivrtta Trikonasana). In both these cases, the ability to double-check the English term via the common Sanskrit equivalent is an excellent way to make sure you are using the correct language.

Other German yoga terms have even less obvious translations in English and will not feature in your average German to English dictionary. For example, the Schneidersitz makes no reference to a “tailor” in English; the correct term is the Easy Pose, which is sufficiently unimaginative that English-speaking yogi often resort to the Sanskrit term Sukhasana. And while the German yoga pose known as the halbe Drehsitz can be translated into English as the Seated Twist pose, a quick check of the official asana name, Ardha Matsyendrasana, reveals that English also gives this pose the more poetic name “Half Lord of the Fishes”. Similarly, without referencing the Sanskrit Baddha Konasana, it would be difficult to work out that the geschlossene Winkelhaltung im Sitz refers to an asana known in English as the Bound Angle, Butterfly or Cobbler’s pose.

Finally, specialist vocabulary such as this for yoga translation invariably reveals the shortcomings of machine translation. I particularly enjoyed the German for child’s pose (Kindeshaltung) being rendered as “child’s attitude”. This reminded me of my own rather immature and petulant response on being instructed to adopt this supposedly straightforward and relaxing pose and discovering that my unaccommodating calves have other ideas!

About the Author

Alison Tunley

Alison is a seasoned freelance translator with over 15 years of experience, specialising in translating from German to English. Originally from Wales, she has been a Londoner for some time, and she holds a PhD in Phonetics and an MPhil in Linguistics from the University of Cambridge, where she also completed her First Class BA degree in German and Spanish… Read Full Bio

The post Translating via an intermediate language: yoga translation from German to English via Sanskrit appeared first on Rosetta Translation.

As a former student of German at Cambridge University, the Times headline “Cambridge seizes Zeitgeist with gender-neutral German” immediately caught my eye. Despite the bold claim in the introductory paragraph that the university is saying “Auf Wiedersehen to teaching gendered German”, the reality is somewhat more mundane. Contrary to wild protestations on Twitter, there is no suggestion of eliminating grammatical gender from German teaching. All that is being proposed is that students explore the different options for encoding a person’s “natural gender” — in other words, their sex — in job titles and other nouns. Admittedly, contemporary sensitivities about cross-sex identities have heightened tensions around this issue. And the novel adoption of non-binary identities by large numbers of young people has thrown an additional spanner into the very binary works of German’s “natural gender” noun system (there is no equivalent of neuter for these personal nouns). But there is nothing new about the debate itself; arguments over the encoding of sex in German go back many decades.

German, like many other languages, has tens of thousands of sex-specific everyday words such as Lehrer/Lehrerin, Rechtsanwalt/Rechtsanwaltin, Politiker/Politikerin (male/female teacher, lawyer, politician) etc. Unlike in English, there is no gender-neutral option for these words. The correct version depends on the individual being referred to. When referring to several people, German exhibits a familiar patriarchal strategy of using the male form as the default. This is something that has been annoying feminists since at least the 1960s and resulted in moves to create more inclusive collective plurals (e.g. Lehrende or Lehrkräfte for teachers) or the use of both male and female forms (Lehrerinnen und Lehrer).

It took until 1995 for Duden (the preeminent German dictionary) to acknowledge somewhat begrudgingly “Bemühungen, eine sprachliche Gleichbehandlung von Frauen zu erreichen” (efforts to achieve equal treatment of women in the language). Even now, many Germans are dissatisfied with the inelegance of the suggested alternatives. Particularly fraught are the various typographic methods used to merge the male and female plural forms by inserting an asterisk, colon or underscore, Lehrer:innen/ Lehrer*innen/ Lehrer_innen, or by starting the female ending with a capital letter LehrerInnen. Not only are these widely regarded as rather ugly, but also there is little agreement about how they should be pronounced.

In frustration at the cumbersome nature of the gender-neutral German options, in 2013 the University of Leipzig took the radical decision of adopting the female form as the default instead. Needless to say, that just caused a whole new group of people to get annoyed!

A more interesting question perhaps is why it is that quite so many languages mark an individual’s (natural) gender in this way. In the past, language users presumably chose to signal this information because they deemed the sex of the person they were talking about relevant in some way to their message. Perhaps future language users will consider this a very odd quirk and sufficiently irrelevant as to abandon the system entirely. Or perhaps languages will evolve to encode the plethora of novel gender identities in even more complex ways. Whatever happens, people are sure to have firm opinions about it!

About the Author

Alison Tunley

Alison is a seasoned freelance translator with over 15 years of experience, specialising in translating from German to English. Originally from Wales, she has been a Londoner for some time, and she holds a PhD in Phonetics and an MPhil in Linguistics from the University of Cambridge, where she also completed her First Class BA degree in German and Spanish… Read Full Bio

The post Cambridge University grapples with gender-neutral German appeared first on Rosetta Translation.

Fashion vocabulary in German is sprinkled with borrowings from English, and when items of vocabulary are imported into a language, they are prone to undergoing a semantic reinterpretation. For example, German uses the word “Shirt” for everything from a T-shirt to a long-sleeved top to a to a cycling jersey. In English shirt is always understood to be a relatively formal garment with a collar, with the sole variation being short and long-sleeved styles. At any rate the collar is what philosophers might consider to be an essential property of the shirt in English, and an English customer searching for a shirt online would be surprised to be presented with other garments for the upper body.

A similar semantic distinction affects the German word Bluse (blouse). In English this is usually a relatively formal garment and would certainly not be used to refer to a sports top or functional T-shirt. Just because it says “Bluse” in the original German does not mean you can merrily apply the equivalent term in English, even if the dictionary fails to suggest alternatives.

Lots of clothes in German are described as sportlich, which translators often assume simply means sporty or athletic. In German fashion, however, this term is applied to items that are very definitely not sporty. Perhaps it is a reflection of our national character that when a British person says an item of clothing is “sporty” they are referring to something that would be worn for genuine athletic activity involving exertion and perspiration, or at least a garment that looks as though it is designed for this purpose. In German, sportlich often seems to mean something more akin to “casual” or “informal”.

Finally, one of my favourite clunky false friends involves the German Kultobjekt, which really shouldn’t be translated as a cult object because the English term cult also has slightly negative associations with counter-cultural or unorthodox religious groups, requiring unquestioning devotion from their followers. The German term simply implies an item that is or was highly fashionable and is better captured by phrases such as design classic or style icon. A similar issue arises for the German phrase Kultfaktor, where any suggestion of frenzied religious devotion can be avoided by describing products having “a dash of style” or a “trendy vibe”.

About the Author

Alison Tunley

Alison is a seasoned freelance translator with over 15 years of experience, specialising in translating from German to English. Originally from Wales, she has been a Londoner for some time, and she holds a PhD in Phonetics and an MPhil in Linguistics from the University of Cambridge, where she also completed her First Class BA degree in German and Spanish… Read Full Bio

The post False friends in fashion translations appeared first on Rosetta Translation.

The world changes and language races to keep up. Sometimes a word that had a very clear meaning becomes more ambiguous as a result of new inventions or discoveries. Enter the retronym, a type of neologism in which the new name helps distinguish between an existing form and a more recent one. The classic example of retronyms is the acoustic guitar, which was coined to describe a musical instrument that had been around for a considerable time, but which required an updated name to differentiate it from the more recent interloper, the electric guitar.

Examples of retronyms

Once you start looking out for these terms, they are everywhere. Merriam Webster cites examples such as whole milk (previously just milk before the introduction of various low fat alternatives), regular coffee (which was an unnecessary clarification before someone figured out how to remove the caffeine to create a decaffeinated option), and organic food (previously all food was organic). The dictionary also suggests that retronyms consist of a noun and a modifier that clarifies the original meaning of the noun. This is true in the previous examples and in more recent retronyms such as brick phone (as opposed to a smartphone), and cis woman and cis man (coined to convert the previously sex-based terms into categories that are defined by gender-identity and to distinguish between trans and non-trans identities).

Types of retronyms

Perhaps the best retronyms acquire a life of their own without the accompanying noun, which is what has happened for the phrase brick and mortar as applied to businesses that have a physical presence in addition to an online or mail-order capacity. The origins of the phrase are slightly difficult to pin down, as discussed entertainingly at English Language & Usage Q&A at the Stack Exchange site. Several instances contrasting physical bank branches versus electronic services can be traced to the 1970s, with the phrase morphing into a term to distinguish mail-order retail from shops that you could visit in person during the 1980s. The definition we are most familiar with today, where brick and mortar acts as an antonym for online retail outlets, can be traced back to the 1990s.

Origins of the term

As for the origin of the term retronym itself, that is said to go back to 1980 and Frank Mankiewicz (who was president of America’s National Public Radio at the time), who was apparently intrigued by way plain old books were being referred to as hardcover books to distinguish them from the softback variety. But the popularity of the term retronym was no doubt boosted about a decade later by William Safire’s column “On Language” in the New York Times. This short article consists mostly of Safire musing about the need for a retronym to distinguish the kind of mail you get posted through your front door from the variety that comes into your electronic inbox with this new-fangled thing called email. Safire also rather beautifully captures the inherent nostalgia in a retronym, describing these neologisms as “two-word names … for … things that have been overtaken by events”.

About the Author

Alison Tunley

Alison is a seasoned freelance translator with over 15 years of experience, specialising in translating from German to English. Originally from Wales, she has been a Londoner for some time, and she holds a PhD in Phonetics and an MPhil in Linguistics from the University of Cambridge, where she also completed her First Class BA degree in German and Spanish… Read Full Bio

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Thanks to the volunteers at Standard Ebooks, you can browse the entire dictionary online or download an e-reader version. As literary critic H. L. Mencken put it “in The Devil’s Dictionary are some of the most devastating epigrams ever written.” These range from the pithy: Twice, (adv.) “Once too often” and Positive (adj.) “Mistaken at the top of one’s voice” to more in-depth, searing diatribes from Bierce, such as his definition of Regalia (n.) which runs to many lines: “Distinguishing insignia, jewels and costume of […] Visionaries of Detectable Bosh […] the League of Holy Humbug […] Plumed Increscencies of the Magic Temple […] Impenitent Order of Wife-Beaters”. This style of dark humour is a recurrent theme, as seen in his definition of Orphan (n) “A living person whom death has deprived of the power of filial ingratitude”.

Bierce holds an impudent disdain for other professions, with Historian defined as “A broad-gauge gossip”, Lecturer as “One with his hand in your pocket, his tongue in your ear and his faith in your patience”, and a Lawyer is simply “One skilled in circumvention of the law” (to be cross-referenced with the definition of Liar as “A lawyer with a roving commission”).

Bierce is equally merciless for those within his own world of writing and publishing. The Proofreader gets the delicious entry “A malefactor who atones for making your writing nonsense by permitting the compositor to make it unintelligible.” Meanwhile, the Editor gets an extended definition in which Bierce no doubt wreaks vengeance on some of his own editorial adversaries: “Prankily, crankily prating of naught, Silly old quilly old Monarch of Thought.” He hasn’t forgotten his potential literary reviewers either, defining a Critic (n.) as “A person who boasts himself hard to please because nobody tries to please him.” When American novelist and literary critic William Dean Howells said, “Mr. Bierce is among our three greatest writers.”, Bierce is said to have quipped, “I am sure Mr. Howells is the other two.”

But Bierce is not averse to turning his sardonic attentions on himself. Thus we have Egotist (n) “A person of low taste, more interested in himself than in me.” And his roguish self-awareness is all too clear in his definition of the Dictionary itself as “A malevolent literary device for cramping the growth of a language and making it hard and inelastic. This dictionary, however, is a most useful work.”

About the Author

Alison Tunley

Alison is a seasoned freelance translator with over 15 years of experience, specialising in translating from German to English. Originally from Wales, she has been a Londoner for some time, and she holds a PhD in Phonetics and an MPhil in Linguistics from the University of Cambridge, where she also completed her First Class BA degree in German and Spanish… Read Full Bio

The post Ambrose Bierce and The Devil’s Dictionary appeared first on Rosetta Translation.

Hang a lantern on it
This phrase is used to refer to a plot device where something implausible happens but, instead of glossing over it, the writer deliberately draws attention to it in a conscious effort to tell the audience to suspend belief and not ask too many questions. As screenwriter Melinda Snodgrass puts it, “By acknowledging that we are aware of the problem/issue we reassure the audience that we know what we’re doing and they can sit back, relax and take the ride with us.”

A hat on a hat
This is the film industry equivalent of over-egging the pudding. Comedy writers use the phrase to refer to two iterations of a joke, where the second is unnecessarily repetitive or even a distraction. It often describes a gag that was previously working successfully and is undermined by the embellishment. The Mighty Boosh comedy TV show featured one episode with a character called Johnny Two Hats (wearing the predictable headgear) who subsequently turns up wearing four hats in possibly the ultimate insider joke about “putting a hat on a hat”.

Jumping the shark
This term is used to refer to the scripting of a wildly unlikely event, usually in a bid to reverse the fortunes of a programme with declining audience appeal. The phrase is credited to Jon Hein, who is said to have coined it in 1985 in reference to a 1977 episode of the hit sitcom Happy Days, in which the character Fonzie goes water-skiing and jumps over a shark. Hein created a website on which he posted his assessment of popular television shows and the moment each one “jumped the shark”. Perhaps even more delightfully, Wikipedia suggests the phrasal antonym to jumping the shark is “growing the beard” supposedly in reference to the dramatic improvement in quality in Star Trek season two, and in honour of the beard grown between the two series by the Star Ship Enterprise’s first officer William Riker.

And finally, the MacGuffin
A device that is instrumental to plot development but insignificant in itself. This term originates outside film but was popularised by Alfred Hitchcock with reference to the military secrets that motivate the protagonists in The 39 Steps. The nature of the secrets is never revealed; instead, the audience is expected to assume their importance and enjoy the ensuing adventure. Similarly, in the Big Lebowski, Jeff Bridges’ character The Dude embarks on a convoluted quest triggered by a case of mistaken identity when someone pees on his rug. Arguably here the Coen brothers have devised a MacGuffin and then proceeded to hang a lantern on it.

About the Author

Alison Tunley

Alison is a seasoned freelance translator with over 15 years of experience, specialising in translating from German to English. Originally from Wales, she has been a Londoner for some time, and she holds a PhD in Phonetics and an MPhil in Linguistics from the University of Cambridge, where she also completed her First Class BA degree in German and Spanish… Read Full Bio

The post Film industry jargon appeared first on Rosetta Translation.

This blog previously delved into the question of foreign diacritics and whether or not to include them in English text. Mulling this issue again recently led me off down another rabbit hole to investigate linguistic purism in English. Some time ago, I came across the piece “Uncleftish Beholding” by American science fiction author Poul Anderson. The text is designed to illustrate what English might look like without the now familiar loanwords from French, Greek and Latin. Douglas Hofstadter jokingly coined the term “Ander-Saxon” in homage to Anderson’s linguistic creation. You may need a bit of assistance to decipher the text itself, but it is a fun exercise, particular for anyone with a knowledge of the Germanic languages. Anderson creatively uses existing Germanic vocabulary and coins new terms in his description of atomic theory. So, there are firststuffs (chemical elements), waterstuff (hydrogen, “Wasserstoff” in German), sourstuff (from German “Sauerstoff” meaning oxygen) and the delightful sunstuff (for helium, derived from Greek hēlios meaning sun).

The text represents a partial conlang, or constructed language, in which the phonology, grammar and vocabulary is consciously devised, often with a particular purpose in mind. The most famous example is undoubtedly Esperanto. What caught my attention with the Poul Anderson text was its quest for linguistic purism. Only Anderson could reveal his motivation for writing the piece, but it seems hard to imagine that humorous effect was not a factor. As well as playful intent, the piece is an intellectual exercise and an opportunity to exhibit his linguistic prowess. The text is likely to be gibberish without some familiarity with philology not to mention a passing knowledge of the scientific concepts being described.

Other writers have made more serious arguments for linguistic purism in English. John Cheke, a 16^th century English classical scholar, argues “I am of this opinion that our own tung shold be written cleane and pure, unmixt and unmangeled with borowing of other tunges”. A couple of centuries later, the Rev. William Barnes was proposing the avoidance of Greek, Latin and other foreign influences to allow readers without a classical education to better understand English texts. If we ignore the potential appeal to those with an excessively nationalistic or even xenophobic mindset, some of Barnes’ coinages are delightful. He comes up with sun-print for photograph and wortlore for botany. Other rather charming lexical suggestions include birdlore instead of ornithology, and bendsome for flexible.

There is a streak of nostalgia in the arguments proposed by English language purists that is echoed in some of the pronouncements on French by the Académie Française today. The 19^th century poet Gerard Manley Hopkins writes wistfully, “It makes one weep to think what English might have been; for in spite of all that Shakespeare and Milton have done … no beauty in a language can make up for want of purity.” More recently, elements of linguistic purism are reflected in George Orwell’s statement in 1946 that “Bad writers […] are nearly always haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones.” And a similar philosophy, albeit with a more broad-minded emphasis, underpins the often admirable campaign for plain English.

About the Author

Alison Tunley

Alison is a seasoned freelance translator with over 15 years of experience, specialising in translating from German to English. Originally from Wales, she has been a Londoner for some time, and she holds a PhD in Phonetics and an MPhil in Linguistics from the University of Cambridge, where she also completed her First Class BA degree in German and Spanish… Read Full Bio

The post Linguistic purism and conlangs appeared first on Rosetta Translation.

My preference for “this” over “the” in these contexts is typical of the kind of stylistic subtlety that translators often use to make their translations read more smoothly. The choice is largely subjective in the sense that the alternative is not incorrect; it just doesn’t feel quite right to the pernickety reader. At any rate, I had never given any great consideration as to why there might be this difference in style between German and English or even how to describe it. In fact one of the wonderful things about language is the way humans effortlessly use it in all sorts of sophisticated ways without understanding the rules that explain their usage.

Curiosity finally got the better of me. Even though I don’t have a firm answer as to whether German and English genuinely differ in this regard or why that might be, I am now at least able to describe the syntactic mechanism being deployed.

The simple definite article “the” does not need much explanation. It’s the word we use to refer to a specific person or thing. In contrast, the indefinite article “a” or “an” introduces a generic or unspecified noun. Demonstratives (this, that, these, those*) are used to indicate a particular item and they come in two varieties: proximal and distal. The choice between proximal and distal, depends on a frame of reference that can be spatial, i.e. a consideration of the object’s physical location in relation to the speaker, or more abstract, for example how long ago something was referred to by the speaker or writer.

It is in this abstract frame of reference that my suspected difference between German and English is found, with a slight increased preference for the definite article in the former, where the latter might opt for a deictic demonstrative. My linguistic hunch may be entirely wrong as I’ve been unable to find any reference to it elsewhere, but at least I know how to describe the hypothesis now.

*Footnote: My one disappointment with English demonstratives is that the archaic yon and yonder have fallen out of use!

About the Author

Alison Tunley

Alison is a seasoned freelance translator with over 15 years of experience, specialising in translating from German to English. Originally from Wales, she has been a Londoner for some time, and she holds a PhD in Phonetics and an MPhil in Linguistics from the University of Cambridge, where she also completed her First Class BA degree in German and Spanish… Read Full Bio

The post This, that and the other: proximal and distal demonstratives appeared first on Rosetta Translation.