This link from last week’s Language and words in the news caught my eye; it talks about the idea of a ‘universal translator’, and how difficult it is in practice to produce one (though science fiction has never had a problem coming up with them, for example the babel fish in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy). It also mentions probably the biggest problem with existing translation tools and software – the fact that the translation you end up with is often so literal, that it makes no sense whatsoever. What do you tell your students with regard to these kinds of technology aids, and have you found any that are particularly effective?

It’s quite common these days to use foreign words or phrases to make your speech or writing sound a bit more interesting, cosmopolitan or even learned. It should be done with caution, though, as this article in the Guardian demonstrates. There are just so many opportunities for error and embarrassment; you might find you’ve completely confused the issue with the reference, accidentally allied yourself or your writing with something inappropriate or offensive, or just left those fluent in the language you borrowed from in fits of laughter.

The same can happen the other way around, of course, dropping English words into conversation in another language. Big companies have made some famous mistakes in this area over the years, my favourite probably being the Rolls Royce model that had to be renamed in some countries because it’s English name meant something very different to ‘high quality’, ‘luxury’ and all the other typical Rolls Royce values!

Haresh Pandya is a freelance journalist and teaches English in a college in Gujarat in India.

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Of all nations, India can boast of having the richest and most diverse literature. This is not a recent phenomenon. It has been so since time immemorial – long before the written word came into existence. The tribe of Indian writers writing exclusively in English has been flourishing by the day. But that is hardly the point. What is important is the scores of others who write in a variety of regional languages.

Even without considering the 2000-odd dialects in use in various Indian states, the country has 20-odd officially recognised languages, including Hindi, Bengali, Urdu, Tamil, Gujarati, and Marathi.

Good English translations of the works of regional writers would not only enrich India’s national literature, but also contribute substantially to world literature. As the poet and critic Vinay Dharwadker has rightly remarked:

“Indian-English literature by itself is inadequate to represent who we are to the rest of the world. Only a broad representation of the full range of Indian literatures, translated into a world language such as English, can do what is needed.”

But Indian literature remains surprisingly short on quality translations of works from its own rich repertoire of regional languages into Hindi and English. Consequently, the goldmine of India’s literature remains largely unexplored.

Hindi is unofficially India’s national language, and is gaining ground even in southern states like Kerala and Tamil Nadu, where people take pride in speaking their own regional languages. But how many quality literary works written in other Indian languages are translated into Hindi, let alone English?

Not many people are aware that when Arundhati Roy approached a renowned Indian publisher with the manuscript of The God of Small Things, she was offered a pittance – for the book which eventually won her The Booker Prize when she got it published in England. Roy was not unknown even at that time and, more importantly, her novel was in English. If a writer of Roy’s standing had to face such a problem in her own country despite writing in English (and coming up with a masterpiece), one can imagine the plight of lesser mortals when it comes to publishing their translated works from regional languages into Hindi or English!

So we need both Hindi and English translations of good works from a wide range of Indian languages. It is the only possible way to bridge the multi-lingual India, and bring her literature to an international audience. This is not always easy. A translator may be well-versed in the original language as well as the one into which he or she is translating. But he or she may not necessarily be aware of the cultural background of the work at hand.

But despite these problems and shortcomings, it is heartening that slowly but steadily, Indian translation work has been building up to a state of critical mass. We now need more talented translators to come forward and help India’s outstanding regional literature emerge from its cocoon and reach not just a majority of Indian readers, but also a global audience.

Over on Facebook we asked fans to translate – word for word – sayings from their language into English where the translation really doesn’t make sense in English. This turned out to be quite entertaining for a day at the office, and I’m sure there is a lot more fun to be had in this area.

I’ll admit it may only be fun for a certain type of language lover: one without better things to do? Anyway. I’m bringing across the Russian ones from the ‘What’s your English?’ Facebook page as it’s Russian English month. There are others which you may want to look at.

The first Russian saying:

Julia Bay
from Russian:) would you, please, be so kind as to give me some water … because I’m so hungry that I even have no place to stay for the night …

And the second:

Nastya Yandulskaya
- Do you want some cake?
- Yes, no, maybe …

If you’d like to add your own, please post a comment to this post.

Have you noticed how, in the past 10 years, a whole bunch of completely unrelated words have become totally interchangeable, all thanks to predictive texting?

Predictive texting is now a feature of pretty much every mobile phone on the market, and love it or hate it, we’re all exposed to it in one way or another. It struck me the other day, though, that as a result, many of us have developed quite a knack for ‘auto-translation’ – understanding what was actually meant, despite predictive texting producing something completely different.

Take, for example, a text I got the other day: ‘Don’t worry, I’ll post it out with her later’. Predictive texting had inserted ‘post’ instead of ‘sort’, but I immediately understood what it was meant to say, given the context of the conversation, and it was only a second later that I thought, hang on, that didn’t look right. And even when I looked back at it, it took me a minute to identify the error.

Just as our brains can fill in the gaps when words are missing or overlook errors because we know what should be there (the bane of the proof reader’s life!), it seems we can now automatically translate words that we know can be created by the same keystrokes on a mobile phone as the word we actually wanted.

Many of us (me included) probably experienced this for the first time when an older relative (usually a Mum!) started learning to text, but didn’t quite understand how to use predictive texting. So you received all sorts of weird and wonderful texts that took 20 minutes to decipher, like: ‘When you in on ink, ban you look nut for a 7th for the spare soon. Thanks, loud Nun’ (translation: ‘When you go on hol, can you look out for a rug for the spare room. Thanks, love Mum’).

Now, although most Mums have figured texting out (no more blank texts accidentally sent in reply to your messages!), it’s become second nature to ‘auto-translate’, because of the sheer volume of texts coming and going, and the fact that we all, at times, either don’t bother to read back what we’ve written before we hit ‘send’, or we see what we want it to say when we do. (Well, I say second nature – I’d still struggle with bits of that example – the ‘look nut’ and ‘7th’ would still throw me, though I think I’d probably get the rest.)

And it’s going even further than that – I remember a while ago seeing Stephen Fry interviewed, and he was talking about how his nephew used the word ‘book’ to mean ‘cool’, precisely because they are created from the same keystrokes on a mobile phone. Presumably, he and his mates got so many messages accidentally saying things were ‘really book’, that that gradually became the ‘in’ word to use. Or should that be the ‘go’ word?

I’ve had an enlightening week reading Stephen King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. I’ve avoided his books – and most of the resulting movies – all my reading/watching life, as …  well, I’m hellishly easy to scare (seriously, Ghostbusters scared me senseless). But his approach and his advice is straight-up and liberating rather than terrifying. What it did, though, was get me thinking about the difference between being at home in a language (as a first-language speaker) and being an immigrant, a visitor or, even, a spy (a non-native speaker).

King says: ‘Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule’. At first I thought – well, that’s alright if you’re English speaking, and if you’re writing prose. I guess what he is saying is that writing instinctively and honestly beats writing to be fancy. Writing: ‘Lend me your ear’ beats writing: ‘Advance me your stirrup, anvil and cochlea.’

But then I cast my mind back to those English teaching days – sitting in a class of high-school students in the neon-clad city at the end of a long day … all of the students keying words furiously into their pocket translators, flicking desperately through their chosen English dictionary answering questions such as: ‘Where are you going for Chinese New Year?’ with ‘Myself will roam primarily to the kin’. Poetic … but confusing.

At the end of this train of thesaurusean (I know that’s not a word!) thoughts I was  thinking: so, a thesaurus can be confusing for the non-native speaker and it can be a dissembling tool for native speakers (I promise dissembling came to mind before concealing),  so is a thesaurus only good for a crossword puzzler?

I tweeted Stephen King’s quote a few days ago, and found the responses from @green_knight most heartening:

@green_knight @MacDictionary I’ve found a thesaurus useful to chase down weird translations: how did he get from here to there, where there=exact opposite.

and
@green_knight @MacDictionary Sometimes I reach for a thesaurus to avoid five repetitions of a perfectly good word – or to avoid a rare one.

That put my mind at rest and made me once again pleased and proud to point to our ‘integrated free online thesaurus’ without recalling to mind nearly all of the dialogue from Everything is illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer whose main(ish) character speaks in a sort of parallel English constructed of synonyms and near-misses: ‘Forgive my speaking of English, Jonfen, as I’m not so premium with it.’

But that book is a subject for another wandering.

It would be no exaggeration to say that I have a history of both triumph and tragedy in the kitchen. Delia Smith I am not. I don’t believe in recipes; I’m not going to be told what to do by all those egotistical, narcissistic celebrity chefs; I cook by my own rules. The result is that I am somewhat hit and miss when it comes to delivering edible, safe meals and have acquired a reputation as ‘the Queen of Cordon Bleurgh’. Last Sunday’s rhubarb fool fooled no one; it was rhubarb soup. My hand-made, stone-baked margharita pizza was so monstrously yeasty it looked like something James T. Kirk once did battle with, my Boxing Day sprout risotto still makes my brother retch at the very mention of it and the only surprise about my marrow surprise was that my partner was able to go to work the next day. Have I made my point? I think so.

However, on Friday evening the culinary gods had finally decided to give me a break. I made that old Tuscan classic Cacciucco alla Livornese, a throw-it-all-in fish stew. My better half sat down at the table with some trepidation, but relief soon spread across his face. It looked (and smelled) genuinely delicious. He wouldn’t have to give it to the cat when I wasn’t looking, after all. ‘Buon appetito!’ we chimed in unison, forks and spoons at the ready. Or as we say in English … er, actually, what do we say in English? How do we convey the sentiment that we want someone to have an enjoyable gastronomic experience when presented with a plate of tasty nosh? As we chewed on our squid rings, we tried to think of the English equivalent. Here are the contenders (none are convincing):

Good appetite!/Have a good appetite! Clearly no one has ever said this.
Enjoy your meal!/Have a nice meal! Only spoken by McDonalds employees. Doesn’t count.
May the sauce be with you. Only really relevant when eating chips with Obi-Wan Kenobi.
Tuck in/Get stuck in! What are we, pigs?

Of course, the sad truth is that there is no equivalent expression for Italy’s Buon appetito, France’s Bon appetit, Germany’s Guten appetit, Spain’s Buen provecho, Uzbekistan’s Yoqimli ishtaha … OK, you get the gist. The translations offered on www.omniglot.com aren’t much better: Happy eating … Chow down … Get your laughing gear around this … the Goodfellas-inspired Eat already! and the unbelievably lame This looks nice.

What does this gastronomic gap in our idiomatic repertoire say about anglophone culture? Has the British so-called ‘food is fuel’ mentality stunted our culinary language? What is the reason for our lack of refined dinnertime expressions? Maybe we English speakers are just content to stick our heads in the trough and chow down; we don’t want to spend precious seconds on culinary niceties. Who knows?

What about at the end of a meal? What do we say to express satisfaction? It doesn’t get any better, I’m afraid:
I’m full.
I’m stuffed.
I’m fit to burst.
I’m dreadfully sorry but if I eat any more I may physically explode.

… think Mr Creosote in that horrendous Monty Python scene. In fact, an Italian tutor once told me that she found the way English people describe their satisfaction at the end of a meal exceptionally vulgar. ‘You English just shovel it down and then say you’re full. That’s not very elegant.’ In Italian, she told me, the correct expression would be ‘sono satio/a’ – I am sated. We’ll take this on board. Here is a sneak preview of next Friday’s dinner table conversation:
Would you like another helping of chicken a la marmite?
No thanks, darling. [scraping food into bin] I am sated.

As a translator, I use dictionaries nearly every day. But contrary to what many people might believe, I don’t simply look up words in a bilingual dictionary and then write down the first definition offered. Translation is about much more than approximately equivalent words. That’s why actual people are needed to carry out translation, rather than machines being employed. Only people can understand the context and see which of a variety of possible translations is the best choice.

Monolingual dictionaries are much more useful for translators than bilingual ones and I wish people, including translators themselves, appreciated this fact. Monolingual dictionaries explain a language’s words in its own words. That is to say that rather than simply offering possible equivalents or near-equivalents, a monolingual dictionary offers you an understanding of how the speakers of that language define and use a word and what associations they get from it. This in turn helps translators pick the best possible translation. One cannot translate word-for-word; one translates the context as well, and the context includes all of the source language and culture.

Translators should focus on studying monolingual dictionaries first and only once they have fully understood a word from the perspective of the speakers of a given language ought they turn to a bilingual dictionary to get a list of possible translations. As a translator, my first reference tool will always be a monolingual dictionary, and I use it not only when I have a query about a specific word but any time when I want to learn more about the source languages I translate from. It’s the one book that can be read over and over again and yet still offer new and useful information.

This is a guest post by Dr. B.J. Epstein who can be reached via her translation blog Brave New Words or her website.