Working Languages

According to Western media reports (e.g.), last Sunday's elections in Serbia were a contest between a pro-European alliance and the ultra-nationalist Radical Party.

Don't know about you but ultra-nationalist has a decidedly rabid ring to my delicate ear. Those with similar political views in Britain go by the rather more cerebral epithet Eurosceptic.

Patriotic is more salubrious still but, like God, seems to exist only in the US.

The substantive difference between these terms, as far as I can make out, is roughly that between astronaut and cosmonaut.

Which fits them nicely into Bertrand Russell's paradigm of irregular conjugation:

"I am a patriot, you are a Eurosceptic, he is an ultranationalist".

Whatever about Old Irish, Modern Irish is certainly best approached through English. Indeed, it could be argued that much of the language is inaccessible to anybody not knowing English.

It is not just a matter of the extensive borrowing from English, typically in the form of loan translations. It is that these loan translations do not seem to be integrated into the language as stable elements but remain dynamically linked to the original, borrowed afresh each time they are used.

The situation is worth comparing with that of a bigger language such as German. Concern is sometimes expressed in Germany at the number of English words and expressions being borrowed into German these days. But these loan-words, if accepted, seem to become fully domesticated and to lose their connection with what is going on in English.

I came across an example of this on a Lufthansa flight listening to the English and German versions of the pilot's greeting to passengers. Referring to where he was speaking from, he used the word Cockpit in German, clearly a borrowing from English. In the English version, however, this became flight deck. Presumably because cockpit is now avoided in such contexts for taboo reasons. But German had no reason to change and has stuck with Cockpit.

The bilingual pilot sees nothing awry in using one English term in English and a different one in German - because Cockpit in German is now a German word, not an English one. The reference to its English origin is static/historical only.

Not so in Irish, it often seems. In much spoken and especially written Irish, the relationship to English is dynamic: the language ends up reduced to little more than a code, with as its referent not the real world but the calqued English original. It cannot really be understood without resort to English, into which it first has to be decoded (unconsciously or otherwise). It would thus be impenetrable to a learner not already familiar with English.

Something similar can be found among German-speakers, but only in reverse i.e. it is their English that cannot be understood without a knowledge of German. Things like resp. ...

Still with Umberto Eco it appears that, like the 23rd archbishop of Paris André Vingt-Trois and anyone called Esposito or Colombo (including Christopher Columbus?), he is descended from a waif:

Eco’s grandfather claims to be a foundling, and that he was given the name Eco by “an inventive civil servant.” Supposedly the name is an acronym for ex caelis oblatus, or “offered by the heavens.”

How apt that the classically erudite Umberto should have a Latin acronym for a surname.

As regards his relationship to this foundling ancestor, his Mouse or Rat book has an interesting discussion of the Italian word for grandchild, which happens to be the same word as for nephew or niece.

But the fact that there is only one word does not mean that Italians do not see any difference between the child of one's son or daughter and the child of one's sister or brother. They see it to such an extent that even in the case of death duties the two kinds of relatives pay a different tax

This illustrates admirably a point often lost on those who translate: it's not the words themselves that matter, it's what they refer to.

Even the simple fact that one language can have one word where another has two is not always appreciated. It seems to have escaped even the redoubtable Mark Liberman at Language Log in a post which includes some translation from French to make a point about the expression vertical politics:

Underlining how flexible the metaphor of horizontal/vertical politcs can be, a quick web search for the French translation politique verticale turns up two radically different interpretations (neither of which has any connection with the current American presidential campaign):

(link) ... le développement d'une politique verticale visant à encourager la participation des jeunes, la liberté de création, la divulgation de l'information ...

... the development of a vertical politics aiming to encourage the participation of young people, the freedom to create, the release of information ...

Like Italian nipote, however, French politique corresponds to more than one word in English, and here it clearly translates as policy not politics. Vertical policy is something quite different from vertical politics.

(...) it seems to me that the idea of translation as a process of negotiation (between author and text, between author and readers, as well as between the structure of two languages and the encylopaedias of two cultures) is the only one that matches our experience.

If the book were a translation, that word negotiation would strike me as one that hadn't been translated very well. According to me, a different word is needed there, something like trade-off.

Consider this googled example, also produced by a non-native, saying much the same thing in a more specific context:

What requirements should a translation of a Apache documentation meet, if there were a trade-off between fluent readability and exact words translation?

To replace trade-off with negotiation in that sentence would render it opaque and portentous. Which is just what you expect from an "intellectual" like Eco, some might say. But that wouldn't be fair. His regular column in the news weekly L'Espresso is highly readable and he doesn't normally tend to obscure his ideas in verbiage.

I suspect it might be just his Italian leaking into his English. The Italian cognates of negotiation have a much more concrete sense of trade and exchange than the English word as normally understood. Negozio, for example, is the word for a shop.

In any case, I can't help feeling that if English were his first language he'd have chosen some other word.

Then again, maybe I just don't get it. What can possibly be meant, for example, by a negotiation - or even a trade-off - between author and reader? Don't they both want exactly the same thing?

Here's a nice short piece by Umberto Eco on the season that's in it.

Reported in yesterday's Financial Times:

The panel, initially dubbed a "wise men's committee", will be approved by European heads of government at the December 14 summit in Brussels, but it will instead be officially known as a "reflection group".

This follows expressions of concern from some governments and EU commissioners that the term "wise men" implied an absence of women on the panel.

As it would. So why, in this post-phallocratic age, would anyone suggest calling it that in the first place?

Of course nobody did. The unwanted implication is entirely the result of the inept transposition into English of a French expression, comité des sages, which itself does not imply any such "absence of women".

In French, gender does not follow sex in the same way as in English. The feminine pronoun elle can perfectly well refer to a man and the masculine il to a woman, where the gender of the antecedent noun so requires.

Similarly, the fact that "sage" is a masculine noun doesn't imply that the wise ones have to be male. So translating "sages" as "wise men" isn't even literal.

(Earlier post on bizarre effects of retaining German gender in English translation).

The equivalent of the French sages in international English would appear to be Eminent Persons.

A case recently before the European Court of Justice threw up an instance of a literal translation that means more or less exactly the opposite of the original.

For reasons best known to themselves the Greek plaintiffs had chosen to bring their action in English (they would have been perfectly entitled to use Greek). Not only that but at some point during the written procedure they applied to change the language of the case to French. This request was formally refused but, when it came to the oral hearing, the presiding judge, who also happened to be Greek, didn't insist on them sticking to English so we ended up with plaintiff, defendant and judge, all native Greeks, attempting to communicate with each other in alternating bursts of English and French as the mood took them.

Much to the chagrin of those interpreting of course.

But the written submissions were all in English, albeit with a distinctly Hellenic flavour, and included several instances of the seemingly innocuous phrase 'to file a complaint'. Only that it was used to describe an act ending rather than beginning the legal process.

I don't know what the Greek is but there are equivalent expressions in other civil-law jurisdictions e.g. 'classer une affaire' in France or 'archiviare un procedimento' in Italy, both meaning to close a case with the literal sense of filing it away.

The website of the Greek Ombudsman uses the expression in both - antonymous - meanings. Here in the conventional sense...

Who can file a complaint? Everybody who is directly involved in a case of a child's rights violation, meaning, the child him/herself, the parents/guardians, relatives or any other person who has direct knowledge of the violation...

and here à la grecque:

The Ombudsman may file a complaint, which is judged to be manifestly vague, unfounded or has been submitted in an abusive manner or in violation of the principle of good faith

The same thing is also found in translations from other languages. Here from Spanish:

In view of the complainant's failure to respond the prosecutor decided to file the complaint

i.e. decided to drop the case, not to prosecute it.

The Greek case at the ECJ illustrates a point not always appreciated - that mistranslations are found not only in actual translations but also and perhaps more insidiously in original texts by overconfident non-natives.

The popular TV series Cold Case is known in France as Affaires Classées.