“la parole exportée”

Sifting through some of my favorite blogs, I come across a title that seems made to measure for this blog: ‘What’s in a word? The evolution of disability language‘ by Glenda Watson Hyatt.

Glenda is a famous blogger who’s living with cerebral palsy, so she knows her subject, and she wrote this long article to show how society, culture and language are slowly evolving in their treatment of disability. I once had a very interesting discussion with the only conference interpreter I know who comes to work in a wheelchair. I was arguing that translating documents mentioning people with disabilities was very difficult, as you had to tackle two sets of the society-culture-language conundrum, usually at different evolutionary stages, but you also have to take care not to use language that can be considered offensive by the people concerned.

And since we are approaching the date celebrating the beginning of the French Revolution, I can’t help digressing: how is it that in the ‘country of human rights,’ so many places are still inaccessible to disabled people, when there are laws making it compulsory to make all public places accessible?

I shouldn’t read other people’s posts. Seriously. I end up reading lots of stuff that is not directly relevant to anything I do.

Yet I find all those blogs fascinating, because they refer to things that are sometimes very different to what I can do/should do, and thus get me to think outside the box.

Like this one:

Joanna Young’s post took me to Wordle, and I started playing with it using a selection of words from my tag cloud. (It helped that I had completed all my urgent jobs!!!)

First experiment got me this:

A little bit of tweaking colors, layout, etc. and I came up with this one (strictly identical in terms of colors, font, background colors).

Mmmmm…

I’m left wondering why I find the bottom one more “acceptable,” when the top one “appeals” to me as being untidy, yet more creative?

Apparently simple things like that tell you more about yourself than all the manuals you could read on the subject. Translating is a mental and cognitive activity that requires order and method. But it also needs some creativity. Maybe that’s the explanation?

A better explanation, anyone?

Many years ago, I was lucky enough to work for a couple of French publishers, translating books on various ‘real-life’ subjects. Gardening was one such topic and I translated a few on tree-pruning, flower-planting, vegetables… One I particularly liked was on how to use colorful plants in your garden. I had just moved to a house with a garden, so I was happy to test some of the advice too!

Philadelphus, or mock orange, or seringa (the last being its French name too), was one of the easiest plant names to translate, if you overlook the fact that it has two spellings, namely ’seringa’ or ’seringat’ in French. But I remember a book on medicinal plants that was more of a challenge.

As ever, when translation is concerned, your own knowledge of the general background is invaluable, and it helped me that my parents had a passion for Botany and had exposed me to all sorts of plants and plant names from a very young age. Not a total country bumpkin, I do have links with Nature! Nowadays I run across urban people who have no idea what a lime tree (Tilia, tilleul) is. Some of them have encountered it in the herbal tea section of their supermarket, but my neighbor has been the source of nightmares around my lime tree, that no herbal tea could cure!

Challenges are said to help you grow. Probably true, at least in the case of the translation of plant names. Faced with a mass of unknown names and species and varieties, I quickly had to find a way around the problem. In the days of real dictionaries and books, no Internet available, I decided that the way to go was to find the plant’s Latin name, and search its accepted French name, bearing in mind that people in different regions may use different names, so it was necessary to sift and choose the most widespread ones. The Internet now makes this task much easier.

My Philadelphus above didn’t have the honor of being planted by me, but it’s been offering a mass of white blossom year after year. Today it’s just having a shower and I wanted to capture this moment. But most of all I wanted to give it recognition for sending a sea of deep, rich fragrance into my office.