“la parole exportée”

As translators we are required to be excellent, which we strive to be.

The bit I’m quoting below is taken from a coupon I received from a supermarket chain that implements a customer loyalty system. Usually, I just check the amount they are refunding me, but this time I took the time to read the rest.

Literal translation into English:

‘It must be used until 03/05/2009.’

I disagree.

Either the original text should read:

Il peut être utilisé jusqu’au (It can be used until) 03/05/2009,

or it should be:

Il doit être utilisé avant le (It must be used before) 03/05/2009.

This sentence makes no sense. Option 1 would be possible only if you were allowed to use it several times, or if you could redeem only part of it, and redeem the rest at another time, before the expiry date. But it’s a one-time ticket, and you lose any amount that you are not using (i.e. if you’re buying something cheaper).

You can guess the meaning of course, because the only important piece of information here is the date itself.

But it’s not as if this had been translated by a poor soul speaking a language with a different grammatical structure. It simply shows that the person who wrote it is unable to follow the logic of a short, straightforward sentence, in his or her own language.

And that’s only a detail. Think about bigger things. Politics. The economy…

During my brief visit overseas (understand ‘under the English Channel’ and on to Canterbury, England) last Saturday, I dropped by the Oxfam second-hand bookshop in the main street and there I made my way, shelf after shelf, sifting through a much better selection of books than I imagined.

I almost bought a gilt-edged copy of Longfellow’s poems (and still regret not doing so, hoping it will still be there when I return in September).

Ending up in the Languages section, there, under a set of brand-new copies of Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Nouveau Roman gems, I found what promised to be fun for someone interested in words, and pure torture for ordinary people. [About Robbe-Grillet, I must confess that we parted ways when I was in high school and was assigned the reading of his Manifest toward the end of the school year; I found it so excruciatingly boring that I've never read anything by him since then.]

‘A Glossary for the 90s’ was published in 1998 by Guardian columnist David Rowan. It lists words and phrases that crept up maybe not in our personal vocabulary, but at least in the media, in corporate publications, etc. in the previous decade. Some of them have become very standard, like ‘Reality TV’, ‘Social Entrepreneur’, ‘the New Black’, ‘the Defining Moment’, ‘Pushing the envelope’, etc.

The book is classified in the Humour/Reference category, and it includes many euphemisms. I’m not sure which one is the longest, but one I particularly liked (and had never heard before) was: ‘Real-time Precipitation Syndrome’. The author doesn’t cite a source, but provides a translation: ‘Rain’.

Unfortunately, there are only 9 pages in the section headed ‘Eurojargon’, that well of linguistic and sometimes incomprehensible invention. But the ‘Wheeled Child Conveyancing Vehicle’ has been included. In those Eurocrats’ heads, What’s wrong with pushchair, or pram?

I am still reading the book, there are quite a few of these phrases and words that I’d never seen before. Buying this book was a good move. Longfellow will have to wait…

photo credit: erix!

It is no mystery that we learn our language in childhood and become citizens of our countries thanks to the institution of primary schools. It is therefore essential to ensure that children are exposed to a diversity of situations, and taught about life as it is, and not just their immediate surroundings.

I am saddened to read this article. But I’m not overly surprised. Of course, a child doesn’t learn his or her mother tongue by reading dictionaries, but partly by looking up those secret words that they’ve never seen or heard before. The vast majority of children are now brought up in at least semi-urban conditions, and despite their teachers’ efforts are increasingly removed from Nature. It’s a pity that the adults who are in charge of producing such tools of knowledge as dictionaries are so keen to sever the flimsy links that still connect them to Nature. We are not being esoteric or excessively nostalgic here: some of the words culled are not just the catkin shown above, but also acorn, buttercup, heron, almond, marzipan, ash, beetroot, porpoise, gooseberry, raven, carnation, blackberry, tulip, porridge, etc. Was blackberry replaced by its capitalized version?

The author’s argument has to do with the important link between language and imagination. But there are ‘down-to-earth’ implications too. We know that science teachers are also having a hard time maintaining children’s interest in and curiosity for life sciences.

To me, the future looks pretty grim and rather puzzling: At a time when so much is made of environmental protection and conservation, how are our children and grand-children to understand anything about it, and name the components of that environment, if it is turned into a remote, undescribable concept instead of remaining part of their reality, if only in imagination?