35 years for pregnant teen killer.
That’s appalling. Oh, no. I see. It’s a man who killed a pregnant teenager, not …
35 years for pregnant teen killer.
That’s appalling. Oh, no. I see. It’s a man who killed a pregnant teenager, not …
Would you commission a translation from a company that advertises itself in this way?
Video-Tutorial to setup Profile and Keyword watch function
We noticed that 95% of all registrars did not or only partially fill out their Profile and Keywords/Language combinations.Only if you register correctly and fill out the requiered fields you can profit from our job portal.
If you do it right you will get automatic e-mail alerts of all jobs of interest for you.
Please update your Profile it lasts only 5 to 10 minutes.Important remark: A few freelancer in the WWW complaint that our portal only benefit the cheapest bid for a job offer. This is NOT true. After the closing an offer the job poster can select between all bids the one that is most conveniant for him. The offered price is certainly an important but not the only criteria that will be considered (freelance rating, delivery date, experience, turn-over etc.).
I am not going to take up the suggestion that I might wish to work for them. They receive text for translation and ask their freelance translators to bid for it. The client then chooses from the available offers.
If you sell professional services through a Dutch auction, quality goes straight out of the window.
Trevor notes that the Tourist Department of the Xunta de Galicia has resurrected an English word that hasn’t been used for a few centuries. And doesn't know what it means. Nor does it have in general anything more than what might be called an innovative approach to the language of Shakespeare.
Or, to put it another way, slightly raised. The Alhambra is one of the most visited tourist sites in Spain.
Whatever the media may say Francesco Schettino is the master, not the captain, of the Costa Concordia as I have explained in this post.
Inclusive language is a problem. This is a link to a useful explanation of the question of mankind and humankind. As I say in A Guide to English Language Usage:
Mankind means people in general. In Old English man meant a person of either sex as well as a male person; it is still sometimes used in this sense, but less frequently now. Despite this, some people prefer the word humankind as being non-discriminatory while others object to it as a hybrid compound. Here kind is a noun meaning race or family; it is connected to kin and has nothing do with kind as an adjective.
It is not immediately obvious – at least it wasn’t to me – that this BBC headline* starts with the word ill set in caps in a sans serif font. I wondered why the Roman numeral 3 (III) was appearing in that position.
This image has been copied at the largest magnification size available in Firefox, then using Windows Magnifier. A close examination at this magnification of the mouse pointer over the relevant letters does show that the width of the first letter is indeed very slightly greater than the others.
A similar problem arises with the number 1 in such fonts.
*No link is available because this is from the constantly updated headlines screen. The article itself is headed:
George Michael postpones shows because of pneumonia
Facebook recognises that I have posted in Spanish and asks me:
Did you know that you can provide better translations for Lavengro Books?
Well yes, as it happens I did know that I can provide better translations for Lavengro Books than Bing can.
When a Word file is saved in rtf format its size can increase dramatically, especially if it contains images. My file of Great English Mistakes is 937 Kb as a doc but expanded to 25,042 Kb when I saved it as an rtf. As this conversion is a necessary part of creating an epub file it is a real problem.
After some searching on the Internet I came across Microsoft’s Fix-It. It explains:
This functionality is by design in Microsoft Word [now there’s a surprise – PH]. If an EMF, a PNG, a GIF, or a JPEG graphic is inserted into a Word document, when the document is saved, two copies of the graphic are saved in the document. Graphics are saved in the applicable EMF, PNG, GIF, or JPEG format and are also converted to WMF (Windows Metafile) format.
The same page explains that this can be fixed by doing something mysterious to the Registry (no thanks) but also offers a wizard to do it for you. I have used this wizard. and it has produced a manageable rtf of 2,374 Kb. As far as I can see there is no difference between the resulting rtf and the original doc.
A Midlothian mother who disembowelled a man with a pink knife because he broke her window has been jailed for 45 months.
Now, let that be a lesson to all of us men. There’s no point in carrying a pink knife around because it will be of no use at all if a Scotswoman tries to disembowel you.
This morning a student asked me to go through a PowerPoint presentation that he has to make. At one point he said casually ‘I’ll ask my secretary to also include Table 32.’ He’s a very good student. You’ve got to be good to split infinitives that naturally.
Yesterday’s La Vanguardia has an article about an English assistant in a school in Badalona. It is obvious that it’s not only children in Catalonia that need to improve their English skills. Journalists could well do so too.
Click to enlarge.
Hat-tip John Stone
Supongo que aquí falta una palabra donde hablan de la liberación de Sirte. Es una errata, y una que conduce a primera vista a una malinterpretación del texto. Pero estas cosas ocurren. Son para lamentar pero con las prisas del periodismo son inevitables.
Pero existen también los errores. Y ellos no se disculpan. (Se habla de la familia de Gadafi.)
Los dos pantallazos son de El País del 21 de octubre de 2011
Yesterday I was reading this text with a student. It is a perfectly serious science article from the BBC and it contains the following:
The Imperial [College London] team also carried out mouse studies which found levels of SGK1 in the womb lining decline during the window of time during which they can fall pregnant.
My student was somewhat surprised by the phrase fall pregnant. I told her that it is a perfectly normal colloquial expression. Then I went on to say that you could also fall ill and fall in love. Well, she could see some sense in both of those but what does falling have to do with becoming pregnant?
What indeed? The COED has
4 pass into a specified state. Ø (fall to doing something) begin to do something.
which meets the case but apart from the construction with a gerund or the absolute from ‘fall to’ I can only think of the three expressions I have mentioned, with adjective or adverb complement.
The OED offers no explanation. Under fall it has
22. a.III.22.a In moral sense: To yield to temptation, to sin; esp. of a woman: To surrender her chastity.
A fallen woman? Well yes, but it sounds rather archaic these days.
b.III.22.b To become pregnant.
1722 Session Bk. Penninghame (1933) I. 479 The said‥Jannet‥confessed that she fell with child and parted with it in May last.1891 Farmer Slang II. 370/2 Fall (venery), to conceive. 1957 Young & Willmott in ‘C. H. Rolph’ Human Sum vii. 129 The expression a woman uses when she is pregnant. She says she has ‘fallen’. ‘We had been married eight months before I fell.’
Are these normal colloquial expressions or do they bear a tinge of moral judgement? Even in the case of the unfortunate Jannet there is no clear moral opprobrium in the wording itself, and the last example clearly implies that the falling was welcome.
And to return to our laboratory mice, I am sure that there was no moral implication in saying that they fell pregnant.
The prices shown for Lavengro Books on the Amazon sites (except amazon.co.uk) are too high, as are the prices for ebooks on Todoebook and other sites. This problem is being addressed and will be resolved shortly.
Metaphors, figurative speech, proverbs and sayings – these can all be a minefield for people who use different languages. Translating them literally is unfortunate at best and incomprehensible at worst. Sometimes of course you can get an idea of what’s going on; if a Spanish-speaker says that when you have a horse given to you as a present you shouldn’t look at its teeth, it is easy to make it out as the English: Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. A simple translation of the Spanish A caballo regalado, no le mires el dentado is close enough to the English to be understood, although it jars because such phrases are formulaic, and any deviation from the standard form of words is unfamiliar to us.
The other day I was asked by a translation agency to quote for a job that involved rewriting a text. In the end, as sometimes happens, the job didn’t come off although I had already submitted a very small part of the work as a sample. It was cancelled with no hard feelings and the client sounding positive about offering future work. My friend in the agency sent me an email: Más vale el perro que el collar. Well, yes, the dog is worth more than its collar, and a client who has cancelled a small job with no fee charged and no hard feelings might come back later with something bigger. I had not heard this Spanish proverb but thought that it seemed something similar to the English saying A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. After all, these things rarely equate as nicely as the horse’s teeth.
I told my friend that I liked his Spanish proverb – and then he told me that in the heat of the moment he had written it the wrong way round; it should have been Más vale el collar que el perro. That puts a different complexion on things; the collar is now worth more than the dog. How can that be? It can’t be much of a dog. Exactly. What it means now is that a secondary objective costs more than the primary one, or as we might say It’s more trouble than it’s worth.
In the cases that I have described so far the meaning of such an expression in another language is clear or can be worked out. But what would you think if a Spanish-speaker told you in English that he was taking your hair? You would be as confused as that same person would be if you said in Spanish Te estoy tirando de la pierna because in Spain people take each other’s hair when in English we pull other people’s legs.
If such a saying is transparent, it can be understood but the phrasing will seem strange. If it can be worked out, the meaning can be put across but most inefficiently; and a meaning can even be found for a spurious saying. But if it is totally opaque, confusion and even ridicule can ensue. Once, many years ago, I was involved with a European youth organisation. We had a president who had done a lot to increase its image and influence, and when he left after his term of office a eulogy was pronounced in which Carl was thanked for his work in our organisation ‘in which he has played the part of a brick.’ Sad to say, the British delegation immediately fell about laughing. For us a brick was a heavy, solid, boring, passive lump of hardened clay that would hurt you badly if it landed on your foot accidentally; most certainly not the sort of thing you would wish to be compared to. But for the speaker a brick was a fine, constructive, positive thing, an essential element in the construction of a house …
| … in which he has played the part of a brick. (Wikimedia Commons) |
Operating in different languages can be a complicated matter. I was in the UK recently, trying to make an internet connection with a dongle (USB modem). I couldn’t get it to work so I took it to the shop, where I was told that it had been suspended because it hadn’t been used for several months and that I would have to get a new SIM card (free) and pay money into the account for the time that I wished to use it. I did so. (It still didn’t work, but that’s another story.)
I mentioned this to a friend, and said quite spontaneously that I had taken my dongle to the shop because it had to be charged. She asked in surprise whether it didn’t charge from my computer’s USB port. I was a bit confused, then I realised that I had said ‘charge’ as an equivalent of the Spanish ‘cargar’ but that this process is called ‘topping up’ in English. My friend had quite reasonably taken ‘charge’ to refer to electrical charging, which is also ‘cargar’ in Spanish.
I have just spent a few days in Toulouse at the very pleasant Hôtel St Claire. That is sic, not Ste Claire. It turns out that it is part of an international group and their licence does not allow them to change the hotel’s name to the correct French form!
I recently downloaded a sample of Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata for my Kindle. I checked to see if was the same version as the Maude translation that I have in hard copy and found that where in the first few lines the Maudes have a woman wearing a ‘mannish coat’, the Kindle version dresses her in a ‘semi-masculine outer garment’. I didn’t look any further and deleted the sample. What this shows is that not all translations are the same and, while it is always possible to have several respectable versions, some literary translation is far below acceptable standards. This is particularly true of older work, which is what Amazon gives away free, but a snag there is that the samples that Kindles download sometimes have such a long introduction that they do not actually manage to start on the substantive text of the book, so you can’t check. There is a Kindle version of the Maude translation of The Kreutzer Sonata in a collected edition of Tolstoy’s works. There is no separate edition, but at the price for which Tolstoy (safely out of copyright) is sold this is hardly a great problem
It is obviously important to check with translated books which version is being made available, but a problem also arises with books that have been abridged for one reason or another. The Kindle edition of The Golden Bough is the 1922 abridgement, which omits his views on matriarchy, sacred prostitution and the crucifixion of Christ.
I have written before about the problems of translating, with reference to Tolstoy, and I have posted a review of my Kindle here..
Llotja is the Catalan for a box in a theatre. It also means a wholesale market, especially for freshly caught fish. Which explains this photo of a circus poster in Sitges published in today’s La Vanguardia
Oh, Herr bitte gib mir meine Sprache zurück,
ich sehne mich nach Frieden und ’nem kleinen Stückchen Glück.
Lass uns noch ein Wort verstehen in dieser schweren Zeit,
öffne unsre Herzen, mach’ die Hirne weit.
Ich bin zum Bahnhof gerannt und war a little bit too late
Auf meiner neuen Swatch war’s schon kurz vor after eight.
Ich suchte die Toilette, doch ich fand nur ein "McClean",
ich brauchte noch Connection und ein Ticket nach Berlin.
Draußen saßen Kids und hatten Fun mit einem Joint.
Ich suchte eine Auskunft, doch es gab nur ‘n Service Point.
Mein Zug war leider abgefahr’n - das Traveln konnt’ ich knicken.
Da wollt ich Hähnchen essen, doch man gab mir nur McChicken.
Oh, Herr bitte gib mir meine Sprache zurück,
ich sehne mich nach Frieden und ’nem kleinen Stückchen Glück.
Lass uns noch ein Wort verstehen in dieser schweren Zeit,
öffne unsre Herzen, mach’ die Hirne weit.
Du versuchst mich upzudaten, doch mein Feedback turned dich ab.
Du sagst, dass ich ein Wellness-Weekend dringend nötig hab.
Du sagst, ich käm’ mit good Vibrations wieder in den Flow.
Du sagst, ich brauche Energy. Und ich denk: "Das sagst du so."
Statt Nachrichten bekomme ich den Infotainment-Flash.
Ich sehne mich nach Bargeld, doch man gibt mir nicht mal Cash.
Ich fühl’ mich beim Communicating unsicher wie nie –
da nützt mir auch kein Bodyguard. Ich brauch Security!
Oh, Lord, bitte gib mir meine Language zurück,
ich sehne mich nach Peace und ’nem kleinen Stückchen Glück,
Lass uns noch ein Wort verstehn in dieser schweren Zeit,
öffne unsre Herzen, mach’ die Hirne weit.
Ich will, dass beim Coffee-Shop "Kaffeehaus" oben draufsteht,
oder dass beim Auto-Crash die "Lufttasche" aufgeht,
und schön wär’s, wenn wir Bodybuilder "Muskel-Mäster" nennen
und wenn nur noch "Nordisch Geher" durch die Landschaft rennen.
Oh, Lord, please help, denn meine Language macht mir Stress,
ich sehne mich nach Peace und a bit of Happiness.
Hilf uns, dass wir understand in dieser schweren Zeit,
open unsre hearts und make die Hirne weit.
Oh, Lord, please gib mir meine Language back,
ich krieg hier bald die crisis, man, it has doch keinen Zweck.
Let us noch a word verstehen, it goes me on the Geist,
und gib, dass "Microsoft" bald wieder "Kleinweich" heißt.
“Syriac (ܠܫܢܐ ܣܘܪܝܝܐ leššānā Suryāyā) is a dialect of Middle Aramaic that was once spoken across much of the Fertile Crescent” (Wikipedia)
Cambridge University researchers have discovered that the double dot known as zawga elaya in Syriac is probably the world's earliest question mark. It turns out that it was written near the start of a sentence to indicate a question as is done in Spanish withy ¿ and also with ¡ for exclamations. This is useful in Spanish as the word order does not always indicate a question, but also to indicate that part of a sentence is to be understood as a question or exclamation. It also happens in English that a question indicated by intonation, e.g. ‘You’re going away'?’ should have a question mark in print, in a narrative dialogue for example. But in English and other European languages a question mark is always used in unambiguous wh-questions: What is this? Who did you see?
This startling headline appears in today’s Barcelona daily El Periódico. It means ‘Fed up with Moody’s’. In fact, Catalan 'fart' corresponds to Spanish 'harto' and is a classic example of Latin 'f'' changing to Spanish 'h'. This happened under Basque influence, there being no 'f' sound in Basque.
Latin 'fartus' means 'stuffed' as in food preparation, and by association it means 'full, stuffed' as in having eaten too much. It has come into English through French 'farcir' as the name of a comic play that is stuffed with buffoonery. So what we have from Moody's is not a fart but a farce.
The English ‘farce’ refers to comic scenes that were stuffed into medieval religious plays, presumably to hold the audience’s attention.
El Periódico publishes two identical editions, in Catalan and Spanish. It was originally Spanish only and keeps its Spanish title for the Catalan edition.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way - in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
A Tale of Two Cities
That’s the sort of thing you get when you pay by the line.
I recently needed to use the plural of lingua franca. I thought that I might show off by writing linguae francae but a routine check in the COED before I committed myself showed that the only accepted plural is lingua francas. The reason is that the expression is not Latin in origin but Italian, meaning Frankish tongue.
This use of Frankish dates back to the Crusades and derivative forms are found around the Middle East to mean European/Christian in general.
Because the Frankish kingdom dominated Western Europe for centuries, terms derived from "Frank" were used by many in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and beyond as a synonym for Roman Christians (e.g., al-Faranj in Arabic, farangi in Persian, Frenk in Turkish, Feringhi in Hindustani, and Frangos in Greek). See also Thai ฝรั่ง Farang. During the crusades, which were at first led mostly by nobles from northern France who claimed descent from Charlemagne, both Muslims and Christians used these terms as ethnonyms to describe the Crusaders. Another term with similar use was "Latins" (cf. the Latin Empire). This usage is often followed by modern historians, who call Western Europeans in the eastern Mediterranean "Franks" or "Latins" regardless of their country of origin. Compare with Rhomaios, Rûmi ("Roman"), used for Orthodox Christians. Catholics on various islands in Greece are still referred to as Φράγκοι, "Frangoi" (Franks). Examples include the naming of a Catholic from the island of Syros as "Frangosyrianos" (Φραγκοσυριανός). The term Frangistan was used by Muslims to refer to the land where the Crusaders came from, i.e. Christian Europe.
The OED offers no specific recommendation for a plural but its only two plural examples make the Italian lingue franche:
1971 J. Spencer Eng. Lang. W. Afr. 31 A very complex infrastructure of scores of vernacular languages as well as a number of regional lingue franche. 1974 R. A. Hall External Hist. Romance Lang. 21 The distribution of the Romance languages is best treated under four heads:‥(3) use as lingue franche.
This seems unnecessarily pedantic for the non-linguistic context in which I am writing, so I have decided to stick with lingua francas.
Wikipedia has a List of lingua francas.
It is clear that diplomats must be very competent in a number of languages, and especially so in English. It is also to be expected that they will have a high level of culture and education. But is it really necessary for candidates for the Spanish diplomatic service to be able to translate this into Spanish?
WHO does not know Turner’s picture of the Golden Bough? The scene, suffused with the golden glow of imagination in which the divine mind of Turner steeped and transfigured even the fairest natural landscape, is a dream-like vision of the little woodland lake of Nemi— “Diana’s Mirror,” as it was called by the ancients. No one who has seen that calm water, lapped in a green hollow of the Alban hills, can ever forget it. The two characteristic Italian villages which slumber on its banks, and the equally Italian palace whose terraced gardens descend steeply to the lake, hardly break the stillness and even the solitariness of the scene. Diana herself might still linger by this lonely shore, still haunt these woodlands wild.
In antiquity this sylvan landscape was the scene of a strange and recurring tragedy. On the northern shore of the lake, right under the precipitous cliffs on which the modern village of Nemi is perched, stood the sacred grove and sanctuary of Diana Nemorensis, or Diana of the Wood. The lake and the grove were sometimes known as the lake and grove of Aricia. But the town of Aricia (the modern La Riccia) was situated about three miles off, at the foot of the Alban Mount, and separated by a steep descent from the lake, which lies in a small crater-like hollow on the mountain side. In this sacred grove there grew a certain tree round which at any time of the day, and probably far into the night, a grim figure might be seen to prowl. In his hand he carried a drawn sword, and he kept peering warily about him as if at every instant he expected to be set upon by an enemy. He was a priest and a murderer; and the man for whom he looked was sooner or later to murder him and hold the priesthood in his stead. Such was the rule of the sanctuary. A candidate for the priesthood could only succeed to office by slaying the priest, and having slain him, he retained office till he was himself slain by a stronger or a craftier.
The post which he held by this precarious tenure carried with it the title of king; but surely no crowned head ever lay uneasier, or was visited by more evil dreams, than his. For year in, year out, in summer and winter, in fair weather and in foul, he had to keep his lonely watch, and whenever he snatched a troubled slumber it was at the peril of his life. The least relaxation of his vigilance, the smallest abatement of his strength of limb or skill of fence, put him in jeopardy; grey hairs might seal his death-warrant. To gentle and pious pilgrims at the shrine the sight of him might well seem to darken the fair landscape, as when a cloud suddenly blots the sun on a bright day. The dreamy blue of Italian skies, the dappled shade of summer woods, and the sparkle of waves in the sun, can have accorded but ill with that stern and sinister figure.
Sir James George Frazer, The Golden Bough (1890)
The freethinking Guardian is not constrained by the outmoded conventions of English spelling.
I am in the market for a new leather handbag. The one that I have had for the last 22 years is finally beyond redemption. I found this site. Thy look quite good on the web page but I haven’t seen them yet because they aren’t exactly a shop. You let them know which items you are interested in and arrange a time to go to their office (in the unfashionable Guineueta district) to have a look at them. I daresay it keeps prices down but I would be willing to pay a mite extra not to have to put up with a Google translation
Everything what you look will find it
If the quality interest to him!
Direct sale from our Web.