The Business of Language

For all those interested in language I came across this on an English language teaching website. I think it's worth reprinting in full as I was quite surprised and pleased at Fiona's stance.  

A stiff letter to The Times - has the BBC gone mad?

Submitted by Fiona Aish on 5 August, 2010 - 12:51

"Dear BBC

I am a lover of radio 4 and am constantly energised, fascinated and enriched by its programmes. However, I feel moved to comment on the utter nonsense I was subjected to on The World Tonight, Tuesday 3rd August in the discussion on language and specifically “verbing” between Felicity Evans and her guest Rhea Williams, chairman of the Queen’s English Society.

The discussion centred on whether “verbing”, changing a noun to a verb, is acceptable, in response to President Obama’s comment that American troops would be “partnering” those from Afghanistan. Now this is a topic that delights the pedant (and therefore a certain percentage of the radio 4 audience) but produces nothing short of apoplectic rage in me. It is bad enough having to listen to yet another ill-informed discussion on language change and standardisation, but having to listen to non linguists bandy about their emotional reactions to something they just don’t like and clearly have no understanding of is both fury inducing and a waste of everyone’s time.

There are many linguists in the world such as the entire staff of the department of Educational and Professional Studies at King’s College London where I studied the MA English Language Teaching & Applied Linguistics or countless other academics who would have been able to provide an informed and reasoned discussion on this topic but no, someone at the BBC decided that the appropriate body to approach for an intelligent, well informed discussion would be The Queen’s English Society. Now, while I admit that some of their work is admirable, many of the comments in the discussion served as a reminder as to why I chose the words “utter nonsense” in my opening sentence.

Some examples on the topic of whether “verbing” is acceptable and I quote from the programme:

1.       Rhea Williams: ...it depends if they are ugly or not.

Felicity Evans: Yes, I’m with you on that. If it’s elegant one should be able to get away with it but the trouble with that is that it’s a question of personal taste.

Yes, is it – discussion should end here.

2.       RW: to grow a company, that’s actually just vile...What’s’ wrong with we’re trying to get the company to get bigger or we’re trying to make it better?

Indeed, but what’s wrong with to grow a company? Exactly, please. What... is... exactly... wrong?

3.       RW: My most favourite one is “This door is alarmed”.

Oh how droll you are – I too can hardly contain myself for laughing.

4.       RW: ... I think an awful lot of them are really horrid.

And I think you’re insane.

5.       FE: ... if you fail to properly communicate what you mean, the language has failed.

Or there has been a breakdown in communication between the speaker and listener which is likely to be clarified by the use of repairing strategies such as saying “What do you mean?”

6.       RW (in answer to FE’s previous insightful observation): Absolutely.

How?

7.       FE: Business jargon is the worst. I saw a press release about encouraging children to access oily fish. How do you access an oily fish?

Go to Sainsbury’s – they have loads of fish.

8.       RW: We often turn things into a verb for speed so you could say “Are you lemonading or wining?”

Mmm. At 9 syllables it is longer than “Do you want lemonade or wine?” which is 8 syllables. So the point about speed is what exactly?

9.       RW: But if you’re going to try to access a fish, that’s just bonkers.

FE: It is bonkers.

Not nearly as bonkers as you two.

I wonder whether you could get a real expert i.e. a linguist in to discuss language change and the factors which influence it, in the process debunking some of the myths surrounding the subject. I’d be happy to provide a list of names and contacts but in the meantime please remember the following:

All languages change

Change is not wrong, it is change

Communities and groups use specific language or jargon for many socio-cultural reasons – leave them alone

Most people use language in a range of social situations and change it to adapt the situation

Business is not corrupting English, it is doing business

There is no such thing as Standard English. "

Yours, 

Outraged, South London

For the entire discussion, go to:http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00t6trb/b00t6tqd/The_World_Tonight_03_08_2010/ and start listening from 25.50 minutes in.

An interesting read.

"How I Got Lost in Translation"

I've just finished reading this article on the importance of translation; it's from yesterday's Observer newspaper  and I think it's worth reprinting in full here. Let me know what you think, thanks. 

How I got lost in translation and found my true calling

Translation can be an underpaid, anonymous job. Yet it is crucial for the cross-fertilisation of literature and for Maureen Freely, it has become a deeply satisfying life's work.

 

Maureen Freely

The Observer, Sunday 28 November 2010

Outside the Anglophone world, it is not unusual for novelists and poets to work at some point in their lives as translators. Though most will say that they did so mainly to subsidise their own writing, it is often clear, when you look at that writing, that it has been enriched by the imaginary conversations they've had with the poets and novelists whose words they have translated.

Istanbul: Memories and the City

by Orhan Pamuk

If there is such a thing as world literature, it is because today's most interesting writers are also well‑travelled readers and a lot of what they read is in translation. An up-and-coming Colombian novelist might be inspired not just by Borges, Conrad and Faulkner, but by contemporary novelists from Asia, Africa and Europe; his literary response to their work will go on to influence what his contemporaries on the other side of the world write next. These complex patterns of cross-fertilisation would end overnight if it were not for literary translators and the publishers who support them. So you'd think people would thank us, wouldn't you?

Well, sometimes they do, but in the next breath they'll tell you what a terrible career move you've made. To a degree, they're right, because the pay is pretty appalling. Although some translators get a sliver of the royalties, most work for a flat fee. We who translate from non-western languages will often discover, if a book becomes a world phenomenon, that most other translations will be from our translation and not the original. But by and large, we receive no extra fee and it is only when those working from our translations send us frantic emails that we discover how far our words have travelled.

World literature is the big new thing in literature departments, so you'd think our good name would be assured here at least. Sadly, universities and their regulators tend to be suspicious about translations, possibly because they don't know what yardstick to measure them by. For the last Research Assessment Exercise, I was asked to explain in precise terms how my translations had contributed to world knowledge. For the next one, I shall also have to demonstrate their economic impact.

You could say that all we're doing, really, is replicating someone else's thoughts. And aren't we soon to be replaced by machines? I don't think so. Here is the sublime first sentence of Orhan Pamuk's Istanbul: Memories of a City as rendered by Google Translate: "A place in the streets of Istanbul, similar to ours in a different house, with everything I like, twin, or even exactly the same, starting from childhood lived another Orhan a corner of my mind I believed for many years." And here is the first sentence of his seminal novel, The Black Book, replicating the Turkish word and suffix order as closely as possible: "Bed-of top-from tip-to as-far-as stretched-out blue checked quilt-of rugged terrain-its, shadowy valleys-its and blue soft hills-its-with covered sweet and warm darkness-in Rüya face-down stretched-out sleeping-was."

When I translate, I become something akin to a shadow novelist. When I am shadowing Pamuk, what I want to do most is capture the music of his language as I hear it. Accuracy is important, but a lot of what I need to be accurate about lies deep below the surface. After consultation with the author, the first sentence of The Black Book became: "Rüya was lying face down on the bed, lost to the sweet, warm darkness beneath the billowing folds of the blue-checked quilt." The first sentence of Istanbul was: "From a very young age, I suspected there was more to my world than I could see: somewhere in the streets of Istanbul, in a house resembling ours, there lived another Orhan so much like me that he could pass for my twin, even my double." I can see, even as I type these sentences, how ephemeral they are. Other translators will find their own ways to capture what they see and hear in the text.

I was initially drawn to this art because, after many years of journalism, I longed for a quiet life. I imagined weeks and months of solitary reflection in my favourite chair. And of course there were periods like this. But if you are translating a controversial author, the world is never far away.

My first rude awakening came while I was translating the first chapters of Pamuk's 2002 novel, Snow. A Turkish newspaper got in touch; having heard what I was up to, it wanted to know what I thought of the headscarf issue, about which Snow has a great deal to say. My innocuous answer (that a woman should be able to choose what she wears on her head) was transformed into a provocative headline ("I curse the fathers!"), following which I was bombarded with emails from an extremist Islamist newspaper. I could not help but notice that their questions were almost identical to those asked by an Islamist extremist in the chapter I'd just translated. It ends with said extremist pumping a few bullets into his interlocutor's head.

Over the years that followed, and especially during 2005 and 2006, when Orhan Pamuk and many other writer friends of mine were subjected to hate campaigns for speaking openly about the Armenian genocide, later to be prosecuted for insulting Turkishness, there were times when I felt as if I had wandered into the book I was translating.

There were also the lesser fictions in which I featured as a süperajan (no translation needed). Many Turks who feel ambivalent about Pamuk like to attribute his international success and most especially his Nobel prize to his translators, who have, they claim, "improved his words for western consumption". The ultranationalists who drove the hate campaign went so far as to say he had sold his country to Europe for the sake of his career.

If I were just a translator, I might not have thought it necessary to write in Orhan's defence in the media here and elsewhere. I might not have become involved in the campaigns for free expression that went on to change my life and will doubtless carry on doing so. But this seems to be the rule for translators and not the exception.

Most of us do a great deal off the page. More often than not, we are the ones who bring new authors to the attention of publishers. Some run programmes that bring together young writers from countries that were once at war. Some run programmes in schools, working with children who speak a language other than English at home. Many are also novelists, poets, journalists and teachers. Some – most commonly those who translate out of minority languages – are agents.

I know all this because there aren't very many of us. We all work for the dozen or so publishers which remain committed to fiction in translation even as the walls of fortress English grow and grow. If the art of literary translation continues to thrive in this country, it will be thanks to them, and also to the British Centre for Literary Translation, which is training the new generation, and the Translators Association, which speaks up for us when we're exploited, and the Independent foreign fiction prize, whose organisers work hard to take our best efforts to a larger audience.

Why do any of us bother, when the odds are so against us? Because it's fun to discover new books and new writers. It's gratifying to see at least some of them do well. For me, it makes a welcome change from my old life, when I mainly looked after number one, wasting acres of times fretting about bylines and book sales and column inches. Somehow, this feels more romantic and far more worthwhile.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/nov/28/maureen-freely-translation-orhan-pamuk

Mike Leigh and Alfred Hitchcock as Directors.

I was reading this article the other day about Mike Leigh's latest film: "Another Year." Being a great fan of Hitchcock, a director who put all his ideas onto a storyboard then meticulously followed this through so all his actors usually had to fall in line, I couldn't believe just how Mike Leigh works. He seems to create the dialogue or script organically; effectivly he works with his actors and then a kind of script follows from their natural performances. This liberates the actors by allowing them to be more true to their roles; it's like method acting where the actor becomes the character, Al Pacino is a master at this, and taking it one step further. So I guess it allows the audience to believe in the reality of the film. Hitchcock was an expert at manipulating the emotions of his audiences with his great suspense films of the 40's and 50's, but Mike Leigh seems to be engaging the audience in a totally different way.

Alberto Manguel on Reading.

Alberto Manguel is one of my favourite writers~he always has interesting things to say on all things literary. I found this article on the homepage of his website and I think it's worth quoting in full so see what you think.

"Manguel believes in the central importance of the book in societies of the written word where, in recent times, the intellectual act has lost most of its prestige. Libraries (the reservoirs of collective memory) should be our essential symbol, not banks. Humans can be defined as reading animals, come into the world to decipher it and themselves. The battle of every reader is therefore against the enforced education of stupidity in a consumer society that tries to turn every citizen into a buying automat incapable of reflection. In that sense, the act of reading becomes subversive, since it can lead to questioning and thinking for oneself. The enemy is not, as some would want us to believe, the electronic technology. Manguel argues that the electronic technology is not in competition with the technology of the book: they apply to different fields of creative pursuit and overlap only occasionally; the perceived antagonism between both is fostered by mercantile interests to promote the sale of electronic products, constantly updated less for scientific or intellectual reasons than for purely commercial ones -- to sell more computers, not to elicit more ideas. Manguel also believes in the intrinsic illuminating and healing quality of literate texts when they allow constantly renewed readings and in-depth exploration. By literate text, Manguel means that which Northrop Frye defined as a classic: "a work whose circumference is always greater than that of the best of its readers." In his book Into the Looking-Glass Wood, Manguel wrote: "In the midst of uncertainty and many kinds of fear, threatened by loss, change and the welling of pain within and without for which one can offer no comfort, readers know that at least there are, here and there, a few safe places, as real as paper and as bracing as ink, to grant us roof and board in our passage through the dark and nameless wood." (Jean-Luc Terradillos)

http://www.alberto.manguel.com/