Review comment

Comment posted on the New Statesman page featuring John Gray's review of Umberto Eco's The Book of Legendary Lands:

Shame on the New Statesman and the reviewer for not mentioning the name of the translator. I would have preferred that you not mention the name of the reviewer.

Note: As the New Statesman's lead book reviewer, John Gray really should know better.

The Telegraph headline read:
The Book of Legendary Lands, by Umberto Eco, translated by Alastair McEwen, review.

So many thanks to Telegraph reviewer Robert Douglas-Fairhurst.

Scoring the top end

Marking or scoring anything more subjective than a multiple-choice question is challenging enough, but finding words to qualify the resulting scores more so. Financial times wine writer extraordinaire Jancis Robinson (extraordinaire for her palate and her writing) qualifies wine tasting scores between 12 to 20 as follows:

20: Truly exceptional

19: A humdinger
18: A cut above average
17: Superior
16: Distinguished
15: Average, a perfectly nice drink with no faults but not much excitement
14: Deadly dull
13: Borderline faulty or unbalanced
12: Faulty or unbalanced.

Perhaps a similar scale could be used to score top-of-the-market translations and transcreations?

​Her latest survey of the worldwide wine market is here.​

For top-of-the-market translations and transcreations, might I suggest:

20: Truly exceptional

19: A humdinger
18: A cut above average
17: Superior
16: Distinguished
15: Average, a perfectly acceptable translation but not much excitement
14: Correct as regards equivalence of meaning, also grammatically correct, but deadly dull
13: Correct as regards equivalence of meaning, but beginning to plod, perhaps the odd lapse of idiom or noncompliance with OSASCOMPN (see post below)

12: Minor shortcomings regarding equivalence of meaning, target-language idioms or grammar

... And so the list might go on.

Oh, and if that doesn't sound anything like the scoring systems proposed for translation quality assurance, it's no accident. We're talking about a completely different paradigm.

OSASCOMP: Answer to a long-standing question

What's notable about 'a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife'? is a review of The Elements of Eloquence by Mark Forsyth (Icon Books, pp.208, £12.99, ISBN: 9781848316218). The article first appeared in the print edition of The Spectator dated 30 November 2013.

The book sounds very promising indeed.

Quote:

Forsyth’s chief and admirable ambition is to demolish ‘the bleak and imbecile idea that the aim of writing is to express yourself clearly in plain, simple English using as few words as possible’.

Reviewer Christopher Howse also writes:

The shiniest piece of information I picked up is that, in English, adjectives go in this order:

Opinion-size-age-shape-colour-origin-material-purpose-noun. So you can have a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife. But if you mess with that word order in the slightest you’ll sound like a maniac.

This knowledge is implicitly mastered by all native speakers; to see it made explicit is an enjoyable revelation, like learning to carry a tray on the flat of your hand.

The formula "opinion size age shape colour origin material purpose, then noun" is the long-sought answer to a difficult question. And, while agree with Howse when he says that "this knowledge is implicitly mastered by all native speakers", all writers occasionally -- and translators frequently -- hesitate and wonder what it the right order for a string of qualifiers.

It is, in fact, amazing how difficult this information is to track down. I've tried many times and never come up with more than partial answers. The question is important for writers and even more so for translations precisley because, as Forsyth says, "if you mess with that word order in the slightest you’ll sound like a maniac".

As an acronym, that makes: OSASCOMP, or perhaps OSAS_COMP.
Would anyone like to suggest a mnemonic?

A great divide emerging

It is becoming increasingly apparent to this observer of the language services industry (in Western Europe) that a great divide is emerging between language service providers (LSPs) that deal with, or hope to deal with, the departments that actually use their products and LSPs that have to deal with corporate purchasing department.

The former have at least the prospect of discussing quality issues, hence pricing, whereas the latter have no option but to compete on price and speed. And... for translators who are committed to the 'very end user' (i.e. the client's customers), the client and the job itself, the latter prospect -- save perhaps for the very fastest workers -- promises nothing but drudgery.

Many language industry observers have commented on how amazingly fragmented the sector is (language combinations, areas of specialisation, types of customer needs, types of target audience, document formats and so on), but I am not aware of many who have clearly identified this particular form of fragmentation.

Corporate purchasing departments are the option of choice for purchasing commodities. And certain types of language services are indeed very close to commodity status. Some examples among many, many other, include:

• pharmaceutical documents based on existing standard templates
• risk- and safety phrases relating to the Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals (REACH) have agreed equivalents in key languages. R-phrases, S-phrases
• hazard statements under the Globally Harmonized System of Classification and Labelling of Chemicals.

The great mistake many companies make is to assume that all language services are commodities and therefore should be purchased by the corporate purchasing department.

Comments welcome.

From Idéfix to Dogmatix and from Panoramix to Getafix

A post on a couple of brilliant into-English literary translators.

The Saturday 16 November issue of the Guardian featured a brilliant article by literary editor Claire Armitstead on translator extraordinaire Anthea Bell, translator of the Asterix series, among many other works from French and German.

Two quotes: 'It's all about finding the tone of voice in the original. You have to be quite free'. 'The secret to successful translation is invisibility.'

Bell's transformation of Idéfix into Dogmatix and Panoramix into Getafix contributed to her reputation as a great translator of great puns.

Interesting to see that the Guardian article links directly to My hero: Asterix by Tom Holland. Holland is himself a remarkable translator, this time from ancient Greek, as demonstrated by Edith Hall's enthusiastic TLS review of Tom's recently published The Histories by Herodotus under the heading Herodotus the Homer of European prose.

A quote:

This is a twenty-first-century Herodotus. It is a Herodotus whose tongue is often in his cheek: the conflict between Greeks and Persians began long ago with ‘a bout of competitive princess-rustling’. It is a Herodotus who can speak directly to modern capitalism: the Phoenicians ‘began investing heavily in the long-distance shipping business’, exporting goods ‘to a wide variety of markets’. Arion, the travelling poet, ‘raked in an absolute fortune’. It is a Herodotus who knows the language in which powerful men are described today: Peisistratus the tyrant was attended by a retinue of ‘heavies’. Cyrus is described as ‘eyeballing’ Croesus from his rival camp.

But this is also the Herodotus of a translator who respects the old-fashioned niceties of retoric and prose style.

Speaking at a conference?

If you're scheduled to speak at a conference -- and more particularly a conference with simultaneous interpretation -- take a look at this presentation by Calliope interpreters first.

If you know anyone who is organising a conference, suggest that they view the presentation too.

Highly recommended.

RSA Animate version of Pinker on dialogue

In this RSA Animate, linguist Steven Pinker demonstrates how the mind turns the finite building blocks of language into infinite meanings. Along the way, he makes it clear why a good appreciation of cultural conventions is an essential ingredient for effective translation and why fully automated methods will never achieve 100% success in areas like the translation of dialogue whether for film scripts or business presentations to name just two.

To hear and see Pinker's full-length presentation on this and related issues, but without the wonderful animation, go here.