Snippets from Pinker on style, Prologue + Ch1

I'm reading Steven Pinker's The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century and thought I'd use this space to record some snippets of special interest. Page numbers refer to the Allen Land/Penguin hardback edition (ISBN 978-1-846-14550-6).

Most of the snippets quoted apply as much to good technical journalism and its translation, a genre that should "put a premium on clarity and coherence" as Pinker says.

p6: Today ... we have an understanding of grammatical phenomena which goes well beyond the traditional taxonomies based on crude analogies with Latin.

p7: My focus is on nonfiction, particularly genres that put a premium on clarity and coherence.

pp8-9: Style still matters. First, it ensures that writers will get their message across ...
Second, style earns trust.
Style, last but not least, adds beauty to the world. To a literate reader, a crisp sentence, an arresting metaphor, a witty aside, an elegant turn of phrase are among life's greatest pleasures.

p14: ... snatched from the brink of cliché ...
Parallel wording is a powerful trope.
Powerful writing can flip the way the world is perceived ...

p16: Good writing is understood with the mind's eye.

p20: ... zeugma: the intentional juxtaposition of different senses of a single word.

p21: The deliberate use of surprising transitions -- colons, dashes, block quotations -- is one of the hallmarks of lively prose.
... plodding ...
Killjoy style manuals tell writers to avoid alliteration, but good prose is enlivened with moments of poety ...

p22: ... a skilled writer can enliven her and sometimes electrify her prose with the judicious insertion of a surprising word ...
... distinguish sprightly prose from mush ...

p26: ... expressed in pleasingly parallel syntax ...
... fresh wording and concrete imagery over familiar verbiage and abstract summary; an attention to the reader's vantage point and the target of their gaze ...

Literal translations of Mandarin names

In his TEDTalk on Are China and the US doomed to conflict?, Kevin Rudd mentioned in passing (see transcript) the literal translations of the Mandarin names of China (the Middle Kingdom) and the United States (Měiguó which means "the beautiful country").

It seemed only natural to look for other translations along the same lines.
But a cursory search failed to turn up anything that looks carefully researched.
Please let me know if you have any ideas.

The next thing, of course, was to look up my first name in Mandarin. For Steve, Chinese-Tools.com gives:
斯蒂夫 and the Pinyin: Sī dì fū
while another gives

史蒂夫

For Dyson, I found
戴森 and the Pinyin: Dài Sēn.

Kevin Rudd on interpreting

Here are a couple of snippets from the transcript of former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's TEDTalk on Are China and the US doomed to conflict? filmed in March 2015.

The great thing about learning Chinese is that your Chinese teacher gives you a new name. And so they gave me this name: Kè, which means to overcome or to conquer, and Wén, and that's the character for literature or the arts. Kè Wén, Conqueror of the Classics.

***

... So there I am in the embassy in Beijing, off to the Great Hall of the People with our ambassador, who had asked me to interpret for his first meeting in the Great Hall of the People. .... And so the ambassador began with this inelegant phrase. He said, "China and Australia are currently enjoying a relationship of unprecedented closeness." And I thought to myself, "That sounds clumsy. That sounds odd. I will improve it." Note to file: Never do that.

It needed to be a little more elegant, a little more classical, so I rendered it as follows. [In Chinese] There was a big pause on the other side of the room. You could see the giant pooh-bahs at the head of the horseshoe, the blood visibly draining from their faces, and the junior woodchucks at the other end of the horseshoe engaged in peals of unrestrained laughter. Because when I rendered his sentence,"Australia and China are enjoying a relationship of unprecedented closeness," in fact, what I said was that Australia and China were now experiencing fantastic orgasm.

That was the last time I was asked to interpret. But in that little story, there's a wisdom, which is, as soon as you think you know something about this extraordinary civilization of 5,000 years of continuing history, there's always something new to learn.

***

Moving along... I would also like to quote a passage containing a great deal of cultural wisom.

Let me first go to China's views of the U.S. and the rest of the West.

Number one: China feels as if it's been humiliated at the hands of the West through a hundred years of history, beginning with the Opium Wars. When after that, the Western powers carved China up into little pieces, so that by the time it got to the '20s and '30s, signs like this one appeared on the streets of Shanghai. ["No dogs and Chinese allowed"] How would you feel if you were Chinese, in your own country, if you saw that sign appear? China also believes and feels as if, in the events of 1919, at the Peace Conference in Paris, when Germany's colonies were given back to all sorts of countries around in the world, what about German colonies in China? They were, in fact, given to Japan. When Japan then invaded China in the 1930s the world looked away and was indifferent to what would happen to China. And then, on top of that, the Chinese to this day believe that the United States and the West do not accept the legitimacy of their political system because it's so radically different from those of us who come from liberal democracies,and believe that the United States to this day is seeking to undermine their political system. China also believes that it is being contained by U.S. allies and by those with strategic partnerships with the U.S.right around its periphery. And beyond all that, the Chinese have this feeling in their heart of hearts and in their gut of guts that those of us in the collective West are just too damned arrogant. That is, we don't recognize the problems in our own system, in our politics and our economics, and are very quick to point the finger elsewhere, and believe that, in fact, we in the collective West are guilty of a great bunch of hypocrisy.

20,000 hits

This blog has now logged 20,000 hits.
I'm fully aware that it's a very modest figure, but nice to see that it keeps going up and that the number of visits per month is slowly accelerating.
A hearty thankyou to all followers, whether regular or occasional.

Translating near-illegible Roman inscriptions

I happened upon the following reply to the question
How do scholars translate text they only have fragments of?

The full question reads:

For example, in one of Trajan's monuments there is the following inscription:

MARTI ULTOR[I]IM[P(erator)CAES]AR DIVI NERVA[E] F(ILIUS) N[E]RVA TRA]IANUS [AUG(USTUS) GERM(ANICUS)] DAC]I[CU]S PONT(IFEX) MAX(IMUS) TRIB(UNICIA) POTEST(ATE) XIII IMP(ERATOR) VI CO(N)S(UL) V P(ater) P(atriae) ?VICTO EXERC]ITU D[ACORUM] ?---- ET SARMATA]RUM----]E 31.[2]

It seems to me that much of it is guess work, as many of the words are barely there.

The reply is by Astrogator.
Fascinating!

Promoting human translation: The power of two

Friend and colleague Chris Durban recently took part in a Ruckusmakers weekend led by Seth Godin.

Chris took up the ruckusmakers challenge by compiling an eight-post blog entitled simply #RuckusMakersChallenge. (The posts are probably best read from #1 to #8, which is to say from last to first.)

Some of the content develops and expands on ideas presented in 101 Things a Translator Needs to Know. This time around, however, the storylines draw on Seth Godin's workshop. The resulting narratives are cogent and powerfully argued. It's instructive, inspiring stuff.

In her introduction (in post #1), Chris writes:

I’ll be exploring how some of Seth's insights apply to hot issues in translation and to my own personal challenge: raising awareness in the general public of how expert human translators work and how that expertise can be harnessed to make life better. And allow translators to secure the income and recognition they need to shape their working environment — and get even better at what they do.

Colour and perception

I'm happy to report that my post on Colour thesaurus is one of the most frequently consulted.

Various aspects of this topic continue to attract strong interest. One example is IFLS post dated 4 March by Lisa Winter entitled When did humans start to see the colour blue? (my respelling and caps).

Quotable quotes:

In fact, the first mention of blue wasn't found in any language until about 4,500 years ago. Was it possible that they weren’t able to perceive it as we do now?

If you’d like to learn more about the color experiment with the Himba tribe, the origin of the word blue, and extreme instances of color perception in humans and in animals, check out the Radiolab podcast episode Colors right here. (audio duration > 1 hour)

Many thanks to asmarttranslatorsreunion for the constructive feedback. The LanugageLog post concludes:

Whatever the explanation, I submit that the BBC documentary (and the subsequent coverage) has given us a sensationalist interpretation of an undocumented experiment, presented as reliable science, without giving us any basis to trust that this interpretation is even close to true.

See also The Evolution Of Language: Study Of Rare Indigenous Language Shows All Humans Think Of Colors In The Same Way.