Fear and loathing of the English passive

Fear and loathing of the English passive, by Geoffrey K Pullum, Linguistics and English Language, University of Edinburgh (version of 17 January 2014), to appear in Language and Communication, is currently available for download at this address.

And, to add my two cents worth from the viewpoint of the technical journalist and translator, it is interesting to observe in the endless and often, as Pullam points out, incompetent attacks on the passive voice how often critics simply gloss over the need – especially frequent in TJ&T – to describe past, present or future events without identifying the agent.

A quote from Pullam's conclusion:

It is right and good, of course, to instruct students and novice writers in how they might improve their writing. But handing them simplistic prescriptions and prohibitions is not doing them any favors. ‘Avoid the passive’ is typical of such virtually useless advice.

The claims about why you should avoid passives – the allegations about why they are bad – are all bogus, and the interesting point (the discourse condition) is always missed. The advice is often supplied by advice-givers who don’t respect their own counsel – though they are unaware of that because they are commonly hopeless at distinguishing passives from actives.

Forbes on localisation

Under the heading How To Do World Domination Right: 5 Tips For Better Localization, Jessica Stillman, a contributor to the Forbes blog, presents sound advice on localisation based on the recent experiences of Irish startup app builder Soundwave.

Localisation for B2C (business-to-consumers) companies is in some ways simpler than for B2B (business-to-business) companies. Good advice for the former group is also more readily available and more readily applicable from case to case. Still nice to see this article on the Forbes blog.

Weekly action email

Australia-based, Ireland-born multilingual translator (ES, FR, DE è EN) Sarah Dillion now offers a Weekly Action Email for small businesses with BIG vision. I've just received my first issue, dated 21 January, entitled Why Style Matters. Whether you are actually a small business with a BIG vision or simply interested in what leading-edge translators are offering, I thoroughly recommend a subscription.

Here's the link to Sarah's Facebook page.

Exemplary punctuation

Under the heading The 5 Best Punctuation Marks in Literature, blogger Kathryn Schulz lists quotes featuring exemplary punctuation by five leading authors.

It would be nice to have some examples from technical journalism or translation. If anyone reading this has any, please feel free to contribute or comment.

Here's one modest example. The French expression plus ou moins has, perhaps surprisingly, a wider range of meaning than the corresponding more or less in English. Some of the equivalents listed in the Collins-Roberts French-English dictionary include: not very, just about, vaguely, and with varying degrees of. In some contexts, one option is to use more – or less –. The punctuation makes all the difference.

Fact or factoid

From the Guardian's MINDYOURLANGUAGE blog (style.guide@theguardian.com), posted by
David Marsh under the heading A factoid is not a small fact. Fact. Norman Mailer, widely credited with coining the word in his 1973 biography of Marilyn Monroe, said that factoids were "facts which have no existence before appearing in a magazine or newspaper".

Here are a couple of quotes:

Books about grammar and language are full of factoids, such as George Bernard Shaw spelling "fish" as "ghoti" and Winston Churchill writing "this is something up with which I will not put". I think the writers want these stories to be true, so repeat them, even when there is little or no evidence for them.

Part of the Mailer definition that is usually overlooked is that the media create factoids not so much as lies but "as a product to manipulate emotion in the Silent Majority"

Applying OSASCOMP to military terms, part 2

For Applying OSASCOMP to military terms, part 1, see the post dated 10 December 2013.
Reminder: OSASCOMP (or OSAS_COMP) = opinion, size, age, shape, colour, origin, material, purpose (noun)
a suggested rule to ensure that a string of noun qualifiers sounds natural in English.

Under the heading Surface Navy 2014: Saab unveils Sea Giraffe 4A AESA radar, the issue of Jane's International Defence Review dated 16 January 2014, contained the following sentence:

Saab has revealed details of a new E/F-band shipborne active electronically scanned array (AESA) 3D multifunction radar based Gallium Nitride (GaN) technology.

First, I think that should read:

Saab has revealed details of a new E/F-band shipborne active electronically scanned array (AESA) 3D multifunction radar based on the Gallium Nitride (GaN) technology.

Let us now attempt to apply OSASCOMP -- that's opinion size age shape colour origin material purpose noun -- (see post below dated 2 December 2013) to the term a new E/F-band shipborne active electronically scanned array (AESA) 3D multifunction radar.

My first guess at assigning the qualifiers roles would be:
new = opinion
E/F-band = type, or more specifically, operating frequency

shipborne = type, or platform for which the product is designed

active electronically scanned array (AESA) = (Wow, that is some qualifier!) type, or more specifically, array technology
3D = type, or coverage
multifunction = type, or capability.

Comments and issues:

• each step of the analysis presents a classification challenge
• the classification of technical qualifiers is far more complicated than OSASCOMPN suggests
• if multiple qualifyiers are assigned the same role, how does one determine the correct order?
• although extraordinarily long, this elaborate string of qualifiers sounds natural to this blogger and is probably unlikely to surprise anyone used to reading technical journalism on naval matters save perhaps for the expanded form of AESA.

Clearly, OSASCOMP is not readily applicable to complex multi-element military terms.

Thus, the long-standing question raised on 2 December 2013 still awaits an answer meeting the needs of technical journalists and translators.

Have concept, but no straightforward word

On 2 January, the Economist's language columnist Johnson published an article under the rubric Word of the year and the heading Johnson: And the winner for 2013 is... The article is signed 'R.L.G.' and was written in Berlin.

The passage I'd like to focus on reads (my bold):

When Johnson was asked by a German magazine to write a short commentary on the revelations of Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor who blew the lid on America's electronic eavesdropping, I was moved to muse that the German language had no straightforward word for “privacy”. (It has Privatsphäre, or “private sphere”, and Ungestörtheit for the idea of being left in peace, but no word for the abstract notion of privacy itself.)

Under the traditional lazy analysis, “German has no word for ‘privacy’” should mean that the concept is unimportant to Germans, or that they have a hard time understanding it. But the opposite is true.

The comments below the article mention other German possible equivalents of 'privacy', suggesting that Johnson could have elaborated a little on what he meant by 'straigtforward'. Still he does appear to have picked up on a nugget of information. Linguists and more particularly terminologists have long debated the complex and evolving relationships between terms and concepts. See, for instance, this thesis. Johnson's observation may give them further food for thought.