Feb 1st, 2007 | British English, Essays, French, Spanish, Translation | No Comments
By Jonathan Goldberg
We have of course all been exposed to various—if not many!—examples of the differences between British and American vocabulary, but can we ever get enough? The answer, thankfully, is “no.” So let’s explore some bathroom … well, terminology, if not exactly humor (with help from the French and Spanish).
Restroom
This word, most commonly used in the United States, is a euphemism for lavatory, because it eschews any mention of toilet activities performed there. Lavatory, meaning a place where one washes (as well as the apparatus itself), is itself a euphemism, as is W.C., which is short for water closet. Both of these terms are more prevalent in Britain than is restroom.
Bathroom is another word used in the U.S. to mean a restroom, toilet, lavatory, or W.C. Other synonyms in American English, although far less frequently used, include lav, john, loo, and can. Spanish displays the same modesty in the expression cuarto de baño, literally bathroom (or simply baño). In some Spanish-speaking countries, the term W.C. is adopted as is from the English, although pronounced differently. But Spanish has three other words used to indicate public toilets. One is servicios, meaning services, obviously a euphemism. Another is aseos, which without the s has a variety of meanings in Spanish, including cleanliness. The third is lavabo, from the word lavar, meaning to wash.
The common denominator of all these low-key words is that they suggest only the bodily cleaning-up activities performed after the toilet has been used for its primary purpose. The English word toilet is derived from the French toilette. Originally, the French word meant “a cloth on which items used for grooming are placed,” vaguely similar to the present-day (British) English toilet or toilet-bag—“a waterproof travel bag for holding toiletries (soap, toothpaste, etc.).” Later, the French cabinet de toilette came to mean the room in which one washed, from whence its present-day meaning of a W.C., or restroom. British English has adopted the word toilet to mean also the act of dressing and preparing oneself, as in “he made his morning toilet and went to breakfast.”
Queue
In the U.S., one stands in line; for example, waiting to use the restroom at a sporting event. (Although in New York, one stands on line.) In Britain—and indeed in English-speaking countries where British English is in use—one waits in a queue. Queue is, in fact, used in the U.S. in this sense, but only in the field of information processing, to mean “an ordered list of tasks to be performed or messages to be transmitted.”
French has the same word, queue (pronounced differently). This has at least two meanings. The first is that of a line or queue, identical to the British use. (In French you don’t stand in line, you make the line—faire la queue). The second meaning is “tail”—as of an animal. The visual similarity between a line of people and the tail of an animal is clear.
A further use of queue, “a braid of hair at the back of the head” (albeit a somewhat arcane definition) also bears that visual association. The Spanish word for queue (line of people) is cola. As in French, this has the additional meaning of “tail.” However, the word tail in English is used not only to denote the wiggly protrusion of animals but also (among other interpretations) the tail end of an animal or object—such as the tail of an airplane.In the latter respect, the meaning is similar to that in French and in the Spanish of some Spanish-speaking countries, because queue and cola are both used in those two senses of tail. (The Spanish word cola has the additional sense of glue. Cola also exists in English, as in the brand names Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola, having acquired the meaning of a carbonated soft drink, but it has its origin in the fact that Coca-Cola was originally composed of an extract from the kola nut, as well as from the leaf of Peruvian coca. Kola is also a language spoken south of Lake Chad, in Africa.
Underwear
Many Americans might be unfamiliar with the term knickers, commonly used in England to mean women’s panties. Paradoxically, the word from which it is derived, knickerbockers, has its origin in New York. (The New York Knicks basketball team takes its name from this word.)
In England, women’s underwear is probably more typically designated today by the more chic French word lingerie, originally used to mean anything made of linen but now well ensconced in English as women’s underwear. The word bra is a short form of brassière, imported into English and still used in French. But the common French word is soutien-gorge, meaning literally a throat-holder, devised presumably by someone with a poor knowledge of female anatomy. (Brassière should not be confused with brazier, meaning “a container for holding hot coals,” or brasserie, a restaurant serving alcohol—although certain men might be excited by all of these concepts.)
There are many words in Spanish meaning bra, depending on the country of use. Sujetador—literally a subjugator—sounds daunting enough to make any woman want to burn her bra. Sostén, literally a support, also stays well clear of mentioning that part of a woman’s body which the bra serves to keep in place. Vive la modestie! As for men’s wear, knickers was originally used to denote men’s as well as women’s underwear, but the expressions in vogue today are shorts (boxers and briefs) in America and underpants in England.
This article appeared in an abridged form in the Dec. 2004/Jan. 2005 issue of Toga, the newsletter of the Plato Society of UCLA (www.uclaextension.edu/plato). NCTA is grateful to the Plato Society for granting us its permission to reprint.
Dec 1st, 2005 | Essays, Spanish, Translation | No Comments
By Andrea Wells
Linguists are always very enthusiastic about “untranslatable” words. Theory says that a word without a one-to-one equivalent in another language is considered a lacuna; a lexical gap between the meanings of the word, expression, or turn of phrase in the source and the target languages. However, whether a word is truly translatable or untranslatable is debatable, because usually these difficult terms are in fact obscure expressions with a local flavor that cannot be precisely or concisely defined. One of the most challenging words I have come across in my ten years as a translator and editor that has this essence of untranslatability is the Spanish word duende (\doo-EN-day\).
What does the word duende mean and why is it so difficult to translate into English? The Spanish word itself has actually entered the English language; a straightforward definition being “ghost, imp, or elf.” The Random House Dictionary defines duende as a “goblin, demon, or spirit.” In Ireland, a leprechaun could be considered a duende. Irish folklore says that such duendes possess a treasure, usually a pot of gold, which a human may take when the duende is not looking. The word duende, however, has a deeper and more interesting meaning. According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, duende is “the power to attract through personal magnetism and charm.” Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia, adds that duende is a rarely explained concept in Spanish art, related to emotion, expression, and authenticity.
It is in this context that I would like to share with you how researching this word has brought back some vivid memories of my childhood in Salta, Argentina. As I was growing up, my grandmother used to tell me stories of a duende that she described as a playful goblin who was always being noisy and making a general nuisance of himself. This duende was locally referred to as Coquena. This tiny goblin, said to wear a coat, shorts, and sandals, is believed to protect the llamas and other animals in the desert area of La Puna in the north of Argentina. But I also remember my grandmother using the word duende in an emotional context. When I used to dance, she would clap with excitement and great emotion and shout “you have duende.”Only now do I understand what she was trying to say.
In Spain, people use the word duende when they go to corridas to see their favorite toreros and flamenco dancers. The Spaniards claim that the gypsies are responsible for the creation of the word duende. When gypsies entered Spain from France in the mid-1400s, they faced brutality and persecution. But after years of being targets of this cruelty, the gypsies found a way to express their anguish through a particular kind of dance – flamenco. The flamenco dancer is said to have duende.
Others have used the word duende to capture the mood of emotion and passion. Many Spanish poets use it to refer to an inspiration and even something magical. For example, the poet Garcia Lorca wrote in an essay exploring the complex and inspirational flavor of the word’s meaning, “the duende is a momentary burst of inspiration, the blush of all that is truly alive, all that the performer is creating at a certain moment.” And, “The magical property of a poem is to remain possessed by duende … for with duende it is easier to love and understand, and one can be sure of being loved and understood.”
As language professionals, we all need that inner strength that inspires us to properly communicate through words the emotions and feeling of the writer or speaker. In this state, it might fairly be said that we have achieved duende.
Feb 1st, 2004 | Essays, Hebrew, NCTA Members, Spanish | No Comments
BY MERAV ROZENBLUM
When we started thinking of our wedding ceremony and asked ourselves what, how, where and who we would like to have in it, the issue of language immediately came up. I grew up in Israel, and although both my parents emigrated there from Argentina just a few years before I was born, Hebrew was my first language. I acquired most of the Spanish that I now speak as an adult in school. Francisco, now my husband, grew up in a Spanish-speaking home here in the US and is a perfect bilingual.
So there was no doubt Spanish was to be one of the languages of the ceremony. After all, it is our families’ common language, the one we mostly use to communicate with each other, and last but not least, the language in which we met and fell in love. The second language of choice was of course English. The arguments in favor in this case were that the wedding ceremony was to take place in San Francisco, the city that is home for us; many of our local friends do not speak perfect Spanish, some speak no Spanish at all; and English is the language we use for business and politics, at home. We also thought that an English-Spanish ceremony would be a loyal expression of our bilingual lifestyle and the T/I trade which we both practice.
But what about Hebrew, the language which still comprises most of my cultural world, the language in which I will always dream, do math and curse? My Hebrew-speaking friends thought we shouldn’t leave out this important part of what I am. I agreed. But a trilingual ceremony would have been a taxing one, and there was no real need to use Hebrew as a language of the ceremony, since all Hebrew speakers who were expected to attend spoke either English or Spanish almost as a native language.
We started with the invitations. We decided to use our own DTP skills and means, and print the invitations, about 200 of them, at home. We are not sure it was the most economical option, but it certainly gave us control, which we, of course, love. We printed out two versions of invitations and the attached instructions-to-the-ceremony-site page: English and Spanish. Interestingly, perhaps because English is our business language, we felt more comfortable drafting the text in English and then translating it into Spanish. Being a right-to-left language, printing out invitations in Hebrew would have strained our technical abilities too much. However, I did add an extra page in Hebrew for our Hebrew speaking invitees, which was a personal letter from me with some useful information about fares and accommodation options, since most recipients would have had to plan a special trip or a vacation in Northern California if they decided to come to our wedding. And so, we matched the language of the invitation to the language we use to communicate with the addressee, and sealed the envelopes.
A few months later, we delved into the details of the ceremony. Not only are we a multi-lingual couple, we are also “atheists of different faiths”, as Francisco likes putting it. In our case, we were drawing from both Catholic and Jewish traditions when preparing our own wedding ceremony. Luckily, the differences are not that vast. Having taken care of legalities some months earlier in City Hall, we did not really need anyone to officiate at the ceremony. Rather, we wanted our friends and family members to take part in the ceremony not merely as witnesses to our union. And, of course, we wanted them to do it in more than just one language. Being consecutive interpreters, we realized that since each text was to be read at least twice, we would have to limit the length of the texts, or else we would bore our guests with too long a ceremony before the awaited reception.
At the beginning of the Catholic wedding ceremony, there’s a reading from the Bible. Secular and liberal as we are, we chose one on the female lover’s dream sequences from the Song of Songs (3: 1-4), and used Ariel and Chana Bloch’s beautiful, new translation of it into English, and the rather canonized De Reina’s translation into Spanish. Of course, this is where Hebrew came in handy: we actually had the privilege of being able to read the text in its original language, and so asked three of our women friends and relatives to read the passage, each in a different language. Later on in the ceremony, upon exchanging rings, we ourselves read another short passage from Song of Songs (8:6), each in his/her native tongue(s).
Also from the Catholic tradition, we asked a friend who among other things is a talented writer and speaker to write a “sermon” for us. We introduced him by e-mail to one of our translator friends, who translated the sermon into Spanish. In the ceremony itself, she was reading the Spanish translation after each paragraph that he read of the English original. This was the longest text in the program, but we must acknowledge our friends’ cooperation in respecting the time limitations we imposed on them.
Vows are rather foreign to the Jewish wedding ceremony. Some less traditional couples write them, nevertheless, as a part of their Ketubah, which is a legal certificate signed at the time of the wedding. Originally, it used to guarantee the economic wellbeing of the wife in times when women were completely dependent on their husbands. Whatever shape they take, these vows are not read in public. We wrote our vows, again in English, and then translated them into Spanish. Since it was Francisco who led the writing of this part of the ceremony, we thought it would be proper for him to read them in their original language, and so I repeated them in Spanish after him.
The most creative part of the ceremony was the Seven Blessings. In the Jewish ceremony they are read by the officiating Rabbi. Only the last two blessings have the bride and groom as their subject. The rest of the blessings have to do with the wider circles of the couple’s life. We decided to follow a similar rationale, and asked seven of our relatives and friends to prepare blessings for us, starting with our students, and moving closer to us, to our parents and intimate friends. Again, we had to instruct everybody to be very brief. The non-bilingual among our friends had to forward us a copy of the texts they were going to read, so we could translate them into Spanish. Thus, the groom found himself translating quite a bit in the days prior to his wedding. The next step was to find a Spanish speaker from among the guests who could read the translation along with the person who wrote and offered the blessing. Luckily, in our community of translator friends and among our bilingual families, the task was not particularly hard. All we had to see to was that everybody had their texts (glued to a nice card, for the sake of uniformity). It was heartwarming to watch some of our friends who had never met before collaborate in our honor.
Some curious things happened. My mother, a native speaker of Spanish, chose to dedicate to us the lyrics of a song in Hebrew, the language and culture she had made her own in the last 38 years or so. I translated the song into English, and Francisco translated my translation into Spanish. Then we read our translations together with my mother in this tri-lingual blessing, one of the most moving we had. Another blessing was a song offered in Hebrew by our housemate and friend, who does not speak a word of this language. Two other blessings included a song in Hebrew as well, and one included a song in Spanish. In all of them, a translation into the other language(s) was offered before or after the song. So yes, Hebrew was quite present in our ceremony, usually in original poetry and songs.
In only one case did we decide not to use translation. Our Ketubah, which is also an object of art, had a verse from he Song of Songs (6:3), according to our choice, incorporated into its custom-made frame. We liked the reciprocity of this verse, which is usually translated into English as “I am to my beloved and he is mine”. However, I felt that this translation was restricting the original Hebrew by conveying only one possible reading of the verse. Other possible readings are “I am there for my lover and he is there for me”, “I support my lover and he supports me”. Since we couldn’t really come up with any better rendering, we decided to use the Hebrew only and so preserve all these additional meanings of this untranslatable, beautiful verse.
Our wedding ceremony lasted a bit under an hour, and turned out to be a memorable event, among other reasons, because of the three languages used, and thanks to 26 out of our 78 guests who actually participated by writing, translating, reading out, singing or playing musical pieces. As to us, we enjoyed our wedding much more than we expected, in spite of the hard work it entailed, and we are now concentrating on living happily ever after.
NCTA members Merav Rozenblum (English/Spanish-Hebrew) and Francisco Hulse (English-Spanish) were married on October 12th, 2003 in San Francisco.
Feb 1st, 2004 | Book Review, Reference, Spanish, Translation | No Comments
Cisco Press, US, and Pearson Educación S.A. in Madrid, © 2003, by Anna N. Schlegel
by Dee Klein Braig, MIL, MBAIB
Dictionaries being such important beings in our lives as translators, when you see a good one it’s easy to simply fall head over heels in love and tell everyone that it is wonderful and to go out and get it forthwith, and move on.
Such was my case after I had received the Diccionario de términos de comunicaciones y redes, by fellow NCTA member Anna Navarro Schlegel, and had dipped into it here and there. However, a formal review calls for analyzing and substantiating one’s feelings, and in doing so, the odd “but if only …” will inevitably materialize. As opposed to people, though, books successfully undergo revision for their next edition and, unlike leopards, actually do readily change their spots.
Anna Navarro Schlegel, born in Spain and educated in Spain, Germany, and England, is a fluent speaker to native level in Spanish, Catalan and English; her husband is German, and she has been fluent in German at least since her Humboldt University days in Berlin. She has brought over a decade of translation and interpretation experience, plus her technical knowledge honed by her time as a program manager at Cisco Systems’ Localization Group, where this dictionary saw its inception, to bear in the creation of this focused and extremely valuable work of reference.
The author’s Dedication and Acknowledgments pages reflect her multilingual, multicultural background in a touching way through her thanks to the various parties who contributed to the dictionary’s genesis, formulated in each contingent’s own language; to her parents in Catalan, to her family in German, to her colleagues at Cisco in English, and to the publishers and editors in Spain, in Spanish.
The Spanish-English and English-Spanish Diccionario de términos de comunicaciones y redes [Dictionary of Networks and Telecommunications] was published earlier this year by Cisco System’s Cisco Press, together with Pearson Educación S.A. in Madrid. It is a handsome and handy volume, with a jaunty graphic image and cleancut physical solidity that are Cisco-reminiscent. For me, the physical attributes of a dictionary are important: how it sits in your hand, how the pages open [and hopefully stay open], the quality and thickness of the paper, the typeface and layout, the white space, the contrast between categories within the entry, the logical organization … and then, of course, the content.
This single volume dictionary comprises 632 pages in a 17 x 24 cm format. It is approximately an inch thick. The paper is thick enough that you *just* don’t see the print showing through from the other side, a feature that becomes more and more important as time goes by and one’s eyesight is apt to experience greater fatigue sooner. The print itself is large enough that the dictionary can be open on the desk by one’s side and not require to be picked up every time a term needs to be looked up. I am happy to report that the weight of the paper is such that the book will remain open at the selected page despite its relatively small format. Entries are laid out fully across the page, separated by thin continuous lines and listed in bold, with the other language equivalent slightly less emphasized.
The work almost resembles an encyclopedia in that it gives definitions and examples as well as translations. The first part, English to Spanish, contains the English term, followed by its full definitions and application examples in Spanish, while the second part, Spanish to English, is organized rather like a cross-reference index, listing only the terms and their translations. Acronyms and abbreviations are recorded in strict alphabetical order. In fact, its educational value is extremely high, and in some ways it approximates the effect of a communications hardware, software and technology crash course. One example will suffice:
“Ethernet” is a word we have all heard, but here is what it actually is: “Especificación LAN de banda base, inventada por Xerox Corporation y desarrollada conjuntamente por Xerox, Intel y Digital Equipment Corporation. Las redes Ethernet utilizan CSMA/CD y funcionan con diversos tipos de cable a 10 Mbps. Ethernet se asemeja a la serie de estándares IEEE 802.3. Véase también Fast Ethernet.” You can then proceed to look up “CSMA/CD” and find it explained in equally abundant detail. An added bonus is that these definitions teach you how to “talk” about the subject, i.e. the vocabulary and turns of phrase used in Spanish in the subject specific discourse.
As a Cisco Systems sponsored publication, many of the references are to Cisco proprietary products or processes, which is useful because, since Cisco has for a long time set the industry standard, such mentions help the bilingual practitioner orient his or her further research by using them as keywords.
Alas, in delving deeper one finds that even one’s darling is not perfect in the cold light of dawn. As a translator who happily doubles as a proofreader and editor, what irks me most are the typographical errors. Evidently the publishers did not see it fit to review the manuscript (can we even call it that in our day and age? Yet Anna assures me that it does not exist in soft version, yet it should; more about that later) in depth prior to going to print.
Thus we gnash our teeth at items like compatability, conmuatción, Automated Attendand Feature (AA), and many others … too many in my view. Given the situation, and if it were within my purview, I would publish some sort of errata card to be included with each volume.
These are errors, and unavoidable. What is more puzzling is why some things were apparently left out while other items of a similar importance or category were included. The most glaring example, in my opinion, is the acronym SSL for Secure Socket Layer (and its varieties), an everyday item on secure sites, and which is probably not completely obvious to every translator who suddenly needs to understand and translate it while recreating, say, consumer information on a banking or online shopping website.
On the other hand, much more complex items such as the various AALs (ATM Adaptation Layers) and also a much more common acronym, FAQ, are listed, translated and explained.
Similarly, Freeware is included, but not Shareware. Also, not all terms are equal, which shows how a lexicologist is not an island: The definition of the abovementioned Automated Attendant Feature (Operadora Automática) is “Dispositivo automático para la marcación directa de las extensiones en una centralita”. But Centralita is not defined [not even for us non-Iberians], nor is an English equivalent given in the relevant section, while right under where it should be, we find Centrex and its equivalent-Centrex.
These examples sent my mind reeling with questions and thoughts and implications and ideas and connections, all in an intercommunicating network.
Obviously a dictionary is a work without end, both intrinsically and, most particularly, in a cutting-edge high tech subject such as communications. So the immediate question is twofold: how to make it better, more complete, more targeted to any one user’s needs (aside from publishing a list of errata), and how to ensure that it can continue to evolve and not become outdated in two or three years’ time, when the Cisco products mentioned have become obsolete and much more in the way of communications will take place over infrared and RF paths?
A potentially ultimate solution is given in the Author’s Profile page, which states that new terms can be added by visiting www.annanschlegel.com. Anna requests that such contributions be made by email to her, with as much detail as possible; this should ensure dynamic growth and survival for the baby.
As regards my puzzlement in connection with apparently missing terms, I would suggest a foreword explaining criteria for inclusion or exclusion, as the case may be; and, of course, adding them as and when it becomes evident that the omission should be remedied.
An appendix listing Cisco Systems specific or proprietary terms would also be useful. In this day and age of fast paced change we become so accustomed to technical buzzwords that it is hard to keep track of whether we may actually be calling a vacuum cleaner a Hoover without noticing. A section of this nature could also fulfill a “historical” function by explaining how a certain concept or product may in the meantime have superseded another included in an earlier definition.
All in all, this work is manna from heaven to the intelligent translator, to him or her who wants to understand what they are translating and who ultimately becomes part of that rarer breed, the linguistic professional who knows enough about the client’s business to be able to point out mistakes of fact in source texts and prevent their potentially catastrophic propagation.
The Diccionario de términos de comunicaciones y redes, ISBN 84-205-3471-4, carries a price tag of 29.95 Euros in Spain and can be obtained www.casadellibro.com searching for Diccionario de terminus, or by its ISBN.
The dictionary will also be available via www.amazon.com in the month of March.
