Multilitteratus Incognitus

A number of years ago I was approached by a firm to do a translation. A one page bureaucratic document that that to do with excise taxes. I was quite excited to be approached for this, although I borked the translation. I spent way too much time sweating the somewhat difficult stuff (like all the crazy acronyms found in the document) that I mistranslated big time units to small time units. Oh well. Live and learn! Now I've been working on a longer literature translation on my spare time for a friend, and I've learned my lessons, however another thought has come to mind: How close to the original does a translator make his work? The intent of the translation is to not necessarily translate everything verbatim, but convey the meaning of the original into the target language. What I am wondering is how much leeway does a translator have with tenses, active versus passive voice and participial expressions. For example, you are translating something from a language where the ...

Well OK, maybe I am exaggerating a little bit, but it's quite interesting. I thought that for the last post of May it would make sense to close the month with something linguistics related given that this semester was all linguistics all the time :-) I was reading this article on Slate called There's No Klingon Word for Hello . I honestly didn't expect it to be so interesting! For instance I did not know that Klingon was a completely developed language, grammar an all! The following really surpised me: But Klingon uses prefixes rather than suffixes, and instead of having six or seven of them, like most romance languages, it has 29. There are so many because they indicate not only the person and number of the subject (who is doing) but also of the object (whom it is being done to). Klingon has 36 verb suffixes and 26 noun suffixes that express everything from negation to causality to possession to how willing a speaker is to vouch for the accuracy of what he says. By piling ...

Or...rather...50 years of bad grammar advice! I was reading this article on the Chronicle of Higher Ed a few weeks back and I didn't get an opportunity to fully savor it, so I re-read it. As a typical American undergraduate student Strunk and White was a required book, a style manual that we had to abide by. I remember really disliking my English 101 and 102 classes, but I don't remember why. Perhaps Strunk and White was one of the reasons - I have completely blocked the experience from memory it seems :-) In any case, the article was QUITE interesting and I recommend that you read it, even if you are not that much into writing or grammar or linguistics.

Just as I've started taking a course called "structure of the English Language", which deals with English Grammar, here comes a blog post called " there is no grammar ". OK, now that the other blog got your attention, I think that I agree with the original blogger. Grammar is a construct made up to understand the language we speak. From a language learner's perspective though is it useful to start learning grammar from the get go? Whether you agree or disagree, the article is interesting to read. I think that we shouldn't be so grammar heavy in intro courses to language, however we should learn the rules eventually. Verbal communication only gets you so far, and not knowing the intrinsic, abstracted, rules of grammar will only hurt language learners in the long run if they wish to gain proficiency in a language - IMHO.

Recently I had posed an open question to people out there to see how much they remember from their intro language courses. I then stumbled upon two relatively recent starred items in my google reader that I had not read yet: The role of grammar in language study and More on grammar . I have to say that I agree with Steve on both his posts, and this comes from personal experience. As an undergrad I spent a lot of time in language courses despite being a computer scientist. The reason I wanted to take language courses was communicative. I wanted to be able to communicate with natives in a spoken and written format. The curiosity about linguistics was a secondary factor. My professors were great, but I find that the format was rather formulaic and of a different era in language teaching. From what I gathered, my professors were literature people, not strictly foreign language pedagogy people, In Italian this wasn't a problem as I had already had French and I could translate my languag...