Lavengro

What a rollyo!

There is a thing called Rollyo that allows you to ‘roll your own search engine’. I can say nothing about how it works or how good it is, but I doubt if they’ll do much business in Spanish-speaking countries. Un rollo, pronounced rollyo, is a pain in the neck!

The client is always right … or at least he thinks he is

Last week I did a translation of advertising copy for a small luxury item for personal use (for professional reasons I can’t be more specific). It is aimed at women and the text was written in a lush, romantic style. Today it came back. The client wasn’t happy and had made his ‘corrections’.

• First, my fount of inspiration had become a source of inspiration. Well, source is a perfectly correct translation of fuente; indeed it is the standard form. But in view of the style of the whole piece I thought that fount would meet the case better. The Concise Oxford agrees, defining it as: 1 a source of a desirable quality. 2 poetic/literary a spring or fountain.
• The punctuation had been messed about. Punctuation is variable, but it varies differently in English from Spanish. In particular, in Spanish it is heavier than in English and is often ‘oratorical’, i.e. it marks points for breathing in speech rather than grammatical structure. It is normal in Spanish to see a comma between a long subject phrase and the verb, or at the start or end, but not both, of a parenthesis – as had been introduced twice in my text.
• A whole paragraph that wasn’t in the original had appeared, and a phrase that was there had disappeared.
• And finally, it seems that the greengrocer’s apostrophe is colonising the world: my finishings had been changed consistently to finishing’s.

All in all, it took more time (unpaid of course) to make the corrections and argue with the client than the translation job (a mere 467 words) had taken in the first place!

Take care!

The picture shows an advertisement for coffee in a bar-restaurant in Barcelona (Pg. de Gràcia / València). The Catalan says Cuida’t amb el nostre cappucino (Spanish Cuídate con nuestro cappucino). Fair enough, but the translation doesn’t work. It’s not an easy translation; if I were doing it – and I do do translation work for advertising – I would probably go for a free version: Treat yourself to our cappuccino. In any event, a more literal translation would be something like Look after yourself or even Take care of yourself, which might be too long for the available space. But the translation that has been published is simply wrong. The English word care has two meanings (COED):

1 the provision of what is necessary for the health, welfare, maintenance, and protection of someone or something…

2 serious attention or consideration applied to an action or plan.  a feeling of or occasion for anxiety.

and it is the second, the idea of precaution, that is expressed in take care (COED again):

take care 1 be cautious; keep oneself safe.

So Take care with our cappuccino is not a proper translation of the original. In fact, it means Alerta al nostre cappuccino! or ¡Cuidado con nuestro cappuccino!

Posh

A folk etymology is one that is widely believed but which is unfounded linguistically, though often it ‘seems’ right. One example is the widespread belief that the word posh derives from an acronym of Port Out Starboard Home, these being the preferred sides, being sheltered from the sun, of passengers on P&O liners sailing between Britain and India. However, there is no real evidence to support this theory. The etymology given in the OED is:

[Of obscure origin, but cf. posh n.² The suggestion that this word is derived from the initials of ‘port outward, starboard home’, referring to the more expensive side for accommodation on ships formerly travelling between England and India, is often put forward but lacks foundation. The main objections to this derivation are listed by G. Chowdharay-Best in Mariner’s Mirror (1971) Jan. 91–2.]

The reference to posh n.² leads us to the definition:

A dandy

which seems quite plausible.

The Mariner’s Mirror article and other comments can no longer be found on line (12 May 2013) but there seems little room for doubt: the acronym etymology is not valid.

Word of the Year

The Word of the Year is 'bailout’, as voted this week by the American Dialect Society at their conference in San Francisco.
Delegates, including staff from Cambridge University Press’s Academic and Professional Group, were asked to nominate new or newly significant words to have emerged over the previous 12 months. The overall winner was the word bailout, in the specific sense it acquired in 2008 to refer to the rescue by the government of companies, especially banks, on the brink of failure.
Founded in 1889, the society is dedicated to the study of the English language in North America, and its conference attracts academics and amateur wordsmiths from all over the globe.
News of the result was picked up by local and national media, including CBS News. Category award winners were as follows:

Most unnecessary: moofing: i.e., "mobile out of office", working with laptop and cell phone.
Most creative: recombobulation area: at Milwaukee's Mitchell Airport where passengers who "have just passed through security screening can get their clothes and belongings back in order."
Most outrageous: terrorist fist jab: a knuckle-to-knuckle fist bump, or "dap", traditionally performed between two black people as a sign of friendship, celebration or agreement and described as "the terrorist fist jab" by newscaster E. D. Hill, formerly of Fox News.
Most likely to succeed: shovel-ready: an infrastructure projects that can be started quickly when funds become available.
Other nominees worthy of a mention:
lipstick on a pig: An adornment of something that can't be made pretty.
game-changer: In business and politics, something that alters the nature of a marketplace, relationship, or campaign. From sports. "something that changes a match or contest."
Palinesque: Pertaining to persons who have extended themselves beyond their expertise, thereby bringing ridicule upon a serious matter.
long photo: A video of 90 seconds or less. Used by the photo-sharing web site Flickr.
First Dude: The husband of a governor or president.
Bromance: A very close relationship between two heterosexual men.

Machines and menus

I have written before of the problems of machine translation. It is particularly difficult with menus because the machine doesn’t ‘know’ that it is dealing with a menu. That explains what has till now been my favourite: vino y cava was translated not as wine and cava but as it came and it digs, which is quite right because vino is the third person past of venir (come) and cava is the third person present of cavar (dig).

But today I had lunch in a small (and perfectly pleasant) restaurant where the English menu offered entrecote irons, gutter of meat, soup of Wales, shave with sauce, and – amazingly – sausage with Jews, which I sincerely hope was not a pork sausage! What had happened was this:

• A plancha is a griddle, the kind of hotplate heated from below that is used in all Spanish restaurant kitchens, but as a verb planchar means to iron clothes and the computer had read it as the third person present of that verb.
• A canelón is a gutter, but in English we use the Italian name cannelloni for the pasta. I actually had this and it turned out to be a single (and thus singular), rather large pasta roll filled with meat instead of the smaller tubes that are more common.
• Sopa de galets is a Catalan soup containing pasta shells. It had been put incorrectly as sopa de gales and that had been copied to Spanish. Gales is the Spanish name for Wales.
• Shave with sauce is a new one. In Spanish it is rape con salsa, which is monkfish with sauce. There are a number of obvious classic blunders with the name of that fish (rape seaman-style, rape on a bed of spinach, and so on) but this one has been caused by an association with the verb rapar, which is to shave as in a shaven head, not normal shaving of the face.
• Judías are beans. They are also Jewish women. The computer guessed wrong.