Metaglossia: The Translation World

The narrators of my novel Dark Eden use a version of English that differs slightly from standard English as spoken now on Earth. They come from a small community which has been cut off for the rest of the human race for 160 years, and it seemed to me that this needed to be reflected in the language, for we know that new human communities always do quite quickly develop a distinctive way of speaking, even when not completely cut off. In the case of Eden, the differences are not great -- the most immediately noticeable one is that characters double adjectives for emphasis rather than using "very" -- but we are finely tuned to pick up linguistic clues and, to the pleasure of many but to the irritation of some, readers notice them at once. 

All writers play with language in one way or another, but this business of inventing imaginary dialects is a particular kind of game which can be played by writers attempting to imagine, not just the feelings and relationships of characters, but the development of whole societies.

Inventing new languages, or variants of existing languages, can help build a sense of differentness, but there's much more to it than that. One of the things it can do is to foreground the nature of language itself and how it both reflects and shapes our thinking. Imagining different languages, like imagining characters and situations, then becomes yet another way in which making stuff up helps us to notice what is really here.

1. A Clockwork Orange (Anthony Burgess, 1962). "There was a doddery starry schoolmaster type veck, glasses on and his rot open to the cold nochy air..." Alex lives for classical music and ultra-violence, and tells his story through the medium of a Russian-influenced youth argot known as Nadsat. (The name comes from the Russian word for "teen.") When Stanley Kubrick's movie version came out in the early seventies, several real-life acts of violence by teenagers in the UK were attributed to the influence of the film, and the film was taken out of circulation. A teenager myself at the time, I did not copy the violence but did copy the Nadsat as delivered by Malcolm McDowell in the part of Alex. It seemed to me unutterably cool, and I guess for some it helped the violence to seem cool as well.

2. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (Robert Heinlein, 1966). Heinlein's masterpiece is set in a human colony on the moon, where former convict transportees from many nations have established a tough but thriving society which functions without laws or government. It is a kind of Tea Party utopia (though it doesn't work out in the end) and it popularized the expression TANSTAAFL (There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch). Whatever one thinks of its politics, this book is an absolute masterclass in world-building, and part of the effect is achieved through the use of "Loonie" English by the book's first-person narrator. Like Nadsat, Loonie is influenced by Russian and articles and pronouns are typically omitted, in the way Russian speakers of English often do: "My old man taught me two things: 'Mind own business' and 'Always cut cards.'"

3. Nineteen Eighty-Four (George Orwell, 1948).In Orwell's Oceania, Newspeak is a language expressly designed to make it more difficult for people to think outside of the official Party line. The word "blackwhite" for instance "has two mutually contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it means the habit of impudently claiming that black is white, in contradiction of the plain facts. Applied to a Party member, it means a loyal willingness to say that black is white when Party discipline demands this. But it means also the ability to believe that black is white, and more, to know that black is white, and to forget that one has ever believed the contrary. This demands a continuous alteration of the past, made possible by the system of thought which really embraces all the rest, and which is known in Newspeak as doublethink."

4. Ancillary Justice (Ann Leckie, 2013). This very intelligent piece of space opera is written in standard English, but we're made aware that it has been translated for us from another language. Specifically, we become aware that it's been translated from a language where there is only one personal pronoun, rendered here as "she." At first you assume that all the characters are female, but you realize this isn't necessarily the case when the narrator speaks of her difficulties with speaking other languages which do make gender distinctions, and indeed other distinctions, with their pronouns. After that, you read the whole book without knowing whether or not the various characters have penises or vaginas, an interesting experience which makes you think about how odd it is that this one distinction, above all others, has acquired such deep significance that it has found its way into grammar itself.

5. Riddley Walker (Russell Hoban, 1980). "On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs.... He dint make the groun shake nor nothing like that when he come on to my spear he weren't all that big plus he lookit poorily. He done the reqwyrt he ternt and stood and clattert his teef and make his rush and there we wer then. Him on 1 end of the spear kicking his life out and me on the other end watching him dy." Riddley Walker is set in Kent in South-East England, following a nuclear holocaust which has thrown human civilization back to something resembling the Iron Age. Hoban was an American based in England and he meticulously constructed for this book a language which is barely closer to modern English than is the language of Chaucer. By spelling phonetically, Hoban highlights the sounds of the words, which means that you don't hear them in your head as you might speak them yourself, but as the characters speak them. One of the many delights of the book is the way that some words yield up their meaning only slowly. You might be puzzled by "Pry Mincer" at first, and then you realize that it's Riddley's way of saying "Prime Minister."

6. Embassytown (China Miéville, 2011). This must be one of the strangest of all imagined languages. The alien Ariekei have two mouths, and all of their language involves two sets of sounds being produced simultaneously, necessitating the raising of human clones to act as interpreters to them. However, the strangest feature of the language is the fact that it is impossible for the Ariekei to say anything in it that is not literally true. This makes it impossible for them not only to lie but to use metaphors. They can use similes however, and in order to expand the range of ideas they are able to express, the Ariekei get certain humans to enact scenes for them which can then be referred to by way of comparison. Avice, the main character, is one such, serving the Ariekei as a simile. This is surely the only novel in existence in which a group of figures of speech can gather together in a bar to discuss business.

7. The Dispossessed (Ursula Le Guin, 1974). LikeAncillary Justice, this great "ambivalent utopia" is written in English, but with the understanding that this is translation from other tongues. On the anarchist planet of Anarres, people speak a language called Pravic, which has been deliberately constructed in an attempt to avoid the characteristic ways in which older languages shape people's thinking. Possessive words, such as "my" are avoided, for instance, for in Anarres all property is held in common, and different words are used to denote purely biological parenthood, as opposed to the adults involved in actually raising a child. Many words considered rude or insulting in Anarres' sister-planet Urras, are simply meaningless in the context of Anarres, for example the word "bastard," in a society where marriage as an institution simply does not exist. Le Guin does not attempt to construct a grammar or a vocabulary for Pravic, but her main character Shevek reflects on the differences between Pravic and Iotic on a trip to Urras, and this allows us to see how language, even grammar itself, embeds the assumptions of a society.

8. The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R.Tolkein, 1955).It's hard to talk about invented languages without acknowledging a trilogy for which its author designed not just one but several different languages complete with alphabets. I have a love-hate relationship with this work. It would be absurd not to acknowledge the achievement, and dishonest not to admit how much I enjoyed the trilogy when I first encountered it, but there are things about it I really do not like, and one of them is its depiction of races of people who are inherently good (elves) and inherently evil (orcs). Tolkein tried to express this difference in their languages too. The Elvish language is musical and Northern-sounding, somewhat like modern Welsh. The Black Speech spoken by the orcs sounds (to English-speaking ears) "guttural" and "harsh" -- Ash nazg durbatulûk, ash nazg gimbatul... -- but then so do Arabic, Hebrew and Danish, which I'm sure don't sound "harsh" or evil to their own speakers. I'm no more easy really with the idea of some languages being inherently harsh or unpleasant, than I am with certain races being inherently evil.

9. Dark Eden (Chris Beckett, 2014) The language of Eden derives from just two people, one from London and one from New York. This means that it bears traces of both British and American English. Perhaps more importantly, though, it began as a language being spoken by two adults to their children. I've noticed that parents of small children sometimes start using childish language even to one another, and this has happened here, but without the counteracting tendency of other adults, the changes have stuck and childish forms have become the norm: The words doubled up as a means of emphasis being the most obvious example. New ways have been developed to measure the passing time on a sunless planet with no day or night and no year, and new forms of swearing have come into being in a culture with completely different reference poi

Translator and author Linda Jaivin at home in Elizabeth Bay. Photo: Anthony Johnson

With 40,000 characters and four oral tones, Mandarin is a notoriously difficult language to master. Bar the odd misfire that has her Chinese friends doubled up laughing, Linda Jaivin says she is pretty fluent in it.

Jaivin grew up in a town in Connecticut as the daughter of a Jewish shopkeeper, married an Australian scholar and is an Australian citizen, but at times she finds herself acting, thinking and swearing in Mandarin.

I think it is impossible to know any person or any place absolutely. 

''Fuza'', a short-form expression in Mandarin for ''it is complicated'', is how Jaivin describes China's complex and untidy history - the upheavals, campaigns, famine and violence - and it summarises her judgment, after 37 years of close observation, of a culture unable to be easily defined.

''Do I understand China? I do but I don't,'' says Jaivin. ''Do you understand Australia? I think it is impossible to know any place or any person absolutely, and I was mindful of that when I'm writing. The nature of the unknowable. How well do you know the person you love?''

Fuza is how she regards herself. At various times, Jaivin has been a serious scholar, journalist, translator, essayist, playwright and commentator on Chinese urban culture.

''I consider that, as with most people, any single label, be it sinologist or Australian erotic writer, will always sound confining, incomplete, wrong,'' says Jaivin. ''We're all made up of many parts. We're all fuza.''

That which is unknowable characterises Jaivin's elliptical new book, The Empress Lover. Her seventh novel, but only the second about China, tells the story of a film translator of uncertain parentage whose life is upended when she receives a letter from a dead scholar offering to reveal long-hidden family secrets.

The novel takes place over 24 hours in Beijing, interweaving a story of imperial China with modern communist China.

Jaivin takes as her starting point the real-life figure of Sir Edmund Backhouse, a polyglot scholar, who claimed in his memoir, Decadence Manchu, published after his death in 1944, that he had had an affair with the Empress Dowager Cixi of China. Jaivin does not for one moment believe Backhouse's claims. It would be near impossible, she says, for the empress to carry on a semi-open affair with a younger foreign man without it appearing in the records of the Chinese court. What intrigued her, however, was the grand scope of Backhouse's fantasy life, which got her thinking about the boundaries of memory and reality and the trauma of history.

''Everybody thought they knew Edmund Backhouse: he was a quite scholarly gentleman; he was very deferential, very courteous; he tended to avoid foreign company; some people suspected he was gay,'' Jaivin says. ''After his death, questions started to come up. Was he a forger? Was he a scam artist? Was he a fraud? He was never completely nailed down, at least not publicly. When he died he left behind two memoirs - one concerned Europe and the other China - and they were extraordinary. He claimed he was the lover of the empress dowager of China - no one could have anticipated that.''

Jaivin began writing The Empress Lover five years ago and struggled for a long while to create a framework to illuminate the ''big, dark room of history'' while juggling the voices of three narrators. The book's structure of sliding doors almost ''broke my brain'', she laughs.

Jaivin rents an apartment in Elizabeth Bay and when in Beijing likes to stay in the traditional courtyard home of two sisters, one of the few places in old Beijing that has so far avoided the wrecking ball.

She is a bird of bright plumage, wearing a slash of red lipstick, green nail polish, and red-pink hair. A Daoist priest in Chengdu once told her she wore too much black. ''You have too much fire and what you need is to calm the fire down and that will help you achieve focus. I advise you to wear white and yellow.'' Jaivin, who is wearing black and orange, laughs.

''They aren't really my colours. I'm not the kind of person who describes herself as spiritual. I'm not New Age. When people ask me for my star sign, I say I haven't got one. I'm completely secular.''

Jaivin's 2008 temple visit is stitched into The Empress Lover. She didn't know whether the priest was a philosopher or snake-oil salesman. Sipping tea, he told her, ''You are a man among women and I'm guessing you are not in a relationship.'' Jaivin wasn't, having just split from a long-term partner. ''You are not the kind of person who is in need of a long-term relationship.'' She thinks she is more self-contained with age.

Happiness, he told her, was the distance between what you are and what you wish to be true. Don't yearn for the Nobel Prize for Literature, he cautioned. Just write the best book possible, and Jaivin thinks The Empress Lover is that - perhaps her best fiction yet.

''I was very struck by his words. What he clarified for me was the only way to make sense of the world was to acknowledge the world doesn't always make sense.''

Jaivin's interest in China began as a passion, not a career move. At Brown University, she was an environmental activist who wanted to change the world. China studies introduced her to uncharted territory and, in hindsight, she concedes she might have been drawn to the Orient by the opportunities of self-creation.

''I wanted to become a cosmopolitan type, for sure, but also a scholar, a poet - I wrote reams of poetry in my 20s - and even, at times, [I wanted to be] Chinese. It was absurd.''

One of Jaivin's first jobs was editing primary-school English textbooks for Oxford University Press in Hong Kong. In Beijing, she joined the now-defunct Asiaweek magazine and met a young Australian scholar, Geremie Barme, who introduced her to the Foreign Language Press translators and editors Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang, luminaries of Beijing's newly revived intellectual scene.

A recent discussion concerning the proper understanding of a handful of “proof-texts” which are loudly trumpeted as normative to “Christian doctrine” (see study #47) motivated me to offer in a more organized form several principles of translation which are vital to the discipline of linguistics, quite apart from anyone’s “systematic theology.”

As noted in an earlier essay, “The Task of a Translator”, honest, responsible translation requires the rendering of the intent of the original writer or speaker as precisely as possible, into the “target language”. This is requisite in business and political contexts: why, then, is such precision not required of Biblical translators?
Accurate translation has (or should have) absolutely NO room for influence by the political, sociological, philosophical, or theological perspective of the translator. An honest translator of ANY text, is NOT an editor. He must make every effort to serve only as a conduit of what has been said or written by another.

This assignment becomes more difficult as the distance – whether of language, culture, or history – between the original text and the target audience increases. Consequently, when the text of the New Testament writings is the translation in question, there are a number of essential historical and cultural details that are usually ignored, much to the detriment of accurate results. Here are a few:

1.The earliest New Testament manuscripts are uniformly written in Greek. There are “scholars” who insist upon Aramaic, but they have produced NO manuscript evidence prior to the third or fourth centuries. I have been privileged to see fragments of New Testament manuscripts in legible Greek that have been dated to the first century. In the words of a dear brother / teacher / mentor years ago, “the closer you are to the source, the clearer and better is the water.”

2.There are those who insist that the “theological” words in the New Testament Greek manuscripts must be traced back to their Hebrew antecedents in the LXX. These well-meaning people forget (or ignore) the historical fact that the LXX was commissioned because the Jews of the Diaspora, after many generations away from their homeland, no longer understood or spoke Hebrew! They had become acculturated to the Greek world in which they lived.

3.A corollary to the foregoing is the observation that most Old Testament quotations in the New Testament documents correspond more closely to the LXX than to the Old Testament as we know it. The LXX was the “Scripture” that most first century folks knew.

4.Most of the New Testament was written to individuals or churches composed largely of Gentile converts – at least Luke/Acts, most of Paul’s letters, and the churches mentioned by John in the Revelation. These folks would have had Greek background, and consequently a classical Greek understanding of the vocabulary and grammar. Any trained linguist is aware that usage, both historical and contemporary, is the key to understanding both vocabulary and grammar in anylanguage, and this is no exception.

5.Perhaps the most obvious, and certainly the most accessible evidence lies in the Acts 15 record of the Jerusalem conference, which was convened to figure out how (or whether) to incorporate Gentile converts into the Christian brotherhood. NOBODY – even the most ardent of the “Judaizers” – is recorded to have insisted that these “alien” brethren learn Hebrew, study the Law and/or the Prophets, or adopt any of the other trappings of the Old Ways (except circumcision, which was voted down). They were required ONLY to abandon all of their former idolatrous practices: blood or strangled sacrifices and various sexual perversions were inherent in idol worship. They were assured, “If you keep yourselves from these things, you do well.” (Ac.15:29). If an understanding of the intricacies and assumptions of the Old Covenant (many of which had been copied from pagan neighbors) had been essential, surely these would have been imposed upon the newcomers. But they were not.

Moving to more recent history, one must also be aware of the basic error (mentioned in #2) of assuming even the existence of “theological words.” To be sure, “theology” has developed its own very precise and highly defined vocabulary: but the source of that vocabulary is NOT the New Testament!

Please remember that the vast majority of New Testament writings are devoted to the effort to encourage and teach committed followers of the Lord Jesus “the Way” of life together as citizens of his Kingdom. They WERE NOT, and ARE NOT, a list of principles that anyone was required to”believe”, or with whose veracity one was required to argue or to agree.

That all happened later, as in the second and third centuries, a hierarchy (which Jesus himself had flatly forbidden – Mt.23:8-10) emerged, and with it the need to force “ordinary” (“lay”) people into subjection to their authority. You need a codified “doctrine” if you are going to exclude (or execute!) heretics for deviation! But you CAN’T FIND THAT IN THE NEW TESTAMENT!!!
There are instructions for restoring someone whose behavior has necessitated discipline, but NONE for regulating thought. That all came later.

Officially codified and proof-tested “doctrines” came much later, by more than a thousand years, as Councils, Reformers, Counter-reformers, and heresy-hunters of various stripes threw the brotherly attitude of the Jerusalem Conference to the winds and angrily consigned one another to the flames – both figuratively and literally.

With similar (although usually less violent) attitudes, virtually every “official” translation into a “modern” language has been done in the last few hundred years by a person or group whose purpose was to advocate or challenge a particular “theological” perspective. Read the introduction (called the “Epistle Dedicatory” ) of the venerable King James Version, if you doubt this – a treatise on royalty and its privilege!

Others carefully specify the “theological pedigrees” of those chosen to do the “translating” (so that you may be sure their work is “safe”) – see introductions to the NAS and NIV.

Some, to their credit, at least admit that they have made changes to cater to a particular bias (new RSV).

Still others fail even to distinguish between paraphrase and translation (Amplified, Living, Good News, Message), and end up being quoted as if they were equivalent to translations. They are NOT.

It is entirely in order that people should write, for the benefit of others, the insight they have derived from their study of Scripture, and the life to which we have all been graciously invited.

When I became passably proficient in another language (Spanish, in my case), and particularly during the time that I lived in Spain, I began to have the sensation not only of being able to say the same things in different ways, but of having conversations in which I appeared to be accessing a wholly different set of feelings. A previously hidden aspect of myself? One being generated in a new culture? Or, as I suspected, something to do with Spanish itself? While the forbiddingly dense Dictionary of Untranslatables is undoubtedly aimed at the academy, this, “what a thought can do in what a language can do”, as Barbara Cassin puts it in her introduction, is just one of a number of less specialist points of interest that it delves into, with great success.

An untranslatable isn’t, in fact, a word that cannot be translated. It is one that cannot be straightforwardly expressed in any but its original language. An untranslatable, therefore, has to be translated over and over. For example, the entry for “Feeling” explains that in French, “the substantial infinitive le sentir is sometimes used, but with little conviction it can be a consistently used equivalent. The whole cluster of [English] terms around feeling – ‘passion’, ‘emotion’, ‘sentiment’, ‘sensation’, ‘affection’, ‘sense’ – has posed such serious challenges that [French translators] sometimes prefer … to leave the English word in parenthesis”.

It is set out as an encyclopaedia, so each of the 400 or so headwords proceeds into a discussion of history of philosophical usage. In each case, then, the untranslatable presents not just a linguistic problem but also a jumping-off point for philosophical inquiry.

Paradoxically enough, this encyclopaedia of endlessly retranslated terms, which is itself an expanded translation of the French Vocabulaire europeén des philosophies (2004), is an act of resistance to norms in translation. Broadly, there is a school that opposes the mushrooming of World Literature courses, and attendant academic activities, for the way they sacrifice depth (close readings of books in the original language) for breadth (cross-comparing translations from several countries), plus tend to do so in one “master” language (English). By preserving the s

Knowing how to speak one language is one thing, but being able to translate it to another language is another story. Before you can successfully translate one language to another, you must have the mastery of both languages. Otherwise, you will fail to relay the proper message. Take note that the smallest errors in translation of certain texts could mean huge consequences. If you are tasked to translate something, you need to take note of the common errors other translators have committed so that you will avoid doing them.

The Literal Translation

This is one of the most common mistakes translators commit. There are certain expressions such as idioms or figurative languages that should not be taken literally. For instance, an idiomatic expression “snake in the grass” means a traitor. As a translator, you can either look for an appropriate idiomatic expression in the language in which it has to be translated or just translate the actual meaning and not the idiom itself. Otherwise, it will sound awkward and won’t make any sense.

Fillers and Expressions

In some languages, there are words that don’t necessarily have meanings. They are used to imply politeness or simply an expression. For instance, in Thai, women usually say “na kha” at the end of every sentence to sound polite. However, these words don’t have any meaning. Thus, when translating the sentence to another language, the expression does not necessarily have to be copied. Others try hard to look for a corresponding polite word, but other languages simply don’t use such expressions. Just make the sentences sound formal in order to relay the same tone.

Word for Word Translation

Translation is usually difficult especially for those who do a word for word translation. This is among the biggest mistakes in translation. The thought of the sentence or the entire context must be translated and not necessarily one word after another. There are also some languages in which the entire sentence can be expressed in one word. Thus, there is no reason to worry if the translated paragraph is shorter than the original paragraph. For instance, the Italian word “cualacino” literally means the mark left on the table by a cold glass. There is no single word translation for this word in English so it has to be expressed in an entire sentence. Another example is the Portuguese word “cafune.” This single word means running one’s fingers to another person’s hair gently when translated to English. As there is no one word equivalent in English, it has to be expanded that way.

Cultural Context

There are certain words that are culture-specific. This means that there is no actual translation in another language as these words don’t exist or are immaterial to another language. Therefore, the best thing to do is to just enclose the word in quotation marks and copy the exact word. Trying hard to translate this culture-specific word does not make any sense. This is usually common in foods. For instance, the Malay dish “laksa” is of local origin. It can be literally translated as a spicy noodle soup, but the point is there are a lot of different spicy noodle soups. Thus, the translator needs to further explain what the dish is like.

“Where to start, the possibility of having a traineeship in any of the European Institutions was always on my “realistic bucket list”, I thought it would be a stretch for me to achieve, but achievable nonetheless. You can imagine my reaction when I actually received my confirmation email of this traineeship. Fast forwarding several months, and here I am, in the TermCoord unit, taking part in huge projects and fulfilling my professional needs by actually working on things that are relevant to my fields, surrounded by an amazing bunch of permanent staff members and trainees. I can tell you that the trainees from the other units envied us for having such a loose atmosphere within these office walls, yet a very serious work ethic”.

Dutch Trainee from April 2013 to September 2013

“I really enjoyed my time here. It was really providence that led me to choose TermCoord. I believe what I’ve learnt here, I will never be able to learn elsewhere. I really enjoyed researching terminology and working with IATE! Sometimes I find myself looking forward to going back to work after a weekend, which is rare for me (or for anyone, I’m sure). Before I came here, working in an EU institution was really like a pipe dream. I imagined a group of people who take themselves seriously, and nothing could be further from the truth! Before I came here, I had no knowledge of what the EU did, or what it means for ordinary people. I loved seeing how much people are passionate about their own culture/ country. I loved how my view of the world has expanded through learning to see through others’ perspectives. I will definitely be going back, and educating my British friends about the EU. Thank you for having me“.

British Trainee from May to September 2013

“Before leaving I would like to thank you all again for this great opportunity and for your support and feedback. It feels good to know that you appreciated my work. During these six months I have met the most interesting and inspiring people and I will take with me not only the experience and new skills that I acquired, but also great moments, laughs and the best colleagues I could have asked for“.

Portuguese Trainee from April to September 2013

”I am very surprised to have met such a friendly, human and enthusiastic unit. I did not feel like a trainee but one more member of the TermCoord team. They are very participative, active and they really take care about the trainees’ opinion and their work evolution”.

As Mayor Michael Nutter updated his constituents on the city's conditions following another snow storm Tuesday, a bearded man stood beside him communicating the same message with his hands. 

Josh Steckel, 37, served as an interpreter, translating the Mayor's speech to American Sign Language (ASL) for the deaf and hard-of-hearing communities in the Delaware Valley.

Nutter: Philadelphia Goes Into State of Emergency

"I always thought it was a beautiful language," said Steckel, who has a national interpreter certification from the Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf. "I grew up in deaf culture." 

Steckel is a CODA - short for child of a deaf adult. 

Indo-European is a family of languages that first spread throughout Europe and many parts of South Asia, and later to every corner of the globe as a result of colonization. The term Indo-European is essentially geographical since it refers to the easternmost extension of the family from the Indian subcontinent to its westernmost reach in Europe. The family includes most of the languages of Europe, as well as many languages of Southwest, Central and South Asia. With over 2.6 billion speakers (or 45% of the world’s population), the Indo-European language family has the largest number of speakers of all language families as well as the widest dispersion around the world.

The cradle of the Indo-Europeans may never be known but an ongoing scholarly debate about the original homeland of Proto-Indo-European (PIE), may some day shed light on the ancestors of all Indo-European languages as well as the people who spoken it. There are two schools of thought:

Some scholars (e.g., Marija Gimbutas) propose that PIE originated in the steppes north of the Blackand Caspian Seas (the Kurgan hypothesis). Kurgan is the Russian word of Turkic origin for a type of burial mound over a burial chamber. The Kurgan hypothesis combines archaeology with linguistics to trace the diffusion of kurgans from the steppes into southeastern Europe, providing support for the existence ot a Kurgan culture that reflected an early presence of Indo-European people in the steppes and southeastern Europe from the 5th to the 3rd millenium BC.Other scholars (e.g., Gamkrelidze and Ivanov) suggest that PIE originated around 7,000 BC in Anatolia, a stretch of land that lies between the Blackand Mediterranean seas. It lies across the Aegean Sea to the east of Greece and is thus usually known by its Greek name Anatolia (Asia Minor). Today, Anatolia is the Asian part of modern Turkey.

Cooperation (NBC) has expressed dismay over the man condemned for "fake" sign language interpretation at Nelson Mandela's memorial service last Tuesday.

Speaking to New Era last week on Thursday, Moses-Sackaria said at first she thought the man was using a more advanced international sign language but to her alarm he kept repeating the same signs and he was "incoherent".

"It is not clear-cut for me to conclude so soon. Although there are similarities in our sign language with that of South Africa, the huge difference is how we sign as some signs stem from culture," she explained

Moses-Sackaria says by tradition, as a Namibian interpreter she has a high regard for South African interpreters as they started the profession years ahead of Namibia.

"I was a bit perplexed to see the gentleman who just confidently repeated the same sentence throughout," she said joining in the international chorus of condemnation of the interpreter.

Moses-Sackaria further says one could not really read much meaning into his bogus signing.

This year’s Dhaka Hay Festival took place November 14-16 at the Bangla Academy. Always a veritable goldmine for avid readers and thinkers, literary minds from across the globe congregated once more to bring to forth the issues still plaguing both the literary industry, and the world at large. A recurrent theme of this year’s Hay Festival was the subject of translation.  Why translate?In a talk titled Is There A World Literature, Indian essayist and novelist Pankaj Mishra said: “The most exciting thing for me in India today is the rise of fresh translations, sometimes by people who are accomplished writers. Finally we are beginning to see good translations from Indian languages being made available to an audience that is also eager for them. Back in the 80s and 90s they used to appear in a vacuum.” The idea put forward by Mishra and many others was that translations effectively build bridges between societies and cultures; what we lose from an inability to communicate with one another due to language barriers, is no longer an issue.  British literary agent Rachel Mills, hunting for Bangladeshi work to promote abroad, said: “While there is excellent writing in English, I’m sure some of the best work is being produced is in Bangla, and I have no way to evaluate it for international audiences. So I’m hoping to get access to more works in translation.”  The best answer to the question came from Syed Shamsul Huq during the Crossing Cultures poetry reading session where he said, “Reading poetry in translation is like kissing a girl in a photograph.”  Found in translationEssentially, translations have helped develop writing in many ways. As Kaiser Haq explained: “Before the British, there was no prose in South Asian literature, only prose. We didn’t have punctuation: no commas, full stops, exclamation or question marks. Hence, without those you can’t write prose.” But when writing began to overlap, and genres from the west and east started influencing each other, original writing also flourished.  During the session of Exploring Language, Aamer Hussein stated, “Bangladeshi literature certainly has a very strong sense of it’s own region and its own sort of linguistic music, which comes across in the English as well. I think a translation cannot ever fully betray the sound of the native language.” Supporting this ideology was Elliot Weinberger’s favourite translation story that he shared during Spanish Literature, saying, “A man was so enthralled with Pablo Neruda’s poetry that he determined to read him in the original Spanish. But then he was struck by the fear that the originals would not move him as his beloved translations had. So he vowed never to learn a word of Spanish.”  The flipside remains, and not everyone thinks translations are all that necessary. Mario Bellatin was one such thinker, and he spoke strongly in support of writing about different cultures in one’s own language, explaining that often, translations are not the only medium through which to span cultures, because if more writers wrote about different settings but in their native languages, their readers would still be able to relate. Who translates?In a hurriedly obtained interview, Kaiser Haq enunciated on translators and writers. “Translation is a way of relating to the medium’s traditions. If I like a poet’s work, then I translate it, it’s a way of building bridges, making it mine,” he said, explaining that translations can come from writers who are purely translators, or authors who also write originals on the side. It all depends on whether a writer comes across a piece of work that they feel so strongly about, like he does with all the authors he’s translated himself.  Writers versus translatorsKaiser Haq, referred to as Bangladesh’s best living translator, insists that he is primarily a writer. David Shook does not see the two labels as separate things, saying, “I don’t consider translating to be derivative of my life as a poet. I think it’s a creative act in and of itself.” Eliot Weinberger believes that writers make better translators than scholars. “It may be philologically accurate, but it’s not living literature in the same way as if you have a translator who knows contemporary literature. So you can be an expert on Bangla poetry, but if you know nothing about contemporary English poetry, you don’t understand the context in which the translation is going to be read,” he said.   What’s lost in translation? When asked: “Have you made any stupid mistakes while translating?” during the panel Have You Really Read Kafka? Kaiser Haq responded: “I hope not,” while Eliot Weinberger said: “If I have, no one is alive to complain.” But David Shook took the cake with: “I translated a whole novel from Spanish only to find out later that ‘the lover’ was in fact a male, and that the story was about a homosexual romance.” Translations are far from exact. Often, the beauty of the original language may be lost, but the depth of the text itself rarely is. Regardless of the cons of translating, these writers are definitely pro translations. Dhaka Translation CentreThe Kakfa panel also marked the launch of the Dhaka Translation Centre, to be headed by Kaiser Haq. The Centre will offer fellowships to translators and publishes translated works from Bangla to English under the imprint of Bengal Lights Books. The goal of DTC is “not just to export Bangla literature but to import world literature into Bangla,” said board member Chris Heiser, also a publisher based in Los Angeles.  The inspiration for DTC came during last year’s Hay Festival, in a conversation between the centre’s board members K Anis Ahmed and David Shook who said, “basically I feel like I’m missing out on what I suspect is the most exciting part of contemporary Bangladeshi writing.”  The birth of a new genre Kaiser Haq is a Bangladeshi poet, essayist and translator, and the director of the newly launched Dhaka Translation Centre. Haq graciously found time out of his busy schedule to give WT a thought provoking phone interview. The Asian subcontinent is rife with unique and original literature (both poetry and prose), so when did translations really come into the scene? Translations have been around for ages, but they have not been as well publicised or marketed till more recently. Niaz Zaman is one of the few pioneering Bangladeshi translators in this field with her own translations, and subsequently with Writer’s Ink.  Why are translations so necessary? Other than English, which is a very binding language, most other languages continue to be localised. So in order to create universal appeal for outstanding pieces of work, and to spread an understanding of cultures and traditions, translations are much needed. The key is to produce quality translations, since thus far, most translations have been slapdash at best. What are the problems faced by translators? Well in terms of translating from Bangla to English, I guess the primary problems are cultural differences, the names of objects, or local words. Sometimes they simply cannot be translated, but in those moments, it is best to let it stand. With sub-continental languages, there’s also the problem of idioms. Sometimes these just don’t translate well, and become even more vague when translated. How would you go about solving these problems? The best solution is to strike a balance. Glossaries seem to have gone out of fashion, since people can just use Google to find explanations of words they are unable to understand. But I personally am pro glossaries, and commentaries and notes. Introductions from the translators are also effective ways of explaining away un-translated words or phrases. Really, just look at the text, and see what it needs. Sometimes people think that translators are not real writers. How do you feel about that? There are some people with literary interest, whose abilities are channeled into translations. Then there are writers who translate, but write on the side too. Translating really needs to come from within. It is not something that a writer must do, but rather something they might want to do. There has to be some kind of inner compulsion. Some people feel that it is more important to spread what already exists, rather than attempting to put forward something new. There is nothing wrong with that.  Would you encourage more translation work? We Bangladeshis are insular. We have this misplaced superiority complex and don’t want to learn other languages, not in the same language family. This is a problem. There are so many varied mythologies and folklore out there, and we’re essentially missing out on a good read because of the language barrier. I definitely encourage translations, in every language, and the Dhaka Translation Center was started purely for this purpose. 

- See more at: http://www.dhakatribune.com/arts-amp-culture/2013/nov/23/translation#sthash.jAFPbHWC.dpuf

Addis Ababa, Nov 4 (IANS) An Indian scholar in Ethiopia has so far published over a dozen books specially designed for foreigners to learn Ethiopia’s languages, particularly Amharic. His story reads like a journey in reverse to the one made centuries earlier by the Siddis – Indians of East African descent brought to India mostly as slaves, who live mostly in Gujarat and have embraced the local language and culture. Apart from ‘Amharic for Foreigners’, K. Sekhar from the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, who teaches business management at Mizan Tepi University in southwestern Ethiopia, has also written language primers in Tigrigna, Oromifa, Nuer, Kafi Noono and Hadiya. The last two are the first to be written by an expatriate. “Languages have a trait of similarity at some point and finding out these traits is the way to understanding them,” Sekhar, a self-thought linguist and lexicographer, told IANS in an interview.

Read more at: http://www.firstpost.com/fwire/indian-writes-ethiopian-language-primers-for-foreigners-1210135.html?utm_source=fwire&utm_medium=hp

An Indian scholar in Ethiopia has so far published over a dozen books specially designed for foreigners to learn Ethiopia's languages, particularly Amharic.

His story reads like a journey in reverse to the one made centuries earlier by the Siddis - Indians of East African descent brought to India mostly as slaves, who live mostly in Gujarat and have embraced the local language and culture.

Apart from 'Amharic for Foreigners', K. Sekhar from the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, who teaches business management at Mizan Tepi University in southwestern Ethiopia, has also written language primers in Tigrigna, Oromifa, Nuer, Kafi Noono and Hadiya. The last two are the first to be written by an expatriate.

"Languages have a trait of similarity at some point and finding out these traits is the way to understanding them," Sekhar, a self-thought linguist and lexicographer, told IANS in an interview.

"The similarities I feel between the two countries (Ethiopia and India) are also important and made things easier for me", he said.

 

FOR modernising African languages and developing new terms in technical subjects like science, translation is one of the tools emphasised by researchers, such as Madiba (2001). I agree that translation is a valuable tool to use, but it is only possible to a certain extent, because it does not allow all necessary concepts to be translated from one language into another language by means of single terms.

The link between language and culture is complex. One can express any thought or feeling in any language, but the cultural overtones and resonances differ from group to group. The difference occurs because what is true in one culture is not the same in another culture, and what is considered valid in one culture might not be valid in another (Gee, 2003).

FOR modernising African languages and developing new terms in technical subjects like science, translation is one of the tools emphasised by researchers, such as Madiba (2001).  I agree that translation is a valuable tool to use, but it is only possible to a certain extent, because it does not allow all necessary concepts to be translated from one language into another language by means of single terms.

The link between language and culture is complex. One can express any thought or feeling in any language, but the cultural overtones and resonances differ from group to group. The difference occurs because what is true in one culture is not the same in another culture, and what is considered valid in one culture might not be valid in another (Gee, 2003). This includes the way individual ethnic groups do things, and the way each cultural group understands the world. Thus, translation is not workable in every situation, more especially in the lower primary phase, where teachers deal with small children who are still in the early stage of their language acquisition. Some translations might mislead because they will not accommodate all the necessary analogous ‘contextual’ realities, due to cultural differences. One good example of the problems observed relates to colours, due to the fact that the colour spectrum is segmented differently in the English language and indigenous languages like Rukwangali for example.  The conceptual spaces occupied by each ‘colour’ in each of the languages do not always coincide. Certain colours in English might differ from the ‘same’ colours in Rukwangali, so it must not be taken for granted to be the same in both languages. The colour of blood is red and it applies in English, as well as in Rukwangali. At the same time red is used in many cases for various reasons e.g. in English, the colour of ripe fruit such as papayas or lemons is refered to as yellow or orange, while in Rukwangali the same colour is considered red. In this case papayas or lemons are not actually red, but are considered red to indicate that they are ripe.  Also, domestic animals like cattle(red cow, red bull) are categorised in three main colours, black, white and red. These will make brown cattle to be considered red.  In one word ripe fruit andbrown cattle fall under the red colour scheme in the Rukwangali language. Learners need this kind of conceptual understanding to make things meaningful in their mother tongue for social communication purposes. The explanation given above would enable learners to differentiate colours, and to know when to use which colour and when to avoid it. Against this background teachers are advised to ‘teach outside the box’ as it were. Therefore, I concur with the suggestion for the new curriculum for schools in Namibia to strengthen and prolong mother tongue instruction at an early age insofar as teaching and learning is concerned for the following reasons. It will allow learners to establish a solid foundation in their language acquisition

Every South African has the right to be educated in their mother tongue. Indigenous languages are recognised in the Constitution and laws as is the right to live free from discrimination on the grounds of language. Unesco says people also have the right to establish and have access to media in indigenous languages. When asked if he thought African languages were facing extinction Professor Kaschula said: “In general terms they are not facing extinction. Millions of people are using African languages in various forums – one just has to check social networks.” “There are of course languages that are dying and that are being swallowed up by other bigger African languages as well as the non-indigenous colonial languages. But as long as people speak languages they will not die.” UmXhosa Ikroti LakwaXhosa has written a book entirely in IsiXhosa called Isihobe Isidlo Somphefumlo. The book is also available in an audio disc. “The book is targeted at the youth, I want reading to be exciting, I want the reader to visualise what I’m saying – create a theatre of the mind.”

I recently had the privilege of interpreting for Chef Kurt Ramborger  on the Food Network show Chopped. Every time I interpret for someone so talented and dedicated to pursuing their dreams, my own passion is reignited. My clients inspire me to do the best job I can do, and remind me why I became an ASL interpreter in the first place.

I feel blessed with the perspective I gained growing up in a deaf family. I’ve never thought of deafness as a disability and, through my interpreting work, I have been able to expose many hearing individuals to the Deaf Culture that I know and love. Deaf people tell jokes, have parties, go to concerts, drive cars, work jobs, and watch TV. They attend classes, and go out to eat, and communicate on the phone (using a video phone or relay). As an interpreter, it’s interesting to note how many hearing people simply assume deaf people cannot enjoy things. That notion couldn’t be more misguided! As I. King Jordan famously said “Deaf people can do anything hearing people can do, except hear.”

"Indigenous languages safeguard our stories in their hidden meanings and subtext, so much so that the mis-translation of a single word can create a completely different interpretation of history as we know it, and we’d literally lose ourselves.

Perhaps that’s why we stubbornly stick to fluency in “the mother tongue” as the yardstick for “Africanness,” “our-ness,” “us-ness.” Perhaps the tune about real Africans being able to speak their mother tongues is only sung in protest against the hegemony of our colonizers’ languages. But is spiting them reason enough to spite each other? By perpetuating the use of a single cultural marker to create a hierarchy of Africanness, aren’t we simply deploying the same tools colonizers used to divide and conquer? Aren’t we essentially continuing the work the British Empire started?

We can do better.

There are a myriad of other identity markers that reveal the extent of both our sameness and uniqueness and make up the diverse African cultures that span the globe. Africa is complex – Africans, even more so. Let’s not trade in our shared heritage for the exclusivity of an unjust social hierarchy. Let’s not, as our colonizers did, draw borders around poorly constructed monoliths. Our just protest for an Africa with linguistic agency must not turn us into the same masters of imperialist dogma we’re still yet to hold accountable."

http://africanarguments.org/2013/04/08/what-kind-of-african-doesn%E2%80%99t-speak-any-african-languages-me/