matching tracksuits

Language Log: Comparing communication efficiency across languages

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When learning Polish, for some reason I had the hardest time initially using the formal voice of address. English-only speakers might not know what I’m talking about, even though the formal/intimate distinction existed in English for hundreds of years.

In French, it’s a question of “Vous” and “tu.” “Vous” would be “you all” — second person plural — and is used in all formal occasions; “tu” is informal, and used with intimate friends or family. In German, it’s “sie” and “du”.

This is why Martin Burber’s wonderful book Ich und Du is translated I and Thou and not I and You.

In English, it used to be “you” and “thou,” with “thou” being the more intimate. Because most of us are exposed to “thou” exclusively through liturgical language, we get the sense that it’s incredibly formal. In fact, it’s the opposite.

Po Polsku

In Polish, there are two options. The first is the common use of “Pan” or “Pani” — literally, “lord/master” or “lady/mistress.”

The older, now-obsolete form is to use “Wy” — “you all.” It’s still used in the mountainous southern region, and K in fact speaks to her grandmothers this way. “Co robicie ostatnio?” “What have you been doing lately?”

Out of this came an amusing verb: dwoic. While this is related to the word “dwa” (two), it’s not, strictly speaking, “double” (which is “podwoic”). Instead, a better explanation would be “to use the second person plural.” In that case, one might ask another, “why are you [dwoic] me?” meaning, “Why are you using the formal voice with me?”

The second method, and the one used now, is to use “Pan” and “Pani.” To be polite, a shop attendant, for example, doesn’t ask, “Do you need help?” Literally, he asks, “Does the lady need help?”

The problem for me was not so much remembering the odd construction but learning when to make the switch from “Pan” or “Pani” to “you.” I called people “you” when I should have used “Pan/Pani” more times than I care to recall. And there really are no guidelines — it depends, somewhat, on the person.

Linguistics of Diplomacy

I got to thinking about all of this due to an article by Charles Bremner. It begins,

Here is one of those stories that are difficult to convey to people who speak only English. President Sarkozy’s government has annoyed the “progressive” sections of the teaching establishment with an order that school pupils must address their teachers with the formal vous rather than the familiar second person singular tu. Teachers are advised to use the respectful vous to Lyc�e teenagers in their classes.

While I could never imagine students in Poland referring to teachers in the second person, I could also never imagine teachers using the formal third person with teachers.

The piece goes on to discuss how world leaders refer to each other — tu/du or vous/sie?

Angela Merkel dropped German formality enough to call him “Lieber (Dear) Nicolas” but stuck to the formal “sie” not the familiar “du”. Sarkozy’s matey reply jarred on old-fashioned ears. “Ch�re Angela… J’ai confiance en toi.” (In older English I trust thee not you). Lib�ration joked that Franco-German harmony was still lacking. “They are going to have to start by agreeing whether they use tu or vous,” it said. (Charles Bremner piece)

While the article doesn’t mention George Bush, it seems safe to assume that, like Gordon Brown, his dependence on interpretors will solve the tu/Vous problem. But considering the little back rub he once gave Merkel, it’s fairly reasonable to assume that Bush would opt for “tu” over “Vous.”

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The first time I was in Polska, I started making a little ‘zine that I’d mail out to friends and family. I called it “Entropy.”

I remember that yesterday evening and wondered who had “entropy.com.” I knew it wouldn’t be available, and I typed “entropy.com” in the address bar.It re-directed me to “entropy.ie”.

“Entropy — Secure Networking.”

I’m not sure how much faith I’d put into a networking security company that’s taken its name from a principle of decay.

What would its logo be? A frayed networking cable?

Anticipating user confusion, the company included this explanation:

Conall Lavery founder of Entropy decided upon the name after reading a book called “The Crying of Lot 49″ by the American author Thomas Pynchon.

In the book the professor uses the two theories of Entropy (thermodynamics and communications) and invents a perpetual motion machine that is driven by telepathy.

There are various definitions of Entropy.

According to the Collins dictionary, Entropy means “a thermodynamic quantity that changes in a reversible process by an amount equal to the heat absorbed or emitted divided by the thermodynamic temperature.”

In my view, that doesn’t help clarify things that much.

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We have several Polish friends in the area, and a surprising number are in mixed marriages: a Pole and a Bulgarian; a Pole and a Czech; a Pole and an American. We went to a house-warming party at the Pole/Czech couple’s house, and as always happens at such parties, I got to thinking about the effects of the English language’s relative isolation. Last night, the Czechs spoke Czech, the Poles spoke Polish, and everyone was mutually intelligible. And a Slovak couple been there, they could have spoken Slovakian as well and we’d all get along fine.

I try to imagine what it would be like to experience something similar: to hear someone speaking Dutch, for example, and understand enough of it to be communicative. Poles understand Slovaks; Urdu speakers understand a sizable portion of Hindi; someone fluent in Spanish would make a bit of sense out of Portuguese — but there’s no equivalent in English, that I know of. Sure, German has “gut,” and there are a lot of English/French cognates thanks to 1066, but nothing approaching the level of intelligibility speakers of Slavic languages experience.

More images of the party, including the inevitable table tennis tournament, at our Flickr account.

For me, it can be a bit of a nightmare. I understand a lot of Czech, but it’s a stretch to get a real sense of what’s being said.

Of course the real winners in such a situation are the children. Growing up speaking three languages — what a gift to give your child. But I know of situation slightly more linguistically advantageous: a former Polish student of mine married a Spaniard. They live in Vienna and speak English to each other. Now if they could only get a, say, Chinese babysitter…

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“Cicho” would be spelled phonetically in English “chee-ho,” with the “o” being very short.

“Ciiiiiiiiii-cho, cicho, cicho, cicho. Ciiiiiiiiii-cho, cicho, cicho, cicho.” K leans over L — who is simultaneously howling, crying, screeching, and moaning — and whispers the most onomatopoeic word in Polish.

“Quiiiiiiiiiiiiiiet, quiet, quiet quiet.”

It’s a word conducive to whispering, made up entirely of long, soft, quiet sounds. It has all the sounds of the womb, all the peace of a whisper, and all a rhythm that softly strokes the ear. Hearing “cicho” whispered makes one’s eyes want to close.

It’s probably the most pleasant sounding word in a language made up of harshness. W Szczebrzeszynie chrząszcz brzmi w trzcinie (Translation). These are the sounds of Polish: a phlegmatic language best spoken with spit flying everywhere.

What’s so remarkable about the word is that, when a mother whispers it, “cicho” contains the universal sound made for comforting a baby — it contains an inherent “shush.”

It is a candle being extinguished by damp fingers; the sound of walking through dry, light snow; the sound wind and leaves and trees.

If L chooses not to speak Polish to her own children many years in the future, I hope she chooses at the very least to calm them with a whispered “cicho.”

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Alright, I goofed. I mistranslated “iskra” as “ember” because, translating on the fly, I guessed from context and asked K whether it was “something from a fire…” Guess that covers ember and spark.

Nina corrected me, and I’ve been thinking about it since.

Not to be stubborn, I still prefer “ember.” Why?

“Spark” in my mind conjures images of particles floating, not sitting in a fire, as the “storyteller” in the lullaby is implied to be doing. It “winks” (mrugac); it doesn’t float; it doesn’t fly; it doesn’t soar. “Winking” is the perfect description of the what the small embers, buried under ash at the edge of the ash pit, do.

The only thing that “spark” has going for it (other than literalness) is the fact that in the verse it shines “for a moment” and then disappears. Embers tend to last longer than that.

Not content with all this, I went to a dictionary — an English-English dictionary, for there’s no question that “iskra” is literally “spark.” My only question was whether or not I was properly understanding “spark” in English, that all my connotations had been justifiable.

1. An incandescent particle, especially: a. One thrown off from a burning substance. b. One resulting from friction. c. One remaining in an otherwise extinguished fire; an ember. 2. A glistening particle, as of metal. 3a. A flash of light, especially a flash produced by electric discharge. b. A short pulse or flow of electric current.

And there it is: “an ember.”

The whole thing simply underlines what I was initially saying about translation: it can be very if-y. The original title of a biography of Singer I’ve been reading, literally translated, is Landscapes of the Memory. Madeline Levine, the translator, gave the title Lost Landscapes. Strictly speaking, this is incorrect — the word “lost” appears nowhere in the original Polish title — but I think it works better than the literal rendering.

Additionally, I’ve read English/Polish side-by-side editions of Czeslaw Miloszcz’s work and Wislawa Szymborska’s poems — often, so radically different from a literal rendering as to be shocking. But in each case, a literal rendering doesn’t capture nearly as much as the published translation.

I’ve never taken a course in translation, or read a book about it, so I can’t really say whether or not anyone would defend using “ember” instead of “spark” in the above example. But, bottom line, it works, underlining the slippery nature of language.

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I dislike my translation very much. There’s no child’s voice in it, no simplicity. But it gives you the idea of what the poem’s about…

On the bank of a sky-blue river
live many small sorrows.
The first is sad because
he can’t play in the garden.
The second — that water doesn’t want to be dry.
The third — that a fly flew into his ear.
And what’s more, that cats scratch,
That he can’t catch the hen,
That he can’t bite the neighbor’s leg,
and that it never rains sausages,
And the last sorrow is that
People travel by cars, and a pup has to go on foot.
But just give him a little milk,
and bye bye sorrows.

Na brzegu błękitnej rzeczki
Mieszkają małe smuteczki.
Ten pierwszy jest z tego powodu,
Że nie wolno wchodzić do ogrodu,
Drugi - że woda nie chce być sucha,
Trzeci - że mucha wleciała do ucha,
A jeszcze, że kot musi drapać,
Że kura nie daje się złapać,
Że nie można gryźć w nogę sąsiada
I że z nieba kiełbasa nie spada,
A ostatni smuteczek jest o to,
Że człowiek jedzie, a piesek musi biec piechotą.
Lecz wystarczy pieskowi dać mleczko
I już nie ma smuteczków nad rzeczką.

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Writing the translation for “Bajka iskierki” was a fairly easy task, but there were a few words that gave me pause.

To begin with, there’s the title: Bajka iskierki. A literal rendering would be “Fairy Tale of the Ember.” But that implies that it’s a fairy tale about some little ember.

Yet it’s not that straightforward, for equally possible is “Fairy Tale of an Ember.”

Ah, those article-less languages give us a fit sometimes when we’re translating them to German or English or Spanish or Greek–any language with “a/an” and “the.”

Is this a “bajka” that the ember told–the only cognitive, communicative ember in the whole ash pit (we’ll return to that later)? Or is it a “bajka” that one of many embers could have told?

“The” gives it more import than “an,” and so I went with the latter.

Next: the question of “bajka.” When to use “fairy tale”�? When to use “story”�? When to use “bedtime story”�? Indeed, when to use “cartoon,”� as in “Oglądamy bajkę?” “Little Red Riding Hood” and “Tom and Jerry” would both be called “bajka” in Polish. So all these would be acceptable translations in given circumstances, though the most strict translation is “fairy tale.” But “fairy tale” doesn’t capture the sense of this being something told when little Wojtuś is going to sleep, and so I changed it to “bedtime story.”

What about “zgasić“? In common usage, you “zgasić” a fire, or a cigerette. Literally, it’s “to die out”� or “to burn out”� or “to be put out”� or “to be extinguished,”� or, more actively, “to extinguish.” But none of these sound very poetic at all � not that “die”� sounds any better.

Finally, there’s “popielnik.” “Ash pit”? There’s got to be a better term, but I can’t find it in any dictionary, and I can’t find it on the internet, and I certainly can’t find it in my own head. So I took the liberty of changing it to “the fire’s ashes,”� even though that’s not really what it says.

To translate poetry, one must be a poet � it’s that simple. The translation of poetry is completely unlike the translation of a legal document. With legal translation, you want as nearly as possible to translate every word exactly as it is. There’s no taking license with a legal document.

With poetry, the idea seems to me to be entirely different: read the poem in the original language; then read it again, and again, and again � until you know it almost by heart. Then take a piece of paper and write the same poem in your target language.

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Geoff Nunberg, at Language Log, describes Bush’s new slogan “A new way forward” thusly: “it sounds like a tagline an ad agency would come up with for a railroad trying to emerge from Chapter 11.”

Short, and worth a read.

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Slate has a fascinating article on plagiarism and the implications of Google Book Search:

For any plagiarist living in an age of search engines, waving a loaded book in front of reviewers has become the literary equivalent of suicide by cop.

As it turns out, even authors not living in this online age are in trouble.

The surprise plagiarist: Lawrence Sterne, who swiped his rant against plagiarism from Robert Burton.

It’s well worth a read.

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