Author: lnlanguage

Translator, writer, cat paparazzo | English, français, español, Gaeilge
Fiction Writing, Films, Literary Translation, Writing

New Words #16: Literary AND Commercial?!

lnlanguage

A couple of years ago, at an online event about breaking into literary translation, the Q&A went off the rails for a reason I found wildly amusing. An attendee asked about “finding the right balance between literary and commercial translation.” The panelists then spoke about “finding the right balance between literary and commercial translation.” But the question and the answer did not match up.

Here’s what happened. . . . Read the rest of this post (for free! nothing is paywalled!) over on Substack.

Articles, Books, Language Acquisition, Literary Translation, Spanish, Translation

New Words #15: It’s a Dude Group!

lnlanguage

Years ago, while teaching Spanish to beginners, I overheard the following exchange between two seventh-grade boys.

A. I think I’m supposed to write “Somos altos,” but it doesn’t seem right. I have four sisters. Isn’t it better to write “Somos altas,” since there are more girls than boys in the family?

B. Dude, if there’s even one dude in the group, that’s it, it’s a dude group.

I have had the phrase dude group stuck in my head ever since. As a translator, I am regularly faced with a quandary: How can I communicate in English that a French or Spanish text is referring to a dude group?

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Literary Translation, Recommendations, Translation, TV series, Writing

New Words #14: Good Advice

lnlanguage

If you’re engaged in some kind of creative pursuit, it’s almost certain that you’re going to get frustrated at some point and conclude that you’ve been approaching it “the wrong way.” The good news is that there’s plenty of advice out there. The bad news is that there’s so much advice out there—just, like, way, way too much—and it’s contradictory and confusing, and a lot of that advice isn’t going to apply to you, even if it’s what somebody else swears by.

I started thinking about this topic after witnessing an online tiff about whether or not rough drafts produced in a generative writing workshop must always have a title. (Yes, the internet is a treasure trove of low-stakes controversy.)

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French, Language Acquisition, Links, Recommendations, Spanish, Translation

New Words #13: How Many Continents Are There?

lnlanguage

Years ago, when I gave my high school students an assignment (in French) to learn about the origins of the Olympic Movement, they were flabbergasted by the revelation that the Olympic rings represent “les cinq continents habités.” They had always been taught that there are seven continents, of which six are inhabited—but their French-language sources, along with the United Nations, were insisting that there were merely six continents, of which five were inhabited. What on Earth (literally) was going on?

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Books, French, Language Acquisition, Podcasts, Recommendations

New Words #12: Caffeine Complications

lnlanguage

I spent my junior year of college living with a host family in Paris, and Madame and I didn’t always understand each other.

Our frequent bouts of mutual confusion were based less in language—my French was reasonably solid when I arrived—than in cultural differences. She couldn’t fathom why I liked Seinfeld; she’d watched a couple of episodes, and the jokes made no sense. (In fairness, providing French subtitles for a show that made up words on a regular basis had to have been a thankless task.) And she didn’t know what the big deal was about American pizza; that place down the street was awful! (I had to explain to her that I had never set foot in a Domino’s on either side of the Atlantic but was quite certain it wasn’t what I, a New Yorker, would call pizza.)

But my favorite of our misunderstandings had to do with a request on my grocery list: decaffeinated tea. Our conversation went something like this:

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