Language Acquisition – LN Language Solutions

Books, French, Irish, Language Acquisition, Recommendations, Spanish, Translation

New Words #7: If and/or When

February 13, 2023 lnlanguage

I will make dinner when I get home from work. A pretty straightforward sentence, right? Sure. But let’s take a closer look.

· When does the dinner-making part happen? In the future, obviously. That’s why it says “will make.”

· When does the getting-home-from-work part happen? Also in the future, duh. It’s right there in the sentence: when I get . . . Wait, that’s the present tense!

If English is your primary language, you say things like this all the time without thinking anything of it. We use the present tense in when clauses regardless of whether the action takes place habitually or is a predicted future event. This gets weirder the more you think about it: I will make dinner when I get home from work is a sentence in which a person plans to return home on one future occasion, while I make dinner when I get home from work is a sentence about a person returning home on a regular (perhaps daily!) basis, even though the phrase when I get home from work is identical in both instances. That is objectively wild.

Many other languages of western Europe handle this scenario differently. In French and Irish, for example, the future tense would be used in both clauses, given that both actions are expected to occur in the future. (How logical!) Personally, though, I have a soft spot for the way Spanish speakers approach this type of sentence: with the “making dinner” clause in the future tense and the “getting home” clause in the present subjunctive—the mood that suggests an action is possible or hoped for rather than certain. I find beauty in that grammatical feature of Spanish, with its suggestion that the future is fundamentally unknowable.

For learners, these small distinctions can lead to misunderstandings—of greater or lesser severity, depending on the languages involved. For example, if a learner of English applies French-language logic and says something like “I will make dinner when I will get home from work,” that’s not too big a deal; English speakers will find that sentence a bit awkward but perfectly comprehensible. However, if a learner of French applies English-language logic and uses the present tense in that same scenario, it will sound to French speakers as though the when clause refers not to a one-time future event but to something that happens regularly: “I will make dinner [on one future occasion] when I get home from work [every day].” It just doesn’t add up; one part of this sentence or the other requires clarification.

Even in the absence of linguistic interference, speakers of the same language can disagree about the exact meanings and implications of statements about future events. Many English speakers today consider shall and will interchangeable in terms of their meaning, with the former merely sounding more formal or old-fashioned. But in legal drafting, the debate over the use of shall and/or will to create an obligation in a contract, rather than to predict future events, is an ongoing headache, despite efforts by plain-language advocates to circumvent the issue and encourage the use of must in their place. In my experience as a certified translator working primarily with legal documents, understanding French or Spanish legalese is never the most challenging part of a contract translation. It’s the ambiguity of verbs in English—my primary language and the one I translate into—that causes me the most consternation.

A Humble Suggestion

In each newsletter, I’ll offer at least one recommendation for your reading, watching, or listening pleasure. This time around: two recent reads I greatly enjoyed.

In Brandon Taylor’s first story collection, Filthy Animals, characters struggle to reconcile their fears and vulnerabilities with their desire for intimacy. Taylor’s prose is riveting, and I was intrigued by the collection’s structure: a series of linked stories taking place over a two-day period, interspersed with individual stories about unrelated characters. I imagine this collection could have been presented as a novella accompanied by other stories, but the decision to treat each of the linked stories as a stand-alone narrative has significant implications for the reading experience.

Lauren Willig’s novel Band of Sisters follows a group of recent Smith College alumnae on a volunteer mission to a devastated region of rural France in 1917. Among them are Emmie, an heiress determined to step out of her socialite mother’s shadow, and her onetime roommate Kate, a scholarship girl turned schoolteacher who dreads being patronized or pitied by her wealthier classmates. Loosely based on the real-life Smith College Relief Unit, Band of Sisters is a lively and inspiring portrait of young women taking control of their lives amid extraordinary circumstances.

Here, Look at My Cats

The world is a mess, and you might welcome a pleasant distraction. For what it’s worth, here are my cats.

Top: a tuxedo cat lying on his belly on an open white looseleaf binder, with his head turned to face the camera, yawning dramatically. Bottom: a dilute tortoiseshell cat curled up on a cat tree beside a window, looking up at the camera, in the middle of a yawn with one eye slightly open. — A yawn, if done properly, looks an awful lot like a scream into the void.

Out next month from Frayed Edge Press: Songs for the Gusle, my translation of Prosper Mérimée’s 1827 hoax, La Guzla! I’ll be in touch when I have pre-order information. Or when I will have pre-order information. Or when I hypothetically have pre-order information. Never mind, you get the idea.

Laura

Dialogue, French, Links, Recommendations, Translation, Writing

New Words #6: Merci beaucoup, y’all

January 17, 2023 lnlanguage

For nearly thirty years, I’ve been fascinated by a man I never met. He was the uncle of my supervisor at the after-school retail job I had my senior year of high school, and the following is everything I know about him.

1. He was a middle-aged man from Texas.

2. Sometime in the mid-nineties, he took his wife to Paris for their anniversary.

3. Throughout their ten-day stay, each time they left a shop or restaurant, he’d tip his cowboy hat and address the establishment’s (presumably horrified) employees in his very best French-adjacent drawl: “MARE SEE BOW COO, Y’ALL.”

This story pops into my head at random intervals because, well, the mental image delights me. But it has some practical applications as well. Back when I was a middle and high school teacher, the tale came in handy when perfectionistic students needed a distraction from their own perceived flaws. (“The French r sound is tough for English speakers to learn, but you’ll get there sooner than you think. Besides, you’re already doing way better than the ‘merci beaucoup, y’all’ guy, and he made it home from France in one piece.”)

More recently, I’ve been writing and translating fiction in which characters are either traveling far from home or returning from long journeys. As I work through the idiosyncrasies of their dialogue and body language, I keep noticing how their home language affects their speech patterns in an unfamiliar setting, and I’m reminded of my old supervisor’s uncle. Most of us are far more subtle about announcing our origins when we travel, but no matter how hard we might try to blend in, we can’t keep our past experiences and ingrained habits entirely hidden. When I write or translate about the ways in which habits picked up abroad carry over into a character’s daily life back home, I like to imagine that same gentleman, jet-lagged upon returning to Texas, greeting a gas station attendant or grocery store cashier in French. After all, it seems only fair that he would bring a little bit of his Parisian self home with him.

A Humble Suggestion

In each newsletter, I’ll offer at least one recommendation for your reading, watching, or listening pleasure. This time around, I’m highlighting a couple of Substacks of interest to avid readers and (especially) writers. Like mine, their posts and archives are free to read.

Each Sunday, I look forward to checking out Sarah Nicolas’s Virtual Bookish Eventsnewsletter, which lists upcoming online events—some free, some paid—that will appeal to readers and/or writers. It’s a great resource for everything from book launches and readings to classes and workshops for writers working in a variety of genres.

I’ve also been enjoying Kate Broad’s newsletter, Ask an Author, in which she answers questions about drafting, editing, and marketing novels. I particularly recommend her three-part series (starting here) about how to write quickly, deal with deadlines, and manage large writing projects.

Here, Look at My Cats

The world is a mess, and you might welcome a pleasant distraction. For what it’s worth, here are my cats.

Left: a dilute tortoiseshell cat looking off to the right, alert and bright-eyed. She’s pretty and she knows it. Right: a tuxedo cat looking off to the left, chin held high. He’s glad the artist has come at last to make his official portrait. — Alexis knows her best angles. David is certain he’s handsome from every angle.

Merci beaucoup for reading, y’all. See you back here soon.

Laura

Books, Irish, Language Acquisition, Links, Recommendations, TV series, Writing

New Words #4: Force of Habit

December 14, 2022December 14, 2022 lnlanguage

Here’s a story about making things a little more complicated than they need to be—on purpose. Later this week, I’ll take the final set of exams in my Irish translation program, and even though I’ll need to submit my answers in a Word doc within a time limit, I’ll write about half of each exam by hand before I type a word. (Don’t worry! I did the same thing the last two semesters, and it all worked out!) The reason is simple: my written Irish is way more accurate when I write by hand.

a hand holding a black pen writing in a notebook — Photo by Hannah Olinger on Unsplash

Here’s an example: I can’t spell the word aghaidh unless I can see it in my own handwriting. (If you’re wondering how that’s pronounced, think of the yg in bygone, and you’ll be close enough.) It’s equivalent to the English noun face, but it’s also part of several common expressions: ar aghaidh is equivalent to forward or ahead, in aghaidhmeans against, le haghaidh is akin to for the purpose of . . . This is a high-frequency word. If I’m just typing it, I second-guess the placement of every letter between the first aand the last h, making an utter mess of things. When taking an exam without access to spell-check, I could waste lots of time agonizing over details like this one. But look at the note I made before attempting to type this paragraph:

the word “aghaidh,” handwritten in black on a white background — Look how pretty!

I don’t think I could misspell it by hand even if I tried. The loops just feel right this way. And once I’m looking at the word in my own handwriting, copying it onto the keyboard is a cinch.

At this point you might be assuming that I favor writing by hand in general—that perhaps I’m the type of person who would draft a novel on legal pads. As it happens, I have repeatedly tried to write and translate fiction by hand, but I find it maddeningly slow. In English, my touch typing is fast enough that I can pretty much keep up with the pace at which I’m thinking. I’m able to type with about the same speed and accuracy in French and Spanish, which I learned in my teens and twenties in courses with a mixture of typed and handwritten assignments.

It’s no mystery why Irish is the outlier here: it’s because of the way I was introduced to the language. My first exposure to Irish was in an intensive program with a strong focus on conversation and no computers in the classrooms. I took tons of notes by hand in class, but aside from looking up individual words in online dictionaries, I had no reason to type in Irish until I had decent conversational proficiency—by which point Irish seems to have settled into a different slot in my brain than my other languages.

And you know what? It’s fine. Writing by hand feels like an unnecessary hurdle to me in other situations, but in this case, doing “more work” actually saves me time and stress.

Share New Words

A Humble Suggestion

In each newsletter, I’ll offer at least one recommendation for your reading, watching, or listening pleasure.

Sayaka Murata’s novel Convenience Store Woman, translated from Japanese by Ginny Tapley Takemori, is the story of a woman in her thirties who finds it impossible to meet the societal expectations placed on women in Japanese society but thrives in the highly regimented environment of her workplace, a Tokyo convenience store (konbini). I also recommend Lit Hub’s interview with the author—an enjoyable read before or after the novel itself.

On Twitter and Instagram, @CatsOfYore posts beautiful and quirky vintage photos, paintings, and sculptures of cats and their people. The account owner is also a great advocate for the adoption of cats with feline immunodeficiency virus, and she posts regularly about her own healthy, active, FIV+ cat. The whole thing is heartwarming and delightful.

Finally, if you need to catch up with the final season of Derry Girls (now available on Netflix in the United States), do that! If you’ve finished watching and would like some more time with those goofballs, check out the special episode of The Great British Bake Off in which five cast members attempt to prepare a New Year’s feast. The results are as charmingly chaotic as you might imagine (“I can honestly say you are five of the most troublesome people we’ve ever had in the tent”). On Netflix US, you can find it in the third season of The Great British Baking Show: Holidays under the title “The Great Festive Baking Show.”

Here, Look at My Cats

The world is a mess, and you might welcome a pleasant distraction. For what it’s worth, here are my cats.

Left: a dilute tortoiseshell cat is sitting calmly on a white windowsill, looking out the window. Right: an artificial Christmas tree through the branches of which a tuxedo cat’s head and paws are vaguely visible. — A throwback to December 2020, when I put up an artificial tree. Alexis didn’t care. David cared very, very much.

All the best for a happy and healthy holiday season. See you back here in early January!

Laura

Books, Dialogue, Fiction Writing, French, Language Acquisition, Recommendations, Translation, Writing

New Words #3: Bonjour monsieur !

November 28, 2022November 29, 2022 lnlanguage

Even if you’ve never taken a French class in your life, you know what “bonjour” and “monsieur” mean, so go ahead and translate “Bonjour monsieur.” I’ll just wait here.

Four new iPhones are displayed with the “hello” text in different languages: Korean, Portuguese, French, and Spanish. — Photo by Daniel Romero on Unsplash

Great. If you gave it a try, thank you for indulging me, but unfortunately there is one (and only one!) correct answer: “I’m not translating this until I get more context. GIVE ME MORE CONTEXT.”

You might want information as simple as the time of day. “Bonjour” means “hello,” but it also means “good morning” and “good afternoon” in many parts of the French-speaking world; you’ll want to keep those options in mind.

However, the speaker’s location and variety of French also matter. For example, “bon matin” is commonly used for “good morning” among French speakers in Canada and Louisiana; if the speaker has “bon matin” in their everyday vocabulary, you’ll probably rule out “good morning” as your best likely translation of “bonjour.”

Aside from all that, who is this “monsieur,” and in what context is he being addressed? A bilingual dictionary might suggest that the most common translation of “monsieur” is “Mr.,” but “Hello, mister,” is not a common way for English speakers to greet one another. “Sir” will work in many formal contexts, but it won’t account for all the circumstances in which a person might say “Bonjour monsieur,” and the variety of English into which you are translating may affect your choices as well. If the speaker is a teenage student saying hello to a teacher in the morning, what greeting will your target readership recognize as standard: “Good morning, sir,” “Good morning, Mr. So-and-So,” or something else?

But wait! Why are we saying “monsieur” at all? Is it because the gender of the person being addressed is important? Not necessarily. Many French speakers have a general aversion to one-word utterances, which can come across as abrupt or even rude. For example, if someone tells me that they are going on vacation next month, I might ask “Where?” in English, but in French I’d ask “Où ça?” rather than just “Où?” The “ça” doesn’t add anything significant in terms of meaning—“Où ça?” is akin to “Where’s that?” or “Whereabouts?”—but the inclusion of a second word has the effect of softening the question. The same principle applies to greetings; where an English speaker might just say one word, a French speaker is more likely to use a greeting and a name or designation of some kind (the equivalent of “Good morning, everyone,” or “Hello, friends,” for example). Maybe, then, all “Bonjour monsieur” really means is “Hello.” (Or “Good morning.” Or “Good afternoon.” You get the idea.)

Of course, all this is assuming that you intend to make the dialogue sound natural to the target reader—or that you’re a language teacher or learner aiming to communicate appropriately in a target language culture. It’s also possible that you’d prefer to preserve a hint of the source language in your translation so as to emphasize the specificity of the source text and/or its setting. This concept in translation theory—domestication vs. foreignization—is a topic for another time, but now that I’ve mentioned foreignization . . .

Noticing this type of conversational habit is useful not only for translators but also for writers of dialogue. Let’s say you’re writing a character whose first and strongest language is French and who acquired proficiency in English as an adult. You don’t want to lean on stereotypes and replace all their th sounds with the letter z (please don’t!), but the recent acquisition of a new language is an important aspect of this character’s experience, and you want it to be reflected in their conversation patterns. Looking at everyday phrases in the character’s two languages can give you insight into the kinds of conversational habits that a learner might transfer from one language to another—habits that a reader might not consciously recognize as French but that distinguish this character’s speech patterns from those of your other characters.

A Humble Suggestion

In each newsletter, I’ll offer at least one recommendation for your reading, watching, or listening pleasure.

Hilary Leichter’s 2020 debut novel, Temporary, is a brilliant satire in which regular employment (“the steadiness”) eludes the protagonist, who accepts a series of increasingly bizarre temporary work placements. How bizarre? When she’s posted to a pirate ship, she thinks the lingo will be easy enough to learn, but it turns out “Davy Jones’s locker” is where the pirates store their office supplies. The narrative of this fanciful and unexpectedly moving novel is as fragmented, disorienting, and ultimately rewarding as its protagonist’s career progression.

Words Against Strangers is a new daily game that challenges you to list as many words as possible in a given category (think “nouns that start with v” or “eight-letter words that include the letter n”). You’ll be racing against the clock (four rounds per day, each lasting one minute) but also against one random person who volunteered to play the quiz a few days in advance. I got to be the “stranger” for game #38, and it’s not too late to challenge me; you can go back and play the games you’ve missed.

Here, Look at My Cats

The world is a mess, and you might welcome a pleasant distraction. For what it’s worth, here are my cats.

Two cats are lying on a purple and gray blanket beside a green decorative pillow. The tuxedo cat is licking his dilute tortie sister’s face. She looks like she’s smiling. — Adopting a bonded pair might be the smartest decision I’ve ever made.

See you back here soon!

Laura

Irish, Language Acquisition, Links, Literary Translation, Translation, TV series

New Words #2: Complicated as 1, 2, 3

November 12, 2022November 12, 2022 lnlanguage

Has there been an uptick lately in clickbait about “untranslatable” terms? Maybe the algorithms are just increasingly determined to lure me in. Either way, I’m not falling for it.

I suspect this focus on untranslatability leads people to believe that the challenges of translation are concentrated in a handful of terms per language, which isn’t the case at all. In fact, the grammatical impacts of simple, everyday concepts in a given language can affect its syntax, rhythms, and sounds in ways present as much of a challenge to translators as they do to language learners.

To illustrate this, let’s imagine we want to describe in Irish what we see in the photo below.

two bees on a pink flower — Photo by Esperanza Doronila on Unsplash

First, we’ll need some basic vocabulary.

bee: beach

small: beag

small bees: beacha beaga

This might seem reasonably straightforward so far. As is the case in many other European languages, the adjective follows the noun, and both words are made plural, in this case by adding -a. Simple enough! So if we want to say exactly how many small bees, we’ll just state the number and follow it up with “beacha beaga,” right?

Not so fast. English speakers are accustomed to thinking of singular vs. plural as a binary concept; any quantity greater than one is plural. (“This recipe calls for one and a quarter cups of sugar.”) But many languages treat small quantities as their own separate category.

In Irish, if we’re talking about anywhere from two to six bees, we’re going to use the singular form of the noun with the plural form of the adjective. Yup! Oh, and they’re also getting lenited; that means the “b-” becomes a “bh-” (pronounced v). So no, “two small bees” aren’t “~~dhá beacha beaga~~”; they’re “dhá bheach bheaga.”

But wait! That was for numbers two through six. What if we have seven, eight, nine, or ten bees? Well, the adjective is still plural and lenited. But the noun? It’s still singular, but instead of lenition, we’ll use eclipsis, which means the “b-” becomes “mb-” (pronounced m). So “seven small bees” are “seacht mbeach bheaga.”

To summarize:

Come on, Laura, counting in Irish can’t be all that complicated. Surely these rules still apply even if you’re working with quantities greater than, say, nineteen? *Not exactly.* Well, do they apply if you’re counting people? *LOL, no.*

At this point you might be wondering what difference this makes when it comes time to translate. Two small bees are two small bees, right? Well—translators, say it with me!—it depends on the context.

If you’re working with a factual, informative text, such as a caption for that photo of two small bees on a flower, then yes, the thought process is fairly straightforward. The goal is to state the idea of “two small bees” so that it is clear and comprehensible to readers of the target language. That might not be quite as simple as it sounds; perhaps the target language has multiple words for “bee” or the target readers are most familiar with a bee species that conjures a different image in readers’ minds than the source text intended. Even so, the options available to the translator are likely to be few in number, and the decision-making process shouldn’t be especially draining.

If you’re working with an expressive text, such as poetry, fiction, or personal essay, things might get more complicated. Let’s say we’re translating a picture book from Irish into English. The author’s choice to include “dhá bheach bheaga” in the story might have been motivated by the alliteration. Maybe that’s the whole reason why there are two of them rather than seven—because “seacht mbeach bheaga” wouldn’t be alliterative! Maybe the whole book is organized around alliterative phrases! That sounds delightful for the reader and nightmarish for the translator. If you need to translate the text so that the same illustrations can be used, it’s unlikely you can translate those phrases directly while maintaining the spirit and purpose of the book. So perhaps you’ll decide those are “baby bees” or “itty-bitty bees.”

All this for three words that will never show up on a list of “untranslatable” terms—and a similar challenge awaits on every page of that picture book.

A Humble Suggestion

In each newsletter, I’ll offer at least one recommendation for your reading, watching, or listening pleasure.

If the writers in your life are crankier than usual, that might be because November is National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) and they’re trying to write 50,000 words in thirty days. I’m technically a NaNo rebel this year because I’m trying to use the positive peer pressure to finish the first draft of a novel already in progress rather than starting from scratch on November 1. Either way, it’s tough! NaNoWriMo is a nonprofit that works with writers of all ages; if you have K-12 teachers or students in your life, check out their programming for young writers.

The Hulu series Reboot has finished its first season, and it’s brilliant. The premise: Hulu greenlights an edgy reboot of an early 2000s network sitcom. The original cast members’ reunion is not exactly joyous, a generational conflict is playing out in the writers’ room, it’s anybody’s guess who is actually in charge of this production, and everything is hilarious. Seriously, go binge-watch the whole season right now. (Unless you’re doing NaNo, in which case you should be writing.)