Category: Books

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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Books, French, Language Acquisition, Podcasts, Recommendations

New Words #12: Caffeine Complications

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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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Articles, Books, Events, French, Language Acquisition, Literary Translation, Recommendations, Spanish, Translation

New Words #11: Greetings, Dear Lady!

lnlanguage

It’s happening again. I’m getting LinkedIn messages from total strangers that open with phrases like “Hey, dear Nagle!” and “Greetings, dear lady!”

These greetings are jarring, especially in the context of a cold business contact, but it’s easy enough to imagine how they developed. If you’ve been taught that it is polite to use dear when opening a letter in English but also that Dear Ms. Nagle is too formal for online messages, you might attempt to strike a happy medium by doing a mash-up of formal and informal terms. And if it’s acceptable to address a crowd as “ladies and gentlemen,” then it must be polite to address an individual woman as “lady,” right? Well, not exactly.

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Books, Recommendations, Translation, TV series, Writing

New Words #8: Why the Computers Aren’t Coming for My Job

lnlanguage

This is not a newsletter about ChatGPT (if you want to read one of those, I’d recommend this one), but our topic this time around was prompted by reports of the chatbot just plain making up “facts.” That has disturbing implications—if there’s one thing we’ve already got plenty of, it’s online misinformation—but it didn’t surprise me. After all, for nearly two decades, I’ve been bombarded with confident-sounding nonsense spewed by the translation apps that supposedly threatened to render my work obsolete.

Credit where credit’s due: Google Translate and similar tools have improved somewhat since the ubiquitous “paper jam” / “mermelada de papel” screenshot was taken. But being programmed to recognize commonly used two-word phrases is not the same thing as understanding context, much less recognizing nuances or errors in a source text.

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

New Words #7: If and/or When

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.

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