Books, Recommendations, Translation, TV series, Writing

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

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.

And source texts have plenty of errors, of course! I find all sorts of factual errors in source texts written by humans on a regular basis: tourist attractions listed with the wrong locations, inconsistent spellings of people’s names (think Alison/Allison and Brian/Bryan) in legal documents, and government-issued identification with obvious typos. These things happen!

What matters is how we handle errors like these. If I’m translating a text that claims the Crocker Art Museum is located in San Francisco, and I know it’s actually in Sacramento, here’s what happens: I ask my client for clarification, they are mildly embarrassed (but much less so than if they’d published the text with the error!), the error gets corrected in both languages, and we all go on with our day. If that same text is entrusted to Google Translate, you know what happens? No fact-checking, that’s for sure. If you tell Google Translate the Berlin Wall was a mural in Paris painted by Banksy in 1856, it will not question the accuracy of your statement.

Just like Google Translate, ChatGPT was not designed to care about Northern California, Banksy, or you. These tools are meant to produce grammatical and plausible-sounding language and no more. They might provide an answer to every question you ask them, but that doesn’t mean those answers are worthy of your attention.

A Humble Suggestion

In each newsletter, I’ll offer at least one recommendation for your reading, watching, or listening pleasure. This time I’m suggesting a streaming series and a short story collection that are remarkably effective in balancing pathos with laugh-out-loud humor.

The new Apple TV+ series Shrinking is centered around three therapists and their social circle. Major characters are struggling with grief, Parkinson’s disease, and PTSD, yet the tone leans more toward comedy than drama. Some of the subplots are less than compelling early on, but now, about halfway through the first season, they are being woven together in rewarding ways. Even before that, though, I was more than happy to stick with a show that lingers on such moments of absurd beauty as Jessica Williams’s astonishingly layered reading of the line “ruh-roh,” Jason Segel’s attempt to scale a fence, and Harrison Ford’s . . . well, I guess I’ll single out the Sugar Ray carpool karaoke, but every moment he’s on screen looks like the most fun he’s had in his entire life.

Gwen E. Kirby’s debut collection, Shit Cassandra Saw, bounces among genres and forms and offers a mix of historical and contemporary settings, but the stories are united by a sensibility that finds humor in tragedy (and vice versa). If you’re wondering whether this is up your alley, check out the story that lends the collection its name—full title “Shit Cassandra Saw That She Didn’t Tell the Trojans Because at That Point Fuck Them Anyway”—in SmokeLong Quarterly.

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 napping on a white blanket. One, a dilute tortie, is in the foreground, lying on her side with her belly exposed and her head at the right-hand side of the image. Her tuxedo brother is also stretched out, with his head at the left-hand side of the image and a hind leg propped on his sister’s side.
Adopt a bonded pair! They’ll play and snuggle together and use each other as footstools!

We got through the longest/shortest month, folks! A quick reminder: Songs for the Gusle, my translation of Prosper Mérimée’s bizarre and genre-agnostic 1827 hoax, La Guzla, is out March 21. In my next newsletter, I’ll share more about the book and what motivated me to translate it. It’s available for pre-order at a 20% discount now through March 20, so go get that deal!

Laura

Dialogue, French, Links, Recommendations, Translation, Writing

New Words #6: Merci beaucoup, y’all

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

Articles, Fiction Writing, Literary Translation, Recommendations, Translation, Writing

New Words #5: A Pep Talk for Everyone Except the Late Muriel Spark

I invite you to get the new year off to a hilarious start by watching Muriel Spark describing her creative process in this 35-second interview clip, which makes me howl with laughter and/or frustration every time I watch it.

I can’t be the only one who finds that video maddening. Are we really supposed to believe Muriel Spark would just sit down, write a book, and then be done writing the book?

a GIF of Frollo from Disney’s animated The Hunchback of Notre Dame shouting, “Witchcraft!”

The implication is that Spark told her stories to herself multiple times, essentially drafting entire novels in her head over a period of weeks or months, before she ever set pen to paper. (As she once put it, “I do all the correcting before I begin, getting it in my mind. And then when I pounce, I pounce.”) If that sounds like a plausible approach for you, go for it! To me, it sounds like torture.

Both my writing and my translation skills improved once I’ve accepted that, for me, the purpose of a first draft is to be a mess. I don’t just mean it’s okay for a first draft to be “bad”; I mean the more cluttered the pages are with notes I’ve written to myself, the better the second draft is likely to be.

I’m just starting now to look at the 50,000 words I wrote during NaNoWriMo in November. Did they get me 50,000 words closer to the end of my story? Absolutely not—and I’m glad! For me, the real benefit of that challenge lies in the prioritization of quantity over quality. If I’m trying to accumulate words for NaNoWriMo, I’m not tempted to delete an awkward bit of dialogue or an unwieldy phrase; instead, I add a bunch of alternatives and plan to figure out what works when I come back to the draft with fresh eyes.

I do the same thing with the first draft of a literary translation; my notes might include links to resources I’ve already checked, but they consist primarily of alternative options for word choice or phrasing. (That said, I recently found a couple of comments I’d left for myself that simply said “nope” and “THIS IS NOT IT,” which might not be great for bolstering confidence but did give me a laugh.)

Sometimes I decide my first instinct was the right one, but the third or fourth idea I had is often my best option. My second thought virtually never turns out to be the best one, but it’s still worth putting on the page; without it, the third and fourth versions wouldn’t exist.

Anne Lamott’s famous “shitty first draft” advice notwithstanding, I think a lot of us privately fear we’re the only ones struggling through messy drafts while everybody else simply sits down with a fresh notebook and writes the title and then their name and then “Chapter 1” and then the first sentence of Chapter 1 and then the second sentence of Chapter 1, à la Muriel Spark. The thing is, even Muriel Spark didn’t actually write that way. The process she describes in that interview clip is transcription; she had done the real work of writing before she sat down. She didn’t have a preternatural capacity for summoning a novel out of thin air, but she did have the self-knowledge to develop a method that worked for her. That—not the bit with the christening of a new notebook—is worth emulating.

Self-Promotion Corner

For the last few years, I’ve looked forward to Iron Horse Literary Review’s annual PhotoFinish issue—a compilation of very brief prose and poetry based on the same photo prompt, released at midnight on New Year’s Eve and free to read online. The 2022 edition is here, and I’m thrilled to say it includes a flash fiction piece of mine. The photo prompt is on page 4, and each contributor provides a statement at the end of the issue saying how they drew inspiration from the photo. Please do take a look!

Songs for the Gusle, my translation of Prosper Mérimée’s 1827 hoax, La Guzla, will be published in March by Frayed Edge Press, and I’m excited to make this unique collection of fake folklore and bogus travelogues available in English for the first time. Come for the vampires and ghosts, stay for the trenchant critique of cultural imperialism! I’ll have information to share about pre-orders soon.

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 two recent articles that focus on increased interest in (and demand for) translated literature in traditionally insular Anglophone publishing markets.

Fiona O’Connor wrote last week in The Irish Times about a dramatic surge in sales of translated fiction in the UK and Ireland. O’Connor points to small presses as a particular driver of a “disruptive swipe on big publishing houses” but also notes that Brexit has threatened UK-based small presses’ business models.

In her introduction to The Best Short Stories 2022: The O. Henry Prize Winners, Valeria Luiselli presents the common threads in the twenty stories she selected for inclusion, fully half of which were first published in languages other than English. Works in translation only recently became eligible for the O. Henry Prize, and Luiselli notes that this change was a deciding factor in her acceptance of the invitation to serve as guest editor.

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 napping on a sage green blanket. On the left is a tuxedo cat; on the right, a dilute tortie. They are facing each other and holding paws.
Sometimes they get a little territorial, but then again, sometimes they hold paws in their sleep.

All the best for a joyous start to the new year!

Laura

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

New Words #4: Force of Habit

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 aheadin aghaidhmeans againstle 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 !

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