New Words is a newsletter about writing, translation, and language acquisition. New posts appear once or twice per month. To receive new posts via email—no paywalls, nothing spammy!—visit lauranagle.substack.com.
Newsletter Archive
New Words #16: Literary AND Commercial?!
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.
New Words #15: It’s a Dude Group!
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?
Keep reading this post on Substack. (Don’t worry—nothing is behind a paywall!)
New Words #14: Good Advice
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.)
Keep reading this post on Substack. (Don’t worry—nothing is behind a paywall!)
New Words #13: How Many Continents Are There?
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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New Words #12: Caffeine Complications
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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