Unfortunately, although the modern economy is very much global, there are still those with a quite astounding lack of geographical knowledge of our global village, as seen in this video clip that’s been doing the rounds on YouTube for a long time now, but deserves another airing*. I love the kid sniggering as the contestant flails around in search of an answer:

* Sadly this ISN’T an April Fool’s joke.

While there may be around 7,000 distinct languages in the world today, many of them descend from the same roots and therefore share many similar characteristics.

Romance languages, for example, comprise all languages that have descended from Latin, and today equate to 700 million native speakers across the globe.

And this goes at least some way towards explaining why over a third of Lingo24’s translation projects contain at least one Romance language, with French, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian ranking among the most commonly requested translations.

When is a rare language not a rare language?

Among the rarer Romance languages we’ve been asked to translate include Catalan and Galician, although between them they still have around 15 million native speakers.

Then there is the often-overlooked Romance language that isn’t all that rare at all. Romanian – spoken by around 30 million people worldwide (the majority of whom live in Romania, might I add) – is the 34^th most commonly spoken language in the world.

However, there are an estimated 47 Romance languages and associated dialects spoken throughout Europe, from the Swiss vernacular Romansh, with around 36,000 native speakers, to the Walloon language, spoken by some 600,000 people, located largely in Belgium.

Just how close is this language family?

As all translators will know, it takes a considerable amount of time and effort to learn a second language. But with genetically-related languages such as Romance, there is often a certain degree of mutual intelligibility that aids understanding between the two languages.

The word ‘black’, for instance, can be ‘negre’ (Catalan), ‘noir’ (French), ‘negro’ (Galician/Spanish), ‘nero’ (Italian/Venetian), ‘neir’ (Piedmontese) or ‘negru’ (Romanian). And the word ‘shop’ can be ‘magazin’ (Romanian) or ‘magasin’ (French).

Of course, there are always the infamous false-friends that come along and ruin the show, such as ‘carte’ which could refer to a ‘book’ if you’re in Romania, or a map/card/ticket if you are in France.

Spanish and Portuguese, in particular, are similar to the point of having a significant degree of mutual intelligibility for speakers of these languages. And to make matters worse, they can look almost identical on paper to those who have had little exposure to either language.

And this caused Lingo24 a little bit of bother recently, after being asked to carry out an English to Spanish AND Portuguese translation.

After receiving the translated and fully proofread texts from us, the client asked if they could be reviewed again, as the translations seemed identical to each other!

However, this is not too uncommon, whereby we have to explain the subtle differences between two seemingly identical languages. But fortunately, most of our clients are only too happy to take the advice of an experienced translation company.

This can often mean explaining to clients the importance of using, for example, a Latin American Spanish translator over a Spanish translator. Although this news normally goes down rather well, given that it is generally cheaper to translate into Latin American Spanish than it is Spanish.

Similarly, we are often asked to translate between French and Canadian French, Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese and even non-Romance languages such as UK and US English. The importance of localisation in a translation can never be understated, and this is a message that seems to be catching on across most industries.

Of course, whilst nobody can be held personally accountable for any similarities that exist between two Romance languages such as Spanish and Portuguese, it does serve as a timely reminder that, at a time when globalisation is one of the biggest business buzzwords, it certainly pays to be wary of the more subtle cultural and linguistic differences.

© Paul Sawers

“Arse, poo and widdle.” With this unholy trinity of coy expletives, Stephen Fry introduced us to the joys of Twitter earlier this month

By far the most disappointing report on Twitter that I’ve witnessed was on Newsnight yesterday evening. Apprarently Baroness Greenfield has piped up and said that communicating online is contributing to a rise in autism and is increasing the social isolation of children. Paxman had a couple of ‘experts’ on the show to discuss this. Watching this discussion felt a bit like watching the blind leading the blind, since nobody really seemed to have actually used Twitter or any other social media tool, despite professing to be experts on the matter. My favourite quote from one of them was “Children could be writing to people in another country who they’ve never met before”. Shock! Horror! Damnation! As someone who works at the global interface, I couldn’t quite understand why it would be such a terrible outcome for children to communicate with other children in different countries/cultures, provided that is done in a safe environment (remember internet parental controls?). My other half, equally bemused by the discussion, said to me “What about at school when we all had penpals abroad?”.

In reality, however, it’s not actually children who are using Twitter.  I’ll do my best to try to dispel that myth and others about Twitter here:

• Twitter is just for kids/teenagers/people under 25. Stats show that Facebook is still mostly used by the under 35s, but heavy users of Twitter are in fact more likely to be in the 25-45 age bracket. There is even a sizeable number of over 65s using it. I would (as have others) suggest that this is because the majority of Twitter users are on Twitter because they are mainly using it in connection with their work.
• Tweeters just send text messages to themselves to tell Twitter what they’re doing all day (I actually heard this description last week). Anyone who does that too much is pretty much an instant ‘unfollow’ for me – the most productive aspect of Twitter is that it helps people share news and information about their fields of interest or their occupation, with the occasional anecdote about their personal lives thrown in to show that they’re human.
• Twitter stops people from going out into the world and socialising in a normal way, and destroys peoples’ social skills. As with any new-fangled, revolutionary device, there is an initial ‘craze’ period, and a period where everyone scratches their head and worries that it signals the end of civilisation as we know it. I wasn’t alive at the time, so you’ll have to do your homework on this one, but sources tell me that people were worried about this when the telephone was invented too.

Twitter can help people build a ‘community’ of like-minded people, yes. This is a ‘community’ in the traditional sense of the word, nothing more sinister than that. That ‘community’ is a very valuable virtual water cooler for those of us who work freelance. I’m not sure how others working in open plan offices, for example, use Twitter. Perhaps they use it to reach out to virtual ‘colleagues’ beyond their immediate co-workers. That’s what it’s all about, folks. COMMUNICATION. BUT you still can’t beat socialising in person, and I’m pretty sure that most ‘normal’ Twitter users still do that. Perhaps even with someone they initially met on Twitter and found they had a lot in common with. There have always been reclusives,  and there always will be, with or without social media.

Feel free to share any other myth shockers you’ve come across, or even ones that you believe to be true.

A debate is currently raging across the British media concerning this news story, and the wider issue of new mums of all ages and social statuses who for whatever reason decide to return to work rather more quickly than is ‘normal’. Most new mums are entitled to at least 3 months’ leave following the birth of their child (except freelancers, of course – how long we choose to take it entirely at our own discretion, or rather, how long we can survive on the state Maternity Allowance).

The Guardian encouraged a debate on the issue, with numerous writers (all women, I might add) being very forthcoming with their views on Dati’s decision regarding her newborn. I began reading the comments with a fairly neutral attitude. But, as I read on, I found myself  forming a much stronger opinion…but not the one I expected.

Contrast this view of one writer:

Dati is someone who has a serious job to do and it really doesn’t matter whether she’s postnatally flabby or annoyingly thin when she does it. It’s not unsisterly to be slim and it doesn’t make you unfit for public service. As for the health consequences of going back to work so soon, it’s not as if she is a hod carrier, or a firefighter, or a teacher – she’s a government minister and if she feels up to sitting down at a desk and attending meetings shortly after giving birth, bonne chance to her

With this one:

Then there was the businesswoman who spent her labour on her Blackberry because she didn’t want to look like “a slacker”.  I’ve also spoken to despairing midwives who see women missing out on the vital, once-in-a lifetime experience of bonding with their newborn.

Machismo of this sort by women in prominent positions makes others feel guilty about exercising their rights. It also deters women from striving to reach the top. There are precious few women in leading business roles and many of them are single or childless. It is easy to understand why that is if they are expected to start working almost immediately after birth.[...]  As a society, we should encourage our leaders to show that it is possible to take proper maternity leave and hold down a high-profile job.

To my surprise, my major reaction was disappointment at some of the criticism levied at mothers. Although many of the responses made some very salient points, these points risked being lost amongst the emotionally charged tone of the writing. Why does this, as women, upset us  quite so much? Why are we still hounding each other for the decisions we take in motherhood? Why do we feel that motherhood is an issue where we are all entitled to pass judgement on each other?

Sure, there are things about the way some women choose to begin motherhood that would not work for everyone, but is it really fair to haul them over hot coals for deviating from what we perceive to be ‘normal’? This particular observation really stood out:

[...] you have to wonder where feminism has taken us when women are judged because they don’t conform to the current view of what a “good mother” looks like

France has excellent maternity provision, much more generous than the UK. But in France reactions have been even stronger, especially among women’s rights organisations. A spokeswoman for one of the major women’s rights organisations in France said ‘c’est un scandale‘. This is a somewhat  misplaced agenda for a women’s rights organisation, surely.

This is such a contentious issue and feelings clearly run very deep; there aren’t many things that offend humans more than when others take issue with their parenting style.  What saddens me is that people, especially women, are so very quick to pass judgement on how other women choose to return to work after having a baby. After all, I don’t think child neglect is an issue here – we can probably quite safely assume that Ms. Dati has employed a suitable-qualified nanny.

One of the most surprising things for me in this story was that I found myself agreeing with a columnist in The Times (!). Melanie McDonagh on Friday really hit the nail on the head for me when she said: ‘[...] real women are infinitely various, their circumstances even more so.’ The debate continued in The Sunday Times today, again with some pretty reasonable and pragmatic arguments put across. I still don’t have a very strong view for or against Ms. Dati’s decision. All I hope is that soon the day will come when the image of the ‘perfect mummy’ is no longer idealised and women do not vilify each other for not conforming to it.

This is the blurb from the site:

Welcome to our ???? ??? ????Literature in Translation store. Browse here for great deals on top fiction from around the globe. You can search by language or by genre to discover new authors, and see what other people are reading and rating.

Despite the slightly muted introduction of this new feature, I’m really pleased to see a large outfit such as Amazon allocating special space to translated literature, and shining the spotlight on non-Anglophone writers, particularly given that currently only 2% of the books on our bookshops’ shelves are translations from another language.

Kudos to The Bookseller.com for reporting this news.

One for linguistics enthusiasts: a truly fascinating interview today on Excess Baggage travel program with Daniel Everett, Chair of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at Illinois State University, US. Everett travelled to the Brazilian Amazon to live with the Piraha people, and In this interview he shares his experiences of living with the Pirahas and what he learned about their language, previously un-translated. Interestingly, it turned out that Everett was the one who was converted to their way of life and communicating, rather than the other way round.

His book, published this month, will certainly be on my Christmas list

White people of European descent will no longer make up a majority of the US population by the year 2042 – eight years sooner than previous estimates.

What will this mean for the evolution of English? The fascinating language-contact phenomenon of ‘Spanglish’ (the language, rather than the film of the same name) is already the subject of linguistic research and attempts have been made to capture it in dictionaries; perhaps with even more speakers in the future it will grow to be regarded by all as a modern language in its own right.

True enough, there are many examples of poor grammar and spelling around, enough for many eagle-eyed writers to write entire books about them. I enjoy spotting these mistakes and chuckling about them as much as the next person; I am a massive fan of Lynne Truss and have read and re-read her books like old friends, and I applaud anyone who heightens awareness of language and grammar amongst the general public. As Truss demonstrates in the title of her book Eats, Shoots and Leaves, a wrongly placed comma can completely mislead a reader. This is amusing for native speakers, but a major comprehension problem for a non-native reader of English, and it is of course something translators must always be careful to avoid.

However, there is a difference between the language we use in official publications and translations, and the language we use to communicate via instant, informal methods such as text messages, social networking sites and emails. Think about it: in speaking on the phone to friends and relatives, only the proudest people would claim to be able to hold conversations free from mistakes in word order, use of the possessive, tense etc., every single time they pick up the phone.  We must all accept that we are human, that instant communication methods require us to think on our feet; our brains simply don’t have time to focus on the message of what we’re saying and the grammar within it. We have moved far beyond the era of telegrams and communicating solely by posted letter and we have adapted accordingly, as humans are so adept at doing.

Whilst in spoken language we have recourse to intonation, volume and tone, to ensure the clarity of our message in place of grammar, you might argue that is what we’re attempting to do in emails and text messages as well. We use emoticons, capital letters, italics, amongst other tools, to try to express what it is we’re saying when we don’t have a lot of time in which to do it. I happen to think that this is not a bad thing; we are unable to claw back much time these days, we’re all terribly busy, that’s a given, so we are adapting to that with time-saving methods.

My favourite linguist, David Crystal, recently wrote a fascinating article for The Guardian on text speak, in which he argues that it actually represents a highly creative use of an evolving language. Moreover, he makes the important point that writers such as Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, Walter Scott, DH Lawrence all used ‘deviant’ spelling in their novels, so it’s not something entirely new. A bit of trivia for you: ‘cos’ was first entered into the Oxford English Dictionary in 1828, and ‘wot’ in 1829.

Doom-mongers will be horrified to learn that there is now even a ‘text laureate’, but perhaps surprised that last year’s winner was in fact in her late 60s.