Wabi-sabi.

It’s a concept, an aesthetic, and a worldview. It’s also a phrase that doesn’t translate directly from Japanese into English, and the ideas behind it may not immediately translate in the minds of those who haven’t encountered it before. Put simply, it’s an intuitive way of living that emphasizes finding beauty in imperfection, and accepting the natural cycle of growth and decay. The best way to learn about wabi-sabi is just to accept that it’s there – and to begin noticing examples of it in one’s daily life.

The words wabi and sabi were not always linked, and they can still be used separately in the Japanese language. Wabi, stemming from the root “wa,” which refers to harmony and tranquility, has evolved in meaning from describing something sad and desolate to describing something that is purposely humble and in tune with nature. A wabibito – literally, a “wabi person” – can do more with less, and is content with a life lived free of material possessions. Think Henry David Thoreau, or, more recently, “Cadillac Man,” who wrote recently in the New York Times about the simple joys and freedoms of his many years spent homeless in several of New York’s boroughs.

Sabi by itself refers to the natural progression of time, and carries with it an understanding that all things will grow old and become less conventionally beautiful. However, things described as “sabi” carry their age with dignity and grace. At the heart of being sabi is the idea of authenticity. I’m reminded of the classic children’s story, The Velveteen Rabbit, in which only the oldest, shabbiest, and most well-loved toys in a child’s collection magically become “real.”

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In collaboration with Lauren, Jocelyn, Maria, and Tatyana.

What we consider beautiful is subjective, but there are some English words that language lovers have reached a kind of consensus on regarding beauty.

A unique combination of vowel and consonant sounds, coupled with a nuanced or associative meaning of a word, can create an aesthetically satisfying phonologic harmony and musicality.

However, just as excessive explanation can strip the humor from a joke, we risk dulling the experience of hearing, speaking, and reading beautiful words with too much analysis. Best to jump right in and see what we’ve uncovered.

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How will 2008 be remembered? What enduring memories will be etched in the annals of history?

Between the failing economy, the Beijing Olympics, and the rise of President-elect Obama during the longest political campaign in recent memory, translators had many opportunities to apply their skills of cross-cultural communication around the world. Most of the time, the work was flawless, but when it wasn’t, the results ranged from hilarious to potentially treasonous, and even deadly.

Will the citizens of Little Britain have fond memories of visiting Racist Park during the Olympics? Perhaps the Russian government will finally balance the budget for the State Bowels Fund when members of the Max Planck Intistitue complete their visits to Chinese Brothels? Only time will tell.

In the meantime, here are ALTA’s top 10 translation goofs of 2008:

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A loanword is a word used directly from another language with little or no translation. Such foreign words and phrases are peppered throughout the English language.

Every kind of English writing, from poetry collections and cook books, to newspapers and magazines, contains thousands of words that have been adopted from foreign languages by writers constantly in search of le mot juste.

I asked our resident linguists and translators to name a few of their favorites, and we came up with the following list of top 20 foreign loanwords used by English speakers:

Le Mot Juste
[French] The most appropriate word.

Schadenfreude
[German] The pleasure one takes from someone else’s misfortune.

Modus Operandi
[Latin] Someone’s habits or method of operating (often used by police investigators to describe someone’s criminal profile, or MO)

Hoi Polloi
[Greek] The many, or the masses. Usually used in a derogatory sense to refer to ‘common people’ vs. the ‘upper-crust’ of society.

Faux pas
[French] The violation of a commonly accepted social rule, a blunder like a gaffe.

Poshlust
[Russian] From the Russian word, poshlost, meaning ‘petty, trivial and vulgar’, it was re-branded by Vladimir Nabokov to mean ‘trashy, falsely clever, and falsely beautiful’.

Kitschy
[German, or Yiddish] The quality of being lowbrow, tacky, or in bad taste, usually used in reference to art or decorations.

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Sometimes even the finest translators come up against words that defy translation. Many languages include words that don’t have a simple counterpart in another language. When translators come across such a word, they usually describe it so that it makes sense in the target language. But some words pose more difficulty than others due to interesting cultural differences. Here are ten words that are particularly difficult to translate:

Mamihlapinatapei
From Yagan, the indigenous language of the Tierra del Fuego region of South America. This word has been translated in several ways in English, always implying a wordless yet meaningful look shared by two people who both desire to initiate something but are both reluctant to start.

Jayus
From Indonesian, meaning a joke so poorly told and so unfunny that one cannot help but laugh.

Prozvonit
In both Czech and Slovak language, this word means to call a mobile phone only to have it ring once so that the other person would call back, allowing the caller not to spend money on minutes.

Kyoikumama
In Japanese, this word refers to a mother who relentlessly pushes her children toward academic achievement.

Tartle
A Scottish verb meaning to hesitate while introducing someone due to having forgotten his/her name.

Iktsuarpok
From the Inuit, meaning to go outside to check if anyone is coming.

Cafuné
From Brazilian Portuguese, meaning to tenderly run one’s fingers through someone’s hair.

Torschlusspanik
From German, this word literally means “gate-closing panic” and is used to describe the fear of diminishing opportunities as one ages. This word is most frequently applied to women who race the ‘biological clock’ to wed and bear children.

Tingo
From the Pascuense language of Easter Island, it is the act of taking objects one desires from the house of a friend by gradually borrowing all of them.

Ilunga
From the Tshiluba language spoken in south-eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, this word has been chosen by numerous translators as the world’s most untranslatable word. Ilunga indicates a person who is ready to forgive any abuse the first time it occurs, to tolerate it the second time, but to neither forgive nor tolerate a third offense.

Update!

Check out the new post: 5 More Difficult Words to Translate.

About the Author:
Maria is a true polyglot, translator, and contributing writer for ALTA, which offers translation services in over one hundred languages to government agencies, non-profit organizations, and businesses worldwide.

The Angoff Method is a widely used standard-setting approach in test development.

In plain English, it is a kind of study that test developers use to determine the passing percentage (cutscore) for a test. The passing grade of a test can’t be decided arbitrarily; it must be justified with empirical data. The Angoff method relies on subject-matter experts (SMEs) who examine the content of each test question (item) and then predict how many minimally-qualified candidates would answer the item correctly. The average of the judges’ predictions for a test question becomes its predicted difficulty. The sum of the predicted difficulty values for each item averaged across the judges and items on a test is the recommended Angoff cut score. Here is a real world example that illustrates the process:

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Recently, ALTA received a fax from a law firm with a request to translate an attached document. Strangely, the lawyers had received this document enclosed in an envelope with no return address, and with no English indication as to what the sender wanted done. We receive translation requests daily, but this one was quite odd. The lawyers couldn’t decipher the language that was printed on the tattered page. It was a single sheet of thick, yellowing paper, about half-filled with ornate characters that looked “maybe Arabic?” — as the lawyers wondered. But it was not Arabic.

It was not anything that we at ALTA had ever seen before. The mystery document was passed around the office and we attempted to identify the source language. A few of us offered educated guesses based on the diacritical marks and some other aspects of the script, but no one could determine the language exactly. We scanned it and sent it out to a few translators who specialize in East African, Middle Eastern, and East Asian languages. A couple of them responded with the theory that we had uncovered an example of a Manichean script that was banned centuries ago!

They were wrong. It took ALTA’s resident language sleuth and linguist, Wes Cook, to get to the bottom of the mystery.

Here is the story, in the Language Sleuth’s own words…

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Back in the ’90s, the magazine Language Today published an article by George Weber that analyzed the world’s most influential languages. It was an interesting analysis, because it accounted for “influence” of a language in a number of ways.

For example, Chinese has the most speakers in the world, but it ranks 6 on the list. The formula also takes into account the number of secondary speakers of a language (of which Chinese, a relatively complex language, has few), as well as other factors, such as the economic power of countries that use the language.

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You may have had an experience where you took a test for a class, and the instructor showed you the class’s results afterwards. The results probably mapped out into the infamous “bell-shaped curve”, with a few people scoring on the low end of the curve, the majority clustering in the middle, and a few people scoring on the high end. What you may not have known is that this is a normal distribution found in norm-referenced testing.

Norm-referenced tests (or NRTs) compare an examinee’s performance to that of other examinees. Standardized examinations such as the SAT are norm-referenced tests. The goal is to rank the set of examinees so that decisions about their opportunity for success (e.g. college entrance) can be made.

Criterion-referenced tests (or CRTs) differ in that each examinee’s performance is compared to a pre-defined set of criteria or a standard. The goal with these tests is to determine whether or not the candidate has the demonstrated mastery of a certain skill or set of skills. These results are usually “pass” or “fail” and are used in making decisions about job entry, certification, or licensure. A national board medical exam is an example of a CRT. Either the examinee has the skills to practice the profession, in which case he or she is licensed, or does not.

ALTA’s exams, which measure the candidate’s performance against pre-defined criteria (the performance levels), are also an example of criterion-referenced tests. Based on the passing level set by ALTA or the client, the results can then be used to determine whether or not the candidate meets the performance requirements of the job from a language standpoint.