When news of J.D. Salinger’s death was reported late Wednesday afternoon, I was surprised, but then not. Despite being one of the most recognized American authors of the twentieth century, Salinger was also one of the most reclusive. After being thrown into the limelight in 1951 with Catcher in the Rye, Salinger moved to a 90 acre home in Cornish, New Hampshire and, after an unwelcomed newspaper article was published about him by a group of high school students he had befriended, he erected a 6 ½ foot tall fence around the perimeter in order to keep people out.

Even though few of us knew anything about his failing health or major accidents, Salinger was 91 years old, and 91 is a ripe old age.

Salinger’s most recognized work, Catcher in the Rye, faced issues in translation that still haven’t been resolved today, some fifty-nine years later. According to Bernd Wahlbrinck, an English teacher and Salinger enthusiast living in Germany, the novel was harder to translate into certain languages than others.

He writes specifically of Heinrich Boell’s German translation originally written in the 1950s. Part of the inaccuracies of the translation were possibly due to a lack of proper slang or the cultural taboo around slang—‘that David Copperfield kind of crap’ is translated into ‘David Copperfield Zeug’, where ‘Zeug’ more accurately refers to ‘stuff’ and should have been ‘Scheiss’, but also the:

…weird tendency to translate the past tense into German Praeteritum, which is, however, usually stupid because in colloquial language we just don’t use it most of the time. Thus, in the very first sentence of the novel, it says ‘… was meine Eltern taten…’. Actually, nobody says that, certainly not a kid of 17; we would say something like ‘was meine Eltern (so) gemacht haben’.

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The boundaries between formal and informal language are often blurry. Misunderstandings can arise when a language student or interpreter does not choose correctly when speaking a language that distinguishes between formal and informal personal pronouns. One runs a risk of being considered impolite on the one hand, or snobbish on the other.

The formal singular pronoun is used to express respect to an addressee, whether it is a superior, an older person, a business partner, or a new acquaintance. The informal pronoun, conversely, establishes a sense of closeness and trust among friends and relatives. There is a very special—even intimate—moment when the formal pronoun suddenly changes to its familiar form in the middle of the conversation; or there is a reverse effect of chilling distancing when the formal pronoun is uttered in place of the familiar. Interestingly, most European languages preserve the distinct forms of polite and familiar personal pronouns. In Modern English, however, the practice became largely obsolete.

A similar form of both formal and informal pronouns exists in almost every Indo-European language. Here are a few examples:

In linguistics, the practice of distinguishing personal pronouns on the basis of familiarity and social courtesy is referred to as a T-V distinction, from the first letters of Latin pronouns tu and vos. Common to most of the Indo-European languages, the formal singular pronoun derives from its plural form. Addressing someone in plural has been a universal symbol of inexorable power and authority. According to some sources, the first record of addressing a superior in plural dates back to the Roman Empire during the 4th century. Later, plural pronouns began to be commonly applied to the European aristocracy—so-called “majestic plural.”

In Old English, second-person pronouns thou and you derived from the plural ye. Originally, thou was simply a singular counterpart to ye. The Norman Conquest of 1066 AD marked the age of the French language influence on English. Thou—just like its French version tu—was used to express familiarity, affection, or even condescendence, while the plural ye was reserved for a superior during a formal address. Starting in the Middle English period (mid 15th century), ye gradually generalized to you, which became a standard in both plural and singular forms with no distinct connotation of familiarity or social distance. Thou, which was losing its prominence in the early 17th century, is still preserved in some regions of England and Scotland; it is also commonly used in religious context.

This can pose a challenge to translators and interpreters. They must be aware of the cultural and social circumstances that require a more formal tone to avoid an insulting statement and, at the same time, to avoid archaic and awkward wording. It is even more difficult to reflect the subtle nuances and shades of meaning that accompany the two forms of pronouns. One way to ameliorate the problem is to reserve to the so-called compensating translation. Using a first name or a nickname instead of honorifics or using some informal phrasing, one can “compensate” for the lost meaning or implication.

Ever since I wrote about the Hmong language in A Note on Hmong Language and Culture, I’ve noticed more and more news items regarding the Hmong people. Maybe it’s just the kind of situation where the Hmong have always been written about and it wasn’t till I was made aware of it that they seemed to be everywhere, but they have popped up in major news articles several times in the past few weeks. A few weeks ago the news was regarding the forcible repatriation of the Thailand Hmong to Laos, but this time, thankfully, the news is a little lighter: the Hmong in California need hunting rules and regulations translated.

Of all of the translation news bits and cultural issues that I find so intriguing, this one tops them all. The New York Times posted an article on January 27 with the headline For Hmong Hunters, a Guiding Voice in Their New Home. Tying in with my previous article which was spurred by the first English language Hmong cookbook, the article focuses on Mr. Yang, the host of an “all-things-hunting” AM radio program in Sacramento. The reason for a hunting radio show—“In Laos a main source of food was wildlife,” so Hmong immigrants are simply adhering to their old customs and heading outside to find some food.

The radio show (which is in Hmong, of course) educates listeners about the various California rules and regulations regarding hunting—what licenses are needed, how to transport heads to Fish & Wildlife offices, the times of the different game seasons, etc. Hmong from all over the area can call in and ask their specific question which Mr. Yang will answer. The show complements the state-run hunting education program—a ten hour safety program required of all hunting license applicants. In California, classes are offered in Hmong, Spanish, Russian, German and Mandarin, but only 15 bilingual instructors teach the classes. Mr. Yang was the first Hmong instructor (there are now two more, both located in Fresno) in the state and already over thirty people have signed up for the next class.

While two other states—Minnesota and Wisconsin—have hired Hmong speakers for fish and wildlife issues, this certainly isn’t something I’ve seen much elsewhere. In the southeastern US, I’ve never heard of this being a problem, and while it seems like it ought to be limited to California, a state of such diversity, the Hmong presence in the Midwest is obviously strong as well. Maybe one day the stereotypes of the “good ol’ boy” out hunting will disappear and be replaced with the thought of people from all cultures—you never know.

Photo depicts Chou, a Hmong man proudly displaying his family knife. Via Napix Hmong Soul

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Last summer while I was researching various journals on translation testing methods, I constantly ran across articles mentioning the difficulty surrounding Cherokee language testing, specifically in the Bilingual Education Program. Although I don’t have the articles anymore, the gist was that under several testing programs it was nearly impossible to create an equal English language literacy and Cherokee language literacy test. In testing young elementary school children of both Cherokee and non-Cherokee background, the program administrators found that bilingual children achieved noticeably lower scores on the English language tests, and that these scores were not due to a limited exposure to English but due to the cultural-linguistic nature of the Cherokee language.

The problem with technical academic journals is that the amount of background information or history is limited. While the studies made sense and were useful regarding the information I needed for my own project, I was left wondering what exactly were the differences between Cherokee and English, and why exactly the two languages could not be accurately tested in a bilingual situation. I’d nearly forgotten about the issue until recently when I picked up a copy of Christopher Camuto’s book, Another Country.

I read Camuto’s three published books (the three I could easily access, he recently published a fourth book, Time and Tide in Acadia in 2009) in backwards chronology, starting with his most recent, Hunting from Home, then his second book, A Fly Fisherman’s Blueridge. As those titles suggest, Camuto’s writing is interested in the Appalachian landscape, in hunting and fishing and the environment of the Appalachian mountains. Camuto is also interested in language and the way language works in relation to the environment. In his first book, Camuto explores the relation of the Cherokee people to Appalachia and spends a great deal of time discussing the Cherokee language.

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I was first introduced to Erin Mckean through her 2007 TedTalk on the work of lexicographers, and I’ve been a big fan ever since. Her sense of humor, wit, and effervescence when writing or speaking about language are contagious, and although she is playful, her work is attempting to do something serious: to change the common perception that people have about the relationship between authority and language. I was reminded of this yesterday when I stumbled upon her Boston Globe article on Sweet Tooth Fairies, three word phrases that contain separate two word phrases such as, periodic table manners, victory lap dance, and unrequited love handles.

While many linguaphiles would simply revel in the wordplay for a bit and then move on, Mckean looks more deeply at the pleasure we take from these fun word combinations to make a point about the elasticity of language — it’s ability to wiggle out of the rigid categories that authoritative figures attempt to prescribe to English speakers and writers. As she explains, “by putting words into an unaccustomed double role, they let us see ordinary English words for the truly versatile actors they are.” For our part, many users of the English language have been conditioned to look towards the authority of linguists for the right answers to every grammar, spelling, or usage issue. Recent popular works such as Jack Lynch’s The Lexicographer’s Dilema, and Mckean’s new innovative online dictionary, Wordnik, are making strides to change this perception.

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When the 2nd UN Arab Human Development Report was released last year, I discovered some sobering facts regarding literacy in Arab states. With statistics like 65 million illiterate people in a region composed of 22 countries or “the total number of books translated into Arabic during the 1,000 years since the age of Caliph Al-Ma’moun [a ninth-century Arab ruler who was a patron of cultural interaction between Arab, Persian, and Greek scholars] to this day is less than those translated in Spain in one year,” it’s hard not to become discouraged about the state of literacy around the globe. Largely considered to be a cornerstone to political and economic development, the ability to read and write is essential—as well as the exposure to literature.

With heartbreaking statistics like those published by the Arab Human Development Report, it’s exciting when good news regarding literacy and exposure to literature arises. Although it is not in the Arab world, India is a key player in the world political and economic scene, and as a developing country, literacy has been on the forefront of social and cultural development initiatives. In 1947 at the end of British rule, a mere 12% of Indians were literate. The number has risen in recent years to 66% (in 2007), showing a record 12.63% increase in the 1991-2001 decade. Looking at the numbers, of course, this still leaves the country with a 34% illiteracy rate—14% more than the AHDR statistic for the Arab world and well below the 84% world average literacy rate. Additionally, a large gender gap appears in the rates (something which wasn’t discussed in the AHDR). This past year in 2009, the literacy rate for women was 54.5% as opposed to 76.9% for men. That gap, thankfully is closing with a 14.38% increase in women in the 1991-2001 period (during the same time, literacy in men increased by only 11.13%).

So what about these statistics is positive? India, along with the Arab states, is well below the UNESCO literacy threshold of 75%, and although literacy is increasing, and has increased exponentially since independence, the nation still has a long road to travel before it achieves any substantial literacy goal. But there is a bright side—unlike in the Arab states, literature is accessible (or relatively so, depending on region) in India.

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A recent study conducted by researchers at The University of Granada’s School of Translation and Interpretation attempts to analyze and evaluate the results of machine translations done with popular online tools such as Google Translator, Promt, and WorldLingo. The study was published in this month’s issue of Translation Journal, and it raised interesting questions for me about the possible uses for online machine translation.

Looking at the findings, it should come as no surprise that all of the machine translation tools produced poor results in terms of the number of errors, or that after the translations passed through a round of human editing, the number of errors were drastically reduced. What is interesting, though, is that certain online tools performed better than others, and specific language combinations produced varying results. The graph below shows results from German into Spanish (the researchers used EvalTrans Software). The best translation machine is the one showing the lowest word error percentage (WER). Check out the study for more charts and an explanation of the sentence error rate (SER).

Doctors Lola García-Santiago and María-Dolores Olvera-Lobo do a thorough job of laying out the methodology that they followed, and of acknowledging the difficulties inherent to such studies. They write that,

Evaluation of machine translation is an unresolved research problem that has been addressed by numerous studies in recent years. The most extensively used assessment tools are classified into two major groups: automatic objective methods, and subjective methods (Tomás, Mas & Casacuberta, 2003). The objective evaluation methods compare a set of correct translations of reference against the set of translations produced by the translation software under evaluation. The units of measurement most often used work at the lexical level, comparing strings of text.

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The English lexicon is constantly growing. Urban Exploration, it seems, is the next frontier.

What happens if you’re interested in an activity including extreme heights, technical skill, and strength and endurance but you don’t live near glaciers, mountains, or rock wall cliffs? What if you live in the middle of the city, surrounded by skyscrapers and manholes and taxi cabs, and you want a taste of adventure and the great outdoors? For some, the option is to domesticate, to find a park to run in or ride a bicycle around town. For others, though, a simple compromise is possible—turn the urban environment into an extreme environment, scale buildings and spelunk down underground pipes.

The sport is broadly referred to as Urban Exploration or urbex or UE for short. Defined by James Lester as a sport that explores the “off-limits or seldom seen parts of man-made structures,” urban exploration is also widely categorized by the desire to “[examine] and [understand] the inner workings of our constructed world, of seeing civic society in its real, raw, unpainted, unplastered and unprettied state.” In that sense, the sport is also referred to as infiltration—although the connotation is often that of exploring an “active” or inhabited site as opposed to an abandoned building or one in construction.

Urbex is composed of various activities—most with their own code name—such as draining, urban spelunking, urban caving, building hacking, and buildering. Draining is the act of exploring underground cement tunnels intended to transport storm water (as opposed to human waste). Catacomb exploration falls under the category of draining as well. Urban spelunking and urban caving, of course, fall under the definition of draining.

Building hacking, as the name suggests, refers to entering a building, either abandoned or inhabited. The buildings are generally abandoned and in some sort of decay, or sometimes in the process of being built—urbex does not advocate the breaking and entering of a business or home. Buildering, on the other hand, specifically refers to the act of climbing on the outside of a building or a structure.

Linguistically, buildering is a portmanteau created by combining building and bouldering. Done without ropes, buildering is extremely dangerous, although some attempt free soloing where “the climber (the free soloist) forgoes ropes, harnesses and other protective gear while ascending and relies only on his or her physical strength, climbing ability, and psychological fortitude to avoid a fatal fall.” The sport can be traced back to Cambridge University where students would regularly scramble up the roofs of campus buildings. In the 1890s, Geoffrey Winthrop Young, a student at Cambridge, wrote a treatise of building climbing, and the activity is usually traced back to him.

For examples of urbex, visit Urbex.org
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Photo by Paulhitz

Language Hat posted a translation today of the Russian blogger Anatoly’s thoughts on free verse, specifically regarding Russian poetry. Anatoly writes:

There is just such a Problem standing before scholars of literature, a large and natural one: to explain the transition of almost all world poetry to free verse during the 20th century. The rare exceptions—Russian poetry being one of them—do not abolish the rule. These developments took place at different times in different languages and cultures, but gradually all of them converged and arrived during the second half of the century at the same destination: what Gasparov called “international free verse.”

He then goes on to ask why there was such a great shift in poetry at the end of the 19th century, a shift from rhymed and metrical formal verse to that of free verse, a poetry without formal constraints.

While many of Language Hat’s commenters provided interesting and accurate reasons for why the shift occurred—revolution, Baudelaire’s influence, the push against the aristocratic, etc.—it can be helpful to go back and look at the initial terms we’re working with.

The OED defines free verse as “poetic writing in which the traditional rules of prosody, esp. those of metre and rhyme, are disregarded in favour of variable rhythms and line lengths”—following the French vers libre which first appeared c. 1549. The time line puts free verse at 1886, although it probably appeared before then. The opposite of free verse can most easily be described as formal verse, that is poetry with rhyme, meter, and other patterns.

The first comment left in regard to Anatoly’s post states that “a lot European poetry followed French poetry during the 19th century, and the French were tired of the alexandrine, which they found constricting. Baudelaire and Hugo pushed the alexandrine to the limit, leaving not much for others to do except be second rate Hugos, Baudelaire’s, Racines, etc. “ Also, “The 19th century was also a time of conscious modernism and revolution, and the classic forms didn’t seem to fit that. Baudelaire played the pure form and impure content game to the limit, though Gide, Genet, and other picked it up in prose.”

While most of this analysis is spot on, it is important to remember the Baudelaire also pioneered the free verse form (if it can truly be called a form). Far in advance of his time, Baudelaire experimented with prose poetry during the latter part of his life. While no great prose poetry movement caught on, his work certainly influenced the move toward modern experimentation and free verse expression. Yes, the alexandrine and other formal elements were overused, but this hardly accounts for a worldwide shift in poetry. As Anatoly points out, other languages maintained formal integrity—Russian one of many. Far more than a pushing to the limit of form, I think the second half of the comment holds more water.

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