stuart@rochester.UUCP (Stuart Friedberg) (10/14/83)
From: Stuart Friedberg <stuart>
I attended the Defense Language Institute - Foreign Language Center
in Monterey, CA a few years ago to be forcefed Czech and Slovak.
There are a few things in Czech (and Slovak) that are relevant to
some of the discussions we have been having about English.
"R" and "L" are semi-vowels. While we don't credit them with a
vowel-like character in English, the Czechs *depend* on them to
be able to pronounce sentences like:
"Strc' prst skrz krk"
There are similar examples using "L"...
I submit that "W" is also a semivowel (in English). To be honest,
I never earned the exception about "w" sometimes being a vowel. I
certainly accept it though. My pronunciation of "snow" differs from
that mentioned in an earlier article. I definitely say /snou/.
"Y" in English is rather different from "Y" in most other languages
using a Roman alphabet. In English we have a vowel sound (sky /skai/
or /skaj/) and a consonant sound (yes /jes/). Generally, the consonsant
sound is represented by "J". As an example, we spell Yugoslavia, but
almost everyone else using the same alphabet spells Jugoslavia. In Czech
"Y" sounds exactly like "I" and the difference between the two is that
generally "I" follows "soft" consonants and "Y" follows hard ones.
Those familiar with Russian will recognize the tvrdy and mleky znak's
(hard and soft marks).
Most Slavic languages have a substantially different tense structure
than English does. I don't think it's fair to say that Latin or Greek
make it difficult to say certain things about the ongoing nature of
an activity in the past or future, since English makes it difficult
to say certain other things (Sorry, that was a reference to another
article. Continuing...) There are three tenses: past, present and
future. There are also a number of "modes": durative, perfective,
iterative, and a couple of very rare special ones. At the risk of
a slight overgeneralization, every verb has a durative and a
perfective form. The durative corresponds *roughly* to the English
simple tense, while the perfective corresponds *roughly* to the
English perfect tense. The perfective mode only exists in the past
and the future. Thus a generic Czech verb has 5 effective tenses
which *basically* translate to:
Did - past perfective
Was doing - past durative
Do - present durative
Will be doing - future durative
Will be done - future durative
The perfective mode carries some connotations that are not present in
the English perfect tenses. There is this notion that the activity was
over, complete, wrapped up, finished (for the past, similarly for the
future). Notice that there is no way to easily distinguish things like:
Going to do (in the future, indefinite)
Going to be doing (in the future, ongoing)
Going to have done (in the future, completion)
The way you would say the third thing is to explicitly talk about
completion. Please note that I am *not* saying that Czechs can't
distinguish these things. What I *am* saying is that they talk
about them in a different way than we do in English. This is not
because Czech is better than English or English is better than Czech,
just that they are different. For a *really* different treatment
of the verb, try Hopi ...
As an example of the iterative mode, those familiar with German may
recognize this construction using the basic verb "carry". I can carry
a uniform, but if I indicate that this "carrying" is a general,
repetitive activity, I change the sense of the verb to "wear". In
German this usage exists without a special form of the verb. In Czech
the iterative mode of the verb "to carry" (nosit) has the meaning
"to wear". Few verbs have an iterative mode. Some verbs of motion
do. I would add at this point that Czech is an extremely regular
language with very few vestiges of earlier forms like Slavonic.
Russian, on the other hand, has entire dictionaries devoted to its
verbs of motion, because a) they are treated differently from "other"
verbs, and b) they are monstrously irregular!
The above was marginally related to topics under discussion here. I
now have a statement to make about translation. One of the hardest
things to get across is that a literal translation generally stinks.
You take someone straight from language training, and if they have
never really worked in a foreign language (it doesn't have to be the
same one) they can point to all the dictionary entries and the grammar
tables as say: "Of course, my translation is correct". The problem
is that meaning is generally not preserved in these translations. I
am willing to rewrite a paragraph as a sentence or a sentence as
a paragraph in an attempt to preserve the essence of what the author
had to say. I am not talking about paraphrasing or gisting, either.
It's just that when two languages don't have the same grammar or
syntactic constructions and often have very different styles of
exposition the best translation is one that observes the semantics,
not the mechanics. There is no point to translating elegant French
into barbaric English just to preserve punctuation! Sigh ...
and who says that mechanical translation is such an easy thing???
So much for random rambles...
Stu Friedberg
{seismo, allegra}!rochester!stuart
stuart@rochesterminow@decvax.UUCP (Martin Minow) (10/15/83)
Actually, comments on translation sparked by Friedburg's excellent article. Karlgren's Law states that translations are always 15% longer than the original. This is because you have to explain concepts in the destination language that are implicit in the source language. A Swiss friend who works with me said she never understood what "vanilla" meant when describing computer programs until she found out about the American ice cream culture. Consider, if you will, the following problem that I had a few years back. I was translating a document that had been written by three people. One used "he/she", one used "you", and the third used passive voice constructions to avoid having to mention gender. (This is more acceptable in the source language, Swedish, than in American English.) What should I do? Preserve the variability (and poor style) of the original, or choose one of the forms (or choose another)? Note that I am not interested in which form is "socially correct", but which is proper for the translation itself. (I don't remember which I chose, but I'm sure I normalized the text.) Martin Minow decvax!minow