The Off Topic Topic

[Zanza]

[Duque de Bragança]

I slightly prefer neoparler because in English one of the points of newspeak is that there's an implied degradation of the written word - it's newspeak. Which is sort of the opposite of our culture where we've valued the written word and not "oral" traditions. So that makes sense to me as possibly engaging with the sort of cricism in English language analysis of 1984.

This has long been an issue with French translators who seemed incapable of coping with various registers of language considered "improper", like orality, or regional variation, or even deliberate mistakes in the original work. Everyone ends up sounding like a proper bourgeois.

That might be the case, though not when the book was translated, but néoparler is not that much better in this case, cf. the Greek prefix néo. Langue is pretty plastic in French, hardly proper bourgeois, that would be idiome. Parler is a bit restrictive.

I have even seen Novídioma in Portuguese which is somewhat formal. Usually, Novílingua.

Main problem for me is everything in the present tense. It's typically proper néo-bourgeois bohème, if you ask me. 
Some updating of the translation would have been fine, but not this preteritophobic newspeak rewrite.

As a matter of fact, novlangue has made it into the common parlance in French.

[Tamas]

So the only way to learn grammar in England is to go to elite schools and the like (public schools) and study humanities, as in Latin and Ancient Greek?
Level has degraded quite a big in France, but grammar is still taught, even analyse logique (clause analysis?).

It's a generational thing - my generation did not learn grammar beyond "nouns are subject words", "verbs are doing words" and "adjectives are describing words". The only grammar I have learned - and I think Tyr's had the same experience - is really learning a foreign language. And it was that way in school too - the only grammar I learned was in French.

[Josquius]

Yep. I mostly learned this stuff when learning Swedish.
I remember learning a lot more about it when I was meant to be teaching it in Japan... And still frequently forgot it and had to bluff.

It probably explains why I was so awful at French. Presumably I missed the class where they explained this.

[celedhring]

I slightly prefer neoparler because in English one of the points of newspeak is that there's an implied degradation of the written word - it's newspeak. Which is sort of the opposite of our culture where we've valued the written word and not "oral" traditions. So that makes sense to me as possibly engaging with the sort of cricism in English language analysis of 1984.

This has long been an issue with French translators who seemed incapable of coping with various registers of language considered "improper", like orality, or regional variation, or even deliberate mistakes in the original work. Everyone ends up sounding like a proper bourgeois.

Catalan has the same issue. A lot of the translations of informal/oral language end up not sounding anything at all like real people speak everyday, since the cultural intelligentsia is more obsessed with correctness than reality.

[Sheilbh]

I slightly prefer neoparler because in English one of the points of newspeak is that there's an implied degradation of the written word - it's newspeak. Which is sort of the opposite of our culture where we've valued the written word and not "oral" traditions. So that makes sense to me as possibly engaging with the sort of cricism in English language analysis of 1984.

This has long been an issue with French translators who seemed incapable of coping with various registers of language considered "improper", like orality, or regional variation, or even deliberate mistakes in the original work. Everyone ends up sounding like a proper bourgeois.

Yeah and it is incredibly challenging - especially when a text is doing something with language which is why it's such an elevated risk with poetry and, I'd argue, post-colonial texts because the language is normally such a core part. Just thinking of texts that are using Indian or West Indian (especially West Indian) English as literary languages - it is English and would be easy to translate casually but the differences between that language and sort-of RP English are key to the texts. But I was thinking of Patrick Chamoiseau's Texaco. I have an English translation which I enjoyed but from my understanding it's probably bound to fail given how important creole and French are to the text. I don't know how well that's been achieved because so much of what matters in that sort of text is at the very margins of what you can translate much like as you say the interaction between the oral and the textual.

And the challenge for a translator must be to give that sense but then also avoid, you know, going into ridiculous and normally offensive transliterated regional voices. The worst is always Gone with the Wind or books like that.

[Duque de Bragança]

And the challenge for a translator must be to give that sense but then also avoid, you know, going into ridiculous and normally offensive transliterated regional voices. The worst is always Gone with the Wind or books like that.

Not just translators; I still remember an Alsatian getting somewhat irritated at Alsatian dialect of French as described by Balzac in the 19th century. 
It felt a bit too much for me but that being the early 19th century meant I did not know what it would have sounded like.

[Sheilbh]

[snip]

That's really interesting - it reminds me of the point during the first lockdown that actually 80+% of people have access to their own outdoor space which blew my mind having lived in London for over a decade

Definitely seems to be a little North-Western European thing about terraced/semi-detached houses in Belgium, Netherlands, UK and Ireland. I'd never realised it was unusual before. I wonder if there's any correlation with renters' rights and the proportion of people living in flats?

Catalan has the same issue. A lot of the translations of informal/oral language end up not sounding anything at all like real people speak everyday, since the cultural intelligentsia is more obsessed with correctness than reality.

So it's challenging for me to judge but I feel like we're in a bit of a golden age for translation into English. As I say I can't vouch for their correctness but the translations of, say, Knausgaard, Ferrante and Tokarczuk are really accomplished novels. And there's enough interest that there are successful independent publishers taht are specialising in contemporary international literary fiction so we don't just have to wait for something to be big enough for Penguin or Bloomsbury to take an interest.

[celedhring]

Catalan produces great translations of classics - the Catalan translation the Divine Comedy is imho a great accomplishment of the language - but it fails quite badly at anything more modern that actively uses more informal registers. Part of it is the social reality of the language: orality is very "contaminated" (bad word) by Spanish, and most slang is derived from it. Cursing and prophanity, for example, is extremely dominated by Spanish. So you can't write lower registers of the language without either sounding fake or introducing lots of Spanish in it (which is frowned upon because reasons).

[Sheilbh]

Interesting and I can definitely see the challenge with translation and politics like that.

It's not related but I know we've talked about Catalan and Irish writing before because one example of why it's a bit of a golden age in English translation is that we now have two translations of the Irish novel Cré na Cille (The Dirty Dust or Graveyard Clay - I've read The Dirty Dust but I know someone who did a review of both). It's an Irish book from the 40s about the residents of a small village graveyard in Western Ireland. The corpses continue to talk and bicker and posture just as they did when they were alive in the grave. It's very funny and incredibly scabrous. In Ireland for a while it was like samizdat - it was so offensive to the image of Irish, of rural values that Ireland at that time felt embodied "real Irishness" and to the church that there were just the occasional private print runs that would pass round Irish-speaking circles. For example one of the very strong voices is newly buried Catherine Paudeen who lets vent her feelings about her still-living sister (who got the man they both loved):

I thought I'd live for another couple of years, and I'd bury her before me, the cunt. She's gone down a bit since her son got injured. She was going to the doctor for a good bit before that, of course. But there's nothing wrong with her. Rheumatism. Sure, that wouldn't kill her for years yet [...] I nearly buried her. If I had lived just a tiny little bit more ...

And literary critics basically said it stood up to Beckett and Joyce in terms of 20th century Irish novels. But because of the squeamishness around it, its reputation as a great work, what it said about Ireland and English language indifference to "minor" language there'd been no English translation. Until about 5 years ago when two arrived in the same month

But yeah I don't know about the sensitivity of translating, especially into a "minor" language that has imported lots of words from its larger neighbours. As you say the challenge is you either end up like the Vatican inventing Latin words for the internet, or you import the threat.

[crazy canuck]

But how many people live in an apartment?

[Josquius]

I'm surprised detached houses are so common elsewhere.
And that the UK has so few flats

[Tamas]

I'm surprised detached houses are so common elsewhere.
And that the UK has so few flats

Terraced houses are horizontal flats. I am not saying that's not better than vertical flats, but that's what they are.

[Jacob]

I'm surprised detached houses are so common elsewhere.
And that the UK has so few flats

Terraced houses are horizontal flats. I am not saying that's not better than vertical flats, but that's what they are.

Flats have all the rooms on one floor, at least traditionally. Terraced houses usually have several floors.

[Sheilbh]

And the number of floors/type of terrace can vary wildly from back-to-backs#:

To a Georgian terrace: