Imperial translation

Numbers can be so much more than numbers. Measurements of speed, distance and weight may embody levels of idiomatic and cultural meaning.

Going the distance

We might discuss the fuel usage of our cars, and in the UK although fuel is sold and priced by the litre, many of us still think of cars as going a certain number of miles (since that’s what the road signs say) per gallon.

When buying and selling cars, we often ask each other how far the car has already been driven. So we ask each other whether that’s a high mileage car, or what mileage you get from your car? We answer with things like a number of ‘quite high’ or ‘pretty low, considering its age (or performance, etc.)’. Mileage collocates with ‘calculator’, a device to work out how many miles (displayable of course in kilometres) a journey will take when you look online. It also collocates with ‘check’ (sensible to have that done when buying a used car) and ‘allowance’ and ‘rates’ (which you need to know for expenses claim forms and tax returns).

Travelling further

Well, I’ve never heard of kilometerage. So then how will a translation follow the thread into other areas? Some are quite close, for example, ‘I got a lot of mileage out of my dishwasher before it finally broke down.’

Others start to move away a little: ‘Michael always got a lot of mileage out of that one joke.’ And into quite dull business settings too: ‘Clara is trying to get as much mileage as she can out that tired old idea.’ ‘I don’t think we’ll get much mileage out of the latest proposal – it’s not going to convince many people.’

Actually, you could express some of these with older forms of transport. We’ll know what you mean if you say that your dishwasher has finally ‘run out of steam’, even though steam-powered transport is a thing of the past.

Old models

And you can follow that line of technological detritus littering the language with its archaisms that so stubbornly persist, when they are surely past their sell-by dates. Why do we talk about ‘hanging up’ the phone (which hasn’t physically happened in my lifetime, except in black-and-white films), ‘dialling a number’ (and not pressing numbers) or ‘ringing’ (for no-one tolls a bell anymore)?

As easy as 1, 2, 3?

What about if you stick with really simple things, like basic numbers, and learning to distinguish similar-sounding numbers? This is a very important basic thing, and means you’ll pay the right money, catch the right train from the right platform, and so on.

In English, you need to distinguish ‘thirteen’ and ‘thirty’ (as much a question of stress as phonemes) and to keep an eye or ear on ‘three’. Does this work the same in French? There you have, respectively, ‘treize’, ‘trente’ and ‘trois’. Are they more or less confusable than the Spanish ‘trece’, ‘treinta’ or ‘tres’? What about Turkish: ‘on iki’, ‘otuz’ and ‘üç’? Maybe that nugget of confusable 3s is a Latin thing…

Called to account

We have to accommodate changes in numbering systems, including currencies (of the financial kind). If I have some nice English tests and there’s a tidy little listening task with two people discussing the price of something, then the discussion might involve whether you get three for £30 or whether they’re £13 each and so on. Worth testing, because it’s genuinely meaningful.

But if the UK joins the Euro (just to wipe the smug smile off Nigel Farage’s face), then how will we translate that discussion and its questions? At today’s rates, I can’t see many candidates being sorely tested when distinguishing between three for €37 (or even €36.87) or whether they’re €16 (or even €15.98) each.

‘What on earth’, and indeed ‘Who on earth’?

On March 13th, I very much enjoyed a talk given by Boping Yuan as part of the Cambridge University Linguistics Forum. He’s been researching Chinese speakers’ L2 English grammars. The information about the Chinese speakers’ grammar was interesting in itself and also led to an intriguing discussion in general terms about L2 grammars. Boping Yuan’s empirical study investigated Chinese speakers’ L2 acquisition of English “wh-on-earth” questions.

His results indicated that Chinese speakers of English can learn and store various wh-on-earth forms in apparently native-like ways, but without in fact being endowed with fully elaborated features. The interesting point in all this is, what kind of answer you would expect to the question, ‘Who on earth would buy that house?’ For native speakers of English, such questions are marked for a negative response. You might term them, perhaps, rhetorical questions. The person who asks this question is really focusing on the fact that the house is very overpriced or in a terrible condition or location. Apparently, the Chinese translation of this sentence does not carry the same negative marking, so it’s perfectly OK, from a Chinese point of view, to reply ‘Peter would.’ Boping Yuan stressed that it’s therefore very difficult for Chinese speakers of English to pick up this salient feature and cheerily admitted that it had taken him over 20 years to do so.

He referred to features being ‘dormant’. By this, he meant that they haven’t been activated but they have the capacity to be woken up, so it is possible that a Chinese speaker of English will eventually notice the negative marking of the wh-on-earth questions. There was a lot of discussion about the idea of features being dormant. He prefers ‘dormant’ to ‘inert’ because of the possibility of recovery. He was using this idea as a counter-point to Larry Selinker who advocated the concept of fossilisation, which sounds irredeemable.

I was taught by Larry Selinker for some years in the 1990s and at the time, as I recall, he was focusing on L2 speakers’ apparent failure to notice things that perhaps seemed much more blatant as evidence than the quite elusive evidence that Boping Yuan’s Chinese speakers were failing to notice in his study. So, for example, the above reply ‘Peter would’: this might be delivered as the excessive ‘Peter would buy the house’ or various attempts at deletion, such as ‘Peter would buy’ or ‘Peter would it’. What I remember Larry arguing was that, if a learner is exposed to plenteous correct examples but persists in producing partial examples themselves, then you have the concept of interlanguage. One of the key characteristics of interlanguage is fossilisation.

So, in some ways, Boping Yuan’s talk seemed very positive in that it offered the hope, potentially, of L2 learners achieving native-like proficiency in very large numbers.

Crossing continents

That’s Europe on the right and Asia on the left, from the taxi window on the way to my meeting in Istanbul.

Nigh on 30 years ago, when I started teaching English to a very wide range of nationalities in the UK, I think it’s safe to say that intrinsic motivation, at least among the grown-ups, was fairly high. Students tended to be genuine language enthusiasts, more intrigued than frustrated by swathes of phrasal verbs and idioms, and often saying they wanted native-like pronunciation.

The business of teaching and testing English hasn’t just grown, it’s multiplied, exploded into a vast global concern. Those earnest types I remember fondly of course still exist, but they are heavily outnumbered by the globalising (actively and passively) crowds of people for whom learning English is a no-brainer.

Here in Istanbul, there’s no particular expectation that business will be conducted with some jolly British chaps (or chapesses). English is rather what’s needed to trade with all viable nations, and to travel with.

So what about the phrasal verbs, the quasi-humorous idioms? Which accents work best in airport lounges, taxis and coffee shops, whether you’re a traveller or on staff there?

Taking the wrong line?

Leaving St Petersburg behind, I sit on the swish train to Moscow, which takes only four and a half hours with very few stops.

In the UK these days, carriages are relatively quiet compared to a few years ago, as people have moved to texting and emailing more than making mobile calls. However, all the Russians around me on the train took or made several calls each during the journey, in addition to laptop and iPad activity. There were also a Spanish couple, a Brazilian man and some French people nearby.

Much of the time, the view from the window was fairly unchanging, and before each stop the announcement came first in Russian and then English. Having stated the name of the station and saying that the train would stop only for a minute, the announcement said, “For your safety, we ask you not to alight unless this is your destination.”

For me as a native English speaker, this was fine; indeed it conjured an amusing nostalgia, and a hint of Brief Encounter. But surely the point of using English wasn’t to entertain; rather, it was to use a globally accessible language, just the kind of English I’ve been musing about recently.

So what, I wonder, did the non-Russians make of the announcement? Did “alight” come over as intended, or did it seem to contradict an earlier announcement prohibiting smoking on the train or platforms? What aspects of grammar and vocabulary made the announcement particularly challenging for non-native speakers of English? And how would you re-phrase the announcement so that it becomes communicative rather than potentially obstructive?

Passing (on) thoughts from St Petersburg

Is absence presence or just something left (out)?

There’s not much to read in hotel rooms, and once you’ve again accepted that the Gideon Bible is still what it was the last time you looked at it, your attention inevitably returns to the signs and notices.

Signs and notices are a staple of lower-level language learning and testing materials. They are handy because they are authentic and self-contained. They are often in English because it’s the language of global travel. And they are often therefore translated into English, rather than having been originally composed in English.

Looking at this leaflet cover, and if you take the first line into account, it’s fairly obvious what’s missing from the second line. But without the first line, could you be certain? It might be “there”, or it might be “away”, “off”, “away from it all”, “to heaven” or “rich”.

The translation has an error of omission, an absence that has presence as information about the translator’s current level of knowledge of English. You can learn about Russian from this direct translation. Would it be useful to use this in a gap-fill test?

Once you’ve considered that, what about this conversational exchange overheard yesterday?

A: Have you read [name of a novel]?
B: No, have you read?

What’s missing from B’s statement: the name of the novel, or “it”? And again, would this be useful as a gap-fill test?

Forgotten in translation

This picture shows a fairly standard hotel bathroom sign (this one just happens to be in a bathroom in St Petersburg).

It got me thinking that I might have abbreviated “Did you forget something?” — which I assume “Forget something?” represents — differently.

As a UK native speaker of English, I’d have opted to consider the original question in the form “Have you forgotten something?” — the present perfect sits more comfortably with how I see the situation: the forgetting has effect now. I would therefore have written the sign as “Forgotten something?” It would perhaps also work as “Forgot something?”; you could even put “If you’ve forgotten anything, then…”

Now, I’m not suggesting that this isn’t a nerdy thought; and I’m certainly not suggesting that anyone could possibly misunderstand the sign as it is. But the choice of language is interesting. ‘Forget’ is actually the most accessible version, since it uses the basic present form of the verb, and it is the form that a foreign visitor is most likely to know.

As English continues its global spread, its uses and forms, gently pressured by so many more second-language than native-language users, are perhaps slowly moulding to more accessible forms, more regular patterns.

And this has profound implications for writers of language materials and tests.

What can you learn from others’ mistakes?

Here are a few interesting examples I have experienced of non-native English speakers using English professionally.

The first set of examples are utterances I heard and jotted down at two conferences, spoken by two established, expert and academic speakers giving different talks:

• “…native speakers who can talk your head off…”
• “Let me mention the most of these three…”
• “…and sometimes you slip a little down the slippery slope.”
• “Either the judges are fudging or they are not having a right sample.”
• “For what examples I have mentioned, it is clear that…”
• “There is more later to come.”

The second example is a note I received in a package containing a replacement object:

Dear Russel
Following the water proof wallet request it.

In each case, I think it’s interesting to reflect on the following questions:

• Is it a mistake?
• If so, where is the error, and what could have caused it?
• What do you think about the way language is being used?
• What do you feel about the way language is being used?
• What would you say to the person who said this?
• For those of you in the business of writing tests or teaching materials, what here needs to be taken account of? How?
• For those of you in the business of applying or interpreting CEFR levels, what would you say here?

We would love to hear what you think, so do feel free to add a comment (click ‘Leave a reply’ above).

Capito?

David Sedaris has a way with words, and a very good way with words when it comes to capturing aspects of the troubles of language learning. He mentioned recently on the radio that a learner “nodded the way you do when you’re foreign and you’ve understood that the sentence has finished.”

Mind you, even that could have been deceptive. Some cultures take nodding as a negative and head-shaking as positive, so the chap Sedaris observed may not have known much — and he may have been denying even that!