The Google Alert for “translation” was all abuzz today with the controversy over translating the Bible into Jamaican patois. Here’s hoping that the Bible Society of the West Indies reads Translation: Getting it Right before forging ahead with the project, which it estimates will take 12 years and cost US$1 million; moreover, this story highlights the issues faced by translators who work in languages that are not standardized.
For most of us, a real dilemma of word choice results when two of our trusted terminology resources conflict, or when the meaning of the source text seems to be deliberately ambiguous. However, few of us have to cope with translating from or into a language that has few/no/radically conflicting written resources. For example, the Wikipedia entry for the Jamaican language states “Because of its status as a non-standard language, there is no standard or official way of writing Jamaican Patois (for example the word ‘there’ can be written ‘de’, ‘deh’ or ‘dere’; and the word for ‘three’ is most commonly spelt ‘tree’, but it can be spelt ‘tri’ or ‘trii’ to distinguish it from the noun tree). ” By comparison, coping with a disagreement between the Grand Dictionnaire Terminologique and the Presses Pocket French-English Dictionary of Computing seems hardly worth complaining about.
An interesting side note to the issue of non-standardized languages is the role that e-mail, texting and the Internet at large play in creating written language. Until the advent of e-mail and texting, most people’s writing was done in a formal context; i.e. school assignments, letters to the newspaper editor, complaints to the gas company, etc. Today, most of us write a great deal in informal contexts such as e-mails and text messages. Here in the U.S. we can see that spoken forms of words are now, for better or worse, often used in writing as well (“See ya!” “Gotta go!” “Gonna get back to work!”). In countries where the spoken language has historically had a more formal written form, for example Swiss Standard German (largely written) versus the many variations of Swiss German (largely spoken), many young people now e-mail, chat and text in the dialects that they speak, rather than the more formal language used in schools, government and the media.
One of my students a few years ago used the verb “go” (as in “said”) in her final paper. Now mind you, this was at the graduate level!!! I commented “Where did she go?” and gave her a lower grade. One of my biggest pet peeves… the decline of writing skills of our nation’s youth.
Yes, I’m only 38 and have already become a curmudgeon 😉
@Jill, so did you go “That’s not proper English”?! I agree, I’m 36 and I despise receiving poorly written e-mails from the younger generation! But a graduate student writing “She would go ‘Fantastic, I love it!'” in a paper? Inexcusable!!
Two points. First, I personally think that language evolution is natural and that people should avoid “language rage” (a topic much discussed on Language Log http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/). To me, e-mail is not a formal mode of communication and one cannot expect the same care or attention to go into the language used in an e-mail as in a paper-printed letter or report, etc. To become upset about this reality is not productive. Instead, perhaps it is time to accept that different language conventions apply to e-mail than to other modes of communication, and these conventions will not perturb the younger generation–and in 50 years our old-person’s perspective will seem unfathomable. The English language hasn’t died out yet, and it won’t because of e-mail conventions. So I shrug at this issue. (As a linguist, I actually find e-mail writing to be fascinating on a variety of levels.)
Second, the translation of any large work but especially the Bible into an otherwise noncodified or standardized language is per se an exercise in standardization. After the Bible comes out in Jamaican patois, suddenly that speech will have a standard that any future writing in that speech can fall back on. My hope then is that the translators who undertake such projects really devote themselves to understanding the phonology and syntax of the target language so that they come up with a practical, usable standardization that will serve the people who speak it well for eons to come.
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Nice article.
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Thank you! At the moment I don’t have much time for guest posts but I appreciate the offer!