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10 FALSE FRIENDS EVERY ACADEMIC TRANSLATOR SHOULD STAY AWAY FROM

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Every academic translator has a common enemy to fight: “false friends.”

False friends are words that appear to be similar in two languages, but their meanings are actually quite different.

They have a common etymological origin, but their definitions changed over time as they moved in different linguistic directions.

I have personally counted more than 50 of them in English and Spanish. They are making headway because of their similarity in sound and, in some cases, spelling, and the proximity of the two languages in some communities in the United States and Latin America. Inexperienced English-to-Spanish translators and vice versa fall in this trap because of their lack of familiarity with both languages.

These words traveled slowly and weren’t a threat when paper dictionaries were the only tools that an academic editor or translator had. Today, they travel at the speed of the Internet.

Here are 10 of the most common “false friends”:

1. Aggressive/agresivo: Be careful with this one if you are talking about violence or behavior. In English, you are describing a pushy person, an abrasive individual or an illness. In Spanish, on the other hand, you are talking about a violent person.

2. Casual/casual: In English, this word means “informal,” “without formalities” or “ceremonies.” In Spanish, it means “unforeseen” (imprevisto) or “by chance” (impredecible). If you hear, for example, “I dressed casually for the party” in English, don’t translate it as “I dressed by chance for the party.”

3. Crime/crimen: If you are a legal translator, law editor or interpreter, the life of a person could be in your hands if you don’t know the nuances of these words.

“Crimen” in Spanish means “murder,” “homicide” or “injury with the intent to kill.” The English “crime,” on the other hand, is defined as “an action harmful to the public good and legally prohibited.” Thus, rape, drug dealing, theft, and battery are crimes and do not necessarily involve murder.

4. Definite/definido: In English, when you want to be positive or express something that is certain, you use “definite”  (“She was definite about her answer”). For something that was “explained” (explicado) or “clearly marked” (claramente marcado) in Spanish, you use “definido.”

5. Disorder/desorden: If you are dealing especially with medical or scientific translation, beware of the differences. One of the words meanings in English is “malady,” “illness” or “disturbance in physical or mental health functions.” In Spanish, it could be “confusion,” “mess,” or “public disturbance.” In non-medical terms, such as “the girl left the room in complete disorder when she went out,” they are synonymous.

6. Elaborate/elaborado: “Complex,” or “worked out in great detail,” are the English meanings of this English word that has a simple rendering in Spanish: “hecho” (made) and “producido industrialmente” (industrially produced). For example: “Me gusta más el pan elaborado en fábrica” (I prefer factory-made bread).

7. Global/global:  The word’s similar spelling makes it irresistible for lazy translators. For starters, the English “global” refers almost exclusively to the whole world. Two of its synonyms are “worldwide” and “universal.” The Spanish means “tomado en conjunto” (taken as a whole). For example, “analizaremos los resultados globales” can be translated as “we will analyze the overall results.” For words like “globalize,” “global village” and “globalize” we use, in that order, “universalizar,” “aldea mundial” and “mundialización”.

8. Ignore/ignorar: Another sneaky friend, “ignorar” has been gaining undeserved popularity among Spanish speakers. In English, it means “disregard” or “do not pay attention.” In Spanish, it means “not to know” (no saber) or “lack of education” (falta de educación). However, the nouns “ignorant” and “ignorance” can be synonymous in both languages.

9. Molest/molestar: By far, one of my favorite “false friends.” My students blush when I give them a sentence to read with “molestar,” which they think has sexual overtones. They think that “mi amigo me molesta mucho en la clase” means “my friend molests me a lot in class.” But they relax when I tell them the real meaning: “My friend bothers me (or annoys me) a lot in class.”

10. Topic/tópico: Despite being so close in spelling, these two words have almost nothing in common. The English “topic” refers to “a subject of conversation or discussion.” The Spanish “tópico” could be a medicine or a chiche.

How can translators avoid falling into the false friends’ trap? The answer sounds obvious, but it’s overlooked by inexperienced translators: realizing that languages, like members of a family, may have a common ancestor, but are different. Another suggestion is that if the word that you are translating sounds similar to one in the target language, beware and dig deeper. It may take you a few more minutes to finish the job, but you might unmask a false friend.

We Can All Be Polyglots

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A friend in Paris has sent me a recent article from an unexpected source, The New Yorker. It’s by one of their well-known staff writers Judith Thurman and its title is The mystery of people who speak dozens of languages. In what follows I will try to dispel some of the mystery.

Pruned of its New Yorker chattiness, the first part of the article gives interesting information about famous polyglots in the past:

*  According to Pliny the Elder, the Greco-Persian king Mithridates VI, who ruled twenty-two nations in the first century B.C., administered their laws in as many languages, and could harangue in each of them.
*  Plutarch claimed that Cleopatra very seldom had need of an interpreter, and was the only monarch of her Greek dynasty fluent in Egyptian.
*  Elizabeth I also allegedly mastered the tongues of her realm—Welsh, Cornish, Scottish, and Irish, plus six others [including the language of her enemy, Spanish].
*  The prowess of Giuseppe Mezzofanti (1774-1849) is more astounding and better documented. Mezzofanti, an Italian cardinal, was fluent in at least thirty languages and studied another forty-two, including, he claimed, Algonquin. In the decades that he lived in Rome, as the chief custodian of the Vatican Library, notables from around the world dropped by to interrogate him in their mother tongues, and he flitted as nimbly among them as a bee in a rose garden.
*  Thurman misses out the 18th-century English orientalist and translator Sir William Jones, who was reputed to know 26 languages.

Those were champions, so-called hyperglots. Their achievement was the fruit of many years of learning. But scarcely less remarkable is the achievement by the little girl Bella Devyatkina who was described last month on this blog and who could converse in seven languages at the age of four. Yet the underlying reason why all of them could do what they did is the same. It’s that human psychology and the physical human brain are built from infancy, perhaps from birth, for multilingualism (bilingualism being a special case of multilingualism and not the other way round.)  Bella’s mother insists that her daughter, for all her precocity, is not a genius. It’s just that she has been put in situations and relationships where she responds to the motivation of receiving a present from speakers of other languages.

Scientists and philosophers agree that language is one of the marvels of human evolution, No other animals have anything comparable. To it has been added another evolutionary marvel: the ability to learn multiple languages. The examples quoted above suggest that in principle there is no limit to their number. Yes, there are practical limits; the time we can devote to learning them and the length of our lives for instance, and the amount of contact we have with other-language speakers . And there are also psychological constraints, in particular motivation, without which we may be unwilling to work at it. But not the structure of our minds.

There are different degrees of multilingualism, which makes it difficult to compare polyglots. Full multilingualism requires much more than knowing the grammars and vocabularies of the languages. The functioning multilingual can do the following:

a)  Keep the languages separate. Actually very young bilinguals are prone to mixing their languages in the same sentence or utterance, a phenomenon linguists call code switching. Typically this weakness disappears around age three, but vestiges of it remain throughout life. We multilinguals are all used to occurrences of leakage or interference between our languages; for instance the common phenomenon of false friends. However, they dwindle to a frequency where they don’t hamper communication.
Just how the separation is maintained is a matter of disagreement. Some psycholinguists believe we keep our languages in separate drawers, as it were, and take them out and activate them as we need them. Others think that on the contrary they are all present in our working minds but we suppress the ones we don’t need at the moment.
b)  Switch between the languages. This may be done at will and almost instantaneously; or the switch may be triggered automatically by a stimulus, for instance when answering a question in the language in which it is asked.
c)  Use the languages appropriately to express the thoughts we want to convey or to understand what others are telling us. It may be, however, that we aren’t equally competent at this in all our languages; it depends very much on the experience we’ve had in using them.
d)  Use the languages in ways that are appropriate for the speaker/writer and for the addressee. For more about it and the weakness of machine translation in this respect, enter pragmatics in the Search box on the right.

There are several ways in which we can learn languages. For example, “Mezzofanti, the son of a carpenter, picked up Latin by standing outside a seminary, listening to the boys recite their conjugations.” I learnt my mother language, English, unconsciously and effortlessly from birth as I’m sure you did; three languages (French, German, Latin) in compulsory formal courses at school from age 11; one (Arabic) in formal university courses from age 18 because I was interested in it and thought it would help me get a job; and two others later (Spanish and Valencian) without ever taking a course in them but from elementary teach-yourself books and everyday conversation with native speakers with whom I was working. Apart from English, age had little to do with it. If I went to live in another country, even at my advanced age, I wouldn’t hesitate to learn its language. Of course, as with any natural skill, there is a pathology: a minority of people may have learning problems, and language learning becomes more difficult, requires more conscious effort, once the stage of early plasticity is passed.  It has seemed to me, though, that most of my English and Canadian compatriots who say they can’t learn a foreign language are like people who don’t learn to swim because they’re afraid of the water.

Sources
Judith Thurman. The mystery of people who speak dozens of languages. The New Yorker, 3 September 2018. My thanks to Philippe Lambert for sending it.

William Jones (philologist). Wikipedia, 2018.

Image
Cardinal Guseppe Mezzofanti.

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How to Increase Your Book Sales with Accurate Literary Translations

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Translating a work of fiction into other languages represents a chance to introduce your book to a wider audience and substantially increase book sales, whether you’re with a traditional publisher or an independent author looking to find new readers.

Why You Should Think About Translating Your Book

The main reason to expand to other countries comes down to sheer numbers. A book in English will only reach English speakers, which leaves out the rest of the world. Many works of literature have been translated into different languages so that people can enjoy them all over the world.

Some of them have gone on to become international bestsellers, including:

  • The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Expuéry (originally French)
  • The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Steig Larsson (originally Swedish)
  • The Alchemist by Paolo Coelho (originally Portuguese)
  • The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco (originally Italian)
  • One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez (originally Spanish)
  • Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling (originally English)
  • Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (originally Russian)
  • The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas (originally French)
  • The Vegetarian by Han Kang (originally Korean)

General literature is not the only type of fiction that can find success in foreign markets. Authors of genre fiction, including thrillers, romance, mystery and fantasy, have come to realize there is large, untapped foreign market that is hungry for the type of books they write. They know there is money to be made and so many authors are having their English-language novels translated into German, French, Spanish and other languages.

The Challenges of Translating Fiction Into Foreign Languages

Of course, translating a book from its native language is not easy. In fact, it is perhaps the biggest challenge translators face. The trouble lies in the very essence of language itself, especially when it comes to fiction novels. Here are a few challenges translators face when translation works of fiction:

1) Translating Abstract Concepts – Author’s Style, Tone, Meaning

You can translate words literally, but conveying the ideas, style, tone, meaning, and even the spirit of the story is a totally different matter. A word in one language might not even exist in another. Then there are the idioms, phrases and references that are completely unique to one language or culture. Something that makes sense to an English speaker might not convey any meaning to a Spanish speaker…and vice versa.

2) Translating Across Different Sentence and Word Structures

Another difficulty is that languages can have entirely different sentence and word structure. For example, Arabic is read from right to left and subject pronouns are included in conjugated verbs. Deborah Smith, the translator of the Korean novel The Vegetarian, relates that Korean uses a “subject-object-verb language so a lot of information is delayed until the end of the sentence.” Korean authors also rely heavily on repetition and ambiguity, which might not have the same poetic effect when translated into English. Capturing the essence of the source language, while making the story flow and be relatable to readers in other languages all comes down to the knowledge and skill of the translator.

The Importance of Using A Native Speaker for Fiction Translation

The knowledge of a culture is important in foreign language literary translation, which is why it is vital to use a translator who is a native speaker and who fully understands the cultural references, humor and subtext in the book in its original language. You need someone who is capable of conveying the meaning of a story, while still staying true to the original intent. In many ways, an expert fiction translator has to be a gifted author in his or own right. At the same time, it is also vital to be accurate and avoid mistakes in translation, or worse, adding or making up things that were never in the original.

For a more in-depth look at the challenges of translating a specific work of fiction – in this case J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series – check out our blog here.

Let ALTA Help You Find A Professional Fiction Translator

Translating a work of fiction into other languages represents a unique challenge that should only be handled by experts. ALTA Language Services has a network of 2000+ native language literary translators in over 100 languages who can interpret the meaning and spirit of a novel, while maintaining the accuracy and integrity of the source material. For more information about translating a work of fiction, contact us today.

Kristin Wallace is a USA Today Bestselling fiction author and advertising copywriter who is addicted to learning and writing about language, culture and art around the world. She lives and works in sunny Miami, Florida.

Posted by  on September 27, 2018

Top 5 Most Popular African Languages Everyone Must Learn

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Africa, with its over one billion people, is not just the second most populous continent in the world but home to the most diverse languages. The continent has over 1,500 different languages.

As the world celebrates International Mother Language Day to promote linguistic and cultural diversity, it would be ideal to learn some African languages that will enable you to communicate with people while doing business on the continent or enjoying tourist destinations. It will also help you understand the diverse cultures easily.

Here are 5 African languages you should know:

Swahili

This is the most spoken language in Africa, with over 100 million speakers. Also known as Kiswahili, the language is a Bantu language believed to have originated from other languages, specifically Arabic, following historical interactions between Arabs from the Middle East and East Africans. Swahili is the lingua franca of the African Great Lakes region and other parts of eastern and south-eastern Africa, including Uganda, Rwanda, Tanzania, Kenya, Burundi, Mozambique, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

It is currently the national language of four countries, namely Tanzania, Uganda, Kenya and the DRC. Shikomor, the official language in Comoros and also spoken in Mayotte (Shimaore), is also related to Swahili. With Swahili being widely spoken, it becomes imperative to learn the language as it will afford you the opportunity to visit and transact business with countries like Tanzania and Kenya.

You could also go to Rwanda, Uganda, Burundi, and Mozambique and do same. It shouldn’t be too hard for you to learn Swahili, as unlike other African languages, it does not use tones. It basically uses the Latin alphabet. And learning the language would also be easier if you already know some Arabic, as there are so many Arabic loanwords in Swahili. To practice some Swahili greetings, here’s how to go about it.

Amharic

This is the second most popular language in Ethiopia after Oromo, having over 21 million speakers. It is spoken as a mother tongue by the Amhara (an ethnic group traditionally inhabiting the northern and central highlands of Ethiopia) as well as other populations residing in major cities and towns of Ethiopia. Currently, Amharic is the official language of Ethiopia and also the working language of several of the states within the country. Over 2 million Ethiopians living outside the country also speak this language, as it is the second most Semitic language in the world after Arabic. Semitic languages are a branch of the Afroasiatic language family originating from the Middle East. Amharic which is related to Arabic and Hebrew, is written in the Ge’ez or Ethiopic script, with over 30 different characters. Learning to write and speak this language should be a part of your to-do list if you love literature, as the language continues to host so many Ethiopian literature – poetry and novels. Getting to know Amharic would enable you to keep abreast of a wide range of literature from the country, besides learning its diverse cultures.



Yoruba

The third most spoken language in Africa, Yoruba is also one of Nigeria’s official languages, serving as the mother tongue of the Yoruba people in the country. It has over 30 million speakers in Nigeria, Benin and Togo and it is widely spoken by West African expatriates in the US and UK. Yoruba, which has over 15 dialects, also forms part of the also forms part of Volta-Niger branch of the Niger-Congo family of languages. If you want to say hello in Yoruba, you should say “Bawo”. But take note, Yoruba is a tonal language with three tones: high, mid and low. Take some lessons in Yoruba. There are millions of sites and portals for doing so.  On the lighter side, if you are a fan of Nigerian films, then you should learn Yoruba, as the language is often used in its traditional films.

Oromo

Over 30 million people in the Horn of Africa, specifically in Ethiopia, Somalia, Kenya and Egypt speak Oromo. The Oromo ethnic group is the largest in Ethiopia, accounting for over 40 percent of the population. The language falls under the Cushitic branch of the Afroasiatic language family. In the 20th century (between 1972 and 1991), Oromo was banned during the reign of Haile Selassie, and by the communist regime that followed his overthrow. The language has since adopted the Latin alphabet and it is now used in education, the media, government administration and national commerce. Here are some tips.

Hausa

Spoken as a first language by some 27 million people, Hausa is one of Nigeria’s official languages and one of the most spoken Chadic languages (a branch of the Afroasiatic language family) on the continent. Hausa originated as the language of the Hausa people in northern Nigeria and southern Niger. It immediately spread as the lingua franca of Western Africa as a result of trade. The language is spoken mainly in the following areas: northern Nigeria, Niger, Burkina Faso, Benin, Chad, Congo, and Cameroon. Other countries like Ghana, Central African Republic, Eritrea, Togo and Sudan also speak Hausa. Hausa is a tonal language, but do not let that discourage you from learning the language. It uses the Boko and Latin alphabet, which is the writing system for most Muslims in western Africa. Get abreast of the language.