Lost in translation An illustrated compendium of untranslatable words from around the world

Ella Frances Sanders

Book - 2014

"An artistic collection of 50 drawings featuring unique, funny, and poignant foreign words that have no direct translation into English. Did you know that the Japanese have a word to express the way sunlight filters through the leaves of trees? Or that there's a Swedish word to describe the reflection of the moon across the water? The nuanced beauty of language is even more interesting and relevant in our highly communicative, globalized modern world. Lost in Translation brings this wonder to life with 50 ink illustrations featuring the foreign word, the language of origin, and a pithy definition. The words and definitions range from the lovely, such as goya, the Urdu word to describe the transporting suspension of belief that can... occur in good storytelling, to the funny, like the Hawaiian pana po'o, which describes the act of scratching your head to remember something you've forgotten. Each beautiful, simple illustration adds just the right amount of visual intrigue to anchor the words and their meanings"--

Saved in:

2nd Floor Show me where

410/Sanders
1 / 1 copies available
Location Call Number   Status
2nd Floor 410/Sanders Checked In
Subjects
Published
Berkeley : Ten Speed Press [2014]
Language
English
Main Author
Ella Frances Sanders (-)
Edition
First edition
Physical Description
1 volume (unpaged) : color illustrations ; 18 x 20 cm
ISBN
9781607747109
Contents unavailable.
Review by New York Times Review

IT'S SURPRISING THAT even in this data-driven era, we don't know exactly how many words there are in English. Every specialty has its jargon, of course, its own subset of terms that separate the knowing from the newbies. When expertise is often measured in language, knowing the lingo shows that you're ready to talk the talk, which is especially important in fields that touch our lives as frequently and intimately as food and finance. That makes this the perfect time for a book like Dan Jurafsky's "The Language of Food." A professor of linguistics and computer science at Stanford who teaches a course and maintains a blog of the same name, Jurafsky has worked with other computational linguists to study the ways food is described, assembling thousands of online menus, one million restaurant reviews and five million beer commentaries. The resulting book, with its abundance of colorful culinary and etymological history framing serious research, is a model of rigor and readability. At this scale, reviews are no longer opinions: They are data. We learn that positive beer reviews tend to use vague words (amazing, perfect, incredible), whereas negative ones are specific and even technical in their vocabulary (metallic, colorless, overcarbonated). Bad experiences in restaurants become narratives, using the pronouns "we," "us" and "our" much more often than in positive reviews ("we waited," "our entrees"). The most common words used in negative reviews don't even have to do with food: manager, attitude, mistake, tip. Jurafsky is particularly skilled at connecting familiar food words with surprising linguistic patterns, and there are revelations on nearly every page. A large number of sexual metaphors in positive restaurant reviews correlates with higher prices on the menu. The language of drug addiction ("These cupcakes are like crack") is associated with junk food - blaming the food that we know is bad for us. Expensive potato chips use negative phrases relating to craft ("never fried," "nothing fake or phony"), while inexpensive potato chips emphasize "tradition" or "classic" recipes. Ice cream is usually named with round open vowels ("Rocky Road," "Cookie Dough"), but cracker names tend to use thin-sounding closed vowels ("Ritz," "Wheat Thins," "Triscuit"). Though food terms are the richest source of new foreign-language additions to English dictionaries today, the process by which one culture adopts another's cuisine is nothing new. A word's etymology is its biography, telling the story of how it came to have the meaning we know. In tandem with his many etymological histories, Jurafsky traces the history of the foods themselves: Ketchup was originally a fish sauce; sushi initially used fermented fish; pecan pie started as custard; fish and chips, ceviche and tempura all hark back to an ancient recipe invented by Zoroastrian Persians. His brilliant achievement is to weave together the journey food makes through culture with the journey its name makes through language. John Lanchester has also written engagingly about food, particularly in his outrageous and delectable novel "The Debt to Pleasure." But his attention has recently shifted to finance, and particularly the task of putting the Humpty Dumpty world economy back together after the crisis of 2008. A writer with a fine-tuned ear for irony, Lanchester perceives the often opaque language of banking as a cloak - intentional or not - for the dubious actions of financial institutions. He explains this language in "How to Speak Money," an idiosyncratic collection of short, sharp essays translating the jargon of finance with admirable concision and wit. Translation is necessary because so many of these terms have come to mean the opposite of what they seem to mean. Lanchester coins the term "reversification" to describe this phenomenon. "Bailout" goes from pouring water out to pouring money in. "Inflation" doesn't mean getting larger but rather buying less. "Security" now means risk, and "credit" now means debt. A hedge fund should mean a fund that is protected against loss; instead hedge funds are enormously risky bets - he notes that 90 percent fail - that are nevertheless largely unregulated. The confusion of important terms is also a problem: How can voters make informed decisions if they keep mixing up mean and median, or debt and deficit? Reversification also occurs at the level of economic theory and practice. The problem with mortgage-backed securities wasn't the mortgages or the securities - it was the backing. If the institution that granted the mortgage no longer has a stake in its payment, Lanchester writes, "the basic premise of banking - that you lend money only to people who can pay it back - has been broken." This led to the reversal of the fundamental tenet of neoliberal economics "that markets can self-regulate," since the markets created the problem that governments then had to step in to fix. Profits were private, but losses were shared: another dismaying switcheroo. The result is increasing inequality, the moral backdrop of the book. The neoliberal mantra of cutting taxes on the rich, dominant since the era of Reagan and Thatcher, was accompanied by the promise that all incomes would rise accordingly. Instead, though G.D.P. has grown, an astonishing increase in the assets of the already rich has not led to improvement for the poor and middle-class. In Lanchester's words, "It's becoming clear that if these policies were going to work, they would have already worked by now." TWO OTHER RECENTLY published glossaries are much slighter. In "How to Speak Brit," Christopher J. Moore actually provides little advice on how to understand British English. His short but desultory miscellany includes entries for "eavesdropper," "lame duck," "egghead" and many other terms that are perfectly standard in American English. The articles are light in tone but often brittle and charmless; the definition for "anorak" reads : "A sloppy, unattractive waterproof coat and a slang word for a person who is gray and colorless, such as a politician." The "posh" entry is devoted to the notion that wealthy steamship passengers' trunks were formerly marked "Port Out, Starboard Home," presumably for cooler cabins on the voyage to India - a story so thoroughly and frequently debunked that the Oxford English Dictionary warns readers about it. Elsewhere, he seems to lament the fading importance of the upper-crust accent. Moore's working conviction seems to be that English comes from England and that it used to be better. A similar lack of basic research mars "Lost in Translation," a slim collection of "untranslatable" foreign-language words from the illustrator Ella Frances Sanders. A word in one language without an equivalent in another exposes a lexical hole to fill, and these can be fun, especially when accompanied by the author's graphic images depicting each word's meaning in a vivid folk-art style. The Russian razliubit means "to fall out of love." The Swedish tretar means a second refill, or "threefill," of coffee. The German Kabelsalat ("cable salad") means the mass of tangled cords under your workstation. If the selection suggests an online top 10 list of cool things, that's because it essentially is: It began as a much-forwarded blog post. For all its charm, this grab bag of language tourism is flawed by the absence of pronunciation guidance, the uncertain grammar of some definitions and the absence of fonts for several source languages. PETER SOKOLOWSKI is editor at large at Merriam-Webster.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [November 30, 2014]

Introduction How you do introduce the untranslatable? In our highly connected and communicative world, we have more ways than ever to express ourselves, to tell others how we feel, and to explain the importance or insignificance of our days. The speed and frequency of our exchanges leave just enough room for misunderstandings, though, and now perhaps more than ever before, what we actually mean to say gets lost in translation. The ability to communicate more frequently and faster hasn't eliminated the potential for leaving gaps between meaning and interpretation, and emotions and intentions are misread all too often. The words in this book may be answers to questions you didn't even know to ask, and perhaps some you did. They might pinpoint emotions and experiences that seemed elusive and indescribable, or they may cause you to remember a person you'd long forgotten. If you take something away from this book other than some brilliant conversation starters, let it be the realization (or affirmation) that you are human, that you are fundamentally, intrinsically bound to every single person on the planet with language and with feelings. As much as we like to differentiate ourselves, to feel like individuals and rave on about expression and freedom and the experiences that are unique to each one of us, we are all made of the same stuff. We laugh and cry in much the same way, we learn words and then forget them, we meet people from places and cultures different from our own and yet somehow we understand the lives they are living. Language wraps its understanding and punctuation around us all, tempting us to cross boundaries and helping us to comprehend the impossibly difficult questions that life relentlessly throws at us. Languages aren't unchanging, though they can sometimes hold a false sense of permanence. They do evolve and occasionally die, and whether you speak a few words of one or a thousand words of many, they help to shape us--they give us the ability to voice an opinion, to express love or frustration, to change someone's mind. For me, making this book has been more than a creative process. It's caused me to look at human nature in an entirely new way, and I find myself recognizing these nouns, adjectives, and verbs in the people I walk by on the street. I see boketto in the eyes of an old man sitting at the ocean's edge, and the resfeber that has taken over the hearts of friends as they prepare to journey across the world to an unknown culture. I hope this book helps you find a few long-lost parts of yourself, that it brings to mind fond memories, or that it helps put into words thoughts and feelings that you could never clearly express before. Perhaps you'll find the word that perfectly describes your second cousin once removed, the way you felt two summers ago that you were never able to fully describe, or the look in the eyes of the person sitting across from you right now. Eckhart Tolle wrote, lWords reduce reality to something the human mind can grasp, which isn't very much.W I'm hesitant to agree. Words allow us to grasp and hold onto an extraordinary amount. Sure, all languages can be picked apart and reduced to just a few vowels or symbols or sounds, but the ability that language gives us is incredibly complex. There may be some small essential gaps in your mother tongue, but never fear: you can look to other languages to define what you're feeling, and these pages are your starting point. So go and get lost in translation. Excerpted from Lost in Translation: An Illustrated Compendium of Untranslatable Words from Around the World by Ella Frances Sanders All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.