The mayor of Eu wants to have a longer name for her town, writes Charles Bremner in an amusing piece in the Times Online. The number of tourists is dropping and the mayor believes this is due to Eu being hard to find on the internet. Indeed, searching for “Eu” will sooner get you to Brussels or Strasbourg than to Eu. On the other hand, would it not help if Eu registered the domain eu.fr?
You would think that if a newspaper were to print an article on the Dutch Word of the Year, they would take care to spell all the candidates correctly. Not so in case of de Volkskrant, who misspelled runner-up wiiën (”to play on a Nintendo Wii”) as wieën. Come on, folks, how hard can it be?
Suppose you’re an English speaking person working in a Welsh town. Your boss tells you to construct a traffic sign telling lorries to stay off of a certain road. This being Wales, the sign has to be bilingual. You send an email to the in-house translation service, asking for the Welsh version of “No entry for heavy goods vehicles. Residential site only”. You promptly receive an email containing only the following:
Nid wyf yn y swyddfa ar hyn o bryd. Anfonwch unrhyw waith i’w gyfieithu.
Sounds reasonable, doesn’t it? It’s two sentences and it’s about the same length. You send everything off to the sign making company and a few days later, there’s a shiny new sign to keep English and Welsh truck drivers out of the local residential area.
Except that in Welsh, the sign reads, “I am not in the office at the moment. Send any work to be translated.”
The French have come up with a new way to save themselves the trouble of having to speak English. Operating through the Organisation internationale de la francophonie (International Organization of La Francophonie), they have reinforced French’s traditional status as one of the two official languages of the Olympics.
Why?
Or should I say, pourquoi?
I’m all for using two languages at the Olympics, but that should be English and the native language of the host country. French has no place as an official language at worldwide events, even if you accept it as the world’s second most influential language. It only has that ranking because the French-speaking community is so actively promoting its use around the world, which I’m tempted to say is solely to save the French the effort of having to learn English. The paper by George Weber, linked above, has a more balanced discussion of the status of French (the text between Figs. 10 and 11 is of particular interest), but it comes down to the same conclusion: French is artificially held to be more influential than it really is.
Abdou Diouf, the Secretary-General of La Francophonie, said the promotion of French as an integral part of the Olympics was to ensure linguistic and cultural diversity that will benefit all languages and cultures.
Ehm, Mr. Diouf, please explain how forcing everything Olympic to be done in English and French is going to benefit the Dutch language and culture.
The way I see it, it only ensures that the French don’t have to speak English. The driving force behind this agreement was French president Nicolas Sarkozy, who has been praised for improving relations between France and the USA. So, just when it looked like Sarkozy’s France was reaching out a little bit, they pull a 180 and go back to their old chauvinistic ways. If they don’t want to speak English, that’s fine, but they should not then force the rest of the world to speak French. Ils ne peuvent pas avoir leur gâteau et le manger aussi.
A rare Dutch-only post here… This one’s too much work to explain in English.
De Volkskrant meldde vandaag dat de koningin het naar haar zin had in Makkum en Franeker: “Uitbundig pakken de Friezen uit terwijl de koninklijke familie zich vermaakt met overwegend oud-Hollandse activiteiten.” Waarom die oud-Hollandse activiteiten? Zijn oud-Frieze activiteiten minder leuk? Of worden er oud-Nederlandse activiteiten bedoeld? Friesland is toch echt geen onderdeel van Holland, is dat nooit geweest, en zal dat vermoedelijk ook nooit worden.
The Chinese recognize that foreign tourists and business travellers are an important source of income, so more and more places include English translations on their Chinese signs. Unfortunately, only few Chinese are fluent in English, so the translations are not always correct. In fact, many of them are downright incomprehensible. Language Log has a growing number of examples of Chinglish, like this one, this one and this one.
Their latest example, borrowing from peer-see.com, provides little hope of the translations improving any time soon. It shows a set of blocks to help toddlers learn English, with pictures accompanied by the Chinese and English words. Kind of, anyway:
For the full set, head over to the peer-see.com post.
I was looking up a word just yet at Dictionary.com, and more so than by the definition, my attention was drawn by an advertisement banner:
I’ve retained enough high school German to understand that. For those who don’t, I’ll translate:
Must be German efficiency to be able to answer a question about your opinion with a simple yes or no.
The automatic translation service from Babel Fish remains a source of fun. As Tersie discovered, the phrase so many birds is translated as zo vele vogels. While technically correct, that sounds rather archaic. We would typically say zo veel vogels.
I wondered whether Babel Fish was simply thrown off by the lack of context, so I feeded it the full sentence I see so many birds in the sky. The result: Ik zie zo vele vogels in de hemel. That is a good translation, but again has the archaic vele instead of the common veel. It also gives hemel instead of lucht for sky; hemel is much closer in meaning to heaven. Incidentally, this is one of a few sentences with the words in exactly the same order in Dutch and in English, so all words translate one on one. Usually Dutch puts the verb in a different location.
As I was typing this post, I heard the traffic information on the radio, so I tried another sentence: There are so many traffic jams today. This becomes Er is vandaag zo vele verkeersjam. That’s correct… sort of. Jam is a difficult word to translate, since it has two completely different meanings: traffic congestion or the jelly you put on your toast. The Fish oddly seems to have taken the second one, creating a Dutch sentence that literally means There is so much traffic jelly today. Try putting that on your toast!
Following up on the previous post and Mark Liberman’s Language Log post, I thought I’d delve a little deeper into the Babel Fish translation of the opening paragraph of the Leiden University newsletter article on the WNT going online. In Dutch, it goes as follows:
Met ingang van zaterdag 27 januari is het Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal (WNT) voor iedereen gratis op het internet te raadplegen. Is dit nieuws alleen van belang voor neerlandici, filologen en taalkundigen? “Magnifiek”, reageert Harm Beukers, hoogleraar geschiedenis van de geneeskunde.
I gave a translation in my previous post, which I will modify here slightly to be more literal:
As of Saturday 27 January, the Dictionary of the Dutch Language will be on the internet for everyone to consult for free. Is this news only important to scholars of Dutch, philologists and linguists? “Magnificent,” responds Harm Beukers, professor in history of medicine.
Altavista’s Babel Fish service gives the following translation, as already provided by Mark in his LL post:
As of Saturday 27 January the dictionary is for free consult language (WNT) for everyone of the Nederlandsche on the Internet. Is this news important only for neerlandici, philologists and linguists? “magnificent”, Harm tired cherry, hoogleraar history of medicine react.
Surprisingly, the type of quotation marks used around magnifiek matters to Babel Fish. I used double quotes, whereas Mark used single quotes, resulting in a slightly different translation:
Why is the capital M lost in both cases? Why is the closing quotation mark lost in the single-quotes case? Why is a space inserted after the opening quotation mark in the single-quotes case? Why does the position of react depend on the type of quotation marks?
Moving on to the rest of the text, it is clear that the old-style spelling of Nederlandsche is confusing. Using modern spelling (Nederlandse), the translation is better, but still not good: As of Saturday 27 January the dictionary is for free consult of the Dutch language (WNT) for everyone on the Internet.
The word neerlandici (scholars of the Dutch language) is left untranslated. The singular form, neerlandicus, is also unknown to Babel Fish. The word hoogleraar (professor), a rather common Dutch word and easy to translate, poses another problem.
Most puzzling is the transformation of the name Harm Beukers into Harm tired cherry. If I remove the rest of text, leaving only the name, it yields the same translation. Removing the first name, leaving only Beukers, results in a translation of tired cherry. This makes absolutely zero sense to me. A Google search on {”beukers” “tired cherry”} comes up empty, only adding to my wonder. Where did Babel Fish pull this from? [Update (January 24th, 2007): See the comments for a further discussion and a likely answer.]
On a related note, can anyone tell me what Beukers means as a last name? As a word, it is something like batterers or bashers, from beuken, to batter, to bash, but I doubt it means the same as a name. If no one knows, I’ll consult the WNT in a few days and see what I can find there.
[Update 2 (January 24th, 2007): Mark Liberman posted a follow-up on Language Log, adding his thoughts on Babel Fish's handling of Beukers and hoogleraar and machine translation in general.]
This week’s Leiden University newsletter has a story on the Dictionary of the Dutch language becoming freely available online in a few days. I forwarded this report to Mark Liberman, co-creator and senior writer of Language Log, a weblog about language (no kidding!) I have greatly enjoyed reading since I discovered it last year. Mark found the story interesting enough that he posted it on LL, expanding it a bit to make it a more entertaining read than I could ever do.
Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be an English report on the WNT going online, so all the juicy details were lost on non-Dutch speakers. (Of which I’m sure there are many amongst the Language Log audience.) Not anymore, though, as I will provide a translation right here:
The Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal (WNT; Dictionary of the Dutch Language), will become freely available on the internet on Saturday, January 27, at wnt.inl.nl. Is this news important only to scholars of Dutch, philologists and linguists? “Magnificent,” responds Harm Beukers, professor in history of medicine.
Records
The Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal is a record-breaking piece of work. It required 134 years of work, from 1864 to 1998. It contains hundreds of thousands of entries with definitions of Dutch words and more than one and a half million quotes from sources from between 1500 and 1976. The dictionary was published in 686 parts collected in forty volumes. This makes it a very complete account of nearly five centuries of Dutch language history.CD-ROM
On the other hand, this also makes it a bulky and even unwieldy dictionary; it is not one any person would readily have on their bookshelves. A trip to the university library or another scientific library is required to consult it. This situation improved when the dictionary was published on CD-ROM in 2000. (An incomplete edition, up to the W, was already published in 1995.) However, this CD-ROM edition had its own disadvantages, certainly compared to the online availability soon to be realized.Useful sources
Professor Beukers is very happy the WNT will soon be available on the internet. Up to now, he had to cycle to the university library to do research. “There was the cd-rom, of course,” he says, “but I just never got around to buying it. The biggest advantage is that one can now consult the dictionary while writing a paper.” Rob Visser, professor in history of the natural sciences [and no relative of mine, --Ruud], is also delighted. “I only used the WNT sporadically, but if it becomes more easily accessible, I will certainly consult it more often. The WNT uses sources that are not always obvious for my area of work.” Visser recalls a student who quickly found a list of sources in the WNT they could use for their research on evolution.Magnifying glass
Marietje van der Schaar, a researcher at the university’s philosophy department, also makes frequent use of the WNT and–because she often writes in English–the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the English equivalent to the WNT. Van der Schaar: “It is wonderful that the WNT will be available online. I have the OED at home, but I can only read it with the magnifying glass that came with it. It is important for me to know how certain words were used in the past, and these dictionaries provide a lot of information on the development of words like kennen and weten. In modern English there is no distinction between these words; both are translated as to know. The OED tells me there was a distinction in the past: to ken and to wit.”Definitions
All words in the online WNT can be looked up using the original 1863 spelling rules or modern rules. It is also possible to look for parts of words, like suffixes and prefixes, for word categories, like interjections and conjunctions, or for terms used in the definitions, like all words that have the term plant or ship in their definition.Information outside the dictionary
An important advantage of the online WNT over the CD-ROM edition is that links could be added to information outside the dictionary. For instance, all words that have been published so far in the Etymologisch Woordenboek van het Nederlands (Etymological Dictionary of the Dutch Language), with the most recent developments in etymological research, are coupled to their equivalents in the WNT. Further links are available to similar words in Afrikaans, to figures of plants and animals, and to dialect charts. The source list of the online WNT was completely revised: it contains a large number of new works, which also turned out to be used for the printed WNT. This new source list allowed many entries in the WNT to be dated more accurately.Using the online WNT will be free of charge. After a one-time registration as a user, the dictionary can be consulted wherever and whenever one wants to.
The newsletter article also contains two pieces of text set apart from the main body. The first piece explains how the WNT came to be:
Historical dictionary
The WNT is a historical dictionary. For every word, it lists the grammatical characteristics, the origin, the original meaning, and other meanings that developed over time. The WNT also gives derivations and compound words and information concerning usage in expressions and proverbs. Of particular note is the fact that the descriptions are fully based on an independent collection of source material: almost ten thousand literary and non-literary sources with millions of quotes. However, the WNT is also a historical dictionary in another sense.New spelling rules
Matthias de Vries and Lammert te Winkel, the driving forces behind the WNT, created a new set of spelling rules to be used in the dictionary. These rules are appropriately known nowadays as the De Vries and Te Winkel spelling. In 1863, Te Winkel published De grondbeginselen der Nederlandsche spelling. Ontwerp der spelling voor het aanstaande Nederlandsch Woordenboek (The foundations of the Dutch spelling. Design for the spelling rules for the upcoming Dictionary of the Dutch Language). These rules soon became very popular and were adopted in Belgium already on November 21, 1863. De Vries and Te Winkel published the Woordenlijst voor de spelling der Nederlandsche taal (List of words for the spelling rules in the Dutch language) in 1866 to be used by the common man. The entire WNT was written according to these rules, surviving two spelling reforms before the WNT was completed in 1998.1921
In order to finish before 2000, the board of the Instituut voor Nederlandse Lexicologie (Institute for Dutch Lexicology), founded in 1967 and overseeing work on the WNT ever since, decided in 1976 that no words first used after 1921 would be added. Words like vacantiegeld and zappen are therefore absent.
The second additional bit of text compares the WNT to some other large dictionaries, but I’ll leave that out here, because for some reason my weblog refuses to display the table properly. Suffice it to say the WNT is of equal size to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the Deutsches Wörterbuch (DWB) by the Grimm brothers and the Dai Kan-Wa Jiten (DKWJ; a Chinese-Japenese dictionary) by Tetsuji Morohashi. It has been said the WNT is actually the world’s biggest dictionary; in terms of pages, that certainly seems to be true, but the OED contains more entries. As often with size comparisons, the winner depends on the exact definition of “biggest”.
