Although public transport within Ann Arbor is quite alright for getting to and from the university on weekdays, it isn’t of much use for anything during the weekend, when the buses in my neighborhood run only once an hour. So, in spite of the snow and cold outside, I’ve gone shopping for a bike. I happen to live close to Wheels in Motion, one of Ann Arbor’s better bike shops, and the folks there were very helpful in finding me the right bike. They were also very patient and forgiving of my lack of American cycling vocabulary. It happened twice that they suggested a type of bike or piece of equipment to which I responded enthusiastically, only to realize when they showed the bike or item in question that it was something different than what I had thought. (Similar moments have occurred in other shops. For all my fluency in scientific and everyday English, it’s interesting to discover how many words I don’t know in other areas of the language.) Still, it didn’t take too long to settle down on the FX 7.2 by Trek. It’s a fitness bike, or at least so I’m told. Whatever its designation, it looks to serve me well on my daily commute to campus, as well as on the occasional 20- or 30-mile ride.

I picked up the bike Thursday evening and immediately chickened out of riding it the next morning, because it felt like the bloody coldest morning I’ve had here yet. For which of course I got made fun of by my nice friends on Facebook — and never mind that the real reason was that I wanted to try the route first on a non-work day. So, despite even lower temperatures on Saturday, I went ahead and biked to campus for the first time. First, though, I went for a short warm-up run to the grocery store. An elderly man there remarked it was quite cold for cycling, recalling he’d never ridden below 18 °F (-8 °C). I had just faced something like 5 °F (-15 °C), with wind chill in the negative F, so I beat him by a fair margin.

The three-mile ride to campus was not too bad as far as the cold went. In fact, there was one nasty hill that had me sweating as on a summer’s day by the time I reached the top. The downhill return would have been fun if the road surface were in better condition. As it was, it was something of a challenge to dodge cracks, potholes and patches of ice at 20 mph on an unfamiliar bike, with a freezing wind battering my eyes to tears.

Yesterday morning, with the temperature up to 11 °F (-12 °C), I took a slightly different route to avoid that hill and also to avoid the moderately heavy traffic on Saturday’s route. The attempt was successfull on both counts, although the quieter roads do mean poorer road conditions now that there’s been some snowfall again. The additional twisting and turning also increases the likelihood of me getting lost, especially cycling home in the dark — which didn’t take long to actually happen. I added an extra mile and a half to yesterday’s homeward journey by missing a turn and not recognizing an intersection later on where I could have fixed my initial mistake with minimal damage. I suppose it’s a good way to get to know the city a bit, but I’d rather do that in warmer weather. Note for tonight: check the map extra carefully before heading home.

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:

• “Magnifiek”, reageert Harm Beukers, hoogleraar geschiedenis van de geneeskunde. is translated as “magnificent”, Harm tired cherry, hoogleraar history of medicine react.
• ‘Magnifiek’, reageert Harm Beukers, hoogleraar geschiedenis van de geneeskunde. is translated as ‘ magnificently, react Harm tired cherry, hoogleraar history of medicine.

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.]