THE REAL VOCABULARY ISSUES I FACE AS A TRANSLATOR
It is easy for someone to ask, “Am I an accurate translator?” I can provide good evidence that I am. But I don’t ignore that “accurate” can be vague here – the good news is that I’m not reluctant to discuss it at length.
There used to be a time in my career as a translator when, every so often, I took a bit of time to take some words out of my French of German dictionary and write them in a notebook, with English translations, for the purpose of broadening my French and German vocabulary just like I did at school. I’ve ended up not really that concerned about doing that any more, mainly because I want to spend more time and energy focussing Internet marketing; which is precisely why I went to Chris Cardell’s “Internet Revolution 2013” in London recently. Of course, I can’t help but appreciate that French and German native speakers are more inventive with the words of their own language than I am; and it’s not just about multiple stand-alone meanings. I’m talking about idioms and proverbs and that sort of thing. If I had to do more to keep my French and German up to date – without paying for trips to France and Germany – I would try looking for native speakers on Facebook.
When I’m doing anything that involves reckoning with vocabulary of English and French or German, I am aware that not all words, and their counterparts, have the same status. Slang words are definitely of lower status, there’s no doubt about that. But I have no idea what name people give to certain categories of manufactured words which are not without an air of humour (if that’s what you call it) attributed to them.
Like “Sheeple” (I know I’ve talked about this in a comment dated 14th November 2012). A portmanteau of “sheep” and “people”, it refers to those people who always follow the crowd, not showing any independent thought of their own. This is a word that actually has its own Wikipedia article, if you can believe that.
“Embiggen”, taken from the episode of the Simpsons “Lisa the Iconoclast”, is a different kind of “manufactured word”: it is supposed to be recognised as a transitive verb that basically means to make something bigger – who has ever argued with that? Many know it to be a token of humour – even though many “get” it, no-one uses it, and everyone knows it. Like I said, how do you refer to words like that?
Seeing as I have mentioned the so-called word “embiggen”, I thought I might as well say that I am aware that that word is listed in urbandictionary.com, which I’ve definitely referred to in an earlier comment here (6th December 2012). It is easy to regard urbandictionary.com as only a list of slang expressions – so many that even very complacent and idle teenagers aren’t likely to have heard of all of them. And it’s not the case that each expression always has the same nuances for every individual person. Some of them are nouns, some of them are adjectives, some of them denote actions within a given interest (usually something of some sort of “cool” nature) where a lot of people who do not pursue that interest would have definite frustrations as far as understanding it is concerned. But it also has expressions that are nouns or adjectives or which denote actions pertaining to phenomena outside of the realm of popular culture, which all kinds of people – not just teenagers, or ostensibly the cool (or the uncool) crowd – do.
But if I could also bring up something more relevant to my work: I was recently given some German-to-English translation work with a style sheet that was unusually prescriptive (by the standards of my experience, anyway); among other things, it mandated that non-breaking spaces be used between individual words within a brand name and in certain other circumstances. A non-breaking space, as explained in its very own Wikipedia article, is a kind of space which essentially prevents the words / characters on either side of it from being separated at the end of a line in an electronic document; whatever happens, they will always be on the same line, as if they were a single word. The style sheet explained how to implement them, and implement them I did; and chances of me forgetting how to do it are minimal. But I don’t wish to talk about non-breaking spaces as such; I want to refer to the name that the Germans use for them, specifically the German expression for them I first came across, in the style sheet of the project in question: “geschützte Leerzeichen”, literally translated as “protected spaces”. I got to thinking that, had I come across this expression in school, in any material which did not include anything that specifically explained what they are like this style sheet did, I never would have guessed that it meant “non-breaking spaces” (but back then I didn’t I even know what “non-breaking spaces” were or what they could have been. It sounds crazy, doesn’t it?).
Final note: if there is a word for that feeling you get when you don’t know whether or not to feel (or look) offended, then I don’t know it. Maybe I should make one up?