Does language have boundaries?

THE ALLEGED BOUNDARIES OF LANGUAGE – IF NO-ONE ELSE CAN OR WILL DISCUSS THIS, YOU CAN COUNT ON ME TO DO IT!

I start this comment by posting a link to the website of a translation agency http://www.a-translator.com/ For I remember seeing a bit where they make the statement: “Language has no boundary”. Really? Being the self-proclaimed hot (or at least certainly talented and eager) linguist that I am, I’m going to give my thoughts as to the truth of that statement. Does language really have no boundaries? Or is it possible to have 100% of all aspects of it effectively accounted for in a system tried and tested; a system which can be applied for any kind of language task and yield success? Of course, I should realise that some people sometimes disagree on the exact traits / significance of certain elements of language (one good example might be what divides taboo words from merely “impolite” ones), but it’s not as if systems have never evolved over time; couldn’t any “language system” as described above do the same, and more or less automatically?

When people resolve to deal with problems, they often say how they claim to be willing to target them “at source”. But when you talk of targeting the source of linguistic problems, you just might, say, make someone recall a time when they were looking at a piece of writing which contained a mistake in it which they realise originated from something which was not only something they didn’t understand; that something could only have originated from something that the author didn’t understand either (maybe the author agreed to admit it openly at some time after having finished their writing of it?). There are some things where, if you want to target problems within them at source, then there is a relatively high possibility of it being difficult or impossible to know where to begin; and I (even as a professional linguist) agree that language and written material is one of them.

I must go out of my way to make it perfectly clear that the kind of linguistic problems / inaccuracies / mishaps I’m talking about here are far more subtle and abstract than well-known poor English idiocy like “I should of”. Getting things like “affect” and “effect” mixed up or saying “less” when it should be “fewer” is one thing, but any educated person will find it depressing when I tell this story of how I swear that I once found that someone, somewhere had actually asked this question on an online forum: “Do you say ‘I should have’ or ‘I should of’?” You don’t have to be a genius to point out that it is never “I should of”; “I should of” simply doesn’t exist as any kind of proper English. You’ve only got to look at the words “should”, “have” and “of” in a dictionary”. Having said that, I just doubt that people who habitually write “I should of” while having no idea what it suggests about their education, also make the mistake of writing things like “I of done this” or “I of never been told about this before” when they are talking about something that has happened in the past, you know? I fear that the content of this paragraph will pretty much inevitably be seen as fatuous at this point, but I would have you understand that what I’m trying to do here is show that I can think like an illiterate person / an idiot / whatever term you want to use. If there are people out there who write “I should of”, and there are, then why don’t they also write “I should’f”? LOL. Surely if they had that idea they would at least agree that “I should’f” just doesn’t look like proper English, even if that were enough to make them admit that they don’t know the correct way of writing it? How about those who write things like “your so cool” or “their really clever”? Given how often the verb “to be” is used in everyday English and then some, surely even these people are capable of remembering that “are” has an “e” on the end – wouldn’t this be enough to help them to realise the grammatical incorrectness of something like “your so cool” or “their really clever”? (Mind you, I recently once read “our” when it should have been “are.”) Is that a worthwhile and engrossing point to make, or should I accept / stop pretending that these people tend to be too personally lazy or ignorant to care? I mean, if I somehow made the mistake of writing something like “I should of” and someone pointed it out to me, I know I wouldn’t need someone else’s explanation to understand the gross mistake factor of it all…

Now, I haven’t ruled out the possibility that some people reading this might think that I have effectively already touched on this subject (reminder: “does language have boundaries or not?”) in earlier comments, especially in all these “anecdotes” I have written which refer to little particular challenges I’ve had to face in my work as a professional translator; a good example might be where I decided to write a translation of a phrase which was unusual yet probably the most effective and reliable one, or where I realised something that probably never would have been specifically taught to me by a teacher back when I was still studying languages at school (i.e. if anything, it was specifically an “intellectual epiphany” which came from within, do you know what I mean?). What follows is some more of these “anecdotes”:

In a German-to-English translation project
Original: “Mit voller Akku-Ladung kann der Haar- und Bartschneider max. 45 Minuten netzunabhängig betrieben werden.”
Translation: “When the battery is fully loaded, the hair / beard trimmer can be used for a maximum of 45 minutes with no connection to the mains necessary.”
Comments: With the “with no connection to the mains necessary” bit, I just wrote that without thinking about it – I must have dismissed the idea of writing “independent of the network” unconsciously! Good for me, huh?

In another German-to-English translation project
Original: “Stimmen unserer glücklichen Gewinner.”
Translation: “Statements of our luck winners.”
Comments: Normally I would translate German “Stimme” as “voice” or “vote”, but not here (although “voice” is hardly completely misaligned with “statement”).
In a French-to-English translation project (survey responses)
Original: “Bon téléphone dans l’ensemble. Manque d’application et jeux. Manque indicateur de pourcentage de la batterie.”

Translation: See comments.
Comments: When I was translating these three sentences, which constituted a casual survey response… I remember specifically asking myself how I should translate the first one: “good phone overall” or “good phone in all respects”? I remember specifically deciding on the latter rather than the former – then I read “manque d’application et jeux” (“lack of applications and games”! Needless to say, I changed it to the former.
In a German-to-English translation project (possibly the first of the two referenced above)
Original: “Dank der gestiegenen Anforderungen bei elektronischen Apparaturen in den letzten Jahren”

Translation: See comments.
Comments: I was proud of myself when I translated this as “With the increased requirements of electric-technical appliances in recent years”. This is because I had to the sense to put “OF electric-technical appliances in recent years” rather than “for”: it was not talking about “demand for” i.e. people wishing to buy these electric-technical appliances, as easy as it might have been to just take it as meaning that and write accordingly in the translation. By the way, I remember a similar situation when I saw an ad on ProZ.com looking for a translator; although it was written in English, it was written by someone from India. Its title was “Urgent Requirement of German Translator” – personally I would have said “for”, but isn’t “of” also OK in this context (even if I want to differentiate it by suggesting that it suggests some sort of urgent requirement that some German translator has, something completely different from the concept of someone looking for a German translator urgently)?

But when I was writing this comment, I specifically intended to include discussion of CAT tools in it at some point. (By the way, let me state beforehand that it is a fact that CAT tools and machine translation tools / software are NOT one and the same. I know from personal experience that you need a licence to access something like MemoQ, and they work differently, but I won’t discuss it at great length; not here, anyway.) Surely the very existence of CAT tools is indicative that there are some people out there who have tried to fathom the boundaries of language as part of a project of creating a CAT tool?

Earlier this week I accepted a project which, at the time I accepted it, I expected that it was just going to be me translating the content of a standard Powerpoint file from French into English. But it was only about two hours after the project was confirmed as mine that the project manager told me that she expected me to use Trados for it, even though I never claimed I used it, because I don’t. She said, “please deliver a .ttm file (or whatever file)” – …errr, what now? I found it even more puzzling that she didn’t specify which glossary I should use; all this compounded by my having thought from the start that, when I looked at and accepted the work, the project itself was far too easy for me to require the help of a CAT tool to help do it. I have no idea what she was expecting me to and maybe she didn’t either. But I stubbornly agreed that I could and would do this project, to a totally satisfactory level, without Trados, and I would put that woman in her place! And after all, just how comprehensive is the subject matter range covered by the glossaries of Trados or indeed any other CAT tool? All the examples below relate to the project in question; everything you see written is 100% a product of my own thinking and consideration and is therefore part of this great point I am making:

Original: “Preamble: Quelques éléments sur la consommation de parcs de loisirs”
Translation: “Preamble: some INFORMATION ON THE CONSUMPTION HABITS within theme parks”
The subject matter of the project: statistics referring to leisure parks as business entities. “Connaissance” (of individual parks) was translated as (public) “awareness” rather than “knowledge”. Would a CAT tool really have pulled that one off? I doubt it. Also, I kept seeing “parcs d’animaux” in the original, which I originally translated as “animal parks” because I was thinking like petting zoos and all that, but it was only when I was about halfway through the project that I just stopped and thought, “ ‘animal parks’… or ‘safari places’?” And when I thought of that one, I didn’t delay including it in a post-it note attached in the translation project file meant to be read by the project manager. Further cases in point: did “un parc où les visiteurs participent” really mean “a park in which visitors ‘participated’” (such as petting animals at petting zoos) rather than just visiting? Does that even make sense? Did “notoriété globale” mean “overall awareness” i.e. pending consideration of all statistics as a whole or did it mean “awareness among people throughout the world?” – what?

And I also really doubt that CAT tools or machine translation tools understand the use of certain literary devices, such as irony. In one French-to-English project I did only on Wednesday afternoon, I read this in the original: “là où le chef gaulois Vercingétorix donna une leçon de résistance à César lui-même”. Would it really have been appropriate to translate it as: “the place where the Gaulish chief Vercingétorix provided César himself with a lesson in resistance”? Like a kind of semi-comic euphemism, do you know what I mean? I think of it as not so much translating it literally as taking the content literally (I can only hope that you understand what I mean by that), as if it were not too dissimilar from incorrect interpretation of history, if that makes sense. Didn’t I do the right thing to rewrite is as follows?: “the place where the Gaulish chief Vercingétorix taught César a lesson in resistance”. (I just think that I never would have thought of and jumped to an idea like this as an autistic child.)

Or idioms, such as “it’s raining cats and dogs.” For example, look at this sample of French: “Il a filé à l’anglaise dans le plus simple appareil à notre nez et à notre barbe parce qu’il était beurré et nous cherchions la petite bête en balançant une vanne.” and now ask yourself if you could expect any machine translator or CAT tool to interpret it as anything other than this: “He span at the English in the plainest camera at our nose and our beard because he was buttered and we were looking for the little beast in swinging him a sluice.”
In addition to announcing my continuing mission to produce the best professional translations, I wish you too all the literacy you could need. Of a nice day.