Monthly Archives: September 2014

Lively times in Lund

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Recently , my colleague Gary Watson did a language training course for LKF, a housing company in Lund in the south of Sweden. As part of the training, I rang up each of the participants and asked them to explain a little about the housing market in their area.

My mental picture of Lund is a green, slightly sleepy university town, not dissimilar to Oxford and Cambridge. Lots of students on bicycles, lively coffee bars etc. Lund University is one of the oldest in the country.

Founded in 1666, it was an attempt to re-Swedify Skåne. The southern part of Sweden had been under Danish control until the Treaty of Roskilde. Fans of Kurt Wallander will know that the Swedish spoken down there sounds far more like Danish than the posh version we speak in Stockholm.

The university may be ancient but it is certainly cutting edge when it comes to technology. The LKF people explained to me about a massive new research building project: the MAX IV Lab and the ESS (European Spaliation Source). A spanking new, next-generation, synchrotron radiation facility and a new, state-of-the-art European facility for materials research that are currently being built.

The local community are very excited about this project. It will bring a lot of new jobs to the area and attract top class researchers from all over the world. I drove past the area last summer and was very impressed by the futuristic design, but at that point had no idea what it was. Now I do and I’m even more impressed.

You can read more about it on the university website:

http://www.lunduniversity.lu.se/research-innovation/max-iv-and-ess

In the capital they may be loathe to admit it, but the area around the Öresund Bridge is one of the most dynamic in Sweden these days.

The rather fabulous Watson housing vocabulary Swedish -English dictionary

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Far be it from us to brag, but there can be few people in Sweden who have such an in-depth knowledge of housing vocabulary in both English and Swedish as we do.

I’m not bad. I know words like door, wall, window, cat poo and roof. My esteemed colleague Gary Watson knows words like: cohabitee (medboende), debt recovery officer (inkassohandledare), confirmation of termination (uppsägningsbekräftelse) and urban area (tätort).

Impressed? You ought to be!

We’ve even created a Swedish- English – Swedish dictionary in collaboration with our business partners at SABO. What’s particularly clever about it, is that is constantly snowballing. Every time we do a new course with people working in the municipal housing sector, we add any new words that they mention. This means that it is absolutely up-to-date with developments in that sector such as recycling. A simple but very effective tool.

If you are interested in the list, please drop us a mail.

“Hunted by dogs!” Devised by chimpanzees?

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What has man’s best friend done to deserve this?

Gary and I are great dog-lovers.  We are therefore  far less than pleased to read about the idiotic new TV3 reality show Jagad av hundar (Hunted by dogs) in which young people go off in search of a treasure. And then get hunted down by dogs. Which chimpanzees thought that one up?

I do have one consolation. When Swedish dog-owners get wind of this they are quite rightly going to go ballistic.  Not a group to be messed with. Now there’s a great idea for a dramatic TV show:  Hounded by Dog-owners. A group of TV executives in search of a quick buck get hunted down by some very irate  ladies from Östermalm and their pooches. Definitely not suitable for family viewing!

I tried to get a reaction from Gary’s pooch Cazpar on this latest TV show. He just slinked off to his basket.  Far too dignified to even waste his time with a comment.

The Full Monty? The tribulations of translating film titles

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Do you remember The Full Monty, that wonderful 1997 British comedy about the six unemployed Sheffield steel workers who became male strippers? Here in Sweden it was called Allt eller inget.

The original title is quite impossible to translate. “The full Monty” is an expression means going the whole way, giving it everything you’ve got. The works. The full nine yards.

Nobody quite knows where  the expression comes from. Perhaps from Field Marshal Montgomery who enjoyed enormous breakfasts with all the trimmings? Perhaps from a tailor called Montague Burton who sewed suits for men leaving the army and gave his all to the ask?

It was hilarious to read that when it was released in China it was called Six naked pigs!

Rather a lot got lost in translation!

I discovered this interesting fact from this list of the 50 funniest movie titles

http://www.shortlist.com/entertainment/films/50-funniest-movie-title-translations

There are some other real gems:

I’m drunk and you’re a prostitute. (Leaving Las Vegas – Japan)
It’s raining falafel (It’s raining meatballs – Israel)
Urban Neurotic (Annie Hall – Germany and Austria)
The teeth from the sea (Jaws – France). That makes it sound the story of someone who’s lost their false teeth while having a dip.

There are lots of  rather amusing lists of poorly translated film titles out there on the internet.

But translating film and book titles is no enviable task for the poor translator. The new title has not only got to be accurate but also sound right in the new language. It also needs to appeal to the potential audience. You Swedes for some reason love film titles which include the word “dangerous”.

Polyglots can hours of fun looking through the “Also known as” section in IMDB. Here is what happened to Jaws

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0073195/releaseinfo?ref_=tt_dt_dt#akas

The Swedish title of the first Millenium novel, Män som hatar kvinnor (Men who hate women) would, I suspect, never have been as internationally successful as The girl with the dragon tattoo. The original sounds like a newspaper headline, the latter suggestive and interesting.

There’s a new comedy out here about a Finnish man who desperately wants to be Swedish: Hallonbåtsflyktingen. It seems that the English title will be The Raspberry Boat Refugee. Not a bad title. It’s accurate and makes you curious. What it can’t possibly do is let you know that the raspberry boats are a kind of sweet associated in many people’s mind with the ferries between Sweden and Finland. Put the word sweet into the title and it just doesn’t work so well.

Titles that involve a pun are a real pig. The importance of being Earnest was Oscar Wilde sticking his tongue at the over-seriousness of his contemporaries. At the time there were many tracts and pamphlets urging moral behavior.

There are some stinkers of course, but also those times when you think the translator got it just right.

I rather like “Indigo Blue” for Michel “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” Gondry’s adaptation of Boris Vian’s novel “L’épume des jours,” It’s the title of a Duke Ellington tune which features significantly in the film. “The froth of days”, the literal translation, would just not have got bums on seats.

Working with translation yourself, makes you realise,  just how difficult this sort of thing is.

So,  Six Naked Pigs? No,  I don’t think so!

One sentence can ruin everything

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Astonishing, isn’t it? Organisations and companies spend a lot of money on producing something like an attractive brochure or website in a foreign language to promote themselves. But never give a thought to getting someone who speaks the language (like Gary and me!) to read through the text and check for mistakes and howlers.

I liken it to someone who has spent a lot of dosh on a nice suit to make a good impression, but hasn’t noticed that they have a large stain on their tie. The person they are meeting spends all the time looking at the stain and doesn’t notice anything else.

And the more perfect everything else is, the more that stain is going to stand out

My pal, Steve gave me a great example of this. A few years back he was visiting a delightful Austrian hotel with its own farm. The hotel manager was (quite rightly) very proud. He showed Steve the new brochure they’d just had printed.

It was a top-notch job. Until he started reading it that is. One sentence really stuck in his throat. The hotel was very proud of serving their own farm produce in the restaurant. They’d written:

“All the farm animals are personally slaughtered by the staff.”

Oops! The cosiness suddenly disappeared out of the window. Instead of an alpine idyll, the place suddenly felt a Tyrolean remake of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

Something more neutral was needed. “All the produce served here is produced on our own farm” would have done nicely.

Unless your name is Norman Bates, “slaughter” is just not a word you want to see in a hotel brochure!

Medalling with the English language?

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English is a very versatile language which offers great scope for creativity. One example of this is making new verbs out of nouns.

We heard two examples of this from the sporting world recently involving the nouns medal and podium. Several athletes at the Commonwealth Games were heard to make comments like this:

I’m really hoping to medal today.

She’s got a good chance to podium in this event.

New usages but both immediately comprehensible.

Scotland: Should they stay or should they go?

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It’s a momentous day for the UK today as the Scots go to the polls for the referendum on independence. Governments in other parts of Europe are watching very nervously. Could this start a trend? Catalonia, the Basque Country, Brittany……. Öland and Gotland: where will it all end?

Just to help you understand here is a rather bizarre Taiwanese animation!

What will the papers say tomorrow? Here are some not terribly serious but rather amusing predictions:

http://www.buzzfeed.com/tomphillips/the-siege-of-balamory#4gd1jnq

The sinful life of Utah homophones

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kneel/ Neil, bury/berry, whore/hoar, flour/flower, cellar/seller, earnest/Ernest

Homophones: words that sound the same but are spelt differently and mean two different things. They often crop up in jokes. Not to mention the title of Oscar Wilde’s play which poked fun at the seriousness of his time: The Importance of Being Ernest.

Here’s the sad but true tale of an unfortunate language teacher in Utah who got sacked for writing on the school website about homophones. The school did not want to be associated with gay sex!
http://www.theweek.co.uk/us/59766/utah-teacher-fired-after-homophone-blog
I just wonder how their biology teacher refers to the species to which we belong.
It could have been worse. Thank heavens he didn’t mention the devil’s own word category: sin-onyms. They’d have burnt him at the stake!

The fan-bloody-tastic world of grammar

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All of you  know all about prefixes and suffixes. Prefixes are added to the front of a word to change its meaning (ex-, pre-, anti-). Suffixes are added to the end of a word to create a new word (-ism, -acy, -ship). English speakers love to be creative with language and constantly invent new words.

But even the most ghastly grammar ghouls among you probably don’t know about infixes?. Far rarer, this is when a part of speech is inserted into an existing word.

The most common example of this is when an expletive is added in this way. e.g. abso-bloody-lutely. This is known as Timesis. Extra-bloody-ordinary what you can learn, eh?
This article explains it all.
http://www.altalang.com/beyond-words/2008/11/03/tmesis-how-ned-flanders-…

Thousands of people do this all the time but very, very few of them know the grammatical term. Now you do!

Want to have some fun with prefixes and suffixes? Try this BBC site:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/skillswise/topic/prefixes-and-suffixes

Ombudsman – a common English word!

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Back in Viking times many Scandinavian words entered the English language. But in recent times,  there have been far fewer. But, as you may know, ombudsman is now a commonly used word in English.  When and why did this Swedish word first enter the English language? It’s an interesting story. I

The word itself is quite old. In medieval times in Scandinavia it was used to describe the messenger who delivered the king’s message to the local chieftains. The first modern Swedish ombudsman was created in the constitution of 1809 (justitie ombudsman), They had broad powers and had the right of an extraordinary prosecutor who could take legal steps against officials for failure to discharge their duties properly. In the early 20th century, Denmark, Norway and Finland also established ombudsmen.

In the post WW2 world, the idea of having a parliamentary watchdog of this kind was very attractive and the term began to appear in quasi-official use in several countries in the early 1960s. In 1962, New Zealand was the first country outside of Scandinavia to appoint one, and four years later the UK created the first Parliamentary Ombudsman. Many countries followed suit. Since then the idea has spread and there are ombudsmen in many walks of British life. It’s worth noting though that the British version has a narrower, weaker range of powers than the Scandinavian equivalent. Complaints can only be submitted via your MP.

One would have thought the word would have settled in and been accepted by now.

Not if one is to believe some of the comments on the UK Financial Ombudsman’s site. They asked the public what they thought of their name. There were some quite reasonable comments. But Enraged of Tunbridge Wells was foaming at the mouth:

“Ombudsman” is an unintelligible, lugubrious, pretentious, imported name, which should have been stifled at birth!”

Xenolingophobia of the first order!