Automatic UK-to-US English converter produced amazing mistakes by the vanload Translating one's life from the wonders of the weekend to the madness of a Monday is never easy, but The Register tries to ease the change by delivering a new installment of Who, Me? It's our reader-contributed column in which you admit to making messes and share your escape routes. This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as " …
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Ehm....
the US costomary gallon (3.7 L) is almost 20% smaller than the Imperial gallon (4.5 L)
Yes, L for litre, I find this preferable over the lower case l, becasue it makes it easier to distinguish between l and I (and 1 depending on the font).
---> I'm ok with the small glasses, called a "Stange", I'll rather have two of those. No need to go full Norther European (Cologne, Dusseldorf) though, and have only 0.2 L glasses, more like beer shots.
A stange is originally 6 oz, which is actually less than 0.2L.
But beer always finds a way, so nowadays a stange can be anything from 6 to 12 oz.
10 oz. sounds about right for a beer, since that is approximately the contents of a regular sized can.
Only week beers —like lagers, guinness etc.— are fine in pint sized glasses.
But feel free to disagree.
Note that a US floz is larger than a UK floz (29.6ml vs 28.4ml) so you can't directly compare 16 to 20.
It's better to convert to a common unit (metric, in this case) where a US pint is 473ml, vs a UK pint of 568ml; this makes it clearer that a UK pint is "only" 20% larger than a US pint and not the 25% you might expect due to floz counts.
I'd incorrectly assumed it must be smaller as I reasoned that's where the smaller 25ml "floz" measure comes from when it's something expensive; I was going to say "like spirits" but actually can't remember where I've seen it; it seems used to calculate some oddly arbitrary bottle sizes where decimalisation remains the gift that still keeps on giving after 50+ years (not that I'm against it per se, just the lack of dealing with some sharp practises). Though going the other way, a proper pint glass has to be be around 600 ml as it's supposed to contain 568ml of actual beer and the head doesn't count towards that.
In UK law, a "reasonable" head counts as part of the 568ml of volume.
Where reasonable is defined by what the punter is happy to accept, given the markings on the glass. The bartender must top it up if requested - which means pulling more beer than if they'd given the smaller head to begin with. So it works out.
Icon: An unreasonably large head. Can I get a flake with that?
Pfffft. My local pub used serve it's strongest beer in 1/3 pint glasses and you could only buy two. Otherwise you'd be totally off your tits in no time.
Other similar beers are Old Tom and those lovely Belgian Trappist ales. I had one of those a few years ago on a warm summer's afternoon and discovered my legs just wouldn't work afterwards. Result!
Strongest I ever saw was at the Hall & Woodhouse, Blanford Forum Brewery, Sports and Social ground. This was when I was a child (around 1980) and my father made beer barrels. His company played nearly all the UK brewery's at cricket and we used to go away with all the other families in a bus every fortnight.
Anyway, as with most clubs there was a heavy drinker - in both meanings of the word, as Bruce weighed about 20 stone, but could still run fast.
"Stingo" was a brew that was only sold in shot glasses, and if you could still stand after 7, you got them all free - and they were expensive.
Bruce only managed 5!
"Pfffft. My local pub used serve it's strongest beer in 1/3 pint glasses and you could only buy two. Otherwise you'd be totally off your tits in no time."
I believe that's more due to licensing for brewpubs that don't hold a full license (beer and wine only).
For me, a fully fortified stout isn't nearly as nice as one with less alcohol.
I'm quite sad that one passed me by. Actually typed "pissed me by" in mistake, probably the memory of UK.AC.HAT students' choice of snakebite & black (halves of cheap lager and cheap cider mixed together with cheap blackcurrant in a cheap glass... or often a cheap plastic if it was The Font) and usually ending up covered in puke. Guilty as charged, vague memories of a very drunk and now painful Vommie trying her best to de-vomitify the toilet cubicle using probably most of the toilet roll and to little avail. I don't usually talk about myself in 3rd person but that way I can imagine the story as if it happened to someone else; anyone who isn't me.
yes please! I once had the pleasure of having both in the house, so I did a taste test, just because I could . The colour, the taste, everything is so much better with the Budvar! (no, I didn't buy the Budweiser, that was a present, I have better taste than that).
Real beer maybe.
Trad sweet ales are vanishingly hard to find.
Best beer I ever had in the UK was Davenports Top Brew Deluxe. Marketed as an IPA.
Should have come in a ribbed bottle with a skull and crossbones on the label, but unlike most wildly hallucinogenic beers, this one was absolutely delicious.
I was told that Bass Charrington bought out Davenports and closed the line down a few years after I moved to the USA.
Gone to the dogs Two world wars Mafeking Rationing etc more etc.
"A van isn’t a truck."
A removal(s) van is usually a truck in US parlance (moving truck). This is one of those places where there's a traditional word or phrase for something that is the exception.
Humans can deal with the weirdness much better than machines and trying to define all of the rules is going to be a fruitless exercise. I've seen machine translations of speeches where the meaning is completely lost as the person was being ironic or sarcastic. A human translator would pick up on that and put the inflections in to signal the true intent.
>"Our system combined tackling spelling swaps like changing 'ae' to 'e' in words like 'archaeology' and word/phrase swaps so that British terms like 'post' were changed to the American 'mail.'"
I was wondering if this was going to screw up the web service calls
Icon as he'll need some SOAP soon
On my first trip to the US I had to present to a room full of developers. I had given it several times in the UK. After an hour I put up a chart saying "Fag break" - every one sat there bemused.
I said "Cigarette break?!" and every one got up.
I also learned on that trip that you park on the driveway and drive on the parkway.
At a conference where there was simultaneous translation from English into French, German and Italian, someone was going though a dump
"At offset Baker Dog Dog"... there was laughter as the French heard ".. Boulanger, Chien, Chien"
There are also Canadian Multi-lingual keyboards, which are meant for use with both English and French. They are a basic QWERTY layout, with the addition of a few extra keys to give accented characters, plus the right alt or ctrl key will give access to a whole bunch of extra characters unrelated to French, such as common fractions, ligatures such as æ ( ae written as one character), various currency symbols, etc.
They aren't commonly used though because American layout keyboards are a bit cheaper.
I once spent a month or two at SWIFT (great office, set in a small park containing a lake and a deer herd and with easily the best canteen and coffee of anywhere I've worked). However, as it's on the outskirts of Brussels all the keyboards were AZERTY. This was not the problem I'd expected: just somewhat annoying for about the first week then I got used to it.
Yeah; as in so many ways, Canada is culturally part way between the UK and US. "Centre" and "honour", but "-ize", f'rinstance.
And Imperial gallons, back before we went metric, but US cups (8 US fluid ounces) in the kitchen, even though we used to have our very own cup, which was 8 Imperial fluid ounces.
> "Main Streets" instead of "High Streets" in their towns.
Town near here has both. Main starts from Water St (by the river, the only way to travel) and runs up the hill to timber country. High St is a later addition crossing Main St and running toward the poor overland highways west and east. In the 1960s High St took over from Main St as the shopping district.
""-ize" is British, the canonical Oxford English Dictionary still prefers it to this day. "-ise" is a shift purely, as far as I can see, for the sake of modernizing, pushed by Chambers."
As far as I'm aware it has to do with adopting ancient Greek works in English, some should get an S, others a Z. But not an expert.
If you pencil in something that you later need to change, remember to ask for an eraser.
Unless it's the date with your tottie.
I recall my schoolroom French also had la gomme which is pretty much the English( UK) without the the double entendre but going to a French lumber yard and asking for a "preservative" might occasion some Gallic hilarity and the directions to the nearest apothecary.
"(left-pondian: swede or Swedish turnip is a rutabaga)"
I've found for many things, they can be used interchangeably. I know I should be using swede for a true Cornish pasty, but turnips/rutabagas are ok. I've even used, gasp, parsnips as I had some that needed eating up and it was pointless to go to the store for just turnips.
For a real dose of fun, how about a US/UK/AUS translator?
"Trousers - Pants - Shorts"
Could someone please explain the UK senses of those?
In Canadian English (I'm in my 60s, in case that matters):
Pants: generic term for pretty much any bifurcated lower-body outerwear; though in some contexts I think it can mean specifically long ones.
Shorts: pretty much anything above the knee -- anywhere from a couple of inches above to just barely decent. There are qualifiers to specify how short you're talking about. Can also mean men's underwear.
Trousers: not much used; sounds old-fashioned. It's a word my grandfathers (both born in the late 1890s) might have used.
Thanks much.
The swimwear sense of "shorts" doesn't really apply here. I could see saying "swim shorts", but "swim trunks" is more common (though it has an American feel). I'd typically say "bathing suit", which covers all swimwear -- both men's and women's -- unless I needed to be more specific.
And the "small measure of spirits" sense is totally unfamiliar. Is that what we call a "shot"?
Having been to the US many times in the past, I got into an auto-translate mode in my mind, so I used American words and expressions in a Northern England accent.
It generally worked though later as a tourist we travelled through Carson City, NV which has a railroad museum. There was a rally of 50s period autos going on in the parking lot there which prompted confusion over the word 'car' in the museum. They use 'car' for our railway carriages...
If you are on a modern rolling-stock in the UK Midlands, the computer display will tell you you are in Coach 4 and that Carriages 1 and 2 have plenty of spare seats. Glance out at the right station stop, and you'll see signs telling the driver they are halted in the correct position for a 6 Car train.
In AmE, "car" means both "automobile" and "railway carriage". I'm actually rather surprised that it doesn't in BrE.
To me, "railway carriage" suggests passenger ones. Do Brits use that word for freight cars too?
Hmm, what's the term for those special-purpose freight cars built to carry road cars? "Car car" would make logical sense (in AmE anyway), but nope! That's what a small child says...
"What do we call the spherical objects inside a ball bearing?"
Ammo.[0]
Humo(u)r aside, assuming you mean rolling-element bearings, those would be called "balls" (or perhaps cones, or cylinders, depending on application). They roll in races.
[0] Not to be confused with ball ammo, of course ...
"On my first trip to the US I had to present to a room full of developers. I had given it several times in the UK. After an hour I put up a chart saying "Fag break" - every one sat there bemused."
It would have been much better to just put up a slide that reads "10-minute break". It gives better information and smoking isn't as socially cool as it once was.
> It would have been much better
It would BE much better (nowadays)
> ... smoking isn't as socially cool as it once was
>> On my first trip to the US
We have no information on when that trip took place; if it was in the '70s, smoking wasn't so much "cool" as damn near mandatory! Though back then they'd already have lit up, no leaving it for the break, so maybe late '80s?
> Much better ... "10-minute break". It gives better information
>> a chart saying "Fag break"
*Much* better? Clearly he was trying to insert an informal tone, which is an important piece of information in a presentation, tempering the presenter/audience relationship. To be a *much* better replacement requires maintaining that information as well.
It looks like no one's mentioned yet the American conservative web site "One News Now" which was caught in 2008 "translating" articles from Associated Press with automation, when American sprint athlete Tyson Gay made the headlines. Their version of the story was about an athlete named Tyson Homosexual. Who mostly was referred to only by his surname.
Not quite an opposite error happened when I think an authority figure in the Roman Catholic church shared his concerns about sexually permissive lawmaking with a newspaper, which ran an article including a photograph of the great man above the sub-caption "Homosexual Bill".
Google tells me that over the years, the New York Times has run stories "City Council Committee Rejects Homosexual Bill" but also "Marchers Back Homosexual Bill". Times change, though not always for the better.
Back in the days of 3.5” floppy disks, a colleague of mine came over to my desk and asked “Do you have a stiffy?”
Fortunately I was aware of the fact that the 3.5” disk, due to its hard casing, was known as a ‘stiffy’ in parts of the world including South Africa where she was from, so an awkward situation was avoided.
"Autumn" is from the Latin autumnus, via French automne, and is not very English at all. First commonly used in its current form in English in the 1600s.
"Fall" is from the Old English "feoll" (pre Norman conquest), and is very English indeed, although the time of year was more often referred to as "harvest", or hærfest, until the mid-1500s when they started calling it "fall of leaf".
So, as usual when the Brits bitch about a particular way the Yanks use English, their version is actually French .... but the Yanks are still using English. Go figure.
Falling under the influence of the Norman-descended fifth column that remains here, keeping alive the notion of the French words as the posh and proper way to speak. They have a strong sense of irony and weaponised the Daily Mail readers' knee-jerk outrage, making them "bitch about...".
Luckily, aside from their linguistic ambitions, these infiltrators' goals are too confused to regain traction: do they want the return of the Angevin court? Or all the lands claimed by the Tudors? Is it to be the restoration of the English lands, making The English Channel once more merely the inconvenience when travelling from Summer to Winter palaces, or the claim that all of the Norman lands are now to be under the Tricolore - Vive La Manche!
Yes they do. See also Mediaeval. Furthermore, Americans with celiac disease sometimes get diarrhea. Whereas British coeliacs sometimes get diarrhoea.
But, Vincent Truck Gogh? That's confusing as the band called Camper Van Beethoven are American.
Well if Greece and Turkey follow the lead set by "The Great Orange One" then that body of water will be known from now on as BOTH "The Gulf of Greece" AND "The Gulf of Turkey".
Mine's the one with the Norwegian bluetooth keyboard in the pocket.
> Do they really spell archaeology like that over there?
I look-up my medical troubles online, and sometimes Google offers me UK sites. It is good to have the second opinion, but the medical lit is full of ae.
We took a very short cruise on the QE2. The staff offered to knock up both my wife and I.
I work in the UK and my current customer is in the UK.
But the head office of my company is in the US, and so I have to write in Simplified English (American) spellings. It drives me up the wall.
The group head office is in Ireland where they also write English using the correct spellings.
I am waiting for the customer's customer (the MOD) to reject about 100,000 pages of documentation as it is in Simplified English, but no-one in the company will listen!
First thing to do would have been to populate a CMS with the UK English version from the HTML data, then make the website serve from the CMS, then auto-translate from UK English to Merkin in the CMS, then proof read and tidy up the Merkin version.
> running the replacements directly on the body HTML, and causing lots of page repaints, meant we had to build a REST API
Ok, IANAWD but - immediate response to "static HTML" was "tricksy problem, especially with regexes, but at least you only need to translate each static page once, manually patch any edge cases, save the new static pages in a directory en-us/". Put a trigger into version control on the en-gb/ originals (or set up Make...) to re-process when edited.
But - repaints? REST API? Not cause slowdown? Is this a new definition of "static" page?
Then again, this is a "Who, me?"...
[1] I Am Not A Web Dev
You sure it wasn't a reference to the "Left Behind" franchise of books and films aimed at right-wing evangelical Christian American types (*), which apparently involves those "left behind" after the rapture?
I always thought they should do a sequel to that called "Right Behind: The Other Buttock".
(*) But I repeat myself... most likely more than once.
Americans' vans and British vans are pretty nearly entirely the same thing; it's trucks* and lorries where we disagree. And I don't think I've heard of Vincent Lorry Gogh.
* unless you're delving into some of the slightly more obscure meanings of 'truck', or its verbed form
more obscure meanings of 'truck'
The Truck Act of 1831 references to which puzzled me greatly as a child as I was mostly sure they didn't have highways let alone juggernauts in Wellington's time and besides I imagine Cobbett would have railled against both if they had.
I have often wondered what Cobbett would have made of the railways, the first of which were running near the end of his life (d.1835.)
"British trains have bogies but British trams have trucks, because electric tram technology was mostly imported from the US:"
They are called bogies in the US as well. Hmm, I wonder if there is a distinction with "trucks" being more permanently mounted to the carriage and bogies more of a self contained wheel set.
My favourite cut 'n' paste cock-up is very recent.
The Queen is dead! Long live the King! The Church of England now needs to bang out new copies of the Book of Common Prayer and other such stuff. Quick Elizabeth to Charles and Queen to King change later, job's a good 'un!
Except for the bits that mention Queen Elizabeth I. So a couple of the intro pages of said book now refer to King Charles II, by the Grace of God, King of England, France and Ireland, Defender of the Faith etc.
Ooops!
Not that this is a cut 'n' paste error on my part. Just a typo. But King Charles III.
Chas Two was legitimately King of Ireland and France. Well OK, not really. Ireland had recently lost around 20% of its people killed in the civil war(s). And Henry V had been dead for an awfully long time by this point - plus Calais (the last French possession) was lost in the reign of Mary I - so nearly a century, 4 reigns an interegnum and a civil war ago.
Although he was also King of Scotland, which is one better than Liz I.
I can imagine a flaming redheaded insane maga, homicidal gun crazy Vincent 'truck' Gogh living in a trailer park† called Yard of Eden in the rather dangerous Easter Hoods of some urban planning disaster.‡
A reworked A Clockwork Orange screenplay featuring this wholly¶ American nutter could be the next Netflix triumph also with the very real likelihood of his being elected the next president of the US.
† caravan (~ trailer) park with more (white) trailer trash. ‡ any post-colonial US city. ¶ wholey
The initial G is pronounced as an H, and the final gh as in the correct Irish/Scottish pronounciation of loch, i.e. with the 'ch' in the back of the throat, not as "lock", hence he is Vincent van Hoch, with a guttural 'ch'.
As somebody born and bred in the Netherlands with Dutch as mother tongue, a mother who is a retired teacher of Dutch (and a father who also used to teach languages), I can tell you with absolute certainty that initial "G" is not pronounced as an "H" (unless you speak the dialect from Zeeland, where they switch them around) but as the "ch" in loch.
Ask the Rijksmuseum if you doubt it.
I recommend you do so yourself.
Slightly too late for an edit:
Check the pronunciation at Wikipedia Vincent van Gogh, that is pretty good.
I've just been reading about Goch; it hadn't occurred to me to consider how it might be pronounced. Which of course probably varies a lot anyway, even simple things "ich" ranging from kinda "argh" to "eh". And my German sucks without all this general confoundment und scheiß; how's it pronounced in Geordie?¹ That'll be the correct way.
1. Not Mackem, obvs.
We English mostly have trouble pronouncing the Scots ch in loch (pronouncing it as lock) as well as the ll in Welsh as in Llanelli
I'm English but I lived in Scotland for a fair proportion of my formative years so I can pronounce loch correctly and, as Ll is pronounced rather like the ch in loch with a L on the end, I can also pronounce Llanelli as chLanechli like it should be.
We get our own back on the Scots & the Welsh by having names that you'd never guess how to pronounce from the spelling such as:
Featherstonehaugh pronounced "Fanshaw"
Chalmondley pronounced "Chumly"
Woolfardisworthy pronounced "Woolsery"
This is the basis for the Monty Python joke where Graham Chapman says "It's spelt Raymond Luxury- Yacht but it's pronounced Throatwarbler Mangrove"
Why is it that Americans seem unable to deal with UK English. We in the UK seem to manage to deal with the US version. We have to. There is never any US to UK translation.
The mapping from en_UK to en_US is (very) many to one with the consequent loss of meaning for the great many concepts the American intellect is unable to grasp.
Mapping from en_US is basically choosing the en_UK word or concept from the shallowest available which even densest of the pommy polloi can manage in their heads.
I gave a talk in Houston about networking within the telco I was working for to a bunch of software developers.
Well, I found out that if you pronounce "routing" the way we Brits do it has a totally different connotation to Americans. Cue lots of guffahs and laughter at all the parts I thought were serious.
I was at a networking conference in Amsterdam many years ago, I think the topic was IPv6? In any case, since this was an international crowd, most of us pronounced the word "routing" as the Americans do - /ˈraʊ.t̬ɪŋ/. After about half an hour of initial discussions, a gentleman (there's no other word better suited to describe him) spoke up to respond to some question or other, and started his reply by saying "First of all, can I just clarify that it's pronounced '/ˈruːt.ɪŋ/'. Trust me, we've been using the language a LOT longer than they have. Anyway, to answer your question..."
(I still pronounce it the American way.)
Regardless of who has been using the language longest (what a fucking stupid DSW!), the fact of the matter is that the router was invented in the US, and so the yanks get to name it.
It is a rowter, not a rooter.
Back in 1986 I was tasked with shepherding one of the first commercial Ccisco routers ever built (a pilot build AGS) across the pond to Blighty. To UCL, to be precise.
It was an evaluation unit, and I was selected for the initial exposure because I was familiar with the project from the "Blue Box" stage at Stanford to current ... AND because I had spent a good deal of my life in England, so didn't have any of the supposed communications issues, (as amusingly detailed here on ElReg).
My local counterpart and I installed the thing, verified functionality, and the next morning they brought in a group of what I assume were management and other mucky-mucks. I gave the standard sales lecture, short on technical details and long on hype, and ended up with a simple "Any questions?".
One gent stuck his hand up and said "I'm terribly sorry, but you are pronouncing it incorrectly. It's called a "rooter", not a "rowter"". I was expecting this, and looked him right in the eye and said "I was at the manufacturer's facility in California not 48 hours ago. They call it a "rowter", and I think they should know". Three voices popped in from various corners of the room to say variations of "Well, they are wrong!". I just chuckled and said "whatever, anybody have any real questions?". A couple folks did, and I told them that we were having a more technical discussion after lunch, and they were welcome to attend, and perhaps access the keyboard. I used rowter throughout the afternoon session, and nobody said anything. We adjourned to a pub (sorry, I can't remember which one), and the discussion continued. Nobody questioned me using "rowter" ... and most of them were also using it by the time we adjourned.
I flew home the following day. Was a nice little three day interlude. Recommended.
During the meanwhile, the gent who initially raised his hand had filed a formal complaint with the guy he assumed was my Boss (he wasn't, I was self employed at the time). He actually had the audacity to tell cisco that they HAD to rename the box to rooter, or it would never sell outside the US, and that I should be relieved of my duties. Seems he had never in his entire life been dismissed so rudely (whatever). He was laughed at. The rest, as they say, is history. And you lot are still calling it by the incorrect name ... and still being laughed at.
Life's to short to sweat the petty stuff. Has the meaning been gotten across? Let it slide, relax, have a homebrew.
Routing is in good company with Row: an argument, a line of things or what you do with an Oar (phonetically Oar/Ore/or being a device for propulsion, substance containing minerals and also the English grammar coordinator for alternatives). Context is king.
I do smile when besuited university types* with a distinct accent get snooty about pronunciation of terms that originated from people with very different distinct accents being used by other people with equally distinct accents, the English 'oo' simply transmogrified into American 'ow' as time passed.
That the US pronunciation of router (route selector) now matches English words with completely different meanings is as the French would say "c’est la vie"
I blame Samuel Johnson...
*Don ? - University professor also a Spanish aristocrat as well as an Irish card game and 'to put on' - this rabbit hole is deep...
A few years ago a work colleague announced that the problem with her home internet was the wireless router and asked whether we could recommend one, but in trying to sound cool around the techies she pronounced it 'rowter'.
She returned from lunch to find on her desk a Screwfix catalogue open at the section of cordless power tools.
"routing" the way we Brits do it has a totally different connotation to Americans.
AU follows the US in this.
A very definitely Aussie (first fleet ancestry I should think) network chap here invariably and unrelentingly spoke of Cisco rooters, rooting tables† and "we can root around that" etc to his audience's initial dismay and later, (internal) mirth.
Later virtual rooting and forwarding sounded too much being put on hold when calling a tawdry telephone sex service to evoke anything more than a vague question of what that musak could be? Big Spender rendered by Shirley Bassey would be favourite.
† not oversexed Septics¶ nor a typing pool league. ‡ Remember those pre Webcam extortionate"premium" third party services abetted by your telco?
¶ but definitely overpaid, possibly over here, unfortunately.
I think pretty early on in Aho and Ullman's classic text they point out that finite state automata cannot in general parse context free grammars. Bit vague now but I think regular expressions are equivalent to FSAs (REs can be implemented with FSAs which I think originally egrep(1) did.)
Any natural language syntax is light years from a context free grammar and even if you can parse a natural language you still have to deal with multiple layers of potentially contradictory meaning encoded in the text. Think of something of fairly simple like damning with faint praise.
"Angels fear to tread where fools rush in" could have been coined for the never ending legions that believe natural language processing is only slightly more complicated than compiling a C++ program. The whole AI/LLM boiling are the latest cohort but almost certainly won't be the last.
Even skilled translators can come a cropper in their translation when the discourse strays slightly outside the areas of their competence.
Imagine attempting to translate a text on MPLS from English into French you knew nothing about networks and your past gigs were Mills&Boon bodice rippers or the more sedate Barbara Cartland œuvres.
In a previous life as IT Manager for a timeshare company we had sales offices all over the world selling holidays at our resorts in Spain and Tenerife.
The sales contracts and annual invoices had to be in the correct language for the customer, so we had documents in English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Greek, Hungarian, Romanian, Polish, Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Cyrillic Russian, Czech, Slovakian, Slovenian, Bulgarian, Greek, Croatian, Serbian & Indonesian. Everything we sent out had to be translated into all those languages.
Initially, to save money we used native speakers from these countries to do the translations until someone realised that actually native speakers aren't the best people to translate legal documents from English to their own language as they often use colloquialisms and slang which made for some interesting comments from customers who understood both the English original and their translated version.
Eventually we had to employ the services of a professional translator company in the UK that specialised in legal and contract translations.
Yup Translation is very hard, you need someone who is not only fluent in both languages but quite often also very familiar with the subject being translated. I've seen professional translators who've been replying to "you got that wrong, I prefer X translation" go into quite deep detail about exactly how and why they made the choice they did and point out both might have been correct for general use but they chose their version because of something like "it was more accurate for the context and time period" or "It was the better choice for the character.
in my youth I spent far too much time laughing at some of the anime fandom who were convinced fansubs done by people who often had very little experience of the language were always better than the "official" translations*.
For legal stuff every single word and bit of punctuation can be vital, as any ambiguity can change the meaning of the contract or provide an unintended way out of it (or worse for the company, bind them to something expensive they didn't intend to do).
*Possibly my favourite one was an argument that went on for dozens of comments over the bra sizing of a character of all things, where it was claimed the official translation was censoring or something because it gave a different size to what was "clearly said" in Japanese, It turns out the Translator knew something the "better fan translators" didn't, Japan used a slightly different size chart, so for the translation they'd actually converted it to the US size as leaving it at the "clearly spoken" Japanese size would have been wrong in American.
An Australian bison† is where you wash up your hands, mate!
Being a fluent aussiephone I was scratching my head until I realised how the Canucks might pronounce our "buy son."
My knowledge of the (non Quebecois) Canadian vernacular is limited to Corner Gas and Letterkenny but I remembered being surprised that a long expatriate Canadian actually pronounced about 'a boot' which always imagined that was a South Park (Terrance & Philip) exaggeration pandering to American prejudices.
† for the record AU doesn't have any bison, native or otherwise. Only some imported, now feral Asian water buffalo confusingly known in PH as carabao.
Canadians do not pronounce "about" as "aboot". "Ou" is pronounced in the middle to front of the mouth, while "oo" is pronounced further back in the mouth.
However, the way Americans pronounce words will cause their brains to interpret sounds in the way they expect to hear them based on other surrounding consonants and vowels. Thus they imagine they hear "oo" when objective analysis of the sound waves shows otherwise. I assume the same phenomenon applies in Australia.
There are variations in accent in different parts of Canada, including differences in rural versus urban accents, but I doubt that the person you heard was saying "oo".
I haven't seen one of those 'O's with raised eyebrows† in English for yonks... ranks with aëroplane.
Back in the days of clackomatic typewriters I recall fabricating a diaeresis by over striking with the double quote key (") which probably led to its extinction in English on the buggerit principle.
I suspect this coincided with the extinction of typing pools and the diacritically inclined were faced with DIY document preparation "Zo[ALT]+0244 ô bugger! ... Zo[ALT]+0246 ölogy ... sod this for a game of soldiers."
Funny though it's invariably Occidental Pondians that write Brontë rather than natives of the more Oriental land of those ladies' birth.
† always reminds me the eyebrows of Penrose, Danger Mouse's sidekick, which hovered in the air above his spectacle lenses.
Anonypoo sez:
Back in the days of clackomatic typewriters I recall fabricating a diaeresis by over striking with the double quote key (") which probably led to its extinction in English on the buggerit principle.I suspect this coincided with the extinction of typing pools and the diacritically inclined were faced with DIY document preparation "Zo[ALT]+0244 ô bugger! ... Zo[ALT]+0246 ölogy ... sod this for a game of soldiers."
It seems that the compose key has largely fallen out of fashion of late. It's the modern (as in c. 1980s) means of typing, backspacing, and adding frilly bits and I use it a great deal; especially handy as my late gf's name had an e-with-flair in it even though she'd given up trying to type it correctly herself (mostly as a lot of online crapps still don't know what they're doing with UTF) but how else can one type Spın̈al Tap's name correctly? Unfortunately a lot of font-rendering also messes up combining characters, forgetting the width of the previous one, so the n̈ will look wonky on some screens and not others.
Unfortunately there's eleventy billion entries in XCompose and I keep adding more because "that seems handy" and then have to keep looking them up because I chose something neither memorable nor sensible. But I also chose sensible shortcuts such as a+6 for â and u+2 for ü because throwing the shift key into the equation made it even more likely that my mistyping would have its usual irritating effects. One of the worst is the Portuguese' love of ã, which is now a + #.
And the recipes
1,Take a perfectly satisfactory regular English verb
2. Convert the poor thing screaming into a noun by appending -ization
3. Euthenase the original now mutilated verb
4. When the need for the verb crops either backform -ize form or append -al -ize
I await publicationalize for publish.
(Rinse repeat)
1. Take a stolid perfectly content English noun
2. Convince it that the patriarchy or whatever has deprived it of its potential as a verb
3. And turn it loose
So we have architects who architect some abomination whereas formerly they were content to just to design abominations.
"Verb" is a noun. I presume that whoever coined that phrase was being intentionally ironic, but I doubt that most of the people who complain about "verbing nouns" are aware that they're committing the very sin they're inveighing against.
Personally, I love that English has that flexibility.
It was the great Bill Watterson who taught us "Verbing weirds language". Weirding is not a bad thing, especially in informal writing/speech. Unless you lack the humo(u)r gene, of course, in which case I feel very, very sorry for you.
Allow me to beer you.
In the days of 'Empire', English gentlemen were taught to deal with gibbering 'natives' by speaking English slowly, loudly, and firmly. Indeed, in addition to its application in hell-holes of Africa, and Asia, that worked well when travelling in France, Germany, and elsewhere in Europe.
Never concede to the American patois, not in regard to vocabulary, pronunciation, or spelling. Set an example to all Kipling's "lesser breeds".
Fortnight or better still a sennight if you really wish to confuse. But I still think I have met the worst (best) misuse of English in Charleston - A girl sidled up to me in a bar/nightclub and asked me if I wanted to shag - it appears that's a dance in those parts!
"Never concede to the American [version of English], not in regard to vocabulary, pronunciation, or spelling."
That much I have some sympathy for. The smoothing out of regional Englishes is to be lamented.
As for the rest - including the word I paraphrased - well, the only example that sets is of obnoxious colonial arrogance.
There are no standards of English.
“English is the result of Norman men-at-arms attempting to pick up Saxon barmaids and is no more legitimate than any of the other results.” — H. Beam Piper
"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary." --James D. Nicoll
The joke goes:
The first English to Russian translating machine was proudly being demonstrated when an impertinent reporter fed it the phrase:
"The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak"
And the machine responded with computer speed in Russian what is best translated back into English as:
"The Vodka is good, but the meat is poor"
"The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak" => "The Vodka is good, but the meat is poor"
"Out of sight out of mind" => "invisible idiot"
Neither of these is real; they were made up by a journalist poking fun at early efforts at machine translation. Machine translation still does not really work; machine *assisted* translation is useful, and is used by professionals.
Microsoft's text transcription in Teams has had dumb word choice for non US English for years where it chooses the most inappropriate homophone
draft : draught
check : cheque
filter : philtre
fortnight : Fortnite
or if you say the initials PI : π
Meeting summaries can draw bizarre conclusions from these.
van isn't always a truck. in the particular instance when a truck is helping us move, it may be called a "moving van". still a truck but in this case it's called a van. hood vs bonnet is kind of silly. bonnets are thought of decorative where hoods are practical coverings. hood makes sense.
Nonce has been a perfectly cromulent word in the English Language since the 11th century, or probably earlier, and the crypto guys'n'gals are using it properly within their context.
The undereducated kids tittering about its use should probably learn their native tongue before they embarrass themselves further. There may be a time and place for locker-room humo(u)r, but an international security conference probably isn't one of them.
For one project I used regular expressions to parse the numerous product designations our company had, something that should have been straightforward enough. It wasn't because try as I may I could never persuade Marketing to keep their product designations 'Regex Friendly' -- logical. So what should have been a simple task sprouted exceptions to the rule, individually simple enough but each one requiring programmer intervention (time) to set up and test.
I tell people I'm bi-lingual -- I speak both fluent English (my native language) and American (where I've been living for 40+ years). Its supposed to be a joke but actually its not, there's a lot of differences in the language and its usage besides spelling. Its maybe not quite as bad as Spanish where "Castilian" (used in Spain) and "American" are offered as two distinct language options for movies (but even then there's wide differences in the language and its use between different countries of the Americas) but its wide enough to make what might seem to need a simple mechanical translation into something that actually needs a rewrite.
(BTW -- Although people say they speak "English" in European countries this invariably means "American". You only really come across English in places like India where they seem to speak better (more correct) English than native Brits!)
Being Canadian, with maternal anglo roots and paternal South African ones, and living by the American border, I grew up listening to family members speaking two different English dialects, hearing a third one at school, and a fourth on TV and radio.
Although Canadian, British, South African, and American dialects are extremely similar, there are differences, and I've often caught British suppliers and American customers (or vice versa) using the same words, but meaning different things.
If you 'tabled' an issue at the last meeting, does that mean the item was discussed, or that it was deferred until later? Americans and British use the word completely differently, for historical reasons.
I've also had to de-Americanize, or de-Canadianize documents. And I've seen the damage done trying to replace "anonymize" with "anonymise", or vice versa. Shotgun approaches to replace "ize" with "ise", or "or " with "our " have resulted in some hilarious changes, as per the article.
But if you want to see true hilarity, get a hypersensitive soul immersed in gender politics to do your library translation. There was a Canadian winter themed park that was running a deficit, and was scheduled to be closed, until an anonymous donation made it viable again. This was reported in the local paper as "children will be continued to be able to build Persons of Snow in the park, as the anonymous donation leaves the park financially in the African-Canadian".
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