Taccuino di traduzione 2.0

La situazione attuale: il mio test sul FOUNDATION Fieldbus (si veda sopra) non avanza, MB è alla ricerca di notizie su una sindrome sconosciuta dal nome gotico, e la copydimare sta cavalcando un’onda di creatività.

Detto questo, ecco i link degni di nota per i prossimi giorni (sicuramente fino a lunedì).

Trent’anni di libri della casa editrice Virago Books. Una bellissima storia, che comincia così:

The Virago Modern Classics really began in a convent over 60 years ago. It was the sort of Catholic convent that should have been in deepest Ireland, but was, in fact, in one of the more elegant suburbs of Melbourne, Australia. There I was sent when I was eight, and from it I was disgorged at 16. The Loreto nuns who educated me were semi-enclosed, which meant no speech from dusk to dawn, Mass every morning at 6.20am, a tomato for supper on Sunday nights and much Irish brown bread the rest of the time. Rules, censorship and silence, and above all a sense of disapproval waiting to pounce on those rare times when you felt most entirely yourself. And an obsession with sin. What sort of sin? Answers came there none.

Un’altra casa editrice, Faber Finds, invita scrittori e autori a proporre titoli ormai difficilmente reperibili.

There can be little more disheartening for an avid reader than to discover that a favourite book has gone out of print, or a much-admired author’s work has become completely unavailable. Faber Finds is a groundbreaking new imprint whose aim is to restore to print for future generations a wealth of lost classics.

Il primo elenco contiene già 100 bei titoli.

Gadget degno di James Bond: una smartpen tutto fare:

Inside a sleek, anodized aluminum barrel, the Pulse stashes a camera, a microphone and a surprisingly loud speaker. It also has a bright black-and-white screen (18 by 98 pixels) that displays messages, menu commands and even cramped little animations. There’s a nonremovable, rechargeable battery (10 hours per charge), a headphone jack and contacts for a USB charging cradle.

Le disavventure di Helen DeWitt alle prese con la punteggiatura. E un motivo in più per non sopportare Cormac McCarthy.

McCarthy is laconic, with a deep voice. He’s impressive. This is someone who had no doubt that he had improved on Swift by fixing the punctuation — and in some cases rewriting sentences to accommodate the improvement. He’s been lucky, though, because he never came up against an editor or a production manager or a copy-editor who decided his own texts were not fit to be seen.

Audio: come l’ebraico è diventato una lingua moderna.

Postato da: IM

Di consigli come questi non ce ne sono mai troppi. A convincermi è stato il sesto consiglio.

Postato da: IM

Non voglio privarvi di questo piacevolissimo post di Trevor / Kalebeul su Berlusconi, la storia delle falangi e altri disastri politici.

Postato da: IM

Oggi vi propongo due articoli.

Il primo riguarda le abitudini linguistiche di Michael Bloomberg, il sindaco di New York. La sua parola preferita: unconscionable.

When a court awarded $308,000 in 2003 to a Bronx woman who slipped on a snowy sidewalk, the decision was “unconscionable.” When the city’s transit workers went on strike in 2005, their walkout was “unconscionable.” And when Mayor Bloomberg contemplated the possibility earlier this month that the State Assembly might not bring his congestion pricing plan to a vote, the mere thought of such a thing was — you guessed it — “unconscionable.”

As a way to express outrage, linguists say the word is an effective choice. It sounds more astute than “terrible.” It has more syllables than “disgraceful.” It has a certain weight that “unbelievable” and “disgraceful” lack.

And the word implies a subtle yet stinging critique of Mr. Bloomberg’s antagonists: that they lack a conscience. Because its meaning is so loaded, some linguists wondered whether Mr. Bloomberg might be using the word a little too liberally.

“It is a strong word and has a little bit of heft,” said Ben Zimmer, the editor of Visual Thesaurus, a Web site that charts synonyms and their relationships to one another. “So in terms of style, it might be better to use it less frequently.”

The Oxford English Dictionary defines “unconscionable” two ways. When it is used to describe a person, the word means “having no conscience.” When it applies to actions, the Oxford defines it as “showing no regard for conscience; not in accordance with what is right or reasonable.”

Il resto dell’articolo è qui.

Il secondo articolo prende spunto dal titolo di un CD di Neil Young, Are you passionate?, per riflettere sull’uso della parola passionate nel linguaggio pubblicitario/corporatese.

Ecco l’inizio:

Are you loving it?” asked Neil Young in his song Are You Passionate?. Some people are, but they’re probably not the ones Young had in mind, “we’re lovin’ it” being the slogan of McDonald’s. Young’s question was that of a rebel rock’n'roll poet, but the answer came straight out of corporate America.

As to the big question of the album Are You Passionate?, businesses are answering in the affirmative as never before. No matter how mundane an industry is, someone is passionate about it. For example, you probably couldn’t be less interested in anything in the news than Interpack 2008, a trade fair for the packaging industry. It has been going on in Dusseldorf. But Elopak is “passionate about packaging”, as are Active Packaging, Polyphane, Venture Packaging, L Gordon Packaging, WEBPackaging and countless other companies that use this same phrase in their marketing.

Potete leggere il resto su The Herald.

Postato da: IM

Postato da: IM

Vi ricordate quando avevate appena imparato un po’ d’inglese, abbastanza da capire sì e noi il 30% di quello che cantavano Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Fleetwood Mac & cronies? E poi cercavate il resto nel vocabolario, imparando così qualche parola nuova e inutile? O ero solo io a farlo?

E’ lo stesso principio, in versione aerobica, applicato in questi sfiziosi video, trasmessi in Giappone per insegnare l’inglese a tempo di musica.

Due sono particolarmente interessanti.

Spare me my life

e una frase sempre utilissima

I have a bad case of diarrahoea

Postato da: IM

Il Guardian propone oggi un’intervista con George Steiner, filosofo, scrittore, saggista, traduttore, critico letterario, il tutto multilingue.

Il paragrafo seguente mi ha fatto molto ridere e per questo ve lo propongo:

Sex, Steiner thinks, is mediated by language in interesting ways. “I have every reason to believe,” he writes, “that an individual man or woman fluent in several tongues seduces, possesses, remembers differently according to his or her use of the relevant language.” This isn’t an unexpected position for Steiner - who has written extensively on translation and “the polyglot condition” in general - to take. But eyebrows have been raised over his arresting examples of multilingual sex-talk, which draw on his own characteristically recondite experiences. A French lover, he writes, once distracted him “in, as it were, mid-flow” by using a tricky subjunctive pluperfect (”Proust may have been among the last to handle these with ease”). “V”, whose dreams were filled with “cats, chamberpots and left-handed firemen”, liked Viennese place names: “Thus ‘taking the streetcar to Grinzing’ signified a gentle, somewhat respectful anal access.”

Tempo fa, sempre il Guardian aveva pubblicato una recensione dell’ultimo libro di Steiner, My Unwritten Books, una raccolta di saggi, fra l’altro sulle sue avventure sentimentali/sessuali.

Steiner, however, breaks his own vow to forswear what he calls ‘publication’, which for him means making public the secrets of his soul, with some tangy glimpses of his sex life. A female colleague at a high-minded colloquium passes him a note suggesting a fuck; after a lecture in Oklahoma, an ‘ebony’ academic tops up his fee by taking him to bed. The coital toil of the lower body never manages to switch off Steiner’s hyper-active head and he looks back on his amorous adventures as a course of research in comparative linguistics. What, he wonders, would it be like to make love in Basque or Russian (as opposed to Finnish or Korean)? As DH Lawrence insisted, the best words are the good old four-lettered Anglo-Saxon ones. Maybe Steiner knows too many languages and has forgotten what a tongue is for.

Ho sempre pensato che meno ne sappiamo della vita privata di un intellettuale famoso, meglio è. Per lui e per noi.

Non credo di aver torto.

Postato da: IM

Appropriateness in language is the same as appropriateness in other walks of life. Take clothing. If you looked into your wardrobe and found there only one suit of clothes, or one dress, how prepared would you feel to face the sartorial demands made upon you by society? No one would be happy if they had only the one option for all types of formal and informal occasion, for different days of the week, or for different functions, such as swimming, gardening, or washing a car. The more types of clothing we have, the better. But having a large and varied wardrobe is only useful if we have developed a ‘clothes sense’.

We know what would happen if we disregarded a dress code on an invitation. We know how we feel if we wear the same clothes two days running - an issue which seems to affect Venus more than Mars, but in principle is applicable to everyone. We know how stupid it would be to use clothes that are totally inappropriate to the situation - or, of course, how daring. None of this is instinct. It is all social learning. And it starts at an early age. Parents let children know it if they dress inappropriately - whether by ignorance or intention. “YOU CHANGE THOSE TROUSERS BEFORE YOU GO ON THAT BIKE!”

Da: David Crystal, The Fight for English, OUP,2008, pgg. 102-103

Postato da: IM

William Safire, giornalista, scrittore, premio Pulitzer nel 1978, un uomo con un’opinione incisiva su tutto, anche sull’uso dell’inglese. Suo è anche il Political Dictionary pubblicato dalla Oxford University Press alla fine di marzo. Conosco molti blogger che non lo sopportano, ma se piace agli esperti dell’OED, qualche cosa di buono lo dovrà pur dire.

Giudicate voi stessi. Ascoltate queste due interviste:

una seria

e una più scherzosa con Jon Stewart.

Chi potrebbe essere l’equivalente italiano di W. Safire?

Postato da: IM

All living languages are promiscuous. We promiscuous speakers shamelessly shoplift words, plucking bons mots and phrases from any tempting language. We wear these words when we wish to be more formal, more elegant, more mysterious, worldly, precise, vague. They flash on our fingers like gaudy rings, adorn our hair, warm our necks like rich foreign scarves. They become our favorite trousers, the shoes we cannot live without, our way of describing illness to our doctors, declaring love to our lovers, formulating policies, doing business. We believe we own them and are frequently astonished to discover their original roots in another language.

Così inizia un articolo dell’artista e scrittore libanese Rabih Alameddine nel L.A. Times.

Un altro piccolo estratto:

The word for God matters quite a bit more than what lands on one’s table for dinner at night. We never say the French pray to Dieu, or Mexicans pray to Dios. Having Allah be different from God implies that Muslims pray to a special deity. It classifies Muslims as the Other. Separating Allah from God, we only see a vengeful, alarming deity, one responsible for those frightful fatwas and ghastly jihads — rarely the compassionate God. The opening line of every chapter in the Koran is “Bi Ism Allah, Al Rahman, Al Rahim”: In the name of God, the Gracious, the Merciful. In the name of Allah. One and the same.

Potete leggere il resto qui.

Postato da: IM