Why a thesaurus, not a dictionary, is often a translator's best friend

Earlier this year I went to Madrid to take the Institute of Linguists' Diploma in Translation exam. The full exam consists of three papers, which you can either do individually or jointly. I had opted to do all three on one day, so I took with me a small suitcase of bi-lingual Spanish-English dictionaries and other reference books. Among the dictionaries were two large general works - a much-used and very battered Collins and a newer Oxford - and more specialised dictionaries in areas such as business, medicine and science, kindly lent by a colleague. The rules of the exam state that you can consult as many printed dictionaries as you can haul into the room, but access to the Internet is strictly forbidden (while the Internet is a godsend to modern translation and an integral part of most translators' professional lives, there would be obvious dangers of abuse if exam candidates had access to it - you could even put the job out to tender on proz.com).

The three papers comprise a general paper, lasting three hours, and two so-called semi-specialised papers lasting an hour and a half each, where you can choose from one of three different subject areas. I had pretty much decided in advance that I wanted to do the Business and Social Science options, since these are the areas I feel I know most about and the risk of encountering obscure terminology seemed relatively low. It is recommended that candidates take specialised dictionaries for these papers and, fearing the wrath of the translation gods if I failed to make some gesture of propitiation, I duly did.

As things turned out nearly all the dictionaries made the round trip from Cordoba to Madrid without being opened once. I used the big Collins a few times, but the book I used more than any other wasn't a Spanish-English reference book at all. It was an old Penguin copy of Roget's Thesaurus.

The reason a thesaurus is so useful to a translator - in my experience - is that very often one has a general sense of what the writer of the original is trying to express, but one struggles to choose a word that has the right 'flavour' in English. Many, many times I have looked up Spanish words in bi-lingual dictionaries not because I didn't know what the Spanish word meant but because I wanted a better way to translate it than the word that immediately came to mind. This is apt to be frustrating, especially with Latinate words where dictionaries are liable to give just one-word equivalents. Thus if you look up intensificacíon you might get 'intensification', accompanied by a yelp of, 'Well I knew that! Tell me something I don't know for crying out loud!'

This is where a good thesaurus comes into its own. A thesaurus allows you to rummage around at the edges of a word, trying out expressions in your English sentence until you find one that seems to fit. Of course this may force you to recast something else, or replace one part of speech with another, but that is part of the pleasure of the job.

The story has a happy ending, since the Institute of Linguists awarded me a merit in all three papers. Good old Roget.

Javier Marías gets it wrong

In any dispute between Javier Marías and José María Aznar I would ordinarily expect to side with the former, but cannot help feeling his latest sally puts him in the wrong.

The background is a speech given by Aznar at the University of Columbia in New York in which he described Muammar Gaddafi as an 'extravagant friend'. Admittedly, this does sound an odd collocation in English. Presumably what Aznar was trying to convey was the idea of Gaddafi being an outlandish, or eccentric, or unpredictable friend, not that he is spendthrift. Ordinarily if one heard that so-and-so has an 'extravagant friend' one would assume that the friend is fond of lavish spending. To this extent I have some sympathy with Marías when he writes in El País:

..."extravagant" no significa nunca "extravagante" en español, sino siempre "despilfarrador", "dispendioso" o "derrochador". Es lo que se llama, en traducción, un "falso amigo" clásico.

 ...which in English could be translated as:

..."extravagant" never means "extravagante" in Spanish; rather it always means "spendthrift", "wasteful" or "prodigal". It is what is known in translation as a classic "false friend".

The problem is that in his eagerness to lampoon Aznar, Marías goes too far the other way.

Exhibit A for the defence comes from the Concise Oxford Spanish Dictionary 2005.

extravagant /ɪk'strævəgənt/ adjetivo  

1. (lavish, wasteful) ‹person› derrochador, despilfarrador;
   ‹lifestyle› de lujo

2. ‹claim/notions› insólito;
   ‹praise/compliments› exagerado, desmesurado;
   ‹behavior/dress/gesture› extravagante

Concise Oxford Spanish Dictionary © 2005 Oxford University Press

So it seems 'extravagant' does sometimes mean the same as 'extravagante', at least when it refers to someone's behaviour, dress or gesture (Aznar was presumably referring to Gaddafi's behaviour).

Exhibit B for the defence is from the British National Corpus. Many of the examples it gives of 'extravagant' could be replaced by 'spendthrift' with no difference in meaning, but not all:

His extravagant action, his grace, his poise and his enthusiasm combine to produce a perfect jumping machine, and people soon realise that they are watching something exceptional.

Marías is right to poke fun at Aznar for his dreadful English, but he does his own argument no favours by over-egging the pudding.

The nowness of now

Conversation overheard in a museum in Granada between a young boy, anxious to visit the museum shop, and his mother, recharging her batteries on a bench outside the shop:

Boy: Quiero ir a la tienda.
Mother: Ahora. Ahora vamos.
Boy: ¡Pues venga! ¡Levantate!
Mother: No, no, estoy cansada.
Boy: ¡Pero es que has dicho que ahora vamos!
Mother: Bueno, es que 'ahora' no es 'ahora mismo'. Y ahora tengo que descansar.

This is difficult to translate into English, because the concept of 'ahora' in Spanish corresponds only rather loosely to the concept of 'now' in English. A literal translation might be:

Boy: I want to go to the shop.
Mother: Now. We'll go now.
Boy: Come on then! Stand up!
Mother: No, no, I'm tired.
Boy: But you said we'll go now!
Mother: But 'now' and 'right now' are not the same thing. And now I have to have a rest.

But would anyone actually say 'We'll go now' in this context in English? A better translation might be:

Boy: I want to go to the shop.
Mother: Very soon. We'll go very soon.
Boy: Come on then! Stand up!
Mother: No, no, I'm tired.
Boy: But you said we'll go very soon.
Mother: But 'very soon' and 'right now' are not the same thing. And right now I have to rest.

This is a revealing conversation for an English speaker. In English 'now' refers to the moment of utterance ('Now I understand') or the moment immediately following utterance ('The doctor will see you now' - i.e. please go in, the doctor is waiting) or the moment immediately preceding utterance ('just now'), but it doesn't extend very much beyond this. Ahora in Spanish, at least as it is spoken in Spain, is a more flexible concept. It covers what the speaker is experiencing at this moment ('Ahora estoy cansada') but also what will or may happen in the near future ('Ahora vamos'). Quite how far into the near future it can extend is an intriguing question - it would be interesting to know if people in, say, Bilbao use ahora in the same way as people in Granada, for example.

One way of looking at the conversation above is that the boy has not yet fully realised how blurred a concept ahora is. He wants ahora always to mean en este momento, something that English speakers will sympathise with. His mother reminds him that it can be used in two distinct ways however and she does in fact use both: Ahora tengo que descansar - Right now I have to have a rest, and Ahora vamos - We'll go very soon. It is to avoid this very ambiguity inherent in ahora that ahora mismo is often used. 'Right now' is also used in English of course to emphasise to the immediacy of 'now', although arguably there is still some way to go before the nowness of now is eroded to the extent that it is in Spanish.

Mucho ruido y pocas nueces

One of my favourite Spanish expressions is mucho ruido y pocas nueces, which literally means 'lots of noise and very few nuts', but is usually translated as 'much ado about nothing' - indeed it is used as the Spanish title of Shakespeare's play. Another possible translation, also from Shakespeare, this time Macbeth, might be 'full of sound and fury, signifying nothing'.

Does this however capture all the texture of the Spanish phrase? Probably not. 'Much ado about nothing' means something along the lines of a lot of fuss with no justification, whereas mucho ruido y pocas nueces arguably has a richer meaning.

The image it conjures up in my mind - I have no idea whether this has any basis in reality - is that of walnut sellers (nueces being nuts generally, but specifically walnuts) trying to tempt people into buying their wares by giving them an ostentatious shake (the nuts that is, not the people). The punters, forgetting perhaps that the larger the kernel the less noise it makes rattling around in its shell, are persuaded into parting with their money, only to find that the contents are disappointingly small and hard, hence the racket. The key idea seems to be the disparity between what is promised or expected on the one hand and what is actually delivered on the other, and the disappointment arising as a result. On this reading a better translation might be something like 'promising much and delivering little'.

I have tried to substantiate this theory by looking at online Spanish concordances. This was the only freely accessible one I could find, and it seems to have no samples of the 'mucho ruido y pocas nueces' phrase (can anyone point me in the direction of a better Spanish concordance on the internet?). So lacking a concordance I did a completely unscientific search of the El Pais website. Many of the results are references to Shakespeare's play, while in others the 'much ado about nothing' translation could be used perfectly well. But at least one seems to support the 'promising much and delivering little' interpretation:

[in a report on a bullfight]...El quinto [toro], quizás el de mejor pintura y más en tipo, pareció prometer algo más. Pero tampoco. Sin humillar, ahora voy y ahora me paro, acabó por ser toro ramplón. A su altura estuvo Juan Bautista: también vulgar. Mucho oropel, bastante ruido, pero nueces ni una.

...which might be translated as...

The fifth [bull], perhaps the finest-looking and the fittest, seemed to promise rather more. Not a bit of it. More a case of willing to wound and yet afraid to strike, 'now you see me, now you don't, in the end I'm just a common or garden bull'. Juan Bautista, similarly vulgar, fell into the same category. Plenty of flashiness, lots of bombast, but nothing to show for it.

Wiktionary gives 'all bark and no bite' as a translation, which has its merits, although it seems to emphasise threats at the expense of promises.

Ultimately perhaps no translation is entirely satisfactory, which tends to be the way with translating. If I were forced to choose, I might go for something like 'plenty of show and precious little substance', which seems to capture the meaning quite well but has the drawback of not being a well-known saying. Any other suggestions?

The greengrocers' apostrophe - alive and well and living in Spain

Where does the greengrocers' apostrophe - that curious habit of writing -'s to indicate a plural - go on holiday? To Spain of course, along with the greengrocers. To prove it, here is an example of local packaging:

Spanish has been borrowing from English for years, and there has been a steady trade in the opposite direction, but helping itself to dodgy English grammar is arguably taking the borrowing too far.

One question that occurs to me is why the Bimbo company should choose to call their product a 'roll' in the first place. It does not seem to be recognised by the Real Academia Española as a Spanish word, but no English-speaker (at least, no British English-speaker - I cannot vouch for other varieties) would call what is essentially a flat, flour pancake a 'roll'. A roll is an individually-baked portion of bread or a spirally-wound cake, like a Swiss roll, but it is not a flat disc.

The product in question is for making fajitas, 'a Mexican dish of strips of chicken, beef, etc, served hot, wrapped in flour tortillas' (according to Chambers dictionary, 11th edition), 'fajitas' and 'tortillas' being two examples of Spanish words successfully imported into English. Clearly, once you have put your chicken strips in position and wrapped them up you have a delicious cylindrical-shaped object - hence presumably Bimbo's 'roll' - but the flat tortilla is not a roll, any more than it is a fajita.

This is where the plot - or the tortilla at any rate - thickens. Founded in Mexico in 1945, Bimbo set up a Spanish subsidiary in 1964. (Quite why its founders chose a name that in English is a derogatory term for an attractive but unintelligent woman is an intriguing but not entirely germane mystery, possibly the subject for another post.) The packaging shown above comes from the Spanish company, now a separate business. Spanish Bimbo couldn't call its product 'tortillas' because a tortilla in Spain - a thick omelette made with potato and egg, otherwise known as a Spanish omelette - is very different from a Mexican tortilla .

But then why (question number two) couldn't Bimbo simply announce their product as '6 tortitas de harina' (6 flour pancakes), since this is unquestionably what they are? Presumably because calling a boring tortita a roll makes it sounds more foreign and exotic, even though it doesn't correspond to anything in English. Perhaps you can charge more for a 'roll' than a 'tortita'.

And finally, having decided to sex-up the tortita by calling it a 'roll', who decided the plural of 'roll' should be 'roll's' - and why? The answer to the 'who' bit is presumably a person in Spanish Bimbo's marketing department who knew some English but not very much - a little learning is a dang'rous thing. They had seen the possessive -'s countless times in English and got it muddled up with with the plural ending in -s, as native English-speaking greengrocers are notoriously wont to do. But there is another possibility. The rule in Spanish says that plurals of singular nouns ending in consonants are formed by adding -es: un árbol, dos árboles etc. Applying the rule here would have generated 'rolles', but this would perhaps have deprived the word of its foreign exoticism. Meanwhile calling them 'rolls' would be too confusing for the average Spanish consumer, who is unused to processing three consecutive consonants, or at least these three particular consonants. So the perfect solution is to introduce an apostrophe: this subtly manages to convey to consumers that they are about to buy an exciting foreign product and they are getting more than one of them. Added value in action. (Interestingly, the same packaging refers to 'creps', rather than the Real Academia-approved 'crepes'; this flouts the consonant plus -es rule, but it perhaps makes them look more 'French' - even though in French they are crêpes.)

There is a twist. Lynne Truss in her excellent book Eats, Shoots and Leaves points out that before the nineteenth century it was common practice in English to use an apostrophe to write the plurals of foreign-sounding words ending in vowels (e.g. folio's, banana's, pasta's, ouzo's) as an aid to pronunciation (I am grateful to the Wikipedia article linked to above for reminding me of this). So it could be argued that Bimbo's marketing department is simply reverting to eighteenth century good practice, albeit unwittingly, and we have come full circle.

This, my inaugural post, has already taken me far longer to write than I envisaged and led me down byways I had no intention of exploring. By way of conclusion I would like to put forward a linguistic 'law', immodestly entitled 'Moorhouse's Law', which says that the shockingness of a grammatical or orthographical mistake varies in direct proportion to the permanence and gravity of the medium in which it is written. Thus a spelling error engraved on a tombstone in Westminster Abbey, for example, is much more shocking than the same error written in the sand on a beach with a sharp stick. And the appearance of '6 roll's' on a printed piece of food packaging constitutes a greater sin than its appearance on a hastily-scribbled shopping list. If anyone else has already formulated a similar law and claims it as their own I offer my apologies in advance.