| Pages in topic: < [1 2] | "Dumbing Down" English? Thread poster: dolichos
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Balasubramaniam L. 
India
Local time: 07:27
Member (2006)
English to Hindi
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SITE LOCALIZER | Have been asked to do this a couple of times | Jan 28, 2016 |
This happened recently on a small advertisement being translated into Hindi for Canadian audience. The brief given was to use a liberal mix of Hindi and English as the target audience would be most familiar with this mix (often referred to as Hinglish).
It turned out to be a tough job and the reviewer made it worse by rejecting my choices of words and substituting them with chaste Hindi words. Probably, he was appalled by the open murder of two languages by mixing them in this indis... See more This happened recently on a small advertisement being translated into Hindi for Canadian audience. The brief given was to use a liberal mix of Hindi and English as the target audience would be most familiar with this mix (often referred to as Hinglish).
It turned out to be a tough job and the reviewer made it worse by rejecting my choices of words and substituting them with chaste Hindi words. Probably, he was appalled by the open murder of two languages by mixing them in this indiscriminate manner, and didn't want to be a party to any such linguistic violence.
In the end, after several back and forths between me, the reviewer, the client and the agency we arrived at something that was consensual.
I didn't enjoy it one bit, but I had to agree to it as that seemed to be what the client wanted, and the client is of course always right. ▲ Collapse
| | | | | Off-topic, but... | Jan 28, 2016 |
dolichos wrote:
One, for a major dairy company, had the sentence, "This miraculous liquid, emulging from the teats of our satisfied cows..." in a voice-over text.
I would drink this. I would so drink this. Best milk advert ever.
| | | | dolichos
Turkish to English
TOPIC STARTER | Google Translate | Jan 28, 2016 |
TransAfrique wrote:
If the client's audience is mostly non-native readers, then a lot of them might read the text through using auto-translation software like Google translate
This is an excellent point, and one that I had not considered. Though if Google Translate is as dismally bad with Japanese as it is with Turkish, there is little I could do to remedy it.
| | | | dolichos
Turkish to English
TOPIC STARTER | Fascinating and off topic but indulge my linguistic geekery please. | Jan 28, 2016 |
Balasubramaniam L. wrote:
This happened recently on a small advertisement being translated into Hindi for Canadian audience. The brief given was to use a liberal mix of Hindi and English as the target audience would be most familiar with this mix (often referred to as Hinglish).
It turned out to be a tough job and the reviewer made it worse by rejecting my choices of words and substituting them with chaste Hindi words.
I've been really fascinated by the way speakers of Indian languages throw in not just words, but entire phrases of English. I've mostly seen it with Hindi speakers, but I also saw an interview in Tamil where I felt I could almost follow along. I assume there must be situations in which it isn't acceptable, and that there is a class aspect to it as well. Do most Indian people with a good knowledge of English speak this way in everyday situations?
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| Matter of "complex" vs "idiomatic" | Jan 29, 2016 |
dolichos wrote:
The client now says my English is "too complex" and "too difficult," and says that since many of the readers may not be native English speakers, I need to use simpler words. For example, I write "events playing out before his eyes" and he says "don't say 'playing out,' people might not understand, say 'happening.'" "Playing out" isn't exactly a rarefied literary term.
It sounds more like your customer is looking to avoid *idiomatic* English - idioms/phrases that non-native speakers might not be familiar with. I get this request all the time for Japanese to English translations, and sometimes the customer says "complex/complicated" when he/she really means "idiomatic"....Just my 2 yen.
MGrant
| | | | Tom in London
United Kingdom
Local time: 02:57
Member (2008)
Italian to English
I would reply "how dumb do you want it? I can do dumb, dumber, and dumbest. You choose. All I ask is that you allow me a free hand to be as creative as necessary".
Then I'd have fun!!
| | | | Tom in London
United Kingdom
Local time: 02:57
Member (2008)
Italian to English
Michael Grant wrote:
It sounds more like your customer is looking to avoid *idiomatic* English - idioms/phrases that non-native speakers might not be familiar with.
There's an interesting consonance between "idiom" and "idiot". Perhaps the dumbed-down version of idiomatic English is "idiotmatic" English.
| | | | Markus Nystrom
United States
Local time: 20:57
Swedish to English
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| Ancient roots of idiocy | Jan 30, 2016 |
Idiot comes from the ancient Greek "idiotes". This denotes a private person, but was used to connote someone who only exists within that privacy, or with reference to himself, that is to say a solipsist without a public presence or function, properly speaking. Most of us now are idiots willy nilly by the facts of the age, all the more so as freelancing nodes in a radically atomistic webworld in which the idiocy-transcending agora can scarcely be imagined. We can of course wish for and work towar... See more Idiot comes from the ancient Greek "idiotes". This denotes a private person, but was used to connote someone who only exists within that privacy, or with reference to himself, that is to say a solipsist without a public presence or function, properly speaking. Most of us now are idiots willy nilly by the facts of the age, all the more so as freelancing nodes in a radically atomistic webworld in which the idiocy-transcending agora can scarcely be imagined. We can of course wish for and work towards more.
@Tom Yes, I guess being overly idiomatic is somewhat "idiotic", since the potential audience is reduced to those who properly possess the language.
[Edited at 2016-01-30 09:25 GMT] ▲ Collapse
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Kay Denney
France
Local time: 03:57
French to English
Tom in London wrote:
I would reply "how dumb do you want it? I can do dumb, dumber, and dumbest. You choose. All I ask is that you allow me a free hand to be as creative as necessary".
Then I'd have fun!!
and perhaps provide a sliding scale for your fee: the dumber they want it the more you charge obviously. It's hard to talk to idiots when you are used to an intelligent readership.
Or ask them to re-write the source according to the level of dumb required...
| | | | Tom in London
United Kingdom
Local time: 02:57
Member (2008)
Italian to English
| Don't be dumb | Jan 30, 2016 |
I don't believe in speaking in an artificially simple way, for the benefit of someone else whose English might not be up to it. Speaking clearly, and perhaps a little slowly, yes.
I didn't become fluent in Italian by having Italians speak to me in a dumbed-down version of Italian.
| | | | Balasubramaniam L.
India
Local time: 07:27
Member (2006)
English to Hindi
+ ...
SITE LOCALIZER | It's a class issue I think (Off topic) | Jan 31, 2016 |
dolichos wrote: Balasubramaniam L. wrote:
This happened recently on a small advertisement being translated into Hindi for Canadian audience. The brief given was to use a liberal mix of Hindi and English as the target audience would be most familiar with this mix (often referred to as Hinglish).
It turned out to be a tough job and the reviewer made it worse by rejecting my choices of words and substituting them with chaste Hindi words. I've been really fascinated by the way speakers of Indian languages throw in not just words, but entire phrases of English. I've mostly seen it with Hindi speakers, but I also saw an interview in Tamil where I felt I could almost follow along. I assume there must be situations in which it isn't acceptable, and that there is a class aspect to it as well. Do most Indian people with a good knowledge of English speak this way in everyday situations?
I think it is a class issue. Although India's tryst with English is only two hundred odd years old, by now a class of Indians have grown up for whom English, even if it is not the mother tongue, is the main language they know. They inhabit the big urban centres and are usually affluent and belong to the professional and business classes. They are said to constitute about 5 to 10% of India's population. Many of them are settled abroad and form the vast diaspora of Indians living abroad. These people mostly use English at an every day level. The base language is their mother tongue and the sentence structure mostly follows the base language but because their vocabulary in the base language is so poor, as they have never studied it formally in schools and colleges, they insert English words and even whole sentences liberally in their speech. You can almost be taken in that they are speaking English, but if you ask them, they will claim they are speaking their mother tongues!
This phenomenon is not confined to Hindi, but is common with all Indian languages. You would have noticed it more among Hindi speakers because Hindi is the largest language in India with about half of the billion Indians having it as their mother tongue, while another 20% are fluent in it.
| | | | | I find it easier to accept that English is not a single language | Jan 31, 2016 |
I started school in an English-speaking school in Bombay, now Mumbai, and some of my classmates may well have grown up into the sort of Hinglish/English-speaking Indians Balasubramaniam L. describes.
My brother and I were strangely silent if ever our parents came to the school - where we normally spoke the same language, with the same sing-song rhythm, as the others. It was called Babu-English in some circles, and forbidden at home - our parents did not want us to sound odd when we ... See more I started school in an English-speaking school in Bombay, now Mumbai, and some of my classmates may well have grown up into the sort of Hinglish/English-speaking Indians Balasubramaniam L. describes.
My brother and I were strangely silent if ever our parents came to the school - where we normally spoke the same language, with the same sing-song rhythm, as the others. It was called Babu-English in some circles, and forbidden at home - our parents did not want us to sound odd when we came back to England... (My father and his brothers had the same problem a generation earlier.)
Some years ago I read a book by Tom McArthur entitled 'The English Languages' - which I can warmly recommend.
There never has been one uniform English language. To continue on the 'idiot' theme, we all have our idiosyncrasies and speak our own idiolects. 
As others have mentioned, it is necessary to write for the target group on each occasion. There is no universal 'Globish' either, so in fact you do have to write the kind of thing that will be understood by your specific readers.
I love polishing a piece for those brought up in the same tradition as me, with discussions of Latin and Greek, 'English as she is Spoke' and the whole of the bottom of the bookshelf taken up by the Oxford English Dictionary. It was not just there, it was consulted, too!
Nowadays I also have to accept Danglish and Scandi-English, because that is what is spoken in my current neck of the woods.
It means I can distinguish between my own glorious heritage and the various shades of lingua franca. From that point of view, the Scandi-varieties are often a fascinating mix of common heritage and modern creativity. In fact it is not at all a case of dumbing down - there is plenty of allusion and idiom in it too.
It is not actually simplified, but it IS different. Where communication is the primary purpose, it is necesary to keep within the readers' frame of reference.
As a completely different exercise, we can promote the a closer study of various types of mainstream English and cultivate the best. But there is no way we can impose British English (whatever that is!) or any other variety on the rest of the world.
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It goes both ways.
Danes complain about English 'ruining their language', and I sometimes retort ' Well, look what your ancestors did to our language back in the day - we're just returning the compliment!' On other occasions, I say they should take better care of their own language - it is up to them to speak it properly and not bastardise it.
Although some schools do teach languages properly, IMHO Danish is not always taught adequately from the start. Grammar 'is a bore', and the 'comma war' is a joke, although with a little analysis most intelligent people can learn the Danish comma rules. Without a solid base in their native Danish, some children pick up all shades of English or Danglish from television, Facebook and all over the place, and create their own varieties.
Then it is necessary to write a simplified version of any language to get through to them.
I suspect something similar may be happening in a lot of places, and THAT should be resisted. ▲ Collapse
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dolichos
Turkish to English
TOPIC STARTER
Michael Grant wrote:
It sounds more like your customer is looking to avoid *idiomatic* English - idioms/phrases that non-native speakers might not be familiar with. I get this request all the time for Japanese to English translations, and sometimes the customer says "complex/complicated" when he/she really means "idiomatic"....Just my 2 yen.
MGrant
I think it's just a level of knowledge issue. He objects to certain words that he doesn't know and determines that because he doesn't know them, they must be literary or somehow too "high-level."
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