Interpreting: December 2007 Archives

"Senor Martinez fell into my Spanish as passionately as into a beloved's arms. Not that he'd previously been parsimonious (according to Jack) with his ungrammatical English, but his Spanish was a force of nature that now gushed out of his mouth like water from a blocked pipe.

...

'And you're the one who will be my translator?' he said to me in Spanish. 'Then please tell Senora Eva that her eyes are as blue as the Mediterranean.'

'Senior Martinez says he's dying to try some paprika chicken,' I said. 'But I suggested the stuffed carp.'

Eva handed him her menu. 'Please.'

'I speak of love, not food.' He pushed it away and fixed her with a tender look.

'I can't persuade him,' I said. 'It's gotta be the chicken.'

The Gypsy musicians had appeared . . . 'Tell Senor Martinez this is a real Gypsy tune, not for tourists.'

'I translated and Senor Martinez sighed eloquently, his hand at his heart. 'The Spanish and the Hungarians are very much alike. We have the wildness and also the sadness, what we call duende. We have both ben conquored peoples, we have the souls of Gypsies and the heads for business. That is why I think I can sell our beautiful bathroom fixtures here. I believe they will be understood. And now you have democracy. Hungary, I salute you!' He raised his glass. 'Down with fascism!'

'What's he saying?' asked Eva.
'He says he wishes the paprika chicken would hurry up. He's starving!'

But Senor Martinez was a single-minded man when it came to the similarities between Hungary and Spain, and the possibility of a spectacular union, plumbing and otherwise, between them.

'While the Gypsies made wild music over our shoulders, Senor Martinez outlined a theory of history. 'Both Christian Spain and Christian Hungary fought agasint the infidel Arabs,' he said. 'We stopped the Mohammedans from overrunning Europe.'

'But surely you must admit, Senor Martinez,' I corrected him, 'that the Moors in Spain created a brilliant civilization of poetry, philosophy, gardens. Not only did they have the first lighted, paved streets in Europe, they had the first sewage system in the world. Plumbing. Senor, they had plumbing.'

'The Reconquista was Spain's finest moment,' he disagreed.

'What's he saying?' Eva demanded.

'He thinks the Turks have gotten a bad rap,' I said. 'He says, Really, what's so bad about a culture that drinks coffee and sits around in bathtubs all day?'

'The Turkish infidels?' said Eva, shocked.

'What does Eva say?' he asked.

'She says she wishes these Gypsy musicians would take a hike. They're starting to remind her of a Luftwaffe raid, except there are no bomb shelters.'

Senor Martinez stared at me a moment and then spoke in laborious English, with a pleading glance at Eva, 'I am think Senora Reilly is have fun with me.'

'Oh no, Senor Martinez, you're wrong about that. Believe me, I'm not having much fun at all.'

Eva whispered, 'Cassandra, don't tease the poor man s much. He's paying for our meal.'

'Cassandra, you are being just the slightest bit rude, dear.' Jack smiled wickedly. 'See? There's my mother speaking.'

...the difference, according to Heidegger, is pain.

"Diviners," writes Dennis Tedlock, "Stay close to 'the rift of difference,' as Heidegger calls it, even a small difference. They leave us between two points, or at both of them, and sometimes three." (1983:254)

"The Babel fish," said The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy quietly, "is small, yellow, and leechlike, and probably the oddest thing in the universe. It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequences with nerve signals picked up from the speech centers of the brain which has supplied them."

fi yuo cna raed tihs, yuo hvae a sgtrane mnid too Cna yuo raed tihs? Olny 55 plepoe out of 100 can. i cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno't mtaetr in waht oerdr the ltteres in a wrod are, the olny iproamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it whotuit a pboerlm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Azanmig huh? yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt! if you can raed tihs forwrad it.

Ok - so "new research" is apparently untrue, although there is something to be said for "the role of letter order on reading." Matt Davis has compiled an impressive corpus of equivalents in at least thirty languages, along with references and commentary from original and follow-up research in this area of word-form research. The number of letters in the word has quite a lot to do with whether the mind can grasp it.