…if you’re going to put foreign words into an English book/movie/etc., can you please make sure the aforementioned foreign words are actually part of the language you’re purporting to transcribe?

Because, let me tell you, reading or hearing French that fails to take into account the most basic grammar (as in, gender of words and/or article use) doesn’t fill me with glee and enthusiasm.

(we can then move on to poor word choices, but I’m willing to cut a little more slack here, even though those things tend to sound like nothing a Frenchman would ever say).

Current mood:

cranky

You know modern English only has one set of second-person pronouns and basically no formal address that uses pronouns? And how French has “tu/vous”, informal/formal forms of address?

Well, I have the whole weekend to work out how characters in Obsidian and Blood should address one another in the French translation, whether by tutoiement or vouvoiement–in order to help out the translator.

Arg.
(don’t get me wrong, I’m overjoyed I get that kind of control over the translation, but it’s just that I now have to mentally translate my characters interactions into French, and it’s a teensy little bit painful)

-taught myself (not that there’s much involved) how to use VNI to input Vietnamese characters. Basically input numbers in addition to letters in order to add the diacritical marks (slightly non-intuitive, but I prefer numbers to the other method, which involves inputting extra letters/symbols). OK, that’s this week’s distraction, now I have no excuse to go back to my lessons…

-tried a slightly different phở recipe (see, I can use VNI *grin*). H was happy; I, less so. I think using the vegetarian broth as the basis for a phở bò is a bad idea. Yes, kind of obvious, when you think about it. We have veggie broth at home because it’s more versatile, but it’s just not phở without the meat broth… (beef, in this case. Never was a fan of the chicken version). Let’s see if I can find some without MSG… (yes, I could make my own beef broth, but I seldom have 3 hours to cook broth, so shortcuts are nice).

-also, am self-teaching myself Python, on the H’s recommendation that it’s a more versatile language than bash scripting, which is what I used before. I can see his point: it’s more practical, more readable, and it’s portable, which is darn handy. Go Python.

Er…
So this is possibly quite silly, but the H and I need someone who can read Chinese. See, we bought ourselves a nice rice cooker from the local Chinatown. What we hadn’t planned for was that although it came with an English instruction manual, it doesn’t provide an explanation of the different settings in a language either of us speaks. There’s a row of white Chinese characters around the central LCD screen (which is meant to be the cooking modes), and a further set of five settings on the LCD screen itself (which is meant to be the rice type, if we read the instruction manual correctly). I have no idea if they’re traditional or simplified Chinese.

Pictures below after the cut. If anyone can provide us with translations, we’d be pretty grateful (it would avoid our messing up dinner by confusing congee, steam-cooking and standard rice cooking…)

EDIT: we’re pretty reasonably sure the white characters are the following (or some variant): regular, quick, small amount, cake, steam, soup, congee, casserole. We just don’t know which ones correspond to which…
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…to the reader-hivemind: if I call a soldier a “knight”, does this mean that he *has* to have a horse or be mounted on one?
The equivalent French and Spanish words are “chevalier” and “caballero”, which are formed from the root of “cheval” and “caballo” respectively, suggesting that possession of a horse is imperative. “Knight”, insofar as I can see, doesn’t have that connotation, but maybe it’s irreversibly acquired it by now?

Swamped. Or ocean-ed, quite possibly.

Working on a new short in the Xuya continuity, involving spaceships and poets.

Made my first serious phở ersatz, mostly pre-prepared broth and paste, but with veggies and spices thrown in for a better taste. Yummy… Next up, I think, is using pre-prepared beef broth (instead of the pre-made phở broth, which is full of MSG). The full broth including beef is at least three hours’ simmering, too long to make for an evening dish, but I can live with cubes of beef broth and additional spice. Now to find some cloves, which my local supermarket doesn’t stock…

Vietnamese continues apace; we now have a book. Or rather, four books, out of which the first one is entirely dedicated to pronunciation. Arg. Still struggling with normal vowels and consonants, and then we move to diphtongs…
Fun stuff I’ve learnt: my default tone isn’t the level one (ngang), but rather the falling-rising one (hỏi). When I’m really tired, I default to this, with hilarious results…
Also, the day I can pronounce “Wednesday” in Vietnamese is going to be a red-letter one (“ngày thứ tư”, lit. “the fourth day”, regroups four sounds I can’t manage,, the “ng”, the “th” which should be somewhat harsh but distinct from the “t”, and the “ư”).

I’ve been a member of SFnovelists for a while, but I was mostly lurking. Now I have decided to de-lurk, with my very first blog post on translation, language and cultures. You can find it here (and I’ll be posting monthly from now on).

So, it’s been a thoroughly uninteresting weekend in the Bodard household, with activities ranging from movies (Robin Hood, surprisingly better than expected, although a lot of it was sheer nonsense), to cooking (chocolate and orange scones with a dodgy recipe that resulted in burnt things tasting vaguely of chocolate), ironing (aka tackling the pile of laundy that’s not been touched for a few decades) and writing (finished up one short story, subbed it).

Also watched a bunch of Bones episodes in Spanish, in an effort to revive my flagging command of the language. It’s not always optimal, because they do the dubbing and the subtitles separately, and the text on the bottom of my screen seldom coincides with what the characters are saying. A good bonus of this, though, is that when I don’t understand what they’re saying, chances are I’ll know the vocabulary in the subtitles and vice versa. Am learning a lot of useless vocabulary with this, such as a bunch of synonyms for “skulls”, or how to say “hanged” in Spanish.
(alas, the fun will have to stop soon, because for some weird reason they only released season 3 as a French/English/Spanish set of DVDs, all the others are in French/English. Of course it had to be the shortest season they picked. I’m contemplating Veronica Mars next, if I can borrow them from my sis).

Tomorrow, back to the grind.

Your daily Three Kingdoms progress: Kongming attempts to conquer the Man people for the Second Emperor, Liu Bei’s successor. Interesting visions of the south of China/North of Vietnam, with a bunch of amusingly racist stereotypes (I’m cutting the book a lot of slack here, in case you have a doubt). By the looks of it, I’m nearing the end.
BF has started Ian M Banks’ Against a Dark Background, and spends a lot of time chuckling to himself. I imagine I’ll have to try it at some point, after I finish all the books I had at Eastercon.

So, Eastercon is approaching: this year, it’s at the Radisson in Heathrow, the same place where I attended my first convention in 2008 (also an Eastercon)–and my first real experience at socialising in English on a massive scale (I went to Bootcamp and WOTF before that, but I’d never actually dealt with so many people in such a small amount of space).
My first Eastercon will always remain etched in memory as the moment I realised that being fluent was one thing, but being a non-native speaker came with a few annoying side-effects. Here are a few:

• Unintentional idiomatic language:
  English is full of idioms–and it’s made worse by the fact that I have to reckon against a lot of local variations (the ones I know most are UK and US, but I bet I miss out on a lot of others, too, like Indian English and Australian English). Now, I generally know what a given idiom means; but the reverse–knowing that I’m using an idiom when I’m writing–is a lot less obvious. For instance, in Harbinger of the Storm, I have references to “bean counters” that are precisely that: dried beans used as die and counters for the patolli game. However, of course, the word has the other, far more common meaning of “accountants”, providing for much unintentional fun…
• The cocktail party effect (or lack thereof):
  You might not know what the cocktail party effect is. It’s a little magic trick of the brain: when you’re talking to someone in a noisy environment, your brain will automatically edit out the background noise (even and especially if said noise includes intelligible conversations), allowing you to focus on the person(s) you’re speaking with. It’s invaluable in parties (hence the name), but also in restaurants, bars, and other kinds of social functions.
  Sadly, I’m completely immune to it in both English and in Spanish, the languages I speak as a non-native. I think it comes from those hours of classes that forced me to listen to the language in order to understand it (and to fill in little summaries to make sure I’d made out the meaning of the words correctly). Now, when I hear people speak, I have to make a pass at understanding it. Even if it’s a conversation that’s completely unrelated to me. As a result, pub-time with me? I might look a little bewildered if the pub is particularly noisy. It’s not because I don’t care what people I’m saying–but rather because I’m trying to disentangle the current conversation from the four others happening at the neighbouring tables.
• Spelling issues:
  Ah yes. I think part of that one comes from the fact that I’m a visual person, and part of it from the fact that I’m a latecomer to English (I only started investing heavily in it at 16 or so). The most obvious effect of that one is that I will need a long moment to process when you’ve spelled a word. At, say, signings, it’s a little more problematic than I anticipated. I live in terror of the day I won’t have understood someone’s spelling out of their name, and will inscribe a book to the entirely wrong person.
  The other side effect is related to the other way around: if you’re pronouncing a familiar word in a way that I don’t expect, I’ll blank it out as “this funny word I can’t figure out”, even though I quite possibly know that word already. This happens a lot with French words or with words I’ve only seen in writing. I don’t seem to have quite the same flexibility for pronunciation as I have in French: figuring out alternative spellings for words I don’t recognise right off the bat has never worked out for me.
• Accents:
  That one often puzzles my BF. I can understand a lot of the more common accents (Scottish, Irish, Australian, etc.), because I sat for my Cambrigde Certificate of Proficiency back when I was 17, and that part of the training for that included listening to a text which would necessarily be in an accent of the Commonwealth. However, somewhere along the line to fluency, I lost the ability to understand the accents of non-native speakers: someone speaking English with a heavy French accent is going to be very painful for me. I remember we went to a panel at the 2005 Worldcon, which had four native English speakers plus a Japanese man. I couldn’t make head nor tail of what the Japanese guy was saying; my BF, however, couldn’t understand the natives, but could deal with the Japanese accent just fine. I think that for him, all non-native accents are somehow kindred, no matter how different they might be from French. For me, they’re just… too unusual to be parsed, I guess.
  (it’s not that bad, though. A few hours are usually enough for me to pick up a new accent and add it to my repertoire. I had a lot of trouble understanding Jetse de Vries‘ Dutch accent when we first met, but by now it’s become second nature).

So… is it just me? Do you share some of those, or know people who have the same issues? Are there other pitfalls when you’re a non-native?

In other news, Lavie Tidhar’s World SF Blog is moving over to WordPress. So if you want to keep receiving the latest news about World SF (and I’d definitely recommend you to, because it’s chockfull of fascinating overviews of SF in the non-anglophone world), here’s where you should go:

http://worldsf.wordpress.com/
LJ syndication (not entirely sure this is working yet)

Lavie has also posted something I should have thought of earlier: Elisabeth Vonarburg’s planned GOH speech for Worldcon, which is a very interesting overview of her relationship with English. Read it here.

My name is Elisabeth Vonarburg and I don’t speak Klingon.

I do speak English, though, more or less. But just in case, I brought my Faithful Igor, who will translate the less intelligible parts if needs be.

In fact, I love the English language. I loved it first, and learned it much on my own because it was the language of Peter, Paul & Mary, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen (whom I didn’t know was a Canadian and a Montrealer, at the time, when I was living in France. In that respect, France is not very different from the States : lots of Canadians get lost in the shuffle. Hey, they speak & write in English, don’t they ? More or less.)