Thoughts on Translation(s)

This post is not so much about my learning Dutch, but more about thoughts on translation and translations of books.

While doing some browsing online, I saw the word 'craiefiti' listed as the French translation of 'warchalking' -- the practice of drawing chalk marks on the sidewalk to indicate to people in search of an open wireless network that one is near and the settings required to use it and such. At the time, I thought it was a pretty neat word, but a short time later realized that 'craiefiti' actually loses one important property in translation: it's history and "feel".   'Warchalking' links back to 'wardriving' (the process of driving around looking for open wifi networks), which itself comes from 'wardialing' (the process of dialing all the phone numbers in a given prefix looking for a modem). The word 'wardialing' was coined in reference to the 1983 hacker movie "WarGames".  For me, these words spawn thoughts of open access to information, sharing, maybe something a little shady or "grey hat", illicit access, and maybe a little cyberpunk.

The French word 'craiefiti' has none of that. In fact, there's not even a reference to Wifi, or computers, or anything. 'Craiefiti', to me, is just a compound word of chalk ("craie") and graffiti, and could easily refer to any sort of chalk art, wanted or not.  "Chalk graffiti" could mean hobo symbols, tags,  random swear words, slogan, or even murals. But the French word has no links anything that the English word conjures up.

Walking home from the gorcery store, I came up with "wifiti", which at least is "wifi" + "graffiti", and in my mind at least, links the neologism with its meaning a little more. Now, I'm not a native French speaker, so perhaps 'craiefiti' sounds better than 'wifiti', and maybe there are other aspects of 'craiefiti' that I'm not aware of that make it a better translation. But then again maybe not.

Maybe it doesn't matter that the French have a different word for 'warchalking' with difference mental links.  The English word was coined by a guy in London, but it's not necessarily an English concept.  Does the word in all languages have to relate back to the thoughts of the person who first came up with it?  I'm obviously beyond the state in langauge learning where you think that all languages have a 1=1 translation for any given concept, but for something so precise and so new, something in me really does want the French word to "mean" the same thing as the English one.  (This of course all relates to translations of Jabberwocky, of which there are many, but I'm not going to get into that either..)  Maybe all of my ideas about what warchalking "feels" like are enbodied in the French word "craiefiti" simply because of what it "means" to them, and it doesn't need history.  It's meaning, and all the history, stand alone.

The reason I've been thinking about translation is because one of the books I packed to come with me to Amsterdam was Hofstadter's "Le Ton Beau de Marot". It's a book that talks about translation through the process of translating a short French poem into English 50-60 times, and what each one has as an advantage over the other translations. In Hofstadter's way, he also delves into meaning, symbols, artificial intelligence, and the processes of cognition. I skimmed part of this book while in Toronto and I can't wait for it to arrive.

However, this post isn't about Hofstadter,  and it's only marginally about warchalking.  It's actually about the Italian semiotician Umberto Eco. Eco also wrote a book talking about symbols and language and translation called "Experiences in Translation". Eco writes hard to translate books, much like Hofstadter, and this book (among other things) talks about issues he's met with during the translations of his works. Unlike Eco's novels, this work was originally written in English. There exists a French translation. So, which version do I read?

If the book were originally in Italian, I'd read the French translation in a heart beat. But somehow I'm torn knowing that the French one is not what he wrote, and that it would in fact be easier for me to read the original. I've read French translations of English books, but never without having read the original. Most of that reading I regarded as 'studying' anyways, instead of pleasure reading. In fact, my reading list also has on it Hofstadter's "Goedel, Escher, Bach", followed by it's French translation.

The problem for me is that I'm scared of missing something important when reading in French.  Reading is no longer just a study exercise for me  (in which case the content could be almost anything, I just chose something to hold my attention), but as the end in itself. I don't want to miss something important that Eco, of Hofstadter, or whoever, is saying, or some subtle joke or pun or snippet of information or idea or whatever because I can't understand the language. If I'm reading Eco, it's not because I'm studying French, but because I want to read his thoughts on translation.

AJATT just had a post on always making the choice to use your target language, if available. I'm still very hesitant to do that for my pleasure reading, though, and that's probably going to hold me back. My use of French has dropped of considerably since moving to Amsterdam.  Duh.  Hopefully a trip or two to Paris will help :) Actually, probably having a routine and not feeling in such a state of flux will probably help.

Maybe my thoughts on translation will change after reading "Le Ton Beau de Marot", or maybe they'll just become more more hard-line and I'll never want to read anything in translation again.

A couple more speaking attempts

My list of notes for things to blog about has been growing, so I may as well flesh them out and get a blog post up.

I've spoken Dutch a couple more times, once buying "De Hobbit" (including asking a clerk where it was), and putting more money on the OV Chipcards. I know I had said after watching Laoshu505000's videos that I wanted to start production early, but I think I'm changing my mind about that. I'll probably continue to parrot out set phrases for some daily tasks, but I'm not going to engage in any real conversation until I'm much more comfortable at the listening stages.

Speaking of listening, I'm up to lesson 35 of Assimil's first wave. I'm starting to be able to get fewer of the individual words (Lesson 26 was a pain), but I can still gloss the meaning. I think I just need to study them more rather than only reading the text 2 or 3 times. Hopefully they will be easier when I need them during the second phase.

Going through Assimil this time seems harder, and it's probably because of all the latent French I had squirreled away. I'm also having trouble differentiating between the many separable verbs: opFOOing, verFOOnen, and such. It's a sign I need to listen to the dialogs more, but also that I need to go back and read what the word is in the first place so I really know what I'm listening for. To bring this back for French, I think I was familiar enough with the language that just hearing the word once or twice was sufficient for me to be able to pick it out correctly from the dialog: less of the sentence structure was totally brand new, so the pieces I needed to listen for were easier to hear.

There are a couple of French developers at work, and I've spoken with him a couple of times. One of the co-founders of my company speaks 14 languages or something, and I had a nice language geek chat. (He was the one who sent me the email in Dutch on my first day.)

I spent my entire commute today listening to "De Hobbit". I'm still missing much to much of the Dutch for it to make any real sense. I had tried doing some LR a bit earlier, but the same problem: even though I know the story quite well, there's just too much new stuff there for me and it's just a tidal wave of gibberish. I'll try again AA (After Assimil :)

Now that I've tried to use Living Language for basics, I noticed a problem with the dialogs. I had noticed it before with French but never though anything of it because of my level at the time. Living Language has the problem that there dialogs very frequently fall into the category of "thin plot around a list of vocabulary." In "French Beyond the Basics", for example, one of the dialogs is a tour guide describing a tour in The Louvre: "First to the antiquities: Oriental, Greek, Egyptian, Etruscan, and Roman. ... Then to the collection of European, African, Asian, Oceanic, and American. ... As you'll see, there are classic and modern paintings: guache, watercolor, oils, as well as etching and engravings." That dialog is particularly bad and I've only given a sample of the some of the more egregious errors, but that book is actually filled with them. In a CD Shop ("What kind of music do you like?"), renting a car ("All our vehicles are equipped with.."), a camera repair shop ("I need "). At least with the intermediate/advanced French lessons I could just skip over them because there wasn't any important vocabulary. The Dutch "Spoken World" course has similarly obnoxious dialogs but tied into important grammar points and I'm supposed to be listening to them because I don't know enough to ignore them yet.

I'm not doing anymore Linguaphone lessons at the moment but I _do_ mean to get back to it. I did enjoy the all-Dutch-all-the-time feel of the dialogs, even the performance was a bit melodramatic.

I watched Laoshu's videos on his FLR system. It's a bit like how MT primes you to make longer complex sentences by getting some of the important conjunctions early on. And I like the idea of prepping yourself with answers to questions native speakers ask learners. I'm still not sure about production so soon without a massive level of exposure, or coming up with your own exercises when you have no native speaker to "check your work" as it were. Although I know understand what he meant by "making your own exerciess" for the TY courses: just make up 10-20 sentences describing made up facts about the participants in the dialogs using grammar and vocab points from the lesson.

Finally, I found some Dutch radio plays with transcripts. The page seems to be a bit slower than some of the audiobooks I have, and they're shorter (30m each). I'll probably start trying to work on one of those in my Copious Free Time to augment the Assimil/TY/LL dialogs I'm listening to back and forth.

In a couple of days we'll probably be in our new apartment which means I'll no longer have the 1 hour commute there and back. I suppose that's good, but I'll need to find another way to get my shadowing in. We're moving right next to a park, so I suppose I can "walk swifly" in a nice outdoor space.

I have another posts of unfinished ideas talking about translation. Not sure when that'll be done yet though.

shopping and the first day at work

Did some shopping on the weekend. Picked up a Dutch-as-second-language dictionary with example sentences for each of the words. My Dutch isn't good enough yet to actually use it, but I've looked up a couple words and they helped me confirm a guess or at least get a rough idea of what the word meant.


My new office is very international. I was surrounded by people speaking a number of different languages, not just the obvious Dutch. I installed my work computer in French which confused our sysadmin when he needed to fix something. Luckily Macs have lots of pretty icons.

One of my new coworkers (who googled my name and found this blog) sent me an email in Dutch that I was able to get the gist of. I responded with a two sentence email IN DUTCH saying basically "Thank you for you email but I was unable to understand it." Two small errors (a verb conjugation and a gender error) were corrected by another coworker, who also validated my interpretation of the email. So, that was pretty cool. Another Good Dutch Day as they say.

My commute at the moment is about an hour. Certainly obnoxious and longer than I was expecting from previous sample trips, but basically it'll give me a good chunk of time to listen to dialogs.

I pass a couple of used bookstores on my way to work, so I should be able to find a copy of HP1 and "De Hobbit" without any trouble. I doubt I'd be able to read them yet (the audiobooks are still mostly incomprehensible), but you 1) have to have goals and 2) need to be reading things you're interested in. Granted, I'm still at the level where I have to read materials written for beginners, but you have to reach high.

I'm still not sure how my chapter notes would work. Possibly just some vocab notes and other random "work". I can't see myself using anki and sentence mining, 'cause as much as I want to believe otherwise, flash cards are Just Not My Thing.

Part of my keeps being pulled to Anki, though. "Maybe this time wil be different."
It's a bit like when I was stuck at Intermediate with French and kept thinking to myself "Surely the lack of this one book is what's preventing me from becoming fluent." I never actually feel into that trap (well, maybe once) but I was at least aware that that was the underlying cause of my desire to purchase these books. I felt I was so close to fluency I was just missing some vocab, or some slang, or some idioms, or whatever. I always stepped back, but it was very frustrating to have been tempted like that in the first place. I have a bit of an idea in my head that using flash cards is similar -- a silver bullet that will magically improve my Dutch. Yes, I could mine my courses for sentences (since they're all dialog based), but I highly doubt I could get into the routine. Maybe it's worth another shot? There certainly have been enough upheavals recently (pretty much everything associated with the move) that it doesn't seem unreasonable that I could make it work? I'll keep you posted.


As for courses, at the moment I'm up to 28 in Assimil. I'm still batching them in groups of 7 trying to listen to them all together for about a weeks. I sliced up the Linguaphone audio lessons from a single giant mp3 into lesson-sized records so that should make studying lessons 5-10 easier. I haven't progressed any further on Living Language but I want to try to at least understand the dialog up to lesson 4 or 5 by the end of the week. I haven't done any of the written work for them yet.

Well, it's kind of late here now. I'm going to go listen to some Assimil (22-27) and Living Language (2-3).

"Spoken World Dutch" and out-and-about in Amsterdam

I arrived in Amsterdam on Tuesday and have been busy settling down.

Before I left Canada, I picked up "Living Language: Spoken World Dutch". I really enjoyed the Living Language "Beyond the Basics" and "Ultimate French Advanced" courses for French (since they were both dialog based). I quickly flipped through the book when I opened the box. It seems to be close to Teach Yourself, but with more traditional exercises and fewer drawings. There are also writing exercises (like, paragraph sized and scaled to the difficulty of the lesson) that I'm going to do and post on lang-8. (Finding topic to write about on lang-8 was always hard for me.)

That was a couple of days ago. Having looked a little more closely at it, I think I'm going to drop TY in favour of it. There is much more audio content (6 CDs vs. 2), the dialogs are in general longer, there is more content in the grammar explanations and example sentences. All the example sentences are also recorded on the CDs. The CDs are actually in 2 sets: The (A) set contains the dialogs, example sentences, and exercises to do with the book in front of you. Set (B) is for using "on the go" without the book. Giving the way the tracks are broken down, it's just a matter of copying the right tracks onto my mp3 player so I can have the dialogs alone to shadow with. Plus, having the extra example vocab spoken and in context is a great help.

Today was my first day speaking with Real Dutch People.

I told someone (in Dutch) that I spoke a tiny bit of Dutch. She asked me (in Dutch) "How is that?" which I understood without translating to English (it's a phrase from conversation 5.1 of TY "Teach Yourself Dutch Conversation"). I wasn't able to reply (which is stupid, since I should have been able to respond using sentences from Lesson 17 of Assimil -- it's all about how to say you learned with Assimil and how it's the best method on the market :), but I kind of sputtered and only managed to say the name of the course, rather than an actual grammatical sentence.

Dutch exchange number 2 was ordering at a café where I then didn't understand the waiter's question ("what kind of bread"), and then two more exchanges on the metro trying to get home: 1) "where does train 51 leave from" and 2) "what is the name of this station" (pointing at a map of the area near our hotel with unmarked station names). In both of these cases, I managed to get the piece of information I needed, even if I didn't fully understand the response. So, success.

I'm pretty happy actually. I feel like I'm already more willing to use what small amount of Dutch I actually have. To contrast this with French, I was always terrified to speak French without being perfect.

more dutch thoughts

I've been doing a ton listening to Dutch dialogs. Assimil, TY, Linguaphone. I noticed with French that's how I felt I learned, so it's probably best to start earlier with that in Dutch.

I've started to "gently" shadow some of the Assimil dailogs. Dutch still feels very "foreign" to me. The words don't come easily even when I'm used to hearing them on the dialogs. When I speak, I don't have the meaning of the words in my brain, just the rote repetitions of the sounds. Sort of like a trained chicken who fakes intelligence by playing tic-tac-toe. The Assimil dialogs 1-21 are familiar enough that I feel I understand them without translation, although there are a couple of sentences that I still can't piece apart and hear as the individual words and fragments. The understanding, though, is not the same understanding I feel with French, but I also don't feel I'm translating through English.

Did the 20 short conversations of "Teach Yourself Dutch Conversation" a bunch of times, then the "A2" exercises CD. Still don't feel A2 even though I understand most of the conversations. I've already spoken about this so I won't rehash it.

Flipped through a copy of "Neerlandais sans peine." I could totally use that to learn Dutch. The only issue might be that since Dutch is closer to English, it's probably easier to learn through English than through a Romance language. The hooks to hang Dutch on are English ones, and if I have to find those hooks through translating from French, then that's just going to slow me down.

I'm still trying to figure out how to take notes. With CS and math, subjects I'm used to, it's "obvious" how to take notes. But just writing down grammar points doesn't seem to make sense for language. I think that's why I like idea of flash cards as collections of sentences, and _those_ are the notes. (But I still hate flash cards...)

Listened to Linguaphone 1-10, read the notes, then listened to the lessons again. The notes are a quite dense and too grammar oriented for me to absorbe all 10 lessons worth in a single quick read. I'll need to do a bit more alternating notes/recording/notes/recording instead of batching it up like I tend to do with Assimil.

Listened to Assiml lessons 1-21 on random twice. Went through Assimil 1-21 reading along with the text. Listed the 'het' words. Started doing the Assimil exercises into my wiki and reading the Assimil lesson notes again.

Did the exercises for Assimil 1-14.

I'm slowly working through the Linguaphone lessons 1-10 and the notes in smaller chunks so I can absorb more of it.

A bunch of my Dutch books got accidently packed, so I won't have the dictionary, phrasebook, grammar, or any of my French stuff for a while. Guess it's down to Assimil and TY and an electronic copy of Linguaphone.

first day of doing dutch again

First day of studying Dutch again after a bit of a break. LR'd lessons 1-21 of Assimil (but none of the notes) and then listened to the recordings on a random loop a couple of more times through. These were the lessons I had studied back in September/October and it was nice to see that I hadn't forgotten too much.

Listened to lessons 1-10 of Linguaphone. I like the fact that the textbook is all in Dutch and the English notes are in a different book -- I don't find myself switching languages as much, which is nice. The immersion is a bit more complete. That's something I find really distracting with Michel Thomas and Pimsleur. I skimmed a bit of a Pimsleur lesson (30) and found myself thinking "Wow, this would be much more useful to listen to if there wasn't so much English."

Linguaphone has at least one spelling different -- 'mijnheer' where Assimil and TY have meneer. Linguaphone _feels_ out of date, but hopefully what I'll pick up is stuff that's repeated in the more modern TY/Assimil.

Can't wait to be in Amsterdam to get copies of Hobbit/HP. I tried listening to them again and was only picking up words here and there. I want a copy of the text to follow along with and mark up. They're probably still too advanced for me, but it's a goal.

Still need to figure out how I'm going to take notes. The geek in me likes the idea of a wiki, but it sort of failed when I tried it during my brief studies in October. I'm just going to admin that Flash Cards aren't for me and not bother with them this time. My requirements are a tool that lets me take notes or capture snippets of information and allows (or maybe forces) me to review them at reasonable intervals. Flash cards were the snippets, but maybe I wasn't being vicious enough with them -- too many of my flash cards were dull.

Debating doing my TAC logs in French. I probably wouldn't be happy with them if I did (neither the length nor quality I'd want), but I wan to be working on my French somehow. I picked up the upgrade for Antidote. Seems to work fine under 64-bit Ubuntu, but still no Chrome plugin.

I have the full set of "Calvin et Hobbes" and have been reading them to much enjoyment. I have set myself the task of doing some sentence mining from them. I also can't wait to live in Europe so I can buy the H2G2 audio book. I'll be glad when the shipping doesn't outweight the purchase price of the product.

ABC Signup

I will of course continue my language journal throughout 2010. My focus will be to keep improving my French through reading, writing, and speaking. Hopefully being in Amsterdam a stone's throw away from France and Belgium will help. My plan for French is to speak English as little as possible (wife and co-workers), but otherwise have all my news sources and other reading/listening I do be in French. So, French will be my 'major' language.

Second, I will be learning Dutch. My plan (at the moment) is to work through Assimil, using TY as a grammar guide and left-brain "rules" guide. I'm expecting this (based on how long is took with the French one) to take 6 months to get to the stage where I'm comfortable with all the material. However, I know a bit more about language learning, so this might end up taking less time. I also have "De Hobbit" (one of my favourite books) as an audio book, as well as the first HP. My goal is to have worked through those by the end of the year. That, combined with living in Amsterdam is my approach for Dutch. I will also be writing on lang-8, using sharedtalk, and trying to start speaking what little Dutch I do learn as soon as possible as restaurants and with coworkers.

I've already started on the "French only input" part. My second attack on Dutch will have to wait until I've arrived in Amsterdam. I'm still very busy with the move packing and such. (I might restart as early as the 24th of December, since that's the date when we leave Montreal.)