Brain dump...

The first thing that has struck me about Moscow during this visit was the shift in the exchange rate. During previous trips, I had become used to mentally dividing ruble prices by about 25 to derive the equivalent in dollars; today, the factor I use is 33. Said another way, a 500-ruble note was worth $20 when I left for home in December; today, it’s worth only $15. Predictably, some voices in the Russian print media are talking about a "conspiracy against the ruble."

Be that as it may, prices in Moscow - here in “the center” - are absolutely off the wall. The hotel offers Internet connectivity, but the rate for one hour is about $11, while access over the course of an entire day runs about $37 (which is about what a month of connectivity costs back in Pagosa Springs).

Email/Internet access via my BlackBerry does what it's supposed to do, but I’ve come to really loathe the phone’s interface, which is functional enough to do basic tasks but falls short when it comes to doing the kinds of things I need to do. The phone’s built-in browser also has some quirks, chief among them being an inability to properly reload web pages to reflect updated content. (Then again, this may be evidence of a problem with what my high school typing teacher called “the nut operating the keyboard,” but the end result remains unchanged.)

Monday night, our group tramped literally across the street to a restaurant called Джун Го (Dzhun go, possibly a try at 中国, meaning "China") which proclaims to serve Chinese - or at least Asian - cuisine. The food was edible, but the bill ran us very nearly $80 per person for food that - in terms of quality and quantity - was significantly inferior to what one can order from the Shanghai restaurant back in Pagosa for a lot less money.

Last night, after returning from our meeting, most of the folks I’m supporting descended on the hotel’s executive lounge to take advantage of various goodies. I joined them, after which I went for a rather longish walk (a good thing, as I hadn’t been doing much exercise in Pagosa).

The meeting is proceeding nominally. During an announced break yesterday, one of the participants buttonholed me to chat about some issue or other with a counterpart, whereupon individuals joined and left the conversation for the duration of the announced break, leaving me - once it was time to resume the meeting - with barely enough time to visit the men’s room before returning to the face of the salt mine. (Not a complaint, merely an observation.) All in all, Maya and I have been doing an awesome job, if I do say so myself!

I am going to have to set aside some time this evening to work on an entry for LJ Idol. I have it mostly planned out; I just have to set it down.

Cheers...

LJ Idol Week 5.18: It’s not what you think...

Some folks can get positively weepy about language.

The ability to use language, folks used to say, is what distinguishes humans from all other species on the planet, though as we learn more about the animals that share this rock with us, such a claim begins to stand on ever-thinning ice, together with the assertion - which is standing out there where the ice is really thin - that only humans exhibit intelligence.

Language, folks like to say, is a marvelously precise tool that is part of the heritage of virtually all humans, enabling us to define and transmit our cultures, give expression to the most sublime of thoughts, and pursue human progress. Such sentiments can bring tears to one’s eyes, but from my perspective as a translator and interpreter, the reality is that language can turn on you like a riled rattlesnake, and will, if you’re not careful.

To whet our appetite, consider the terms “translator” and “interpreter.” In the language services industry, a “translator” describes someone who works with written materials, producing a written translation, while an “interpreter” is someone who listens to an utterance and then translates it orally. The jobs are quite different, requiring different skill sets. As a result, a great many translators do not interpret, and many interpreters do not translate.

Unfortunately, the two functions don’t seem all that different to people outside the industry, which is why they are almost universally lumped together under the word “translator.” And while normally, this particular point of confusion is benign, I do know of a couple of cases where clients requested - and were sent - translators (i.e., people who do not interpret) to support interpretation assignments, entailing less-than-optimum results.

Sometimes, confusion of terminology is not so harmless or innocent. If you really want to see some sparks fly, try using the terms “safety factor” and “safety margin” interchangeably in a technical conversation with an engineer. The two terms denote related, but decidedly different concepts. (Unfortunately, quite a number of bilingual dictionaries do not draw the distinction, thereby sowing mayhem in translated documents.)

Worse than having two terms become confused is having the meaning of one word become smeared, like a line drawn with pastel charcoal under the pressure of one’s fingers. For example, there was once a time when the prefix “bi-” meant “every two” in words such as “biweekly,” “bimonthly,” and “biannual.” Yet despite the best clarion efforts of editors such as Theodore Bernstein, a common tendency arose and persisted to use the prefix in the sense of “twice every.” As a result, you end up with the following definition for “biweekly,” which I found at Merriam-Webster OnLine:

Main Entry: ¹bi·week·ly
Pronunciation: (")bI-'wE-klE
Function: adjective
Date: 1832
1 : occurring twice a week
2 : occurring every two weeks : FORTNIGHTLY

Now, contrary to what is often propounded in school, the numerical order of definitions listed for a word has nothing to do with which is “more correct,” though the ordering may reflect what the dictionary editorial board feels are the prevailing priorities of usage. In any event, I’ve never met anyone who predicates his or her usage - or understanding - of a word on the basis of where, numerically, the intended meaning appears in the word’s dictionary entry.

The bottom line? Given this pair of definitions, the word has become well-and-truly useless. Forget you even know how to spell it; just tell the reader “every two weeks” or “twice a week,” whichever applies.

* * *In 1978, Osmo Wiio, a Finnish researcher into communication among humans, published a set of laws, the fundamental one of which was “Human communication fails, except by accident.” Couched in the humorous pessimism embodied in Murphy’s Law (“Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong”), most people assume Professor Wiio meant his laws as some kind of joke. Curiously enough, making such an assumption means you’ve misunderstood Wiio’s attempt at communication (as the professor did not intend his laws only as humor), which - come to think of it - illustrates Wiio’s assertion. Such logical reasoning aside, however, I can recall a incident from my professional life that lends additional support to Wiio’s Fundamental Law.

Back when I worked in-house for the NASA contractor that provided language services for the International Space Station program, I managed to get technical representatives from the US and Russian sides to sit down at a table with language specialists and work out a basic list of ISS terminology. Previous efforts to compile glossaries of this kind over the years fell short, mostly because whoever was compiling the glossary was working in a vacuum, lacking the kind of comprehensive participation that I sought to achieve, and largely did.

In the course of our panel’s deliberations, one term was added to the list rather routinely. The Russian term, transliterated, was oblyot; the equivalent English was flyaround. It was jointly understood as denoting the performance of a specific spacecraft maneuver around and in the immediate neighborhood of the ISS.

A year or two passed, and once, while visiting the Cosmonaut Training Center at Star City, near Moscow, a US Shuttle pilot was given the opportunity to take a Russian Soyuz capsule for a spin in a training simulator. Everything went well, until the Russian instructor asked the astronaut to perform an oblyot.

Obligingly, the American started a flyaround, which involves maneuvering the spacecraft 360 degrees around the station, smartly maintaining a fixed distance from an imaginary center point, just as if he had been at the controls of an Orbiter.

“What the heck are you doing?” asked the instructor, interrupting the pilot about a third of the way through the maneuver.

“An oblyot,” replied the pilot, “just as you asked.”

“That’s no oblyot,” said the instructor, and in the course of the subsequent discussion, it was learned that, when performed by a Soyuz, an oblyot aligns the Soyuz docking port with a port on the station, in preparation for docking. It was definitely not this fly-completely-around-a-fixed-point business one does in a Shuttle. Although both words refer to a maneuver, they don't denote the same maneuver.

Oops.

In the end, the misunderstanding was the result of several factors, including the fact that Soyuz capsules are small and maneuverable, while Shuttle Orbiters are, due to their size, not anywhere near as agile. The major factor, though, may have just been Wiio's Law.

In the end, it turns out there are quite a few ways for language communication to fail. If it’s not in the actual verbal symbols that we use, it can be in their perception. Once, during a teleconference, I distinctly heard a participant say “we’ll have to yell at Agate” (where I assumed “Agate” was a person, but could not imagine why we would have to yell at him or her). I was then informed that what had actually been said was “we’ll have to 'yellow-tag' it” (which is NASA-speak for literally tying a yellow tag to a cargo item being delivered to the station as a way of highlighting its safety status).

Language is powerful because it’s the only tool we have to communicate, to relate our tribal stories, to tell the salesperson we want the red one instead of the black one, or to reach out to others across space and time.Yet while powerful, language is also frequently treacherous. I could go on, but I think I’ve made my point.

Doubtless, Professor Wiio would disagree.

Cheers…