Words and Wordiness

Looking at the lesson plan I have for later today (rhetoric in English), I found a section on reducing sentence length by use of punctuation and conjunctions. (ie: using periods and but/and/however/since/etc...) In it, the notes say:

"In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, good writers wrote sentences as long as sixty or seventy words. [...] To avoid lack of clarity caused by extraordinary long sentences (more than thirty or forty words), break them up into two or three shorter sentences."

Only seventy words, eh? This of course prompted me to do a search on the historically long sentences found in traditional literature, which led me to Molly's Soliloquy in Ulysses by James Joyce (an attested 4k+ words). Of course, being the semi-obsessive academia nut (cheap pun, I know) that I am, I decided to actually download the full text from Gutenberg -- a very good resource.

And upon reading the relevant section (thankfully not all of it, but enough to get a sense of style), I had two thoughts: (1) It was only "one sentence" because of the physical absence of periods, not any inherent grammatical or semantic cohesion; (2) the soliloquy was written for effect, much like Catcher in the Rye.

What do I mean by the first point? Basically, that if we were to go in and punctuate it as we would normally, we would find that the soliloquy is really a massive tangle of sentences that have been twined together into a knotted ball of polyester (none of that cashmere-literature). But I can understand his conspicuously conscious choice for omitting punctuation, which leads me to the second thought --

Style. Without giving too much of the plot away, the Soliloquy basically traces the emotionally-charged thoughts of Molly. And as we all know, both from ourselves and general experience, people never feel emotions in a logical, structured order. Thoughts come and go in strange ways and the ways that we can be reminded of a specific fact can at times be quite remote. So, what better way to reflect the unstructured, confusing and stream-like quality of thought than an unpunctuated body of text?

To that extent, I acknowledge Catcher in the Rye as an innovation to English literature, but I will never accept it as "fine literature", if only because it's too contemporary. (Well, other reasons too, some of which include the fact that even as a teenaged boy growing up in North America, I could barely relate to the issues raised in that overpriced dime novel.)

But back to the larger issue: do many words in a sentence necessarily mean wordiness? I would argue "no". When we look at better examples (and the legal system is a prime source for this), we find that with adequate thought and structure, it is possible to construct sentences of paragraph length without getting lost in ambiguity. In fact, it is precisely because it's law that it's so long -- to avoid any ambiguities. Likewise, back in the day when literacy and literature was restricted to a small class of people who deserved could afford a real education, writers could afford to write effectively with long and highly structured sentences without losing their audience, because the variation in their audience at the time was considerably smaller. But now, in our frenzied age of information and brevity, we've ironically gone the way of an aesthetic dystopia in lowering the national standard to accommodate the majority. I wonder how much longer we'll have to wait until they force leg weights on ballet dancers so that they all leap with equal clumsiness?

Fun fact of the day: The letter J evolved from the letter I, because the Germans didn't feel like including Y for their alphabet party. ("Ioshua" became "Joshua", even though "Yoshua" would have made more sense, and more accurately reflects the pronunciation across different languages.) English, on the other hand, adopted the French pronunciation, and so, a semi-vowel sound became a fricative.

Bedeviling B-Grammar

Wow, it's been some time since my last post. I've been busy with some school stuff, which still doesn't seem like it'll be sorted out soon, so I'm forced to put it on hold for the weekend. Anyway, on with my grammar rant.

I've been known to frequent "scanlation" sites -- a coined blend between "scans" and "translation", to refer to the not-so-legal translation and editing of foreign comics (which, in North America, predominately means Japanese-to-English). But at least most groups retain a sort of relative morality (in the sense that if it's not licensed in the US for distribution, they'll still treat it as fair game for scanlating online). And of course, given the obsessive and greedy need for development in the storyline, online readers seem to be content with 2nd-generation translations and unnatural phrasing.

Now, I could go on for quite a while about the issues of scanlations, as well as the policies behind their "translator" selection process, but today I just want to narrow in on a specific topic: the scanlation translators' knowledge of English (the target language).

But firstly, a brief introduction to what makes a good translator: In short, the translator should have a thorough knowledge of both source and target languages for the context of the translation. Which means that if you studied Medieval Japanese, you probably aren't the best person to call for a technical manual. Conversely, an engineer wouldn't be first choice for translating prose. (Incidentally, the school recently asked one of the Japanese TA's to check my translation of a short story, whom I know personally, and I've noticed that given her extreme lack of experience with English narratives, she erred on the literal, and not on the communicative, thereby making my original translation sound more "Japanese" and unnatural.)

Anyway, back to the topic at hand. So, if we're reading a light, fluffy teen-romance comic, we'd want a translator who has experience with the casual and contemporary side of both languages. Likewise, if the comic is a historical fiction set in medieval times, a knowledge of the history and culture would be indispensible.

Unfortunately, from what I've seen, scanlation translators seem to be mostly composed of dictionary-dependent beginners who may or may not have taken a first-year course in Japanese. Frightful when the lack of furigana would scare away potential translators (which is sorta like saying how the lack of niqqud would scare off Hebrew translators). -- I'll make a glossary of terms below.

But, not only do these translators lack a sound knowledge of Japanese, they also seem to lack a sound knowlege of English (although, admittedly, this is more common for the Chinese-to-English translators, since C-to-E has more asian immigrants working as N.American translators than J-to-E). So the source text is not clearly understood, and the translation is shoddy and ambiguous.

One such elementary error seems to be the abuse of the be- prefix. From what I can observe, the not-so-educated would use this to replace a more regular verb, thinking it sounds more sophisticated and complex. (Which, doesn't exactly work when you do a blind substitution. Consider: "hey dawg, wassup?" --> "hey thou, wassup?")

"... an accident befell on their old foster parents, ..."

Whenever you replace something as crucial as verb, you always have to check that the constituents aren't affected. "X fell on Y" is most emphatically NOT the same as "X befell on Y".
Remember: be- verbs always take on DIRECT objects! So that means that it should be "X befell Y", assuming that the verb was correctly used.

So that means "X fell on Y" becomes "X befell Y". Also:
"X came to be Y" -> "X became Y"
"X bears/holds a grudge against Y" -> "X begrudges Y"
etc.

And, on the topic of prepositions, just because one verb uses one, doesn't mean a similar verb would use the same one for the same meaning.
e.g. "we talked about the problem"
but "we discussed about the problem"
Also: "I said it was fun"
but:"I spoke, 'it was fun'"
However: "I spoke about the problem"
and: "I said, 'this is the problem ...' "

Mawrr. Let's end with a fun fact: the word "nice" originally meant "fool; ignorant" from "nescienta", lit. "no knowledge". So the next time someone calls you "nice", give them a friendly, piercing glare. =D