Hi, Alexander! Recently you wrote in a message to mark lewis:

Let's take a phrase: THERE IS NO TWO IDENTICAL NOSE-
PRINTS AMONG CATS. From one side, probably, I should
use "there are no..." -- I tell you about nose-prints.

it seems to me that "are" is correct since we're talking
about more than one "nose-print"...

Up to this point, I agree with both you & Mark. :-)

As I say that maybe the fact is more important than
details. For instance:

Yann Martel's Life of Pi (winner prize book)

|I think you mean "prize-winning book"

-----Beginning of the citation-----
The lifeboat was now covered and the tarpaulin battened
down, except at my end. I squeezed in between the side
bench and the tarpaulin and pulled the remaining tarpaulin
over my head. I did not have much space. Between bench and
gunnel there was twelve inches, and the side benches were
only one and a half feet wide.
-----The end of the citation-----

Check it out: "there was twelve inches!"

Ah... but the author has Pi tell the story in the first person. As a translator of stories you need to be aware of the context. Yes, the fact that (unbeknown to Pi) there's a tiger hidden under the tarp is more important than Pi's grammar & spelling... OTOH I regard scrupulous attention to detail as one of the distinguishing features of an exceptionally good novelist. Pi is a kid of roughly the same age as my students in grade eight, and he's the only human witness to these events. His parents are/were apparently quite well-educated. If he makes typical grade eight errors from time to time, however... or uses a variant spelling in preference to the more conventional "gunwale"... that's in character! At a fairly similar age Huckleberry Finn was speaking as a kid who had skipped out of school & who lived in the southeastern US would have spoken in Mark Twain's day. I don't expect such fictitious personages to dot all the i's & cross all the t's correctly. When other adults here ask me to "find two errors, please" I see they're operating on a much more advanced level.... ;-)




--- timEd/386 1.10.y2k+
* Origin: Wits' End, Vancouver CANADA (1:153/716)

Hi Ardith -- on May 23 2013 at 21:23, you wrote:

Ah... but the author has Pi tell the story in the first
person. As a translator of stories you need to be aware of the

[...]

errors from time to time, however... or uses a variant spelling in preference to the more conventional "gunwale"... that's in
character! At a fairly similar age Huckleberry Finn was speaking as
a kid who had skipped out of school & who lived in the southeastern
US would have spoken in Mark Twain's day. I don't expect such
fictitious personages to dot all the i's & cross all the t's
correctly. When other adults here ask me to "find two errors,
please" I see they're operating on a much more advanced level....
;-)

It seems to me that this passage is akin to those in works by Mark Twain, Robert Louis Stevenson, James Fenimore Cooper, and others, in that the author is trying to reproduce the character's speech AND dialect -- and in order to do
so it's often necessary to spell a word (or misuse a grammatical point) the way
the character would have done. In addition, we must remember the audience for which the piece was written. For example, a British audience of Stevenson's time might not be familiar with the pronunciation of "gunwale" as a sailor would say it, hence when he quotes Long John Silver he spells it "gunnel" to give the right sound.

Pi comes from India, and we don't know (at least, I don't know!) how he would normally speak - and would he even think in English or is it translated for us without telling us?


Cheers... Dallas

--- timEd/386 1.10.y2k+
* Origin: The BandMaster, CANADA [telnet: bandmaster.tzo.com] (1:153/715)

Hi, Dallas! Recently you wrote in a message to Ardith Hinton:

Ah... but the author has Pi tell the story in the first
person.

[...]

It seems to me that this passage is akin to those in
works by Mark Twain, Robert Louis Stevenson, James
Fenimore Cooper, and others, in that the author is
trying to reproduce the character's speech AND dialect
-- and in order to do so it's often necessary to spell
a word (or misuse a grammatical point) the way the
character would have done.

Exactly.... :-)

In addition, we must remember the audience for which the
piece was written.

Uh-huh. With the invention of the printing press & the rise of the middle class their target audience was the paterfamilias who would purchase a novel *he* liked the looks of... and then read it aloud to the entire family.

For example, a British audience of Stevenson's time might
not be familiar with the pronunciation of "gunwale" as a
sailor would say it, hence when he quotes Long John Silver
he spells it "gunnel" to give the right sound.

| Adding the proviso that there may be umpteen different editions of classics such as TREASURE ISLAND & various editors may have their own ideas:

Yes. It wouldn't be in anybody's best interests to delay the action while Papa struggles with "forecastle" or "boatswain", either. The author who knows which side his bread is buttered on may use apostrophes to represent the letters and/or the syllables an experienced sailor would probably omit when he is trying to make himself understood over a howling gale. We have other words like that in English... "Worcestershire", for example. In such cases I figure the pronunciation may have changed where the spelling hasn't, but my life does not depend on how quickly I can get the idea across to folks from Russia. And if they want to look it up the standard spelling usually works better.... ;-)

Pi comes from India, and we don't know (at least, I don't
know!) how he would normally speak - and would he even think
in English or is it translated for us without telling us?

Perhaps we don't need to know. In this story he's alone most of the time, and when he finally runs aground in Mexico (or wherever) the first human beings he meets don't speak English. Nowadays international publishing houses employ people to massage an author's dialect so that readers from the US won't get upset because s/he uses British English & readers from elsewhere won't get upset because s/he doesn't, but grade eight errors seem to be universal. :-))




--- timEd/386 1.10.y2k+
* Origin: Wits' End, Vancouver CANADA (1:153/716)