Growing up in a bi-lingual country can be fun..... especially if you are interested in languages. By law all products and produce sold in Canada must have accompanying info or instructions in both languages .... French and English. Breakfast was a learning experience as we kids gulped down our favourite Snap Crackle and Pops while reading the backs of cereal boxes comparing Corn Flakes to Flocons de Maïs .or flakes of maize. Then someone from my Irish entourage might remind me that Kellogs was the Scottish form of the old Gaelic word " coileach " .... rooster , cock..... and all of a sudden the ' wake up guy with a topnotch ' on the box took on real meaning !!
When buying a desk at Staples or a wheelbarrow and outdoor propane gas BBQ appliances at Canadian Tire which come in the form of jigsaw puzzles these objects always come with step by step bi-lingual instructions telling you how to put the dadblasted masterpiece together. If you are following the English version you may or may not have difficulties assembling the parts ..... and should you be bi-lingual you might even crossreference by checking out the French directives.... quite often either gains or losses of information between the two renditions are available LOL. For example in English they might include four bolts with three washers and five nuts whereas in French you could end up with only three bolts , four washers and four nuts !! Sometimes it could be a bit more serious though. .... the case of screwing in a table leg until tight and in French an important gain in info telling you to screw leg tight until you hear a click , meaning that the leg is now firmly in place and won't fall off . One might even throw in a free wrench while the other does not .I always read both sets and decide upon the best .
To avoid complicating an idea which , at the outset , was meant to be simple I shall now bring this short post to an end with two quick anecdotes about translation pitfalls and pleasures.
First of all the Finnish episode comes to mind. I was doing research back in the 70s at the University of Helsinki and living at the local Hospiz or WMCA .. cheap but clean rooms. There were two public toilets on each floor and one day while sitting there with time to waste while waiting for the show to start I began reading the houserules hanging on the wall beside me . They were written in five languages : Finnish , Swedish , German , English and Russian. Check out time for the Russians was 10 am , for the Finns and Swedes 11 am , the Germans had to be out by noon whereas the English version gave us until 1 pm n the afernoon !! I noticed an extra line though in Russian absent on the others .. a gain of info so to speak....which translated out as " please do not steal the toilet paper !". Had I been Russian I would have felt utterly humiliated !!..
The second anecdotal item concerns a phone call I received this morning from one of my former students who is nowadays working on native landclaims and was looking for someone to translate a text into the Innu language and vice versa too !! So I gave him the name of a woman whom I had trained as a technolinguist some years ago and who does a great deal of interpreting / translating for her people... Marie- Jeanne. At the mention of her name my mind drifted back to Marie-Jeanne's first translation for the goverment IT wanted her to put into " Indian" (as they called it back then ) some godforsaken text about water rights and pay her five cents a word in the target language , her own native Innu. Now as I explained in a recent blog Innu is a word -sentence language which implies that one word in Innu corresponds to many words in one of our own Indo-European tongues. Example ... I see you = tshiwapmitin in Innu....three words in English , only one in Innu / you see me = tshiwapmin / he sees you = tshiwapmukw / etc .I' ll add one final clincher for those who might be interested. .... a simple sentence of introduction .. I am very pleased that you are well = Nimistaminwenten e-minupaniekw ! Should Marie-Jeanne be paid in the target language here then she has just earned $ .10 ( ten cents ) since there are but two words in the translation . However , she would earn $ .40 ( forty cents ) if paid according to the number of words in the starting language. My advice to Marie-Jeanne was ... and still is ... to never accept a contract wherein she is nemunerated using a wordcount based on her own language.
P.S. In above pic Marie-Jeanne is the young woman on the right. The other woman is also Innu whereas the two young men are Atikamekw and speak a language close to Innu structurally and historically ..... yet not mutually understandable.
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