The beginning and end of it – the meal – of course names

 

In elegant or at least expensive dining, one main dish will not suffice. The meal needs a prologue and epilogue, as they say in theatre, to create a complete experience. However, the magic of the culinary art requires appropriate names for these extra dishes that start and complete the feast. The origins of this gastronomical nomenclature paint a picture of the development of food.

Upon sitting down at an elegant restaurant, diners enjoy a small but tasty dish to awaken their appetite. For this reason, some English speakers refer to them as appetizers. Other cultures merely note the timing, i.e., before the meal. Thus, Italians call it antipasto, which sounds anti-carbohydrate but means “before the meal” and highlights vegetables, and Yiddish speakers call it a forchpeiz, meaning before the meal. Granted, those two nationalities are not referring to the exact same dishes. The classic French word entrée got lost in translation in the US as the dish that one received upon “entering” the meal became the main dish in the United States, maybe because the Americans were not that keen on multicourse meals in the past. A classic American Sunday brunch clearly illustrates the chaos in the choice and order of the foods. At home, the French call it hors d’oeuvre, which literally means “outside the work”, implying that the addition of an opening dish was originally not an integral part of meal. The use of the term first course shows it truly was a burden on the kitchen staff as they had to “run” to bring the food on time and still hot from distant kitchens. Hebrew has two options, both quite concrete: mana rishona, first dish or mana pticha, opening dish. Arabic takes another approach, using the word mezza to describe a wide assortment of shared salads intended to create a social environment but often having the unintended result of filling up the stomachs of the guests. Linguistically and culinarily speaking, there are many ways to start a meal.

When dining out, the dessert is the dish that leaves the most lasting impression. However, somehow the name of the course does not do it proper service. The English term dessert is derived from the French word to clean the table. Likewise, the German Nachtisch means “after the table”, eliciting the picture of an almost empty but slightly stained tablecloth at a restaurant after the dishes from the main course have been cleared. By contrast, the root of the Hebrew word kinuach is “to clean” because dessert cleans the palate. Another English term for the last course is sweets, a view that the Italians share with their il dolce. Of stranger origin is the English term pudding, which originally referred to sausages, both sweet and savory, from a French word brought to English by those charming Normans. With the invention of the pudding cloth in the 17^th century, according to Wikipedia, it was no longer necessary to cook the ingredients in an animal’s stomach, which led to a wide variety of English sweet puddings.

I hope that these facts have opened up your appetite for food and its nomenclature. To borrow the concept from Gertrude Stein, the opening dish, regardless of its name, is meant to open up your appetite. My mother used to say “L’appétit vient en mangeant”, meaning that starting to eat makes you hungry even if you didn’t know you were. As for the last course, being full or overweight is irrelevant to the issue: a tasty, sweet bite is a perfect end of the meal, whatever you eat or call it. Enjoy both if you can.

 

Say what or the joy of trying to understand extreme accents in foreign languages

 

Most people in the world are exposed to a second language. Some are fortunate enough to live in a place where many languages are spoken while others have to learn an additional language in a more formal way at school. Regardless of how well they are exposed to a foreign language, people always have less confidence in their knowledge of it relative to their mother tongue. There is no method more certain to feed that doubt than to visit a place where people speak a version of the foreign language so different from what they learned that it is hard to understand. The failure to understand immediately raises the question whether this incomprehension is a result of poor knowledge or the “weird” manner of speaking. Almost every language has these outliers, including French, Spanish, Arabic and English. The cause of the local uniqueness may be historical, linguistic, geographic or any combination of these. The difficulty posed by these variants makes being a translator far easier than being an interpreter in terms of language knowledge.

Even after the advent of radio and television, devices that shattered geographical language barriers, every area, whether a village, city, province or country, has its own vocabulary and way of pronouncing words to one degree or another. In some cases, the resulting dialect is so different from the standard language that even non-local native speakers struggle to understand it. For example, the Picard dialect in northern France sounds like French but only “sort of” due to its strange syntax. Of all of the Spanish variants, Chilean Spanish combines rapid speech with missing syllables and local vocabulary, a deadly combination. As for Arabic, putting aside Moroccan Arabic, which is a language in itself, Bedouin Arabic is beyond the ability of most non-native speakers to understand due to its different pronunciation of certain sounds, among other reasons. The English language enjoys a myriad of accents, with among the most confusing existing in Scotland and the parts of the south in the United States. Even native speakers struggle to understand what the locals are saying. An encounter with any of these dialects will instill doubt in the most intrepid of language learners.

The source of these local language identities may be historical, i.e., it is a previous form of the language. For example, Church Slavonic is the old Orthodox Slavic language, which was retained in Church literary and speech even after the reform of the Russian language in the 18^th century. The Cajans or Acadians, who live in Louisiana, speak an old Breton French as part of their creole dialect as they left France several centuries ago. Old Anglo-Saxon speech survives in signs and the writings of Tolkien, who studied the language. It is possible to find bits and pieces of previous “versions” of language here and there.

A more common factor in a very local dialect is the presence of other languages in the area and among the population. French speakers in all of the colonies may use the French framework but freely integrate words from African or other native languages into their speech, including even Dutch in some northern areas of France. Berber, a non-Arabic language, makes its presence felt in North African Arabic. Spanish in South America borrows Indian words while English in many southwestern states in the United States steals terms from Spanish. Depending on the local ethnic mix, the main language develops its own style.

From another point of view, geographical isolation is a vital factor in differentiation. Where mountains or extreme geography limit contact with other cultures, languages develop in their own way. The heights of mountain ranges, the great distances of the oceans, the lengths of the desert and depths of the jungle cut off a language from its source and ultimately create a new one over time. The dialect becomes ever more distinct from the standard form.

This evolution creates challenges for linguists. For interpreters, this diversity means that knowing the standard version may not be sufficient to be able to understand the speaker. By contrast, written communication remains relatively standard over cultures. Official Russian from the Brezhnev era is not much different than the current form. For the foreign visitor under the impression that several years of language study in high school or college will ensure smooth linguistic sailing in foreign lands, it is a shock to experience total incomprehension. The only reaction to the flood of apparent gibberish is “say what”. However, to cheer up any bewildered foreign visitors to such areas, it is normal. It is not you. It’s them, at least from the visitor’s perspective.

On translation, fidelity and project choice

 

To non-linguists, translation seems a rather simple task, merely expressing the meaning of words in one language in another language. A solid knowledge of grammar and a comprehensive dictionary should suffice in faithfully rendering the content into a second language. However, in practice, the term “translation” encompasses a wide variety of text types, from the most technical to the most creative, and purposes, and from literal rendering to cultural equivalency. The significance is that the art of faithful translation involves a variety of approaches. For individual translators, these characteristics may define which projects they should accept.

The use of the term faithful as it applies to translation naturally poses the question “to what”. In some rare cases, the translator must rigidly reflect the form and content in the source language into the target language, mistakes and all. For example, a translation of a court deposition must show the level of language and evasiveness of the source text as these elements may have legal significance. For documents submitted to a foreign court, the translated text must be written in line with the accepted writing norms of the foreign court while fully reflecting the content of the original document, no more and no less. Medical documents, due to their potentially significant role in any lawsuit, must strictly reflect the content of the original but yet must be understandable to a reader of the target language. Marketing documents, including travel-related documents, must speak to their target audience, i.e., flow well in the second language, at the expense of the form of the original text while referring to the same factual elements. Finally, literary translation involves the art of expressing the uniqueness of a writer’s style and message into a second language, which may sometimes involve radical changes of the syntax and even details. For example, Umberto Ecco wrote in one of his essays that one scene whose core element was swearing in a holy city took on many different forms in its translations into various European languages in terms of city and actual curse in order to communicate the extremity of the act. Thus, the translators’ obligation to be faithful is far from straightforward.

As a result, translators approach each type of text differently. On the most basic level, a word-by-word translation with little consideration of syntax, as typical of some machine translations, involves little translator input but not a small amount of resoluteness as the resulting text sounds awful . However, when translators must render the content of the original text into the form of the target language, they must apply their knowledge of these forms to produce a natural-sounding document. When the genre lacks any prescribed form, the translator’s linguistic skills come to the fore as it is necessary to produce a seamless text, one that does not sound like a translation. Finally, in a literary translation, the linguist must reproduce all the nuances of the writer’s style, often when there is no direct equivalent in the target language. This translation tests not only the ability of the translator to identify the overt and hidden elements of the original but the creativity to find their equivalents in the second language. In each case, the translator calls on a different toolkit of skills.

Consequently, the ability to effectively translate all or many document styles is far from obvious. Personal tendencies, training and practice hone certain skills while bypassing others. Some translators are perfectly at ease handling the most technical texts due to their knowledge of the content and form but may produce the most unremarkable marketing text imaginable. By contrast, a translator with the ability and experience to successfully render the effect produced by one language into another language when given full rein may fail when required to follow strict rules of syntax and vocabulary, a result of that same creativity. Experienced professional translators know when the document involves a genre too far.

Thus, translation goes far beyond the formal knowledge of grammar and vocabulary and involves a comprehensive understanding of how to translate specific types of documents. Each genre has its approaches and challenges. Yet, the basic goal remains the same, i.e., to produce a faithful rendition of the original document into another document, however that fidelity is expressed.