The Pope’s Champion

Battle Pope image courtesy of Robert Kirkman and Tony Moore.

A recent assignment contained a fleeting reference to a chapter title in an old book: ‘s Pausen Zwitser. The title was not important for the translation, so I could have left it in Dutch without harm. But like every dyed-in-the-wool translator, who is a creature desperately devoted to unraveling the tantalizing mysteries of language, I couldn’t let it pass. I had to figure out what this outdated, metaphorical, and (judging from the Internet) possibly author-invented phrase meant in English.

Let us begin with ‘s Pausen. An old Dutch possessive form, des Pausen, which in modern Dutch becomes van de Paus. In English, of the Pope, or, more usually, the Pope’s. Good. Moving on to Zwitser: Swissman. The Pope’s Swissman.

Er, not quite. The subject of the title, Herman Schaepman, was not Swiss; he was born and bred in Holland. He was a late nineteenth-century Roman Catholic priest turned statesman who campaigned heavily, and successfully, for Catholic representation in the Netherlands’ Protestant political landscape.

Aha. Zwitser is not a literal reference, but a figure of speech.

One no longer employed in modern Dutch.

All right. What do the Swiss have to do with the Pope? Well, they’ve provided his bodyguards for the past five hundred years. On the Vatican website, I learn that the early Swiss were called Helvetians. Ooh! Ooh! The Pope’s Helvetian. No! I say, smacking down my giddy inner vocabulary buff, though it certainly sounds impenetrable enough to match the original. Helvetian only muddies things for the English reader, and – more importantly – it still fails to reflect the actual meaning of ‘s Pausen Zwitser.

But a possible answer has bubbled up. Schaepman, like the Vatican’s Swiss soldiers, safeguarded the interests of the Pope. Schaepman even extended those interests in the Netherlands, propelling Catholics to political power. The Pope’s Crusader? No; the Swiss aren’t generally a symbol of zealous faith-spreading. The Pope’s Soldier? Closer, but still no cigar.

One of the handful of Internet hits on ‘s Pausen Zwitser contains gold. There, I read that Schaepman was unconditionally loyal to his Pope, and that he had a forceful, seductive personality. So I’m looking for something more charismatic, more  take-charge, than soldier.

Yes. That’s it. The Pope’s Champion.

Know the Target Audience, and Translate the Intent

The driveway at the typical middle-class home where I grew up. It's more than twice as long as the driveways of the "impressive experience."

A recent project contained the following sentence:

Uw verblijf is aan een oprijlaan gesitueerd, wat uw aankomst tot een imponerende beleving maakt.

Literally: Your home is situated at the end of a driveway, which makes your arrival an impressive experience.

Now, my job was to translate this for an affluent American audience. There is no affluent – or even middling – American who will be impressed by a simple driveway. So I did what a good translator should do: I dropped the last half of the sentence, then combined the modified first half with the next sentence to preserve the flow:

At the end of your private driveway lies your home, whose architecture…

Forsooth, Do You Grok My Jive?

No matter how hard proscriptives try to keep the language from changing, change it does.

Lost in Translation: Heavy Duty Out of Office

They thought they were getting great service when the translator replied within seconds...

From the BBC article:

When officials asked for the Welsh translation of a road sign, they thought the reply was what they needed. Unfortunately, the e-mail response to Swansea council said in Welsh, “I am not in the office at the moment. Send any work to be translated.”

It’s tempting to point at the council and laugh, but to me, the fault lies primarily with the in-house translator. In automated responses, a translator should include the message in all his working languages – how else will his clients understand him?

Unfortunate Names: Artfully Chopped Kitty Pie

Oooh, butcher some more language for me, baby. Cartoon courtesy of Allan Cavanagh.

Seen while browsing through Dutch magazines:

applepiepussy.com

and

Design Butchers

I’ll give you a moment to imagine.

The first is a jewelry shop; the second, a clothing designer’s firm. This kind of misnomer is frequent in Dutch; the drive for trendy English names too often builds upon a scanty understanding of the language. Second meanings are overlooked.

Origins: Implicit ‘Go’ in Shakespeare’s English

The Bard left us a treasure trove of late Early Modern English forms.

The April edition of Merriam-Webster’s newsletter lists several extant words used by William Shakespeare in ways since fallen into disuse. Two of these caught my eye:

must verb, archaic meaning: ought to go, is obliged to go
“I must to Coventry”

shall verb, archaic meaning: will go
“he to England shall along with you”

Here, the go is implied rather than explicit. It sounds quaintly old-fashioned, something uttered by a heroine in petticoats, and certainly wrong to our twenty-first century ears, but this phenomenon is still active in standard modern Dutch.

Ik moet echt naar de supermarkt
I really need to go to the grocery store

It’s thus likely a Germanic construction that arose before Early English and Early Dutch split away. Why did English go on to abandon an apparently viable form? Chalk it up to the mysteries of living language.

Lost in Translation: Try This? Unlikely!

A little high-speed water balloon on the translator's face for this episode's flub-ups.

Spotted last night on Discovery’s Time Warp: despite the pre-show warning in Dutch that viewers should absolutely never, ever try any of the show’s tricks at home, the translator managed to turn a don’t try this at home! group shout before a particularly dangerous stunt into thuis proberen, which means….try this at home. Doh.

That same episode saw unreal translated as onwaarschijnlijk, which means unlikely. What the dude meant, of course, was onwijs gaaf: totally awesome. Which most everything on the show is.

The First Rule of Translation Acquisition (2): Use a Native Speaker

Latvia spent half a million British pounds on its new ad campaign, then discovered the hard to live flaw. In addition to that show-stopping error, the text contains other infelicities: Birthplace of Christmas Tree. Now for 499 years.

The First Rule of Translation Acquisition: Use a Native Speaker

'Eeriness': Even the best of dictionaries is no substitute for target language proficiency.

Source: Engrish.com.

Getting Your Money’s Worth: Speed Isn’t Everything

Don't leave accuracy in the dust.

We all know that price can be misleading. As the nineteenth-century English philosopher and social critic John Ruskin famously said, “There is nothing in the world that some man cannot make a little worse and sell at a lower price, and he who considers price only is that man’s lawful prey.” Translation speed is equally misleading, for exactly the same reason:

There is nothing in the world that some man cannot make a little worse and, in so doing, complete much faster, and he who considers speed alone is that man’s lawful prey.

Certainly, some translators are quicker than others for positive reasons: they have more experience, they type more quickly, they make efficient use of available tools. But the eye-catching differences result from negative factors: careless typing, lack of research, literal translation, accepting ‘false friends’ at face value, no editing round.

I regularly spend half an hour—or longer—researching a single term. Take, for example, the Dutch word notaris. The immediate translation for this word is notary. That translation is fine in other civil-law countries, but it fails spectacularly in the United States. There, where most states have nothing comparable to the Dutch notaris, a notary means a notary public, an entirely different animal.

A translator churning out 1,000 words an hour doesn’t have time to research the American context for notary and search for an accurate alternative. This error is not only misleading; it may have unintended legal consequences. The Dutch notaris is an attorney at law, and his services far exceed those of the common-law notary public, who mainly witnesses the signing of documents and confirms the signer’s identity.

When you weigh a translator’s value, then, look beyond earliest delivery date. An accurate, elegant translation is worth waiting for.