Author: 101translations

The word ‘slang’ is generally used to refer to informal language, often associated with particular age or social classes – but a precise definition can be elusive, as words and phrases slide in and out of various categories over time.

But one of the most charming qualities of slang is that it can be quite ephemeral, associated with a particular – sometimes brief – period when it resonated with a certain group of people.

Of course, there’s slang in every language – both a linguistic treat and a headache to the translator – but sticking with English for now, here are some nineteenth century terms that were all the rage… until they weren’t:

‘Bang up to the elephant’: perfect and complete.

‘Cheese and Crust’: a politer alternative to an exclamation that sounds similar – can you guess?

‘Doing the bear’: hugging your beloved in the process of courtship.

‘Gas-pipes’: tight trousers.

‘Got the morbs’: feeling temporarily mournful.

‘Smothering a parrot’: knocking back a glass of absinthe.

If those phrases sound odd to you, imagine what today’s slang will sound like in 150 years!

As you can imagine, slang can be exceedingly difficult to translate. The best option is to find an equivalent phrase in the target language, even if the literal meaning is vastly different.

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Constance Garnett, who was born Constance Black in Brighton in 1861, attended Cambridge, where she studied Latin and Greek; one of relatively few women in Cambridge at that time (it started admitting women in 1869, but didn’t award them degrees until 1948).

In 1891, Garnett met Russian exile Feliks Volkhovsky, who began teaching her Russian.

This would lead to Garnett translating Russian literature for publication; one of her first translated works was The Kingdom of God is Within You by Leo Tolstoy. She would translate dozens of books by the best Russian writers over the course of her lengthy career and was praised by many of the great writers of her day, including DH Lawrence and Ernest Hemingway. Her greatest detractor was Russian author Vladmir Nabokov, who abhorred the idea of female translators on principle, and stated that he found her work excessively demure.

History has judged Garnett’s work kindly. Subsequent translators have stated that they based their work on hers, and many of her original translations are still in print. Today she is recognised as a pioneering translator who helped to bring much of the greatest work in the Russian language to a wide English-speaking audience.

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Language is what makes our species utterly unique. While all animals communicate, only we know how to talk. And it’s truly amazing how a child is born and, typically, manages to learn how to speak in just three years or so.

The example of a small number of children described as ‘feral’ – to mean that they were not socialised or given the opportunity to learn in the ordinary way – has shown researchers how important the years of early childhood are to language acquisition. Many experts believe that early childhood is a ‘critical period’ when the brain is best able to acquire language skills, with the window closing around puberty, after which it is impossible, or extremely difficult, to acquire full language skills.

Instead, the children who – for various unhappy reasons – were isolated in early childhood typically struggle to acquire language to a meaningful level at all, irrespective of their intelligence. However, in a supportive environment, they may learn how to communicate in other ways, with gestures, body language, and possibly some words and phrases to express their needs.

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Every year, the Oxford University Press designates a ‘word of the year.’ This year, it’s ‘rage bait’, a term referring to social media content that’s supposed to elicit strong, negative reactions.

Why would anyone want to antagonise the public? Well, content creators on social media make more money if their channel gets more viewers, so they don’t necessarily care how they get them.

Rage bait often works because humans have a negativity bias, which makes us react more strongly to negative stimuli than positive ones. That’s a good thing in general, because it helps us to flee from dangers in our environment – but it doesn’t always work to our advantage in the online world. Rage bait can make us feel angry, stressed, and upset, even though nothing bad has happened. It can also encourage people to harden their views, and to feel that they should join forces with others with similar views, to protect themselves from the perceived threat – which might be the rage baiter themselves, or whoever the rage baiter is railing against.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong per se with social media, but it does help to understand the processes behind our emotional reactions and to understand that while we don’t have control over what other people say, we can manage our own responses to it.

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Often, translation is about the need or desire to cooperate. For example, businesses in different countries want to work together, but they do not have a common language, so they will use a translation service to help them to communicate effectively with one another.

Cooperation, often across what initially look like insuperable barriers, is what makes the world go round.

Consider the example of coyotes and badgers. These animals, both native to parts of the United States such as the Santa Cruz mountains in California, are known to hunt cooperatively. This interesting behaviour is referenced in Native American mythology and has also been studied by zoologists.

Typically, one coyote and one badger will team up to hunt ground-dwelling animals that both like to eat. Their vastly different hunting styles are complementary, so by working together, each is likely to do better than it would on its own, or with a companion from the same species. Coyotes can run faster than badgers, and badgers are much better at digging than coyotes. The coyote can effectively chase a small animal underground, and the badger can dig it out. Everyone is happy (except, of course, for the small animal).

Video footage of these animals cooperating also shows them communicating with body language in ways that indicate feelings of camaraderie and playfulness. While their modes of communicating are less complex than ours, these intelligent mammals still get their message across.

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Ventriloquism – which means ‘to speak from the belly’ and comes from Latin “venter” (belly) and “loquitur” (to speak) – is one of the odder forms of popular entertainment. As you know, it is a type of performance in which the ventriloquist speaks in such a way that it appears as though their voice is coming from somewhere else, usually a puppet or doll, often referred to as a ‘ventriloquist’s dummy.’ From a technical perspective, ventriloquism is tricky, as the performer must speak with their lips almost closed, making it exceedingly difficult to pronounce labial sounds such as ‘p’ and ‘b’. The performance typically involves a ‘conversation’ between the performer and the dummy, often including cheeky or ribald humour.

Although some link ventriloquism to religious practices in ancient Greece, it emerged as a form of entertainment in England in the eighteenth century, with performers doing tricks such as appearing to speak from their hands or ‘throwing their voices’ so that they appeared to come from far away. By the early nineteenth century, dummies as we know them now were starting to be integrated into the act.

Throughout the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century, ventriloquist acts remained popular. As the dummy rather than the human performer was notionally the one pushing the boundaries of good taste with their jokes, these acts provided greater artistic license, with the dummy acting as sort of surrogate prepared to say the things the performer wants to say, but doesn’t quite feel able to – a bit like an anonymous avatar on social media today. This flouting of linguistic, behavioural, and cultural norms places the ventriloquist’s dummy in a sort of “uncanny valley”, the negative emotional response towards robots and puppets that seem “almost” human. This might be one of the reasons why they’re so often featured in horror movies.

By the dawn of the twenty-first century, ventriloquism was in retreat, although it is still sometimes performed in talent shows and on social media, so there’s life in the old dog yet.

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Many people have asked the question: are there other intelligent beings living elsewhere in the universe?

And many have further gone on to ask: if there are, how can we communicate with them?

If there are intelligent beings living on other planets, they will certainly have a language to communicate with one another. Presumably, however, it will be vastly different to ours. So, if one day we contact them, how will we be able to talk to them?

We can derive hope from the fact that, to some extent, we are already able to communicate basic messages to other earth-based species, without language but with simpler forms of communication predicated around body language, gestures, and vocalisations.

From 1974, the hope that we might one day be able to communicate with beings from another planet drove American Frank Drake to use what was then the biggest radio telescope in the world to send a message to the Hercules globular cluster of stars.

Assuming that intelligent beings would understand maths, which is a universal form of communication based on numbers, he used the binary code across two different radio frequencies to communicate how humans count, what we look like, and more. Today, this is remembered as the first radio message to be sent to aliens.

Of course, many questions remain. Will the aliens be as good at maths as we hope? If they receive it, will they understand our message? Will they want to say something back, and if they do, will it be friendly?

All these questions have inspired countless literary and cinematic works and continue to fascinate us today.

Here at 101translations, we’d like to be the first to say that if we do make contact with an alien civilisation, we’ll be very quick to get some of them on the payroll, because – as we all know – good translations are essential for communication.

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In the Arab world in the 9th century there was growing interest in science, philosophy, and other schools of learning. At that time, much of the knowledge of these fields had only been written about in Greek, and only a very few Arab scholars spoke or read it.

Enter Hunayn ibn Ishaq, born into an educated family in 808, who became the greatest Arab translator of his day, translating countless works from Greek into Arabic and Syriac, making the learning accessible to a much wider array of scholars. He also travelled widely in search of additional manuscripts to translate, and wrote original works on topics including religion, grammar, and medicine, and he is considered a pioneer in the field of ophthalmology.

Despite his many accomplishments, Hunayn ibn Ishaq is chiefly remembered as a translator, and it was in this capacity that he helped to change the world for the better, making it possible for thousands of scholars and deep thinkers to develop their intellects and apply their knowledge to their communities.

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We humans are born communicators, and we use language, and numerous other methods, to get our message across to others and, often, to express our feelings of solidarity for the people around us.

Sometimes we are so good at communicating that things go awry.

Since the late 19th century, psychologists have studied what is now known as social contagion, which refers to when certain beliefs and behaviours spread spontaneously through a social network.

One of the most well-known twentieth century scholars of the phenomenon is Herbert Blumer, who coined the term ‘social contagion’ in his fascinating paper about a dancing mania in the European Middle Ages, when people compulsively danced. Also known as St Vitus’s Dance, the mania affected adults and children alike, until some of them collapsed, and even died. From the first major outbreak in Aachen, in what today is Germany, the mania spread across much of Europe.

Most scholars agree that social contagion occurs when people spontaneously, rather than consciously, imitate the language and behaviour of others, in a sort of mutated version of the same instinct that sees us adopting popular fashions because we want to communicate our identity and our desire to fit in.

Until recently, most studies of social contagion explored its negative aspects: contagions that caused people to self-harm or otherwise engage in damaging behaviour. But some forms of social contagion can have a positive effect. For example, people who are lucky enough to have neighbours who are mostly happy are more likely to be mostly happy themselves, even after factoring in matters such as relative wealth.

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Did you know the Arabic language has around 14 different words for “love”? Each of these expresses a distinct phase of the wonderful feeling of falling in love.

It begins with Al-Hawa, the first spark of attraction, and Al-Sabwa, the playful infatuation when two people are getting to know each other. 

When love begins to surface, it moves to Al-Shaghaf, followed by Al-Wajd, when thoughts of the loved one begin to consume the mind.

With time, love can ache and intensify: Al-Kalaf speaks of the longing desire that borders on pain, Al-Oshok of devotion and adoration, and Al-Najwa of when love is so consuming it triggers feelings of sadness.

Then comes Al-Shawq, a deep yearning to be close, and Al-Wasab, the torment of loving too deeply. In Al-Istikana, love becomes an unhealthy, blind submission. 

At its most beautiful, love softens into Al-Wodd, a gentle tenderness where the couple are not only lovers but also best friends, and Al-Kholla describes two soul-mates. Al-Gharam describes love that binds and clings, and finally comes Al-Hoyam, the madness of being completely, overwhelmingly in love.

Fourteen words, fourteen phases of feeling – because love, in every language, is never just one thing.

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