Category: Interesting facts

We humans communicate with words – and sometimes also with sign language – but things like body language, gestures, and even the pitch, tone and timbre of our voices matter a lot, too.

For example, men typically speak with lower voices than women, and men’s voices are in general readily distinguishable from women’s. In societies in which most power is – or historically has been – in the hands of men, that means that lower voices are often associated with authority.

Deeper voices are also often associated with men perceived as ‘more masculine’ than others and are often experienced by women as more attractive. Some research also suggests that men with deeper voices are, in fact, statistically more likely to have genetically healthier children, suggesting that a deep voice in a man is one indicator of health.

On the other hand, research also suggests that women perceive men with deeper voices as more likely to be unfaithful. So, you know, food for thought.

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Comic books and graphic novels are generally enjoyed as a solitary, silent experience, but the visual and written representation of sound is a big part of what makes them so expressive.

Linguists call the way in which comic book artists render sound ‘textual audio.’ This refers, among other things, to the heavy use of onomatopoeia (the use of made up words to reproduce non-language sounds), often in combination with the liberal use of punctuation indicating emphasis, to communicate what a particular action sounds like: for example, a kiss (SMACK!!), a punch that’s as devastating as a gunshot (KAPOW!!!), or an explosion (BOOOOOM!!!!).

And while comic book artists often draw on a rich library of textual audio that has been used before, and that everyone recognises, they can also invent new sounds to match their characters and storyline. Often, these sounds only make sense in the context of the image and the specific action it depicts.

Translating comic books is an exciting challenge. Some onomatopoeia works quite well in multiple languages, at least so long as they have the same writing system and similar phonetics, but sometimes it doesn’t work at all, and the translator must find a sonic equivalent in the target language, while avoiding unwanted connotations. And it’s more difficult again when translating from a language with a completely different writing system to the target language (think Japanese into German, for example).

Comic books, a literary format that is often underestimated in terms of its cultural reach, can call for the most refined, most delicate, most sophisticated translating skills of all.

GADZOOKS!!!???!!!!

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She sells seashells on the seashore.

Tongue twisters – in any language – are a lot of fun, and they also provide us with opportunities to work on our diction and fluency. Often, they rely on the speaker alternating rapidly between phonemes that are similar, but different. Frequently they also use a mixture of alliteration and rhyme.

Tongue twisters became extremely popular staples of English-language humour in the nineteenth century, and they exist in other languages too. In Spanish, a tongue twister is a trabalenguas (tongue jammer), for example; and the sign language version of a tongue twister is known as a “finger fumbler”.

Experiments conducted in-house at 101translations seem to suggest that tongue twisters are often easier to enunciate in one’s second language. Contact us for details!

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Vindolanda was a Roman fort just south of Hadrian’s Wall in northern England, the northernmost boundary of the Roman Empire in Britan. It was occupied from about 85 CE to about 370 CE.

For lovers of language, Vindolanda is a treasure trove, because local conditions – including the anaerobic acid peaty soil that doesn’t allow for most bacterial activity – mean that many of the letters received by the Roman soldiers stationed there have survived, giving us insights into their lives, and how they communicated.

Written in Latin on thin pieces of wood about the size of a postcard, the Vindolanda tablets carry messages of all sorts: about supplies, about the soldiers’ daily lives, and about the things they missed from home.

One of the most endearing letters was written by Claudia Severa, the wife of a Roman commander, to her friend Sulpicia Lepidina, issuing an invitation to her birthday party:

‘On 11 September, sister, for the day of the celebration of my birthday, I give you a warm invitation to make sure that you come to us, to make the day more enjoyable for me by your arrival, if you are present. Give my greetings to your Cerialis. My Aelius and my little son send him their greetings.’

The Vindolanda Tablets remind us that, while the materials and modes employed may change, the urge to communicate – and to share happy times with our friends –has remained remarkably constant throughout time.

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Anne Dacier was born in Paris in about 1651. She would grow up to have a deep love of ancient literature and gained fame as the translator into French of many classic works, including the Iliad and the Odyssey, having initially studied Latin and ancient Greek under her father’s tutelage.

Anne was known not just for the high quality of her work but also for how prolific she was, as she was commissioned to produce high-quality French translations of many classic works. From 1685, following her conversion to Catholicism, she also devoted herself to theology, even as she continued her work in translating classic authors like Plutarch and Marcus Aurelius.

While nobody queried the quality of Dacier’s work, not everyone was a fan.

Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant complained that “A Woman who has a head full of Greek, like Mme. Dacier… should also wear a beard; for that might perhaps better express the mien of depth for which they strive.”

Dacier’s work on the classics, and especially her work on Aristotle – whom she regarded as a fount of pedagogical thinking – continues to impact on French philosophy to the present.

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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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