Category: language

» I’ve been an avid reader all my life.
» I have a BA in Linguistics.
» I’ve studied seven foreign languages.
» I taught reading for over two years.
» I wrote a grammar curriculum.

Words are really important to me.

What’s the best translation of In Search of Lost Time (Remembrance of Things Past)?

You might think there are only two translations to choose from. Well. That’s what *I* thought.

But after many, many hours of collecting and organizing information on Marcel Proust’s masterwork, I can tell you, the situation is much more complicated…

Head over to the first of my Lost Time pages on We Love Translations to learn how many versions of the Scott Moncrieff translation the Anglophone world has produced (and is still producing!), plus details (on the second page) about the Penguin Prendergast project and the rather nebulous new Nelson and Watt project.

Intimidated by the scope and scale of the complete Search? If you want, you can read just a fraction of it. Visit my Swann’s Way page on We Love Translations for information on just Volume 1, and on the novella Swann in Love (which is contained within Volume 1).

If you want a quick-and-dirty recommendation, why not read the new, complete, modern, multi-translator Penguin version? Or at least the first volume of it? Lydia Davis translated Penguin’s Swann’s Way. She has a lot of interesting things to say about her process, and others (mostly) say positive things about the result.

Buy the Davis translation of Swann’s Way on Amazon

For more on Davis’s translation, keep reading.

Continue reading What’s the best translation of In Search of Lost Time (Remembrance of Things Past)?

Shopping for Books in Albania

Wherever I go, I look at the books. Doesn’t matter if I can read them, although books in English have spread across the globe just like English itself has. I’m always interested to see what books look like, whether they are originals in the local language, world classics translated into the local language, or books in English imported from overseas.

See below for photos of two very different types of book shopping experience.

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Syntax of Scientific English by Lee Kok Cheong

I hereby declare: It is not necessary for me to finish reading every book I start.

In other words, next time a book bores me as much as this one did, I am going to stop reading it.

I admire what the author set out to do: analyze English-language textbooks to help university teachers guide non-native speakers of English in understanding science.

But this book-length research paper is basically just a bunch of lists. It’s about as dry a piece of writing as one could imagine. In fact, I never imagined it would be this dry, or I wouldn’t have bought the book in the first place.

Continue reading Syntax of Scientific English by Lee Kok Cheong

When and Why I Read Syntax of Scientific English

I bought this at the National University of Singapore "EResource Discovery Day" book sale. It was published by Singapore University Press. The topic is interesting and relevant to my work, but I'm not sure the analysis will be.

Genre: Linguistics/English
Date started / date finished: 02-Aug-23 to 27-Aug-23
Length: 290 pages
ISBN: na
Originally published in: 1978

China culture shock: English on signs

The holy grail of Chinglish, for me, would be to see in person a sign saying “Carefully Slip And Fall Down“.

Since the English on signs in Hangzhou is not by any means so terrible on average, I’m still looking.

Meanwhile, I’ve spotted quite a few other amusing signs in Hangzhou.

Have a guess… what kind of store advertises its products as “cheap, fresh, quality, intimate”? See below to find out!

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What’s the best translation of Demons (aka Devils aka The Possessed)?

There are five in-print translations of Demons, seven in total.

  1. 1914 – Constance Garnett (various publishers)
  2. 1953 – David Magarshack (Penguin)
  3. 1962 – Andrew R. MacAndrew (Signet)
  4. 1992 – Michael R. Katz (Oxford)
  5. 1994 – Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (Everyman’s Library, Vintage)
  6. 2008 – Robert A. Maguire (Penguin)
  7. 2017 – Roger Cockrell (Alma)

It took a while to figure out how many there were because they’re not all called Demons. Why not?

Continue reading What’s the best translation of Demons (aka Devils aka The Possessed)?

What’s the best translation of The Nine Cloud Dream?

I’ve now read this book three times. I’ve read the 2019 Fenkl translation twice and the 1922 Gale translation once. I haven’t read the out-of-print 1974 Rutt translation. The Fenkl translation is more faithful to the original text, but the Gale translation is okay. For more information on all three translations, visit We Love Translations: World Literature in English:

» What’s the best translation of The Nine Cloud Dream?

See below for a list of characters in The Nine Cloud Dream.

I’ve given the character names as spelled by Fenkl and Gale and also the English meanings as given by Fenkl and Gale. Fenkl uses Chinese-style names using archaic-feel Wade-Giles romanization and Gale uses Korean-style names mixed with English names. I’m pretty sure Fenkl is using the same names that Rutt used.

(Scholars have determined that the original was written in classical Chinese, not Korean Hangul, but I think Gale was using a Hangul source text.)

Beware spoilers! Knowing who the characters are is a bit like knowing the plot.

Continue reading What’s the best translation of The Nine Cloud Dream?

How to say the names of years in English words

I saw this on Facebook today, though not for the first time.

Today it made me think of a Chinese friend who’s not always sure how to say years as words in English. I don’t blame her… You see, if answer “A” is a year—and not, like, a quantity of watermelons in a math problem—by default it absolutely does sound like “two zero two four [year]” in Chinese, although it’s also possible to say “two thousand and twenty-four [year]”.

How do we say the names of years in English? Turns out it’s complicated.

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What’s the best translation of The Master and Margarita?

These are the English translations of Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita:

  1. 1967 – Mirra Ginsburg
  2. 1967 – Michael Glenny
  3. 1993 – Diana Burgin and Katherine Tiernan O’Connor
  4. 1997 – Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky
  5. 2006 – Michael Karpelson (out of print)
  6. 2008 – Hugh Aplin

It’s a short list compared to, like Don Quixote, which has like 20. I thought, aha, there are only six this time, so the research on this one should go pretty fast.

Well, yes; but actually, no.

I got tangled up in two related questions about the origins of the book:

  • Was Bulgakov’s draft of The Master and Margarita complete?
  • Are all the English translations of The Master and Margarita complete?

I didn’t want to stuff what turned out to be ~1500 words into the beginning of my post at We Love Translations. That post is about choosing which English translation to read.

» What’s the best translation of The Master and Margarita?

THIS post is about the answers to those two preliminary questions.

Continue reading What’s the best translation of The Master and Margarita?

What’s the best translation of The Hunchback of Notre-Dame?

You’ve seen the Disney movie. Maybe you’ve read the novel. But do you recognize the name Frederic Shoberl? Probably not.

He’s the guy who chose the title we now use to refer to Victor Hugo’s novel, which was originally titled Notre-Dame de Paris. Shoberl wasn’t the first translator (the first was the politically motivated William Hazlitt), but his version gets the credit for hitting the bestseller list in England in the 1830s. (Hazlitt’s title was: Notre-Dame: A Tale of the Ancien Regime. Yawn.)

More about the publication history of The Hunchback of Notre-Dame below.

Continue reading What’s the best translation of The Hunchback of Notre-Dame?