Welcome to the end of another week, or the start of a new one if you're one of those weirdos who considers Sundays the 'start' of the week. ;)
This was the first week of our new posting schedule - once on Wednesdays and the review on Sundays, as usual. However, the surprise element has been our FaceBook page, which has allowed me to quickly frame my thoughts and post any interesting issues as they've come up. It also allows you other FaceBook peeps to quickly reply to these brain burps. Apart from a few funny, translating-related pictures and so on, let’s look back at some of the highlights of the past week.
On Monday the 30th, we looked at how to collocate ‘professional’. A line from an advertising text for a catering firm that I was working on read: "Nice and professional service, competitive prices."
This is an odd collocation, nice + professional. It sounds sort of contradictory, and many people do indeed believe that being professional means not also being nice. So any time you want to do something with 'professional' that isn't ultra hardcore business/banking/legal etc, go for the common collocation of friendly + professional. np.
"Friendly, professional service, competitive prices." Note that you will always use a comma, not a joining article. Another common collocation for professional is fast.
On Tuesday the 31st we looked at an ‘inspirational’ photograph (includes a rude word, uwaga) that highlighted a notorious film title translation: Bruce ‘the King’ Willis’s legendary Die Hard, translated appropriately enough as ‘Szklana Pułapka’ (Glass Trap) for the first film. But how do you cope with the fact that the ensuing sequels were based in airports, cities and the Internet? Is the title still appropriate, or was it itself a kind of pułapka? Hmm.
Wednesday the 1st of June saw us flirting with noun usage, based on this line: "Supervision over the committee reviewing the entities' applications is conducted by a secondary team of experts and judges."
Correct usage of the noun supervision here is with of, never over. Put simply, you’d never write supervision over, only supervision of. Similar words and phrasing, that might be responsible for the confusion here, include 'look over', 'check over' and 'oversight', e.g. “to have oversight of sth.”
Thursday the 2nd left two interesting items on the doormat (however, I’m only going to give you one here; you’ll need to go and look at the other one yourself – note that you DO NOT NEED TO HAVE A FACEBOOK ACCOUNT TO JUST VIEW THE BAD ARTICLE PAGE!!!!!). The first of these is a very, very important thing to learn and remember – I should point out now that things that appear on the FaceBook page that then appear here are in NO WAY LESS IMPORTANT than those items that appear here on Wednesdays (sorry for all the caps, but this stuff is important you know ;)).
1a. "This causes that people ..."
1b. "This means that people ..."
1c. "This causes people to ..."
Verb use of cause is often used wrongly (1a), and the safer, better bet is to stick with (v) mean instead (1b). Depending on the rest of the sentence and how much work you want to do on it, you can rephrase and keep the cause (1c) – just remember the key part: writing causes that can lead to premature baldness in men and advanced short-sightedness in women!
That’s all for now, friends. It looks like it’ll be another hot, sunny day here in Kraków, so I’m off to open a window (hundreds of pages to read by yesterday, fast!). Enjoy yourselves. :)
Jim :)
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