Rolling Ball, Facing Book

Hello again! By now you might all be back in the swing of things after the festive period. Personally, I took things a little easy in-between Christmas and Sylwester – recovering from the former lead into preparations for the latter, and the time in-between seemed ideal for catching up on some R&R.

But of course it’s all over for now (he said, thinking of the three-day weekend that starts tomorrow here in Poland (R.I.P. Polish GDP)), and it’s time to set our sights on new goals and plans. I’m not one for new year’s resolutions, and long-term readers will know I’m great at promising exciting new articles and then totally failing to deliver them. So let’s just say that in 2012 I will be trying harder to stock the shelves here more often. 

To get the ball rolling, let’s catch up on some of the action that’s occurred on our Facebook wall since late October’s post on prepositions. First of all, there was quite a lot of follow-up to that item, and I’m going to roll it all into one proper article, Part II of the main thing. But plenty else of interest also occurred, including:

Word order
Bad: You can get here X about all the exciting things the city has to offer.
Good: You can get X here about all the exciting things the city has to offer.
Good: Here you can/will get/find X on all the exciting things the city has to offer. :-) 

Where X = advice, information, help etc. “here” could also be “at the (place)”, e.g. You can get/find advice on English grammar at the school/Bad Article etc.

Bottom line: get-noun-place

Pronoun agreement
In a Lingua Franca article by Geoffrey Pullum, the weighty role of opinion in the interpretation of grammar rules, particularly gender pronouns, is brought to somewhat humorous light. Bad Article reader Adam from Warsaw subsequently thought that, “... language reflects social norms, although it usually takes some time. That’s why ‘you’ began to be used in the singular, and the polite 2nd person in Polish is actually the 3rd. Such things must have been perceived as incorrect or weird, until they became the norm.”

Countable nouns
I often see plural noun ‘travels’ used where ‘trip’ or ‘journey’ should be. For example, ‘From the central train station, there are many travels you can make’, or ‘Travels on Bus 172 during this period will take approx. 20 minutes longer than normal.’

Let’s agree on this as a simple rule of thumb: Unless we’re using the idiomatic phrasing of, for example, ‘If you see a newspaper on your travels, please buy it for me’, always remember to use ‘trip/s’, ‘journey/ies’ or ‘travel times’ (particularly good for public transport notices). Ok?

Translating menus, food and dish names
A bigger topic than we covered over there, this is something we can pencil-in for a full discussion later on. I forget what now, but something in a menu translation made me explode with rage. Possibly a mushroom name or a fish name, both of which tend to get mangled quite ferociously on the way from Polish into English. :D

Phrasing
BAD: ...in the course of the last several decades...
GOOD: ...in the course of the last few decades...

‘last few’ is a self-contained unit; ‘few’ is not interchangeable with ‘several’ in this phrasing. There’s probably more to say on this subject, but this is the burning heart of it.

Wot I do
The Society for Editors and Proofreaders put up a good thing – it’s only half a page long, but it illustrates precisely and with greater clarity I can usually muster, what exactly it is that I do with our translations. Check it out here.

 So, that was most of it. There’s a sizable chunk of preposition debate too, which as I said, I will fillet and fatten, strengthen and flatten, rate and berate into another exciting instalment of... The Bad Article! *dramatic music, flash of lightning*