Thursday, August 20th 2009
This new entry has had to sit and wait in my waiting room for ages. It has read all the old magazines there, and was frightfully bored. When business is good, the blog suffers. And business has been excellent for months. Whenever there was a brief lull, there was always administration to catch up with, invoices to be sent or tax returns to be prepared. And then the summer heat would kick in, mercilessly and exhaustingly, and my office became a death zone. Such is a freelancer's life: always free, and always busy – and of course no airco.
Not that there was nothing languagey going on. I've had to deal, one way or another, with English, Danish, Dutch, Spanish and Maya – the last, a group of languages that I don't read but merely stare at in awe. I have travelled to Italy, Guatemala, Hattemerbroek (where? Hattemerbroek. Find a good Atlas and a magnifying glass) and Frisia Magna. All from behind my desk, of course. Then there was the constant background noise of language, like a steady drizzle so fine that you don't feel it, but it is always there and plants wilt without it, as a lack of language lames all life.

My cat purrs and PURRS - 'I'm happy' and 'Food!': language.
A little girl says 'uhh!!', and I know exactly what she wants: language.
A wild boar in the woods tells me 'Mine! Get out!', merely using his pungent porcine smell: language.
Ehtyarion, my name in Quenya, in the fuzzy weird world of make-belief: language.
Ans so on, and on, and on. Always that same language drizzling, keeping life alive.

The attentive reader has undoubtedly noticed at this point that I'm rather fond of alliteration. Most bad writers are. I will try to make amends with a quotation from a very good writer. While leafing through my copy of Cervantes' Don Quixote (which I have NOT completely read) I stumbled upon this gem about translators and translation. My copy is a translation by J.M.Cohen, published in 1950 by Penguin Books in their series 'Penguin Classics'; this fragment appears on page 877 of that edition.
“But yet it seems to me that translating from one tongue into another, unless it is from those queens of tongues Greek and Latin, is like viewing Flemish tapestries from the wrong side; for although you see the pictures, they are covered with threads which obscure them so that the smoothness and gloss of the fabric are lost; and translating from easy languages argues no talent or power of words, any more than does transcribing or copying one paper from another. By that I do not mean to imply that this exercise of translation is not praiseworthy, for a man might be occupied in worse things and less profitable occupations.”
'Zo is het maar net', as we Dutch say.

Tuesday, April 28th 2009
I often take a short walk before work. Because my office is in my own house, this is the only way to give myself some exercise and fresh air in the morning. I usually walk through the old town centre and the adjacent parks. It is a walk through history, my personal history. This is the street where my grandmother was born, that is the alley where my great-grandfather spent his last years, and there is the market square where my other great-grandparents, country folk, sauntered on market days, buying their groceries and gossiping. I myself was born far from here. I have travelled much, to places my great-grandparents could only dream of, and I have moved house often. But chance finally brought me back here, to this old, old town.
I'm an average Dutch person, from an average family that mostly avoided the eccentric or the adventurous. Money, land or power never felt at ease with our sort. If any ever came our way, they never stayed long. Linguistically, however, ours is a rich story.

My mother grew up speaking Achterhoeks, of the Almen variety, in her youth; her mother in turn spoke the Gorssel variety. My maternal grandfather and all his ancestors for many centuries spoke Achterhoeks with a Vorden accent, living as they did within the same hamlet near Vorden called Mossel – five farms and a chicken coop. My paternal grandmother and most of her ancestors spoke the Zutphen town dialect, while my paternal grandfather spoke southern Drenthian as a child but switched to standard Dutch as a teacher. That is also what my father learned as a child. Further back on that side, there were more southern Drenthian dialects and the one of Rouveen, as well as some German ones from right across the border.
These are all Saxon dialects. They are the rumbling voices of my maternal grandfather and his friends talking grown-up business with serious faces, unintelligible but soothing sounds that surrounded me while I, a toddler, quietly sat under the table and smelled the sweet smoke of their cigars.
For very different sounds than the soft Saxon vowels and smothered word endings, I have to dig deep into my paternal grandfather's past. Before 1800 the male and female lines all spoke one of the dialects of the south of Zuid-Holland and of Zeeland, with very far back some Flemish herring fishermen sailing past, as well as some middle-class Amsterdam talk of the town. The most exotic languages on that side are French, from two Huguenot ancestors, and even - dare I mention it - the solemn speach of English Puritans – from London, and possibly even eastern Yorkshire, which would introduce a Danish strand as well. Much, much further back whispers a shred of Carolingian courtly conversation through the mists of time, one tiny royal strand in a vast web of paupers, peasants and small traders. What exotic languages and looks contributed to that one strand is the stuff of legend.

So what is my mothertongue? In a literal sense it is standard Dutch. That is what my mother taught me, or rather sang to me from the day I was born. But looking at my long line of ancestors I do not know what to answer. Saxon? Southern Dutch? French or English? All of them and more have sounded at some time in my family's past, and from that past came my present. Do not talk to me about pure language or pure blood. They never were, not in my line. As president Obama said: 'I'm a mutt', and I would add: 'Thank Goodness'. My cat and I have much in common.
Sometimes I wish that I could hear my English ancestors speak, if only as an echo whispering through those same mists of time. Would I understand?

Monday, April 7th 2009
There is translation, and then there is translation. Translating an archaeological text from one language into another is straightforward, relatively speaking. Translating a poem from one language into another is anything but that. In poetry, at least in good poetry, everything matters desperately. Words, wordorder, rhythm, sound, allusions and associations and metaphors: all these together form an intricate web of constantly shifting colours ans shapes. Remove one strand, and the fabric unravels. Replace one thread, and the fabric is no longer the same.
Translating poetry is like trying to weave a cloth that closely resembles the original, by using a different type of loom and a different technique, with different materials and different colours. It can be done, certainly, but only by expert weavers who can match the maker of the original. Others should give the tapestry-loom a wide berth. A badly translated archaeological text still has its uses (although I hope none of those will ever leave my desk). A badly translated poem is horrible, and nothing else. That is why I don't 'do' poetry professionally. I fear to damage beautiful textiles beyond repair, and to insult their makers.
That being said, I do dabble a little bit in private. I do it to sharpen my mind, and to remind myself from time to time of my limitations. Here is one of my attempts. The victim is a well-known poem by Ernest Dawson (1867-1900), an English poet of the so-called 'decadent' school. The subject is the brevity of life and the oblivion that follows. Surely that appeals to archaeologically minded souls. Judge for yourselves, dear readers.

Original text:

'Vitae summa brevis spem nos vetat incohare longam'*

They are not long, the weeping and the laughter,
Love and desire and hate:
I think they have no portion in us after
We pass the gate.

They are not long, the days of wine and roses:
Out of a misty dream
Our path emerges for a while, then closes
Within a dream.

My translation into Dutch:

'Het korte geheel van het leven verbiedt ons op lange duur te hopen'

Lang duurt het niet, het huilen en het lachen,
Liefde, begeerte en haat:
Me dunkt, geen aandeel hebben zij in ons als
We door de poort gaan.

Lang zijn ze niet, de dagen van wijn en rozen:
Uit mist en droom
Doemt onze weg op, even, lost dan op,
Weer in een droom.

*from Ode I.4 by Quintus Horatius Flaccus/Horace, 65 – 8BC (my translation).

Friday, April 3rd 2009
I read an interesting and moving article in last week's Guardian Weekly. It is about Native American tribes in the USA who are trying to revive their languages, many of which are nearly extinct. It is too late for Eyak, about which I wrote on Thursday, May 27th 2008, but for others there may still be hope now that many tribes are regaining their confidence, and deliberate suppression of their languages by the dominant English-speaking culture is slowly abating.
You can find the the article on The Guardian's website. It is well worth reading.

Friday, March 27th 2009
I have to grumble a bit. Bear with me, please; it won't be long for it is almost time for my lunch.
In informative texts, form and content are inseparable. You may have discovered the ultimate answer to life, the universe & everything (which is, as we all know, 42), but if you publish your discovery in gobbledygook nobody will be interested – except for a few who will be far too much interested and start religious wars about it. How you write matters as much as what you write about. This is why I have noticed with increasing alarm a recent linguistic development in written Dutch: the abuse of a poor, innocent stylistic device called 'historic present'. English only uses it in informal speech and tabloid headlines, Dutch also in formal (but never in very formal) written prose. The 'historic present' involves, as my beloved Principles & Pitfalls of English Grammar (by J. Lachlan Mackenzie, Coutinho 2002) tells me, ' …..using the present to invoke the past.......it is generally regarded as making the Dutch prose more vivid.' [p.39]. And so it does, and so it does – if used sparingly and with understanding. That is precisely what increasing numbers of journalists will not, or cannot, do. Our local newspaper is full of clumsy sentences like 'Fifty years ago Mr Jansen goes to the village school'. Even a respectable popular-history magazine I subscribe to includes articles about events in the (distant) past that are nonetheless written almost entirely in the present tense. 'Julius Caesar is being murdered in March 44BC'. Poor man; dead for ages and still being murdered.
Like English, Dutch depends mainly on verbal tenses to 'reflect in language our perception of time' (again according to Principles & Pitfalls of English Grammar [p.37]). Other languages use other devices, but if we Dunglish wish to make ourselves understood we have to stick to what our own languages allow. One of these verbal tenses is the present tense, as in 'It is now time for lunch' (very true, incidentally). This present tense is a wily beast, in Dutch perhaps even more so than in English. Take for instance the Dutch sentence 'Hij gaat naar huis'. The word 'gaat' is present tense third person singular of the verb 'gaan' (English speakers probably guessed as much). The sentence usually means 'He is going home' (present), but in some contexts it can also mean 'He will be going home' (future), and even occasionally 'He must go home!'(command, very much present). In this, the Dutch present tense is similar to the English, with a few tricky exceptions that fooled me many times and will continue to do so. Now, keeping this in mind, imagine the confusion and the potential for misunderstanding when a text dealing exclusively with past events is written entirely in the present tense. Or, even worse, imagine what this Persistent Present State does to a text which is mainly about past events, but which also includes a few current issues. The poor reader is left to work out what happens after what, what is now and what was long ago, and who does what before, or after, or perhaps even simultaneously with, somebody else. Most readers are not stupid and will eventually figure it out, assisted by a sprinkling of 'before', 'afterwards', 'finally' or 'the next year' the writer has (hopefully!) been kind enough to add. But if the reader understands the intended meaning of such a text it will be despite its style, and not because of it. Instead of making the text more accessible, as good writing should do, its style has made it less so. There is probably a textbook for journalists somewhere that says 'Use the historic present! It makes your texts more lively'. Well, yes, up to a point. The 'historic present' as a stylistic device is fine (at least in Dutch), but overindulging in it without really understanding it is not - and that is what these writers have done. As we Dutch might put it, 'Ze hebben een klok horen luiden maar weten niet waar de klepel hangt'. Very true indeed.
Grumble, grumble, grumble. It really is time for my lunch.

Friday, March 13th 2009
I know a young lady who is a perfect polyglot. She speaks Abaza, Bai, Chhattisgarhi, Diola, Ewondo, Frisian, G�, Hiri Motu, Inuit, Kiki-Chin and occasionally, when she's in the mood for it, Quenya. Her repertoire of consonants includes Plosives, Implosives, Ejectives, Nasal Trills, Lateral flaps, Lateral fricatives, Ejective fricatives, Ejective lateral fricatives, Percussives, Lateral approximants, Click consonants (including the odd Lateral click) and a couple of grunts that defy all description. She switches from one to the other effortlessly, in mid-sentence, simply for the heck of it. The most astonishing fact is this lady's age. She is a bright-eyed, perky 10-month-old.
Once upon a time, in another universe far, far away, I myself was a 10-month-old and I could do what this lady does now. So could we all. As babies, we could all produce every sound in every language on the whole planet, and we loved it, too.
A glimpse of that joy returned to me much later, during evenings with friends and friends of friends in our dorms at the American university I attended. Many of its students came (and still come) from all four corners of the world, and so did my friends and friends' friends. On those evenings we would swap mock-insults (cheerfully un-PC), weird recipes and linguistic acrobatics. I remember one evening in particular, when among those present was a lady from South Africa who spoke, beside an impressive number of other languages, Xhosa. Xhosa is famous for having no less then 15 click sounds, something no sluggish Dutch tongue can imitate and live to tell the tale. This lady could, and to tease us click-less folks she produced a tongue-twister. I have forgotten what the phrase meant; it had something to do with bracelets. What I do remember is that it contained no less than three different types of clicks, one for each syllable, and sounded like an avalanche of little pebbles. We were stunned. None of us came even close in our attempts to reproduce that. I tried to avenge my nation's honour by issuing my own challenge, 'Achtentachtig Scheveningse schonen schaatsten schreeuwend een scheve schaats', which I'm proud to say was fairly effective, but yet did not quite match the clicks. We concluded that we all spoke weird, impossible languages, and proceeded to have a wonderful evening together.

I don't like that story in the bible about the Tower of Babel. There are several reasons for that, but one of them is that I don't understand the Babylonian curse. Why is it a curse to have many languages? Perhaps divine dictators like perfect uniformity in all things, including language. I don't like divine dictators.
......Oh, and all those languages and sounds I mentioned in the first paragraph? Don't ask me what they all are. I had to look most of them up in my favourite 'Dictionary of Languages' (by Andrew Dalby; Bloomsbury 2004). A little showing-off goes a long way.

Friday, February 6th 2009
Earlier this week I listened to the radio, to the Dutch news station (so-called) Radio 1. A journalist was interviewing a politician on some issue of truly cosmic importance; I have forgotten which. To me a good interview involves coaxing the interviewed persons into saying things they would rather hide, and critically testing their arguments. Information and analysis, in short. I'm sure the journalist thought this was a proper interview. It was certainly typical for most interviews on Dutch radio these days. The journalist interrupted every half-started phrase, answered his own silly questions, and repeated himself ad nauseam in long rambling sentences, all in a loud, aggressive voice. The voice of a bully. The poor politician – I rarely apply the word "poor" to politicians – couldn't get a word in edgewise. Hooligans would express their tender feelings on the pitch with more finesse.
At the end of it we, the listeners, had learned absolutely nothing about the politician's views or arguments, or their strengh. All we knew was what the journalist had said. Translated into another language, any language, it would simply be: 'RRRROARR!! ME TARZAN, ME BIG!'
That was all. The journalist had used language as a sledge hammer. Not even as a battering ram, trying to break into information not otherwise accessible. No, a coarse, heavy sledge hammer only fit for breaking down. So much for information and analysis.
Deeply annoyed, I switched to another station, BBC World. Immediately my mood lifted. Soft voices, calm and articulated, interesting facts and thorough analysis, and yes: proper interviews. Two or three brief, soft-spoken questions and a devious politician, slippery like an old eel, had revealed all he would have bitten his tongue to hide. One more question delivered in similar style, and the eels' arguments bit the dust. No raised voices, no interruptions, only tact and - deadly - skill. Language like an artists' brush, language like a scalpel.
Does BBC World offer training courses to foreign journalists?

Friday, January 9th, 2009
These are dark days for diggers. I mean diggers in the ground, not diggers for words like me. But when I and the world were younger and I, too, occasionally wielded a trowel instead of a pen, winters were tough. Long after all builders and farmers had disappeared indoors we archaeologists would struggle on, until our fingers were frozen more solid than the hardest potsherds and our feet were as cold as those of the corpses we were digging up. I've dug in blizzards so fierce I couldn't even see the trench, and in frost so severe that the ice in our water hoses was as hard as the very flints on the mesh of our sieves. Admittedly, that was in Norway in November, where winter is still a mighty King. And this was also before something like a Health & Safety Department existed in archaeology. Ah, those good old days.......when archaeologists were archaeologists, and death in the trenches considered an honourable end to a noble career.
Spring was very different. Spring was the season when lambs were born, trees were budding and archaeologists became frisky. Many a colleague would disappear for days on end, long-standing appointments cancelled with a brief phone call: 'sorry, technical weather today'. For that is how they were called then, those balmy, sunny days in spring when the fields were freshly ploughed and new crops of delicious finds were poking their lovely little rims out of the dark soil: technical weather. All diggers would be itching to be outside, and all paper-pushers were green with envy. Many a dry and dusty dossier of sites long forgotten suddenly needed urgent checking in the field, without delay and in person. On such days I will still drop my books in a wink and run off on a survey with the very first ex-colleague who asks. But today it is winter and cold, very cold. I think of those dark days in Norway and, purring like a cat beside a cosy stove, turn to my dictionaries. Not technical weather today.

Friday, December 19th, 2008
The year 2008 is almost at an end. For GrondTaal it has been a special year: the first year of its existence as a fulltime company. Fortunately it was also a successful year. Many institutions, companies and private individuals have already approached GrondTaal and allowed us to work with their texts. GrondTaal feels honoured and grateful. More projects will follow in 2009, the second year of the company's existence. To all our present customers, to all future ones and to everyone who may read this, GrondTaal wishes a merry Christmas, and a happy and healthy 2009! Het ga U allen goed.

Wednesday, December 17th, 2008
Having just finished an interesting but somewhat hectic project last week, I allowed myself some breathing space and sauntered over to a small Christmas fair here in Zutphen. There was a local folk-dance group, all dressed as my own late great-grandparents would have done, and performing country dances on clogs. There was a friendly lady spinning and carding fleeces who patiently answered all my eager questions (I'm a knitting person). And then, in a corner, I could see some large birds. A falconer! He had some ten birds in all, several species of falcon and hawk, a squabbling pair of barn-owls, and a lovely, gentle turkey-vulture. I have a soft spot for vultures, much maligned as they are. Yes, they eat dirt, and what's wrong with that?
On his fist the falconer carried his top attraction: a full-sized eagle owl. Full-sized is really, really big in the case of eagle owls. They can deal with a careless fox if that is all the food there is, and they eat prickly hedgehogs for breakfast. This one, however, didn't look particularly hungry just yet, and I could get up close & personal, gazing deeply into those wonderful, orange eyes while the falconer told various interesting things about its private life. Suddenly one word caught my attention. It sounded like 'tarsel', and the falconer used it while he was speaking about male birds. I asked the man to repeat it, and it was indeed 'tarsel': a male eagle owl. He said it had something to do with the word 'three', and referred to the smaller size of the male birds (roughly a third) relative to the females. Tarsel! I had never heard it before, in any language. It had an oddly ancient flavour to it, enough to raise my archaeological instincts. For the next few days I chewed on it, and I decided to find out more about it.
I had a hunch where to look. The 'tar-/ter-' suggested something central- or south-European, probably Romance, and old; and the '-sel' too had a Romance, if germanicised, flavour. It wasn't in any of my printed dictionaries. Long live the internet: I Ixquicked (I don't Google). Initially without result, but a reference to Chaucer, falcons and 'tercel/tarsel' provided the first opening. Chaucer, falcons: that suggested falconry, Middle English and ultimately French roots. And yes! There it was. Tarsel, not in any Dutch dictionary but definitely the word I heard. Middle English tercel/tarsel, from Old French ter�uel, from Vulgar Latin *tertillus, diminutive of Latin tertius, third; with an Indo-European root trei- . My hunch had been correct. True, all instances of tercel/tarsel I could find referred to male falcons, not eagle owls. But changes in a language never proceed with strict logic and regularity, like a cool Vulcan working on a warp drive problem. They are rather as Klingons were before the Federation tamed them. If a male falcon is a tarsel, then any male bird of prey (with or without cloaking device) is a tarsel, never mind that this one is fluffy, eats hedgehogs and cries 'UHU'.
Only a person who is equally language-mad can understand my excitement. One obscure little word for the male of one species of bird that most people have never even seen. So what? I don't care, dear reader. It was my reward for the previous week's hard work.

Wednesday, November 12th, 2008
The Orcs and Rings have been defeated once more, and for many pages the waters have been out in Lincolnshire – but not on Vlieland. There, fog and sea mist lay heavy on the bleak dunes (no pun intended), creating a perfect atmosphere for long and silent hikes. As expected, of professional translation there was not a trace. But there was language. Language is everywhere, always. There were, for starters, the entries previous guests had written in the guest book in their various dialects and languages. One guest had even taken the trouble to write a long, delightful poem in K�lsch, the dialect c.q. language of Cologne. Then there were all the different regional accents I could pick out whenever fellow-guests passed me on the road (not many of those). Having grown up in Friesland, I need only a few words – any will do – to recognise a Frisian. For Gronings two or three words with -aa – and t- will do. For Twents, -oo and -en will clench it. But this is nothing compared to what my mother told me. When she was a child, local dialects in her area, the Achterhoek, were much more distinct then they are now and still widely spoken. She and her sisters could pinpoint the exact village people came from, even as near as 20 miles along the road.
Now, Vlieland is fading to the back of my mind and work yet again demands my full attention. The first big thing to come up are the 'Reuvensdagen', the annual national convention of all Dutch and (increasingly) Flemish archaeologists. Everyone who has any connection, however tenuous, to archaeology will be there. That means the bulk of my potential customers will be there, and therefore that I must be there and grab them. Fresh stacks of business cards and company brochures in my pockets, dressed to the nines and shoes shining, then a deep breath: off I go. Wish me luck!

Tuesday, October 28th 2008
Another long period of silence. When my Business is busy, time for the blog is short. My most recent project involved writing an article for a client (not translating, original work; GrondTaal is constantly exploring new territory), and that took much time and thought. But now that I find myself briefly in between projects (come, dear clients, come!) there is room for other things. I use it to prepare the Christmas mailing, Excuse me? Christmas mailing? In October? Yes, in October. It is entirely a DIYS job, both because of the costs and because I like to pretend I'm good at design and graphic arts (quod non). That does make it, however, something which cannot be rushed at the last minute. There are addresses to be selected and checked, labels to be prepared (no small feat to have achieved that in spite of all the opposition Word could muster - veni, vidi, vici), the Christmas card itself to be designed. Finally the trip to the copyshop, comparable (I assume) to going to the maternity ward to have your baby. I always go to Aquarius, a delightful local shop, and as usual they made the delivery painless. All that is left for me to do is signing my own name in silver ink over 200 times, sticking the labels on the envelopes (idem) and waiting for the Dutch postal service TNT to produce their annual Christmas stamps.
With that out of the way, I can take up my Bach translation again. The man has reached the end of his life, and in a few pages he will meet an unpleasant end at the hands of a fake eye surgeon. Please tell this to any local quacks you may meet: 'One of you lot murdered the greatest Western composer who ever lived!'. I have little hope that it would stop any of them, but it is worth a try.
Next week will be different: it will be GrondTaal's annual retreat to Vlieland. Some religions acknowledge the existence of seven heavens. I know only two: Vlieland and Schiermonnikoog. GrondTaal will be accompanied by Bach, books and breiwerk as well as by a choice selection of linguistically stimulating DVD's involving Orcs and Rings. No cars, no computers, no telephone. I'm sorry, dear customers, but you will have to make do without GrondTaal for a while. Business will be resumed on Monday, November 10th.

Tuesday, September 23rd 2008
Well! A new entry every week? Clearly not. Almost seven weeks have passed since the last one was written. So much to do, so little time to do it in. Projects to attract new customers, projects for those same customers once safely contracted (thank you for placing your trust in me!), administrative backlogs, and more or less parallel to everything else a lovely little project I initiated myself, the translation of a recent biography of Johann Sebastian Bach into Dutch. I feel privileged that the author has kindly allowed me to touch his work on The Great Master. Heaven is: translating a well-written and interesting text while listening to any BWV-number I can get my hands on. Not 565 or 538 , of course. I greatly mistrust anyone who can concentrate on something else while those two thunder through the speakers like mighty rivers.
So, busy, busy, busy. A good thing, for having nothing to do except writing out cheques to other companies makes me nervous. Being freelance has many advantages, but this drawback scares many potential colleagues off : you never know when your money will be coming in. You have to be able to ignore your financial situation from time to time. There is a trap lurking there, into which many a hapless freelancer has fallen: you panic and blindly throw yourself on random tasks, racking your brains day and night, but everything you do is inefficient and has no solid strategy behind it. Nothing comes out of that except being overworked and miserable - and not a penny richer. I know that trap: I've seen the inside of it myself a couple of times. It's ugly.
One thing I have calmly considered after looking at my bank account and deliberately done, is raising my prices. I'm sorry, my dear and esteemed customers! But your servant's poor cat has to eat, and so does she herself. You may want to re-read the entry for Friday, May 23th 2008......

Wednesday, July 30rd 2008
Back again! Back from a ten-day immersion in an English bath, which had a large dose of pine-scented Scottish bath salt added to it. I feel very clean now, and ready to go. If only the weather would cooperate a bit more all would be very well. Sadly, it doesn't. Hot, hot, hot. My brain began to fry as soon as it got off the plane. Praise be to the Gods for fans and cold showers.
I used my time with the natives well, and tried to settle a few point about English grammar and vocabulary. Surely the natives would know, right? Wrong. Not even native speakers, especially not native speakers, can tell you unambiguously whether something is this, that or the other. Ask four people about the distinction between two apparent synonyms (as I did), and you get five different answers. But at other times they will all agree that something "just isn't as we say it”. There are definitely rules. The natives can invariably tell after only a few sentences if someone (i.e. Yours truly) is one of them or not. But the rules are implicit, elusive, and trying to write them down results in an endless list of “ifs” and “buts“ and “howevers“. All grammars, even the most detailed ones, are necessarily summaries, simplifications. The same is true for dictionaries. Giants such as the OED for English or the “Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal” for Dutch approach perfection. Approach it, never reach it, not even after the hundred-plus years it took to produce them, nor after the umpteen supplements that are still to appear. In the end, it all boils down to “Fingerspitzengef�hl”, as the Germans so aptly put it. You simply “feel” that something is right. If you are a native speaker, that is. I've got a long, long way to go yet – and I love every step.

Tuesday, July 15th 2008
Almost, almost! Two more days of work until my vacation begins. GrondTaal will be closed until Monday, July 28th. No email, no translations, no quotations, no administration. Nothing. Not quite true: I will go to Scotland, so there will be a lot of translation actually, day and night. And since my dear hosts are both archaeologists, much of it will be on archaeological matters, too. But all translation on my part will be spontaneous, improvised, sloppy, and most of the time even unconsciously done. My conscious brain will simply think English, or Dunglish when I get really tired. No carefully wrought texts, each word delicately balanced and each sentence polished until it shines like the purest crystal. .........As if that's how I work professionally..........Dream on, dream on. It is my ideal, certainly, but never quite achieved. Yesterday I finished the last two projects that were still on my desk and sent the results to my customers. Hopefully there will be another project waiting for me upon my return, and as things are looking now there will be. Today there are only loose bits and ends such as this web log, which I don't get around to do much of when I'm in the middle of a project. Tomorrow a semi-business meeting in another town (Groningen; I warmly recommend it). The 'semi-' means some business will be involved but it will mostly be pleasure, really. Then packing a few last things in my suitcase on Thursday, getting rid of the garbage, clean the cat's litter tray, preparing instructions for the cat-sitters. And then.....GrondTaal will really be closed. For now. On the 29th it will be business as usual, and I will be refreshed and inspired and ready once more to produce those polished sentences and delicately balanced words. One must always have hope.

Thursday, July 3rd 2008
It's hot again, which wreaks havoc with my concentration. Since I am in the middle of a complicated translation and have to prepare two important quotations at the same time, a shaky concentration is the last thing I need. Juggling two languages simultaneously is hard work at the best of times. I could always tell in Denmark when I was getting really, really tired. First my Danish, otherwise fine, would disappear. Then my English would start to fall to pieces. Finally even my Dutch would desert me, leaving me speechless except for some inarticulate grunts and groans. But it wasn't just fatigue that had strange effects on my language skills. Funnily enough, the better my Danish became, the more my German deteriorated. My spoken German has never been good, although I can read and understand it well enough. But I have always been able to keep a simple conversation going in it. Not so after some months in Denmark. Whenever I tried to speak German, nothing but Danish would come out of my mouth. Sometimes I wouldn't even notice it myself, leaving my German conversation partners somewhat bewildered. The effect had worn off and my German skills returned to their former level, when I visited Denmark again this year. Attempting to speak German with a German fellow guest after having been completely immersed in Danish all day was definitely not a success. Since the poor man spoke only German, our conversations were very brief. Strange how the brain works. I'm sure it must be related to another weird thing which has often happened to me when listening to the radio. If I turn it on at some random station during a period when I am frequently switching between languages, I can sometimes not understand a word of what is being said – until somewhere, deep in my brain, a switch flips and I realise what language is being spoken. Then, all of a sudden, every word is crystal clear. Curiouser and curiouser!

I am a great TimeTeam fan. I have seen all the episodes and specials as well as several of the DVD's, and once I have come to the last one I simply start all over again. The programme cannot be received in the Netherlands (long live the internet!) but some years ago Discovery Holland ran several episodes and then ran them again, and again, and again in true Discovery fashion. I was hooked. Opinion on the programme amongst the Dutch archaeological community is divided, with roughly equal numbers hating it and loving it. I love it and I think it has done archaeology a world of good. We could do with something similar over here – but that is an entirely different issue.
Sadly, those first Discovery broadcasts were not entirely satisfactory. That had nothing to to with the programme itself but everything with the Dutch subtitles. I find subtitles distracting when I can understand the original language but I accept their necessity and simply try to ignore them. But these subtitles were difficult to ignore: they were often simply wrong. A respectable Norman church suddenly became Norse (Noors in Dutch), a Roman military site lost a thousand years of its age and became “Romaans” (Romanesque in English), and BC and AD regularly changed places, creating a new and very interesting British chronology. Trenches, as in “Phil has opened up another trench” became “greppels” (drainage ditches in Dutch), but my favourite was “earthworks”. This was regularly transformed into "pottery", which may seem miraculous until you realise that pottery in Dutch is “aardewerk”. All those poor Iron Age sites surrounded by huge heaps of pottery........
I'm sure the Discovery translators were very good within their own field of expertise, but that field clearly wasn't archaeology. I'm fond of the series “House”, but I wouldn't touch its subtitles with a bargepole. My knowledge of English (or indeed, Dutch) medical terminology doesn't reach much beyond “appendix”, and in my hands the patients' medical problems would have become even more mysterious then they already were. I can deal with the dialects of archaeology, history, anthropology and classical music. That should be enough. The rest I gladly leave to my colleagues; the world is big enough for all of us.

Monday, June 9th 2008
Those who visit this website regularly (welcome, welcome!) may have noticed that the banner text at the top changes occasionally. There is always an English quotation about language or translation, followed by its Dutch version. These quotations are my choice, and I wish I could say they came from a vast stock of literary texts firmly stored in my head. But no. I simply select them from the Oxford Dictionary of Literary Quotations, having looked up “translation” in the index. But the gems I found there!
This one, from the preface to the venerable English bible translation known as the 'King James version': "Translation it is that openeth the window, to let in the light; that breaketh the shell, that we may eat the kernel; that putteth aside the curtaine, that we may looke into the most Holy place; that remooveth the cover of the well, that wee may come by the water, even as Jacob rolled away the stone from the mouth of the well, by which meanes the flockes of Laban were watered." [thanks to www.kjvbibles.com/kjpreface.htm for the original 1611 version]. One possible translation of this in Dutch would be: "Een vertaling opent het venster en laat het licht binnen; breekt de noot open en laat ons de kern eten; schuift het gordijn opzij en toont ons het Heiligste; haalt het putdeksel weg en laat ons bij het water komen, zoals Jacob de steen van de putrand rolde, en zo de kudden van Laban liet drinken." But this, my feeble attempt, does not come close to the original with its glorious rhythm and sound.
There's a nice quotation by Goethe in the same Dictionary: "Translators are like busy pimps extolling the surpassing charms of some half-veiled beauty. They excite an irresistible desire for the original." That original would be in German, and this is my translation of the above translation: "Vertalers zijn als nijvere pooiers die de charmes van een of andere half-gesluierde schone aanprijzen: ze wekken een onweerstaanbaar verlangen naar het origineel." Does that make me a pimp twice over? Here is the original, by way of atonement: "�bersetzer sind als gesch�ftige Kuppler anzusehen, die uns eine halbverschleierte Sch�ne als h�chst liebensw�rdig anpreisen: sie erregen eine unwiderstehliche Neigung nach dem Original."
All translators should frame that and hang it on their walls.

Thursday, May 27th 2008
On January 21, 2008, a world came to an end. On that date the last surviving speaker of Eyak, Marie Smith Jones, died. Her Eyak name was Udach' Kuqax*a'a'ch , which translates as "a sound that calls people from afar". Ms. Smith Jones or Udach' Kuqax*a'a'ch was also the last full-blooded member of the Eyak Nation, a Native American group in Alaska. Until her death she worked with linguists to record her language and to produce grammars and dictionaries of it. But none of her nine children learned to speak Eyak. Many Native Americans never learned their own language, and many languages in the world died out because its native speakers didn't teach it to their children. They didn't because they couldn't.
For mysterious reasons many people classify languages broadly into two groups: “good” ones and “bad” ones. “Good” languages are beautiful, logical and advanced. “Bad” languages are ridiculous, primitive and spoken by backward people. Invariably those who decide which is which are those in power. Governments, church authorities, the wealthy. And those in power can determine, by force if necessary, which languages are being taught in schools, which ones are allowed within the administration, and which ones are taken seriously. Those are always their own languages. Parisian French, not Occitan. “Goois” Dutch, not Frisian or Achterhoeks. American English, not Eyak.
Every linguist knows that there is not, nor ever was, a primitive language. Every language is perfectly suited to its own culture and has an equally long and complex history. They all look at the world in a different way and so, in a sense, are different worlds. There is a deliciously bewildering variety of them, an endless source of joy for those with open minds and ears. But people in power fear variety and consider their own world supreme. Therefore Eyak had to die and with it, its world. Languages are mortal, as are people. They wax and wane and at last pass away, leaving their children behind. But some people are deliberately murdered. So was Eyak. Its sounds will no longer call people from afar.

Friday, May 23th 2008
A few stern words on the rates we language people charge you, our customers. Read and remember.
- IF we work 40 hours every week;
- IF at least 2/3rds of those hours are being paid for by customers;
- IF no more than 1/6th of all project time is spent on research, revision, or consultation with the customer;
- IF we can do 400 words per hour when we are actually translating or editing;
- IF all our customers accept a rate of at least € 0,10 per word;
- IF no more than half of the total price we charge you (approximately half being the norm in the Netherlands) goes towards paying all taxes, premiums and company costs;
THEN we have about € 2130,- every four weeks to live on. Those are six big IF's. BUT:
- IF, all other factors being equal, the text is complicated and allows us to do only 200 words per hour, our earnings drop to € 1065,- ;
- IF, all other factors being equal, projects are temporarily scarce and only 1 /3rd of our hours are project hours, our earnings also drop to € 1065,- ;
- IF, all other factors being equal, our customers will only pay, say, € 0,04 per word (a rate many Dutch commercial publishing companies use), our earnings drop to € 845,-. That is well below the legal minimum wage in the Netherlands. And all other factors are never equal.
There are ways around this. Some work insanely long hours. Others rush through a job, cutting down on hours but sacrificing quality. Some rely on a partner's income. And some give up after a while, because they can't make ends meet. Those include many excellent professionals who could have given you top-quality work but will do so no more. So, dear customer, remember this before you raise your eyebrows upon seeing our invoice. We just try to make ends meet, like you do.

Friday, May 16th 2008
Tomorrow has come and gone, and temperatures have gone down. With renewed energy I have burrowed deep into my ever expanding client database. Tunnels through names, corridors through dates, and piles of superfluous data outside. Spring cleaning. Following additions to my service package I have renewed my company brochure, and my website too has undergone some important changes. Extra information, different illustrations, and of course a giant blooper in my menu that needed immediate fixing. No, the message “this page cannot be displayed” was not your server's fault. Mea culpa entirely.
So: changes, new information. Relevant to whom, and in what form? Email, letter, with or without business card or brochure? Which potential customers have not been approached for far too long, which colleagues should be informed? There are letters to be written, carefully phrased, addresses to be checked and printed, envelopes to be neatly filled. And afterwards, important, do not forget: notes to be made about who has received what and when. Pestering people with the wrong messages at the wrong moment is a bad idea. But with almost three hundred business contacts in the database I cannot trust my memory to keep track of that. Therefore it is Ctrl-F, search, copy and enter many, many times over.
The whole project took three days of concentrated work but now, late Friday afternoon, all is finished. Hopefully with good results in the form of new projects and customers. But that is out of my hands now: time to relax. Monday I will start afresh. There is an interesting Danish news paper article on a treasure find in Sweden, in need of a good Dutch translation, and another one about making plastic from pig manure (!) that will interest a former colleague. Never a dull moment in the world of translation.

Friday, May 9th 2008
It is hot outside and hot inside. Hot upstairs but slightly cooler downstairs . I wilt in temperatures others call 'balmy'. My concentration drops to zero and my eyes quickly follow. So, I have moved The Office. GrondTaal now resides in the living room downstairs, its premises reduced to a laptop and some books. Let's try again, shall we? No, no web surfing, focus on that text. It's interesting, honestly, give it a chance. And no, you don't need another cup of tea. Some ice cream from the Italian around the corner? Not now, dear, not now. Work, work, work.
It is hot outside and hot inside. My concentration ebbs, my eyes burn. I'm wilting. My boss tells me to keep going for another hour. I will write a proposal to management to make the director redundant for the rest of this day. Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow I will hire myself again.
It is hot outside and hot inside.

Monday, May 5th 2008 (Dutch Liberation Day)
I spent the last few days tying up loose ends. Amongst them were insurance matters. Dull, dull, but necessary. As long as my head is clear and my body can drag itself to my office, I can work. But if even that fails, my landlord will still want his rent and my cat his food. No kind employer or state to help me out; independence has its price. Saving up would take too long: life is fragile, I could fall down the stairs (my house has five steep staircases) tomorrow. For my cat's and my own sake I need insurance, a policy with fair conditions and an affordable premium. That's a needle in a haystack: finding it requires time and the patience to sift through daunting documents phrased like alchemists' arcana. Insurese is, of course, a language in its own right and quite unrelated to Indo-European. I postponed the job endlessly but finally made the time and found the needle. Nonetheless I will still be careful on the stairs. I may have misinterpreted some of the Insurese.
Yet another loose end: my customer database. It's digital, part home-made and part courtesy of the software company (all legal and above board, dear software company!). It contains relevant information on almost 300 people, at last count, all business contacts of some sort. Keeping track of mutations and of who has been contacted when and how is essential. Being sloppy with customers is rude – and bad for business. I therefore spent some hours checking, changing and making new entries. Well done.
Tweaking my website and other digital jobs were also on my list. As a one-person business I cannot afford to outsource such things; a self-employed translator must be a Jill-of-all-trades. Some software applications drive me up my four walls and back again (no names). After such epic battles, going back to translation pure and simple is sheer bliss. Give me grammar and idiom any time. That's on my list for tomorrow: to relax and study. I am halfway MacKenzie's “Principles & Pitfalls of English Grammar”. Believe it or not, it's great fun, at least for the like-minded.

Monday, April 27th 2008
So far, most of my customers are academics. The downside is that they question and argue, and bluffing won't do. But the upside is that they question and argue, and bluffing won't do. I don't work for them but with them, and that suits me well. To do so I use my Eightfold Path towards Translation. That path is the result of much trial and some error.
Step 1 is Reading. I carefully read my customer's text, trying to understand its meaning and underlining words or passages that may cause trouble later on.
Step 2 is Research. Trying to find the correct translation for those words in this context. For that I use all my dictionaries, encyclopedias and word lists, an ever expanding collection. I once tracked down the English translation of a 17th-century Dutch military term in an on-line Latin-English glossary on Roman military engineering. I have had to resort to Anglo-Saxon for an equivalent to a medieval, eastern Dutch territorial unit. This is why I do this work.
Step 3 is Translation. Translating the text sentence by sentence or paragraph by paragraph, never word by word. Where there are ambiguities or mistakes in the original I make a digital note in the margin, as I do if I suspect my choice of words or syntax needs explanation. Step 4 is Correction. The spell check (but never on automatic pilot), removing double spaces, the basics.
Step 5 is Fine-tuning. I read the translated text from first to last, often aloud, without referring to the original. Would a native speaker accept this, or is it Danglish or Denerlands? Where necessary I change words, spelling, grammar, style.
Step 6 is Back to the Roots. I carefully compare the original and the translation, sentence by sentence. Sometimes my efforts at step 5 make me stray too far from the author's meaning.
Step 7 is that Author. The translation and my remarks, explanations and questions are sent to him or her, and they can shoot at it. Have I understood what you wished to say, and do you understand my choices?
Step 8 is Revision. I look at the author's comments and questions and where necessary adjust my translation or if not, explain why. Ideally, after that the translation is finished and the author well pleased.
There is no step 9, or it would be my invoice. To be paid promptly, of course.

Thursday, April 24th 2008
I work from home, in my office on the top floor of my medieval house. It is full of books. There is the usual pile of dictionaries, grammars and style guides, paper or digital. Those are the ones I use regularly, often daily. Then there are my other bookcases, stuffed with archaeology, anthropology, linguistics, whatever, collected over many years and used for background research or specialized words. They have been joined recently by others, ones I could not resist buying. What attracts a translator's attention?
There is a fat “Dansk sprogl�re”, a combination of a professional grammar and biography of the Danish language, all in Danish (by Danskl�rerforeningen). There is an equally fat overview of Danish history from the first centuries AD until the present, also in Danish (by Aarhus Universitetsforlag).
In a brave moment I also picked up an introduction to Old Norse. Viking language, sword language. It is in English (by E.V.Gordon, revised by A.R.Taylor), looks daunting but is fascinating. Only a fellow language freak can understand my joy upon discovering that Old Norse verbs had a 'middle voice'. I could have known; modern Danish has traces of it, Indo-European was riddled with it. This is how a paleontologist feels when a supposedly extinct creature hops past. My former teacher at Groningen University, professor Stefan Radt (one of the best ever) needed a full semester to explain the intricacies of this beast and its kin to us in their Classical Greek disguise. Is it relevant to my translations? Not at all. But it makes my day.
Another new gem on my shelves, a bridge between this Norse and my English: 'The Reckoning of King R�dwald' by Sam Newton. Short in pages but rich in content, well researched and overflowing with useful notes and references. Inspiring. That matters: no good translation is possible without inspiration and joy. I will soon need extra bookcases.

Tuesday, April 22nd 2008
Why does one start a blog? I am, among other things, a translator and an archaeologist. This is my professional website. Why do I start this blog? Practice, information, self-reflection: these are some of my reasons. No doubt there are others, there always are, but those need not trouble you, my readers.
Practice is obvious: a good translator must also be a good writer. There are many ways to interpret the word 'translation'. To me a good translation is above all a good text, well written and able to speak for itself, not leaning on its source text like a cripple on crutches. But writing well requires practice, developing skills and keeping them needle-sharp. That is what I hope to do in this blog. I beg your pardon if I do not altogether and all the time succeed. I try.
Information, I said. You, reader, may be interested to know what happens between the moment you hand over your text to me and the moment, days or weeks later, when you receive your translation – and the bill. What does a translator do, and why? What do you pay for? Read and learn, reader.
And then self reflection: a dangerous word, likely to put people off. No 'dear diary' here, no exploration of your translators' innermost feelings. No. But translation can be lonely work without colleagues eager to hold up a mirror, forcing the translator to step back and look : is this right? Should I do this, and now, or something else, later? Lacking colleagues holding mirrors, at least in my office, I will use this blog instead.
Since this is not to be a personal diary, there is no need to write daily. But regularly, a few times every week, whenever other tasks allow it. I will write in English only, not in Dutch. I trust that most Dutch visitors to this site can read English, and keeping two blogs would take too much time. My apologies, Dutch readers. Take it as a compliment to your language skills.