transliteracy
Most of my dear classmates and teachers during grad school: round one (for more on the forthcoming round two, stay tuned!) studied the Arab world. So while we Turkish and Persianate sorts were always on the fringe, we nonetheless heard a great deal about the woes of Arabic translation, transliteration, and software formatting, especially during thesis-writing time. When I finally started studying the language myself last spring, my sympathy deepened.
Along these lines, Graeme Wood at the Atlantic has an odd little piece on the magazine's attempts to come to grips with the challenge of adopting a consistent transliteration policy (though along the way he misattributes an aphorism that I'm pretty sure belongs to Ambrose Bierce).
And whether or not war has managed to teach Americans much about geography--I'm not holding my breath--it certainly hasn't managed to teach us better pronounciation. I don't have a television, so I am blessedly insulated from the mangling of Arabic that goes on in most TV coverage. But I routinely end up cringing in meetings and conference calls where people from NGOs and think tanks that will remain unnamed (and these are the good guys, I promise) say Eye-rack and Eye-ran and Aff-Gann-iss-Tan.
Of course, nobody seems to be able to pronounce Turkish names either. Szerelem recently put up a link to Orhan Pamuk's apperance on the Charlie Rose show; Pamuk conducts himself charmingly despite continued mispronounciations of both his name and the beloved city's. The yumuşak g in Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's name is often turned into a hard g, and the "c" in his first name (which should be pronounced like English "j") often gets garbled as well. Some translators have dealt with this by transliterating letters that exist in the romanized Turkish alphabet, but not in English--i.e., replacing ç with "ch", c with "j", and so on. Reading this on the page makes my brain hurt. So I'm rather glad to see many recent non-academic books (whether about Turkey, or translated from Turkish) opting for a pronounciation key at the beginning instead. I generally insist on using the Turkish characters whenever it's possible to type them, even if sometimes it results in unicode gibberish.
Speaking of fun with transliteration, though, here's a delightful little time-sink of a tool, via the Arabist: Yamli, a transliteration-and-search engine. You type in the romanized word (say, kitab) and it automatically transliterates it to كتاب and then searches the Arabic web for it. Now, this is of little use to someone whose Arabic is as rudimentary as mine, since I probably wouldn't be able to read any of the search results. But I have been spending far too much time playing around with the Yamli editor, which just does predictive-text transliteration. As a result of several years spent engaging with academic and other literatures on the Middle East, I actually know quite a lot of Arabic vocabulary--it's just that until recently, I couldn't read any of it. So I sit around plugging familiar names and words into Yamli and looking at the variant Arabic spellings it produces, and it's proving to be an excellent tool for bringing together my vocabulary and my rudimentary literacy. Plus, procrastination gold.
Along these lines, Graeme Wood at the Atlantic has an odd little piece on the magazine's attempts to come to grips with the challenge of adopting a consistent transliteration policy (though along the way he misattributes an aphorism that I'm pretty sure belongs to Ambrose Bierce).
And whether or not war has managed to teach Americans much about geography--I'm not holding my breath--it certainly hasn't managed to teach us better pronounciation. I don't have a television, so I am blessedly insulated from the mangling of Arabic that goes on in most TV coverage. But I routinely end up cringing in meetings and conference calls where people from NGOs and think tanks that will remain unnamed (and these are the good guys, I promise) say Eye-rack and Eye-ran and Aff-Gann-iss-Tan.
Of course, nobody seems to be able to pronounce Turkish names either. Szerelem recently put up a link to Orhan Pamuk's apperance on the Charlie Rose show; Pamuk conducts himself charmingly despite continued mispronounciations of both his name and the beloved city's. The yumuşak g in Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's name is often turned into a hard g, and the "c" in his first name (which should be pronounced like English "j") often gets garbled as well. Some translators have dealt with this by transliterating letters that exist in the romanized Turkish alphabet, but not in English--i.e., replacing ç with "ch", c with "j", and so on. Reading this on the page makes my brain hurt. So I'm rather glad to see many recent non-academic books (whether about Turkey, or translated from Turkish) opting for a pronounciation key at the beginning instead. I generally insist on using the Turkish characters whenever it's possible to type them, even if sometimes it results in unicode gibberish.
Speaking of fun with transliteration, though, here's a delightful little time-sink of a tool, via the Arabist: Yamli, a transliteration-and-search engine. You type in the romanized word (say, kitab) and it automatically transliterates it to كتاب and then searches the Arabic web for it. Now, this is of little use to someone whose Arabic is as rudimentary as mine, since I probably wouldn't be able to read any of the search results. But I have been spending far too much time playing around with the Yamli editor, which just does predictive-text transliteration. As a result of several years spent engaging with academic and other literatures on the Middle East, I actually know quite a lot of Arabic vocabulary--it's just that until recently, I couldn't read any of it. So I sit around plugging familiar names and words into Yamli and looking at the variant Arabic spellings it produces, and it's proving to be an excellent tool for bringing together my vocabulary and my rudimentary literacy. Plus, procrastination gold.
posted by kitabet at 12:48 PM
5 Comments:
Lovely post. I was reading Saids interview in 'Culture and Resistance' a while back and the point about how people in the West often refer to Iraq as Eyeraq and Saddam as Sodom was brought up and he answered that the worst thing is a lot of people don't even bother trying to correct their pronunciations, it's almost like they couldn't be bothered.
The Pamuk interview is lovely isn't it? I was most amused when he referred to his daughter as 'him' - I think it probably has something to do with the genderless third person 'O'.
hehe, I see an oft discussed point has cropped up yet again - and with good reason too.
I only wish there was more someone could do something about it - sometimes, speakers who I KNOW are wrong have grandiose notions of being correct! most disconcerting if you're trying to be polite and at the same time, not blow your top!
thanks y'all!
and szerelem, yes, one thing I find very charming about turkish-english is the genderbending. (queering translation!) also, the funny things that happen to definite articles on their way back & forth between tongues.
And on a more serious note, I think Said's right about the arrogance at work in some cases. "Can't be bothered" is as much about power as lassitude.
http://www.arabic-keyboard.org
You are quite mistaken in your attribution to Ambrose Bierce. I went to pains to find that line's source, and no reference was older than Paul Rodriguez's.
One the subject of "Eye-rack" and "Eye-ran," I can't get all that worked up. English pronounces proper nouns in its own way, just as Arabic and Persian do. I'm not about to ask an Arab or Iranian to change the way she says the name of my country; why should she ask me to change the way I say the name of hers? "Iran" is an English word now, and I'll happily embrace (nearly all) the variant pronunciations it inspires among non-speakers of Persian.
Post a Comment
<< Home