Re: NRC kwaliteitskrant? Echt niet!

Harlan Messinger wrote:
Ekkehard Dengler wrote:
Harlan Messinger wrote:
Ekkehard Dengler wrote:
Harlan Messinger wrote:
Ruud Harmsen wrote:
Ze leren het ook nooit.


http://www.nrc.nl/buitenland/article2254151.ece/VS_en_Zuid-Korea_in_hogere_s
taat_van_paraatheid ===
In Zuid-Korea zijn 28.500 Amerikaanse troepen gestationeerd, in
Japan, eveneens binnen bereik van Noord-Koreaanse raketten, zijn
50.000 man gelegerd.
/===

'Troepen' op deze manier gebruikt is een lelijk anglicisme. Ik
vind het volkomen onacceptabel om dit in het Nederlands zo te
doen. Kan echt niet. Zeker niet in een zogenaamde
kwaliteitskrant, maar dat is het NRC allang niet meer.
"Manier" = francicism
"Anglicisme" = francicism
"Acceptabel" = francicism
"Kwaliteit" = francicism or latinism
"Krant" = francicism

For that matter,

"Raketten" = italicism
"Gestationeerd" = francicism or anglicism
I hope you don't mean to imply that people aren't entitled to take
exception to new imports from a foreign language that their
language has borrowed other words or usages from. Imagine hearing
"informations" in an NBC news piece about Germany.
I mean to imply that if one take exception, the express reason
should not carry the implication that borrowing is outright
improper.

It wasn't clear whether "troepen" is an established or a recent and
spreading usage that Ruud either (a) doesn't happen to like it at
all or (b) thinks that sources above a certain level of discourse
should scorn it, or whether it's a brand new usage, as
"informations" would be on an NBC newscast.

Or simply a mistake (< "Informationen"). If you had actually heard
it used on the news last night, it would have struck you as
ungrammatical, wouldn't it? I'm not sure you appreciate the effect
poor translations from English tend to have on other languages. For
instance, while the current German government is known as "die
Regierung Merkel", the Obama administration is often referred to as
"die Obama-Administration".

I don't understand that. Why would (presumably) native German speakers
who are paid to translate foreign material into their own language,
translate it with words that they know perfectly well don't exist in
their language?

I'm surprised you're surprised; in fact at first I thought you were joking.
Poor translations are not the exception, but the rule, and the more a
language is translated into, the more likely it is to be influenced by the
language or languages of the source texts.
Translators are almost invariably underpaid and under constant pressure to
meet unreasonable deadlines. Another problem is that translators are paid
not by the hour, but by the word or page, which effectively rewards sloppy
work:
The more time you spend looking for the right word, the less you earn. Since
you're never going to be paid well, though, no matter how fast you work,
translation is not a very attractive career option. As a result, far more
untalented and/or lazy people go into translation than you would expect.
One convenient way of dealing with translation problems is leaving difficult
bits untranslated. Scientific jargon can be very, very difficult to
translate because new terms are coined every day but can take years to find
their way into any dictionary. Ideally, scientific jargon would be
translated by bilingual scientists, but bilingual scientists are thin on the
ground and tend to have other, more lucrative things to do.

You may also have overlooked the fact that translations aren't necessarily
the work of a professional translator. A lot of translating is done
(sometimes only mentally), by journalists, scientists and other people who
read English-language texts on a daily basis. The more often you read a
particular foreign expression, the less likely you are to think of it as
something to be avoided, which is how things like "die Obama-Administration"
creep into common usage. In today's media landscape, the ability to express
yourself well is no longer a prerequisite for reaching a mass audience and
any expression that has been used a hundred times on national TV will sooner
or later become part of most people's vocabulary.

All this is compounded by what I like to describe as the
emperor's-new-clothes phenomenon. In Germany, you can get away with
peppering your utterances with random bits of English or even
pseudo-English, regardless of whether your audience understands what you're
saying, because English is felt by many to be a more modern or sophisticated
language than German. People are likely to assume that it's their fault if
they don't understand something, but less likely to admit that their English
isn't good enough. In fact, some Germans no longer think of English as a
foreign language, which sadly does not mean that they're anywhere near
proficient in it. If you try to correct them, you'll sometimes get reactions
of the "Das sagen wir [Physiker/Börsianer/...] aber so" type. To give you an
idea of what I'm talking about: the "German English" for "Center of
Excellence" is "Competence Center" (< "Kompetenzzentrum"), and "Competence
Center" is also used in German to mean "Kompetenzzentrum". Google finds
about half a million instances on German websites.

All this may be hard for you to understand because the USA has no foreign
language community to look up to and English isn't under pressure from any
other language, not even Spanish. Has it ever occurred to you how lucky you
are to be a native speaker of perhaps the only language in the world that
isn't under pressure from English?

I don't think I'm exaggerating and I'm not a fanatical purist either. Nor do
you have to dislike the English language to complain about a "lelijk
anglicisme" in the language you grew up speaking. Incidentally,
"Administration" does exist in German, but it wouldn't normally be used to
mean "Regierung". And yet, judging by Google, "die Obama-Administration" is
three times as frequent as "die Regierung Obama".

Regards,
Ekkehard


.

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