Living not at home

When translating, there are always textures in the source language which cannot be directly replicated in the target language. Moving from Portuguese to English, gender is one such texture. Every noun in Portuguese is either feminine or masculine (which is the case in many other languages too) while English only has gendered nouns in special cases. I have been translating João Luís Barreto Guimarães’s collection Aberto todos os dias from Portuguese into English. I noticed a pattern at the start of the poem ‘Aquela garça ali’ (or  ‘That heron there’) . The first six nouns are alternately feminine and masculine. The nouns are:  a garça, o bote, a curva, o rio, a cidade, o fim. (In English this would be: the heron, the boat, the curve, the river, the city, the end).  Since every noun in Portuguese – whether animate, inanimate, concrete, abstract – is gendered, gender can seem arbitrary, not carrying significant meaning. To me the gender of a noun stands out ‘as though each ...

Here’s a transcript from the beginning of an online meeting I had last month with a kind and patient accountant: Me: On the Helena. Common star. Accountant: To the right. I say Go feed bank. Me: I sing sing of Oyster Ben. In town, and Career should come. We arrest. Accountant: Say. Me: E, tambing, it's pretty much temp of the push then you should Sobra. I mean, if she had activity that feeling inside. Accountant: See, there's no physical.  Me: As I should sing. Then you can control. On the He was saying to Do. I do and do site. Okay. Bacteria. The key. Until it comes site commissary merch. I stupid going to sober. The transcription makes no sense. The meeting, on the other hand, made perfect sense and concluded with me submitting my tax return. What’s going on? The short answer is that I forgot to change the language on the transcription software. The software did its job of converting the sounds of our conversation into words, but its frame of reference was the English languag...

False friends are an established idea in language learning. They link two languages in a deceptive way. They are pairs of words, one in each language. They are friends because they’re similar in sound or spelling. They’re false because their meaning is significantly different. They look like effective translations but they're not.  Two classic examples are embaraçada – embarazada and préservatif – preservative .     embaraçada (Portuguese) means embarrassed     embarazada (Spanish) means pregnant     préservatif (French) means a contraceptive     preservative (English) means a food additive I’m proposing a related idea: unreliable friends . These are pairs of words which link two languages and translate each other, but do so with some slippage. I like unreliable friends because they foreground the way languages borrow words and repurpose them. The idea of correct English or correct Portuguese is a fundamental misunders...

No café, a caminho do trabalho, vi três homens a tomar um café ao balcão e um deles tinha as palavras SHOW NO LOVE cortado no cabelo. Ontem, estava no metro ao lado de alguém com uma tatuagem no pescoço:  BE BRAVE   E semana passada vi uma mulher com uma t-shirt que dizia BITCH – I DON'T CARE O português é a língua materna de 95% das pessoas que vivem em Portugal (segundo o Ethnologue ). Porque é que pessoas escolhem o inglês, em vez da língua materna deles, para estas declarações ao mundo? Talvez parte da minha surpresa com a proliferação do inglês na pele e na cabeça seja egoísmo: não sinto que os outros tenham o mesmo direito que eu à minha língua materna. Numa entrevista para discutir o seu novo livro, The Rise of English: global politics and the power of language , Rosemary Salomone questiona se 'o inglês pertence realmente a nós, aos australianos, canadianos, britânicos e americanos... Ou pertence ao mundo? Ter-se-á tornado neutro... libertado do colonialismo britânico, ...