Grammar Girl here, I'm Enyan Fogarty, and just a heads up that today's show was originally a bonus episode released back in March for people who support the show, the Grammarpalusians.
If you like what we do every week and want to support the show and get ad-free podcasts and these bonuses right away, become a Grammarpalusian Visit quickanddirtytips.com slash bonus to learn more.
And now onto the show. Greetings, Grammarpalusians.
I'm here with Hedwyn Newton. We just did the main segment where we talked about all sorts of fabulous slang and new words and the Mandela effect and Yosemite Sam.
It was fabulous. If you haven't listened to it, go check it out.
In this bonus segment, well, first let me tell you who Hedwyn is.
Hedwyn is an English teacher and translator in Germany who was raised in a bilingual household.
And she has a newsletter that I love called English in Progress.
It comes out every couple months or so, every month or two.
But she also has a translation site where she helps people find English translations for different Dutch words that are hard to translate.
We're going to talk about some of those difficult to translate words and also get her book recommendations.
Hedwyn Newton, welcome to the Grammarpalooza bonus segment.
Thank you so much. Yeah. It's funny because I was not aware of your translation work.
I only knew your English in progress. newsletter.
But then as I was sort of researching you for this episode, I became fascinated with the whole other part. of what you do in these untranslatable Dutch words.
And it was hilarious because it was immediately... brought home to me how true it is because I went to your website and I presume it's in Dutch and Google that had the button that says translate this website.
And I clicked that button and almost none of it made sense.
It was definitely difficult for Google to translate.
How did you get into doing this work? Yeah, so I started out, well, maybe not life, but I started out my working life, I suppose, as a translator.
A long time ago, I was working behind the bar in a cafe in Nijmegen in the Netherlands because that's where I'm from.
I'm actually from the Netherlands. And a guy said, hey, I heard that you're bilingual.
I heard that you were raised in English. can you translate this for me?
And I've been a translator ever since. I translate from Dutch into English.
And I'm fascinated with words. So I was immediately fascinated whenever I found a word or a phrase. that just didn't seem to exist in English.
And then much later I decided, well, I've kind of collected all of these for myself for my own translation work.
Why not put them into a website? Because it might be helpful to other people.
And it has been. Yeah. And I think it's amazing that you found it because, as you say, it is in Dutch and I usually don't talk about it very much with my English speaking friends or my English speaking life.
But yeah. Yeah. And it looks like a very robust website too.
I mean, there's a lot there. What are some of these Dutch phrases that are so hard to translate.
Yeah. So I was thinking because there's a lot of them, but I was thinking what would be interesting to talk about for an English speaking audience.
And there's actually two really good Dutch words that if you think about it, it's crazy that English doesn't have them.
It's really a kind of a gap in the lexicon.
And the first one is that in Dutch and in quite a few other languages, we have the word how many-eth.
So you would start a question... with the how manyth time is this that you were late this week?
And then the answer would be the 3rd. which of course you just cannot say that in English.
You have to say, how many times have you been late this week?
Well, three times you know that that works too but you can't ask a question and have the answer be the third so the other example is um What place did you finish in that competition?
You know, fourth place. But in Dutch, you would say, the how manyth place did you achieve?
Oh, yeah. And then the one that I find is truly untranslatable is the how manyth president was John F. Kennedy.
So he was the 35th. And then I really thought, like, how would you say that in English so that the answer... is the 35th.
And the only thing that I came up with is in a chronological list of presidents, which one was John F. Kennedy?
Which is ridiculous. Yeah. Racking my brain, trying to think of how I would ask that question.
And I'm not coming up with anything. Yeah.
Yeah. So there you go. So in Dutch, that is hoeveelste? which literally translates to how many-eth, except in English it's not a word and in Dutch it is a word.
Yeah, that'd be very useful to have. It would, wouldn't it?
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's funny. And then the other one that bothers every single Dutch person once a year. is that in Dutch, and only in Dutch, now this is something that I mean, there might be some languages in the world that have this too, but I have really done quite a bit of research and I cannot find another language that does this. we have an adjective for having your birthday.
So if it's your birthday, then you are birthday-y.
Hey, that person is birthday-y today. My sister is birthday-y today.
She is my birthday-y sister. That's... Okay.
Okay. So I was going to ask you to use it in a sentence, but you did.
And still I'm finding it like, okay, I would never attempt to describe someone that way.
Because I guess there's no word for it. Yes, exactly.
So you don't say it because you can't. But Dutch people, oh, they miss this in English.
It's really hard for us. As I say, once a year, it's really hard for us to be missing this word.
And in one particular... phrase that I always really like to ask my friends when it's their birthday and I congratulate them on their birthday via a text message.
And I love asking the question, do you feel birthday-y yet? which I guess I would translate as something like, do you feel celebrated yet?
Or something like that. It's But it's more, it's about like, are people giving you special attention, but also do you feel kind of special in yourself today.
And it has all these kinds of elements in it, which I am not able to say in English at all Yeah.
I feel like in the back of my mind, there are other adjectives we make up that we add E to the end, but none of them are coming to mind.
Like, Do I feel, I don't know, painter-y today?
If I'm going to paint a room, I was like, oh, do I feel painter-y today or not?
That is a great comparison. Yes, I would say that do I feel painter-y really catches it.
And then in Dutch we can say... Do you feel birthday-y?
Is that a more common thing in Dutch to have adjectives like that that work that way?
Are there others too? That's a great question.
I'm gonna say no, I don't think so. I think normally, because of course, Dutch and English, they're related, right?
They're the most apart from like Scots and Frisian.
But Dutch is the most closely related to English.
Is Dutch something like that? Or the... Yeah.
No, when I think about like moving to another country, I look at the language charts and I'm like, maybe I could go to the Netherlands because that's the easiest language to learn.
Which it is, right? It is actually the easiest language for English speakers to learn.
English speakers who are actually learning Dutch will not agree with me Because we do have quite a tricky grammar and you need to get your head around it.
And it bothers English speakers very much.
So unfortunately... It's the easiest. That doesn't mean that it's easy.
But they are very closely related. So adjectives in general, it's the same kind of usage.
So I would say that birthday-y. is kind of an exception but yeah there it is and as i say it bothers us every single year Whether you're lounging poolside, hitting the beach, or relaxing at home, Rosetta Stone makes it easy to fit in a few minutes of language learning.
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Well, you'll have to tell me when your birthday is so I can ask you that question on your birthday.
That is great. I love your translation work too.
But I have been reading that Translation is one of the jobs that is being especially threatened by AI and people are concerned about losing jobs.
And you actually have a section about that on your website.
I do, yes. But I think it's hidden away a little bit. because it is a bit controversial.
And of course, I am a translator, so I... move in translation circles.
And if you really want to rile up the translation community, you will start talking about this subject.
I am seeing more and more translators move into different jobs because they cannot make money anymore.
I myself... I'm one of those translators, so I write my website because I really enjoy it.
But when it comes to paying customers, They started disappearing about three years ago and then when ChatGPT became popular and was used by regular people, my work basically dried up completely.
It's just gone. And I hear a lot of other translators saying that It's hard to get actual numbers.
I don't know why, but there don't seem to be any real numbers. studies out there that give trustworthy, reliable data on this either way.
Because there are also many companies that claim... or many organizations maybe that claim that actually there's more work for translators because of AI and the logic is and we actually kind of talked about this in the previous segment, that because AI is churning out so much content,
Ergo, there is more content to be translated.
Ergo, there is more work for translators.
It might be true. But if it is, then that work for translators is something that we call PEMT, which stands for Post Editing Machine Translation.
So you take a translation done by a machine and then a human being looks at it and edits it and makes it sound more human, takes out any mistakes, et cetera, et cetera.
That is incredibly boring work. that pays incredibly little and that often gets outsourced to very big companies who then hire smaller companies who then hire smaller companies who then hire smaller companies who then hire a translator, which means that the translator has about, you know, two cents per page left as payment for this. post-editing work.
So it pays very little and it's not very nice work. and many, many translators in my circle have already stopped or are saying, I'm so glad that I am almost at retirement age anyway, things like that.
Yeah. Yeah, that's so discouraging. And I know you had said on your website, you advise people not to go into translating because there's no jobs.
Absolutely. I feel strongly about that. Unless you speak a very unique language.
Unique is the wrong word to use, but a language that isn't spoken by very many people and that because of that reason, is not translated very well by machines because there's not enough input.
There's not enough data for a chat GPT, for example, to use.
Therefore, the translations that machines make aren't very good.
So if you speak, I'm not going to name any language because I'm going to.
I'm going to tread on somebody's toes by saying it's a small language.
But yeah, maybe a small Native American language, for example, those still have some work.
But yeah. For Dutch, for example, so you're an expert in Dutch.
It's one of your languages. How do you find the translation?
Do you think it's... Is it great? Is it good?
Is it adequate? And I'm sure it's changing over time.
How do you find it? It is depressingly good. especially ChatGPT.
So DeepL, DeepL.com has been a tool that's been around for a while now.
It's a company based in Germany, and it's basically Google Translate, but better.
Sorry, people at Google, but DeepL just did a much better job and it's the tool that I as a translator have been using for maybe the past five years or so.
And I already thought that that was pretty good.
And then along came chat GPT. And when I put a text in, a text-in-chat GPT, it makes mistakes.
And that's why a human always has to read through it because sometimes it just completely... misconstrues the original and it just says the wrong thing. in a way that a human being would immediately say, well, this is nonsense, but the machine doesn't recognize that.
So you always have a human... you always need to have a human to read it as well.
But honestly, sentence by sentence, it often does a better job than I could.
It's phenomenal. Amazing. I imagine it depends on the nuance level of the work as well.
It's going to be better at press releases than poetry.
Yeah, definitely. Poetry and novels, I think, will always belong to human translators.
And this is something actually, this might be a good thing to tell your audience as well, because people often misunderstand this, that when I'm talking about translators losing This is not literary translators.
Literary translation has always been not being paid very well but their job isn't changing very much.
I think it's going to be a while. Of course, people who self-publish their work on Amazon are very happy to use ChatGPT to just translate the whole thing.
But actual... What are those people called?
The publishing houses? The actual publishing houses. will still use human translators, I think, for a long time.
But the translators that are losing jobs are actually a much bigger group in the translation world they are the people who translate contracts they are the people who translate manuals that go with microwaves they are the people that translate that was me people who translate marketing texts on websites so I myself did tourism for a long, long time.
So I translated lots of descriptions of cute Dutch towns and why people from abroad should definitely come and visit them.
And that's what I translated to English.
And that kind of stuff, yeah, ChatGPT does an excellent job at it.
It's a whole new world. It's so interesting.
Well, thank you. So speaking of literary translation, let's move on to the book recommendation part.
What are some? Some books that you have recently loved that you'd like to recommend to the audience?
Yes. I'm actually in a book club, so I was very happy about this segment.
I was like, yay, let's have a look at the books that I've recently read.
So there is a very languagey book that I think is absolutely gorgeous.
And I do not understand why the whole world isn't raving about about this book.
And it's called Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn.
Now, if you think that that sounds a bit like the part in the alphabet that goes LMNOP, then you would be right.
The alphabet has a big role in this book.
But it's actually spelt Ella as in the name Ella, Minnow as in the fish, and P as in the vegetable.
So Ella Minnow Pee. And I'm not going to give away what it's about because there's a trick to the book.
And if you maybe read what the trick is or conceit is maybe a better word. then maybe you think, oh, this is overdone or, oh, this is kind of pretentious might be the word.
But it's really not. It is so gorgeous. And anybody who loves language and who loves playing with language and maybe playing Wordle and things like that. definitely read this book.
Excellent. I have heard of that book, but I haven't read it.
So I'm going to move it up on my list. Highly recommended.
And it's not very long. It's actually quite a short book.
So... That's always a bonus. And then the other two books kind of go together.
And I have to admit that one of them I haven't read yet, but I really want to read it.
They're both about the history of the Oxford Dictionary So, one is the fictional work, which is The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams. who kind of places a, girl who didn't really exist, but she places her among all the people who started the Oxford English dictionary who did really exist and she does it very, very well.
And she weaves this beautiful life story. which just had me crying my eyes out.
So highly, highly recommend it. And then there's a nonfiction book which only recently came out called The Dictionary People by Sarah Ogilvie, I think you would pronounce her name.
Which I haven't read yet, but I've heard good things.
Yeah, I will say I actually have read it and really enjoyed it.
Ah, there we go. Yeah. Yeah, wonderful.
Yeah, so I'd be interested if you, but you haven't read the dictionary of lost words yet.
No, no. No, so I'd be really interested to see how those two go together.
Yeah, wonderful. Those all sound so great.
This is becoming my favorite segment of the podcast.
Thank you for those wonderful book recommendations.
So Hedwin Newton, writer of the English in Progress book, which we will put a link in the show notes so people can find that.
If you're extra curious, you can get from there to her Dutch translation website.
And I'll put a link to that in the show notes too, because why not?
Edwin, thank you so much for joining us.
Thank you so much for having me. Thank you.
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