Wherein I finally figure out how to use my Signature Strength

Translation most often falls close to the end of the project cycle. After all, there's no point in paying a translator to translate the first draft if it's all just going to get rewritten again later. However, this often ends up putting the crunch on us. I've been in a number of situations recently where someone before me in the project cycle gave an over-optimistic estimate of how long their part would take them, so I got the text later than I should have. Because printers' deadlines and pre-announced released dates are immovable, that means I have to absorb the lost time and I often end up turning out work that I'm not exactly proud of, because there simply isn't time to do work I am proud of and the client would rather have suboptimal English than delay the release date. However, this makes me very frustrated with the person whose overestimation of their own abilities shortened my translation time, and if I had a say in the matter it would be enough to make me not want to work with them again.

I thought of this when I read Clay Shirky's Rant About Women:

And it looks to me like women in general, and the women whose educations I am responsible for in particular, are often lousy at those kinds of behaviors, even when the situation calls for it. They aren’t just bad at behaving like arrogant self-aggrandizing jerks. They are bad at behaving like self-promoting narcissists, anti-social obsessives, or pompous blowhards, even a little bit, even temporarily, even when it would be in their best interests to do so. Whatever bad things you can say about those behaviors, you can’t say they are underrepresented among people who have changed the world.

One thing I've been doing in my own life, primarily out of distaste for the self-aggrandizing jerks and pompous blowhards I've encountered, is I always try to represent my level of confidence and certainty accurately. I try to give safe deadline estimates, not optimistic ones. When I know I can do the thousand words in an hour I say so, but if I'm not sure if I can I say it will take three hours. (Q: WTF's with the wide range? A: I can work much faster when I'm already familiar with the text type and the subject matter.) If you've been reading my blog for a while, you might have noticed that I try very hard not to make declarative statements unless I'm actually certain. I do that in real life too, and I've found that it's given me credibility over time. When I do make a declarative statement, people tend to listen.

Recently we had a client request a very large, important text for an impossibly tight deadline. After some discussion and negotiation, we came to the conclusion that we could deliver it on time by dividing it up among the entire team, but we couldn't guarantee our normal quality level. Normally, if a text is divided up among several translators, another translator who didn't work on it rereads the whole thing and makes sure it's internally consistent. There simply wasn't time for that to happen. But it was so important and the deadline was so imperative that the client agreed to this, and made time in their own schedule to come into work early to reread it and do quality control themselves. Once it was all done, we ended up getting a very happy email from the client, because the text we delivered was of high quality and needed very little revision at all. Which wasn't completely surprising - we do do high quality work - but we couldn't realistically guarantee the quality if no one does a reread. So we give a realistic estimate, exceed it somewhat, and the client is happy. On the other hand, the people before me in the project cycles overestimate their abilities, and it annoys people downstream and is detrimental to the quality of the entire project.

A long time ago, I took the VIA Signature Strengths quiz and found that my top signature strength is modesty and humility. But you're supposed to use your signature strengths, and I couldn't tell how you actually use modesty and humility.

Turns out this is how. And it only took me five years to figure it out.

The value of using cognates in translation

Everyone knows the argument for not using cognates. Even people who don't speak Spanish know that embarazada doesn't mean embarrassed. And I'm certainly not saying you should use cognates blindly - they're called faux amis for a reason.

However, there is some value in using cognates. It makes it easier for partially bilingual people reading in their second language to understand, and it makes it easier for partially bilingual people to land on the right word when speaking or writing in their other language. If packaging or objects have to be physically labelled, it saves valuable space if the name is the same in both languages.

From the reviser's point of view, departing from the cognate to something that doesn't work as well is far worse than using cognates when there are better words (or even mistakenly using faux amis). Unless the translator is a student or a trainee, the reviser doesn't always necessarily look at the source text and the translation side by side (nor should they have to when revising the work of a fully qualified translator). They're more likely to review the translation on its own merits, and refer to the source text when they feel it's necessary. As trained and qualified translators, revisers can quickly recognize calques, faux amis, and other common traps that arise from the overuse of cognates. These are errors, but they're easy to fix because the reviser can see exactly how you got there.

However, if you depart from the cognate in a way that ends up not being quite right, I might not recognize it. It won't ping as an error. I'm more likely to assume that was the concept used in the source text, and I won't even think to go back and check. Furthermore, if you depart from the cognate to something worse than the cognate, then I can't trust any of your word choices. The mistakes and suboptimal choices you are making are difficult to see and may even be invisible, so now I have to read the whole text side by side, which takes quite a lot of time and raises my frustration level. (Intellectually I know that I should be all zen and not let my frustration level affect my evaluation of a text or the product to client, but realistically I'm just not strong enough to do that.)

To use rather simplistic examples (because I can't think of perfectly analogous fake examples and I don't want to pick on any real translations), if the source text says ministère and the translator translates that as "ministry" for a jurisdiction that uses "department", I can see exactly what the translator did there and it's easy for me to fix (and easy for me to give them clear and specific feedback to prevent it from happening again). However, if the source text says Président and the translator translates that as "Executive Director" but the person's actual title is "Chair" (or, worse, "President") then I have to double check every. single. term. because I can neither trust or predict the translator's word choices.

So what's the solution? You need to be able to justify every departure from the cognate. Every time you choose not to use an available cognate, you must be able to explain "I departed from the cognate because ________". "Because it's a cognate" is not a good enough reason. "Because it's a faux ami" is. So is "because it's the proper terminology", "because the cognate is unidiomatic in English", "because the cognate is not the best word to express what the source text really means", and "because the cognate made my inner 12-year-old snicker". If you can't justify your departure, stick with the cognate. Even if it's wrong, it's wrong in the most painless way possible.

Two perspectives on O Canada

As a Translator

One of the first things we learned in translation school is that the single best resource for translations is previous translations. Why re-do work that has already been done? You are being derelict in your duties if you don't search for previous translations when it is reasonable to expect their might be one. However, the very next thing we learned in translation school is not to perpetuate bad translations. If there are flaws in the previous translation and it's not being explicitly quoted in the target language, you are obligated to correct the flaws. The previous translator was fallible, just like you are. You are being even more derelict in your duties by letting a sub-optimal translation stand without improving it.

Another thing we learned in translation school is that when you cannot capture the precise connotation necessary, you should always err on the side of not making people look worse than they are in the source text. A profanity can't be translated by a stronger profanity. A slur can't be translated by a more hateful slur. Something that will cause the audience to react negatively can't be translated by something that will cause the audience to react more negatively. Clients have trust us to as their very voice, and taking their carefully-chosen words and turning them into something less tactful is unforgivable.

O Canada is a translation. It was originally written in French. The English version isn't a particularly close translation of the French, because the purpose of the text is to be a song, and it is more important that it serve that purpose (rhythm, rhyme, message) than that it capture every single nuance of the French meaning.

However, even given the latitude of literary translation, there are two lines in the English version that are problematic: "in all thy sons command" and "God keep our land glorious and free".

Both of these lines are exclusionary, and nothing similarly exclusionary appears in the original French. (There is "...il sait porter la croix", but that's not as strong as "God keep our land".) Therefore, the translation elicits a stronger negative reaction in the audience than the original. This is doubly unforgivable, because the audience in whom the text elicits the negative reaction are also the people in whose mouths these words are being put. We sing the anthem on our own behalf, so this suboptimal translation is forcing us to represent ourselves before the world with exclusionary sentiments. To do this simply because it has been done before is to perpetuate a flawed translation, and given the context and the importance of the text, to do so would be beyond the pale. If this crossed my desk and I let it stand, I'm quite certain I would be promptly relieved of all responsibilities where I have the final say on any text, because my employer could no longer trust my judgment.

As a Conspiracy Theorist

When I first heard they were considering making O Canada gender neutral, I assumed they were changing it to "in all of us command". It turns out they actually wanted to change it to "Thou dost in us command," which is unnatural and physically difficult to pronounce. Then they cancel the change because it's unnatural and physically difficult to pronounce.

This isn't the first time I've heard people choose the most awkward gender-neutral construction possible, then complain that "politically correct" language is awkward. "Firemen, er, and um firewomen? Firepeople?" Um, how about "firefighters"? "All of mankind! I mean, um, personkind?" How about "humanity"? I do find myself wondering if they do this on purpose.

When I point this out, people often tell me that it isn't malicious, it's just that other people aren't as good at thinking of words as I am. I find this difficult to believe (who hasn't played dumb every once in a while?) But if it actually is difficult and you seriously can't think of a suitable, neutral, non-awkward word, ask a professional like me, or look it up in Termium.

Things They Should Invent: translation problems wiki

I don't really like going to translation workshops and seminars because more often than I'd like, they aren't telling me anything new. More than once I've been stuck in a room playing "Let's brainstorm possible ways to translate intervenant", with no one coming up with anything I couldn't have done myself. Been there and done that in first year university.

However, I know there are translators out there who need this. More than once I've gotten a text from an outside contractor where intéressant was systematically and automatically translated as "interesting". (For the googlers: it can also mean something in the range of beneficial/advantageous/profitable/useful/helpful/worthwhile. Start with the Collins-Robert or TransSearch, then hit the thesaurus until you land on le mot juste.)

What we need: a wiki of possible translations for these tricky words. One wiki for each language combination and direction, one entry for each tricky word. Everyone adds every idea they have, with examples and context. If you come up with a solution that isn't already in the wiki, you add it to the wiki.

This is different from the translation community forums in that we aren't trying to solve a specific translation problem we're facing in our current text, we're trying to brainstorm all the ways to solve a recurring problem for the benefit of future translators.

This would improve the overall quality of translations in general because everyone would be able to access everyone else's ideas, and it would also improve the quality of translation training because there would be no more need to brainstorm on intervenant, at least not outside of a first-year undergrad class. There'd be a cascade effect and we'd all get smarter and better.

I probably have the skills to set this up and admin it, but I don't have the network to get a critical mass of people to use it. If you have the network and want my help to make this happen, contact me privately or through one of the professional networks.

Why your translator is asking you all those questions

The second item in the Reverso English-French dictionary entry for "outsider":

(without links to company) personne f recrutée à l'extérieur
Fiorina is the first true outsider to run the company.
Fiorina est la première PDG de la société recrutée à l'extérieur.

A literal translation of the French sentence is "Fiorina is the first CEO of the company recruited from outside." Not exactly the same as the English sentence, but a smooth, natural, and easily-understandable way to express the concept, which is what you're looking for when using that dictionary.

But you'll also notice that the translator who wrote the French sentence knows more information than is given in the English sentence. They know that Fiorina's title is CEO. They know that the reason she is considered an outsider is specifically that she was recruited from outside the company (as opposed to, say, not being a member of the Stonecutters). Oh, and they also know that she's a woman, as evidenced by "la première PDG" (if it were a man, it would say "le premier PDG").

As you can see by the Reverso entry, the English word outsider doesn't have one single equivalent concept in French. None of the other words given would communicate the right idea. (étrangère would imply that she's from another country; tiers implies third-party, which makes no sense because as CEO she's no longer a third party; and le outsider is specific to an athletic context, implying that she's a poor shot to win.) So to accurately communicate the message of the sentence, the translator needs information about the overall context.

So this is why your translator might call you up one day and ask about the genders of various people mentioned in the text, or how one thing mentioned relates to another, or a bit of background information on the situation. They want to be able to construct a text that will effortlessly tell the target-language audience exactly what the source text tells the source-language audience. If you don't answer their questions they'll have to guess, and the translation might not end up meaning what you want it to mean.

Happy International Translation Day!

As ever, using Fête St-Jerôme as an excuse to post an Eddie Izzard bootleg*




*(Dear Eddie: Massive, massive respect for your ever-increasing awesomeness and I'mma let you finish, but if you'd bring your tour to Canada we wouldn't need all these bootlegs.)

I had a long, difficult day of translation today

But not nearly as difficult as this guy.

This is why I hope to be able to stick to written translation for my entire career.

Things They Should Invent: medical symptom word bank (for patients)

When trying to explain the value of using target language native speaker translators, or of having translation services available even to people who can function on an everyday basis in the target language, I often ask people to think of the last time they experienced medical symptoms that confused or frightened them - didn't know WTF was going on, couldn't google up a cause - and then describe these symptoms in a language other than their mother tongue. Try it, I'll wait. See? You lose nuance and feel less in control of what you're saying, and this is exacerbated when you're confused or frightened or in pain.

One of my favourite reference tools from back in the days when I did more medical translation is this sort of a cheat sheet for student clinicians in psychology. It's like a massive multiple choice test of all the things they need to be diagnosing, listing each factor/indicator, and then the adjectives that can be used to describe that factor/indicator. So mood can be euthymic, affect can be labile, etc. I did rather extensive research when I first started doing this so I am familiar with the concepts, but the vocabulary isn't always right on the tip of my tongue. I read the source text, I grok exactly what they're saying, I know there's a nice psychy word for it, but it isn't coming to me. I do have the tools and skills to look up each term individually, but it's much faster and easier to just scan my cheat sheet and suddenly "Echolalia! That's it!"

I'm thinking a similar tool could be very useful to patients whose first language isn't English (or even to children who don't know what kind of answers the doctor wants). Just a list of words that might be useful, grouped by category. Pain can be: dull, throbbing, burning, excruciating. A wound can be: open, scabbed, weeping, festering, bleeding. The vocabulary would have to be more everyday than my cheat sheet ("How are you today?" "Euthymic, yourself?"), but it would still be a huge help.

You know how it's easy to read in other languages, but really hard to talk at the level you can read at? Like (assuming you're an Anglophone) even if you don't think you speak French, you could totally figure out how to, say, buy tickets on the Juste pour rire website. But even if you do think you speak French, you couldn't get up on the stage and actually perform stand-up in French (unless you're Eddie Izzard, but we already know he's a looney.)

With this word bank tool, coming up with le mot juste to describe pain or symptoms or bodily fluids would be as easy as reading. It would be like skimming the Juste pour rire website, looking for tickets, and thinking "Hmmm, the word for "ticket" is billet so Billetterie looks like a promising link" rather than having to come up with the word billetterie all on your own. Patients could describe their symptoms in a more precise and nuanced fashion plus have a better idea of what sorts of things the doctors want them to tell them about, doctors could give them better care, and all it would take is an hour of brainstorming and a few photocopies.

Things They Should Invent: optional accent sensitivity in search engines

Some of my tools are accent-blind (i.e. they read ou and où the same) and others are accent-sensitive (i.e. they read ou and où as two different words). As a lazy Anglophone, I prefer accent blindness, but sometimes accent-sensitivity would be convenient to filter out interference.

I'd love it if we could have a checkbox to turn accent-sensitivity on or off depending on our needs.

Translation In Death

Eve Dallas wouldn't be entirely comfortable with the fact that she's inspired me in a number of ways, but I'm sure she'd be completely baffled to learn that she helped me with a translation.

To protect my client I'm going to change the words involved, but my example is pragmatically analogous to the actual problem. The subject of the text was something that the organization was committed to providing to various people in various quantities, and the text was trying to figure out how they were going to afford this. Unfortunately, the author referred to the items being given away as trucs. Trucs is a very casual, very indefinite word, the sort of word that people use every day but might not actually be approved by the Académie française. Its most accurate translation given the context is "thingies", which is ultimately meaningless. And, to make matters worse, the word truc didn't appear anywhere on the client's website, reference texts, or texts we'd previously translated for the client.

The author knew what precisely these trucs were, the audience knew what precisely these trucs were, but I had no clue. It was an overnight turnaround, so the author of the text was unavailable - they sent us the translation and went home for the day, expecting it in their inbox when they arrived at the office the next day. While "thingies" was a perfectly valid translation of trucs and would probably stand up in court, it sounds funny, especially when used repeatedly like in this text. There was sentence after sentence of "We need 700 trucs in January and 300 trucs in June. Past presidents of the organization get 2 trucs each as a courtesy, and we need an extra supply of trucs should the media express interest." You can't say "thingies" there every time. There's also the problem that we don't know if the Anglophones involved in the organization call the trucs "thingies". They might call them "things" or "thingamabobs" or "whatchamacalits" or "snapping turtles". I don't know because I don't know what they actually are. If I use the wrong word, my text will be completely and hilarious meaningless to its audience, even if the word I choose is a valid translation of trucs. I really needed to know what, precisely and tangibly, they were talking about so I could make a meaningful translation.

Eve Dallas often solves her cases by following the money. More than once, the key to cracking the case has been that the timing and quantity of deposits to the victim's account corresponds with the timing and quantity of withdrawals from a person of interest's account (or vice versa). So, inspired by this, I decided to follow the numbers. So I started searching for 700, January, 300, and June all appearing in the same document, and turned up something about event tickets. I then went to the part of my text that talked about the total cost of giving away all these trucs, and extrapolated the cost per truc. I then looked up the cost of a ticket to the event in question, and lo and behold it was an exact match. So the trucs were tickets to this event, of which the client was a major sponsor, but the number of free tickets being given away was cutting into the event's revenues. Suddenly the whole text made sense and I was able to clarify a couple of other points that were questionable.

Translation by financial extrapolation. I think Roarke would approve.

Things Google Should Invent: gcourriel (or would that be courrig?)

I was verbally giving someone my email address in French, and without thinking I simply uttered "gmail" exactly like I pronounce it in English, without bothering to spell it out.

Not a huge problem since most people are aware of gmail. However, as we all learned in Grade 4 French, the way we pronounce the English letter G sounds closest to the French pronunciation of the letter J, so it could have been misinterpreted as "jmail."

The inherently English name of gmail is a problem for non-English speakers who nevertheless wish to use this very convenient email system. In English, we just say "gmail" and it's obvious how to spell it, but in other languages it might be less instinctive.

So what Google should do buy a bunch of domains that serve as translations of the word "gmail." For example, the French would be either gcourriel.com or courrig.com, whichever sounds better to the Francophone ear. This would increase the number of gmail addresses available and give people the option of having multiple addresses to accommodate multiple languages. The ideal implementation would be to give the owner of each gmail.com address right of first refusal for the equivalent gcourriel.com address (et cetera for each language), but most likely having multiple parallel email addresses in different languages would only be of interest to a very small proportion of users.

Perhaps my job is safe after all

Translation Party translates any English phrase you give it to Japanese and back until it reaches equilibrium.

Like this.

Still trying to find out: why is it using a mixture of two Japanese alphabets?

Things They Should Invent: foreign-language official document confirmation service

Many freelance translators don't translate birth certificates etc. I don't know if there's a particular business reason for this, but I've done a few as parts of larger files of documentation, and I do know that they are especially annoying to translate. (For the googlers: sorry, I can't translate yours or give you specific advice on how to get yours translated.) For example, I've seen death certificates from France that listed all the pertinent details (and some less-pertinent details such as birthplace and parents' names) in a single run-on sentence of over 100 words. While the gist of the information was simple, it took a not-insignificant amount of actual work to wrestle that sentence into something that the English reader would have a chance of understanding, and I'm never going to be happy with the results because it cannot be made idiomatic in English unless I completely restructure it, which is beyond the scope of translation.

I don't think the end user actually cares whether I reflect the structure of the original. I think they're just looking for the basic death certificate information. So what I'd like to do instead is either produce a summary of the certificate (just list name, time of death, place of death, cause of death in point form without having to worry about the structure of the original) or to issue an official certification letter saying something to the effect of "I hereby certify that the document in question is a death certificate for Pierre Untel."

The logical question at this point is "But then how do we know if the document is real?" The answer to that question is even with normal translation, you still don't know if the document is real. Certifying the validity of documents is outside the scope of the translator's job; we just translate the words on the paper. When I certify the translation, it means that my translation accurately reflects the original. It doesn't mean the original is accurate. I cannot certify the authenticity of the original document any more than I can certify that an article I'm asked to translate is factually correct. Nor would the method I'm proposing hinder the end user's ability to certify the validity of the original document. If the end user knows how to certify the validity of a death certificate from France, they wouldn't need it translated. They'd be familiar enough with the format that they could easily extract the necessary information themselves. In other words, even if they can't read every word on the page, they'd know that this is the space for the deceased's name, and this is the space for time of death, etc. They might have to get the cause of death translated, but that's a 10 minute turnaround at minimum charge rather than an hour spent wrestling with bizarre sentence structure.

Another advantage of this approach is that the less-desirable documentation translation market could be redirected to less-skilled translators without any particular loss of quality. A student in their final year of undergrad or a first-and-a-half generation immigrant looking to earn some extra cash could totally confirm "Yes, this says he was born in Belgium on such-and-such a date" or produce a point-form summary of the death certificate, even if a full translation of the run-on sentences and legalistic language is beyond their skills. This would give the newbies some experience and make it easier for

It sounds like I want the translation industry to invent this, but really what we need is for the end users of translations of official documents (governments, universities, etc.) to accept this kind of simplified translation when they don't actually need a full translation. It would make life easier for everyone, but we can't do it unless the end users would accept it.

To what extent is the delay in Google's Project 10 to the 100 a translation problem?

Project 10 to the 100 was originally supposed to be open for voting last January, but they say they got more response than they ever anticipated and it's taking way longer than expected to sort through the responses.

I wonder to what extent this is a translation problem?

They accepted submission in, and I quote, "English, German, French, Portuguese (Brazil), Turkish, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Spanish, Japanese, Italian, Polish, Dutch, Korean, Russian, Swahili, Norwegian, Finnish, Swedish, Arabic, Hindi, Greek, Czech, Hebrew, Danish, or Thai". If I'm counting right, that's 25 languages. So they all need to be translated into the preferred language of each of the people helping select the top 100, and then the top 100 all need to be translated into each of those 25 languages. Skimping on the translation will prevent ideas from being assessed fairly.

If I recall correctly, the submissions had to be very short. On one hand, this reduces the translation workload because there are fewer words. On the other hand, fewer words means less context or background, so it may well happen that there are cases where the translator honestly does not understand the problem they're attempting to solve, especially since Google seems smart enough to use target-language-mother-tongue translators, which means the person translating Thai into English may well be living in the states and not grok the, say, technical problem with rice paddies that the proposal is attempting to solve.

Also, I wonder if the word count requirements were the same for all languages? How would this affect the quality of the ideas? How would this affect the quality of the translations? (Imagine translating English to French without exceeding the English word count!)

Things They Should Invent: search and replace throughout every file in a folder

The translation request contained 26 files. Three different translators translated them. My job was quality control, which, in cases like this, also means ensuring internal consistency. Each of the three translators might have, perfectly validly, chosen a different way of expressing a certain concept, but I had to make sure that concept was expressed the same way in all 26 files. There were four such phrases that each occurred once in every document.

You can tell the word processor to search for every instance of A in a document and replace it with B. I want to be able to tell it to do the same thing with every instance of A in every document in the folder. An acceptable alternative would be to do so in every open document. (In other words, I'll totally go to the trouble of opening all 26 documents at once to save the work of having to do all the corrections manually.)

That was no fun at all

I recently blogged about how I've never dreamed about translation.

Last night I did.

I dreamed that an IRL person with whom I've recently had a (private, on-the-surface-civilized) disagreement about translation (and I should emphasize that this is NOT one of my co-workers) tracked down some old translations of mine. (IRL these are tucked away in the corner of the internet, but my name isn't on them and it would take some hardcore digging through systems to which this person doesn't have access to find them and attribute them to me.)

They then went over these with a red pen and released the results to the media, spinning me as incompetent. (IRL, the translations are not incompetent, but might be more suboptimal than I'd prefer. Worst case they'd get a mark of 75% when I'm aiming for 100%.)

Their spin was very effective, and the media ran with it as one of those shocking oversensationalized lead stories (like a while back where some government consultant expensed cookies.) People were calling for me to never work again, people were following me around with cameras taking my picture, people were criticizing my physical appearance and speculating on my sexual proclivities in comments threads, people were criticizing me for being overpaid because I recently (IRL too) started wearing real silver earrings (for piercing health) instead of cheap $2 crap from mall kiosks.

All because in a long time ago, in a couple of places, I translated effectué une recherche as "searched" (like it normally is) where in that context it should have actually been "conducted a search".

DO NOT WANT!

Popes' names

Popes' names translate. Emperor Popeatine is Benedict in English and Benoît in French. John Paul II was Jan Pawel in Polish.

I wonder when they started doing this? It's hard to figure out, because we translate them retroactively. Pope Benedict XVI is Benoît in French, and we also call Pope Benedict I who reigned in the 500s Benoît in French. But I seriously doubt they translated his name in the 500s. I don't think they were quite so very concerned about localization at that time. So when did this convention begin?

Why you need Anglophone translators, even for easy language combinations

Click here

If you're changing your twitter location to Tehran

If you're changing your twitter location to Tehran, please consider writing it in Farsi. Not all Iranians are going to be tweeting in English.

I believe this is how you say Tehran, Iran in Farsi:

تهران ، ایران

It should be copy-pastable.

I'm not 100% certain - I can't read Farsi - but Google's Farsi interface doesn't correct the spelling and it returns results for things located in Tehran.

If the Farsi is wrong, please post the correct spelling in the comments and I'll update this post and my twitter.

Edited to add: It occurs to me that if you were actually IN Iran, you wouldn't write "Tehran, Iran" as your location. You'd just write Tehran, like how I just wrote Toronto. So here's Tehran in Farsi: تهران

Comparative stylistics

Writing that last post reminded me of something that my 2nd year French prof said. She said "French expresses abstract ideas better than English."

This is not true.

French tends to express ideas more abstractly, and English tends to express ideas more concretely. But we can't say that either way is "better", because it's always coloured by our mother tongue.

I find that when truly abstract ideas are expressed in the already-abstract academic register of French (especially French from France), they're practically meaningless to me. When reading them I glaze over, and when attempting to translate them I'm tearing out my hair because I need to truly grok what is being said - my standard technique of doing a close translation of the French and editing the English turns out pseudo-intellectual bullshit that is very nearly meaningless even to an Anglophone subject-matter expert. I find the more concrete English is better for expressing abstract ideas because it requires retaining a certain grip on reality.

This is totally because I'm Anglophone. Francophones might find an abstract expression of abstract ideas easier to understand, and a concrete expression might make their brain hurt for reasons I can't possibly conceive of but readily accept might exist.

And that's the point. Neither language is objectively better for expressing certain ideas. We simply understand ideas more easily when they're presented in the concept system we're most familiar with.