Open Writing

“Grammatolatry” was recently featured on Wordsmith.org, provider of the free A.Word.A.Day email service. It means “The worship of words: regard for the letter while ignoring the spirit of something.”

I’ve never been accused of it due to my insistence on the plasticity of words that makes true grammatolatrists wince. Nevertheless, using words precisely right can be critical, especially in a foreign land, and especially one without an alphabet.

The Olympics are being held in China, where ideograms are used instead of letters, and the Chinese government is taking extreme measures to make their cities more appealing to foreigners. They’re banishing beggars, building stadiums and subway lines, closing nearby smoke-emitting factories, and forcing half the cars off the streets. The government has even “recommended new English translations for more than 2,000 traditional Chinese dishes to appeal to Western tourists,” according to an article by Brian Palmer in www.Slate.com.
Chinese often describe food in vivid terms that surprise Westerners. “Bean Curd Made By A Pockmarked Woman,” for example, is made from ground pork, tofu, and chillies. According to legend, a widow with dermatology issues was forced to live on the outskirts of Chengdu, China. When some storm-tossed travelers found refuge in her house, the food she served was so good that word spread, and soon her place became a popular roadhouse serving her trademark dish, now blandly titled “Mapu Tofu.”

“Steamed Pullets” is the official name for “Chicken Without Sexual Life,” and the imagination-boggling “Husband and Wife Lung Slice” is now “Beef and Ox Tripe,” thank goodness.
Hungry travelers can always subscribe to a cellphone-based translation service, like www.ChinaOneCall.com, who you call to get a live translator who uses your cell to speak to the waiter, taxi driver, or other local person you need to communicate with. Last month the Wall Street Journal’s Sarah Nassauer tested several cellphone translation services while visiting China, India and France. Each test included placing orders complicated by vegetarianism or food allergies, and taking a taxi to a restaurant.

Besides the initial registration fee ($40-90 annually), subscribers must pay per-minute fees ($1.50-3.95 per minute). There’s often a lag of several minutes between the time the service answers your call and when a translator actually comes on, and translating accuracy varied widely.
The service could come in handy during emergencies, for as Marcel Marceau once asked, “Do not the most moving moments in our lives find us all without words?” Pantomime remains useful according to Nassauer, who summarized, “In the end, we still prefer our old charades gestures or a good phrase book for communicating in most everyday situations.”
That phrase book better be good, however, and not some deceiver like the infamous 1855 “English as She is Spoke” in which two Portuguese translators hilariously turned their language into English. Lines such as, “This lake seems like it's full of fish. Let's have some fun fishing,” became “That pond it seems me many multiplied of fishes. Let us amuse rather to the fishing.” Speaking of which, the truly desperate for cheap translations can try http://BabelFish.Yahoo.com, a free machine translation service.

Futurists have been claiming for over a decade that the artificial intelligence needed for computers to understand humans is imminent, but as evidenced by BabelFish, it’s still a ways off. When BabelFish translated “What is your favorite book?” into simple Chinese and back into English, it came out as “Anything is the book which you like.”

The Internet’s great at publicly revealing flaws, and a website titled “English As She Is Spoke vs. BabelFish” (www.zompist.com/spoke.html ) compares the two’s errors. When asked to translate “the apricots will soon be ripe,” for instance, EASIP responded “here is some peaches what does ripen at the eye sight,” and BF offered “the damson plums briefly will be mature.”

Everyone’s constantly judged by how well they convey their thoughts. Public libraries, “the People’s Universities,” have been helping Americans communicate clearly since the 1800s, when people turned there to learn how to be more cogent.
Plain speaking’s even more important today with the Internet spreading, speeding, and storing communication exponentially. As Emily Dickinson put it, “A word is dead/ When it is said,/ Some say./ I say it just/ Begins to live/ That day.