Re: Negation?

On Thu, 8 Jul 1999, Christophe Grandsire wrote:

>         Oh no! You want me to die! When I read the posts from this list, my brains
> switch to English and I'm nearly unable to speak in French (I must switch
> back to French). And when I speak of French in a post in English, I
> consider it nearly as a foreign language!
Sounds like me - I'm practically bilingual in Dutch and English, but
I have to make the switch consciously to write coherently in either
language. When I use Dutch examples I'm usually not completely sure
of the spelling, but fortunately the hand is smarter than the eye
(worked as a typist for years and years, the typing patterns of Dutch
words are completely internalized).

> That's also why I have so many
> difficulties in trying to translate anything from one language to another.
Translating is something else - I can read and write different things
at the same time, apparently. Reading English and writing the same
thing in Dutch is *much* easier than trying to *think* in two
languages at once. I'm translating a German book at the moment (well,
not precisely at the moment of course) and that's harder, because
I'm conditioned to the idea that when I'm translating there's English
involved, and I'm tempted to translate into English :-)

I find it hard to translate something I wrote myself, probably
because the shape it has is the shape I gave it; it doesn't matter
whether I wrote it originally in Dutch or in English. Much of the
material on my web page was in Dutch once, and I rewrote it rather
than translating it.

(Anyone here who knows Dutch and would like to have a go at
translating my stories into English? Or French for that matter?)

   Irina

            Varsinen an laynynay, saraz no arlet rastynay.
                     irina@rempt.xs4all.nl (myself)
       http://www.xs4all.nl/~bsarempt/irina/index.html (English)
    http://www.xs4all.nl/~bsarempt/irina/backpage.html (Nederlands)