Re: Untranslated notes (was: Poll by Email No. 7)

En réponse à Jan van Steenbergen <ijzeren_jan@...>:

>
> When you write a text, the basic questions you have to
> ask yourself, are: whom am I writing for, and what
> basic knowledge can be expected from them?
Agreed.

> When you write an article for a linguistic paper, you
> don't bother to explain such things like "gerund" and
> "labiodental fricative", because you can expect that
> the small audience who will read it knows such things
> already. Perhaps, you can assume as well, that the
> small circle of people you write your article for,
> knows German, French, or whatever other language...
That's where I disagree. Your audience may be small, but that's no use making
it smaller by assuming they know other things that their education gave. For
instance, if your paper is directed to linguists, you may not define linguistic
terms, but it's just respectful not to give untranslated quotes in German in an
articles written in English. After all, you can expect an Argentinian linguist
to know English, but not German. The problem of those expectations in language
knowledge is that they are often much too high.

> In Dutch scientific texts it is accepted not to
> translate notes from English, German, and French
> (exceptions are there, or course, but those are
> specific cases); in more popular editions, you
> translate everything.
>
Well, now I understand why my Dutch collegues never read scientific articles in
Dutch. Among them, only one understands scientific German, and no one
understands French, and even less scientific French (which is quite different
from scientific Dutch). At least English-written articles never quote in
another language (when they have a bibliographic note about an article in
another language, the part of the article which is interesting is paraphrased
rather than quoted).

Expecting too much of your audience is an even bigger lack of respect than
expecting too little. It sets the tone on who you think should be allowed to
read what you want to write... I know it may not be meant like that, but that's
what it does.

As a short, and to come back to the Conlang Journal (I wait until the result of
the poll and then I'll post again about it), write your article in any language
you want, quote in any language you want, even in conlangs, but translate
everything then in English. I think it's the only common denominator we can
find here as language. It's at least the only language we can be sure all
members of the conlang list have in common (and is unfortunately the best one
if we want to have some audience outside the list). Still, I think it would be
nice to have articles in other languages than English, especially in conlangs.
It would give some originality to the journal, and be something really
different from what happens on the list.

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

Take your life as a movie: do not let anybody else play the leading role.

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