Yankees Lose Wang in Rout of Astros

I know it’s the family name of Wang Chien-Ming, but don’t you think the headline editors could have phrased this unfortunate incident in a slightly better manner? I mean, the guy injured his foot, but the headline still reads like…well, I think you can figure it out.

And what is Wang’s reaction?

“I feel sore,” Wang said in a statement to the Yankees’ media relations director, Jason Zillo. “The doctor says I have to go to get an M.R.I. tomorrow. Of course I’m disappointed.”

(My mother pointed this one out to me. Thanks, Mom! Here’s your tip of the, er, baseball cap.)

Other names of this sort are Arpachshad (a small but delicious fish occasionally placed on pizza?), Asenath (whose name has the misfortune to be pronounced Osnat in Modern Hebrew; sounds like an Egyptian with post-nasal issues), Malchizedek (which is perfectly acceptable in Hebrew but is often pronounced weirdly in English, as something like mal-cheese-edek), and everyone’s perennial favourite, Habakkuk.

Can you think of any others? What are your favourite funny-sounding Biblical names?

qÁq‘tā’amas — game with wooden ball

Formed from q‘tá’abas, “wooden ball covered with spruce-roots.” There were two sides in the game, with the same number on each. Each side had a goal consisting of a little pit, which was guarded by one man. All but the two guards gathered in the centre. One man threw up the ball and everyone tried to catch it, run with it to the goal of the opponents, and put it into the pit. Those of the other side tried to take the ball away from the one that had it. The side that first made ten goals won the game. After four goals had been made, the game was suspended for a while and a general free-for-all fight took place.

I swear, it’s basically hockey: goals, goaltenders, and free-for-all fighting. Nothing changes.

Hat-tip: Alexa

Great tits cope well with warming

It’s about birds (tits, like ‘tit-willow‘), of course, but who in this day and age is going to read it that way?

Hat-tip: Dan Savage

There’s no word for hockey puck in Mandarin.

So Jason Wang, who’s been calling the Montreal-Boston series of the NHL playoffs in his native Chinese language for the CBC - a first for the public broadcaster - just uses the Mandarin word for ball.

It’s one of the many hockey terms Wang has had to translate and in some cases make up as he calls the games for a Chinese audience. He says it’s no easy task.

“Especially in hockey, where Chinese culture doesn’t have a context for it, so I have to translate a lot of the terms, all the penalty calls, and sometimes I have to borrow from other sports,” says Wang, sitting in the small recording booth at the CBC building in Vancouver where he calls the games while watching them on a large TV.

This appears to be a textbook example of translation involving cultural compatibility issues. There are many words and phrases that can’t simply be translated but which exert influence on the patters of idiom in a certain cultural context. Hockey in Canada is a perfect example. Consider this exchange during Question Period in the House of Commons the other day:

KEN DRYDEN (Liberal, York Centre): Mr. Speaker, with every scandal around him, the Prime Minister can pretend—

VARIOUS MEMBERS: Oh, oh!

SPEAKER: Order, order. This is question period, not a hockey game. We are hearing now a question from the honourable member for York Centre and we have to be able to hear the question. Order, please. …

DRYDEN: Last week [James Moore, the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Public Works and Government Services] talked about something else he was almost too young to know. Pull the goalie? This is April. I do not get pulled.

JAMES MOORE: Mr. Speaker, he says he does not get pulled. He pulled himself on every confidence vote in the House of Commons. He did not show up. Again, I know 1972 was a fond year for my colleague from York Centre, and 1974 may be a fond one for him as well with the Nixon administration, but the reality is that we have spoken the truth. We have stood up and have consistently voted in the best interests of Canadians. The member for York Centre can sit there and sulk, and slowly skate to the bench as he sits there and does nothing for Canadians.

Devoid of a context in which hockey is part of the cultural discourse and the speakers can count on their interlocutors understanding and correctly processing these metaphors, this exchange makes much less sense. It can probably still be understood, but some of the flavour would be lost. The task of the translator, then, is not simply to translate the words, but to translate the cultural context as well.

I wish I spoke Mandarin so I could really understand the nuances of this process. And I wonder how the Chinese Ice Hockey Association and Chinese ice hockey teams, like the China Sharks, deal with these issues. Anybody who knows more than I about Chinese, hockey, or Chinese hockey, is encouraged to contribute!

Anyway, I’ll have some updates later in the day about the results of the by-elections. Look for the Liberals to make a few pickups, especially in urban areas like Vancouver and Toronto, due to dissatisfaction with the current government. Meanwhile, a few interesting links:

• How do you prove you’re gay when applying for refugee status?
• Religious groups are trying to shut down a Russian television channel because they show programming that is ‘anti-religious, violent as well as promoting homosexuality’, such as South Park.
• The hilarious malapropisms of Chicago mayor Richard M. Daley, such as ‘I deny the allegations and the allegators.’

CAESAR. The Ides of March are come.
SOOTHSAYER. Ay, Caesar, but not gone.

His famous last words are, naturally, legend. As the inimitable folks of I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again once put it:

Bill Oddie: Well, I know his famous last words!
David Hatch: And what were they?
Bill: Err…quod erat demonstrandum.
David: That means ‘which was to be proved’.
Bill: What was to be proved?
David: Which was to be proved!
Bill: Well, no wonder they were his last words.

Caesar’s last words were reported by Plutarch to be καὶ σὺ τέκνον; (’You too, my son?’) and literally translated by Suetonius as tu quoque, fili mi? (’You too, my son?’). However, the translation given in Shakespeare of et tu, Brute? is undoubtedly more popular and famous. Also, it flows better, despite the fact that Caesar, like other educated, upper-class Romans, would have probably spoken Greek in day-to-day use, unlike the vulgar Latin of the vulgar masses. In fact, there’s a terrific bit of dialogue from the beginning of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar that picks up on this quite nicely:

CASSIUS. Did Cicero say anything?
CASCA. Ay, he spoke Greek.
CASSIUS. To what effect?
CASCA. Nay, an I tell you that, I’ll ne’er look you i’ the face again: but those that understood him smiled at one another and shook their heads; but, for mine own part, it was Greek to me.

But let turn back to ISIRTA for the last word:

David Hatch: Eventually, Caesar was stabbed in the Appian Way.
Bill Oddie: And that’s a very nasty way to be stabbed!
David: I’m sorry, did I say he was stabbed in the Appian Way? I meant he was stabbed in the Senate.
Bill: That’s even nastier.

My students asked me what they could do to commemorate the Ides of March, and I told them to stab their best friends before their friends could stab them. A good bit of advice, that, especially if you’re an ancient Roman, but I wonder how much utility it has today. I do hope they didn’t take me seriously. Ave atque vale, Caesar.

If I’ve left anything off this list that you feel merits inclusion in such a, uh, worthy list, please leave it in a comment.

Silly-sounding place names

• Agassiz, BC (pronounced ag-uh-SEE)
• Aloha, OR (pronounced uh-LO-uh)
• Boring, OR
• Champoeg, OR (pronounced sham-POO-ee)
• Chehalis, WA (pronounced sha-HEY-liss)
• Chilliwack, BC
• Cle Elum, WA
• Coos Bay, OR (pronounced so that coos rhymes with goose)
• Coquitlam (and Port Coquitlam), BC
• Ekalaka, MT (pronounced ee-kuh-LAH-kuh)
• Estacada, OR (pronounced es-tuh-KAY-duh, like the name Kay)
• Esquimalt, BC (pronounced ess-KWAI-malt)
• Issaquah, WA (pronounced IZZ-ah-kwah)
• Klickitat (and Klickitat County), WA
• La Center, WA
• Moscow, ID (pronounced MOSS-koo)
• Nisqually, WA (not to be confused with Old Nisqually, WA)
• Onalaska, WA
• Osoyoos, BC (pronounced oh-SOY-yooz)
• Owhyee, ID (pronounced oh-WHY-yee)
• Pe Ell, WA (pronounced like the letters P and L)
• Puyallup, WA (a true shibboleth: pronounced pyoo-AL-up)
• Sequim, WA (pronounced skwim)
• Skamokawa, WA (pronounced ska-MOCK-a-way)
• Snohomish and Snohomish County, WA (pronounced snow-HO-mish)
• Snoqualmie, WA (pronounced snow-KWAL-mee)
• Sprague, WA (pronounced spreyg, in one syllable)
• Steillacoom, WA (pronounced STILL-a-koom)
• Squamish, BC
• Wahkiakum County, WA
• Walla Walla, WA
• Whatcom County, WA
• Willamette and the Willamette River, OR (another classic shibboleth: pronounced to rhyme with dammit)
• Yreka, CA (pronounced why-REE-kuh)

However, the one Cree village in Québec definitely deserves to be on this list too: Whapmagoostui, PQ. Also, Woonsocket, Rhode Island, is pretty good.

James Gau pleaded guilty to solicitation of murder for asking a police informant in July to go to his wife’s American Fork, Utah, home, pretend to be a robber, and strangle her.

Gau said left his family and moved to Reno because he wanted to live as a homosexual.

The article (from the AP) makes note of this point twice in its five sentences: he wanted, apparently, to ‘live as a homosexual’. What does that mean, and just how much underlying homophobia is there in this particular formulation? (On the other hand, the jokes basically do write themselves…)

The phrase to live as X generally entails, I believe, the notion to adopt the characteristics of other Xs. If the article said ‘moved to Brooklyn to live as a Hasidic Jew’ we would know what it meant: we would suppose he grew a beard and sidelocks, stopped watching television, and attempted to commit fraud on federal subsidies. Of course, I don’t mean to paint Hasidim with such a broad brush, but this is exactly my point: the phrasing to live as X brings up a particular set of images, not all of which may be appropriate, but many of which would certainly be present, rightly or wrongly. So what does ‘he moved to Reno because he wanted to live as a homosexual’ entail? Certainly it evokes particular images—both of Reno and of a specific type of homosexual—again, rightly or wrongly. Does this reflect latent homophobia? Possibly, but I’d be more inclined to give it the benefit of the doubt, if only because ‘to adopt a homosexual lifestyle’ would have been far too obvious and ‘because he realised he was gay’ doesn’t really have the same ‘ring’ as a motivation for murder, does it? Mental instability, sure, but homosexuality? Doesn’t really work.

Hat-tip: Jess.

His death has rightly sparked outrage across the country, rising to the level of an international incident. It has prompted calls for reviews both specifically of how Dziekański’s case was handled and of how RCMP and other law enforcement agencies use Tasers in general. Every week, it seems, there’s another Taser-related death being reported in the media; recently Amnesty International figured that there had been at least 17 deaths directly linked to the use of Tasers since the weapons were introduced to Canadian law enforcement. I even heard a suggestion—a facetious suggestion, of course, but one that resounded particularly strongly among my local friends—that the newly introduced mascots for the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver didn’t really represent Canada or British Columbia as they exist today. What was the proposed alternative? A Mountie with a Taser. Bienvenue au Canada!

Seriously, though, this really does touch upon issues of language politics. Today, YVR released a preliminary report on how they would spend over a million dollars to improve security in the immigration area of the airport. If you’ve ever been to YVR—or pretty much any Canadian airport—you’ll know that all the signage is in both English and French, and at YVR there are many signs that are also printed in Chinese characters. Aside from the obvious ‘what good does French do’ question, which becomes somewhat more relevant the further away from Québec you go, a better question is ‘why aren’t signs in the Immigration section posted in more languages?’ This is something I’ve always wondered—even large airports in the United States, a country in which many states have notoriously anti-foreign language laws—post signs and employ interpreters for many different foreign languages. The rationale is obvious: how are you going to communicate with an immigrant—or even a resident—who doesn’t speak English if you don’t follow these steps? Yet YVR has been shamefully lacking in this department: although you have to be bilingual to work in the federal government, and therefore be a border guard/customs agent, ‘bilingual’ in this case means ‘both English and French’, and French is really not all that useful at the busiest airport on the North American end of the Pacific Rim.

Hopefully YVR will follow through and begin to employ more people with more varied linguistic skills than simply the government-mandated French and English. Such ‘biligualism’ across Canada, as advocated and established by the former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, is a fine thing. Now that the country’s got it, it’s time to expand to other languages; hopefully we can avert the next Robert Dziekański with proper communication.

Another thing that’s just weird: my spelling checker, which I never modify or anything because I can’t see the purpose or the relevance of trying to do so, recognises the words ‘Wikipedia’ and ‘Google’ without a second hesitation; even the word ‘wikipedia’ as in ‘barbecued congo eel with wikipedia and Fermented bean curd’ is recognised. But ‘href’ isn’t. Go figure.