1984 (a book review post)

I first read 1984 in 1984. I was in 8th grade, and I suppose my teacher thought it was appropriately timed, though I do think 8th grade was the normal time to have the book assigned anyway. Maybe. At any rate, I remember reading the book and having thoughts like, "Isn't it great that someone wrote such a great warning for us so that this can never happen here." And that seemed to be the consensus, even from the teacher: This will never happen here.

Oh, how wrong we were.

No, I'm not saying we're full on living in Big Brother world, but, in many ways, we have taken our first steps toward it. And I'm not just talking about how we're (the USA) the most surveilled nation on the planet, either.

Here's an example:
In the book, the proles (the mass of common people) are kept uneducated, just enough education so that they can do the menial labor jobs they need to do. This serves multiple functions, but the primary ones are that the uneducated tend to question authority less and do as they're told more. It makes them unquestioning of their lots in life so that they don't rise up in revolt. When they're told that their lives are better than the people's of days past, they accept it and are thankful.

For the past several decades, the Republicans have been working at undermining education and preaching the worthlessness of education to their followers for these exact same reasons. When they tell their followers something like "the Republican healthcare bill is better for you than Obamacare," their followers swallow it whole and think it's yummy because they don't have the facilities to question what they're being told. The Republicans have discredited science in favor of dogmatism, and that's straight out of 1984.

At this point in my life, though, the thing I probably find most interesting about the book is the stuff about language, because Orwell has been proven, yet again, to be ahead of his time. The idea of Newspeak in the book is to reduce language to a point where things like freedom and equality aren't even concepts, and we, today, tend to think that that's kind of a dumb idea. I mean, you can't get rid of concepts, right?

Well, let me give you another example:
Anthropologically speaking, all cultures started out with only two colors: light and dark, or white and black, depending on how you want to say it. Other colors didn't exist for those people. You might think that's crazy talk because, if you look out the window, clearly, you can see a whole range of colors: blues and greens and reds and all of these colors that are just part of our world. Clearly, those colors exist, right? Well, sure, from an objective, scientific standpoint, those colors, the wavelengths for those colors, exist, but those people didn't see those colors, not the way we see them; conceptually, they were just lights and darks. But over time, other colors got added in, and it was actually an expansion of the world for those people.

See, here's the thing, and this is a science fact: Language changes our brains. How we speak and what we speak affects our brains and how we see the world and interact with the world. Learning other languages and new patterns of speech changes the "wiring" in brains and causes us to see the world differently. [So does reading, by the way.] So this concept in 1984 where they remove the ability from people to think of freedom and independence by removing the concepts from the language is not very far-fetched. It's not far-fetched at all.

And, hey, Trump is doing a great job of reducing language. And rewriting facts and history to suit his own agenda, another thing covered in the book.

I mean, it's like the GOP read 1984 and decided that they could use it as their own, personal playbook.
"...a hierarchical society [is] only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance."
That sounds like them to me.
"...human equality [is] no longer an ideal to be striven after, but a danger to be averted."

So, yeah, this book is still vitally important and everyone should be reading it. The thoughtpolice, though not quite real in the sense they are in the book, are growing in power, and a huge segment of the population have fallen under their sway and believe every fabrication and alteration that comes out of their mouths. Right now is a time for clinging to facts and truth and upholding them because "reality" isn't as objective as we'd like to think it is. In fact, reality is only as objective as we make it, and we can't allow Trumpism to bend and warp the truth of the world around us into the madness he'd like to make it.

How To Be... a Translator

I was listening to NPR the other day; they were talking about this dude that worked as a translator for the State Department and, later, CNN on recommendation from the State Department. They even played some clips of him translating during a CNN interview. It's what gave me my idea for "T."

Of course, it was all wrong. Which I knew but was forgetting during the moment of listening to the report on NPR about this "translator." But, see, he's not a translator. He's an interpreter. A translator is someone that works with documents. As wikipedia puts it:

Translation is the communication of the meaning of a source-language text by means of an equivalent target-language text. Whereas interpreting undoubtedly antedates writing, translation began only after the appearance of written literature.

[The bold print is mine.]
It was surprising to me that NPR made such a fundamental mistake, but, then, I'm sure most people would never even think about thinking that it could be wrong, because we, culturally, use the idea of translation incorrectly all the time. And that's where it gets even more complicated, because many languages don't make a distinction between the two: it is all "translation." But, here in the USA, we do make a distinction, and it's for rather important reasons, which I will get to in a moment. One other note, when interpreting, it is always "interpreting" or "interpreter;" it is never "interpretation," because that means something entirely different and is more related to translating, which we'll also get to in a moment.

I do have one friend who became an interpreter. She was fascinated with Japan and had decided by our senior year that she wanted to be an interpreter. She went on to get a degree in Japanese cultural studies (or something like that) and graduated from college with a (very) high paying job for some corporation in Japan.

I mention that because my impression is that people think that interpreting is difficult while translating is fairly easy and straightforward. That anyone who knows two languages well enough can sit down and translate, but acting as an interpreter requires much more command of both languages. And, while it's true that interpreting is no easy job, especially high level interpreting (especially high level interpreting like for the UN or the State Department), most of what I found leans toward interpreting as being the easier of the two because it doesn't involve so much interpretation. [See, I told you these word distinctions are important. Okay, so I didn't explicitly say that, but I implied it.]

But why interpretation? Because languages don't always translate directly. There may not be an equivalent words between two languages. Or, as is the case with "interpreting" and "translating," one language may make a distinction in meaning when using a particular word. Or there may be phrases that mean a particular thing, but the individual words, if translated, won't add up to the meaning of the phrase. OR... Or it may be an artistic work, like a poem or a work of fiction, and the translator becomes tasked with evoking  more than just the meaning of the individual words. (S)he must make an interpretation of the work as (s)he translates.

Yes, it's all very complicated.

So, then, how do you become a translator?

Well, to start, you have to have a more than competent grasp of both languages you're working with but an even greater grasp of the language you are translating into. But it doesn't stop with knowing the languages; you also have to be versed in both cultures. Remember that I mentioned phrases that mean something other  than the individual words mean? And, then, there's slang, which is often difficult to keep up with within your own language. [When my brother was still in high school (he's six years younger than me), he used to love to use whatever the latest slang was on me, because I never knew what he was talking about. Seriously, it was weeks before I knew what "Baby's got back" meant.] Translating just the words in those circumstances will lead to a bad translation even though the words are technically correct. This is called knowing the difference between when to "metaphrase" (translating the words literally) and "paraphrase" (translating the meaning of the phrase, creating an interpretation of what the author meant). [In other words, "she has a big butt," which I found offensive just on general principal once I knew what my brother was saying.]

You should also be familiar with the subject matter, so translating, say, The Three Musketeers by Dumas, would require you to know both about Alexandre Dumas and 19th century France and 17th century France, which is when the story is set.

All of that aside, the role of the translator is actually growing, right now, as the Internet reaches more and more of the world. Computer translation devices can do no more than translate the individual words, which can lead to a very many misunderstandings, so the demand for people who can translate web pages is on the rise. It probably doesn't require quite as much dedication as manuscript translation does and could also provide good experience for anyone wanting to get into manuscript translation.

And, now, I'm wondering how my books must read in other languages when translated solely by Amazon's computer translators...

The A to Z of Fiction to Reality: Klingon

I bet you didn't know that, did you? We now have fully functioning Klingons. Really! Just head right down to any big sci-fi or comic book convention, and you'll see plenty of them wandering around. They even have their very own beauty pagent right here on Earth!

If you listen carefully, you might even hear some of them speaking in their own native language. And, really, that's what this is all about.

I'm not really a big Star Trek fan (yeah, yeah, I know... them's fightin' words to a lot of you out there. Especially you Klingons). It's not that I haven't watched it; I have. Well some of it (sorry, I've never seen a complete episode of Voyager or DS9). It's just that, well, to put it bluntly, it never could stand up against Star Wars, and that's all there is to it.

But there is one thing that has fascinated me about Star Trek and that's people's devotion to it and especially their devotion to the Klingons.

See, the Klingons were created  to be the whipping boys of the Star Trek universe. And I mean that in the original sense of the word. They were created to take all the punishment so that we, the viewers, could learn whatever lesson was being preached by Roddenberry that week. You wouldn't think that people would latch onto the dudes that weren't just the bad guys but the incompetent bad guys at that. From what was considered a failed television show.

But that's what happened.

Way before sci-fi conventions were cool or popular, back in the '70s, Star Trek was becoming a thing. More specifically, the Klingons were becoming a thing. When Paramount decided to go ahead with a feature film in the late '70s (released in 1979), they decided that the Klingon language should actually be represented, so James Doohan ("Scotty") came up with some words for the film. In effect, Doohan created the sound of the language.

Fans wanted more, but there wasn't more to go on.

Until 1984. Production was underway on The Search for Spock, and Leonard Nimoy (Spock) wanted something more than the "gibberish" that they'd been using as the Klingon language. It would be hard to say, at that point, that pressure from fans of the Klingons had nothing to do with this. At any rate, linguist Marc Okrand was hired to devise the basics for a full Klingon language. His first book on the subject, The Klingon Dictionary, was published in 1985. The language has only continued to expand from there.

There have been more than just a handful of books published in Klingon,

and, in 1992, the Klingon Language Institute (KLI) was founded in Pennsylvania. Klingon is the most widely spoken fictional language.

Wait! What? It's the most widely spoken fictional language? Yes. As the KLI's existence implies, you can take classes in Klingon, and there are some experts that are fluent in it. Well, as fluent as one can be in a language that's still missing words. The thing to note here is that people can speak fictional languages. And I'm not talking kids speaking Pig Latin, either. Adult people that devote their time to learning these things.

Somewhere in there, a line was crossed. The line from just being some bit of a story somewhere into something that's real. The only other good example we have of something like this is Tolkien, who devised not just one but two languages as support for his writing. But he did that. And Tolkien was a linguist. It was all a part of his world building. But Klingon has gone a step beyond. Klingon has come about, really, from pressure from fans. It was like they reached into this fictional world of Star Trek and pulled Klingon out of it into the real world.

Just, you know, if you do ever happen to be at any of those conventions and see Klingons walking around, be careful. You don't really know how real they may or may not be.