awkward Portuguese writing
Apr. 9th, 2007 02:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
guslI have on two previous occasions blogged about the awkwardness of some kinds of expression in Portuguese. I've thought of an objective way to measure that.
* take an English text
* get a professional translator to translate it into Portuguese, as faithfully as possible
* among educated readers, measure how well they understand the text. Measure how many words of the words in the translation are known to them.
You will find that the translation has a lot of long, difficult words (unlike the original English text).
My hypothesis is that if you do the symmetric thing (Portuguese -> English translation), the same effect is not observed.
Conclusion:
* does English have a better set of words for talking about these things? does English morphology allow one to use the existing words more flexibly? (and among the morphemes that are translatable, are PT morphemes longer and more awkward, e.g. how EN "-ly" becomes PT "-mente")
* are EN->PT translators pretentious?
Here's the translation that inspired this post. Looking at it again, it seems that part of the awkwardness is due to the distance between formal and informal language in Portuguese.
It also seems to me that counterfactual sentences are awkward to express in PT "pintassemos" ( we were (subjunctive) ) takes 4 unpleasant syllables to pronounce. Likewise, the informal auxiliary "tivessemos" ("we had" (subjunctive)). This is even more painful because PT is syllable-timed (where EN is stress-timed). (Some have said that PT in Portugal (EP) is more stress-timed than Brazilian Portuguese (BP))
* take an English text
* get a professional translator to translate it into Portuguese, as faithfully as possible
* among educated readers, measure how well they understand the text. Measure how many words of the words in the translation are known to them.
You will find that the translation has a lot of long, difficult words (unlike the original English text).
My hypothesis is that if you do the symmetric thing (Portuguese -> English translation), the same effect is not observed.
Conclusion:
* does English have a better set of words for talking about these things? does English morphology allow one to use the existing words more flexibly? (and among the morphemes that are translatable, are PT morphemes longer and more awkward, e.g. how EN "-ly" becomes PT "-mente")
* are EN->PT translators pretentious?
Here's the translation that inspired this post. Looking at it again, it seems that part of the awkwardness is due to the distance between formal and informal language in Portuguese.
It also seems to me that counterfactual sentences are awkward to express in PT "pintassemos" ( we were (subjunctive) ) takes 4 unpleasant syllables to pronounce. Likewise, the informal auxiliary "tivessemos" ("we had" (subjunctive)). This is even more painful because PT is syllable-timed (where EN is stress-timed). (Some have said that PT in Portugal (EP) is more stress-timed than Brazilian Portuguese (BP))