45 2017
Upwards & Outwards
Reaching out to sister societies
50 Shades of Plagiarism Investigating LinkedIn Joy Burrough | Camilla Maltas Marianne Orchard
So You Want to be an Editor How to be a Monolingual Jerk Ruth E. Thaler-Carter Alison Edwards-Lange
AND MUCH MORE
IN THIS ISSUE
[3] EDITORIAL Ragini Werner on The serious business of having fun
[4] EC BULLETIN Discovering Daphne Lees, Liz van Gerrevink and Paul Baker
[6] COVER STORY: UPWARDS & OUTWARDS Anne Murrary (MET), Sarah Griffin-Mason (ITI) & Jenny Zonneveld (SENSE) on Reaching out to sister societies
ROVING REPORTS [9] Freelancers unite! Sally Hill on The benefits of joining the Platform Zelfstandige Ondernemers
[11] Business enlightenment or snake oil? Marianne Orchard investigates LinkedIn
[13] BEST PRACTICE David McKay on Translating the Great War, Part II
[15] SIG EVENT Joy Burrough and Camilla Maltas on 50 Shades of plagiarism
[17] TECH TIP Claire Bacon shares her experience with UNPAYWALL A new browser extension for free access to paywalled articles
[18] BOOK REVIEW Helene Reid on In praise of profanity and Scorn
[20] PROFILE Anne Hodgkinson talks to Vanessa Goad about Finding creative meaning
[22] GUEST BLOG: THE ROGUE LINGUIST Alison Edwards-Lange on How to be a monolingual Anglosplaining jerk
[24] MENTORING Ruth E. Thaler-Carter on The basics of being a professional editor
[26] WORD RAP, a NEW column on English idioms and expressions Anne Paris on ‘It’s raining cats and dogs’
[27] HI SOCIETY . Translation by David McKay longlisted, twice . War & Turpentine competition for eSense readers . ‘True humility’ sums up SENSE tax seminar . Executive Committee archives & email now on Google Drive . Upcoming SENSE events on the CPD and social calendar . SENSE sponsors Nationaal Vertaalcongres 2017 . Joining a society for language professionals makes SENSE . Welcome to our new members
2 | eSense 45 | April-June 2017
The serious business of having fun You know the tired old sign that office jokers keep on their desks: ‘You don’t need to be mad to work here but it helps’? Well, for me, ‘here’ has to be ‘at home’. Indeed, it would be sheer madness for me not to work from home. No offence intended, but I had enough social faffery in my corporate days to last me several lifetimes. That said, there is one event on our calendar that always manages to draw me happily (!) from my home-sweet-hermitage and that is the SENSE Annual General Meeting. Even if I weren’t on the Executive Committee and obliged to attend, I’d still turn up, for I can see that catching up with old friends and making new friends in person – not on the computer but face to face – is just good fun. And this year’s meeting was fun. Not in a funny peculiar way, but in the pleasurable way we enjoyed working in unity on serious SENSE business. Archetypal adman Leo Burnett would have been proud of us, and quite right too. The pictures that the SENSE photographer Michael Hartwigsen took on the day capture this sense of fun. He was there to record the event and shoot formal portraits that we could post on our SENSE forum or LinkedIn profiles. As you can see, we had our portrait done too. I call this picture ‘the eSense chook and her chickadees’ because it makes me feel rather like a mother hen brooding over her nest of columnists-cum-copyeditors: Sally Hill, Marianne Orchard and Anne Hodgkinson. But what I like best is that it catches our lovely camaraderie, by definition ‘mutual trust and friendship among people who spend a lot of time together’– online mainly in our case – which is another reason I enjoyed our ‘group grope’, as it were, at the AGM. Seriously now, another word for camaraderie is sisterhood; aptly so, you might say, given that we all happen to be female. But let me hasten to add, even in today’s climate of non-discrimination on the grounds of gender – and rising acceptance of the singular ‘they’ – a word like ‘sisterhood’ can and does apply to more than the strictly gender-defined. Indeed ‘sister’ is common parlance in many gender-neutral institutions, such as Mediterranean Editors and Translators (MET), which devotes a separate page of its website to sister associations, including SENSE. Which brings me to the contents of this issue. Our cover story is about SENSE reaching out to sister societies in the world of language professionals – and having fun in the process. Here’s to the emerging sisterhood with MET in Spain and the ITI (Institute of Translators and Interpreters) in the UK, for starters! We also have our eye on other relevant societies around us simply because forming close ties with sister associations makes good sense. As MET’s Chair Anne Murray points out at the end of the story, ‘By working together, combining our expertise and sharing best practices […] we can strengthen the structures and best practices that will ultimately benefit our members.’ As always, there is far more than just the cover story to read in an eSense issue. So, all you chickadees in the greater SENSE sisterhood, let me stop clucking about and leave you to peck away at the rest of the goodies in peace. Happy reading!
eSense 45 | April–June 2017 SENSE publishes the digital magazine eSense four times a year. eSense aims to provide useful and entertaining content of interest to language professionals in the SENSE community at large while promoting the work and activities of the Society and its members. Contributors: Claire Bacon, David Barick, Joy Burrough, Robert Coupe, Kelly Dickeson (MET), Alison Edwards-Lange, Vanessa Goad, Erin Goedhart-Stallings, Sarah Griffin-Mason (ITI), John Linnegar (special thanks), Camilla Maltas, David McKay, Anne Murray (MET), Helen Oclee-Brown (MET), Anne Paris, Jordi Santander (guest) and Ruth E. Thaler-Carter (guest), Jenny Zonneveld Photographs Michael Hartwigsen (Events) | Graphic design NEEDSer Book reviews Helene Reid | Proofreader Ann Scholten eSense editors Sally Hill, Anne Hodgkinson and Marianne Orchard eSense chook Editor-in-chief Ragini Werner [email protected]
© SENSE April-June 2017. Unless otherwise credited, all photos appearing in eSense are public domain images or have been used with the consent of the photographer. The author of any work appearing in eSense retains the copyright in that work. Offprints of articles are available on request.◄
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Discovering Daphne, Liz and Paul
This year SENSE members elected three new volunteers to the Executive Committee. Please join us in giving a warm welcome to Daphne Lees, Liz van Gerrevink and Paul Baker
Daphne Visser-Lees, SENSE Secretary I come from Manchester. In April 1978 I arrived in the Netherlands to take up a post as an OR nurse in a small hospital in Amsterdam. It was only meant to be for a year, but fate intervened and before I knew it I found myself affianced to one Peter, a tall Dutch brewer (de- scribed by one friend as a never-ending man with a never-ending supply of beer). The hospital was a great place to learn Dutch, but with my background in front- line surgery in Liverpool and London, I found myself drawn back to university hospital life. The ensuing years at the Binnengasthuis, a hospital on the edge of the Red Light District, was where I really learnt to think on my feet. Sixty-hour weeks weren’t unusual, but it was what we did in those days. On amalgamating with the Wil- helmina Gasthuis, the hospital closed and we moved out to the AMC in 1981.
Feeling framed, perchance? Daphne’s profile on Facebook shows her with husband Peter Visser. The couple celebrated their Emerald Anniversary – 35 years of wedded bliss – in November 2015
Liz van Gerrevink-Genee, SENSE Treasurer Having lived in Winsum, Groningen for only one year, I emigrated late 1958 with my parents to Johannesburg in South Africa. I grew up attending English schools, so my mother tongue is English, but my mother’s language is Frisian/Dutch. I only came back to my roots in 1990, after 31 years in Jo’burg. I spent the first two years studying the Dutch language and attaining a few diplomas in the financial and administrative field to get a better grip on Dutch in my accounting profession. This paved the way for a great job in the accounts department of an American multinational. I only met Martin, my knight in shining armour, in 1993. We got married in 1994 and our twin sons Alex and Max were born in 1996. That’s when I decided that I’d had enough of my career and stopped working to be a full- time mum. What a blessing it is to have twins. Nothing in my life is more important than Martin, Alex and Max – they’re my life.
The Van Gerrevink-Genee family (clockwise from l-r): Max, Martin, Alex and Liz. ‘They’re grown up now but being a mum of two gorgeous blond and blue-eyed boys was a real pleasure’
Paul Baker, SENSE Programme Secretary I was born in Buckinghamshire, very close to the Thames, and spent my first seven years in peaceful Burnham, between Betjeman’s beloved Slough and the former Home Secretary’s Maidenhead. Then we moved to historic Rochester, whence I later travelled on a two-week school exchange to southern France. This visit boosted my French exam results; a similar trip to Germany the following year produced further evidence of linguistic ability. My clergyman grandfather was the sponsor of these formative travel experiences. With his strong belief in the importance of international understanding he always encouraged me to pursue a career as a linguist, and I owe him a
4 | eSense 45 | April-June 2017 great debt of thanks for this. I met my wife Jenny as a result of our strong common interest in languages and linguistics, and she is my ever-dependable source of caring encouragement, wise advice and enthusiastic enjoyment of life.
Daphne: After our sons Alex and Phil were born, shift work enabled both Peter and me to continue working while bringing up the children. Whilst initially quite overwhelmed by the ability of the Dutch to speak English, it wasn’t long before I found myself mentally correcting quite a lot of written and spoken English. At 3:00 one Sunday morning while I was clear- ing up after an operation, a song came on the radio that appeared to be entitled ‘Only lice keep us apart’ and that was it. There was much to be done! Shortly afterwards I was asked to translate articles for a medical PhD thesis, which I did with only the most rudimentary of tools, but they were accepted and I had caught the translating bug! In 1995, not long after completing a four-year, part-time course in English and translation studies, I was introduced to SENSE. It was a joy to meet people who were as interested in language as I was and I soon made friends within the group, some of whom I work close- ly with to this day.
Liz: When our boys turned three I suddenly had time on my hands, and I didn’t just want to laze about. As I’d done lots of translation work for Martin, who is a building engineer, he suggested I become a freelance translator. This was in the days when I didn’t know what the internet was. Emails came in via a modem and I spent quite a while building up a client base by phoning every architect agency and engineering company in the country. As TransL Vertaalbureau I’m specialized in the building industry and technical installations. In 2007 I took the oath at the District Court of The Hague and became a sworn translator in NL-EN and EN-NL; registered at Bureau Wbtv. Since then I’ve acquired extensive experience in legal and financial translation work too. I’ve been an avid believer in and user of CAT tools since 2006, having used Déjà Vu X2 and DVX3 for 10 years, but I switched to the far more user-friendly SDL Trados Studio 2017 in October last year.
Paul: How do I ensure a good work-life balance and stay in touch with the world? As far as work is concerned, the most important aspect for this is learning (and remembering!!) to say ‘no’, not least because Jenny and I delight in travelling and discovering the world. I like to keep fit, mainly by running and cycling: sport is something I actively do, not usually something I watch. I don’t spend much time in front of the TV. BBC’s University Challenge, occasionally a news bulletin, nature or historical documentary and – to borrow a term currently popular in Dutch – ‘that’s it’. I’m keen on online reading, particularly about news, current affairs and the sciences, but my digital literacy is merely functional in scope. Until recently my engagement with social media has been quite limited, but now I’m taking a much more active interest in exploring ways of actively using LinkedIn and FaceTime as resources in my new role on the EC.
Paul and Jenny on their travels, visiting friends in Switzer- land, renewing their familiarity with Schwizerdütsch and rediscovering the local cuisine
Daphne: Starting out in business with a young family and a practically full-time job was quite tough, but I received a great deal of encouragement and help in all fields from SENSE. My background dictated that I specialized in medical translation and editing, and it was through SENSE that I got the opportunity to teach scientific writing at Erasmus University for a number of years. I continued to work at the AMC until the end of 2016 when after 45 years, I took ‘early’ retirement from nursing. Translating and editing have moved in seamlessly to fill in the gap left by the hospital job, but by taking on the SENSE Secretary post I hope to be able to contribute to the society that has done so much for me in the past.
Liz: Having already been the treasurer at Stichting Vrouwennetwerk Vertalers en Tolken (SVVT) for four-and-a-half years, I thought it would be a good idea to run the treasury at SENSE. I love working with numbers and the SENSE books are all in Excel – my favourite software application. Thanks to all those who elected me. I’m looking forward to this new challenge!
Paul: I enjoy volunteering. It’s a good way of broadening your experience and discovering what skills you can add to your repertoire, as well as contributing to the success of whatever cause you’re supporting. I aim to be an approachable, active Programme Secretary and I am keen to help SENSE in its outreach to sister organizations. I see my task as Programme Secretary as a way to make full use of abilities acquired throughout my life, so that I will (I hope!) combine and match them to provide enjoyable events for the benefit of you all.◄
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Upwards & outwards: reaching out to sister societies
In the wake of SENSE’s first step in intersociety liaison ― or, as the Spanish say, cimentar, strengthening relationships ― here we report on a sisterhood of three societies headed by Anne Murray (MET), Sarah Griffin-Mason (ITI) and Jenny Zonneveld (SENSE)
Earlier this year in Spain, SENSE took a first step in establishing closer intersociety liaison when our head, Jenny Zonneveld, met with the heads of two of our sister societies, Anne Murray (MET) and Sarah Griffin-Mason (ITI). They were joined by Alan Lounds (MET Continuing Professional Development) and John Linnegar (SENSE member at large). The five conferred in an editor’s eyrie on the fourth floor of a villa perched on the summit of citadel-like Conca de Barberà in Catalonia. How could such an expansive panorama not evoke an equally expansive meeting of minds? And that is what happened in the space of 48 productive hours. The group began by sharing ideas and experiences in the modus operandi, structures and offerings of our respective societies. Naturally, both similarities and differences became evi- dent. For instance, the Institute of Transla- tion & Interpreting (ITI) is the UK’s only dedicated association for practising trans- lation and interpreting professionals. It has more than 3,000 members worldwide, and its chair is chosen by the board members. It is also large enough to have paid profes- sional support for day-to-day operations (eg, membership, secretariat) and individ- ual projects. It convenes a biennial confer- ence and in between them stages regular training opportunities at Milton Keynes. Mediterranean Editors and Translators (MET) is about the same size as SENSE In Catalonia, a key feature of local festivities is the construction of spectacular human towers (Society for English-language professionals or castells in town squares by one or more colles or groups of castellers. The castells comprise a broad phalanx of tightly packed bodies – the pinya – at their base, supporting a tower of in the Netherlands) and, like SENSE, it is athletes reaching impossibly high into the air and surmounted by the youngest, most agile (and run entirely by volunteers. MET’s council pluckiest!) child. What an awe-inspiring feat of willpower and camaraderie those castles are. meets only twice a year for an entire And what an apt metaphor for the efforts by three societies of language practitioners to work weekend – the council members’ loca- together for the benefit of their respective members. Photo: Human Tower, Alessandro Pezzotta © 2013 tions, like those of the society’s members, being spread out across the Mediterranean and beyond, from Portugal to as far as Iran. Meetings for members tend to be based in Barcelona and Madrid; the annual MET Meeting is held at a variety of spectacular locations each year. Usually, a programme of ‘summer workshops’ for members is presented in Barcelona; they’re also used as a ‘dry run’ for workshops to be presented at the upcoming meeting in October–November. Several significant features of the SENSE model distinguish it from the other two societies: the existence of Special Interest Groups (SIGs) that drive lifelong learning and/or socialization through regular meetings (although ITI does have similar networking and regional groups); the biennial Professional Development Day (a CPD conference for seasoned
6 | eSense 45 | April-June 2017 professionals and starters alike) and the annual Volunteers’ Day to reward contributors to SENSE (taking place in October this year, venue to be confirmed: Watch this space!); the lack of a regular full-scale conference (soon to be remedied), and the inclusion in the Society’s interactive website of unique resources such as the Handbook in the members’ Library and the Guidelines for proofreading student texts, a publication that SENSE has made freely available to the public at large.
The intersociety summit was not all work and no play. Indeed, the participants in the newly emerging sisterhood found time to stroll through Barberà and enjoy the local libations. Even so, the discussions continued. ‘Sharing information about our respective societies meant we found both common ground and some unique features to consider adopting,’ reports John Linnegar. Pictured with John (heading the table) are (l-r): Anne Murray, Jenny Zonneveld, Alan Lounds, Sarah Griffin-Mason and Kelly Dickeson (MET Secretary) who came for lunch and happened to be on hand to take our cover photo of the three heads having fun on the tricycle. This photo was taken by Anne’s partner, Jordi Santander
Sharing makes us stronger The idyllic venue for these explorations and deliberations was the home of Anne Murray. Anne recalls: ‘On the day John asked me to reflect on how closer collaboration could benefit our respective members, I had arranged to meet three builders to prepare a quote for renovating our staircase. The job spec was clear: the staircase had to be rendered fit for purpose (clean and safe) and be ready in a month. It’s not an easy job: there are four flights of stairs with four-metre-high walls dating from the 14th to the 20th century, all in different states of repair. The builders kept asking me what I wanted, but I needed them to tell me what I needed. ‘They each came up with very different solutions: one had special machinery for this and that technique, another was an expert in restoring old stone and brick, the third had heard of a new technique that would solve all our problems but needed to investigate it.’ The analogy to our organized societies was not lost on Anne. ‘I couldn’t help thinking: these builders need to be part of an association like ours. They need to share their knowledge, teach each other about new techniques, learn to anticipate and answer their clients’ needs, give and attend courses together, and perhaps even lend each other their fancy tools. Sharing doesn’t make us weaker or less competitive; on the contrary, it makes us stronger.’ For Sarah Griffin-Mason, an avowed proponent of knowledge sharing, the possibility of turning a perceived weakness into a strength is an important incentive for sharing and collaborating among kindred professionals. In the case of ITI, the incentive is the need for ongoing skills training for its members worldwide. Sarah explains: ‘We are aware that we do not have the range of expertise we need to cover the training needs of our members within our own organization. At the highest levels of premium service, the professionals in our sector need to be able to translate, demonstrate sector- appropriate, professional-level understanding of the content of the translation, and offer text-editing skills that ensure the target text is appropriate in shape, style and content for the target readership.’ In practice, this would mean making MET and SENSE conferences, publications and training opportunities more acces- sible to ITI members through better promotion and special offers, and vice versa. The value of closer liaison for ITI members, Sarah believes, will lie in ‘the formation of content-sharing agreements with entities such as SENSE and MET. Such agreements will help to give all of the societies’ members access to appropriate
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content for updating their skills, expanding our professional community of practice, and developing a shared understand- ing of skills. Such skills include research and content-mining; the creation and use of corpora and other tools; translation in specialist areas; and content, copy and style editing.’ What should naturally ease the way for closer liaison and sharing is the fact that the three colles (see box on page 6) have language practice and, to varying degrees, the English language in common.
The importance of continuity One organizational difference that emerged is that MET council members are elected every two years at an AGM held at the close of the annual conference. At the 2016 METM conference, Jenny had already observed that many of those on MET’s council switch portfolios at the AGM, not something that occurs formally in SENSE (however, it has happened in- formally on occasion at the end of an EC member’s three-year tenure). Jenny learned that there are two sound reasons for portfolio switching: first, it is not always easy to recruit new people to help run the organization and, second, keeping members on the council provides continuity, which in turn supports intersociety liaison. She adds: ‘We agreed that, as chairs, we should plan for our own succession and also for continuity in the running of our societies.’ Jenny was also inspired by how the other socie- ties are organized internally. ‘In particular, Sarah emphasized how important it is to keep society, business and private email separate. This made me realize that we in SENSE should not delay any longer in moving our own mail to a user-friendly, profes- sional platform and that each EC member should have their own @sense-online.nl email address to ensure such separation.’ So what will our members gain from all this? Jenny thinks some of the benefits will be intangible. SENSE outreach strategy ‘Other benefits,’ she says, ‘include a greater audi- In the Netherlands, SENSE is primarily in touch with other organi- ence for publications such as our own Guidelines zations related to our profession through the Platform Sector and eSense, of course, and greater publicity and Tolken en Vertalen in Nederland or PSTEVIN. This collaborative support for the events we all organize that could platform is for training institutes, professional organizations, as- surely lead to greater networking between our sociations, agencies and other stakeholders. They meet once or members.’ Jenny adds: ‘All three societies are active twice a year to discuss developments and work closely together on social media and we are already helping one an- on upholding quality standards in the translating and interpreting other to gain greater brand exposure on Facebook professions. PSTEVIN strives to have a broad representation of and Twitter by sharing and liking each other’s posts. both suppliers and buyers of translation services. All this will help to put SENSE on the map.’ As part of our outreach strategy, SENSE is sponsoring Team- Further in the near future, Jenny envisages work’s Nationaal Vertaalcongres 2017 in June. Our material will SENSE running workshops developed by MET emphasize the changes we have made in the past two years to presenters and having other societies’ members embrace all English-language professionals, including editors, coming to the Netherlands to attend the events we translators, interpreters, copywriters, indexers and teachers of organize. Jenny believes that this will open the English communication skills, as well as students registered in doors to sharing knowledge and experience at an relevant programmes who qualify for the special discount (a 50% ◄ individual level. ‘Connected to this,’ she says, ‘we reduction) on our annual membership fee. also discussed the possibility of introducing a kind of hosting arrangement between our members: what better way could there be to get to know translation and editing colleagues from the UK, Spain or elsewhere than by inviting them to stay and then travelling to a workshop or a conference together?’ Also looking further ahead, Sarah avers: ‘Ultimately, content sharing will fuel a virtuous cycle of positive thought in the related professions, helping our language-service-provider professionals to understand clearly the various tracks of work open to them, and supporting them in representing the true value of their skills to clients.’ The final word on the benefits of closer liaison comes from our host in Catalonia, Anne. ‘We at MET, SENSE and ITI are fortunate. We have been sharing for a long time and the benefits are showing. But our respective governing councils need to support one another in this venture. By working together, combining our expertise and sharing best practices, and even our challenges and aspirations – as we did at the joint meeting in Barberà atop four flights of less-than-perfect stairs – we can strengthen, or cimentar, the structures and best practices that will ultimately benefit our members.’◄
Panorama Jenny Zonneveld, who took the photo from Anne Murray’s rooftop in Barberà Cover design NEEDSer | Photo Kelly Dickeson | Photoshop Michael Hartwigsen
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Freelancers unite! The benefits of joining PZO
The Platform Zelfstandige Ondernemers (PZO) is the largest independent advocacy group for freelancers in the Netherlands. Especially for SENSE members, Sally Hill presents the arguments for taking advantage of SENSE’s collective membership of PZO
You may have heard about the PZO on the SENSE forum, or at our Professional Development Day in September 2016. You may even remember a call in eSense 32 (January 2014) from SENSE’s former workshop coordinator Maartje Gorte for members to consider collective membership of PZO: at least 20 members were needed in order to take advantage of the €100 reduction in the costs of individual membership. Together with a bunch of other SENSE freelancers, I took up the offer and joined – not so much because of the direct benefits for me personally, but because, like many others, I think it’s important to support an organization that stands up for the rights of the thousands of freelancers here in the Netherlands (commonly called ZZP’ers or zelfstandigen zonder personeel). PZO is not only our voice in The Hague, it is a member of the European Forum of Independent Professionals, along with similar associations in the UK, Belgium and Spain, for example. According to their website, the EFIP represents more than ten million independent professionals throughout the EU and is involved in research, advocacy and campaigning. Pre- sumably such collaboration will make it easier for the voices of the increasing numbers of freelancers in Europe to be heard.
Hands off the zelfstandigenaftrek! You can read about the PZO’s various lobbying activities on their website, but an issue that likely affects all freelancers in the Netherlands is the proposal put forward by some political parties to scrap or reduce the zelfstandigenaftrek – the tax deduction that freelancers can earn each year (currently worth up to €7280). I recently caught up with fellow SENSE and PZO member Jet van den Toorn who attended a meeting for ZZP’ers organized by PZO to- gether with Dutch employers’ organizations to discuss a number of pertinent election themes (this was in the run-up to the Dutch general election on 15 March). She told me, ‘I am very keen on retaining the zelfstandigenaftrek and think it is no more than fair. ZZP’ers do not have a lot of the perks that employees have. And some years ago the Belastingdienst (Dutch Tax Office) took away the possibility to get a tax advantage for werkruimte aan huis or home workspace, saying we had the zelfstandigenaftrek. Yeah, right! I wonder how much more will be laid at that particu- lar door.’ Of the meeting itself she said, ‘I really had the impression that both PZO and VNO/NCW were keen to hear what we had to say and am confident they will use the information in their talks with the government.’
Pension? What pension? I first came into contact with PZO back in 2012 at a meeting for medical translators where I attended a talk about pension options for freelancers. I remember being impressed by the speaker’s extensive knowledge of the various options, and the fact that the organization seemed to have freelancers’ interests very much at heart – before then I had never heard of PZO. Although it took me another five years before I got round to sorting out something for my own pension (a blocked savings account or banksparen), I would certainly recommend consulting PZO if this is something you’d like more informa- tion about. PZO has recently helped to set up a non-compulsory pension scheme for freelancers in which you can decide for your- self how much money you want to put in and when you want to retire. It’s not something I’ve looked into personally, but
9 | eSense 45 | April-June 2017 the idea of the money you put in remaining your own money and not disappearing into a large company’s profits is appealing. You can download a booklet from their website that explains how you can use this scheme in case of disability.
To insure or not to insure? Disability insurance is of course another key issue freelancers cannot ignore. A recent report published by the Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis (CPB) found that up to 25% of freelancers have insufficient alternatives to cover a minimum wage in case of disability, and 5% have nothing in place at all. Given these figures, the Dutch government has been considering making such insurance compulsory, something else that the PZO is fighting on our behalf. Jet told me: ‘I am also very much against obligatory insurance, but fear I am fighting a losing battle here. There are simply too many ZZP’ers for the government not to do anything about it.’ More about the alternative disability insurance scheme for freelancers known as a ‘bread fund’ can be found in my article in eSense 44.
Tricky transition from VAR to DBA After starting to write this article, by coincidence I found myself getting in touch with the ‘ZZP Servicedesk’ that offers free advice to PZO members. A few weeks ago, a university client informed me that they were no longer able to hire me as a freelance guest lecturer because of the new tax office regulations replacing the Declaration of Independent Contractor Status (VAR) with the Deregulation of Assessment of Employment Status (DBA). (An English-language summary of the whole nasty business can be found on this blog on a Dutch contracting company’s website.) This is of course a very good example of the direct benefits of PZO membership. Whereas the university has a large human resources department with access to legal advice, in my company the legal team is the same as the team providing teaching, editing and writing services, ie the chief cook and bottle washer – me. Time to outsource! Although the legal advisor at the ZZP service desk could not help me directly, he was very understanding of my situation and said they were getting lots of questions on this from freelancers because many organizations appear to be interpreting the new legislation in this way.
Why else join PZO? When I asked Jet van den Toorn (right) about her own reasons for joining PZO, she told me ‘It’s an instrument to get your views across. And the chairman is a member of the SER [Sociaal Economische Raad or Social and Economic Council], which is very important. I’m not sure about any direct benefits, probably there are more long-term benefits. And I don’t like every result they get. The DBA for instance is a case in point. They should have stuck to the old VAR in my opinion. Of course it is always difficult when there are a lot of people involved to get it right, but still...’ On a final note, the freelance translators and interpreters among us may also be interested to know that PZO is lobbying on their behalf to improve their market position within the government procurement policy and improve transparency regarding rates. Besides SENSE, many other organizations have joined PZO collectively, including the Dutch Association of Freelance Professional Translators – the Vereniging Zelf- standige Vertalers. For more information about collective PZO membership through SENSE, please contact SENSE Chair Jenny Zonneveld at [email protected]. – Sally Hill◄
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LinkedIn Business enlightenment or snake oil?
Is LinkedIn an effective way to find new clients? Can SENSE reach new members and associates on LinkedIn? How do SENSE members use LinkedIn? Marianne Orchard investigates
When my kids were babies and thought that sleeping at night was for anyone but babies, everyone I spoke to knew the secret to getting them to sleep through. ‘Try johannesbroodpitmeel,’ they’d say. (Johannesbroodpitmeel is not snake oil but locust bean gum). ‘Try singing to them.’ ‘Try not singing to them.’ ‘Try sticking to a bedtime routine.’ ‘Try bathing them before bed.’ Nothing worked, so bar throwing out the babies with the bathwater, we just sat it out.
Optimize, maximize, hack LinkedIn felt the same. Yes, I had a profile, yes I had a vaguely professional photo, yes I’d listed my stellar achievements, but none of this had led to business enlightenment. Every now and then I’d get sucked into listicles of hacks to optimize or maximize my profile. I concluded that LinkedIn was for people who use the words hack, optimize and maximize, even on their babies. ‘Hush little baby don’t say a word/Mama’s gonna hack you a mockingbird’. So I jumped at the chance to attend the SENSE ‘Social Media at Work’ workshop given by Henk- Jan Geel from Bright Mind Media last July. Would this be the johannesbroodpitmeel I needed? I soon realized that there wasn’t going to be a quick fix. You need a strategy. Henk-Jan recommended 20 minutes per day. His strategy involved activities that had me shuddering at the mere thought of them, ‘send an email to new connections from last week with more information about yourself’. Life took over and I forgot about the strategy. Instead I joined SENSE’s social media team to find out what SENSE was doing on social media. On LinkedIn, SENSE has a group for SENSE members and a company page that anyone can follow. The group is better at sleeping than my kids were: the last post dates from eight months ago. SENSE’s company page, with 261 followers at time of writing, is where we post content that is relevant to editors and other lan- guage professionals outside SENSE. It was time for some research. My mission was twofold: to find out whether LinkedIn is an effective way to reach new clients and whether it can help SENSE reach potential sister societies and members. Survey of SENSE members I decided to start by finding out how SENSE members use LinkedIn and whether they know that SENSE is on LinkedIn. Jenny Zonneveld, our chair, suggested conducting a survey, which 130 of the approximately 350 SENSE members com- pleted. The first question was about whether our members were on LinkedIn and 87% were. The 13% who weren’t said this was because (multiple answers were possible) they didn’t do social media (50%) and had plenty of work anyway (44%). The next thing I wanted to find out was how often SENSE members update their profile. The winner was ‘Less than once a year’ (39%), closely followed by ‘Between once every few months and once every year’ (37%). SENSE members go on LinkedIn more often than they update their profile: the favourite was ‘Between once a week and once a month’ (43%), followed by ‘Between once a month and once every few months’ (19%), ‘Between once every few months and once a year’ (15%) and ‘Between once a day and once a week’ (14%). Do SENSE members find work through LinkedIn? 52% said that potential clients approached them through LinkedIn, and a resounding 72% of these said that it had led to work. And had anyone approached potential clients themselves? A mere 12% had, but for 75% of these this had led to work.
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What about SENSE’s visibility to its Survey respondents (52%) said that potential clients members on LinkedIn? 54% knew about approached them through LinkedIn and a resounding 72% SENSE’s LinkedIn group, whereas only 31% knew about the company page. of these said that it had led them to getting work Mind you, only 40% followed any com- panies at all. The kinds of company that they did follow (multiple answers were possible) were clients (70%), organizations such as SENSE (60%), companies related to their area of expertise (57%), prospective clients (33%) and translation agencies (17%). In the ‘other’ field people noted ‘people like Richard Branson’, universities and companies where they currently worked or used to work. Corporate strategy Is LinkedIn an effective tool for reaching new clients and will it help SENSE reach potential sister societies associates and members? As Henk-Jan Geel mentioned, it indeed boils down to strategy, because LinkedIn is just another medium for your marketing efforts. Two aspects of LinkedIn are worth examining here: the company page and the personal profile. I’ll look at the company page first, taking SENSE as an example. SENSE’s strategy for its LinkedIn company page is to post content once a day on weekdays. Various sites recommend this frequency of posting on LinkedIn. As the survey showed, SENSE members don’t visit LinkedIn often. Other research backs this up. In 2014, Pew found that 25% of users visited the site weekly and 61% every few weeks or less often. Although the SENSE company page doesn’t have many followers (261), some posts reach more people than just its fol- lowers: at times 600 impressions, the number of people who see the post. As only 31% of the SENSE members surveyed knew about the company page, it’s likely that SENSE’s company page has followers who are not SENSE members. Publiciz- ing the page within SENSE and asking members who are on and approve of LinkedIn to like it would be one way to in- crease SENSE’s reach. Another way would be if SENSE members could like and comment on the content that is posted. It may also be worth experimenting with the timing of posting. The next step for SENSE would be to interact, or rather engage, with its page followers. As BeBusinessed says, ‘Being successful on LinkedIn isn’t just about posting content updates every day. It’s about inter- acting with your followers after they comment on your company’s posts.’ However, most of the engagement on the SENSE page is likes rather than comments, which gives little opportunity for interaction.
All-star visibility is key If we turn our attention to the personal profile, visibility is key – unfortunate for a person whose first performance appraisal in a proper job was that I should increase my visibility. Nothing has changed since: my visibility on LinkedIn is positively foggy. Six profile views in 90 days, since I started this article. To make things worse, one of the precious views was the annoying ex who keeps following me around social media until I block him. How do you go about getting more profile views? I refer to Henk-Jan’s strategy and follow his recommendations for the profile. I upload the profes- sional headshot that Michael Hartwigsen took at the SENSE AGM, and opt for ‘Freelance translator (NL-EN), copywriter and editor’ for my headline because, although uninteresting, it’s clear and contains the keywords I want to be found on. Then it’s onto the summary, which Henk-Jan recommends writing in the first person. I’m not completely happy with what I bash out, but it’s better than what I had. I add a volunteer experience section for the social media, writing and editing work I do for SENSE and am done. My profile now rates as ‘all-star’. If I were to believe the snake oil articles, I’d have increased my profile views by 500%. Instead it’s a lowly 50%, with nine profile views instead of six. And someone does approach me for work. (She’s looking for a Dutch native speaker – so much for the clear profile). What else can I do? I read that I should engage with my feed, which sounds like one of those examples of a grammatically correct but meaningless sentence. A glance through my feed shows why I don’t engage: ‘SIAM certification’, ‘FOTY’ awards and ‘Post-IPO’. It’s not engaging. Out of desperation I like something about Dutch training and something about whether work makes you happy (translating and writing does; fid- dling about on LinkedIn doesn’t). Then I discover LinkedIn Pulse and like people and companies there. Now my feed is populated with interesting articles, alongside the odd one about unleashing the power within. SENSE is doing what it can to increase its reach by posting regularly on LinkedIn. This is something to consider if, like me, you want to increase your visibility. SENSE’s LinkedIn group is dormant, but that tallies with observations about LinkedIn groups dying. As for johannesbroodpitmeel for LinkedIn? I’ve discovered that it doesn’t exist. It’s down to something as mundane as strategy and effort.◄ Images Wiki & LinkedIn.com | Portrait Michael Hartwigsen
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Translating the Great War, Part 2
David McKay’s work on the famous novel War and Turpentine by Flemish author Stefan Hertmans has earned accolades from critics worldwide. Here he completes his account of how he tackled its translation challenges
War and Turpentine is packed with references – overt and cov- ert – to art, music and literature. This partly reflects the fact that the protagonist Martien, despite his working-class background, is steeped in the European cultural tradition; the word ‘turpen- tine’ in the title refers to his life as an amateur painter and copy- ist. The many allusions also reinforce the theme of imitation and originality, one of the main preoccupations of the book. Martien was a talented copyist of famous European paintings from the past; similarly, Stefan Hertmans uses an adapted version of his grandfather’s notebooks as the core of his novel. In both cases, we may wonder where imitation ends and creation begins – a fascinating question for a translator. One subplot revolves around a secret tribute in one of Martien’s paintings, a nearly exact reproduction of a masterpiece from the past. Against this painterly backdrop, it seemed appropriate and even important to me to incorporate hidden literary reference into the book that English-language readers might recognize. That brings me back to ‘creep’ (Part 1 is published in eSense 44), one of a few echoes in this chapter of Macbeth’s famous solilo- quy which begins: Stefan Hertmans with a photo of his grandfather, the amateur painter and copyist Urbain Martien – protagonist of his award- winning book War and Turpentine To-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time
A couple of pages later, Martien refers to de dwaze grappen van de idioten in het regiment. This, of course, became ‘the stupid jokes told by the regimental idiots,’ another faint echo of a later line in the same Macbeth soliloquy. Again, feed- back from readers was vital; the writer, editor and translator Michele Hutchison, who read through the manuscript and offered many valuable comments, advised me to axe an allusion to ‘sound and fury’ that had clearly been shoehorned into the text.
Tempting allusions Sometimes it was hard to tell whether I was sneaking in my own literary allusion or discovering one that Hertmans had left hidden. Ergens hoog meen ik een leeuwerik te zien stijgen very naturally became ‘high in the sky I think I see a lark ascend- ing,’ but I have no idea whether Hertmans was thinking of George Meredith’s poem The Lark Ascending – or, more likely, of the Ralph Vaughan Williams composition based on that poem (originally written in 1914). In any case, the thought of Vaughan Williams’s music, along with the image of the lark, makes a perfect transition from the muck of the war to the sublime tranquility of the next paragraph:
Above that, the blue, the spotless blue that reminds me of my late father’s frescoes. There is nothing to confirm what we hear again and again: that war has come. Only the peace of this splendid August, month of harvest, of yellow pears and wasps, of cooler morn- ings, sluggish flies, and weightless spots of sunlight drifting peacefully over the leaves.
One especially haunting allusion is found in a scene where Martien’s mother visits her husband’s grave.
Ze heeft het gevoel dat talloze ogen van talloze doden op haar gericht zijn. ‘Hoe talloos velen reeds heeft de dood verdaan’ – ze herinnert zich die dichtregel, maar ze weet niet meer waar ze hem gelezen heeft. Ze huivert.
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The line of poetry is from Dante’s Inferno. Clearly, the repetition of talloos (countless) is crucial to this paragraph. Unfor- tunately, ‘countless’ isn’t in Dante’s original Italian: e dietro la venia si lunga tratta / di gente, ch'io non averei creduto / che morte tanta n'avesse difatta. Instead, it’s a free translation of tanta, ‘so many.’ Hertmans is loosely quoting the Dutch translation by Ike Cialona and Peter Verstegen (2000): En zo'n sleep mensen kwam er achteraan dat / Ik toen pas tot het inzicht ben geraakt / Hoe talloos velen reeds de dood verdaan had. But since there’s no word quite like talloos in the Italian, the many published English translations of Dante don’t include any word like ‘countless’ or even ‘numerous’ – not that I checked all of them! I eventually decided to solve the problem simply by tampering with an existing English translation of the line so that it would include the word ‘countless.’ But which translation to use? Well, if you search for the line from the Cialona and Verstegen translation, one of the top hits is an article on Dante and Eliot. The Dutch line is quoted in a footnote to a dis- cussion of a passage from The Waste Land: ‘A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, / I had not thought death had undone so many.’ This fact alone made it tempting to use Eliot’s translation as the basis for my own. But what clinched it for me were five lines that closely follow in The Waste Land: ‘That corpse you planted last year in your garden, / Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year? / Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed? / Oh keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men, / Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again!’ Here’s another part of the same section of War and Turpentine (emphasis mine):
How must he look now... The thought makes her head reel. She wants to scratch away the soil with her nails. Eternal slumber, she thinks, eternal slumber, damn it, damn it, he’s so close to me. She grinds her teeth so hard they nearly break. Then she takes a deep breath; the dark urge to dig up the coffin has worn her out.
Again, I’m not completely sure that this was an intentional allusion to Eliot by Hertmans, but in any case, it was clear I needed to use the Eliot translation of Dante – doctored, of course, to include the word ‘countless.’ So I turned the line into hexameter: ‘What countless numbers death already has undone.’ I should acknowledge that any one particular literary reference is not very important, and most readers won’t be consciously aware of any of them. That’s why I didn’t ask Stefan Hertmans to send me a list of allusions with detailed explanations. On the other hand, I believe that the work of seeing how the novel is embedded in a cultural tradition, and of similarly embedding the translation in a cultural tradition, lends a different character to the final product. I think read- ers can sense this intuitively, even without knowing exactly what the author and translator have done. And whether or not I’m right about that, it’s wonderful to discover secrets, and to keep those secrets alive in the English translation, and to give them away to you now.
It takes a village... The author did answer many questions for me and even read through the entire translation carefully, pointing out to me that when Martien peeps from behind a tree at a young woman bathing nude in the forest, he is not like ‘a curious uni- corn’ (eenhoorn), but like ‘a curious squirrel’ (eekhoorn). Stefan indulgently told me that he was tempted to leave in the unicorn, for reasons I understand, but I insisted we change Martien back into a rodent. He also explained some bits of old- fashioned Flemish dialect, such as venijn – not ‘venom,’ but ‘vermin’ – and beulingen, which are sometimes ‘blood sausages’ and sometimes simply ‘offal.’ A reviewer later singled out the ‘offal’ sentence for praise: ‘Describing his own grandmother, born in the first quarter of the 19th century, he said that her black apron – he called it a pinafore – smelled like the offal of young rabbits.’ That pinafore is another story, but I have to stop somewhere. I hope I’ve made at least this one point: it takes a village to translate a novel like War and Turpentine. If there’s one thing I know how to do well, it’s getting the help I need. Besides Stefan Hertmans, Michele Hutchison and Kate Macdonald, as well as Bill Shakespeare, a host of other friends, acquaintances and professional peers patiently discussed my translation problems with me. Then Ellie Steel and the other wonderful editors at Harvill Secker worked their magic. (I could write a Part 3 about how I managed the US and UK vocabulary for the different editions, but I’m not sure who would want to read it.)◄
Villagers Stefan Hertmans, Michele Hutchison, Kate Macdonald, Ellie Steel and David McKay. See also the competition in Hi Society on page 27
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50 shades of plagiarism
Joy Burrough and Camilla Maltas report on an intriguing topic discussed by UniSIG, the ‘University’ special interest group that gives SENSE’s editors and translators who work on academic texts the pleasant opportunity to meet, network and share experiences
At UniSIG’s first meeting of 2017, members turned up to hear Dr Annemieke Meijer (left), who coordinates the Writing and Skills Centre at University College Utrecht (UCU), speak on ‘Understanding, detecting and dealing with plagiarism’. Nowadays, electronic tools are used to routinely check whether student work contains plagiarism. Annemieke described how when UCU students upload their written work, they have to agree to it being checked. The Turnitin software used for this draws on the massive Ephorus database of papers, books and student papers. We had plenty of questions about the effectiveness of the procedure, and several members were able to add to Annemieke’s answers on the basis of their own experience. Turning to the question why students plagiarize, Annemieke suggested several reasons. One – laziness – is intentional and therefore fraudulent. Annemieke explained that at UCU, intentional plagiarism is severely penalized. In the worst case, a student can be expelled from the college. But distinguishing between deliberate and unintentional plagiarism is difficult. There is a grey area. Another reason – a lack of writing skills – is especially common among first-year students. Novice writers may not be good at paraphrasing, or may think that if they paraphrase they don’t need to mention sources. They are not always able to distinguish between what is common knowledge and therefore doesn’t need to be attributed, and what is an idea or claim that must be linked to a reference. And they don’t always realize that they must not reproduce their own text: that’s self-plagiarism. International students pose the additional challenge of cross-cultural differences in the way plagiarism is viewed. During this part of Annemieke’s talk there were various insightful interventions from the audience. Some mem- bers mentioned their own experience as editors and teachers of academic writing, and others reflected on the challenges facing students today in this age of electronic sources in which chunks of relevant text can so easily be copied and pasted. Finally, Annemieke briefly described the process-based approach to writing instruction that is used at UCU in an attempt to prevent student plagiarism. She mentioned a website she found particularly useful for its advice on avoiding plagiarism and for examples of good practice: the Harvard Guide to Using Sources, in particular the section on Summarizing, Paraphrasing and Quoting. She also confessed to using scare tactics: making students aware of the disgrace and career repercussions of plagiarism by telling them about noteworthy cases, such as that of Annette Schavan, the German minister of education, who in 2013 was stripped of her doctorate and forced to resign.
Policies and penalties After a break for refreshments, Mike Hannay (above) moderated the discussion session, starting it off by asking members to comment on whether universities across the board took a similar approach to that used at UCU. In general, universities and colleges do have policies on and penalties for plagiarism, but may differ in how they approach it (eg, with respect to detection and requiring students to use software such as Turnitin). The discussion turned to the best method of teaching students to learn citation skills. One issue is that plagiarism is brought up in such a way that students become very fearful of making mistakes, and thus find learning the skills both confusing and daunting. At the same time, they are learning academic writing skills, often in a non-native language, which puts extra pressure on them. The group discussed the possible advantages of reframing the learning of citation skills in a positive manner, seeing it as the development of a code of academic ethics rather than the avoidance of plagiarism. One university takes a very gradual approach to the learning of these skills, starting out with academic writing skills and proceeding to paraphrasing, and finishing up with citation of sources, over the course of a three-year degree.
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The group also discussed the detection of plagiarism from the point of view of editors, and described their experiences. One member pointed out that the digital age and the availability of online information has facilitated an increase in plagia- rism due to the ease with which information can be copied and pasted. The question of what constitutes plagiarism was also discussed, particularly in the context of research articles. Another member pointed out that in publishing a series of papers on the same research, a writer might simply copy and paste the methods section as this is identical across all of the papers. Can this be considered self-plagiarism, or this acceptable? Many journals are now using software to compare and check papers that have been submitted for publication. With respect to paraphrasing, it was pointed out that simply para- phrasing is not sufficient; after all, it’s the idea that’s being copied and not merely the text. Even when paraphrasing, writ- ers will still need to adequately cite their sources. Finally, questions were raised as to what role translators and editors might have to play in the detection and signalling of plagiarism in the academic texts they receive from clients. Do editors and translators have a responsibility to report suspected plagiarism? If so, how and to whom? With an eye to using these questions as a springboard for the next UniSIG meeting, we would like to hear from any readers of eSense who have used a free plagiarism checker to check texts submitted for editing. And from anyone in SENSE particularly keen to contribute to answering the questions during the meeting. The next UniSIG meeting will be on Friday 9 June. The topic will be announced nearer the date, but it will probably be a continuation of the theme of plagiarism, as at the end of this meeting so much about this topic remained to be discussed. – Joy Burrough | Camilla Maltas ◄
Thanks & goodbye The driving force behind UniSIG has been Camilla Maltas (on the right) who has led the group with Joy Burrough ever since the duo set it up in July 2015 (see eSense 38). At this meeting, Camilla announced she had to step down as co-convener because her new job as an in-house translator leaves her no time for academic edit- ing. The meeting expressed its appreciation for Camilla’s input in the past two years, especially as SENSE’s very popular Guidelines for Proofreading Student Texts, (download your free copy here) and UniSIG were both her ideas. On the SENSE forum (for members only) Joy said, ‘I’d like to publicly thank Camilla for her work as co-coordinator and for being the person who inspired the setting up of both the working group on Thesis Editing and UniSIG itself. I’m sure others will join me in wishing her all the best in her new career. And Camilla, don’t forget that you are always welcome to attend any UniSIG meeting in the future.’ Camilla replied, ‘Thank you very much for your kind words, Joy. And thank you and everyone else who is and has been a part of UniSIG and the Thesis Editing working group for the opportunity to do something meaningful in our field over the last couple of years. I’ve really enjoyed developing the Guidelines with you all, and it’s been wonderful to see UniSIG flourish in its first years too, with all the discussions we’ve had that never quite seem to fit into the allocated two hours. ‘All the best to all of you,’ Camilla added, ‘in your work and in continuing to raise the profile and standard of academic editing and translation. I hope to see you around in future, at a UniSIG meeting or another SENSE event.’ Joy is happy to continue as the sole conevener for at least another year but ‘if anyone in SENSE would like to work in tandem as a co-coordinator, do please get in touch.’ You can reach Joy at this email address.◄
Related reading: Plagiarism: How to spot it and what to do about it from Wordstitch by Hazel Bird, an Advanced Professional Member of the Society for Editors and Proofreaders (SfEP)
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TECH TIP New browser extension provides free access to paywalled articles
Translating good science into a clear, well-written manuscript can be challenging, especially when you need to check current terminology. Claire Bacon, one of our members based in Germany, is a scientific language editor with more than ten years of lab- based research experience. Here she shares her experience with an app that will help you get the work done ― at the right price
I often browse the medical literature when I’m editing a manuscript, usually to get more information on the topic or to check my client’s referencing. As a research scientist, I enjoyed almost unlimited access to the scientific literature through university subscriptions. When I left to start my own editing business, reading articles for free got trickier. The number of open-access journals is increasing, but many articles are locked behind ‘paywalls’. This means that to read the full text of a particular article, you have to purchase it, or subscribe to the journal. For example, if you want to read one article from the current issue of Nature, you are looking at a hefty $32. I doubt my client will accept that add-on cost. But free versions of paywalled articles are sometimes available, if the author has uploaded it elsewhere. Impactstory is a non-profit organization committed to making research data freely available to all. On 4 April this year, they introduced Unpaywall, a new web browser extension that can retrieve open-access articles immediately and automatically. For free.
You can install Unpaywall into Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox browsers. It takes seconds and you don’t even have to restart your computer. It is an improvement on earlier initiatives. Unlike the oaDOI tool, which only retrieves open- access articles after the article’s digital object identifier (DOI) is inserted into a search box, Unpaywall works automatically, while you browse. Unlike SciHub, who are facing accusations of copyright infringement, Unpaywall retrieves articles only from legal sources. Unpaywall is pretty user friendly. A few seconds after finding an article, an Unpaywall symbol will appear at the side of your screen. If an open-access version of this article is available elsewhere, a green unlock symbol will appear. Click- ing on this symbol allows you to read it for free. A grey lock symbol tells you that no open-access version was found. At the moment, Unpaywall is reported to find a free version at least 50% of the time. Looks like this person could do with a good tech tip. Help her out Unpaywall is a step in the right direction; promoting please and earn her undying gratitude. Send in your (serious) tips to open-access publishing will make research freely available to the Editor at [email protected]. We’ll publish the best! all. That’s good news for us, and the research community. – Claire Bacon◄
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In Praise of Profanity and Scorn
In this issue, Helene Reid, our Constant Reviewer treats us to her views on two {expletive deleted} books on ― how shall we put it? ― darker language
How useful, I wonder, can a book about cursing and swearing be to the average SENSE member? I think of the last few AGMs in Utrecht, with all those serious faces of respectable translators and editors before me, or even a one-day workshop in Amersfoort, and I cannot think of a single colleague who would need the latest expletive in a translation. Well, apart from myself of course, and the few other subtitlers among us who have struggled with doe niet zo lullig, and jezus, dat is kut man! Excusez le mot. I will apologize just once for using bad language; it will have to do for the whole document. I am not going to avoid them the way Michael Adams does when he talks about an episode of American TV Series Modern Family, Little Bo Bleep (sic), in which a little girl ‘drops the F-bomb’. But then that’s only the first chapter of In Praise of Profanity. He can’t go on pussy-footing much longer (suddenly that word seems to mean something different). Sure- ly after Adam Mansbach’s wonderful ‘children’s book for grown-ups’ Go the Fuck to Sleep (2011), the word fuck has acquired a level of propriety unimagined by our parents’ generation. Google on the title and you will hear four or five respectable actors reading it out to you, unworried by the F- word. (I became immune to the prefix F- when translating a book about the violin with its F-holes.) In the first chapter, ‘Profanity, the great debate(s)’ Adams rounds up the people who have written about cursing and swearing. Kees van Deemter stands out with Not Exactly: In Praise of Vagueness (2010), his book on the semantics of adjectives. When we talk about profanities or profane words, the meaning of the word profanity depends on the speaker, his background, his religion and the situation in which the supposedly profane words were spoken. Do distin- guish between profanities and obscenities! The former go against religious precepts; the latter are simply ‘dirty words’. But then again think of the context. In the early sixties the musical Hair was all the rage and one of the lyrics caused my five-year-old son, atop an Edinburgh bus, to ask me loudly: ‘Mum, what is cunnilingus?’ Silence reigned. It was as if he had just created a four-letter word from a twelve-letter word. Or, as Adams puts it: ‘We make profanity up as we go along, not by some formula, but by the elastic negotiation of social meaning.’ Wow!
WTF is OKFICUPP? Did I learn any new words? Well this being an American book – I shouldn’t really be reviewing it – I obviously came across words that weren’t in my active vocabulary. And never will be, such as ‘bromosocial’ in the sentence: Fully bromosocial, they can’t really be homosexual. Or the verb to scrinch which comes with an exam- ple I don’t want to repeat. My own favourite swearword bugger, pronounced with a firm exclamation mark, is too British and only gets mentioned in passing. Some of the acronyms remained a mystery even after intensive Googling. But do I really want to know what OKFICUPP stands for? In Chapter 2 Adams deals with the sociology of bad language, and explains con- vincingly that swearwords can have a bonding effect: ‘I can say these bad words because I feel safe in this group. I am not going to be condemned for saying them because you know that I’m a nice girl, really.’ This chapter includes an interesting excursion into public toilets where the writings on the wall, latrinalia, represent the written-down or literary form of foul- mouthing. I am resisting the urge to quote but advise you to find out for yourself. Chapter 3 (there are four) is called ‘Expletive and Euphemism’ and his first examples are Jeepers Creepers for Jesus Christ and Fudge for Fuck! In fact four pages are devoted to euphemisms for Jesus Christ in the non-religious sense. Adams gives seven euphemisms for fuck, all beginning with F, by the way. The politer forms have become so accepted that Adams suggests that the euphemisms have become the expletive and that the relationship between the two is subtler than we
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may think. Discuss. Chimps indulge in shit slinging the way we indulge in expletive slinging only because we’re better at speaking than we are at throwing. The very phonetic construction of swearwords, full of bitter plosives and fricatives, makes them useful as swearwords the way ‘milder’ words can’t be. Chapter 4, ‘Artful Profanity’, deals largely with profanity on TV and is more interesting to American readers who will have guiltily enjoyed the verbal freedoms taken. I hope I am not making this out to be an easy book to read. It is extremely well researched, well documented, well written and presented, but light reading it is not. The front of the dust jacket is the wittiest page of the book. But it is the first book I’ve ever come across in which the footnotes and references are as delightful to read as the body text. I find In Praise of Profanity totally recommendable; a must for anyone interested in the darker corners of our language. However, I have to admit that I had become so bombarded with the American equivalents of kut, kankerhoer and klerelijer [Google them, dear reader – Ed.] that I turned for gentle relief to the very British Scorn, the wit- tiest and wickedest insults in human history by Matthew Parris. Since this book is merely a collection of scornful sayings, it does not really merit a review, but it paired too nicely with Adams’s book to let it go. Three quotes to whet your appetite: Oscar Wilde on Dickens’s Old Curios- ity Shop: ‘One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing.’ Joan Rivers on Boy George: ‘Another queen who can’t dress.’ And Margaret Atwood: ‘Wanting to meet an author because you like his books is like wanting to meet a duck because you like pâté.’ – Helene Reid◄
In Praise of Profanity Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN-13: 978-0199337583
Scorn Publisher: Profile Books ISBN-10: 1781257299 ISBN-13: 978-1781257296
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Finding creative meaning
SENSE member Vanessa Goad likes to combine the meaningful with the creative in her work, deriving inspiration and balance from regular yoga practice originating from India. Anne Hodgkinson chatted with Vanessa to find out more
First of all, a little background: Where are you from, and how did you get to the Netherlands? Born in England, I grew up mainly in Scotland, which instilled in me a love of nature. Another love brought me to the Netherlands, 21 years ago now: my Spanish husband, Rafael Reina whom I met in Greece, was already living in Amsterdam at the time. I left my job as a ship fi- nance lawyer in Greece and on moving to Amsterdam, I headed straight for Greenpeace on discovering that their international head- quarters were in Amsterdam, at the time on the Keizersgracht. Rafael and I now both also have Dutch nationality, Rafael already for some years – Brexit decided it for me.
Do you do both translating and editing? Any teaching/copywriting/ other specialization? In fact I worked for many years as a web manager on environmental campaigns for non-profit organizations. A highlight working for Green- peace was joining one of their ships in Cape Town, sailing the Atlantic and seeing turtles nesting on Ascension Island, before documenting illegal fishing as onboard web reporter. After Greenpeace, I worked for the Pew Charitable Trusts (a foundation well-known in the US for its climate research and wilderness protection), on deep-sea bottom trawling, shark protection and overfishing – latterly out of their Brussels office for four years. On returning to the Netherlands a cou- ple of years ago, I decided to again go freelance, this time also taking on translation from Dutch to English. My first project was translating the 100% Amsterdam travel guide, which seemed like a good way to reconnect with my Amsterdam roots! Vanessa Goad and her husband Rafael Reina, a music teacher So currently, I specialize in copywriting, editing and translation for at the Amsterdam Conservatory, who shares her deep interest the web, for both non-profit and corporate clients, with a dash of pho- in Sahaja Yoga meditation tography thrown in. Producing engaging, targeted text and visuals for a well-designed, user-friendly app or website (and related social media) gives me a lot of pleasure. And if I can combine my creative talents with a desire to contribute something meaningful to society, so much the better.
When and how did you get introduced to yoga and India? Which came first? Like many, I first started with hatha yoga for some physical exercise other than biking around Amsterdam and occasional walks in the Veluwe or Scottish Highlands. In the West, yoga tends to be associated with physical asanas [poses – Ed.]. In fact, yoga means ‘union with the Divine’, the physical exercises having originally been developed as a means to reach that state of union. It was only later that both my husband and I were introduced to yoga meditation. Rafael’s connection with India began shortly after he moved to the Netherlands. After hearing a talented and re- nowned singer of classical South Indian music, Jahnavi Jayaprakash, perform at Amsterdam’s Tropenmuseum, Rafael de- cided to study Carnatic music with her. We travelled several times to Bangalore together, staying with Jahnavi and her family. Rafael went on to develop his own unique programme at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam (CvA) based on the theory of Carnatic music (rhythmic techniques in particular), also completing a PhD and book on the subject.
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It was in India that we were first introduced to meditation – though in fact by a Spanish/Italian percussionist whom Rafael had met previously, and who subsequently came to study with Rafael in Amsterdam. Through him, we gradually learnt more about Sahaja Yoga meditation. India’s ancient spiritual legacy is certainly one of the reasons we love to visit India and keep returning. Today Sahaja Yoga is practised in many countries around the world thanks to the amazing personality who founded this meditation, Shri Mataji. She lived in Ghandi’s ashram as a girl, participated in India’s struggle for inde- pendence and has been recognized for her spiritual life-work spreading inner peace in the form of Sahaja Yoga (you can read more about Shri Mataji on her website). So, in my case you could say from Greenpeace to inner peace! Though really they are two sides of the same coin.
Do you practise regularly? Yoga clearly affects one’s physical and mental well-being – do you find that that it helps your work in some other way beyond stress relief (helping creative juices flow, for example, or allowing you to manage pro- jects better)? Meditation is now an integral part of my life. I meditate every day, once in the morning for anywhere between five and 50 minutes, and again in the evening usually for around half an hour. Of course, it definitely helps the stress levels. What’s rather unique about this form of yoga is that it starts with the experience of self-realization – the ultimate goal of most other forms of yoga. Then you need to meditate regularly to maintain and deepen this experience. The main cause of stress is the fact that our minds are constantly busy. Through this meditation anyone can reach a state of thoughtless awareness, if they meditate regularly. If I meditate in the morning my day just runs more smoothly from start to finish. So that helps with managing the many projects that I always seem to have running at any one time, and to stay focused! If I meditate in the evening, I sleep better. And it goes much beyond than that. Through this meditation you become generally more balanced, but also develop various qualities within yourself such as creativity, and become more able to simply en- joy – I have never felt as much real joy as through this form of meditation. It can be a life-changing experience.
I’ve heard that one of your creative pro- jects was writing opera librettos. Are they connected to India? In addition to teaching at the CvA, Rafael is also a composer of contemporary classical music, and I was fortunate enough to be involved in writing various creative texts to accompany his compositions, including two opera librettos. (I also enjoy writing poetry.) Rafael’s last opera, HesseIndia was indeed connected to India. Based loosely around the book Siddhartha by Herman Hesse, it combined elements from Carnatic and con- temporary Western music and theatre. I wrote the text for the Higher Consciousness that Hesse strove to reach in a life-long search. The opera was performed with fan- tastic musicians from the Netherlands and a German theatre and dance group, in Austria, Germany and the Netherlands.
You also take photos – is this something you integrate in your work or is it a hobby? Visiting New Zealand in 2016, Vanessa rose before dawn to photograph the Tasman Lake in Aoraki Mt Cook National Park. Photo © Peter van Cuijck Both really. Most recently I took photos of school orchestras from around the Nether- lands competing at the Orkestival in Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw, and of a flamenco/Indian fusion concert at the Amstelkerk that was sold out after we ran a successful campaign on Facebook. I particularly enjoy visually telling the story of an event. It all started onboard the MV Greenpeace, where I was combining sound files with imag- es to create some of the earliest webcasts (very interesting in high seas)! I then went on to take pho- tos of delegates at international environmental meetings, such as the IPCC, for the International Institute for Sustainable Development. In December last year, I had the fortune to travel to India to take photographs for Nirmala’s Children, a foundation that helps orphaned children and young people in India. This summer Rafael and I will again travel to India combining work with a long-overdue visit to Bangalore. – Anne Hodgkinson◄
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How to be a monolingual Anglosplaining jerk
Alison Edwards-Lange aka The Rogue Linguist, is a free-range researcher, translator, editor, writer and lover of tennis, infra-structure and collared shirts done all the way up
In his book The relocation of English the linguist Mario Saraceni describes getting a bite to eat one night in Luang Prabang, a small town in Laos. The food stall was popular with foreigners and ‘[i]t was normal that there would be about twenty or thirty people of different nationalities eating and talking together. English was used as a lingua franca and conversations were smooth.’ Until a young Brit asked the owner for something. At this ‘[t]he owner looked at his customer with a puz- zled expression and asked him if he could speak English’. As Saraceni – himself originally from Italy – continues,
The Englishman, a little annoyed, repeated his request, adding a few decibels to his utterance for the sake of clarity, but still failing to make himself understood by the owner. At that point I decided to intervene and I volunteered to ‘translate’ what the young man was trying to say, and the owner finally understood. My ‘translation’ was not into Lao, but into English.
What was it that the Englishman had such trouble getting across? As it turns out, he wanted nothing more complicated than ‘plain water’. The problem was that he
was using his own local variety of English, popularly known as ‘Estuary English’, and did not seem to be aware that the glottal stop he was producing in his pronunciation of ‘water’ as /wɔʔə/ made the word totally incomprehensible to the owner of the food stall, thus causing the only instance of communica- tion breakdown of that evening.
In a world where English ‘native’ speakers haven’t quite cottoned on to the fact that they are now vastly outnumbered by ‘non-native’ speakers (I use the scare quotes deliberately, but that’s another post in itself), it is native speakers who are often the cause of communication breakdowns. Having never gone through the painstaking process of learning a foreign language, many native speakers lack aware- ness of the basic accommodation skills that oil the wheels of international communication. And so they simply plough on with the English they grew up with in the Scottish Highlands or out the back of woop-woop in Australia.
So without further ado, here are 10 ways to know if you’re being a monolingual Anglosplaining jerk. 1. You refuse to watch The Bridge because it has subtitles. No, scratch that – it’s news to you that there is anything other than a Gillian Anderson version. 2. You don’t bother to learn basic greetings and pleasantries when travelling, even to places where Hello is … Hallo.
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3. When your neighbour Ulrich tells you he’s been sinking about buying some new lederhosen, you have no clue, not the faintest idea, cannot possibly imagine what he might be trying to say. 4. You think of non-native English speakers as having ‘an accent’. Guess what? You have one too! It’s no more possible to have ‘no’ accent than it is to have ‘no’ eye colour, unless of course you’re an anime character. 5. You’re genuinely surprised that not all non-native speakers aspire to sound like you. For many, losing their ac- cent would mean losing a part of their identity. Also, they piss themselves laughing when you say ‘crumpet’. 6. You’re nothing short of scandalised when an idle dinner party conversation reveals that your friend Natalya from Vladivostok – someone you went to grad school with, someone you thought you knew – hasn’t read Finnegan’s Wake. When’s the last time you picked up Крейцерова соната? 7. Having never learnt another language yourself, you have no clue how to accommodate to people who speak it as their umpteenth language. So you alternate between not adjusting your speech at all (‘Bit of a sticky wicket for your lot, eh, these new immigration controls?’) and mistaking being foreign for being severely brain dead (this is formally known as the Steve McLaren). 8. You went on holiday to Myanmar – which was big enough of you already, thank you very much – and when the tea lady in Bagan failed to understand your request for organic marigold loose-leaf tea with soy you sighed and muttered under your breath ‘And of course they don’t even speak English, well isn’t that just perfect.’ 9. You find it perfectly plausible that because the Chinese have no past tense, they’re still mad at Japan because it feels like the war is still happening now. So, okay, this one was (unverifiably) attributed to the economist Keith Chen, who is actually bilingual. Still. Also, google him – if you’ve ever wondered what a scrap between an economist and all the linguists would look like, you’re in for a treat. 10. You take the liberty of ‘correcting’ the English of your friend/colleague/classmate Deepa from Delhi. You even imagine she appreciates it. Then she points out that English is her first language too. You Anglosplaining jerk.
Sum up indy scholar in three words Researching, writing, publishing. It’s a lot like being an affiliated scholar, except I get to cherry-pick the best bits of academia. And that without having to get dressed.
So you just woke up one day and decided it was for you? Towards the end of my PhD in linguistics from Cambridge, I got interested in the idea of a humane academia. I was bothered by the dodgy incentives in academia today. Having to game the system in order to land grants (‘just’ doing high- quality research is not enough). The emphasis on output at any cost (fraud is a systemic problem, it’s not just a few bad apples). In my case – less sinister but equally disheartening – I found myself spending all my time writing grant applica- tions about projects I wanted to do, instead of actually do- ing them.
That’s all well and good, but how do you fund it? I’d already been working as a translator and editor and, like anyone who’s painstakingly built up a client list, I couldn’t bear to let it go when I started my PhD. So I kept it up. Only later did I realise my part-time business was more than just a sideline. It was a way to buy my freedom – to be an academic without being at the mercy of the academy. It allows me to make a decent living, while also pursuing my intellectual passions on my own terms. – Alison Edwards-Lange ◄ A version of this post, including the memes appropriated here, appeared previously on The Rogue Linguist blog
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So you want to be an editor
Ruth E. Thaler-Carter is an award-winning writer, editor, proofreader, desktop publisher and speaker whose motto is ‘I can write about anything!’ She owns Communication Central and as a mentor contributes regularly to Rich Adin’s An American Editor blog. Here she shares some good advice on the basics, especially for starters in the freelance editing business
Someone recently posted to an editors’ group on Facebook: ‘I’ve read the official list on how to become an editor: 1. Call yourself an editor 2. Start editing.’ We know that it takes a lot more than those two steps! In the poster’s defense, she followed that ‘list’ by asking how colleagues got started in edit- ing, and might have intended it as somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but social media is full of people who say they want to work as editors or proofread- ers, either in-house or freelance, with no clue about what it takes to be such a professional. Being an editor is a laudable goal; editors are essential to finished works, whether in print or online, books on paper or electronic devices, magazines or journals, newspapers or newsletters, articles or essays, blogs or websites, even ads – that readers can follow and understand easily. However, it does take more than a degree in or teaching English, noticing errors in your daily newspaper and the books you read, or just saying ‘I am an editor’ to be a skilled professional who adds value to someone’s writing work and deserves to be paid well for that work. Most readers of eSense are probably already experienced professionals, but equally probably often get those classic ‘How do I get paid to edit?’ or ‘How do I get started in editing?’ inquiries. Here are some tips for you your- self or for those who ask you what it takes to be a Ruth E. Thaler-Carter has been a full-time professional. freelance wordworker since 1985.
Important skills It takes a number of skills and characteristics to become an editor or a proofreader: An excellent knowledge of spelling, grammar, punctuation and usage, so ingrained that you rarely have to double- check such aspects of a document – but also so realistic that you know when to stop and check. That is often a result of strong training back in grade school or high school, or self-training later on in life. A sharp eye for consistency and accuracy, even if you aren’t doing fact-checking (that’s a separate step or process, although some editors include fact-checking in their services and most will flag items of fact that seem a bit off for the author or client to check and fix). Some of us seem to have been born with this skill, but it’s also something you can train yourself in. Detail-oriented – what some people might call nitpicky, but professionals know is essential to catching errors and in- consistencies. Organized – both for yourself, in terms of following a regular process or approach, and for the client or project, in terms of doing or suggesting what a document needs to ensure a logical flow of information. Self-effacing, because the author’s voice rules; if your ego needs the visibility of bylines, be the writer. Tactful in dealing with colleagues, authors or clients, some of whom can be difficult to work with and some of whom may have delicate egos where their projects are concerned. It takes skill and tact to ask the right questions or point out problems in a way that doesn’t upset the author/client. Authors with hurt feelings won’t respond well to edits. Tolerance for jargon – knowing when it has to remain in a document, which can be the case in some fields or professions; some jargon is a term of art.►
This is a modified version of the original article available at An American Editor and is reprinted with the permission of the author and An American Editor Ltd. Copyright 2017 by Ruth E. Thaler-Carter and An American Editor Ltd. All rights reserved.
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A good memory – for new facts, cross-pollination of information, style guidelines and the ways things are done in dif- ferent parts of a manuscript. The sharper your memory, the less time you’ll have to spend on checking and looking up things in a manuscript.
Tools of the trade To work effectively and professionally as an editor, you need: Internet access, because editing today is a global business and because the internet is how most of us will be found, receive and send back projects, communicate with clients and colleagues, do research, double-check style elements, etc. Microsoft Word (Mac or PC), which is the leading word-processing program of the day, no matter how many of us hate it. Just remember not to rely exclusively on its spell- and grammar-check functions, because they are not fool- proof. Spellcheck will not flag correctly spelled words that are the wrong choice or an inadvertently repeated phrase, and the grammar-check is infamous for its inaccuracies. Adobe Acrobat or other ‘PDF’ maker/editor, since an increasing number of clients expect editors to work on docu- ments in that format. Style manuals as appropriate for the types of documents you might edit – not just having the manual at hand, but knowing it well, and knowing when to check either the book or the online version, whether to refresh and confirm your instincts or defend a change to a client. (Anyone who doesn’t know what a style manual is has a ways to go be- fore being able to say ‘I’m a professional editor.’) Dictionaries, even if you’re a skilled speller, because you never know when a new word might pop up, a client might question one of your corrections, or you might suddenly draw a blank on the correct spelling of a word. Guides to grammar and usage, to provide refreshers or reminders and, again, defend changes to clients as needed. Memberships of professional organizations such as the EFA, SENSE, MET, SfEP, etc., and/or online forums like Copyed- iting-L and the Editors Association of Earth group on Facebook, for access to colleagues and resources you might need when projects present especially knotty problems or you could just use some encouragement and advice. Productivity resources, for automating much of the editorial process (especially for academic or large projects), so your brain and eyes are more free to focus on substance and you can work more quickly, which is especially important if you plan to freelance: Jack Lyon’s Editor’s Toolkit Plus 2014 from The Editorium, which contains The Editorium’s most widely used macros in a single package; Daniel Heuman’s PerfectIt from Intelligent Editing; Paul Beverly’s mac- ros; and Rich Adin’s EditTools from wordsnSync.
Optional but still useful: Fax capability, because some clients still like to send or receive pro- jects that way or use faxing for contracts, and knowledge of proofreading marks and clear printing/handwriting, for those projects that clients ask to be edited on paper. Again, these requests may not arise often, but they do still come up, as I know from current experience. Proofreading marks also can be used as stamps when editing or proofing PDFs.
Words of wisdom One of my Facebook editing colleagues reported recently that Ann Goldstein, copy editor at the New Yorker magazine and also a translator, recently told an audience at a writers’ confer- ence in Auckland, New Zealand, that ‘if you want to be a good editor, the most important thing is to read. Read a lot!’ I would concur. The more you read, the better you will edit. Reading in a wide range of fields and a variety of publications, from books to magazines to newspapers to blogs and newsletters, will expand your sense of what works in written material, as well as add to your general knowledge of trends and events that might crop up in the works you edit. – Ruth E. Thaler-Carter►
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A hard rain’s gonna fall
The idea for WORD RAP came from SENSE’s Enid Tomkinson. Thanks Enid! Translator, language trainer and copywriter Anne Paris often unravels English idioms for her Dutch students. Here’s her take on an expression we may all know, but do we ever use it?
As an ESL trainer, I often ask my Dutch students to name some of the most commonly used English idioms they know. The answers are always ‘Piece of cake’, ‘Under the weather’ and ‘It’s raining cats and dogs’. Excuse me? Used by whom? As native speakers, we all know what it means, but I for one have never actually used it. And the mini-survey I recently conducted among friends and acquaintances brought me to the same conclusion. Moreover, Google’s Ngram viewer, which lets you look up the frequency of word use (yes I’ve done my homework!), shows that the use of this expression has been dwin- dling away since the 1930s. It seems that ‘It’s raining cats and dogs’ is a commonly used idiom here, but only among Dutch speakers of English. The origin of the phrase is a bit cloudy. It appears to have been around since the 1600s, the most popular explanation being that after a cloudburst gutters would overflow with a torrent of filth including dead animals like cats and dogs. However, that doesn’t explain the equally pic- turesque or comical/scary versions of the idiom in other languages, such as our very own Dutch ‘It’s raining old women’, the Faroe Islands’ ‘It’s rain- ing pilot whales’ and the Czech Re- public’s ‘It’s raining tractors’ (ouch!). Compared with our cats and dogs, they all sound pretty hard and painful to me; remember to take a hard hat next time you visit Prague. Of course, I gathered all this information from our trusted friend Google, and I couldn’t find the origins of any of them. So maybe all those weird ex- pressions are, after all, as uncommon in their native languages as ‘It’s rain- ing cats and dogs’ is in our own. Hav- ing said that, one respondent to my survey did confirm its use: ‘Oh yes, we use it in American English. It’s cur- rently raining cats and dogs. In fact, I just stepped in a poodle.’ – Anne Paris◄ Image James Chapman, Illustrations Of Wise Proverbs. See also: Chapmanago
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HI SOCIETY
Translation by David McKay longlisted, twice The English translation of War and Turpentine by David McKay was on the longlists for the Man Booker International Prize and the US-based Best Translated Book Award (BTBA). In fact, it was the only translation published in 2016 to be a con- tender for both of these highly prestigious prizes. Although David’s translation didn’t make it through to the final of the Man Booker, he did remain in the running for BTBA2017, and even if he didn’t win this year’s prize, being shortlisted is surely an honour in itself. See David’s second and concluding part of his account of the challenges he faced in translating this bestselling book on page 13.
Competition for ALL eSense readers David McKay invites perspicacious readers of War and Turpentine to point out the hidden reference to a classic Belgian comic book series, which was placed there by the author and has survived un- scathed in the English edition. This allusion is in the opening pages of the book, which you can read for free on your Kindle or here. The lucky first finder will receive a free copy of either the US hard- cover edition of War and Turpentine or the recent Penguin Book of Dutch Short Stories (your choice). Please mail your entries to David at [email protected]◄
‘True humility’ sums up tax seminar The tax seminar held earlier this year was a bit of a curate’s egg: ‘Good in parts’, reports Robert Coupe, SENSE Workshop Coordinator. ‘The good parts included the large attendance, which was very gratifying. And the presenters from AAme Adviseurs (a tax/accountancy company specialized in working with expat clients) knew their stuff. They tackled all the ques- tions asked – and those were legion. On the ‘less good’ side, one topic – the 30% regeling – was allocated too much time, since it concerned virtually no-one in the room. Despite this, members seemed to be pleased that Robert has reinstated a venerable SENSE tradition. ‘The survey results were positive overall, and most people said they had learned something new. The general opinion was that this sort of tax session should be scheduled regularly, only differently…’◄
The origin of curate’s egg is George du Maurier’s cartoon Right Reverend Host. ‘I’m afraid you've got a bad Egg, Mr. Jones!’ ‘True Humility’, printed in the British satirical magazine The Curate. ‘Oh no, my Lord, I assure you! Parts of it are excellent!’ Punch in November 1895.
Executive Committee archives & email now on Google Drive As part of the overall upgrade to SENSE online – work on the new website has entered its final development phase and is undergoing beta testing – the Executive Committee has moved the EC archives to Google Drive. ‘The Drive is intuitive to use and easy to find things in,’ explains SENSE Chair Jenny Zonneveld. ‘It’s a big improvement on the old system that scat- tered the uploaded EC files about illogically. Now we just “drag and drop” the reports we make for meetings in our shared space on the Drive.’ Keeping EC files off SENSE 2.0 makes sense for security reasons, a benefit that also applies to the EC’s new email addresses. ‘Google’s spam filter is excellent,’ agrees Jenny, ‘though we’ll check it regularly to fish out genuine mails. Most importantly, now everyone on the EC has their own @sense-online.nl address which means we can separate our personal mail from SENSE business mail.’ Besides these benefits, the Drive facilitates SENSE continuity because it simplifies the handover of crucial material to new EC members.◄
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Upcoming SENSE events on the CPD and social calendar SENSE runs an annual programme of events. The Society’s continuing professional development (CPD) workshops are cur- rently coordinated by Robert Coupe. Meanwhile, Special Interest Group (SIG) events and social gatherings are arranged by the SIG conveners. SIG meetings are always open to all members and guests. Non-members may apply to attend select CPD workshops a fortnight after registration has opened to members (first-come basis).
8 May 2017 SIG Far North (social/peer-sharing) Join us in De Oude Wacht, Groningen for a spirited conversation about our adventures in the English- language business and other goings-on up here in the far north. Drinks are on SENSE and dinner (if desired) is on you. Visitors and new members are very welcome! Co-convener: Erin Goedhart-Stallings
10 May 2017 Utrecht Translation SIG (CPD/peer-sharing) Following the success of the topic for our March meeting – on a bit of 18th-century Dutch involving the composer Georg Friedrich Händel – our topic this time around is ‘back translations’. We’ll have several short texts to work on, one fiction, one literary non-fiction, and one exercise for schoolkids. We meet at Park Plaza in Utrecht, which is quite easy to get to from Centraal Station. Convener: Anne Hodgkinson
31 May 2017 From Dunglish to...? Editing non-native English (CPD workshop, 6 PE points) This workshop sold out within two days, and that’s no wonder because Joy Burrough is something of a legend in SENSE: a Founding Mother of the Society, internationally renowned for her editing and for her teaching of editing, including her workshops, and author of the best-selling Righting English that’s Gone Dutch. The highly successful workshops Joy has presented to SENSE in the past focused on the editing of Dutch-authored English. She has now broad- ened the scope, as she explains: ‘Drawing on workshops on editing non-native English given success- fully at conferences in Portugal, Spain, Italy, the UK and for the European Commission, this full-day workshop aims to expand participants’ skills beyond editing Dutch-authored English to editing other non-native English texts.’ Workshop coordinator: Robert Coupe
3 June 2017 SENSE Educators SIG – ICT in the classroom with guest speaker Patricia van Slobbe (CPD) Patricia van Slobbe is an expert in effective ICT use in the classroom. She is the co-author of Kleppen Dicht! Effectief Leren met ICT, a book that encourages teachers to experiment with accessible technology in the classroom to enhance their connection with learners. During the presentation, we will explore the possibilities of using online tools to enforce the impact of pedagogical strategies. We will focus on how ICT can support us and help us to heighten the impact of our teaching. Convener: David Barick
9 June 2017 UniSIG – Detecting, signalling and reporting plagiarism in academic texts (CPD) Following up on our previous meeting [see page 15], this time our topic is ‘The possible role of editors and translators in the detection, signalling and reporting of plagiarism in academic texts’. Plagiarism is not confined to undergraduates – it may crop up in texts by graduates and tenured academics. So, should editors and translators look out for plagiarism? Do we have a responsibility to report suspect cases? If so, how and to whom? I would like to hear from anyone who has used a free plagiarism checker. Convener: Joy Burrough
14 June 2017 ENCORE – From Dunglish to...? Editing non-native English (CPD workshop, 6 PE points) Due to the great demand for this workshop, Joy Burrough has kindly agreed to present it again. At time of writing only four places were still open. Non-members are welcome but you should hurry to register if you want to attend.
For more details on events and to register for any of the above, please go to the SENSE Events page.◄
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SENSE sponsors Nationaal Vertaalcongres 2017 In a new departure for the Society, SENSE has begun pro-actively promoting the benefits of membership to students and seasoned professionals alike. Two representatives, Jenny Zonneveld (Chair) and Liz van Gerrevink (Treasurer), will run the SENSE booth at the Nationaal Vertaalcongres (National Translation Conference), organized every two years by Teamwork’s Tony Parr and Marcel Lemmens, both of whom are also SENSE members. Our intrepid reps will be fielding questions in the breaks and encouraging delegates to post their (filled in) application forms in the SENSE letterbox at the booth. Besides reaching out personally to potential new members in this way, SENSE is further sponsoring this important event with a flyer in the conference material handed out to delegates.◄
Joining a society for language professionals makes SENSE Are you a language editor, translator, teacher, trainer or writer working mainly in English? Are you a student aiming to work as a language professional? Do you live in the Netherlands, or do you have a connection to the Netherlands? If so, then you could consider joining SENSE. All members – seasoned professionals or students in training, no matter what your mother tongue may be – have equal status, including voting rights, and enjoy the same benefits of membership.
SENSE offers very affordable rates for annual membership The annual fee for professionals is just €72.50 For registered students it is €36.25 – a whopping 50% discount
Extra benefit for Nationaal Vertaalcongres delgates. Complete the joining procedure before 16 June and receive 25% discount on the full price for members to attend our Professional Development Day to be held on 23 September 2017.
Go to our Join page – www.sense-online.nl/join – for more information about SENSE and the Membership Application Form which you can fill in online. If you have any questions, please send a message to [email protected]. We look forward to hearing from you!
A very warm welcome to SENSE Please join us in giving a very warm welcome to our new members: Chitralekha Manohar in Chennai, India (pictured left), Aline Valster from Neede in the east of the Netherlands, Ammerins Moss-de Boer from Bitgummole, up in the far north of the Netherlands, Julia Heidstra, from De Hoef, Utrecht, Lynn Nikkanen in Helsinki, Finland, Michiel Jansen from Zeist in the mid- dle of the country, Wendy Rosbag (right) from Huissen in the Nederrijn, the hilly (well, relatively hilly!) area between the cities of Arnhem and Nijmegen near the German border, and last but not least, our newest member to date, Tracey Sullivan from The Hague.◄ ______
© Hilary B. Price Rhymes with Orange
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