Category Archives: Same words

Now, now… you can relax, but not now

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If the Danish prince Hamlet gave the English language the immortal sentence: “To be or not to be?”, so does modern-day English give us the wonder of “Now, know that first now is not the same as the last now, you know?”. Behold now, honored reader:

In the English sentence “Now, follow these steps to confirm your bank account” the word “now” actually does not mean “now” as in “this very instance”. It’s a filler-word more meant as a gentle nudge, or pause in speech, and synonymous (in this context only) with words as “next” or “please”. Or, another way to look at the uniqueness of this “now” is to realize that while the sentence above sounds pleasant and non-alarming, removing the comma and moving the “now” couple of places to the right results in the sentence “Follow these steps now to confirm your bank account”, which obviously expresses more of an urgency and somewhat of an alarm. And, interestingly enough, placing the “now” at the very end of the sentence further enhances the sense of urgency: “Follow these steps to confirm your bank account, now”.

And, of course, we have to note then in this context that in Danish, “now” does not have a double-life as as a filler-word. For Danes “now” means -ahem- now. Starting a sentence with “now” causes a sense of urgency in a Danish reader, so a direct translation of the original sentence with a leading “now”, would convey in this case the meaning but not exactly the spirit of it. In Danish, we have two words at our disposal: “Nu” means “now” (as in “this moment in time”). “Nuvel” is the Danish word we use, when we need a filler-word to let our mouth continue, while our brain pauses. It more or less is equivalent to the English “well, now..”.

And a propos, there was a very famous Danish radio- and tv-personality who so abused the word “now” in his live radio transmissions starting with the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin and all the way through 40s, 50, 60s, 70 and 80s, that the Danish word for “now” (Nu) was forever ‘added’ to his name as little gentle mockery and a Danish sign of respect (Danes, being generally reserved and easygoing people, are not very good at direct praise 🙂 ). Gunnar “Nu” Hansen (1905-1993).
And since he could talk and talk (which of course you had to be able to do as a sportsradio reporter) also a line of licorice flavored throat lozenges was named in his honor: Nu Sportspastiller. His picture was on the outside and a collectable picture of a Danish soccer-star was always inside. The line of lozenges was discontinued in 1977.

Arbeit macht rewards

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“How rewards work” was translated to “Sådan belønnes arbejde” , meaning: “This is how work is rewarded”.  Which brings up some eerie associations with the signs that used to adorn the entrances to Nazi concentration camps… 🙁
This again is an instance of a translation ambiguity starting with English having exactly the same word for the verb and the noun, here: “Reward”. Interestingly enough, in this case we DO have a similar pairing in Danish with the verb “belønne” and the noun “belønning”, except the latter is a bit old-fashioned and not used in context with modern-day Credit Card rewards programs and such. In modern Danish we use the verb “belønner” with the nouns “bonusprogram” or “præmieprogram”. So, a good translation would be: “Sådan virker bonusprogrammet”.

A domestic relations matter is not the opposite of a foreign relations matter (in this case)

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The “domestic relations matter” in the sentence “Except as expressly permitted in writing, Reward Points and awards are not transferable or assignable under any circumstances, including (i) upon death, (ii) as part of a domestic relations matter, or (iii) otherwise by operation of law.”  was translated as the opposite of “foreign relations matter”, which it obviously also can be, however not in this case, where it actually refers to a divorce and such. Probably formulating the English sentence as “…(ii) as part of a divorce settlement or property division…” would have been significantly better.

So, the translation became “Medmindre det udtrykkeligt er tilladt skriftligt af banken, kan præmiepoint og bonusser ikke overføres eller tildeles under nogen omstændigheder, herunder ved (i) død, (ii) som en del af nationale forhold, eller (iii) ellers i kraft af loven.”
It should have been: “…(ii) som følge af skilsmisse eller ejendomsfordeling,…”

Punitive damage may lead to compensatory and punitive damages

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The sentence

“Under no circumstances shall the company be liable to you or to any other person for any indirect, incidental, consequential or punitive damages arising out of…”

looks perfectly good in English, but it actually has no less than two linguistic quirks that come to the surface under translation. The first quirk is that the last one of the “damages” is a completely different beast than the first three ones. “Damage” is something unpleasant that happens to you and under that we can have indirect, incidental and consequential damage. “Damages”, on the other hand, are awarded by a court as monetary COMPENSATION for those unpleasant things, loss or injury, that happened to you. And they become “punitive” when they exceed the value of actual damage caused and are therefore a punishment. And actually, it’s not “they”, it’s “it”. Legal damages is a singular noun (see Wikipedia). Indeed in Danish we have two different words for the damage that happens to you vs. the damages you are awarded in court (the latter: more like compensation (“straferstatning”)).

The second quirky thing is the word “Punitive”. As I commented to my colleagues on the potential pitfalls of the above sentence when subjected to I18n internationalization, one of them said “but wait, I don’t see anything wrong, I can easily see how you can suffer damage that is punitive”. Indeed you can. But that has to do with the dual meaning in English of the word “punitive”: Punitive in this context, when attached to Damages, means: “as a punishment”, but the word Punitive is also used in non-legal speech to mean “terminal” or “decisive”, “grueling” or “inflictive”, like in a “punitive blow to the head”, i.e. a SERIOUS blow to the head (from which it is hard to recover).

So, YES, you can be damaged punitively (meaning: ~seriously, irrecoverably) as the result of something bad happening to you, but “punitive damages” is something else.

Ken surging onto Barbie: plastic surgery? Disecting the joke linguistically: little deep, my apology!

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“Plastic surgeon”… Is that a surgeon made of plastic? Or maybe a surgeon specializing in operating on latex dolls? (George Costanza of “Seinfeld” fame and his stint as latex salesman at Vandelay Industries come to mind, or to those Scandinavian, the history’s probably one and only hit song dedicated to an inflatable doll. It was 1969 and it was Swedish) :-).
Of course we know (somehow) that a plastic surgeon in English is also known as a cosmetic surgeon and is a live person operating (and funny enough: NOT “surging”, similar word, seemingly with the same root, but with a quite different meaning) on live people.
Why the confusion, then? It is because in this context “plastic” is an adjective. It’s derived from the Greek word ‘plastikos’ meaning to mold or shape. It so happens that it’s the same word in English as the noun “Plastic”, which refers to usually stiff objects made out of a plastic (<–adjective) material, a material to which we often refer to as simply “Plastic” (<–noun). And voilá: an easy joke.
A deficiency (or difficulty) of English is that often a noun and an adjective version of a word is the same word: “bet on the red (<–noun)” and “the red (<–adjective) bike”. And that then leads to another issue with the English language: since the two forms of a word are often the same, some times a different (correct) adjective form exists, but is not used in daily speech. Case in point: “Face surgeon”. Yes, we all know it’s the doctor operating on your face. But since “face” here is supposed to be an adjective describing the surgeon, we are actually here strictly speaking describing a surgeon facing us (in a crowd). Like in “face value” (the value you can see). The correct wording is actually “Facial surgeon”, because “Facial” is the adjective pertaining to what happens to a face.
But nobody talks like that.
Linguists, however, sometimes have to understand nuances between how a language should be used and how it is actually used, because otherwise it can come out really funny at the other end.