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"English as it is usually written is too terse and direct" If only. Too many people waste too many words dancing around what they really mean to say. English
by jamesbritt 16y ago
"English as it is usually written is too terse and direct"
If only. Too many people waste too many words dancing around what they really mean to say.
English can be terse and direct (love those anglo-saxon words!), but having glommed so much from so many other languages it affords endless variety for circumlocution.
- alextp 16y agoNot endless. I'm brazillian, and more than once when translating a good, terse, phrase in english to portuguese I felt the need to "pad it up" with rethorical and discourse markers that have no meaning in themselves; conversely, when translating from portuguese to english most of a sentence becomes unnecessary and the final result is a lot terser. I can give you examples if you want.
- sp332 16y agoWell, I'd like some examples :-)
- alextp 16y agoA sentence I extracted from a particularly idiomatic piece of portuguese: > O primeiro, presença ofuscante na consciência social, tem nome definido e inscrição temporal supostamente clara: a crise financeira global. If you translate it idiomatically to English you have > The first of them is the global financial crisis. But if you translate if literally you have > The first, a blinding presence in the social consciousness, has a definite name and a supposedly clear temporal inscription: the global financial crysis. You will not believe me, but in portuguese all this extra unnecessary rhetoric reads a lot better than the equivalent in english. Also, there is a tendency in portuguese to write using as erudite a word as you can think of, which in English mostly sounds pathetic. I'm looking for better examples right now.
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- jamesbritt 16y agoThis looks like translating academic or corporate English into plain English. And in your example omitting that leading clause from the English translation changes the tone and content (for better or worse) so they do not say the same thing. Or is there really no shorter way to say "the global finacial crisis" in Portugese? There may be cultural inclinations for people to dress up their writing but I don't see that one language is innately more terse or direct.
- gaustin 16y agoTerse and direct aren't Anglo-Saxon. Terse is from Latin, via French (16th century). Direct is from Latin (14th century).
- jamesbritt 16y agoAnd "pedant" comes from French. :)