1108. This week, we talk to Heddwen Newton about some of the unique and untranslatable words she's discovered while translating. She shares her thoughts on why the translation profession is being hit hard by AI and the kind of work that is likely to be lost. We also hear her book recommendations, including a novel and a nonfiction book about the history of the Oxford English Dictionary.
1108. This week, we talk to Heddwen Newton about some of the unique and untranslatable words she's discovered while translating. She shares her thoughts on why the translation profession is being hit hard by AI and the kind of work that is likely to be lost. We also hear her book recommendations, including a novel and a nonfiction book about the history of the Oxford English Dictionary.
This episode was originally a bonus episode released in March for people who support the show, the Grammarpaloozians. If you'd like to support the show, and get ad-free podcasts and bonuses right away, visit quickanddirtytips.com/bonus for more information.
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Grammar Girl here, I'm Mignon Fogarty, and just a heads-up that today's show was originally a bonus episode released back in March for people who support the show, the Grammarpaloozians.
If YOU like what we do every week and want to support the show — and get ad-free podcasts and these bonuses right away — become a Grammarpaloozian! Visit quickanddirtytips.com/bonus to learn more.
And now, on to the show.
MIGNON: Greetings, Grammarpaloozians. I'm here with Heddwen Newton. We just did the main segment where we talked about all sorts of fabulous slang and new words and the Mandela Effect and Yosemite Sam. It was fabulous. If you haven't listened to it, go check it out. But in this bonus segment, let me, first let me tell you who Heddwen is.
Heddwen is an English teacher and translator in Germany who was raised in a bilingual household. She has a newsletter that I love called English in Progress. It comes out every couple of months or so, every month or two, but she also has a translation site where she helps people find English translations for Dutch words that are hard to translate.
So we're going to talk about some of those difficult-to-translate words and also get her book recommendations. Heddwen Newton, welcome to the Grammarpalooza bonus segment.
HEDDWEN: Thank you so much.
MIGNON: Yeah. It's funny because I was not aware of your translation work. I only knew your English in Progress newsletter. But then, as I was sort of researching you for this episode, I became fascinated with the whole other part of what you do in these untranslatable Dutch words. And it was hilarious because it immediately brought home to me how true it is. I went to your website, and I presume it's in Dutch, and Google had the button that says "Translate this website." I clicked that button, and almost none of it made sense. It was definitely difficult for Google to translate. How did you get into doing this work?
HEDDWEN: Yeah, I started out, well maybe not life, but I started out my working life as a translator a long time ago. I was working behind the bar in a café in Nijmegen in the Netherlands, because that's where I'm from. I'm actually from the Netherlands, and a guy said, "Hey, I heard that you're bilingual. I heard that you were raised in English. Can you translate this for me?” And I've been a translator ever since. I translate from Dutch into English. And I'm fascinated with words, so I was immediately fascinated whenever I found a word or a phrase that just didn't seem to exist in English. Then much later, I decided, well, I’ve kind of collected all of these for myself, for my own translation work. Why not put them into a website because it might be helpful to other people? And it has been. Yeah, and I think it's amazing that you found it because, as you say, it is in Dutch, and I usually don't talk about it very much with my English-speaking friends or my English-speaking life. But yeah.
MIGNON: Yeah, and it looks like a very robust website, too. There's a lot there. So what are some of these Dutch phrases that are so hard to translate?
HEDDWEN: Yeah, so I was thinking, because there's a lot of them, but I was thinking what would be interesting to talk about for an English-speaking audience? And there are actually two really good Dutch words that, if you think about it, it's crazy that English doesn't have them. It's really a kind of gap in the lexicon. The first one is that in Dutch, and in quite a few other languages, we have the word "how manyth." So you would start a question with "The how manyth time is this that you were late this week?" Then the answer would be “The third,” which, of course, you just cannot say that in English. You have to say, "How many times have you been late this week?" "Well, three times." That works too, but you can't ask a question and have the answer be "The third." So the example is, "What place did you finish in that competition?" "Fourth place," but in Dutch, you would say, "The how manyth place did you achieve?"
MIGNON: Oh, yeah.
HEDDWEN: And then the one that I find is truly untranslatable is, "The how manyth president was John F. Kennedy?" So, he was the 35th. And then I really, really thought, like, how would you say that in English so that the answer is “The 35th”? The only thing that I came up with is, "In a chronological list of presidents, which one was John F. Kennedy?" Which is ridiculous!
MIGNON: Yeah. I'm sitting here racking my brain trying to think of how I would ask that question, and I'm not coming up with anything.
HEDDWEN: So, there you go. So in Dutch, that is "hoeveelste," which literally translates to "how manyth," except in English, it's not a word. And in Dutch, it is a word.
MIGNON: That'd be very useful to have.
HEDDWEN: It would, wouldn't it? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's funny. And then the other one that bothers every single Dutch person once a year is that in Dutch, and only in Dutch—now this is something that there might be some languages in the world that have this too, but I have really done quite a bit of research, and I cannot find another language that does this—we have an adjective for having your birthday. So if it's your birthday, then you are "birthday-y." “Hey, that person is birthday-y today.” “My sister is birthday-y today. She is my birthday-y sister.”
MIGNON: That's…okay. So I was going to ask you to use it in a sentence, but you did. And still, I'm finding it like, okay, but birthday-y, like I would never attempt to describe someone that way because I guess there's no word for it.
HEDDWEN: Yes, exactly. You don't say it because you can't, but Dutch people, oh, they miss this in English. It's really hard for us. Every, as I say, once a year, it's really hard for us to be missing this word. And in one particular phrase that I always really like to ask my friends, it's their birthday, and I congratulate them on their birthday via text message. And I love asking the question, "Do you feel birthday-y yet?” Which I guess I would translate it as something like, "Do you feel celebrated yet?" or something like that. But it's more, it's about “Are people giving you special attention?” but also “Do you feel special in yourself today?” And it has all these kinds of elements in it, which I am not able to say in English at all.
MIGNON: Yeah. I feel like in the back of my mind there are other adjectives we make up that we add "y" to the end, but none of them are coming to mind. “Do I feel painter-y today?” If I'm going to paint a room, like, “Oh, do I feel painter-y today or not?”
HEDDWEN: That is a great comparison. Yes, I would say that "Do I feel painter-y" really captures it, and then in Dutch we can say, "Do you feel birthday-y?"
MIGNON: Is that a more common thing in Dutch to have adjectives like that that work that way? Are there others too?
HEDDWEN: That's a great question. I'm gonna say no, I don't think so. I think normally, because of course Dutch and English they’re related, right? They're the most, apart from like Scots and Frisian. The biggest language that is the most closely related to English is Dutch. Something like that?
MIGNON: Yeah. No, when I think about moving to another country, I look at the language charts and I'm like, maybe I could go to the Netherlands because that's the easiest language to learn.
HEDDWEN: Which it is, right? It is actually the easiest language for English speakers to learn. English speakers who are actually learning Dutch will not agree with me because we do have quite a tricky grammar, and you need to get your head around it. It bothers English speakers very much. So unfortunately, it's the easiest. That doesn't mean that it's easy, but they are very closely related. So adjectives in general, it’s the same kind of usage. I would say that “jarig,” "birthday-y" is kind of an exception. But yeah, there it is. And as I say, it bothers us every single year.
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MIGNON: Yeah. Oh, that's fascinating. You'll have to tell me when your birthday is so I can ask you that question on your birthday. That is great. I just love your translation work too. But I have been reading that translation is one of the jobs that is being especially threatened by AI, and people are concerned about losing jobs. You actually have a section about that on your website.
HEDDWEN: I do, yes, but I think it's hidden away a little bit because it is a bit controversial. And, of course, I am a translator, so I move in translation circles. If you really want to rile up the translation community, you will start talking about this subject. I am seeing more and more translators move into different jobs because they cannot make money anymore. I, myself, am one of those translators. I write my website because I really enjoy it, but when it comes to paying customers, they started disappearing about three years ago. And then when ChatGPT became popular and was used by regular people, my work basically dried up completely; it's just gone. I hear a lot of other translators saying that.
It's hard to get actual numbers. I don't know why, but I haven't—there don't seem to be any real studies out there that give trustworthy, reliable data on this either way. Because there are also companies that claim—or many organizations maybe that claim—that actually there's more work for translators because of AI. The logic is, and we actually talked about this in the previous segment, that because AI is churning out so much content, ergo, there is more content to be translated, ergo, there is more work for translators. It might be true. But if it is, then that work for translators is something that we call P.E.M.T., which stands for Post-Editing Machine Translation. So, you take a translation done by a machine, and then a human being looks at it, and edits it, and makes it sound more human, takes out any mistakes, etc, etc.
That is incredibly boring work that pays incredibly little, and that often gets outsourced to very big companies who then hire smaller companies, who then hire smaller companies, who then hire smaller companies, who then hire a translator, which means that the translator has about two cents per page left as payment for this post-editing work. So, it pays very little, and it's not very nice work, and many, many translators in my circle have already stopped or are saying, "I'm so glad that I am almost at retirement age anyway," you know, things like that.
MIGNON: Yeah, that's so discouraging. And I know you had said on your website you encourage, you advise people not to go into translating because there's no jobs.
HEDDWEN: Absolutely, I feel strongly about that. Unless you speak a very unique—unique is the wrong word to use—but a language that isn't spoken by very many people and that, and that because of that reason, is not translated very well by machines because there's not enough input; there's not enough data for a ChatGPT, for example, to use. Therefore, the translations that machines make aren't very good. So if you speak... I'm not going to name any language because I'm going to tread on somebody's toes by saying it’s a small language, but yeah, maybe a small Native American language, for example, those still have some work.
MIGNON: For Dutch, for example. So you're an expert in Dutch. It's one of your languages. How do you find the translation? Do you think, is it great? Is it good? Is it adequate? Like how are—and I'm sure it's changing over time—like how do you find it?
HEDDWEN: It is depressingly good. Especially ChatGPT. So, DeepL.com has been a tool that's been around for a while now. It's a company based in Germany, and it's basically a Google Translate but better. Sorry, people at Google, but DeepL just did a much better job. And it's the tool that I, as a translator, have been using for maybe the past five years or so. And I already thought that was pretty good. And then along came ChatGPT. When I put a text in ChatGPT, it makes mistakes, and that's why a human always has to read through it, because sometimes it just completely misconstrues the original, and it just says the wrong thing in a way that a human being would immediately say this is nonsense, but the machine doesn't recognize that. So you always have a human; you always need to have a human to read it as well. But honestly, sentence by sentence, it often does a better job than I could.
MIGNON: Oh my gosh.
HEDDWEN: It’s phenomenal.
MIGNON: Amazing. I imagine it depends on the nuance level of the work as well. Like it's going to be better at press releases than poetry.
HEDDWEN: Yeah, poetry and novels, I think, will always belong to human translators. And this is something, actually, this might be a good thing to tell your audience as well, because people often misunderstand this. That when I'm talking about translators losing jobs, this is not literary translators. Literary translation has always not been paid very well, but their job isn't changing very much. I think it's going to be a while. Of course, people who self-publish their work on Amazon are very happy to use ChatGPT to just translate the whole thing. But actual publicists—what are those people called? People who...
MIGNON: Publishing houses?
HEDDWEN: Actual publishing houses will still use human translators, I think, for a long time. But the translators that are losing jobs are actually a much bigger group in the translation world. They are the people who translate contracts. They are the people who translate manuals that go with microwaves. They are the people that translate. That was me—people who translate marketing texts on websites. So, I myself did tourism for a long, long time. I translated lots of descriptions of cute Dutch towns and why people from abroad should definitely come and visit them. And that's what I translated to English and that kind of stuff. Yeah, ChatGPT does an excellent job at it.
MIGNON: It's a whole new world. It's so interesting. Well, thank you. So, speaking of literary translation, let's move on to the book recommendation part. What are some books that you have recently loved that you'd like to recommend to the audience?
HEDDWEN: Yeah, so I'm actually in a book club, so I was very happy about this segment. I was like, "Yay! Let's have a look at the books that I've recently read." So, there is a very language-y book that I think is absolutely gorgeous, and I do not understand why the whole world isn't raving about this book, and it's called “Ella Minnow Pea” by Mark Dunn. Now, if you think that sounds a bit like the part in the alphabet that goes "L-M-N-O-P" then you would be right. The alphabet has a big role in this book, but it's actually spelled Ella as in the name Ella, Minnow as in the fish, and Pea as in the vegetable. So, “Ella Minnow Pea.” And I'm not going to give away what it's about because there's a trick to the book, and if you maybe read what the trick is, or "conceit" is a better word—you might think, "Oh, this is overdone," or "Oh, this is pretentious," might be the word, but it's really not. It is so gorgeous. Anybody who loves language and who loves playing with language and maybe playing Wordle and things like that should definitely read this book.
MIGNON: Excellent. I have heard of that book, but I haven't read it, so I'm going to move it up on my list.
HEDDWEN: Highly recommended, and it's not very long. It's actually quite a short book.
MIGNON: That's always a bonus.
HEDDWEN: And then, the other two books kind of go together. I have to admit that one of them I haven't read yet, but I really want to read it. They're both about the history of the Oxford Dictionary. One is the fictional work, which is “The Dictionary of Lost Words,” by Pip Williams, who kind of places a girl who didn't really exist, but she places her among all the people who started the Oxford English Dictionary, who did really exist, and she does it very, very well. She weaves this beautiful life story, which just, oh, had me crying my eyes out. So, highly, highly recommended.
And then there's a nonfiction book which only recently came out, called “The Dictionary People,” by Sarah Ogilvie. I think you would pronounce her name. I haven't read it yet, but I've heard good things.
MIGNON: Yeah. I will say I actually have read it and really enjoyed it. Yeah. Yeah. Wonderful.
HEDDWEN: I'd be interested to see how those two go together, but you haven't read “The Dictionary of Lost Words” yet.
MIGNON: No.
HEDDWEN: No. So I'd be really interested to see how those two go together.
MIGNON: Yeah. Wonderful. Those all sound so great. I just, this is becoming my favorite segment of the podcast. Thank you for those wonderful book recommendations. So, Heddwen Newton, writer of the English in Progress newsletter, which we will put a link in the show notes so people can find that. If you're extra curious, you can get from there to her Dutch translation website. And I'll put a link to that in the show notes too, because why not?
HEDDWEN: Why not?
MIGNON: Heddwen, thank you so much for joining us.
HEDDWEN: Thank you so much for having me.