A few months ago, while languidly browsing the second-hand book tent at the west country festival I attend every late summer and start look forward to as soon as the line-up is published in late January, I happened to overhear a conversation between a couple close by, who had picked up a copy of something whose title I couldn’t quite see. “Nah. You don’t wanna read that,” came the comment that sticks in my mind, “it’s a translation, remember. It’s bound to be awful”.  “Hmm.” said her partner, carefully replacing the book onto one of the neat piles arranged, alphabetically by author, on the tables around the room. I inhaled sharply, ready to provide an uninvited retort, but thought better of it. An opinion is an opinion, after all.

It wasn’t just that this was a carefully selected and collected, lovingly protected assortment of pre-owned but still in good condition books, whose seller was standing patiently in the corner while visitors, passers-by or half-in-and-half-out people read, handled and viewed with varying intentions to buy. Or the fact that this particular book was probably, as with everything else in the fiction corner of this large yurt, a classic, a prize-winner, or a celebrated piece of literature. My indignation came from knowing how laborious and tricky book translation can be. I have translated very few books and my work is almost entirely associated with factual documents. But I admire book translators enormously, especially fiction translators, and would like to say a few words in their defence.

The difficulties facing book translators are numerous, but the one that interests me the most is to do with the communication of author’s intended meaning in another language, especially when the writer is writing about events that took place in a time and a place that perhaps can never quite be captured and appreciated by those who never lived through those experiences. OK. That also applies to reading a book written in our mother tongue but set in another English – speaking country in another historical setting. Maybe. But there are additional difficulties when dragging a text, sentence by sentence, even phrase by phrase, into a new language, which makes me think of winding damp laundry through an old-fashioned mangle. You can pull it through, but something can be lost. It’s the voice, the subtle inflection, the way that an attentive reader can almost hear which syllables the speaker is emphasising when reading a text in their own language, but which a translator might struggle to re-create when armed with a very different toolbox in another.

Of course, there are skilful translators who obviously succeed. I refer to one or two such people, along with the respective authors and books, in my blog for February 2017, but I do not feel that the difficulty in doing so is widely appreciated. As mentioned in that blog, a word-for-word exchange simply won’t work. Languages vary in their sentence organisation for one thing. I have just finished reading the 2018 Man Booker Prize winner “Milkman”, written by Anna Burns and published by Faber and Faber, through which the author paints a vivid, brutal and shockingly enlightening picture of life in Northern Ireland at the time of the struggles. I have no doubt that this book will be translated into other languages, although I can find no current evidence of this, but I can imagine the obstacles such linguists will have to overcome. When studying and training to become a translator, we are told that it is essential to write good, grammatically correct English, to be succinct, to attempt to avoid repetition, and to be specific. On the face of it, this unique, brilliantly-written book does none of these things. Told from the point of view of a teenage girl experiencing unthinkable difficulties, the language is repetitive, the sentences necessarily long-winded and the word order, which challenges preconceptions about “correct” structure, is jumbled and unexpected. Punctuation is unusually placed or absent where it might be anticipated. This is a girl trying to express and reflect upon her thoughts in a way that is in one sense garbled but at the same time gives these thoughts remarkable clarity. My empathy as a reader awoken, I found I could follow her line of reasoning clearly. So much for grammatical rules.

Temporal and spatial reference points in this book are limited. Neither the town in which the story is set or any of the characters are ever named. People are described as “third brother-in-law”, “eighth woman” or “Somebody McSomebody”. Places are described as “over the water”, “over the border” or “over the road” This makes it difficult to achieve concision and added to this is the breaking off of the narrative to provide backstory and context. This, while helpful, can go on for pages. Succinctness is not part of the plan. Moreover, the author has created some of her own terms.

“They said it was the media’s fault, and indeed the media had espied the issue women via their placards in amongst the traditional women carrying their own placards. And even though there were only seven of these issue women compared to the few hundred of traditional women, all the world’s cameras instantly focused upon them.“

Often points are hammered home through the use of multiple adjectives to describe the same action or emotion, or countless anecdotes and examples are provided to illustrate the point.
My argument is that, yes, this can be translated into another language, but in the target language, with its own set of (different) grammatical rules, the translator will have their work cut out to generate a text that represents the author’s intended message, but also "breaks" the generally accepted grammar rules in the new language in order to create the desired register and intonation: that of a victimised girl with astute observation of the world around her, who is trying to make her reader grasp what she is saying by labouring each point. Furthermore, with no understanding of past troubles in the character’s location, the impact of the phrase “that country over the water” will inevitably be dulled.

Another quagmire that book translators can wade into is the feeling of treading on eggshells when working with an author who, understandably, is proud of their achievement and sensitive about how the material in their book is treated and re-created in a language they may or may not have mastered themselves. Good communication throughout the process is essential, and rather than present the translation as a fait accompli on completion of the target language version, piecemeal translation of each chapter can help to avoid embarrassing disagreements. Authors can be easily put out if they feel that their work is not being processed as they had imagined. Nor do they always realise that the source and target languages simply have a different rule book. This is especially true of punctuation. One author I worked with read the draft version of my translation of his book and could not understand why I made extensive use of commas in some places. Whereas Italian sentences can often ripple on extensively with no punctuation, ending on the key words of the sentence and its final full stop, commas are used more frequently in English. I was obliged to send him a photocopy of a page from Lewis Carroll, to show him that the English language simply does not do so much of this punctuation-free writing, unless used as a stylistic device.
Take the sentence:

“ Durante la guerra mangiavamo di solito nella cucina sopratutto quando veniva la nonna da pranzo,  spesso faceva male la testa percio non voleva prendere il sole.”

Whilst it is conceivable that the writer might put a comma after the “cucina”, the Italian sentence will work quite well without. Consider the same sentence in English:

“During the war we usually ate in the kitchen, especially when grandmother came to lunch. She often had headaches, so she didn’t want to be out in the sun.”
Not only do we need at least one comma in the English, the sentence would also be clumsy without the full stop and new sentence after “lunch”. In Italian, a comma is often used to separate two ideas, where we would use a full stop.
 
Perhaps the biggest handicap for those involved in book translation is that, generally, translations don’t sell. Unless you’re working for a well-known, widely-acclaimed writer, and few translators are, it is highly likely that your translations will sit in obscurity for years, or forever. When I first set out in this industry, I translated several books in the space of two or three years, before my work on pharmaceutical and agricultural projects became so all-consuming. Sadly, only one of these has sold copies. The royalties I receive from this every two or three months have gradually accumulated into what amounts to a reasonable income for the work involved in that translation, although I regard this as a welcome surprise rather than an expectation. As for the others, which I felt were well-written by authors who had carried out extensive research, and whose work was based on sound experience and knowledge, or imagination in the case of novels, there has been little or no response, even though my translations received good feedback from the writers concerned. The problem is that very often neither the author or translator is doing any marketing. The book may have sold successfully in its original language, but unless someone is actively promoting it, it will not be bought because no one knows it is there. As I wrote in my blog two years ago, only a very small percentage of books sold in the English language have been translated from another. Until we have some international focus on this issue and a united, well-thought-out effort to overcome the problems, this is unlikely to change.
 
In spite of all this, some of my own favourite books are translations. I have already described my reactions to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books series of Carlos Luiz Zafon, whose wonderfully flowing prose is translated from the Spanish my Lucia Graves and in which both writer and translator give an outstanding performance. Unable to wait for the paperback version of the latest, “The Labyrinth of the Spirits”, to reach the shops, I have the hardback waiting on my bedside table, and I look forward with genuine relish to immersing myself in that world from tonight.

(Police vehicles parked outside the Trieste seafront hotel where Macron was to meet Angela Merkel and Paolo Gentiloni before attending the Western Balkans Summit of July 2017)


A few months ago, I happened to overhear a rather stilted but amicable dialogue in a coffee shop between a woman who, it transpired, had purchased property in Italy, and her native-speaking instructor who was being paid to hold twice-weekly conversations to help her improve her spoken Italian. The exchange was somewhat one-sided, in that the student was doing most of the talking and her listener was mostly nodding and murmuring agreement or empathy. I remember thinking that this was a cosy, fruitful way to learn or develop competence in a foreign language, particularly speaking and listening skills, provided that your tutor is willing to correct and interrupt as necessary, and provided you have the time to commit.
As a UK-based written translator of scientific material, for the most part associated with the pharmaceutical and agricultural sectors, I don't get the opportunity to speak and listen in my source languages as often as I would like. My work is still fascinating and rewarding and it presents new challenges and obstacles, but tends to throw up largely similar vocabulary from one document to the next and I have steadily grown an ever-thickening, insulating comfort zone. Sadly, my visits to the two countries in which my source languages are spoken, although invaluable, are all too infrequent and I have very little opportunity for day-to-day conversation. So how then is it possible to overcome this sense of losing contact with languages learned but not often practised verbally?
I was first introduced to Euronews by one of my course tutors while undertaking my translation training. She insisted that it offered an effective way to improve both reading and listening skills, and she was right. While studying I found that by far the most difficult text to translate was the content-loaded, jargon-rich, brusque and truncated journalistic style of news articles, often assuming a knowledge of politician sobriquets or for-those-in-the-know abbreviations and euphemisms. (I hadn’t realised, for example, that the word l’hexagone was often used by reporters to refer to the country of France.) Therefore, for me, the most useful aspect of Euronews, established by the European Broadcasting Union in 1993, is that it often provides a written and rapidly spoken version of the article, enabling me to read and listen at the same time.
Euronews has a slightly misleading name – it delivers stories on events worldwide – but it relates to its original objective of presenting news from a European perspective, and the majority of the thirteen available language options are European. There are live-streams of top stories, with videos and photographs of events and commentary, and often a written account of what you are hearing which, while not an exact transcript, closely summarises the discourse. You can quickly read and listen to headlines to catch the main thrust, then you are encouraged to click on further links to explore the issue or related issues in more detail.
An interesting dimension to this for me is the alternative perspective on UK events. Euronews contributors offer an external viewpoint, with less of the hype that emits from UK-based media coverage, particularly from partisan sources. Moreover, with so much upheaval and uncertainty in our own country, it is refreshing to read that life goes on elsewhere and there are developments that do not impact Britain much at all. Earlier in September, for example, I read that European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker, in delivering his 11-point State of the Union speech, made only a fleeting reference to the UK and our imminent departure from the EU, instead focussing on trade, currency, Africa, foreign policy and immigration. This may come as a surprise to those of us who might think Brexit is dominating European thinking.
One rather odd, almost comical feature of Euronews – which has thankfully now disappeared – was the bizarre way in which readers or listeners were formerly invited to provide feedback. Alongside the article on the screen were two quite sizeable circles, one labelled “Good news” and the other “Bad news”. This often raised a dilemma: did it have to be one or the other? I remember a couple of years ago, when I first started using the app, that a group of migrants adrift on the Mediterranean were being temporarily sheltered in a sports complex on a Greek island. Good news that they were safe. Bad news that they were forced to flee their homeland in the first place and their future was uncertain. Not straight-forward, and until making a choice by clicking on the chosen circle, you never knew whether or not you stood with the majority.
That aside, Euronews is a great way for me to capitalise on marginal time in between projects, invoicing, software updates and emails. It serves the dual purpose of keeping me up-to-date on current affairs and providing real language practice in current topics. Making the effort to read and listen in the language you wish to learn is well worth the effort.

 Last year I posted a description of my personal horror of acronyms and the problems they can present for the translator. I have since come to recognise that an even greater nemesis looms in my inbox from time to time, in the form of the non-selectable PDF file. I have no wish to sound negative – I enjoy my work very much – but I do have some suggestions for anyone who finds themselves in a similar situation.

The reasons for companies choosing to create PDFs are perfectly understandable. PDFs protect the document content: unlike Word documents, PDFs cannot be altered or tampered with, and can usually be viewed on any device, irrespective of operating system or installed software. Converting a document into a PDF file is simple and quick to do, whether the original is a Word, Excel or PowerPoint document. The resulting PDF can then be locked, so that the writer or person managing or processing the data has control over who can access or edit it. Furthermore, if a document contains stamps, seals or signatures, as often happens in a legal contract or attestation, for example, these must be handwritten or imprinted onto paper, which will then need to be scanned to a PDF if it is to be shared. PDF stands for “Portable Format Document” and was invented by Adobe. To many, it is a clever and useful device to ensure security, safe sharing of information and effective communication. To a translator though, it can be a headache.

While it’s true that some PDF files will go into CAT tools (computer assisted translation tools), they don’t always go in without protest. Letters or whole sentences can turn into symbols or squiggles, making it look as though part of the text has been encrypted. This can occur both when the file is uploaded into the software or when it is exported into Word as a target document. Often, the PDF is non-editable, or there are sections that are non-editable, which usually have to be treated separately. Faxes, screenshots and scanned images will always be non-editable. There are obviously conversion apps, and I’ve mentioned some of these below, but the process is rarely completely accurate, and the original layout can be distorted or lost on the page. If the original document is not good quality this can create additional problems. Scanned pages can contain unclear, illegible or damaged text, or a fuzzy appearance on the background that translation software may mistake for characters. Logos and seals can also be problematic.

Just to be clear, CAT tools do not do the job of translation for us, but they do segment the text, making it much easier to find one’s place in a document. They make it possible to save a file in its native format, or very close to it. Of course, the translation can simply be typed out without software as it had to be done in the past, and this is probably still the safest way to retain the original page layout as much as possible and avoid losing content. But this is a time-consuming, tedious and demanding task for translators faced with tens of thousands of words on a regular basis, particularly if a file includes diagrams, graphs, charts and tables. Some items, for example stamps or other images that contain diagonal, criss-crossing or over-written text, are simply not reproducible.

There’s a wide range of readily-available PDF to Word (or PDF to another file-type) conversion apps; some are better than others. These work by optical character recognition (OCR) software, which can access the text and make it editable. Some are free, some are reasonable and some expensive, and the choice will depend on exactly what features are required. Some work on a trial basis, with the option to purchase once the trial has expired. Most claim to preserve the original format, with no loss of quality of the text, but this depends on how close the target file needs to be. Some also ask to make changes to your computer. Clearly, the details of this need to be fully understood before you take such a step. I looked into a few PDF to Word conversion apps.

The app eXpert PDF 12 both creates PDFs from Word, Excel or PowerPoint and converts PDFs into Word files. It can be downloaded free, for a trial period, and purchased for £59.99, although it seems to go up to £64.98 when you add on the VAT. Customer reviews are generally favourable, claiming that it’s quick to download and easy to install, with a good display.

Nitro Pro has a two-week trial, with the option to buy for £168 after that. This price includes customer support and product updates. The terms and conditions state that it’s also possible to purchase a subscription, but I wasn’t able to find out whether the above price was a one-off payment or whether regular payments were necessary after a set period. I couldn’t find customer reviews on the website, but PC World seem to think it’s leading the market.

Faced with a lengthy PDF document, which included extensive lists of names of medicinal products and tables with numbered headings and numbered points in columns which I had to be confident in reproducing, I recently resorted to onlineocr.net, at no cost, to convert the document into a Word file. I just needed to log in and provide a few basic details, upload my PDF, and then wait a short time to get my Word document back. I was able to try out a one-page conversion as a trial, then register to convert multiple pages. The quality was generally good. All the text was clear and legible, and the format was surprisingly well-preserved. Some characters, particularly numbers, were shown in bold when they shouldn’t have been, and vice versa, and there seemed to be a mixture of font styles and sizes in places, but it was better than I expected.

Still, the fear of losing content and/or format means that, for the most part, I avoid doing this, preferring to simply type out a non-selectable document onto a clean Word file, in the pre-technology way. So how best to handle a request to work on a difficult document? Here are my thoughts:
·         Politely ask if the customer has a copy of the original Word file. This way the problem can be avoided altogether.
·         If this isn’t possible, ask what the translation is needed for. If, for example, the target document is a PowerPoint to be used as a presentation for training purposes, then the format will be a crucial aspect of the service. However, if the client simply needs to understand what the text says, then you needn’t spend time making the page appear like the original.
·         If you do need to convert PDF to Word, don’t settle for the first app you find. Try out a few and find the most appropriate to your document.
·         In the event that you are faced with a complex document and attempts at Word conversion prove to make matters worse and you end up beginning with a clean sheet, be honest about these challenges. Making it clear to the customer how long it’s likely to take and that it will cost more than a Word document, may take the pressure off and avoid embarrassing confrontations later.

It seems that, despite the ever-advancing sophistication of technology, with better and better CAT tools, conversion apps and even programs able to convert music scores into braille, this is an area that lags behind. I have no doubt that the means of creating programs that can scan the most detailed images and turn them into text, thus surmounting this problem, will be invented very soon. Until then, I will continue to avoid non-selectable PDFs as often as I can get away with.
 
 
 
 
it.

It’s surprising how many of the expressions we use daily, without thinking, are associated with our sense of sight. I was reminded of this during the nerve-racking days leading up to my recent eye surgery. I found myself saying, “I’ll see you at the party”, for which we were collecting money “with a view to” buying a collective present, picked out by someone with vision and an eye for detail. I was feeling “blind terror” while obsessively reading patient reviews detailing the procedure I was about to undergo, and friends told me they imagined I must be feeling “optimistic” about the outcome, though I would have to wear dark glasses for the foreseeable future.

A large proportion of my translation work is concerned with the pharmaceutical industry, and its many documents detailing the trialling, manufacture, inspection, marketing authorisation and directions for use by patients and healthcare providers of many varieties of medication and devices. It’s surprising how many of these products are intended for eye care: antibiotic eyedrops, anti-inflammatory eyedrops, soothing eyedrops, eyedrops to treat blepharitis or conjunctivitis, eyedrops to reduce redness, and a wide range of medicinal ointments for eyecare. The concept of sight, and the fear of losing or jeopardising it, is of undeniable importance to us. 

Palaeontologists believe that the evolution of the eye was a key moment in the history of the animal kingdom. Scientists at London's Natural History Museum, as reported by the FT, recently researched the link between the evolution of sight and colour, with the latter being used, for example, for decoration to attract a mate or camouflage, once sight had developed well enough to be able to perceive different shades. There is overwhelming fossil evidence for a sudden burst in diversity of life: the so-called “Cambrian explosion” around 545-530 million years ago. This significant moment marked the transition from simple photoreceptors, which may have helped early worms move towards light, to a much more sophisticated and intricate organ, eventually leading to high-resolution perception. It doesn’t take much to imagine the benefits of such a development to creatures living on the seabed – being able to locate food, spot prey, be alerted to the approach of a predator are among the more obvious. 

And how much of the sensory information we receive is visual? According to the National Geographic, approximately 30% of all neurons in the cerebral cortex are reserved for processing and interpreting visual data.

With so much at stake, it is small wonder that protecting our sight is a high priority, and it’s hardly surprising that you get nervous when someone is coming towards your eyeball with a cutting tool.
Almost a year after blogging in May 2017 about some of the vision problems I was finding when spending long periods at the computer, I had laser treatment. As I mentioned in that post, working long hours in front of a screen is not an activity specific to translators, but I find the way my document is usually presented on the screen – source language on the left and target on the right, in a very small (occasionally minuscule) font size – makes for particularly close, rather intense work for which total concentration is vital. The need to focus (there’s another) on meaning, and not lose my place in the text, means that I often fail to blink as often as I might, effectively reducing the natural irrigation to the eyes.

Computer work wasn’t my only reason for taking this step. I’d been considering it for years. At minus 7 in one eye and something approaching minus 7 in the other, I’d had enough of staggering around and banging into things if I needed to get up during the night. I wore contact lenses virtually every day for 40 years and decided that was long enough. While some people manage to look intellectual or professional wearing glasses – they can lend a certain style when repeatedly removed and replaced by an individual chairing a meeting – my appearance in spectacles designed to correct such extreme myopia combined with astigmatism was more like that of a science fiction or cartoon character, with the eyes reduced to shrivelled peas behind a thick vitreous barrier. Camping was the worst. Not only the struggle to insert lenses without running water, but the tripping over guy ropes and partially hammered-in pegs when returning to the tent after dark.

It took the surgeons some time to convince me to have what is known as monovision surgery, which was not my initial preference. This essentially meant having one eye corrected to zero (20/20), and the other left slightly under-corrected (to -1) so that it could be focussed for reading. The brain, I was told, would eventually compensate for any blurring that I might experience because of this. I had gone in preferring to have both eyes fully corrected and use reading glasses. In the end I was persuaded by their obvious confidence and extensive experience of many patients.
I won’t go into detail about the procedure itself, which felt a little like having the eye clamped open and an ice cube pressed very hard into the socket. This has been extensively and eloquently described in countless reviews on the websites of various surgery providers. I’m a fairly anxious person and was mortally terrified before the surgery, but it was quickly over, and I began to feel the benefits straight away.

It’s still early days. My eyes need time to adjust and I’m not functioning fully at night-time, but so far I am getting the impression that they were right about the monovision. Being able to read an email or a message from a customer on my phone without groping around for my reading glasses, while also being able to glance up at the clock on the wall to check whether I have enough time to complete the request, is very convenient. As long as I have plenty of light, I can read, write and thus translate with no aids to my vision. Even small text is clear, and I’m feeling an enormous sense of comfort knowing that the surfaces of my corneas are no longer being compressed and suffocated by a plastic disc. Nor do I have the annoyance of having to peer over a pair of spectacles balanced on my nose when someone in the room wants to speak to me. To anyone considering laser treatment, I would say go ahead. Any minor inconvenience during the lead time or recovery period (in my case the horror of having to go without make-up) is worth it.
​
I am very impressed with the care, attention to detail, skill, personal touch, technological know-how, warmth and compassion I experienced at the Accuvision clinic in Fulham. I cannot praise the optometrists, ophthalmologists, surgeons and receptionists highly enough. Their extensive and thorough testing, record-keeping, understanding, communication and the extended, rigorous follow-up have been remarkable. Here is an organisation that realises that they are doing more than simply selling a service or product – this is an intricate medical procedure that is taken very seriously. From my point of view, “thank you” does not quite cover it.

The panel in the photograph, taken inside the Temple of Osiris in Abydos, shows the pharaoh Seti I in the presence of the god Anubis, who is symbolised with the head of a jackal.
 
 
I could go into the details of my recent trip Egypt: the significance of the Aswan Dam and the Ethiopian Dam further upstream; running out of water in the Nile; being stranded on a sandbank; the variety of food and flavoured tobaccos.

But this series of blogs has been entirely about communication and its importance, and how communication is achieved. As a linguist, what I found most intriguing was not the language of hieroglyphics, which I wouldn’t even attempt to comprehend, but how drawings and paintings were used so effectively to tell a story or record events and observations.

I’m no expert in ancient Egyptian art or history, but I had excellent guides who helped me make sense of the hundreds of images I took on my camera phone.

Egyptian history has a complexity that would challenge even the most arduous scholar. Broadly speaking, there are five time periods belonging to the ancient world: the Old Kingdom (2600-2160BC); the Middle Kingdom (2040-1700BC); the New Kingdom (1570-1070BC); the Late Period (600-332BC); and the Greco-Roman period (332BC-AD395). But there are also those stretches of time in between, the ones not characterised by influential rulers, such as the first, second and third intermediate periods, bridging the gaps following the Old, Middle and New Kingdoms respectively.
My tour began with the tombs of Rameses IV, Rameses III and Merenptah in the Valley of the Kings, followed by a visit to the Temple of Hatshepsut not far away. We then moved onto the Temple of Isis on the island of Philae. I spent a couple of days gazing, bewildered, at the images surrounding me, with no knowledge of history or the context in which to place them. It occurred to me that the best place to start was to learn the names, symbolic representations and functions of the gods in the painted figures, reliefs and statues, and how to recognise them.

Armed with guidebooks, maps, and the notes I had jotted down on listening to the guide at the various sites (yes – I’m the person at the back with a notepad and pen, straining to hear every word and hanging back to finish looking and scribbling, sprinting to catch up), I returned to the cabin and set out to memorise the information.

And so I managed to construct a simple but hopefully helpful summary. The information is difficult to condense from any one source. For one thing, worship of some gods dates back to the Old Kingdom and, over time, their role, importance, mythology, representation, and even their paternity or maternity can change. For example, Anubis was believed by some to be the son of Nephthys, while others supposed him to be the son of Bastet or Isis.


NAME
HOW DEPICTED IN PAINTINGS AND CARVINGS
MOST WIDELY KNOWN ROLE/ SIGNIFICANCE

Osiris
As a mummy, with the ceremonial curved beard, with a white crown, and carrying the flail and crozier
King of the underworld, the great god of the dead, god of agriculture

Isis
Wearing a headdress representing a throne, or wearing a vulture headdress with a serpent on the brow, or as a winged goddess or kite
A patron goddess of childbirth and motherhood, wife of Osiris, whom she raised from the dead after he was slaughtered by Set, and mother of Horus

Hathor
Most often in the form of a cow, or a woman with a cow’s ears or horns
Sky goddess. Goddess of women, fertility, children and childbirth; also of beauty and cosmetics and perfumes; and music, dance, romance, joy and many more

Horus
Usually as a falcon or man with a falcon head
Husband of Hathor and son of Osiris and Isis. Embodiment of order. Always placed in opposition to or in conflict with Set

Sobek
As a crocodile or man with a crocodile head
Associated with power and success in war, but also a protector against dangers in the River Nile

Set
Shown as a black boar, pig, donkey or another animal associated with danger or the unclean
Symbol of evil and embodiment of chaos. Believed to swallow the moon each month. Famous for battle with Horus and for murdering Osiris. Represents the desert

Anubis
Usually as a man with the head of a jackal with black fur – black being a colour associated with fertility
Guardian and protector of the dead, associated with embalming and funeral rites; he also presided over the weighing of the heart. Patron saint of lost souls. Originally god of the underworld

Bastet or Bast
As a cat or woman with the head of a cat or lion
Goddess of warfare, but later seen as having a protective role, defender of the pharaoh or goddess of the moon, or of perfumes. Protector against disease and evil spirits

Ptah
As a mummified man holding a staff
Patron of sculptors, painters, architects and carpenters, a god of rebirth and protector of Egypt

Thoth
As a man with the head of an ibis, often holding a stylus and writer’s palette
Patron of scribes and writing. Also associated with medicine, wisdom, time and magic

Nephthys
Usually as a woman crowned with the hieroglyphics that symbolise her name, which consist of the sign for a sacred temple, though can be as a kite or hawk
Wife of Set. Represents the air. Goddess of death and mourning. Believed to be the source of rain and the Nile

By the time I arrived at Kom Ombo and the Temple of Sobek, I had at least memorised a modest amount of information and felt better equipped to make some attempt to follow the stories. So what of the stories chiselled into the walls?

It isn’t always a story – sometimes more of a description of circumstances, or ongoing, eternal events. To me, some of the most beautiful paintings, dominated by the colour turquoise, appear on the ceilings of the Temple of Hathor at Dendera. By craning the neck 90 degrees and following the illustrations from one end of the building to the other, we can, for example, see how the goddess Nut gives birth to the sun every morning, then swallows it at nightfall.

Much of the artwork appears to depict the importance of staying on the right side of the gods. Pharaohs Rameses II, a fascinating, powerful but evidently narcissistic character, and his father Seti I, are seen in panel after panel making offerings to the gods. In other panels, a pharaoh is seen with Anubis, jackal-god, who places a hand upon the shoulder of the pharaoh as a gesture of safe escort. These pictures show that the death process had considerable meaning to the ancient Egyptians. Rulers wanted to be assured of a safe passage into the underworld and a welcome reception once they got there.

There are countless panels containing depictions of offerings to gods – and it is worth looking closely at the objects being offered, which are often related to the characteristics of the gods in question. For example, mortals are depicted offering mirrors to the goddess Hathor, who is associated with the cosmetic arts.

Not all images are entirely religious. Secular illustrations of Rameses II and Rameses III riding a military chariot, defeating the enemy and training their offspring to fight, can be seen in large, bold carvings and paintings on the walls at Karnak, Abu Simbal and many other places, a message of prowess and invincibility that must be perpetually understood by all.
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Occasionally, the identity of a ruler is not immediately apparent, and it becomes necessary to look more closely at the cartouche – an oval-shaped inscription in which the name of a king or queen is written in the form of symbols. These are always found in tombs and temples, usually above the head of the individual they belong to and are very useful in identification and dating. The idea was to eternally encircle the name of the pharaoh, so that he would be preserved after death, and to protect him against evil spirits. Below are some examples of lettering.

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Hieroglyph M

Hieroglyph C

The symbols inside a cartouche don’t always stand for single letters, but rather sounds or syllables. If we look closely at the famous cartouche of Tutankhamun, for example, the symbol in the top left, which looks a little like a comb, represents the sound “men”, originating from a Turkish word meaning “myself”. Put together with the symbol to its right and the one below, the sound “amun” is created. On the third line, the bird symbol represents the letter “U”, with the familiar ankh symbol, the cross with a handle, which represents eternal life, wisdom and fertility, on the left. (See below)
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Egyptian art was a highly skilled and jealous profession. Sculptors and painters studied in dedicated colleges for years before earning the right to work on the temples and tombs of the pharaohs. These people were highly regarded and handsomely rewarded (in the absence of currency, payment was made in the form of goods, property and food). The remains of a village were found in the Valley of the Workers on the West Bank, the bank associated with death and burial, near Luxor, which proves that painters were accommodated in comfortable, spacious houses.

As a former science teacher, I’m always fascinated by the origins of colour, and I was captivated by the striking effect of the pigments used to record history in the tomb and temple paintings. The ancients did not have at their disposal the vast array of colours enjoyed by today’s artists, yet the variety and detail with which they painted, and the visually attractive pairing and contrasting of colours, are often breath-taking. Pigments were manufactured from locally available minerals. The pigment green, for example, could be produced from malachite (Copper carbonate). Charcoal would have provided the black colour, gypsum the whites, while yellows could be produced from ochre, a source of Iron oxides. Blues could be made from azurite and reds from arsenic compounds.

Colours also had meaning. The colour black, for example, was often associated with the silt of the Nile, which was linked with fertility. There were rigorously controlled methods for mixing the paints, treating the stone by smoothing, filling and plastering before it was painted, and the laying out of scenes in a marked-off area gridded with squares, before illustrating could even begin. Grids would have helped the artists to proportion the figures correctly. The work was subject to scrutiny and correction by master artists, and the final painting was carried out one colour at a time.

It is widely accepted that Egypt owes much of the rare degree of preservation of its historical artefacts and monuments, and thereby its thriving tourist industry, to its arid climate. Annual rainfall is extremely low. When looking at this work, it is certainly difficult to believe that these images have survived for thousands of years. But this probably means that we fail to acknowledge the extent to which artists went to ensure survival of their work. Rather than painting into a thin layer of wet plaster, as done in conventional fresco painting, analysis reveals that paint was applied to dried plaster. Varnish or resin was also applied after painting. The artists’ attention to detail is phenomenal.

The Ancient Egyptians were not the only ancient civilisation to write in pictures and symbols. Pictorial Jiahu symbols dating back to the 7th millennium BC have been found on a range of Neolithic sites in China. During the 4th millennium BC the Sumerians were also using impressions in clay to keep accounts. There are many examples of early forms of written communication at times when exchange of messages between groups of people was slow and dependent on the most basic of tools and materials, and equally basic forms of transport.
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The lengths the Egyptians went to in order to communicate and to leave us their messages made me consider the throwaway nature of our exchanges today, and how reliant we have become on instant messages and equally instant responses.
 

​I feel the need to reserve the first blog of this new year for some thoughts about my ex-colleague, Alan Yeates, who sadly passed away on Thursday 4 January. Alan was a German and French teacher and the head of modern languages at the Royal Grammar School, High Wycombe, where I taught for several years. He had been struggling with illness for some time, but his death came as a shock and a blow nonetheless.

When I left that school, almost three years ago, Alan told me that if I ever wished to apply for a job working in foreign languages, he would write a reference for me “with a heavy heart”, since he did not want me to go. It is with a heavy heart that I sit here writing this.

My feelings on the importance of learning and sharing languages can be read in most of my blog posts, and it will come as no surprise that I feel a keen sense of loss that there is now one less teacher of German in our schools. Alan expressed understandable concern that spending cuts in schools, notably at sixth form level, had led to the shrinking of modern language provision and even the disappearance of some languages as GCSE or A level options. I wish he had lived to see an upturn of this trend in his lifetime.

I often quoted Alan during my own lessons, and on my bookshelf I still have a booklet he produced as supporting material for a course on teaching languages to the sixth form, which he organised and delivered for language teachers both within the school and from other schools in the local area. I remember the course very vividly, and I have since used his ideas in the classroom, both in teaching science and languages, for classes and tutoring individuals. One of his many great teaching techniques was a collection of highly amusing photographs, which he would show to his year 12 or 13 set, asking them to invent a story in German that related to the images.

As the head of a very large department, Alan had the rare quality of being able to stand back and allow members of his team to do their jobs in their own way. He could accept a diversity of styles, recognising that the sparkling, “all-singing, all-dancing”, high-tech lessons worked for some, while careful plodding through the exercises in a textbook worked for others, and that both were valuable, both had their place, and both could lead to good results. His organisation of teaching materials was meticulous, and I have yet to see a filing system and store cupboard more rigorously systematic than the ones in his classroom.

On a personal level, he went well beyond expectations in supporting me. As a science teacher who also wished to develop skills in teaching languages, I had some inevitable adaptations to make, and I was struck by Alan’s unquestioning understanding of what some considered eccentricity on my part. On too many occasions when I had a period one French lesson, I would arrive late, breathless and flustered, having hung back to dismiss boys from assembly and spent too much time dealing with the crowd of individuals hanging outside my office first thing every morning, to find Alan waiting patiently in the corridor with my class. Never once did I get the reproach I deserved for delaying his lesson. I remember him helpfully agreeing to evaluate a lesson for me, calmly explaining what he would be looking for and concentrating on the positive aspects of my teaching when giving feedback.

A piece of advice of his that rings in my ears, something that I hear myself saying to anyone I teach, is that “nothing is too simple to revise”. How right he was here. I repeat this endlessly, and in my opinion, it applies to any subject at any level. Specification content learned in year 7 or 8 can seem simple at the time, but it can be forgotten, and preparing for tests and exams should include filling in those gaps that were not quite grasped the first time around. 

Alan leaves behind two good-natured and outstandingly able sons who are also members of the school community. Having lost my own father at a similar age, I have some sense of what they must be experiencing now, and I can only hope that circumstances and events proceed as easily as possible for them and for their family and friends, and that life will become more bearable as time moves on.

I greatly appreciate the support, help and understanding I received from Alan and what I learned from him, and I will remember him with huge fondness and respect.

 Not content with simply wearing a periodic table tie, or wiping coffee mugs with a periodic table tea towel, a former schoolteacher colleague of mine insisted on placing a clock in every science laboratory, with the chemical symbols for the first 12 elements in place of the numbers one to 12. Although this move initially seemed somewhat eccentric, I soon got used to thinking that, if I was taking assembly that day, I had to get it finished by ten past Fluorine. According to our schedule, the school day ended at a quarter to Beryllium.

It’s been a few years since I last set foot in a classroom, but I spend a few hours a week giving home tuition to secondary school pupils too ill to attend school. As anyone who has tutored individuals will know, working on a one-to-one basis can provide surprising insight, not only into areas of difficulty, but also into various misconceptions and stumbling blocks that students may be experiencing. One source of confusion is the periodic table.

Unless you’re competing in serious science quizzes – your average village pub quiz probably won’t have more than one question on the symbol for a chemical element – learning the periodic table off by heart is probably something most of us can live without. Even A level students have one provided in their exams, or at least whatever crucial information they need from it. But for most school pupils, it’s worth remembering enough to iron out some sources of confusion. One of these is the apparent mismatch between the names of the elements and their symbols.

For example, when discussing active transport in Biology, and the Sodium-Potassium pump used to move ions across animal cell membranes, youngsters are often confused by the symbols Na⁺ and K⁺. Asked to write a chemical formula for a compound containing sodium, they will usually, unless they have spent time committing the symbols and charges to memory in preparation for a test, begin by writing a letter “S”. To my mind, this raises an interesting question. Why do we assume that the symbols or names are taken from the English language? Is this the arrogance of the English-speaking world? The symbol S is for Sulphur, while that of Sodium, Na, is from the Latin word Natrium, while K is for Kalium, an Arabic word meaning Potassium.

The periodic table is a fascinating collection of words and symbols originating from many languages. We have Nickel, symbol Ni, derived from a Swedish word, Kopparnickel, which was used to describe the ore from which it was extracted. The symbol for Lead, Pb, comes from the Latin Plumbum, which is the source of the word plumber, since Lead was formerly used for water pipes before we became aware of its toxic nature. The Greek word Kryptos has provided the name Krypton. The word was used to mean “hidden”, because of its invisibility and undetectability, having no colour, smell or taste.

Sometimes the origins of the name have quite a detailed and interesting history. You will forgive me for quoting from the chemical element name etymologies offered by Wikipedia. For example, the name Cobalt comes from the German Kobold, meaning “evil spirit”. The historical explanation for this is that miners believed that it contaminated other, more desirable metals. Its compounds are also poisonous. Some chemical elements are named after gods. Uranium, whose ores are a well-known fuel source in nuclear power plants, is named after the planet Uranus, which itself was named after a god of sky and heaven in Greek mythology. Vanadium comes from the name Vanadis, another name for Freyja in Norse mythology. Others are named after countries or geographical areas. Marie Curie named one of the elements she discovered after her Polish homeland, hence Polonium. Others are named after the individuals who discovered them, or made a scientific discovery or invention that warranted the distinction of having a chemical element named after them. The one that springs to my mind is Mendelevium, since it is Dmitri Mendeleev we have to thank for conceiving the periodic table in the first place. The brilliance of this scientist cannot be overstated, but that is for a different account.

The chemical symbols too have some interesting back stories. One theory about the symbol for Antimony, which is Sb, short for the Latin name, Stibium, is that it is borrowed from an ancient Egyptian word, sdm, or

They are by far the most puzzling obstacles I’ve encountered in my work as a translator. They tend to appear in documents unannounced, with no back story, with no key or legend to help decipher them, and are often industry-specific – or, worse, company-specific. Of course, their purpose is intended to denote the title of something, usually an organisation, procedure, device, or in my case – since much of my work is pharmaceutical – to represent a medical condition, without having to write it out in full. Fine, if you happen to be in on these mysterious meanings.

I do not enjoy acronyms. Rather than saving time by shortening the number of words to be typed out, I waste endless time trying to track down their significance. Occasionally, the initials used are familiar, and the same in both languages. PCB, or polychlorinated biphenyl, would be easily recognised within the context of a document listing substances, for example, and the same acronym is used in both French and English. No worries there. Often, however, the meanings of the letters that loom out of the shadows are less than clear and my search for a reliable rendering is fruitless. On nights working late, I have paranoid visions of some secret society locked away in some dimly lit, murky basement inventing acronyms, the connotations of which are only intelligible to a chosen few, leaving the rest of us to grope in the dark.

One of the biggest problems is that there is often no way of knowing whether the initials in question were originally conceived in the source or target language, or whether this elusive meaning is used internationally, as is sometimes the case. Sometimes a corresponding acronym does not exist in the language the document is being translated into, and it would be inappropriate to invent one, assuming one had managed to find the meaning of the original in the first place and translated it in full. To make matters worse, clients have varying tastes as to whether they want acronyms changed at all. It is possible to get into a mess.

I have recently been working on specifications for a new electrical installation in a building in a European capital. The initials ASI, which featured throughout the series of files and in French stand for “alimentation sans interruption”, can be translated as UPS (uninterruptable power supply). This was not too difficult to find, and what really helped was that all those collaborating in the translation project made contributions to a collective glossary, thus maximising consistency and saving time for us all.

However, the initials OIBT almost led me into making a grave error. After searching through my usual trusted reference sources – Linguee, ProZ term search, Reverso, WordReference – I came up with what I thought was the corresponding acronym in English, which was ITTO. It was only when checking through after completing the translation that I discovered that these initials actually stand for “International Tropical Timber Organisation”, which obviously didn’t fit the piece I was working on. After further extensive research, it transpired that the letters in this context stand for “l’ordonnance fédérale sur les installations électriques à basse tension” or in English “Federal regulations on low voltage electrical wiring”. Although grateful that I’d spotted this potentially disastrous mistranslation before delivering the completed documents, it still left me with the unanswered problem of how to represent the initials in English. As far as I’m aware, there is no FRLVEW. Even if there is, it probably means something entirely unrelated, which would be completely unhelpful to the person who will eventually have to read this account in order to understand what they have to do – which components to connect up to which, etc.

So what help is available for resolving this problem? The Harrap Business Dictionary provides a number of alphabetically listed meanings for French acronyms with their English counterparts, as does my now becoming battered hardback copy of the Collins Robert bilingual dictionary. My English-Italian Medical Dictionary and Phrasebook by A.H. Zemback offers a few obliging interpretations of abbreviations, for the names of hormones, for example. The acronymfinder.com site is also helpful, as is the acronyms page on thefreedictionary.com. Probably my favourite site is abbreviations.com, which claims to provide “910 acronyms and abbreviations related to the French terminology and jargon”.

Even with all this support, many acronyms manage to remain a mystery. This may be because there are often several alternative explanations for the same initials. For instance, abbreviations.com comes up with no less than 67 different definitions for the initials FSR. Knowing the context of your document obviously narrows the field. So if, let’s say, my document was concerned with electronics, I might be confident in assuming that they meant “Force Sensing Resistor”, whereas “Flight Status Request” would be more likely if the document had been prepared by the military. The fact that one can never be sure of which language the initials are derived from further complicates the issue. These same initials can also be Falange Social Revolucionario in Spanish.
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If anyone reading this has useful advice on this particular skill, I would welcome your suggestions. Until then, this type of code-cracking will always entail a certain amount of guesswork as far as I’m concerned.