As we wrap up a year of family German classes ...I find myself taking stock of my abilities in the language. What I want, even more than the ability to converse fluently (which I have little opportunity for) is the ability to read in German relatively well. Right now I'm at something of a halfway stage....
However, as I was working through a couple pages of German this way the other night, it was striking me that aside from my vocabulary issues there's still something fundamentally different about what I'm doing in comparison to how an actual German reader would deal with a text. What I'm doing right now might be better termed decoding, because in some ways I'm still turning things into a more standard English structure as I figure them out.
For instance, the use of a past continuous is very common in German, and a standard sentence order in that case is: [Phrase denoting time or place] [helping verb: a form of sein (to be) or haben (to have)] [subject] [object] [past participle].
Laying something like that out in English might go like this:
Early in the morning had we on the train to Berlin to ride.
Of course, in English we'd keep the verb together, and a natural order would be something like:
We had to ride on the train to Berlin early in the morning.
Now, these are easy enough words that I'd make it through fine on my own and wouldn't even be consulting the dictionary, but throw in a bunch of vocabulary and I find myself going back to my old schoolboy Latin habits. Latin, of course, also has the habit of saving the verb for last. We all get the explanation during the early weeks of our first Latin class that this creates a sense of anticipation as you want to find out what is being done by the subject to the object in the sentence. However, I virtually always did what a lot of beginning decoders of a foreign language do: I would identify my subject, then jump to the end of the sentence and wee what my verb was, then go back and pick up the rest of the sentence. In essence, I was transforming the sentence into English sentence order as I went along.
This is fine for getting the sense of what's written, but it strikes me that if you stick with this, you never really move into thinking in the other language the way a speaker or reader of it would.
Turning it into the English order as you go is, I think, what you do if you aim to translate into English eventually, as you'll be thinking all along "how am I going to render this in English?" So it's not like that habit doesn't have its uses.
I like the term "flexibility of mind" for what you're seeking. I wonder if doing some translation exercises from German to English might help you along the way -- but a German->English in which you flout more workaday English word-order conventions and seek a word-order that captures some of the anticipation inherent in the German, so you can begin to get a feel of how that might work in one's native language.
So what I'm saying is: Go ahead and put it "Early in the morning had we on the train to Berlin to ride." At least in your head.
In short, translate into a sort of Yoda-speak, but one in which enough licit English style choices are made that the meaning is clear, if a little unusually phrased. And feeling free to switch from active to passive voice if warranted in order to preserve the anticipation.
Let me give you an example -- I'm going to draw from Latin (French is no good, its word-order conventions are not dissimilar enough from English ones to serve as an example). I have a textbook with its answer key in front of me, and opened it to a passage entitled "Seneca Reflects on Having Lodgings over a Public Bath." Here are the first two sentences in Latin:
Ecce undique me varius clamor circumsonat: supra ipsum balneo habito. Propone nunc tibi omnia genera vocum quae in odium possunt aures adducere...
The textbook translates conventionally like so:
Look, on all sides a varied noise surrounds me: I live above the bath-house itself. Consider now to yourself all the types of voices that can draw the ears into hatred...
but if you want to preserve the sense of anticipation above all, the periodic sentence, you could write this (partly by switching to passive, partly by choosing a less-colloquial construction):
Look, on all sides I'm by a varied noise surrounded: above the very bath-house I live. Consider now for yourself all the kinds of voices by which into hatred can the ears be drawn...
It's not a great translation: when you go from active to passive you lose some of the punch, and the style seems too ethereal and academic for such an earthy topic. But different translations serve different purposes, and this exercise is to see the flavor of the periodic sentence: the sentence that goes around and around, and doesn't wrap up till the end (of clause or of sentence). Notice I swapped a synonym too so I could keep the order intact: "the very bath-house" for "ipsum balneo" rather than "the bath-house itself."
I've always found that literal mental translations help me get into the mind of the foreign language better. The Romans wouldn't pitch camp; they would 'put' camp, and by the way, "castra" being a plural word, think of it as "they put the campythings." (castra ponunt). French people don't play tennis with a tennis racket, they "play at" tennis with a "racket of tennis"; and they don't "play piano," nor do they "play at piano", they "play of the piano" or maybe "play some piano."
So, I think you can do this with word-order too. And no, it isn't quite the same as doing a literal word-for-word translation in the order the words appear in the original text. You can keep certain syntactical chunks together or separate them as needed, and do things like put the adjective before the noun in English. It must remain understandable. But it's okay if it sounds a little weird or archaic; the point is to get the sense of anticipation in.
So, let me continue my weird-English translation:
Look, on all sides I'm by a varied noise surrounded: above the very bath-house I live.
Consider now for yourself all the kinds of voices by which into hatred can the ears be drawn...
When somebody (lazy and with this commonplace oiling contented) I've met, I hear the slapping of the hand on the shoulders, which, depending on whether flat it strikes [there] or hollow, thus the sound changes.
If, though, the scorekeeper too has arrived and begun counting the balls, it's finished.
Add now the brawler and the the apprehended thief, and he who by his own voice in the bath himself he pleases.
Add now those who into the pool, with a mighty surge-of-water's sound, jump.
Beyond those of whom, if nothing else of them is, proper their voices are:
Of the hair-plucker [you must] think, reedy and strident his voice so that it might be more conspicuous, rising and falling, not ever silent, except when he plucks the armpits and someone else, on his behalf, to shout is then forced.
Yes, it's a poor translation, and sacrifices a couple of connections in order to push those verbs back. (They're not all pushed to the end of the clause: "begun counting the balls" is "to count begun the balls" in the original, and I didn't think moving the infinitive would matter much.) The textbook does a better job of rendering decent English, and I could probably do a still better job making it come out sounding well-turned. But I find that the exercise helps me get under the skin of the word-order.
So first you do that translation, then you set it aside and you read the Latin, or German or whatever, again.
Your mileage may vary. I don't know enough about German word-order to know if it's so crazy that you'll never be able to make a sensible English sentence this way. But it's worth a try?
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Another thing that you might try, especially if (in English) you're a relatively fast reader: Watch a movie in the target language, but with English subtitles. The subtitles (at least when they are hard coded) usually appear a split second before the character begins to speak. When the subtitle appears, take the meaning in quickly, then look up and at the character's face, and attempt -- expect -- to hear that same meaning. Expect that verb at the end, if that's a feature of the language, or whatever feature of word-order is giving you trouble.
I suspect you could do it with a side-by-side translation of a piece of literature too, at least with the help of some index card markers to keep your place and cover up the text when necessary. I haven't tried that, though.
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The suggestion in all of these is to train yourself -- using either English or your target language -- to attend to the meaning-chunks coming in an order that's characteristic of the target-language. Word-order, like vocabulary, is something that comes to you through pattern-recognition, and that takes practice with the patterns. We can, I think, render those patterns into our native language with a little tweaking, and harness the power of our brain's flexibility with the language it's wrangled since birth, until the new patterns speak to us too.
I do Danish to English translations as a side job. English is my first language, Danish is my third (there's some now rusted to death Russian in the middle), I am completely fluent in Danish. Danish sentence order is not the same as English, but it is similar - from the perspective of someone who translates between two fluent languages, I don't translate bits and pieces of the sentence, even if really long. Once I understand the meaning I rewrite it as a whole in the other language (this goes quickly for the most part, but slowly for something like legalese). I do however remember when I was in Russia - at some point I reached a level of fluency where I could let go of an ordered sentence structure and use cases instead. It was like releasing a stretched elastic in my mind.
Posted by: Rebekka | 04 June 2017 at 12:06 AM