Wednesday, April 4, 2012

Mentioning the Foreign Language Title of a Work in an English Article


Look, I don't have a problem with foreign languages and think everyone should at least be able to ask directions in the native tongue of whatever foreign country they're travelling in. That being said, I'm not going to learn Russian so I can view Night Watch (2004) without sub-titles, or take archaic English lessons so I can read the Bible. I've picked up the basics of a handful because the people I associated with spoke them, or they were culturally relevant to myself. I even get that speaking Latin can be advantageous to understanding words you don't know the meaning to.

But this shit with being bombarded by German in mid-English-sentence needs to stop. I was recently doing work on chronotypes for the United States government's Department of Chronotype Affairs when I decided it would be a good idea to Wiki what a chronotype was. I stumbled upon this offensive line:

O. Öquist's 1970 thesis at the Department of Psychology, University of Göteborg, Sweden, marks the beginning of modern research into chronotypes, and is entitled Kartläggning av individuella dygnsrytmer, or "Charting Individual Circadian Rhythms."

You could simply say:

O. Öquist's 1970 thesis at the Department of Psychology, University of Göteborg, Sweden, marks the beginning of modern research into chronotypes, and is entitled Charting Individual Circadian Rhythms.

It's bad enough I have to trip over where the damn thing was written, but then busting my knees across a language I don't read and probably never will makes me want to stop reading immediately. In fact I did. You're also not a genius for pointing out the above was not in German. Get a life, virgin. The only thing more offensive than writing it out and forcing people to read it is when someone says it instead. Luckily I stopped watching Jeopardy years ago, so Alex Trebeck no longer offends my ears (and you can read about that in my other entry entitled, Mentioning the Foreign Language Title of a Work in an English Conversation, or "Indicación de la denominación lengua extranjera de una obra en una conversación de Inglés."

My readers know they can just click the translator to read my blog (unless they use Internet Explorer and must instead pay a professional one offered by Microsoft.) I would never intentionally put anything in another tongue to confuse the shit out of them or their translator. When I go to another country, I don't offend the native speakers with my poor understanding of their language. I force them to speak mine instead, because I'm American and it's just not right to make us speak theirs (especially since we took in everybody they were trying to get rid of.) They owe us this.