Category Archives: Useful Notes

Useful Notes: How can I find a good translator?

10 Thursday Aug 2017

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Well, hopefully, if you’re looking for an Italian translator, you already found one here 🙂 However, just in case you were looking for a translator in another language (or [sob] another Italian translator), in this post you will find some tips.

Note that, in the past, I already published several posts about how to avoid scammers, how much you should pay for a translation, and so on. This post is about how to find a freelancer that suits your need. To my knowledge, there are three common ways of doing so: asking your author friends, checking out some websites, or contacting an agency. All of them have upsides and downsides.

Word of mouth

This is perhaps the most common way authors find me: when asked for it, a satisfied client recommends a translator – with whom they worked – to their friends. This way of finding a freelancer to work with has several upsides: the only thing you have to do is ask your author friends if they know a good translator, and since they already worked with the person in question, their firsthand experience will be invaluable.

There’s also a downside: sadly, not every author can judge a translator properly. A lot of people have commissioned (and paid for, and published) bad translations without realizing it. Not every reader leaves reviews, and a bad – or just sub-par – translator can keep working unnoticed for quite a long wile. If possible, ask your author friends if they have any confirmation about the translator’s skills (such as positive comments in the reviews, or at least a lack of negative comments about the quality of the translation).

Window shopping

Another way you can find a translator is search for “[language] book translations” or something similar on your favorite search engine and look at the various web pages that will appear. A serious professional will have most or all of the following on their website:

  • a detailed explanation of what they do (ie. “I translate all sorts of novels”, “I specialize in historical romance”, “I have experience with fiction and non-fiction alike”)
  • clear and up-to-date rates (people who encourage you to inquire about costs tend to be quite expensive, perhaps even excessively so)
  • a list of satisfied clients
  • a list of the books they translated
  • any relevant personal information (studies, languages spoken natively, etc.)

Empty websites are suspicious, as are poor grammar and long, self-praising blocks of text that actually give you no information at all.

The upside of window shopping is that, well, it can be fun. It also allows you to see for yourself what you may be buying. The downside is that all the information come through an interested party (the translator), so it may not be 100% accurate.

Translation agencies

There are a lot of translation agencies out there, many of which will be able to translate any book you want (although it seems that a lot of them focus more, or even exclusively, on non-fiction). Serious ones will have a professional website and a person  (usually an account manager) whom you’ll be able to contact if you have any questions. The upside of working with an agency is that many of them are quire serious about their reputations, and will pursue high quality standards. The downside… well, a translation agency is, essentially, a middleman. They will slap their own mark-up on whatever the translator gets, which may increase the cost quite a bit… and if it doesn’t, they are probably paying a low wage to their translator, which usually doesn’t guarantee good quality.

 

Which method do I recommend? In my experience, word of mouth is usually a good start, followed by a quick search to see if the translator has gotten good reviews and/or seems legit. If you don’t know any author who could recommend you a translator, you’re left with the option between window shopping or looking for an agency. The one you choose generally depends on your budget and on the kind of relationship you want with your translator: agencies tend to be more expensive and impersonal, while individual freelancers are usually cheaper, and working with them creates a more personal relationship. The choice is up to you.

Useful Notes: 5 ways to better characterize Italian characters

12 Friday May 2017

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In the last Useful Notes post, I talked about some episodes of Italian history that I thought could be interesting for authors. This time I’d like to give you a few tips on how to make your Italian characters sound more real. Just like the other post, this one is merely a primer, not a full guide to Italian speech patterns; however, I hope it’ll manage to at least guide your research in the right direction. 🙂

So, about making those character more well-defined…

Use double negatives

In standard English, two negatives make a positive: “I didn’t do nothing” literally means “I did something.” The same isn’t true in Italian, though: “Non ho fatto niente” translates word for word as “I didn’t do nothing”, but actually means “I didn’t do anything“. That’s because, apparently, the two negatives reinforce, rather than cancel out, each other. If your Italian character doesn’t have a perfect grasp of English, having them negate something twice is a good way of showing it.

… or some common slips of the tongue

Words like grazie (“thank you”) and prego (“you’re welcome”) are second nature for most polite Italians. It would be easy, for a speaker of that language not well versed in English (or simply not used to speak it conversationally), to use them by instinct. For the same reason, an Italian character may use sì (don’t forget the accent) instead of “yes”, or the Italian pronunciation of “no” (which sounds closer to the French non) in lieu of the English one. This doesn’t necessary implies ignorance on the character’s part: the person may just be nervous or in a hurry.

Don’t forget to put articles (almost) everywhere

Unlike English, the Italian language makes ample use of definite articles, even when referring to generic things. For example, Italians “go to the work” instead of going “to work”, drink the milk instead of drinking milk, and so on. This isn’t universal: we have sex, not the sex, for example. But it’s a general speech pattern that you can keep in mind to make your characters sound more realistic, especially if they have a very basic comprehension of English.

Play with gestures

That the same gesture may have completely different meanings in different cultures is widely known. You can employ this to your advantage by having an Italian character use the wrong gesture in a given situation or misinterpret someone else’s. For example, the so-called sign of the horns has positive implications in the American culture, as well as in several Norther European ones; in Italy, making this gesture at someone (especially men) means you’re calling them a cuckold. The same goes for the V sign, which in Italy is considered to have less to do with “victory” than it has with female genitalia. Just remember to do a very thorough research, or things could get embarrassing.

Do not make them Sicilian

Alright, we all know that that the South is where most Italian immigrants came (and still come) from. But you can do better. Make your Italian characters from Veneto, Friuli or Piemonte, the three Northern regions that produced more than 47% of the Italian emigration between 1875 and 1900. Veneto (yes, that’s the region where Venice is), in particular, used to have a lot of poverty in certain areas; my late father, a History teacher in high school, used to say that veneti (people from Veneto) used to be called terroni del nord (“Northern terroni“, the latter being a slur to indicate Southern Italians) because they were so poor. Piemonte (Piedmont) also used to heave sacks of heavy poverty, particularly in the country area of the Langhe. If you have the opportunity, do a bit of research about the part of Italy your character is from, focusing on the local dialects and some words that a person from those areas may be likely to use often in their daily life. Nothing like having your character from Brescia call their friend vecio (lit. “old man”), or babao (lit. “idiot”) when they screw up, to make them sound authentic. Although your readers might need notes. 😛

Useful Notes: Four Things You Didn’t Know About the History of Italy

30 Sunday Apr 2017

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I know many authors that like to write about Italy, my country. Sometimes it’s just a brief paragraph about one of their characters’ travels; other times, one of said character is Italian; and in some cases, the whole story is set in Italy. I decided to write this post to provide some food for thoughts (more like a snack, really) to any author who might be interested in learning something new and perhaps use it as inspiration for story details, or – who knows? – perhaps even a whole plot or sub-plot. Do what you want with this; I’ll just leave it here 🙂

The Italian language didn’t exist until the late 1800s

When you have a character in, say, Medieval Europe, and you want to show that he knows a lot of languages, you may be tempted to put Italian alongside the mandatory French and Latin. Unfortunately, that may be an historical faux pas, considering that Italian as a language didn’t even exist at the time.

Until the unification happened in 1861, with the proclamation of the Kingdom of Italy, the country was divided into a number of more-or-less independent countries, and everyone spoke their own language. Today we call those languages “dialects”, but they really are individual Romance languages, in some cases with foreign or ancient influences (Sicilian has some Arabic notes to it, for example, and there are words and expressions in my native, Northern Italian dialect that remind of French). A person from Naples and a person from Milan, each one speaking in their native dialect, will find it very hard to understand each other, unless they had some kind of contact with the other person’s language in the past. Before the unification, and especially before the national schooling system, but even more especially before the birth of national media such as newspapers and the radio (that’s right, we’re talking Nineteenth century here), the person from Milan and the person from Naples did not have a common language.

To put this in perspective, here’s a few sentences in Italian and in my native dialect (which doesn’t sound today as it would, say, 500 years ago, but still):

English: I don’t know.
Italian: Non lo so.
Dialect: Me so mia.

English: Push the button.
Italian: Premi il pulsante.
Dialect: Schisa el butun.

English: You eat like a pig!
Italian: Mangi come un porco!
Dialect: Ta manget come un porsel!

Yep, I know: that sounds like Orchish. And you haven’t heard the people in the mountains next to my home talk. I also probably should have put some accents and other phonetic things in there, but you get the picture.

“But what about Dante!” you might say? I’m sorry to disappoint you, but Dante never wrote a single line in Italian. He wrote his poetry in educated Florentine, while most of his prose was written in Latin. In fact, although the Divina Commedia is still studied in schools, if you open an Italian textbook and find a piece of that poem, you will notice that more than half of the page is devoted to notes; the whole thing would be almost impossible to understand without them.

The “unification” of Italy was more like a colonial war

This is a touchy subject in modern Italy, and something that “official” history has been struggling to recognize, but the unification of Italy was essentially Piedmont (a strongly militaristic state) conquering a big chunk of the peninsula, with all the consequences that you may imagine. Particularly in the South, the transition from the old Bourbon monarchy to the new Savoy one resulted in the worsening of living conditions for pretty much everybody: among other things, taxes were raised, local (thriving) industries were forcefully closed to favor the Northern ones, and dissent was met with armed repression. As a result, banditry began plaguing the South almost overnight. Of course, most of these “bandits” were the modern equivalent of politically persecuted minorities, not to mention a good number of soldiers from the Bourbon armed forces who refused to lay down their arms. A situation of constant war developed and continued for many years; at the same time, corruption and crime became endemic, as it naturally happens when someone forces you to choose between illegality and starvation. Even today, the South is without a doubt the most economically depressed area of the peninsula.

Now, all that may sound a bit harsh. Without a doubt, there were lots of ideals behind the unification of Italy, but the results were mixed and the scars are still there, even today.

Speaking of colonial wars, Italy was the only European country to ever lose one in Africa

Not that winning one is something to be proud of, but still.

In 1889, the Italian government and the Ethiopian emperor Menelik II signed the Treaty of Wuchale, with which Menelik gave the Italian possession of northern Eritreea in exchange for a nice sum of money and some other things. The treaty was written in two languages: Amharic and Italian. The problem (and this should emphasize how important good translations are) was that the Italian version was a little different from the Amharic one. How? Well, here’s how Article 17 looked like:

Amharic version: His Majesty the King of Kings of Ethiopia may use the Government of His Majesty the King of Italy for all business dealings he has with other powers or governments.
Italian version: His Majesty the King of Kings of Ethiopia agrees to use the Government of His Majesty the King of Italy for all business dealings he has with other powers or governments.

Today, historians still don’t agree on whether this difference was a mistake or an intentional manipulation, and in the latter case, on who is guilty. On one hand, it seems strange that Menelik, the ruler of a newly unified country, would want to put his own foreign policy in the hands of a European government; it seems more likely that the Italian government was looking for a casus belli to attack and conquer Ethiopia. On the other, Menelik himself could have planned on taking advantage of the situation by cashing the Italian money and then denounce the treaty, which he actually did in 1893.

In the end, war happened and the Italian got butchered. Which is what normally happens when your army is run by idiots. A few examples? As a defensive precaution, the Italians built a fortress at Makalle that wasn’t even completed before it saw its first siege, and didn’t even have an independent or easily defensible water source (in Africa); and in the decisive battle of Adwa, they went into combat following battlefield maps that didn’t even get major landscape features right. In the end, the Italians lost the war and were forced to negotiate peace, becoming the first and only European nation to get their ass kicked in the pursuit of profit at the expense of faraway-living people.

The Mafia helped the Allies during WWII

This is a little known fact, but it’s been known for a while that, when the Allies landed in Sicily, they found some pretty shady figures ready to help them. The Mafia provided the Americans with intelligence and connections, not to mention more “mundane” services such as interpreting. How much the help of organized crime weighted in the war is unknown, but the fact that it happened is pretty much undeniable.

The most interesting question is: why in the world would the Mafia help the Allies? The answer is morbidly fascinating. Fascism was a totalitarian regime; as such, it couldn’t tolerate not to be the only authority in the land. The underground, deeply-rooted power of the Mafia defied that. Therefore, the Fascist government was openly hostile to the Mafia, and the Mafia didn’t like that. This is why they were more than happy to help whoever was fighting the Fascists in that moment, ie. the Allies.

 

And this is it for this post, folks. If you found it interesting, please let me know by leaving a comment or contacting me 🙂