Losing Myself in the Luscious Forest of the English Language – Part 2

A Thorny Question

Here's the link to Part 1, just in case. Where were we? Oh yes, the enthusiastic beginner (teenage me) realises that learning more than basic English requires hard work and patience, years of hard work and patience. Besides, being still in the process of mastering my own mother tongue was both a help and a hindrance. A help, because the mental structure for the acquisition of a second-language was already there in all its glorious, working complexity; a hindrance, in that I had to reorganise my thoughts – accommodating them on a new semantic-syntactic grid – whenever I tried to utter my first sentences in English.

From a forest to a fragrant, if thorny path of flowers: one of David Austin Rose Gardens in Shropshire, UK. Gap Photos//Howard Rice

English was the first out of the 10 other foreign languages I've studied throughout my life, in chronological order: English, Latin, French, Russian, German, Hungarian, Polish, Serbo-Croatian, Dutch, Japanese. I'd love to boast that I've been able to master all of them, but that would be a big, fat lie. One day, I dream to add Chinese, Sanskrit, and Yiddish to this list of not learnt languages, just to remind myself what a ばか (baka – Japanese for fool, silly, idiot) I am.

My fascination with foreign languages began when, as a 7-year old omnivorous reader, I noticed that not all words I saw on books and magazines, or heard on radio and TV, end on a vowel as they do in Italian, that virtually all European languages have 5 letters more than our alphabet: J, K, W, X, Y, and that foreign words are pronounced differently from the way they're written, especially in French and English… mind-blowing! I wanted to investigate all these fascinating facts, and promised myself that I would study languages, when I grew up. I didn't really care whether I'd be able to speak fluently with other people – my early interactions with my fellow Earthlings were usually an inexhaustible source of bafflement to me – but I was eager to know more about the 5 Ws and H of Linguistic.

At Uni, I finally had the chance to study how all Indo-European languages are descended from a common ancestor, the “single prehistoric language, linguistically reconstructed as Proto-Indo-European, spoken sometime during the Neolithic or early Bronze Age.” I would have loved to dedicate my life to those studies (spending my days surrounded by books is my idea of fun, and I know I'm preaching to the choir here😉) but, when I was a young woman, I used to be easily distracted, and then I found myself forever seduced by translation, see one of my previous posts:

Popping translation cherries

While still at school, my interest for English had begun to dwindle, partly due to the increasingly sophisticated challenges I had to face in learning the language properly, partly because I had fallen head over heels in love with Russian, and so it took me a good 15 years in order to rekindle my special relationship with English, and a job offer.

I was asked to translate a non-fiction book by a Canadian professor, regarding the impacts of the IMF and World Bank reforms. The echo of my enthusiastic answer was still resounding in my ears, when I realised that I had never translated anything from English in my professional capacity up to that point. Besides, the book's author had asked the publisher to send him my translation once ready, so that one of his colleagues, a fellow Italian-native professor could read it and check it thoroughly for possible errors and misinterpretations. No pressure!

I went to retrieve and dust off my old dictionaries, and bought a couple of updated editions. That’s how we used to work in them old days. Google was only established six months later, in September 1998, and I hadn't an Internet connection yet, anyway. At first, I was nervous that I might misunderstand even the simplest words – such as and and one, for instance – therefore, I checked every single one of them in both the monolingual and bilingual dictionaries, before I translated them. Not a smart move: it's a waste of time, and it's not how it should be done. I decided to read a couple of sentences and translate them first, to see if they made sense together. If in doubt, I could always check the words. The sentences became paragraphs, and then chapters, building a context in which I could increasingly smoothly place those words, idioms, and concepts I had never encountered before, alongside the more familiar ones. I produced two drafts, the professor read the second one, said he was happy with it, and so was I: "I got this!"

I was quite sure in my passive knowledge of English, but I wanted to strengthen the active part as well, in view of the dream my husband and I shared of leaving Italy for good. Even though, in the end, we decided to migrate to the Netherlands, I thought I had to up my game, so I signed up for the Cambridge Certificate of Proficiency in English. I had to work hard at it – in January, I produced the worst mock exam in my class, with an especially abysmal Use of English test – but in June, I smashed it out of the park. Well, almost, I got an overall B grade, with my personal best in, wait for it, Use of English!

Nowadays, I do most of my translation work from English, which is my language of choice for reading, and watching movies and TV series with English subtitles (we love Korean and Japanese dramedies and rom-coms in particular). I also owe a huge debt of gratitude to the BBC for keeping me up to date with the newest idiomatic expressions, and for familiarising me with all the regional varieties of English spoken in the British Isles, not to mention just in London. Let me tell you, the very first time I heard a Glaswegian comedian talking, I was shocked and awed. They usually have a wonderful sense of humour, but their pronunciation is so peculiar that it's extremely difficult for a foreigner to appreciate it without the help of subtitles.

I realise now that I'll have to add a third part to this post, such is the hold that the English language has on virtually every aspect of my life. I hope I'll meet you again on here!

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