14 Words That Are Their Own Opposites

Here’s an ambiguous sentence for you: “Because of the agency’s oversight, the corporation’s behavior was sanctioned.” Does that mean, 'Because the agency oversaw the company’s behavior, they imposed a penalty for some transgression' or does it mean, 'Because the agency was inattentive, they overlooked the misbehavior and gave it their approval by default'? We’ve stumbled into the looking-glass world of “contronyms”—words that are their own antonyms.

1. Sanction (via French, from Latin sanctio(n-), from sancire ‘ratify,’) can mean ‘give official permission or approval for (an action)’ or conversely, ‘impose a penalty on.’

2. Oversight is the noun form of two verbs with contrary meanings, “oversee” and “overlook.” “Oversee,” from Old English ofersēon ‘look at from above,’ means ‘supervise’ (medieval Latin for the same thing: super- ‘over’ + videre ‘to see.’) “Overlook” usually means the opposite: ‘to fail to see or observe; to pass over without noticing; to disregard, ignore.’

3. Left can mean either remaining or departed. If the gentlemen have withdrawn to the drawing room for after-dinner cigars, who’s left? (The gentlemen have left and the ladies are left.)

4. Dust, along with the next two words, is a noun turned into a verb meaning either to add or to remove the thing in question. Only the context will tell you which it is. When you dust are you applying dust or removing it? It depends whether you’re dusting the crops or the furniture.

5. Seed can also go either way. If you seed the lawn you add seeds, but if you seed a tomato you remove them.

6. Stone is another verb to use with caution. You can stone some peaches, but please don’t stone your neighbor (even if he says he likes to get stoned).

7. Trim as a verb predates the noun, but it can also mean either adding or taking away. Arising from an Old English word meaning ‘to make firm or strong; to settle, arrange,’ “trim” came to mean ‘to prepare, make ready.’ Depending on who or what was being readied, it could mean either of two contradictory things: ‘to decorate something with ribbons, laces, or the like to give it a finished appearance’ or ‘to cut off the outgrowths or irregularities of.’ And the context doesn’t always make it clear. If you’re trimming the tree are you using tinsel or a chain saw?

8. Cleave can be cleaved into two “homographs,” words with different origins that end up spelled the same. “Cleave,” meaning ‘to cling to or adhere,’ comes from an Old English word that took the forms cleofian, clifian, or clīfan. “Cleave,” with the contrary meaning ‘to split or sever (something), ‘ as you might do with a cleaver, comes from a different Old English word, clēofan. The past participle has taken various forms: “cloven,” which survives in the phrase “cloven hoof,” “cleft,” as in a “cleft palate” or “cleaved.”

9. Resign works as a contronym in writing. This time we have homographs, but not homophones. “Resign,” meaning ‘to quit,’ is spelled the same as “resign,” meaning ‘to sign up again,’ but it’s pronounced differently.

10. Fast can mean "moving rapidly," as in "running fast," or ‘fixed, unmoving,’ as in "holding fast." If colors are fast they will not run. The meaning ‘firm, steadfast’ came first. The adverb took on the sense ‘strongly, vigorously,’ which evolved into ‘quickly,’ a meaning that spread to the adjective.

11. Off means ‘deactivated,’ as in "to turn off," but also ‘activated,’ as in "The alarm went off."

12. Weather can mean ‘to withstand or come safely through,’ as in “The company weathered the recession,” or it can mean ‘to be worn away’: “The rock was weathered.”

13. Screen can mean ‘to show’ (a movie) or ‘to hide’ (an unsightly view).

14. Help means ‘assist,’ unless you can’t help doing something, when it means ‘prevent.’

The contronym (also spelled “contranym”) goes by many names, including “auto-antonym,” “antagonym,” “enantiodrome,” “self-antonym,” “antilogy” and “Janus word” (from the Roman god of beginnings and endings, often depicted with two faces looking in opposite directions). Can’t get enough of them? The folks at Daily Writing Tips have rounded up even more.

Source text here: http://mentalfloss.com/article/49834/14-words-are-their-own-opposites#ixzz2PyMEYHHQ 

Author

Judith B. Herman is a Southern Californi writer with a thing for words and pictures. She blog about the adventures of Lexie Kahn, Private Etymologist, at WordSnooper.com and contributes to Behold, The photography blog at Slate. Thanks to Photoshop she uses her camera to document unreality.

Top tips for managing translations (part 1)

Anne-Claire Chevalier, one of our most experienced translation specialists at Saffron, has put together her five top tips to avoid your translated projects getting lost in translation!

1. Hire a native speaker

It’s a common mistake to assume that just because someone speaks a foreign language that they can translate everything into anything. Remember that only native speakers of a language will know the local customs and habits that subtly affect and impact on a language. You can’t substitute for the real McCoy! 

2. Check that the translator matches your requirements

It can be quite difficult to know your translator’s efficacy when you don’t speak the language(s) they’ll be translating into. Since the storyboard you’ll be sending will probably be written in English, if they’re not a native English speaker it’s crucial that you test their English fluency. If your translator doesn’t understanding the storyboard, they’ll be sure to mess up their translations! 

3. Train the translator

Every company has an induction programme for their new employees, so why not use that material to train the translator? This will give them a great insight on your company’s standards and will help them assess your company’s writing style. 

4. Translate from A to B, not B to C

Avoid at all costs translating from another translation. If you have a version of the course in the original language, send that version to the translator. The best example to highlight that issue is the Bible. It has been translated from Aramaic to Greek to Latin to the current versions. Studies of the bible in the 1990s and 2000s indicate that quite a bit has been lost in translation! 

5. Distrust automated translation

So many aspects of your working life have been digitalised that it’s easy to forget what technology is supposed to be for! And this is perhaps most true in the translation industry. Ask your translator what system they use, and how. Make sure they use technology only to assist their translations, rather than using it to fully automate the entire process. If they use automated translation, you might as well use the Google translator; the result will be the same and you will save yourself money in the process! Remember that language is fundamentally about people and emotions, not machines.

Source: http://www.trainingzone.co.uk/blogs-post/top-tips-managing-translations-part-1/184406

The Art of Translation: Something New, Something Old

By Dennis Abrams

One of the most talked about books of the season has been Herman Koch’s The Dinner. Just a couple of weeks ago, Publishing Perspectives‘ Edward Nawotka looked at the book, its reviews (both positive and negative), and raised the question of whether a translated work can be too “foreign” or in this case specifically too “Dutch” in its attitudes and mindset to reach an American audience.

But how does the translator see this question? What do they see as their role in translating not just the words of the book but the entire foreign culture those words represent? In the Los Angeles Review of Books, Claire Cameron interviewed Sam Garrett, who translated The Dinner from its original Dutch into English. Some highlights:

Are there things you try to avoid?

I try to avoid pre-chewing the reader’s food for them. If absolutely necessary, it’s useful to be able to clarify specific cultural elements without intruding too much. But if it’s not necessary, I try to leave well enough alone. Maybe I’m naïve, but I like to think that foreign elements in a text may educate those readers who are willing to think about them, who haven’t lost their sense of wonder.

Is there a point at which you need to stray farther with the words to convey the meaning?

Oh, sure. In fact, that might be another definition of translation: informed and respectful straying. The words a writer uses not only have a dictionary definition, but also a color and an intention. To pin those down, the translator has to sniff around. From the first to the final word of a translation, you’re leading the reader along a path to a destination. The color is what keeps the reader hipping; the intention is the scent that keeps the translator on the right path.

A good translator has to be not only something of a virtuoso in his or her mother tongue, but also a fluent, knowledgeable, and interested sponge when it comes to the idiom and cultural setting of the language he or she is translating from. If you haven’t absorbed damned near everything, if you’re not fascinated by the picayune details of your second language, you probably shouldn’t be translating.

So a translation is a search for meaning?

A translation is not just turning one language into another. It’s also about opening up a foreign mindset. Our culture is hardwired into us through language.

What was the allure of this project?

What particularly appealed to me about translating this book was the opportunity to try to get the voice of Paul Lohman, the first-person narrator, down pat.  He is, in essence, extremely Dutch, dry and disillusioned. And when crossed, he proves capable of reacting with what you might call ‘extreme prejudice.’ The opportunity to do Paul’s particular brand of extreme prejudice was something I jumped at. The way an actor, I guess, might jump at the chance to play George in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.”

If you’re showing the context while translating, where does Koch’s writing stop and your translation start?

I’ve compared my work to that of the pianist Glenn Gould before. It’s a dangerous comparison, I know! Apart from the obvious self-aggrandizement, the point I was trying to make is that the good translator isn’t a composer, but a fluent medium. However well he pulls it off, Glenn Gould playing the “Goldberg Variations” is not playing Glenn Gould – he’s Glenn Gould playing Bach.

Meanwhile, at NYRblog, Tim Parks talked about the challenges of translating Giacomo Leopardi’s 200-year-old, 4,526-pages-longZibaldone:

Do I keep the long sentences, then, or break them up? Do I make the book more comprehensible for English readers than it is for present-day Italian readers (for whom footnotes given a modern Italian paraphrase are often provided)? Above all, do I allow all those Latinisms to come through in the English, which would inevitably give the text a more formal, austere feel, or do I go for Anglo-Saxon monosyllables and modern phrasal verbs to get across the curiously excited intimacy of the text, like someone building up very complex, often provocative ideas as he goes along, with no one at hand to ask for explanations or homogeneity or any sort of order?

…before concluding,

And I realize that, beyond the duty of semantic accuracy, all I have to do (all! Is to sit down, for a few hundred hours, and perform this Leopardi – in whatever way seems most right, most authentically close to the tone and the feel of it, at the moment of writing (since every complex translation would be somewhat different if we had done it a month before, or a month later, or even an hour); yes, just hear the text and experience it absolutely as intensely as I can, allowing myself to fall into its way of thinking about things, then say it in English, perform it in English, my English, as he performed it, sitting at his desk, writing in Italian, his very peculiar and special Italian. Of course there will be interminable revisions, much polishing up, and an editor will have his or her say. But essentially this is the way with translation, whether it be me or Leopardi; or some other translator and the latest Chinese Nobel Laureate, or some Russian translator and De Lillo or Franzen: the book is fed through a hopefully receptive mind, which inevitably leaves its indelible stamp on the translation. Let the academics argue the issues back and forth; what I have to do now is read honestly, and pray for inspiration.

Source: http://publishingperspectives.com/author/dennisabrams/

Author: Dennis Abrams

Dennis Abrams is a contributing editor for Publishing Perspectives, responsible for children’s publishing and media. He’s also the author of more than 30 YA biographies and histories for Chelsea House publishers, a restaurant critic, and a literary blogger.