#translationethics

Hello, welcome to my blog, where I'm going to write about languages and cultures. My name is Lars Rune, and when I do language related stuff I may call myself SeaLiteral. In Spanish, that would mean "be it literal". And I'll begin with a topic I hadn't thought about until last time I went to Denmark: loaded subtitles. Or maybe I should call them biased subtitles.

Edit: And my surname is Præstmark, which I found a bit hard to type on the keyboard I was using, so now I've made it so that if I write PRAST/MARK it changes to the correct spelling.

I was in Spain when the illegal Catalan referendum took place. Now, I probably should mention I don't live in Catalonia, so I wasn't in the region it was about. I live in Andalucía, the region in the south of the country. Catalonia is in the east. And my mom was in Denmark, where she lives. We talked over the phone, and she asked me how Spanish media were covering the issue. I mentioned the conflict between police departments and the grey plastic box issue, and I also mentioned the results of the election, how it had been decided to let some people vote in other places than where it had been intended, and the stories that had then cropped up about some people claiming to have voted multiple times. A lot of this, she said, Danish media hadn't mentioned. And for those who don't know, the amount of votes, between yes, no, blank votes (empty envelopes) and spoiled ballots made up more than 100 percent. Interestingly, German TV did reasonably well at not taking sides. At least better than Danish or Spanish TV.

And then I went to Denmark for Christmas. And then I saw that not only were they leaving out information about things the Catalanists did wrong: they showed people spaying things in Spanish, and then they made slight errors in the subtitles, making the constitutionalists seem worse than they were. It's so long ago, I might not remember the exact wording, but they seemed to think that "estar en posición de" meant to want when it means the same as the English expression "to be in a position to" whose meaning is closer to "can", "may" or "to be able to". That's quite a misunderstanding. And it seems to happen more often in languages that Danish people are less likely to understand. I should however mention that news get translated very quickly and mistakes can be hard to avoid when you have to translate something in a matter of minutes. I wonder how much effort is put into keeping translations "neutral". Or maybe their employers actually request that the translations be slightly biased towards a particular view.

And now a quick note: the goal of this blog isn't really to write about politics. It's more to practice typing. Or more specifically to practice machine shorthand. I've been stenoing all English words in this post, pressing multiple keys at once and getting out several characters per stroke. Except when I did spell out some words because I didn't know how to shorten them. And I did edit it a bit with qwerty after writing it.

Edit: And maybe I should point out that I’m mainly using it to write in English, but I've been working on a Danish dictionary, so that I should be able to write text in my native language, which is Danish.

By the way, you can tell me in the comments if there's something in particular you want me to write about, but it should be somehow related to languages or cultures. Some topics I've considered discussing are:

- My opinion on languages like Esperanto

- Link interpreting

- Notetaking, and mixing languages