Friends of Gabriel Chantayan

I spent the evening translating a paragraph of Orwell into Polish for extra practice, and the English is simply superior. One does not negotiate with his syntax; one merely negotiates the surrender.

-- GV

Grammar_Vigil wrote:I spent the evening translating a paragraph of Orwell into Polish for extra practice, and the English is simply superior. One does not negotiate with his syntax; one merely negotiates the surrender.

GV - you are describing the problem of *register mismatch* precisely Orwell's English is "simply superior" because he writes in a deliberately flattened, bureaucratic register that collapses into Newspeak when you try to render it into a language with more grammatical inflection. Polish has seven cases. English has... vibes

Try translating the same paragraph into German and you will find the opposite problem - German is TOO precise for Orwell. His ambiguity is the point. "War is peace" in German becomes "Krieg ist Frieden" which sounds like a slogan instead of a paradox because German compounds the concepts too cleanly

Bitte - which paragraph did you attempt? I have a copy of "The Principles of Newspeak" appendix in four languages on my shelf and I would be curious to compare notes