Luis Verano

Hello Everyone,

I wanted to follow up on my presentation with two more things I found interesting in my investigation of Luis Verano's translation.

The first is something I noticed in the manuscript but forgot to mention in class. I wanted to highlight how meticulous Luis was with his translation. One of the comments in the manuscript was in regards to the use of the name "Macbeth" in the original text. To resolve doubts about whether the use of the "Macbeth" referred to the play or the character, Luis read the entire play to check if the context applied to any specific line. It turned out that the usage in the text referred to Macbeth as the title of the play.

The second is something Luis said to me in email correspondence. I contacted him with several questions about translating, especially the editing process, and he responded with the following:

"I don't really know what the relationship between a translator and an editor is because any translations I ever did that involved an editor were accepted exactly as I presented them without any changes, including one of a book that was more than 500-pages long and required over a year to complete. This book required considerable research, consultation, and input from many people, and when I turned the translation in, it was reviewed by three editors from three organizations in different countries. They did not change a single word."

At first my heart sank when I read this because I've never written anything that couldn't benefit from editing, especially not a translation. Having now seen the manuscript for his translation in Manoa Magazine, I'm still a little confused. I'm not quite sure how to feel about his answer, but I thought I would share his response with all of you for your consideration.

Happy Thanksgiving!

As we all recover from the quizzes and prepare for Thanksgiving break I thought we could share a smile over this error from a political email I received:

While Thanksgiving Day offers choices such as what kind of stuffing you prefer and just how much mashed potatoes is too much, flying to your destination may require deciding whether to be ogled or felt up.

"Potatoes" are a countable quantity so the passage should read-

While Thanksgiving Day offers choices such as what kind of stuffing you prefer and just how many mashed potatoes are too many, flying to your destination may require deciding whether to be ogled or felt up.

I suppose that once the potatoes are mashed they become uncountable though, so it becomes a debate over whether "mashed" is an adjective of "potatoes" or if "mashed potatoes" are their own entity.

(:

Editing vs. Writing

While studying for the exams I have been thinking about meaning and intention, especially in the case of James Frey and the business letter we analyzed in class. In A Million Little Pieces James Frey intentionally misleads his readers, whereas in the business letter the author is unable to clearly convey his message at all.

I felt that the biographical note we edited was a whole different animal, though. I can see why it is a publisher's nightmare; I am still troubled by it myself. To me, a piece like this walks a fine line between editing and writing. I didn't feel that way about the business letter because all the ideas were on paper, just not in an ideal arrangement. And in the business letter the content was not factual. Working with the biographical note, I really felt strained trying to achieve meaning from its content.

For example, the my first draft of the first sentence read "Scott Nearing taught economics for ten years at the University of Pennsylvania, but after leading a public fight against child labor, he was dismissed from his teaching post." I then changed the sentence to "Scott Nearing taught economics for ten years at the University of Pennsylvania, but after a public fight against child labor, he was dismissed from his teaching post." The revision seemed safer to me, because the original did not state that Scott Nearing led the fight.

I felt that editing the business letter, though certainly a formidable task, was still editing, but in the case of the biographical note the information is so unclear that it borders being inaccurate, and if I have to read a biography of Scott Nearing to edit the biographical note, can I still just call it editing?

I suppose some editing jobs are just tougher than others. I know that studying editing has really helped me to improve my writing!

A Good 200-Word Sentence

Pat and Chad's comments about run-on sentences led me to this example. See what you think!

Editing vs. Proofreading

After class today I was thinking about the differences between our copyediting marks and our proofreading marks. My question: If we are using proofreading marks do we always use them in addition to the copyediting marks? For example, you couldn't use the proofreading mark alone to transpose text. You need the copyediting mark to indicate which text is to be transposed and then you can include the proofreading mark in the margin to indicate that something needs to be transposed on that line.

Comments?


I also did some googling, and the title link is to an article that differentiates copyediting and proofreading.

knuckleheaded, hotheaded, ham-handed

I was interested in the occurrence of these words in the Asterisky Business article, specifically in their hyphenation.

The words appear in the following sentences:

In the fifth paragraph-
"...and then several more times in a ham-handed effort to get a roomful of sports reporters to retract or ignore his original use of the word."

And then in the second to last paragraph-
"I don't want Mr. McMackin punished for society's larger troubles any more than I want Prof. Henry Louis Gates or Sgt. James Crowley to bear sole racial responsibility for every inflexible cop or every hotheaded homeowner with an ego."

"And whether you believe it's the intolerance Crowley showed gates, or the intolerance Gates showed Crowley -- or the knuckleheaded intolerance Coach McMackin showed about lives different than his own -- it all gets you to the same place."

In each instance the word serves as an adjective, so why the difference in hyphenation? This is a good example of the evolution of words and how they change from two separate words, to hyphenated words, to a closed form. In the Merriam-Webster dictionary "ham-handed" and its derivatives are always hyphenated. "Knuckleheaded" is a closed compound.

Merriam-Webster lists "hotheaded" as a closed adjective but demonstrates its hyphenated use in the example: "He wrote a hot-headed letter." Dictionary.com lists both versions, "hotheaded" and "hot-headed." This leads me to believe that there is not yet a consensus on the form of this word, and it is an example of the in-between on an evolutionary scale. Because it appears in the same paragraph as "knuckleheaded" the un-hyphenated form is appealing.


I'm still developing my understanding of compound adjectives and when they should be hyphenated, so please comment or correct me!

Octopodes!

I was looking up a word on the Merriam-Webster online dictionary and fell in love when I came across this video. This link is to a video that discusses the plural of octopus, but the editors of Merriam-Webster have put together a lot of short videos discussing different word usages. Enjoy!

(Also, I think I will say octopodes from now on to inspire discussions of etymology!)

Moving Large Sections of Text

I am looking at the business letter we were assigned to edit and having a difficult time drawing the line between editing and rewriting. I have been trying to make changes by moving and combining sentences and now I am wondering what is the cleanest way to indicate those changes. We have already seen a few examples of how to move phrases, etc. but how, for example, would I best indicate the following change:

Original-
Aloha! We just wanted to follow up with you on how are you and if everything is coming along satisfactory with your tub installation job, which we did for you on January 22 of this year.


Edited-
Aloha! We wanted to follow up on the tub installation job we did for you on January 22 of this year to ensure that everything is coming along satisfactorily.

Aside from some of the more minor edits, what is the cleanest way to move a large chunk of text without rewriting it?

Words with double consonants

English spelling has always confused me with regard to double consonants. I almost always double-check the dictionary when writing words like "embarrassment" or "caroling" (vs the variant British spelling "carolling"). I was wondering if there was any kind of rule for the double consonant in English?

In my quest to answer this question on the internet, I found this list of frequently misspelled words:

http://www.yourdictionary.com/library/misspelled.html