Linguists, translators, language freaks, etc.

[Eric]

Something Loki said on another thread made me think that there are several classes of people who do things with languages:

1) Linguists. These people usually hold down jobs at universities and are well up on Chomsky and other such tree-diagram people. They tend, in the English-speaking countries, to try to find their niche, which is finding an extremely obscure language that no one else has "bagged", and writing books about it, although all their information comes from one of the five native-speakers still alive.

2) Translators. These are either the type of person who will translate anything, in the way that a paper-shredder does not distinguish between a Shakespeare manuscript and a management document. Or they may be of a superior type, those who seek to hand on culture to others. These latter worthies are usually termed "literary translators". Machines may make the former type of drone redundant, but literary translators are here to stay.

3) Language freaks. These people will create lists of anything to do with language and languages, as long as they don't actually have to learn even one language so they can read a book in it, or effectively insult someone in a pub in it. They may even learn to say ten banal or obscene phrases in eighteen languages, without actually being able to hold a conversation in any of them.

[Eric]

All the types of people that are listed in #1 lack something called humour. They are obsessive list-makers and analysers, and if they tried to smile, their faces would crack. This is because they have never examined languages as living beings but mostly as dead artefacts whence they can extract, for example, the genitive case as it was in the 18th century, then write a 200-page thesis of great unreadability and get a doctor's degree. Once the copies of their great thesis is on a shelf in the university library, no one ever reads it again, but the ritual of writing two-hundred heavily annotated pages has given the ex-student and budding lecture-drone and seminar-lackey the right to be quasi-unemployable beyond the groves (or grooves) of academe, but still add the letters PhD after his or her name when either standing in the dole queue or when marking huge piles of first year students' plagiarised essays on "The Use of the Madeleine in Proust - a linguistic analysis of the syntax of sexism".

As the "scholars" often can't actually read very much in the languages they have so microscopically examined, they rely on literary translators so they can compare original with translation, then writing a further thesis, dissertation or article, such as: "The Comparative Merits of Comparison, Comparing the First Page of 'Fanny Hill' in French Translation With Its English Original - a comparative literary examination of filthy words to get excited about.", University of Deadwood, thesis published in a heavily subsidised version by Bunglesnot Vanity Publications, Nether Wendbucket, Gloucestershire, UK, 2001.

These same industrious frauds of course omit the name of the dirty-minded Continental translator who turned a part of "Fanny Hill" into French, although all their turgid scholarship is totally based on this person's ability to write correct obscenities. Then these linguistically turned-on "scholars" will work their way up the ladder of academia, where they fight like rats in a ratcatcher's sack for tenure, a bigger salary, and so on, stabbing one another in the back with great gusto, and writing endless and pointless "papers" and "publications", as unreadable as everything else mentioned so far.

When these "scholars" are old, and grey and worn out by forty years of teaching undergrads the basics of spelling and syntax, as the intake is of abysmal quality, they finally have time to translate three poems themselves before they die of the pent-up exhaustion of decades.

Such is the life of the scholarly linguist who, somewhere at the back of their mind, actually once had the noble thought of doing a spot of translation themselves.

Am I being cynical? Of course! It's more fun than teaching undergrads the basics of footnote and endnote annotation and pickled pedantry.