Big words

Recently I was asked to do what I thought would be a small job of translation. It turned out to be extremely difficult. The reason: It was the kind of document that preferred to say in a hundred big words what could have been said simply in ten.

A handbook of composition once used a verse from Lewis Carrol as an example of good, simple, concrete writing:

The time has come, the Walrus said,

To talk of many things;

Of shoes and ships and sealing wax

And cabbages and kings.

A government report would have put that differently: "the topics of concern were varied: footwear, ocean transport, epistolary equipment, agricultural products and the monarchial structure of government."

A teacher of mine pointed out how simple, yet how moving is the language used by Antony at Caesar’s funeral. "Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears. I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. The evil that men do lives after them, the good is oft interred with their bones."

A modern politician would have said instead, "My said task is to preside at the inhumation of Caesar, not to indulge in adulatory remarks. The malefactions of humanity are long remembered, whereas benefactions are soon forgotten."

I remember an old joke. A professor told a motorist, "The pneumatic integrity of your rotatory appendage has been impaired." The driver said. "Huh?" Then a little boy came along and said, "Hey, Mister, you have a flat tire."

There was also the old joke from long ago. The professor said, "An ornithological specimen held firmly between the digits is worth two of the same species."

Fifty years ago, when four of us were starting to publish the quarterly Philippine Studies (which has just celebrated fifty years of publication), I used to write articles and reviews for almost every issue, even before I myself became editor. The founding editor, Father Leo A. Cullum (a very fine person and a very fine writer), said to me, "You will never be famous." "Why not?" "Because you write in a way that can be understood. To be famous you must write in a way that keeps people wondering what on earth you could have meant."

That was why I found this recent translation job very difficult and also very tedious. I had to find words to say something like the following: "In a context of gratuity we pursue the educational endeavor in a commitment to the integral development of potentialities, as well personal as social." Would it not have been simpler to say: "We charge no tuition fees. We give free education to the poor."