Quiz: Identify the Textual Accent
It’s quiz time. Laissez les bon temps rouler!
OK, that might merit some explanation. We all know that when someone is talking in a language that’s not the one they grew up speaking, they often have an accent – they say things under the influence of the sounds of the language they’re most used to. Well, when people write things in other languages, there’s often also a sort of accent: they use grammar that is influenced by the language they grew up with. English speakers are known around the world for doing this, and a classic example is “Laissez les bon temps rouler,” which is “Let the good times roll” translated word by word into French following English grammar. (The standard French grammar would be “laissez rouler les bons temps,” but it’s not really an idiomatic phrase in French, so…)
Of course people who grew up speaking languages other than English also sometimes do this when writing in English. Even highly educated people can do it, because, frankly, English grammar is a little weird at times, and even when it’s sensible it’s different from the grammar of many other languages. And so, when you’re editing, you can sometimes find yourself working on an article written by someone who is an expert in their field, and yet it just sounds a little off in places. It has a bit of textual accent. And it’s your job to try to recognize what’s going on, and why, and what phrasing would best match the author’s intent and sound natural in English.
Many effects of the influence of another language are choices of words that seem odd. If you happen to know what language the author is more used to, you can check what that word might be translating from the other language and what other English words can also be used to translate that word, and query the author with a suggestion (for example, an Italian-speaking author might use “synthesizes” where “summarizes” would be more suitable – or vice versa – because “sintetizza” can be translated as either).
But some of the time a textual accent shows up in the grammar – grammatical features of a language being brought over to English, or a pattern learned for English being overapplied. We’ve made a quiz to help you sharpen your observational powers for this. It’s not really a quiz quiz, because there are no absolutely right answers; a textual accent, like any accent, often distinguishes itself through a combination of hints. But have a look at each of these sentences and think about what language the writer may be more used to writing in:
The book it’s on a table.
He gave the book to the William.
This London’s weather is very rainy.
The Professor has left his Book on the Airplane.
The president he is busy.
The patient has 36 years of age.
We have had a good visit last week.
We enjoy very much the food here.
Please come with us in the restaurant!
He is one strong man.
So, whaddya think? As we said, there’s no single right answer, but there are some clues to possible influences.
1. The book it’s on a table.
This suggests that the person is most used to a language where the word for “is” is also used by itself for “it’s,” and so “it’s” can over-generalized. It also might suggest that the person is not fully comfortable with definite and indefinite articles (“a table” where “the table” might be expected). A language such as Italian matches the first characteristic but not the second, but a Slavic language like Polish or Russian matches both.
2. He gave the book to the William.
In most languages, names don’t have definite articles before them. Using “the” before a person’s name could be evidence of overuse of “the” by someone not used to definite articles, such as a person who’s most used to a Slavic language, but it could also be evidence of someone who’s more used to a language such as Greek, which does put definite articles before names.
3. This London’s weather is very rainy.
In English, we would say “This London weather is very rainy” or “London’s weather is very rainy,” but in some languages the genitive (what we usually call – inaccurately – the possessive) is used much more often when a noun is modifying another noun, even if there’s a word like “this” before it. German is one language in which this kind of construction would be more expected. A person most comfortable in a language such as Chinese or Japanese that uses a particle (similar to a suffix) after a word to make it a possessive or adjective could also overgeneralize in translating that to the possessive form every time.
4. The Professor has left his Book on the Airplane.
English’s capital letters are so weird and uncalled-for that even most people who grew up speaking English can overuse them. But the clue in this sentence is that all the nouns, and only the nouns, are capitalized, and that’s a signal feature of German. (By the way, if you know German, you know that the words would come in a different order – like “The Professor has his Book in the Airplane left” – but most textual accents are very subtle: the writers have learned English well enough to be writing in it, after all!)
5. The president he is busy.
In a case like this, we could be looking at evidence of the influence of a language where the pronoun is commonly just implied (Italian, for instance), and the writer knows you have to add it in English but has overapplied the rule. But it could also be evidence of a language like Japanese, where the topic of the sentence (“the president”) is put first and then something that could by itself translate to a complete sentence comes after. French also often does this idiomatically, though in writing it normally uses a comma after the topic: “Le président, il est occupé.”
6. The patient has 36 years of age.
If you stop and think about it, it’s actually a bit weird that we say a person “is 36” – or, worse, “is 36 years of age.” It’s a bit more reasonable that we would say “is 36 years old,” and languages like German agree. But many languages use “has” for years of age, among them French and Spanish: “El paciente tiene 36 años.”
7. We have had a good visit last week.
This almost doesn’t look odd, does it? But in English it’s not formally correct to use the present perfect (“have had”) for anything that was completed entirely well in the past. Some languages, however, like French, use this construction for the past tense in general. And some languages, such as several Slavic languages, have a perfective aspect (which indicates that an action is completed, regardless of when it happened) that tends to get translated into the English present perfect. A sentence like this one could be evidence of a Czech textual accent, for example.
8. We enjoy very much the food here.
Modifier placement is a real game of linguistic dodgeball. Speakers of other languages may get comfortable with English putting adjectives on the “wrong” side of the noun, but adverbs can be just too counterintuitive. After all, “very much” modifies “enjoy,” not “here”! If you’re used to a language such as Spanish, the pure logic of putting “very much” right after the verb might easily win out over the required placement in English.
9. Please come with us in the restaurant!
Prepositions are evil and want to hurt you. There, we said it. Look, as obvious as prepositions are to anyone who is fully used to a language, any given preposition in a particular language might overlap in usage with several different prepositions in another language. When a writer uses a preposition that would make perfect sense in their home language but doesn’t work at all in English, it can be a good clue to which language they’re used to thinking in – if you know which prepositions are used where in that language. Do you know which language would use “in” instead of “to” here? There’s an extra hint in this case: the exclamation mark. There’s one language that uses “in” in a sentence like this and also makes an exclamation mark grammatically obligatory for any imperative, regardless of the tone. They’re not shouting, they’re just German.
10. He is one strong man.
This could, after all, be a perfectly grammatical sentence in English, though it uses an idiom that might seem informal in some contexts. It could also be evidence of the influence of a language that uses exactly the same word for “a” and for “one” – but that distinction is usually not too much trouble for speakers of those languages in English, because in those languages there’s a difference in emphasis between the number and the article. One language that doesn’t use an equivalent of “a” at all, but uses a number specifically before the noun in a sentence like this, is Mandarin Chinese. (On the other hand, if you want to say just “He is strong,” the Mandarin textual accent might make it “He is very strong,” because the word that translates as “very” is used regularly wherever a simple adjective is being attached to a noun.)
So what do you do when you encounter a textual accent?
You may or may not enjoy figuring out which language is influencing the writing, and for that matter you may already know (since you may know the author). But it can also help you have a good idea of what the author had in mind, if you have any familiarity with their language, and it can cue you to keep an eye out for places in the text where the accent might slip in more subtly – for instance, an exclamation mark from a German author in a place where it’s plausible but changes the tone, or a change in preposition that makes a perfectly grammatical sentence – but not the one the author wanted.
However, when you’re working with text that has a textual accent, sometimes it can be hard to keep your perspective – you run the risk of getting used to it, or getting thrown off by it. That’s where an assistant like Draftsmith can come in.
Draftsmith’s Fluency Enhancer can help give you ideas on what the author might have meant and how best to express that in English. If you haven’t tried it yet, there’s a free trial. So let the good times roll!