The bolded are the areas wherein the RAE has sway or outright say. The underlined is universally true portion.
I have to agree with what someone said above, what do you want to accomplish? English is the second most highly spoken language in the world behind Chinese. Given all the restrictions placed on the Chinese as to what they can buy and read, including their internet usage, English would probably be your best bet at reaching the most people. http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0775272.html
Beckett wrote in French - to escape his mother tongue, to quote him - and this neither means that he thought English inferior (although one could argue he did) nor because his "market" in Paris was more open to his work (which it may be)... So if you find something that makes English (or Mandarin, or any other) language closer to you sensibility and more appropriate for what you wish to expess - AND you feel that you are fluent enough to start seriously writing in it.... @mammamaia if marketability was the only (or predominant) reason to choose the language of your writing, there soon wouldn't be any books in Finnish or Turkish, right? it sounds a lot like cultural imperialism, which I hope no (wo)man of words, wits and wisdom should (could?would?) advocate...
bb... marketability is the prime concern of most writers not due to any 'cultural imperialism' but only due to the fact that they want their work to be sold/bought/read as widely as possible... i don't get why you seem to want to turn what i said into something entirely other than what i clearly meant... nor why you seem to do that in so many of my posts... am i the only member here with whom you disagree so often?... or just the one you most enjoy poking your verbal stick at? and before you charge me with being 'pissed off' again, as you have before, please know that i never get upset or angry over such trivial matters and am not in the least annoyed at your doing so, only curious as to your motivation... love 'n puzzled hugs, m
@mammamaia No pokes or sticks here I come from a different cultural and literal background, so the idea of an author making a decision of switching to a different language purely on the possible marketability of his work is a bit out of this world for me. The fact is: a good book published in a "small language" with a smaller "market" has (and had in the past) more chances to actually do something, reach an audience and earn recognition, than the same book published by an unknown author in a huge market where his name may just be another statistical error. Think about it: situation 1: your book is one of 14,000 published in Finland situation 2: your book is one of 357,000 published in US+UK+Australia
I think writing in English has obvious advantages but only if you can write well in that language. I'm not a native speaker, but I spent last 20 years in English-speaking countries, and I speak English as well as my native tongue. But once I started to write fiction, it took me 4 years of concerted effort to bring my English up to a level where I am happy enough with it to write without restriction. So that's perhaps something to think about.
What is it you don't like about translations? Have you tried writing the same thing in both languages? I grew up with English and it works pretty well. I don't know any Dutch but I know that I like some languages better than others. (Personal taste.) I like Russian a lot but find Spanish to be lacking. It could be my own issue, but it's there. If there's a similar thing where you work better in one language than another, why not use it first, and then translate it? You could try it with something extremely short and see how you feel about that.
I don't think it's really an advantage. To be honest, I wish I could write in my mother-tongue: there's less competition. I wish I liked my mother-tongue, but somehow every piece of fiction I read or write in it comes off very comical. The language represents a culture a sizable part of me is trying to escape (mind, not to a specific English-speaking country, even). If your stories come out in English, then you write them in English. If what you're doing feels forced, you're probably doing something wrong.
the first determining factor has to be how well you can write in english, if it's not your birth tongue... if you can't write as well as respected native english-speaking authors, using current idioms and developing believable characters/settings/situations, then you should stick to your own language and seek a local publisher...
The French government fined TV sports channels 100 euro every time their commentators used English words such as corner or goal - the fines got so ridiculous though they gave up!
Writing in English are a HUGE benefit. I'm Norwegian and therefore write Norwegian better. But since I'm always writing in English I'm slowly getting better at it and it just feels more right. English books looks better too.
By the way, if you're an EFL/ESL speaker and write in English... get native beta-readers/editor. Something always slips through the cracks, no matter how strong your grammar is. While being outside looking in could, in theory, make your prose stand out (knowing other languages than the one you write in is a plus, not a minus), you've still got more to prove than a native speaker. Just on a sidenote, the most popular and critically acclaimed author in my home country is originally Estonian, yet she writes in Finnish. I think that's pretty damn cool.
Actually that's not entirely accurate. We have a lot of words but English, as a language, is remarkably lacking in overall vocabulary and largely inefficient. We have a LOT of words but most of them mean the same thing; there are something like two dozen synonyms for "Sad". Yes, it's another 20-something words but they may as well only be one word for all the extra vocabulary they add. Many languages, including Dutch, have single words for things that English has to use entire sentences to describe.
Say, English adjectives for example have surprisingly different connotations attached to them. One may think they're synonyms, but two words rarely mean exactly the same thing. I love l’esprit de l’escalier, it's so fitting, and I find myself cursing this way often, but that's not exactly one word
Let's be honest here. What are the chances for getting published in US or UK if you are, let's say, an Finnish author, who writes in English and lives in Finland?
True but the whole point of a synonym (and there are a lot of them) is that the overall meaning of the word is similar enough to another that the two can be substituted for each other without changing the meaning of a sentence. "Mary was feeling quite happy to have the chance to travel to Pompeii." "Mary was feeling quite pleased to have the chance to travel to Pompeii." Those two sentences mean pretty much the same thing despite "happy" and "pleased" being two different words. It's not an exact match but it's close enough that the overall meaning of the sentence is completely unchanged. So yes, they're two words in an objective count but the addition of "pleased" doesn't add very much to the overall weight of English vocabulary. Imagine every word is an object on a scale in proportion to its effect on the whole language. Every 'original' word counts as a peanut, every synonym counts as a grain of rice. If you have 100 grains of rice, they do add up but they'll never be even in weight to the same number of peanuts. It's still a heck of a lot shorter than "I wish I'd thought of that comeback an hour ago, that would've been great." My overall intent here was to point out that word count is not an objective measure of how much "better" one language is compared to another. It's a matter of quality, not quantity, and English, in my experience, is a bit lacking in the former because, despite being a native speaker with a considerable vocabulary, I find myself constantly frustrated by English not having words for a lot of things I want to say.
Since Hannu Rajaniemi did it, I'd imagine... 0,000000001... ish? But he's got his grammar down and all that. Kind of helps.
@Morgan Willows you should read some poetry... no, you should read a lot of poetry - synonims don't have a 100% identical meaning, and are thus not 100% interchangable. The power of language, any language, lies in those small differences, often melodicaly significant, which create different types of syntaxical tensions... If one would to follow your line of thought ("synonims are insignificant"), every book writen would take the form of an abridged version - cut the vocabulary down to a few thousand words, and everybody is set on a linguistic (and intelectual) level of an average mid-school pupil.
Lordy, lordy, how correct you are! I am constantly questioned in my work (interpreter) as to why I chose this word over that word, attorneys unhappy with the exactitude of interpretation for wanting to nudge a statement in a particular direction. Small shifts of meaning can push a tone or context in ways that accumulate and cause misunderstanding. Happy and pleased are innocuous enough, but hasty and swift are also technically synonyms, but their connotations are decidedly different. Anyone who questions this needs to read Everything is Illuminated and take note of Alex's letters to Jonathan. The assumption that synonyms are casually interchangeable in English is used to great effect.
@Wreybies I stand corrected: read poetry or try translating and slightly off-topic (but only slightly): "Everything &c" was Foer's first novel...
I never said they were 100% identical, those words are nowhere in any part of my post. In fact I'm pretty sure I said specifically that they're not 100% identical just similar enough that, when counting overall vocabulary weight, they don't contribute quite as much as others. I also didn't say they were insignificant, just less weighty when considering the overall scope (as in the number) of concepts a language has single words for. Again, those words were not contained in any part of my post. I'm also well aware that different words have variances in rhythm and flow that have an impact on the tone of prose and especially poetry. But that's not what I was talking about, I was speaking only about the fact that "word count alone does not a better language make" something else I also said very specifically. I apologize if I seem rude or irritated but this is the third or forth thread I've commented on where people have replied with things unrelated to what I was commenting on or with inferences which couldn't really be made without ignoring large chunks of my posts. It is very frustrating.
You know how you curse, say, your bad luck? So I curse my inability to come up with a witty response. Now, the French, they have a string of words that describe the situation quite humorously. Clearer now?
I bet it is, but I think some reacted to this bit in particular: I did read the rest of your post, but in it, I didn't spot you retracting/softening that statement. Especially its end is, at least from a translator's POV, too broad of a generalization. Yeah, it's true in some cases, yet false in quite a few instances too, but I think we all know that, so... bygones. Sometimes I do wish there were fewer words because when you get a translation job that's supposed to be ready yesterday, synonyms with all their different connotations can give you a headache.
