Israel's organization of technical/marcom writers and copy editors
Ehud Barak went on record calling Herzog shakool, m’nuseh, and akhra’i. The Jerusalem Post renders it “ balanced, experienced and responsible.” Ynet says “level-headed, experienced and responsible.” JPUpdates.com says “steady, experienced and responsible.” Haaretz, which of course really likes Herzog, says “sage, experienced and responsible.” Arutz Sheva...
Read MoreI saw a rather bold translation on the Internet the other day. Someone translated מצא לנכון (matsa l’nakhon) as “decided.” Generally the dictionary definitions of that phrase are less blunt. Babylon says “thought it right.” Alkalay says “see fit, choose.”
Read MoreIt seems that in order to be munach somewhere, you have to have come from somewhere else. It would be strange to say that the Shalom Meir Tower is munach in Tel Aviv, although you might say so for effect if you wanted to emphasize that it looks foreign to its neighborhood.
Read MoreOnce when I was a kid watching a TV courtroom drama, a plot twist put one of the lawyers on the witness stand. When he didn’t want to answer a question, he said “I remain silent.” I was impressed on the one hand that he obliged even the humble, unsung court reporter by not requiring everyone to wait through an actual silence. On the other hand, I was impressed by the paradox whereby the words “I remain silent” are acceptable at face value while obviously false.
Read MoreI don’t know who decided that over here we’re Israelis, rather than Israelians or Israelese, or Israelites like our ancestors, but I’m happy with the decision. I like the brevity and the distinctiveness, and I’m glad that the English-speaking community has spared us in its tilt toward standardization. The word “Bosniak” had scarcely flickered on the news pages, back in the nineties, before a sweeping consensus settled on “Bosnian” instead. The people who can be called Chadi, fellow bearers with us of the “i” suffix, are more often termed “Chadian.”
Read MoreThe word “trend” has recently reproduced itself in Hebrew, but with a mutation. In Hebrew, “trend” (טרנד) means “fad.”
Read MoreIn a list of Hebrew expressions that have had their day and should be retired from the language, a blog or blogger named Areshet mentions “where the fish pisses from.” Areshet says, “That’s enough. We get it. We’ve had it up to here. We appreciate the earthy humor, now let’s move on.” But that blog page is four years old and the fish haven’t stopped.
Read MoreBesides the question of whether one sincerely becomes a rhinoceros or just opportunistically fits in with them (although everyone in Ionesco's play seems sincerely won over), there is also the question of whether hitkarnefut means merely becoming like everyone else or becoming like a rhinoceros in more specific ways.
Read MoreI once worked with a fellow who was hard of hearing, and he said that the cause was trauma. For a while, I thought he was like Tommy, the pinball wizard who was struck deaf, dumb, and blind because he witnessed a terrible event. Then I realized that trauma can also refer to a damaging physical blow, or even a damagingly loud noise.
Read MoreTake for example this well-known sentence:וכל המרבה לספר ביציאת מצרים, הרי זה משובח The Hagaddah at chabad.org translates it \"and everyone who discusses the exodus from Egypt at length is praiseworthy.\" The הרי doesn\'t survive translation. And a case could be made that it’s a mere expletive in the sentence, nothing to worry about. But I think that it helps balance the short ending of the sentence against the long subject.
Read MoreTroubles have always been with us, but it’s Rabbi Shmuel Hanagid — the eleventh-century scholar, poet, and Chief Vizier of Grenada — whom the dictionary credits with reporting he worked his way through an occurrence of tsara tsrura, “trouble in a bundle.”
Read MoreThe Targemni website gives “exciting, sensational” as its definition. Morfix, on the other hand, says “inflaming, inciteful.”
Read MoreI asked around and my sister-in-law, a Sabra of a certain age, told me the slogan was used years ago by the Payis lottery. On the Internet, all I found was a single hit, in which Shlomo Hillel (of all people), serving as Speaker of the Knesset in 1988, refers to the phrase as if it’s familiar.
Read MoreIn the news, you often see “exaggerate” used inappropriately to translate "l'hagzim." For example, an Israeli colonel was quoted in the Jerusalem Post as saying, “We did not exaggerate in our use of firepower.” Presumably he didn’t mean exaggeration in the sense of trying to inflate a story, he meant simply “We did not use too much firepower.”
Read MoreThere are two Hebrew translations of “Les Trois Cloches” — one by Ehud Manor and one by Avi Koren. Unlike the English translation, both Hebrew translations leave Jean-François Nicot a Frenchman. They don’t localize him, they foreignize him.
Read MoreEncouraging eleventh-graders to enroll for an educational trip to Poland, a Hebrew letter quoted in Wiktionary says that the trip will surely add an important נדבך (nidbakh) to them personally as citizens of the sovereign state of Israel. The word nidbakh goes back to the Book of Ezra, where King James translates it as “row”: “... with three rows of great stones, and a row of new timber...”
Read MoreI found that on the Internet, source after source says a t’tsugat tachleet is not the performance that is the culmination or the purpose of someone’s efforts, or that demonstrates what others should aim for, but a mere “lesson introduction.” This week we will learn to multiply decimals, or whatever.
Read MoreWhile the song “City of New Orleans” is all about America and its Israeli version is all about Israel, the French lyrics don’t mention France. Nationalism has not been widely admired in France for quite some time. But “Salut les Amoureux,” the song’s French version as performed by Joe Dassin, does give us a dose of tension relating to the narrator. It’s a good French existentialist tension that takes the form of observing your own behavior detachedly.
Read MoreOn packaging, I’ve seen the term “Moroccan spearmint” used for nana, and I’ve used it myself in translations, so I’m not happy thinking that maybe the real stuff is from Asia Minor and I should have written “Anatolian spearmint” instead.
Read MoreExplaining British punctuation, Oxford Dictionaries writes: “If an abbreviation consists of the first and last letters of a word, you don’t need to use a full stop at the end,” and its examples are “Mr”, “Ltd”, and “Dr”. Actually the abbreviation “Ltd” doesn’t consist of the first and last letters of the word, although it uses them. But maybe fine distinctions of terminology aren’t what the Oxford Dictionaries are about.
Read MoreSite for Israel's professional tech writing and marcom community. Originally based in what has become Israel's 2nd largest R&D center (Yokneam), Elephant brings together technical and marcom writers from all over Israel. Behind the scenes and between meetings, members stay in contact with job offers and leads, joint projects, and professional assistance.
Using the wrong technical writer is like using a wrench to open a door, it works, but a door knob is better and cheaper. Elephant was started to help match writers and copy editors with companies where their skills match company needs.
