MARGIENARY

Who's got the perfect timing?  No one else of course but the one who created time.  I have been waiting to come home for the longest time and have been patiently waiting and waiting, but I have also set myself to a time frame of maybe first or second week of August, just to keep my mind from more disappointments; but lo and behold, when I least expected it, I received an email from the airline, saying that they have cancelled my August 2 flights but that they can rebook me to July 27th which was just a few hours away from when I received the message.  I had the other option of waiting until August 13th.  Of course I chose the one that was just 6 hours away.  So I told everyone that needs to be informed that I finally had a flight, then secured myself a transport to the airport, and started packing up my belongings. Most of my things have already been packed up in May but because of the many cancellations, and the fact that I had to still go to class, I have been...

Narrative and normative types of discourses involve some form of speech act.  It is, therefore, essential for a translator to be able to understand not just what form a particular utterance takes, but more importantly, what an utterance does.  A story is told that an Indian mother-in-law who met her son’s American wife for the first time was shocked and asked, “What kind of woman did my son marry?  She wants everything!”  The daughter-in-law, just being the American that she was, apparently kept appreciating a lot of stuff in her in-law’s house and telling the mother how pretty her saris were.  It so happened that in that particular culture, you offer to give whatever someone compliments you for.  As translators, we do not want to create misunderstandings like that.  Therefore, translators should have a considerable understanding of the speech acts involved in our source language so as to be able to translate accurately, clearly, naturally, and accepta...

In Kalanguya, we have an expression which we use in reply to almost everything, "Tawwey"or its variants "Tawwey ah!"or "Tawwey ngo!" Being the Full Blooded Kalanguya that I am, my mind automatically uses it to answer any question in any language, when my mind is not able to focus to think of something quick to say. It roughly translates to "I don't know or אני לא יודעת! in Hebrew, but it also covers instances when a person meant to say, "I don't have/want to give an opinion about that; I don't care to comment on that, or it doesn't matter to me." The most recent I used it was this morning while I was preparing breakfast, a young man asked me what was the food I was putting on the table at the time. My automatic reply was, "I don't know." After a few moments, I was thinking about it, repeating it to myself, and I thought it might have sounded a bit rude, even to my weird ears.                           ...