{"id":68,"date":"2013-04-25T05:40:00","date_gmt":"2013-04-25T05:40:00","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2017-01-18T17:32:52","modified_gmt":"2017-01-18T17:32:52","slug":"please-stop-the-please","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.fresneltranslations.com\/blog\/2013\/04\/25\/please-stop-the-please.html","title":{"rendered":"Please stop the please\u2122"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
Please read the following sign and see if there\u2019s anything that doesn\u2019t sit well with you.<\/div>\n
  <\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
Done? OK, now let me point out that when I wrote that first line, I started it by \u201cRead the following sign\u201d. Then I went back and added \u201cPlease\u201d. It does not come naturally to me. It\u2019s not because I\u2019m rude, it\u2019s because I\u2019m Greek! Yes, it\u2019s a cultural thing. When I read that sign I immediately thought of my colleague Lefteris, an excellent Greek translator whom I hold in very high esteem, and who brought up this issue in a translation forum a few years ago. His posting was titled \u201cHappy new year and please stop the please\u201d (hence the TM in my title). Two seemingly irrelevant things, but perhaps the latter was actually his wish for the new year. I searched for that posting and just read it once again, and I found myself thinking and saying out loud the same things I had said when I first read it: \u201cYes! Exactly! Thank you! I know! Amen!\u201d<\/div>\n
  <\/div>\n<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
\n
If I had to translate this sign into Greek, all these pleases would fly out the window. This is not something that only I would do; it is not personal and has nothing to do with politeness or lack thereof. It would actually be the right thing to do, from a translation\/adaptation point of view. You don\u2019t see that many \u201cpleases\u201d in Greek instructions. When you dial a number and you get to have a \u201cdialog\u201d with a machine (alas, this is no longer an American privilege), the Greek voice on the other end of the line won\u2019t say \u201cPlease press one, please press star, please dial 12345, please don\u2019t curse at me because I\u2019m a machine and you\u2019re wasting your energy\u201d. It might say \u201cplease\u201d the first time only; the rest of the instructions are not adorned. And if you think about it, why should they? They are not requests. They are instructions. You don\u2019t need to be asked politely, you\u2019re not doing anyone a favor by pressing the star key; if you don\u2019t want to press it, then don\u2019t, it\u2019s your job that won\u2019t get done.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
  <\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
\n
The liberty to omit the word \u201cplease\u201d is actually a blessing in interpretation. Why? Because the Greek equivalent is long! In English it is one short and sweet syllable. In Greek it has a terrifying grand total of 4, 5, or 6 syllables (parakal\u00f3, se parakal\u00f3, sas parakal\u00f3, parakal\u00edste, sas parakal\u00fame – <\/span>depending on whether you\u2019re talking to one person or more, or depending on whether you \u2013who are saying please- are one person or speaking on behalf of a group, or depending on whether or not you\u2019re using the polite form \u2013 it\u00b4s similar to saying in English \u201cI ask you to.., we ask you, we ask all of you, you are asked, etc\u201d. And you thought Chinese was difficult.) I remember my very first interpreting exercise in Lucille Barnes\u2019 school in Buenos Aires: the speaker was using the word \u201ccoup\u201d (as in coup d\u2019\u00e9tat) repeatedly. By the time I managed to say the 5-syllable Greek equivalent (<\/span>\u03c0\u03c1\u03b1\u03be\u03b9\u03ba\u03cc\u03c0\u03b7\u03bc\u03b1 <\/span>[praxik\u00f3pima<\/span>]), the speaker had gone off to another sentence. The 4th time it happened is when I decided that I would never become an interpreter <\/span>and that I\u2019d rather stick with translation than deal with all the stress caused by a bloody little coup. (I know, never say never, things changed since then and I became a medical interpreter.)\u00a0 But I digress. My point is that if you don\u2019t have to interpret the word \u201cplease\u201d 50 times, it\u2019s easier not to fall behind.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
  <\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
\n
<\/div>\n
As to the sign in my building\u2019s laundry room, it was taken down sometime in the last couple of weeks. Hopefully by a linguistically sensitive neighbor of mine. (I\u2019m saying hopefully because I\u2019d hate to think that I\u2019m the only one that had her blood pressure rise exponentially with every please.)<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
  <\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
\n
Please excuse the rambling (now this one was intentional!) and thanks for reading.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Please read the following sign and see if there\u2019s anything that doesn\u2019t sit well with you.    Done? OK, now let me point out that when I wrote that first line, I started it by \u201cRead the following sign\u201d. Then I went back and added \u201cPlease\u201d. It does not come naturally to me. It\u2019s not … Continue reading “Please stop the please\u2122”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":true,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-68","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-translation"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8iFRL-16","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fresneltranslations.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fresneltranslations.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fresneltranslations.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fresneltranslations.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fresneltranslations.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=68"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.fresneltranslations.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":142,"href":"https:\/\/www.fresneltranslations.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68\/revisions\/142"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fresneltranslations.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=68"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fresneltranslations.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=68"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fresneltranslations.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=68"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}