Imaginative

This afternoon RantWoman indulged in one of her reservoir of passions from the "strange idea of fun" category: RantWoman took a break from many matters seething in her consciousness to grade answers to translation questions on www.ProZ.Com . These questions work like this: an Asker posts a question in a source language and voices from the worldwide ocean of translation talent propose translations and / or grade the suggestions posted by their peers.

RantWoman most often reviews questions for translations from one language into her native English, fiercely and repeatedly proclaimed to be US English. This distinction is important because every once in awhile a question comes along that reminds RantWoman forcefully how much different national flavors of English have diverged from each other, in a few cases despite the existence only of long undefended land borders between one flavor and another.

Grading ProZ.com questions, RantWoman is also continually impressed by the opportunities her native language offers for those new to it to make missteps. Considering the examples set by numerous mostly monolingual politicians, RantWoman realizes the language poses problems for native speakers too but that is a fish of a different color, a metaphor mangled in different machinery.

The ProZ.com rating system requires people posting answers to assign a confidence level, an indication of the poster's certainty that a proposed answer is correct, 5 = certainty, rather than a wild guess, 1, which may be somewhere on the same planet with the correct answer. ProZ.com allows reviewers to assign the values Agree, Disagree, or Neutral to proposed translations. Agree awards a point to the proposed answerer. Disagree takes away a confidence point, and neutral provides reviewers opportunities to offer opinions without affecting the point count assigned to a proposed answer. Each option provides space for comments and people tend to use that space for small corrections to the proposed answer. Here is how RantWoman uses these grading options:

Agree: RantWoman's opinion may be complete concurrence that the proposed answer is the best, the one RantWoman herself would use, the one (that should be) locked into all available internet dictionaries, the standard! On the other hand, if RantWoman also posts an editorial correction, then Agree may simply mean "this answer is the best of the lot, something that gets a real editor to the correct option right away," close enough to the right planet not to be embarrassing.

Disagree: This answer is grossly WRONG. It says "up" when "down" is needed. It references nuclear physics when the context is social services.It turns the source languages hinky ways of expressing quantities, ratios, and quantitative comparisons into formulations and units that have no meaning in English. Or perhaps it chooses the wrong sense of a word from a dictionary listing. Whatever the problem, there is something so egregious that Judge RantWoman has no qualms about taking away a confidence point.

Neutral: RantWoman may not understand the question and wants to pose a question in case others also detect an ambiguity. Or the proposed answer is the best if a specific flavor of English is neede but not RantWoman's preferred one. Or the answer misspeaks in some way that is imaginative, unidiomatic, and guaranteed to make native speakers smile or even burst out laughing from the misalignment of words and concepts. The proposed answer may in fact be WRONG but something about the way things are expressed tickles RantWoman so charmingly that she needs to register her objections but does not have the heart to take away a confidence point.

This afternoon's selection of questions RantWoman graded had several ambiguous concepts RantWoman simply had to ask for more information about before grading. It also had an unusually high percentage of absolute howlers that RantWoman marked as Neutral and then TRIED to explain her misgivings gently without coming out and saying that she is rolling on the floor with laughter. Considering the responses to RantWoman's comments, RantWoman now suspects that she was being too kind and she COULD perhaps have been more direct. Perhaps it is not even reasonable to expect people who write such howlers to pick up any subtle messages and RantWoman really needs just to roll in with the Mack truck: perhaps RantWoman should just lobby for another grading option: total howler.