The Order of Things: Jennifer Croft on Translating Olga Tokarczuk - Literary Hub - Translation

Olga Tokarczuk’s twelfth book, the novel The Books of Jacob, first published in Poland in 2014 to great acclaim and considerable controversy, kicks off in 1752 in Rohatyn, in what is now western Ukraine, and winds up in a cave near Korolówka, now eastern Poland, where a family of local Jews has hidden from the Holocaust. Between mid-18th-century Rohatyn and mid-20th-century Korolówka, Olga traverses the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in search of the manifold secrets of Jacob Frank, a highly charismatic real historical figure, beloved and despised by his contemporaries, the leader of a wildly heretical Jewish sect that converted in different moments to both Catholicism and Islam.

The novel is divided into seven books: The Book of Fog, The Book of Sand, The Book of the Road, The Book of the Comet, The Book of Metal and Sulfur, The Book of the Distant Country and The Book of Names.

It is the second book that most concerns us now. It opens as follows:

Bywa, że Bóg męczy się swoją światłością i ciszą, mdli go od nieskończoności. Wtedy, jak ogromna, wszechwrażliwa ostryga, której ciało, tak nagie i delikatne, czuje najmniejsze drganie cząsteczek światła, kurczy się w sobie i zostaje po nim trochę miejsca, gdzie od razu z zupełnie niczego pojawia się świat. Najpierw świat przypomina pleśń, jest delikatny i biały, ale rośnie szybko, pojedyncze nitki łączą się ze sobą, tworząc mocne poszycie. W końcu twardnieje i odtąd zaczyna nabierać kolorów. Towarzyszy temu niski, ledwie słyszalny dźwięk, ponura wibracja, która wprawia atomy w niespokojne drżenie. Z tego właśnie ruchu powstają cząsteczki, a potem ziarnka piasku i krople wody, które dzielą świat na pół.

Teraz jesteśmy po stronie piasku.

This section of the book—the novel doesn’t have chapters in a traditional sense—is titled “O tym, jak ze zmęczenia Boga powstaje świat,” which, taking a certain poetic license—a license it is imperative I take, lest I fall prey to Robert Frost’s 1959 definition of translation as “that which is lost out of both prose and verse”—means something along the lines of “Of how it was the world was born of God’s exhaustion.” A somewhat scandalous suggestion on the part of Olga’s narrator that only gets bolder as we continue to read.

“Bywa, że Bóg męczy się swoją światłością i ciszą, mdli go od nieskończoności,” that first paragraph starts. “It happens, that God tires of his brightness and quiet, he sickens of infinity.” That is as close to a literal, word-for-word translation as I can muster without breaking all the rules of English grammar. For now, I have left the original Polish punctuation, even though the Polish conventions surrounding punctuation differ significantly from the ones we have in English. The Google version of this opening is: “It happens that God is tired of his light and silence, fainting him from infinity.” My own first sentence: “Every now and then, God wearies of his own luminous silence, and infinity starts to make him a little bit sick.”

The words of the text are the embodiment of its past. Its sentences, on the other hand, lead the way into its future.

“Every” echoes the Polish “bywa,” meaning “it happens,” or “it so happens,” implying “sometimes”: the third-person singular present tense of the frequentative imperfective form of “to be.” In Polish, this first word lends a somewhat folksy feel to a first sentence that soon vaults into the metaphysical. God tires or is tiring—Polish does not have a present continuous tense like English or Spanish, so the translator must choose based on context clues—of his (own) light or brightness and quiet or silence. The word for quiet or silence is the usual word: “cisza.” The word for light or brightness, meanwhile, is the usual word for light—światło—plus an -ść ending that raises the register a bit. This word, literally “lightness,” often comes up in the context of religion, and more particularly, the Catholic faith that predominates in Poland. It is used, for instance, in the so-called Prayer for the Eternal Rest:

Eternal rest grant unto them,
O Lord, and let perpetual light
shine upon them. May the souls
of all the faithful departed, through
the mercy of God, rest in peace.

Where it says “perpetual light” in English (“lux perpetua” in Latin), in Polish it says “światłość.” Yet this “perpetual” is part of the word’s unfathomable background, and I also can’t use it in my translation because it is too close to what comes next: “mdli go od nieskończoności,” literally “sickens him from infinity.”

The words “światło”—“light”—and “światłość”—lightness or perpetual light—both contain the word “świat,” which is “world.” This will become very important in a moment.

“Every now and then, God wearies of his own luminous silence, and infinity starts to make him a little bit sick.” The trochaic meter of the opening clause is in keeping with the structure of Polish—in which the stress is always on the penultimate syllable of the word—and the particular rolling rhythm of Olga’s writing. The words “wearies” and “luminous” are relatively formal, elevated—as is shifting from noun to adjective, a not uncontroversial choice—while “starts to make him a little bit sick” is informal, in keeping with the deckle edge of Olga’s sentence, which is both humorous and profound.

One drawback to my version is that it weighs in at a whopping twenty-one words, versus the original’s modest thirteen. Because English does not have grammatical case, we need prepositions like “with”; because English can’t abide a run-on sentence, we need to add an “and”; to mark an infinitive, we require a “to.” Translations of Slavic languages into English are generally about thirty percent longer than their originals. But it’s mostly my decision to start with “every now and then” that tips the scales, and I will have to see if I can compensate for that with something pithier over the course of the next few lines.

So now we know from the section title—“Of how it was the world was born of God’s exhaustion”—and the first sentence of the main body of the text that our narrator has determined to rebel against any story of creation with which we might have been familiar, in order to suggest instead that God has weaknesses and failings—that God might even suffer from as humiliating a complaint as ordinary boredom. And as if that weren’t enough, she will now go on to suggest that the world, a world, presumably our world, is a product of that sad malady—that humanity is nothing more than a diversion, the result of some irritation and an almost animal reaction to the same.

Language can’t be separated from the people who create and connect with one another through it.

This is where the connection between the Polish words pertaining to “light” (“światło” and/or “światłość”) and “world” (“świat”) makes itself felt. While there is not a way to reproduce this resonance identically, I got lucky with English, which connects “world” with “word.” I have tried to take advantage of this stroke of luck throughout this vast and treasure-laden tome.

For the connection between light and this particular version of the creation of the world is in no way arbitrary. Olga’s provocative rendering is drawn from a much older provocation, first arising in Isaac Luria’s version of Kabbalah, the most influential and resistant strain of Jewish mysticism. Unlike earlier kabbalists, Luria treated creation not as a positive event, but as a negative one. Before creation, divine light filled every available space, meaning that in order to create the world, God had to endure the process of tzimtzum, a Hebrew word that attained special power in Lurianic Kabbalah, where it became a term for God’s self-diminishing, or shrinking, to make room.

“Without contraction, there is no creation, as everything is Godhead,” writes Gershom Scholem, the German-born scholar who revolutionized the study of Kabbalah. “Therefore, already in its earliest origins, the creation is a kind of exile, in that it involves God removing Himself from the center of His essence to His secret places.” Scholem (a close friend of Walter Benjamin, whom we will come to in a moment) will be a guiding light for Olga throughout The Books of Jacob, which is after all a chronicle of exile and the quest to undo that original absence and every removal that came after.

But let’s get back to the sentence in question for now. “Wtedy, jak ogromna, wszechwrażliwa ostryga, której ciało, tak nagie i delikatne, czuje najmniejsze drganie cząsteczek światła, kurczy się w sobie i zostaje po nim trochę miejsca, gdzie od razu z zupełnie niczego pojawia się świat.” “Then, like an enormous, all-sensing oyster, whose body, so naked and delicate, feels the smallest vibration of particles of light, contracts inside itself and there remains after it a little space, where right away out of absolutely nothing there appears a world.” The Google version: “Then, like a huge, all-sensitive oyster, whose body, so naked and delicate, feels the slightest twitching of light particles, it shrinks in itself and leaves a little space after it, where the world immediately appears from nothing.”

Slavic languages do not have articles, definite or indefinite. English requires them; ending this sentence with “there appears world” is not an option unless intelligibility is not something we care about. The translator must intuit, then, the definiteness or indefiniteness of a noun from its context; in this case, although we may already suspect that the world in question is our world—and thus a definite, specific world—what the preceding sentence tells us is that this happens “every now and then.” In which case, each time it happens, “a” new world is created, freshly nacred and luminous and bored.

Let us not forget the oyster. The Polish word for “oyster” is feminine, so every adjective that applies to it in the original describes a feminine being—no doubt not a coincidence in the work of a proudly feminist writer like Olga Tokarczuk. The oyster is first of all “ogromna,” which I always like to translate as “enormous,” due to the confluence of sounds between the two words. It is “wszechwrażliwa,” which is a highly unusual compound word made up of “wrażliwa,” sensitive, and the prefix “wszech,” which appears in slightly more common adjectives like “wszechmocna,” omnipotent, or “wszechwiedząca,” omniscient, suggesting “omni” as the appropriate divine prefix in the English translation: “omnisensitive.”

Preserving Polish word order in English necessarily makes for less fluid sentences, and it sometimes results in complete incomprehensibility.

Thus the oyster is enormous and omnisensitive. Now for its body. Its body, so naked and delicate, feels—or can detect—the slightest tremor in particles of light, scrunches up into itself, and—now the sentence switches subjects—there remains after it a little space, where at once from completely nothing appears a world. Or, perhaps, we maintain the same subject in the translation: it leaves a tiny space where a world immediately appears, out of nowhere. Where a world comes to be out of absolutely nothing. It leaves a tiny space for a world to arise or emerge or come about or be born.

What to do with this final clause?

The “theres” in “there remains after it a little space” and “there appears a world” are not there in the original; English requires we add something to help smooth out the different syntax. But these filler “theres” are clunky and don’t exactly suit the scene. “Appears a world” is as impossible in English as “there appears world”: not in fact impossible, but enough of a departure from what Anglophones expect that it must necessarily shift the reader’s focus from what to how: rather than experiencing Olga’s context, the reader will experience a disruption of the English language, which might distract her completely from the molluscoid god of Books of Jacob, propelling her into a consideration of how English works and why.

This consideration might well not be in vain, and we can return to such disruptions as indeed strategies for provoking larger reflections, but let us agree for now that my goal in this translation is instead to beautifully render Olga’s ideas. Part of an idea is how it’s ordered. And of all the questions that have come up in this paragraph so far, having to do with rhythm, register, and the balance of sanctity or profundity and humor, the trickiest one is this one.

Let’s think about syntax, why it’s hard to translate (why there are mixed opinions in translation studies about how to handle it), why it matters and possible ways to move forward.

The word “syntax” comes from the Ancient Greek “σύνταξις,” meaning “coordination”: “syn,” or “together,” and “táxis,” or “ordering.” Today, in English, it designates the “set of rules and principles in a language according to which words, phrases, and clauses are arranged to create well-formed sentences,” or “the ways in which a particular word or part of speech can be arranged with other words or parts of speech.” These are, respectively, the ethical and intersubjective aspects of the word.

For words are similar to selves in constitutive qualities and behavior and can be productively considered according to categories proposed for understanding the nature of selfhood in a range of philosophical works, among them Oneself as Another by Paul Ricoeur and Kathleen Blamey, Sources of the Self by Charles Taylor and After Virtue by Alasdair MacIntyre. Though very different from one another in style and purpose, all three of these texts wind up speaking of selves as comprised of three facets: the narrative, the intersubjective and the ethical.

A self is narrative because it must see itself in terms of a life story. It finds those terms in conceptual apparatuses such as language and time. It conceives of the former by way of the latter and expresses the latter by way of the former. Each self’s life story contains causes and effects, arising from a beginning and leading to an end.

Kate Briggs points out that “literary translation, as a labour of changing words, and changing the orders of words, is always and from the outset wrong.”

A self is intersubjective, or “transpersonal,” as Taylor says, because it cannot achieve its telos without the collaboration of other selves, whether these selves function as helpmeets or as obstacles to be overcome along the self’s “journey.” Nor can the self conceive of itself as such except in conjunction with and in contradistinction to its others.

Finally, a self is ethical because it grounds its sense of selfhood in judgments of value. Self-esteem depends on the degree to which the self lives well and for others in justice, as Riceour points out particularly. “To know who I am,” writes Taylor, “is a species of knowing where I stand.” Metaphorically, “where I stand” refers here to what I consider to be right and wrong with regard to my behavior and that of others, while also harking back to the historical positioning of the self in its society, in relation to other selves, and what its roles as a member of that society are.

For a word, narrative identity is etymology: the origins and evolution over time of the word. The ethical facet of a word is what values it holds, meaning what its definition is. This facet is the easiest to swap out from one language to the next, even when it requires several words to translate one. But while “wskazówka” may mean something like “clue” in Polish, and “pista” may (partly) mean something like “clue” in Spanish—that is, may hold similar semantic values—their histories and narrative identities, and thus their connotations, will be completely different.

A word’s intersubjective facet is how it behaves in a phrase and how it interacts with its neighbors. You can try to stop time, and you can try to prevent time from doing something (like advancing), and maybe these attempts will be equivalent, but how they play out in a sentence will differ enough to change the rhythm of the text.

For Riceour, ethics means “living well with and for others in just institutions.” MacIntyre, meanwhile, argues that modern selves are adrift, unlike pre-modern selves, who “inherit a particular space within an interlocking set of social relationships; lacking that space, they are nobody, or at best a stranger or an outcast. To know oneself as such a social person is however not to occupy a static and fixed position.”

Very few words function well on their own. The ones that do are mostly interjections and emphatic particles, like the German “doch,” or the Argentine “che.” The vast majority of words, however, must coexist in a manner that is productive (of meaning, for example) with other words, in institutions called grammatical sentences; in grammars that haven’t crumbled over time, the noun’s role is clear from its case, as we have discussed. Precisely because of this, the position of a Polish noun in a sentence is not fixed.

In Slavic languages, because the endings of nouns change depending on their purpose in a sentence, word order varies considerably more than it does in English, where we can only know what the subject of the sentence is, versus its object, by following the order in which they appear. “Jennifer Croft eats pizza” is a really different sentence in English than “Pizza eats Jennifer Croft” (although what a way to go!). But imagine if we did have a full case system in English, and the accusative case of a noun, which indicates a noun being acted upon, generated an ending of “#.” Then we could say “Pizza# eats Jennifer Croft,” or “Jennifer Croft eats pizza#,” and the only thing that would change would be what gets emphasized, and what we know when.

I come up for air or clamber out of the water, and holding onto the original is like striving to maintain all the moisture on my skin as the sun lifts it away from me drop by drop.

What we know when is extremely important to narrative; if we were told in the first sentence of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca what had really happened to Maxim de Winter’s wife, and how, and why, and what would become of Manderley, would we even keep reading? The reader has to live the process of apprehension, experience a world in an order, not all at once. The Polish phrase “gdzie od razu z zupełnie niczego pojawia się świat” is not the same as “gdzie świat pojawia się z zupełnie niczego od razu,” just as “Along Comes Mary” is not the same as “Mary Comes Along.” In the former, the emphasis is on the specialness of Mary, the unexpectedness of her, her out-of-nowhereness.

And the rhythm is different. Think of the anonymous children’s rhyme:

Itsy bitsy spiderClimbed up the waterspout;
Down came the rain
And washed the spider out;
Out came the sun
And dried up all the rain;
And the itsy bitsy spider
Climbed up the spout again.

“The rain came down” would have massively less effect than “down came the rain” does. “Down came the rain” starts with deluge; “out came the sun” offers an unanticipated twist. We might have been expecting something else after “out came”: the stain? The blame?

It’s microsuspense, and it happens so fast we might not even think we notice, but it affects our reading all the same. It accumulates over the course of the story; it is the tiny space left by an oyster-author for the emergence of a world.

Since if I say: “like an enormous, omnisensitive oyster, its body, so naked and delicate, feels the slightest tremble in the particles of light, scrunches up inside itself, leaving just enough space for a world to come completely out of nowhere, at once,” then the reader encounters world before nowhere and before at once—and in that case, why are nowhere and at once even there?

The principal quality of suspense is finitude; we are always aware of its imminent end, which permits us to cherish it. Microsuspense is even more precious due to the proximity of the full stop: soon we will know, and from that point forward, we will never unknow—a gain that feels more like a loss.

Recent writing on translation has emphasized the unique creative practices of individual translators. Whenever I translate, I first immerse myself in the original as though taking a dip in a lovely cove, far from the eyes of anyone, where the water’s always warm. (I hope it does not undermine all that I have said so far to confess that in life I am not a good swimmer, and that I have never gone swimming in a cove.) By immersing myself, I can feel weightless as the body of the work suspends me—my preoccupations, much of my subjectivity, which merely acts as a filter—and I can allow the images generated by the words of the original to wash over me, feel them all around me, form them afresh in my cleared head.

This sort of suspension is temporary, too. I come up for air or clamber out of the water, and holding onto the original is like striving to maintain all the moisture on my skin as the sun lifts it away from me drop by drop. Now the words of the original find their reflections on the surface of the ocean, as if my translations of them were inevitable, even though others would opt for other words. Now I rearrange the original’s sentences, letting them conform to the different conditions of the shore. I rearrange them with a mind to move on from here soon, with my next destination in my sights.

Kate Briggs points out that “literary translation, as a labour of changing words, and changing the orders of words, is always and from the outset wrong.” But she, like me, believes that that’s not what translation is.

In Slavic languages, because the endings of nouns change depending on their purpose in a sentence, word order varies considerably more than it does in English.

When it comes to verbal disposition and disordering, we might look back at an essay we have mentioned already. Although it arose out of his own translation practice, in the century since its original publication, Walter Benjamin’s “Task of the Translator” introduction has flummoxed and bewildered readers concerned with the practice of translation by carrying notions of poetry, magic and spirit even further to enter into the territory of the messianic, of a pure language likely to be reconstituted on the day of humanity’s salvation, a pure language we can only get a glimpse of now thanks to translation, which acts as afterlife to the original and in so doing keeps up the connections—which are mostly concealed by communication, or the desire to communicate—between the mortal languages of man.

Not that helpful when you’re trying to wrangle a paragraph of Polish into English.

Translator Chantal Wright notes: “In fact, Benjamin’s text feels calculated to produce this tension, marked as it is by syntactic and lexical idiosyncrasy, by re-definitions of terms and by slippery signifiers.”

On the other hand, maybe Benjamin is the only one who can help here, as we struggle to seize Olga’s slippery oyster god.

For Samuel Weber’s innovative book Benjamin’s -abilities posits as follows:

When Benjamin writes that the specifically poetical signification cannot be identified simply with what is meant, with the meaning of the phrase, but rather has to do with “how the meant is bound to the way of meaning in the determinate word,” he indicates both that the semantic dimension of meaning plays a role in binding the way of meaning to particular words, and that the configuration of such binding is not itself determined semantically. Rather, it is syntactical. For what is decisive is how an object or concept is bound to an individual word, and through it, to a particular way of being-meant. And this idea of being bound to or up with individual words depends on a spatial arrangement that can be designated both as syntactical and as singular.

What this boils down to is not exclusively mysterious. Benjamin calls for word-for-word translation, for keeping the syntax of the original intact in the translation, even at “the risk of madness,” as Weber rightly notes.

The Slavic languages order their words differently from the Germanic and the Romance languages. Preserving Polish word order in English necessarily makes for less fluid sentences, and it sometimes results in complete incomprehensibility. This predicament becomes more dire when the distance between languages is increased.

Chamini Abesiriwardhane Kulathunga translates from Sinhala into English. Sinhala is, like English, an Indo-European language, but it is a member of the Indo-Aryan branch of the family, at a significant historical from the European branch. Kulathunga translates the opening of Tennyson Perera’s 1967 Cogwheel Buddha, the first novel ever banned in Sri Lanka, as follows: “Somebody once said that the Maitree Buddha would be enlightened under the giant tamarind tree at the public library. That somebody was a drunk, and his statement has remained deep-seated in my mind.” Translated word for word, these two sentences (“මහජන පුස්තකාලයේ දැවැන්ත සියඹලා ගස යටදී මෛත්‍රී බුදු හාමුදුරුවෝ බුදු වනු ඇතැයි කිසිවකු කියනු මට ඇසී ඇත. බීගත් අයෙකු විසින් කරන ලද ඒ ප්‍රකාශය මගේ සිත තුල කිඳා බැස ගියාක් වැන්න.”) become: “Public library (in) huge tamarind (tree) under Maitree Buddha attain enlightenment that someone saying me heard. Drunken someone by made that statement my mind inside sunken deep like.”

Again, Sinhala is still related to English, albeit distantly. Many of the world’s languages bear no known relation to ours. What happens, then, in a translation that’s determined to preserve the syntax of a language such as Amdolese or Aymara, Japanese or Javanese, Wolof or Zuni?

For a word, narrative identity is etymology: the origins and evolution over time of the word. The ethical facet of a word is what values it holds, meaning what its definition is.

“But a relation to language in which syntax—the sequential arrangement of words—takes precedence over the time-and-space transcending rules of grammar and semantics; in which the ways of meaning, their distribution and relations, have priority over what is meant—this would be a language that seems to approach what Benjamin ‘means’ by ‘pure language,’” Weber suggests. If this is what we’re going to do, then Olga’s sentence in English reads as follows: “Then, like an enormous, omnisensitive oyster, whose body, so naked and delicate, feels the slightest tremble in the particles of light, scrunches up inside itself and remains after it a bit of space, where at once from completely nothing emerges world.”

This is probably largely intelligible, but I would argue that the way of meaning here’s completely wrong. What has been removed are the people: Olga and myself. All that’s left is bare language—yet language is a human innovation, the thing that humans made that made us human.

The sentence “Drunken someone by made that statement my mind inside sunken deep like,” on the other hand, tells us almost nothing about what’s going on, or what’s about to happen, within the novel Cogwheel Buddha. If it does make inroads into the pure language that awaits us when all individual languages finally fall away—which may as well be some future version of AI, an evolved-to-be-functional Google Translate—it nonetheless so obscures the “semantic dimension of meaning” that it would be hard for us to glimpse such possibility. It also razes all of the more elusive elements of literary works, such as atmosphere and tone.

With a couple of careful modifications, a syntactically disruptive translation might make visible the structure of a daily language readers take for granted, might make people aware of convention in such a way as to even enhance the power of individual words stripped of obvious connections, as if spotlit—but such careful modification would be directed by human intention, and Benjamin’s appeal to the translator is that she not have any goal in mind.

Language can’t be separated from the people who create and connect with one another through it. I don’t share Benjamin’s faith in a pure language to come. But I do think he’s right that it is syntax that ushers the original work into its “afterlife,” as he calls it.

The words of the text are the embodiment of its past. Its sentences, on the other hand, lead the way into its future, and in so doing, they also pass through the vast, dynamic labyrinth of the translator’s imagination.

Chantal Wright roundly ignores Benjamin’s “call for syntactic fusion.” Susan Bernofsky, the wonderful translator of German literature into English, writes this about her process of revision in translation:

Sometimes the best translation is one whose syntactical structure bears little resemblance to that of the original. At the same time, it is important to be conscious of the order in which information arrives. Every sentence is a journey that begins with a particular phrase or image and takes the reader somewhere. So what does the itinerary of a particular sentence look like, and where does it lead?

This strikes me as an extraordinarily helpful modification to Benjamin’s suggestion: try, when possible, to keep the original end—the destination the author appointed as the sentence-journey’s goal.

In which case, here’s my version of the whole opening of Book II of The Books of Jacob, The Book of Sand:

Every now and then, God wearies of his own luminous silence, and infinity starts to make him a little bit sick. Then, like an enormous, omnisensitive oyster, its body—so naked and delicate—feels the slightest tremble in the particles of light, scrunches up inside itself, leaving just enough space for the emergence—at once and out of nowhere—of a world. The world comes quick, though at first it resembles mold, delicate and pale, but soon it grows, and individual fibres connect, creating a powerful surrounding tissue. Then it hardens; then it starts to take on colours. This is accompanied by a low, barely audible sound, a gloomy vibration that makes the anxious atoms quake. And it is from this motion that particles come into being, and then grains of sand and drops of water, which divide the world in two.

We find ourselves now on the side of sand.

To the extent that the map can change the territory by determining an undetermined space or feature, by designating its use or at least suggesting it by name, I have likely both narrowed and expanded Olga’s original text in my translation here. I did not succeed in cutting down the size of any of the other sentences of this opening paragraph, though I’m not convinced of the necessity of such perfect matching. What I hope to have generated is microsuspense: the desire to keep reading, the drive to turn the page.

__________________________________

The Books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk (translated by Jennifer Croft) is available now from Riverhead.

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Tales of Destiny 2 English Fan Translation Project New Update Confirms Translation Is Fully Complete, Editing 70% Done - Wccftech - Translation

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In a new post on the team's official website, it has been confirmed that the translation is fully done, and editing is 70% complete.

Now, you’re probably wondering what exactly this means and what comes next. It means that the first-pass translation for the game is complete—every bit of Japanese text in the game now exists in English, from menus, skits, and the main scenario script to minigames, cutscenes, and the quiz book. All of it. The next steps will involve the remainder of the editing that needs to be done for this text, reinsertion, and internal testing of the patched game itself. During this testing phase, we will be looking for bugs and remaining typographical errors as well as checking the translation in context.

The Lumina Tales also provided some additional information on the process that went into translating Tales of Destiny 2. You can find everything on the Lumina Tales website.

Tales of Destiny 2, not to be mistaken with Tales of Eternia, which launched in the West as Tales of Destiny 2, has been originally released back in 2022 on PlayStation 2, before getting ported to PlayStation Portable in 2007. The game, which was never brought to the West, is the direct sequel to Tales of Destiny, starring Stahn and Rutee's son Kyle as he travels the world together with a mysterious girl called Reala to save the world once again.

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Biden’s “Imminent” invasion statement caught up in translation mix-up - Ukrinform. Ukraine and world news - Translation

In diplomacy, a single wrongly interpreted word could cause much harm, as evidenced by the latest example.

Over the past month, a plethora of reports has been circulating across the Ukrainian media conveying warnings from the country’s Western partners, especially the United States, about Russia's "imminent invasion."

President Joe Biden has allegedly voiced such concerns, not to mention Secretary of State Antony Blinken and other State Department officials, as well as intelligence and Pentagon operatives.

It must be noted, however, that the White House categorically denied media reports, which referred to a number of “sources, that in Biden's phone call with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky, the U.S. leader said the military incursion by Moscow was “imminent.”

“This is not true. President Biden said that there is a distinct possibility that the Russians could invade Ukraine in February,” U.S. National Security Council Spokesperson Emily Horne wrote on Twitter. “He has previously said this publicly & we have been warning about this for months. Reports of anything more or different than that are completely false.”

Emily Horne

Indeed, it is difficult to imagine that the diplomats, the military, and even more so the president of the most powerful nation or his spokesmen would resort to such hysterical and unbalanced wording, assuming there was no chance that Russia would give up on the idea to invade the neighboring state.

Of course, no one but the interpreters and the two leaders’ immediate entourage knows how exactly Biden and Zelensky spoke and what words they used precisely.

But what White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki told reporters a few days ago when asked about the withdrawal of part of the U.S. embassy staff from Ukraine is well known from open sources:

"When we said it was imminent, it remains imminent. But again, we can't make a prediction of what President Putin's decision will make. We're still engaged in diplomatic discussions and negotiations." 

Jen Psaki / Photo: Official White House Photo by Cameron Smith

In Ukrainian, one respected publication translated “imminent” in the context used by Psaki as “nemynuche,” which in English is closer to the word “inevitable,” although it is also the word that CAT (computer-assisted translation”) software offers in the first place.

And there are many such examples where Ukrainian outlets opted for “nemynuche” in their pieces, quoting American officials.

So most in Ukraine found themselves confused, to say the least. If it’s “nemynuche” (read: inevitable), why can’t the U.S .government “make a prediction” then? So is it going to happen or is it not? Seems like an oxymoron to me…

The fact is, Biden’s message was totally lost in translation, offered by the media and other sources, after “imminent” became “inevitable.” So what Ukrainians read and hear are warnings of an "inevitable threat,” “inevitable invasion,” and “inevitable war” because, as it turned out, this is the word given by automatic online translators.

Due to this confusion, the wrong adjective went viral across news reports and social media, imposing on the Ukrainian audience the idea of ​​the inevitability of war.

When drafting this piece in an attempt to explain the mix-up and clear things up for the Ukrainian readers in the native-language version of this article, I "tested" the semantics of the word “imminent” on native speakers in the United States. My interlocutors noted that, first of all, the adjective conveys a sense of urgency, the idea that a certain event is looming and likely to occur at any moment; secondly, it contains the connotation of the threat of such an event occurring. At the same time, it is important for Ukrainians to understand that it just doesn’t equal to “inevitable”, which would be synonymous to unavoidable, inescapable, or unpreventable (neomynne, nevidvorotne, “yakomu nemozhlyvo zapobihty” Note that the latter doesn’t even have a one-word analog in Ukrainian).

The Merriam-Webster online English dictionary offers the following meanings for “imminent”:

1. Ready to take place: happening soon.

2. Often used of something bad or dangerous seen as menacingly near.

The dictionary includes the following tokens as synonyms: impending, looming, pending, and threatening.

So there’s nothing from the realm of inevitability ... As the Damocles sword, it is hanging over one’s head, but its strike isn’t inevitable.

And, much to my surprise, I find in this same dictionary a familiar context in recent examples from the Internet: "Ukraine has privately expressed concern to Western allies, including the U.S., over public rhetoric suggesting a Russian attack is imminent, officials from the two countries say. — James Marson, WSJ, 22 Jan. 2022. The United States has voiced growing concerns that a Russian invasion could be imminent. — NBC News, 21 Jan. 2022.”

Thus, in the first example, we see that the confusion over the meaning of “imminent” in the context of the Ukrainian-Russian conflict, apparently caused by erroneous reverse English-Ukrainian and Ukrainian-English translation, has become so ingrained in the media that even the dictionary presents the word imminent as used in the same meaning by Ukrainian and American officials. Although, as we found out, the meaning of this word differs from how it is sometimes interpreted and understood in Ukraine.

It should be translated differently, depending on the combination with other words and context, but by no means as "inevitable."

Examples such as “imminent aggression,” “imminent threat,” and “imminent invasion” (in our case) all require different interpretations in Ukrainian.

So, once again, “imminent invasion” does not imply “nemynuche,” or “inevitable.”

Volodymyr Ilchenko, journalist, linguist, New York

First photo: Official White House Photo by Hannah Foslien

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Lost in Translation Ending Explained - Collider - Translation

Very rarely does an indie film convince large numbers of people to become online sleuths to figure out something that happens at the end of it. Sure, for science-fiction, horror, or other genre films, this kind of behavior is fairly commonplace, as those genres tend to attract obsessive and investigative types. But a low-key character drama that does not have much of a plot? That film must dig deep into someone for them to go on the hunt for answers. Such is the case with Lost in Translation, the 2003 Oscar-winning sophomore feature from Sofia Coppola, which concludes with an ending that has caused many folks online to put on their audio engineer hats to determine what has been said in a muffled whisper between the two main characters.

RELATED: Why Sofia Coppola's Movies Are Not Style Over Substance

Before we get to that, we need some context. Lost in Translation centers on the lives of two people who meet in Tokyo. One is Bob Harris (Bill Murray), an aging movie star looking to make some easy cash by shooting some advertisements for a Japanese whiskey. This was a time when celebrities appearing in commercials to shill products was seen as a faux pas, as opposed to today when it is all we see (Matt Damon and crypto?). The other is Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson), who has recently graduated from college and really has no idea what she wants to be doing with her life. She has traveled to Tokyo with her husband (Giovanni Ribisi), a photographer with whom she feels distant. Bob and Charlotte meet and form a relationship that sits somewhere on the border between friendship and romance, finding kinship with one another as two people adrift and alone.

Image Via Focus Features

The final scene, the one that everyone wants to get to the bottom of, takes place after a half-hearted goodbye between Bob and Charlotte at the hotel they are both staying. Bob is in the back seat of a car on his way to the airport. At a moment where the car is stopped, he looks out the window and sees Charlotte walking down a street. Bob gets out of the car and catches up to her. They share a bittersweet embrace, and Bob whispers something into her ear. The whisper is muffled and unintelligible. They share a brief kiss, their first of the entire film, and tell each other, "Bye." Cue "Just Like Honey" by The Jesus and Mary Chain as the two go their separate ways with smiles on their faces. What an ending!

Obviously, the element that has caused so much speculation and investigation is the whisper. What did Bill Murray whisper in Scarlett Johansson's ear? Only three people in the world know exactly what was said at that moment, and those people are Murray, Johansson, and Sofia Coppola. In the nearly twenty years since the film's release, all three of them have never revealed what was said and do not plan to. When Coppola reflected on the film for its fifteenth anniversary with Little White Lies, she said:

"That thing Bill whispers to Scarlett was never intended to be anything. I was going to figure out later what to say and add it in and then we never did. It was between them. Just acknowledging that week meant something to both of them and it affects them going back to their lives. People always ask me what’s said ... I always like Bill’s answer: that it’s between lovers – so I’ll leave it at that.”

Because they are not giving a direct answer, people have gotten to the point of manipulating the audio levels of the scene to see if it can be discovered. Even this has not provided a definitive answer. One video suggests he says, "I have to be leaving, but I won't let that come between us. Okay?" Another video purports Murray's whisper was out of character, as he says, "I love you is the best thing I can come up with. At some point, he has to tell it to her." Others have speculated he is telling her to leave her husband. Clearly, people's audio skills are not as deft as they think they are with still no definitive answer available.

Image Via Focus Features

Here's the thing, folks. What was actually said does not really matter. Ambiguity is a powerful tool in filmmaking. It is also something that makes many film fans deeply uncomfortable. When a moment in film posits a question instead of giving an answer, that forces the audience to look inside themselves for the answer, and by looking inward, people may not be too happy with what they find out about themselves. For Lost in Translation, in particular, this moment of deliberate ambiguity makes each person watching reflect on their own feelings of love, companionship, age, and hope to determine what that final moment means to them. The person sitting next to you, who has watched the exact same film, could have a completely different set of life experiences and perceptions about the movie to believe he whispers to her something you had not even considered. Interpreting the emotions between Bob and Charlotte is what is important for that scene, not the words that are spoken.

These instances of being able to imprint yourself onto a piece of art is a mark of a great work. Just this small snippet of a film, only lasting a few seconds, has stirred up nearly two decades of constant conversation about Lost in Translation. How many movies since the release of Coppola's film have left your brain as soon as you encountered it? Great art needs to leave a little room for mystery because the unknown is what keeps bringing us back to engage with it over and over again. If you watch a movie for the first time and understand everything about it during that viewing, why would you ever need to watch it again? What is left to discover?

For Lost in Translation, I have my theory as to what Bill Murray whispers into Scarlett Johansson's ear. I think he says something along the lines of, "I want you to know that people, including me, love you, and with whatever you do with your life, you are going to be okay." Am I right? In reality, no, but for how I perceive the story that Sofia Coppola presents us, I am. And whatever you believe he says to her is also true, because in art, what is true to you is the truth. That is what makes it beautiful.

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About The Author

Mike Shutt (42 Articles Published)

Mike Shutt is a Writer for Collider. He is the former co-host of the No Excuses podcast and has been writing about film online since 2014, from news to film festival coverage. You can typically find Mike watching a movie, listening to a musical, or planning his next theme park trip.

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- Translation

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The Devil's Dictionary of Technology and Law - Bar & Bench - Indian Legal News - Dictionary

A

Artificial Intelligence: An intelligence at times so intelligent that it extends beyond the comprehension of human intelligence.

Automation: A build-up to the documentary ‘Rise of the Planet of the E-Apes’. It begins with a blacked-out, anonymous house-helper narrating how he lost his job to a machine.

B

Blockchain: Learning this concept will instantly block your chain of thought and you will block it out of your system forever. See also: Jurisprudence.

Boilerplate Clause: A set of terms in a contract that is used mutatis mutandis to save time and effort, only to increase both time and effort in the form of dispute resolution.

C

Case Management Information System (CMIS): A system that informally performs stress tests on lawyers before producing their desired output. This is done to maintain the highest levels of mental endurance in the legal fraternity.

Cloud Service: A digital space to hold your data, often afforded to you at ‘no charge’ as the real product is not the cloud service but you.

Compliance: A corporate practice that has, somehow, kept thirsty predators from abusing and misusing resources to prey on each other and the masses. It involves drowning said predators in redundant procedures.

Cryptocurrency: A digital asset class that takes an investor and his money from "asmano ki uchaiyo me...bohot upar" to "500 le le land kara de" while being surrounded in the kohra of Elon Musk's tweets, thinking to himself "mai (beep) hu jo isme aya."

Cybersecurity: A process involving bonafide acts similar to fighting hostile gunmen with a pencil. You need to be precise every time, they need to be precise just once. Even this kind of security requires you to ‘jaagte raho’ at all times.

D

Data Protection: A concept you take seriously only after you’re a victim of whatever or whomever you were needed to be secure from.

Decentralized Finance (DeFi): (Un)banking using blockchain technology to defy (pun intended) the existing banking system.

Disruptive Technology: Any new technology that convinces 20-year-olds to invest in it “coz iz d future”. To create “long-term wealth and retire by their 20’s”. My dear 20-year-old, Savdhan rahe! Satark rahe!

Drone: A mechanical creature capable of air, water, and land operability. Yet, most likely to be spotted in weddings hovering over Priti and Pankaj as they do the ‘Titanic’ pose. If you spot multiple of them, someone is finding their own match in the crowd from the comfort of their homes.

E

E-commerce: A new weapon in the arsenal of the bargainers who unabashedly insist on paying the seller at discounted prices, instead of buying from the app actually offering those prices! If the customer is king, this one is irking.

E-sports: A full-time profession, pending the approval of Indian parents. It involves mastery in online physical activity and skill at the cost of real-life physical activity and skill.

F

Fin-Tech: An evolving species of finance professionals who now eye every bit of your data in addition to their historic interest in your money.

G

(5)G: Fifth-Generation technology using higher spectrum to increase the speed of messages on ‘the health risks of 5G’ among other things. An opportunity for both businesses and celebrities to stay relevant in the market.

Geospatial Tech: Use of modern tools and technologies that range from remarkable information systems capable of predicting natural calamities, to navigation systems occasionally directing you to the wrong side of a one-way road with complete confidence.

H

Health-Tech: Innovations such as contactless healthcare to ensure the health, care, and safety of doctors by avoiding contact with the families and other potentially violent stakeholders of the patient.

I

Information Solutions: A new class of professionals perennially convincing you that they are the godsend solution to all of mankind’s problems while charging you enough to cause financial problems.

Intellectual Property: Protectable creations of the mind, often unintellectual in today's age. Like this article.

Internet-of-Things: An interactive system of things leading to a world where your mobile will be connected to your laptop, tablet, smart-watch, smart-glasses, smart-coffee-mug, intelligent-fridge, clever-microwave, robotic vacuum cleaner, robotic guard dogs, and a smart gun to shoot the dogs down if their system corrupts. In simpler words, an unlimited buffet serving close-to-unlimited delicacies of data for companies.

M

Machine Learning: An overoptimistic human effort to make machines better at that one trait that has ensured their sustenance as a species. In a world of survival of the fittest!

Meme Coin: A class of cryptocurrency expected to take you ‘chaand tak’ but doesn't last mere ‘shaam tak’.

P

Phishing: A tool in a fraudster's kit-box that requires less effort and time to generate more money than its work-intensive homonym, fishing.

Privacy: An invasion of this by 'mohalle ki auntiya' is frowned upon. But a violation by tech companies, data companies, the government, and other hackers/fraudsters (who eventually service it to 'mohalle ki auntiya') is overlooked for convenience.

R

Ransomware: Digital equivalent of the Omni van.

Regulation: An often disproportionate State reaction to rein in the monster of disruptive technology much after it has affected industries, children's FDs, and the environment.

S

Simulated Reality: A concept complex enough to make a Christopher Nolan movie out of it.

Smart Contract: A contract capable of performing and enforcing itself, unlike regular contracts that require either courts or Vasooli Bhai to enforce them.

Srikrishna Committee: A cCmmittee consisting of those elderly members of the family who have a remarkable grasp of all trendy tech while a much younger you is clueless.

Surveillance: Warranted to prevent others from looting you in olden times. Enables (almost) anyone to loot you innovatively in recent times.

T

Techno-legal Nomenclature: Calling a spade a Flat-blade Manually-operated Unearthing Device (FMUD). And a shovel a Curve-blade Manually-operated Unearthing Device (CMUD). Collectively calling them and the person operating them a Manual Unearthing System (MUS). This is done to avoid ambiguity. Also to assert the exclusivity of the legal profession.

Tech Contract: A classification in contracts done because, well, why not?

Terms of Service: Extortion wearing a three-piece suit and Gucci shoes.

TMT: An area of legal practice that merits the name TNT in view of the outburst it is witnessing in recent times.

U

UI/UX: A web-based user-engagement platform design in which the term web stands for a real web meant to entangle you with the website/app for the ‘service providing’ spider to incessantly feed on.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV): Mangifera indica equivalent of the drone genus.

V

Virtual Meetings: A place online where you lose your internet connection, patience, persuasion, and confidential data before losing your mind.

Visual Line Of Sight (VLOS): Operating UAVs within this resembles a remotely-controlled helicopter. Beyond this, it resembles a nail-biting-mind-numbing-zero-margin-for-error video game.

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Word in progress: Addition of slangs to English dictionaries - Financial Express - Dictionary

The emergence of new slangs, along with their acceptance by English dictionaries over the years, is democratising the language

By Reya Mehrotra

If Geoffrey Chaucer, hailed as the ‘father of English literature’ was to be alive again, he would not get what was being said in his own mother tongue.
In December 2021, ‘floofy’ was one of the new words added to the Collins English Dictionary. It is a slang for ‘an animal, especially a cat or dog, having luxuriant fur or hair’. Similarly, ‘crypto’ (slang for cryptocurrency), ‘onion bag’ (slang for the goal in hockey, soccer, etc), ‘nelson’ (cricket slang), ‘vacay’ (informal for vacation) and ‘double-vaxxed’ (informal for having received two vaccinations against a disease), too, made the cut to the Collins English Dictionary in 2021.

Cambridge Dictionary editor Rachel Fletcher believes that the emergence of new slangs is just one of the ways in which the English language is constantly changing.

In recent times, a number of slangs and informal words has been added to the dictionary. The reasons are far from one—the rise of the ‘Gen-Z’, the social media effect, the ever-evolving language, or the post-pandemic work-from-home culture, where informality is on the rise. In fact, NFT (non-fungible token) was named the ‘Collins Word of the Year 2021’ alongside nine other words like pingdemic, neopronoun, regencycore, cheugy, metaverse and climate anxiety, among others.
In recent years, slangs like ‘butters’, which means ‘ugly’, ‘snack’ for ‘an attractive person’ and ‘grammable’, meaning ‘attractive or interesting enough to be suitable for posting on the social media service Instagram’, have been added to the Cambridge Dictionary. As for informal words around the pandemic, Cambridge Dictionary has recently added ‘rona’, short for ‘Coronavirus’, and ‘vax’, short for ‘vaccine’ or ‘vaccination’. In 2021, Internet terms ‘TBH’ (to be honest) and ‘FTW’ (for the win) were added to The Merriam-Webster Dictionary.

The year 2020 had seen a number of pandemic words like ‘quarantine’, ‘coronageddon’, ‘maskhole’, ‘covidiot’ and ‘superspreading event’ becoming a part of the daily lingo of people around the world and added to the dictionary as their usage became common. But as for slangs and informal words, it is not just because they are trending that they are finding official entries into dictionaries. What causes a word to enter a dictionary, according to Jonathan Dent, senior editor, Oxford English Dictionary (OED), Oxford University Press, is when it has been used so often and so widely that it has to be recorded and explained in an honest and evidence-based record of the language. “Descriptive dictionaries have a duty to include all the words that have justified their inclusion through sustained and widespread use,” he explains. For OED, that means all words that meet inclusion criteria from the whole history of English after the year 1150.

The making of a slang
Not all modern words might qualify as slang but could get different categorisations when being entered into a dictionary. Jonathan Dent says that OED labels words and senses according to their regional character, currency,and other factors, and as slang, colloquial, etc, according to their use. “The categorisation of particular words as ‘slang’—that is, language which is regarded as very informal, and more common in speech than writing—or as ‘formal’ or ‘standard’ English reflects how words are used at a particular point in time, rather than essential qualities of the words themselves. Yesterday’s slang word is often part of today’s vocabulary of formal or standard English, and vice-versa,” he adds.

Rachel Fletcher shares that Cambridge Dictionary too uses labels to tell users more about the contexts in which a word is typically used. The labels include information about the regional varieties of English in which a word is used, and information about the register such as whether it is informal, formal, offensive, or old-fashioned. “The entries that we label as ‘slang’ are typically extremely informal and often used by a specific group of people (young people, for instance) among themselves. For example, we can see that ‘wonga’, slang for ‘money’, is mostly used in the UK, while ‘putz’, which means ‘a stupid person’, is more common in the US, and ‘furphy’, meaning ‘a rumour’, is mostly used in Australia,” Rachel adds.

In 2020, OED added the slang word ‘zhuzhy’ (stylish, exciting), probably originally a part of the British gay slang known as Polari, but first recorded in a relatively formal context in a dramatic review of 1968. However, the word ‘ghosting’ (ignoring or pretending not to know a person, especially on social media or via text message) shares some of the contextual qualities of slang but its use has become so widespread in the ten years since it was first visible on Twitter that OED does not categorise it as slang.

Shivangi Gupta, assistant director English, British Council India, says that English has changed from the times of Chaucer to Shakespeare to Austen. “Diaspora writers have their own flavours to the language. If you have a smartphone and access to Twitter, you can introduce something that captures the imagination of many, goes viral, and then eventually ends up in the dictionary as valid usage. We have to remember that dictionaries describe how language is presently and prevalently used and understood, these are not necessarily prescriptive tools of how it ought to be used. We all contribute to shaping the language by using it,” she adds.

Shivangi’s favourite inclusions in The Merriam-Webster Dictionary are ‘whataboutism’, which is synonymous with the British English word ‘whataboutery’, and ‘copypasta’. The former means ‘the act or practice of responding to an accusation of wrongdoing by claiming that an offence committed by another is similar or worse’ and the latter is ‘data (such as a block of text) that has been copied and spread widely online’.

Rachel shares that in the past two years, about 6% of the new words that were added to the dictionary have been informal. Of those informal words, less than 1% were slangs. The reason for the small quantity is that the Cambridge Dictionary is meant to be used primarily by learners of English and since slang is mostly used by specific groups of people, it is less likely to be relevant to learners. Another characteristic of slang, shares Rachel, is that it often falls out of use relatively quickly. “Before we add a new word to the dictionary, we monitor its use over time. Only words that are used consistently over a period of time are added. A lot of slang changes too quickly to be included,” she says.

To make the process of inclusion of slangs and informal words more democratic, Cambridge Dictionary features a selection of a few words on their blogs each week for the users to decide if the word will become widely used. Words like ‘midweeker’ (a short holiday taken during the week), ‘proffee’ (a drink made by mixing cold coffee with protein powder) and ‘cardening’ (the activity of growing plants inside your car) have been recently shared on their blog.

Slang is regional
It is often popularly said that the language spoken in India changes every few kilometres. English too has no one standard form, as Shivangi Gupta, puts it. “There is not just one English, there are many ‘Englishes’,” she says. There is British and American English which are the most commonly known ones, Indian English, Australian English, Kenyan English, Philippine English, and more. So is the case with slang. Every city, state and country has its own unique slang which makes it a tedious task for dictionary curators to keep a tab and to decide whether they should make it to the dictionary or not.

For instance, while in India, the words ‘fresher’, ‘aiyo’ and ‘prepone’ might seem very common and popular, they remain restricted to Indian English.
In fact, in 2021, the word ‘fresher’, which means ‘an employee with only a limited amount of work experience; a recent graduate entering employment’, was added to the Oxford English Dictionary, shares Shivangi. “The richness of English is increased by its users every day and these changes and additions to the dictionaries are a recognition of that,” she says.

Jonathan Dent agrees that slang is typically restricted to a particular context or group of people and often varies from period to period and from region to region. “More standard varieties of written English vary in similar ways, but the particular qualities of slang words and the ways in which they are used mean that slang often varies more widely, and slang terms fall in and out of fashion more quickly than the vocabulary of standard written English. Different countries (and even different cities and towns within countries) will have their own slang, and slang terms that they share with other regions, in the same way, that they typically have standard or colloquial varieties of English which have particular distinctive local features alongside those shared with other Englishes,” he says.

Apart from the geographical boundaries, what impacts slang is also the other demographic factors like the age of a particular group of people. Another factor that dictionary curators keep in mind while including slangs in the dictionaries is informing the reader of the context in which a word is typically used so that those unfamiliar with the slang used by a set of people belonging to a different region might be able to use it correctly.

So, the next time if you hear a slang like ‘GOAT’ (greatest of all time), pop open a dictionary and find the meaning. After all, ‘Iykyk’ (if you know, you know).

New slangs that were added to English dictionaries last year

Floofy (Collins English Dictionary)
Crypto (Collins English Dictionary)
Onion Bag (Collins English Dictionary)
Nelson (Collins English Dictionary)
Vacay (Collins English Dictionary)
Double Vaxxed (Collins English Dictionary)
NFT (Collins Word of the Year)
TBH (The Merriam-Webster Dictionary)
FTW (The Merriam-Webster Dictionary)
Fresher (Oxford English Dictionary)
Yeet (Dictionary.com)
Zaddy (Dictionary.com)
Snack (Dictionary.com)
Oof (Dictionary.com)

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