What is the range of application of a word

We are grateful to the Foreign
Languages Chair of the Institute of International Relations (Kyiv
Taras Shevchenko National University) for discussions and valuable
comments on the Manual. We are thankful to Mr. A. Kobzarenko for
style-editing of Ukrainian transla­tions.

We would like to thank Prof.
V. Karaban and Ass. Prof. K. Serazhim for
reading and suggesting valuable comments on the Manual.

We highly appreciate and gratefully acknowledge
the support of the Administration of
the Institute of Inter­national Relations.

Authors

Lecture
1.
LANGUAGE
AND EXTRALINGUISTIC

WORLD

This Lecture:

• _
introduces
the notions of a linguistic sign, a concept and a denotatum;

• establishes relations between the above sets of elements;

• shows
  the difference between the denotative and connotative meanings of a
  linguistic sign;

• describes the mental concept of a linguistic sign;

• describes the relations of polysemy and synonymy, and

• explains some causes of ambiguity of translation equivalents.

It is worthwhile to begin lectures on translation
with a short
intro­duction to the phenomenon of language, since not knowing
the relation­ship between language and extralinguistic world one
can hardly properly understand translation.

•* The relation of
language to the extralinguistic world involves three basic sets of
elements: language signs, mental
concepts and parts of the
extralinguistic world (not necessarily material or physically really
existing) which are usually called denotata
(Sin­gular: denotatum).

The language sign is
a sequence of sounds (in spoken language) or symbols (in written
language) which is associated with a single concept in the minds of
speakers of that or another language.

It should be noted that sequences smaller than a word (i.e.
mor­phemes) and those bigger than a word (i.e. word
combinations) are also language signs rather than only words. Word
combinations are regarded as individual language signs if they are
related to a single mental concept

6

7

which
is different from the concepts of its individual components (e. g.
best man).¹

The signs of language are associated with
particular mental concepts only in the minds of the speakers of this
language. Thus, vrouw, Frau, femeie, and
kobieta are
the language signs related to the concept of a
woman in Dutch, German, Romanian and
Polish, respectively. It is im­portant to note that one can
relate these signs to the concept of a woman
if and only if he or she is a speaker
of the relevant language or knows these words otherwise, say, from a
dictionary.

One may say that language signs are a kind of construction elements
(bricks) of which a language is built. To prove the necessity of
knowing the language sign system in order to understand a language it
is sufficient to run the following test: read with a dictionary a
text in a completely unknown language with complex declination system
and rich inflexions (say, Hungarian or Turkish). Most probably your
venture will end in failure because not knowing the word-changing
morphemes (language signs) of this language you won’t find many of
the words in a dictionary.

The mental concept is
an array of mental images and associations related to a particular
part of the extralinguistic world (both really exist­ing and
imaginary), on the one hand, and connected with a particular language
sign, on the other.

The relationship between a language sign and a
concept is ambigu­ous: it is often different even in the minds of
different people, speaking the same language, though it has much in
common and, hence, is recog­nizable by all the members of the
language speakers community. As an example of such ambiguity consider
possible variations of the concepts (mental images and associations)
corresponding to the English word en­gineer
in the minds of English-speaking people
when this word is used, say, in a simple introductory phrase Meet
Mr. X. He is an engineer.

‘ In
this as well as in many other instances we make use of definitions
which seem the most suitable for the
explanation of translation but might be considered oversimplified
should they be kept to in a comprehensive semantic analysis.

8

The relationship between similar concepts and
their relevant lan­guage signs may be different also in different
languages. For example, among the words of different languages
corresponding to the concept of a women
mentioned above: vrouw,
Frau, femei, and kobieta,
the first two will include in the
concept of a woman that
of a wife whereas
the last two will not.

The differences in the relationship between
language signs and concepts (i.e*. similar concepts appearing
different to the speakers of different lan­guages and even to
different speakers of the same language) may explain many of the
translation difficulties.

ШЬ The
mental concept of a word (and
word combination) usu­ally consists of lexical
meanings, connotations, associations and
grammatical meanings. The
lexical meanings, connotations, and associations relate a word to the
extralinguistic world, whereas the grammatical meanings relate it to
the system of the language.

For example, the German word haben
possesses the lexical meaning of to
have with similar connotations and
associations and in its gram­matical meaning it belongs as an
element to the German grammatical system of the Perfect Tense. One
may note similar division of the mean­ings in the English verb to
have or in the French verb avoir.

Thus, a lexical
meaning is the general mental
concept corresponding to a word or a combination of words.²
To get a better idea of lexical
meanings lets take a look at some definitions in a dictionary³.
For practical pur-

² It
is, of course, a simplified definition but we think it serves the
purpose of

this Manual. In
order to read more on this complex subject you may refer to:

Salomon
L.B. Semantics and Common Sense. —
New-York,
1966;
Chafe
W.L.

Meaning and the Structure of Language. —
Chicago;
London, 1971.

³ Hornby
A. S. Oxford Advanced Learners Dictionary of Current English.
—

Oxford,
1982.

9

poses
they may be regarded as descriptions of the lexical meanings of the
words
shown below:

mercy —
1.
(capacity
for) holding oneself back from punishing, or from causing suffering
to, somebody whom one has the right or power to punish; 2.
piece
of good fortune, something to be thankful for, relief; 3.
exclamation
of surprise or (often pretended) terror.

noodle
—
1. type
of paste of flour and water or flour and eggs pre­pared
in long, narrow strips and used in soups, with a sauce, etc.; 2.
fool.

blinkers
(US
=
blinders)
—
leather
squares to prevent a horse from seeing sideways.

A
connotation
is
an additional, contrastive value of the basic usually designative
function of the lexical meaning. As
an example, let us compare the
words to
die and
to
peg out. It
is easy to note that the former has no connotation, whereas the
latter has a definite connotation of vulgarity.

An
association is a more or less regular connection established between
the
given and other mental concepts in the minds of the language
speakers. As
an evident example, one may choose red
which
is usually associated with revolution,
communism and
the like. A rather regular association is established
between green
and
fresh
{young) and
(mostly in the last dec­ade)
between green
and
environment
protection.

Naturally,
the number of regular, well-established associations ac­cepted
by the entire language speakers’ community is rather limited —
the
majority of them are rather individual, but what is more important
for translation
is that the relatively regular set of associations is sometimes
dif­ferent
in different languages. The latter fact might affect the choice of
trans­lation
equivalents.

Ш* The
most important fact, however, to be always born in mind in
translation is that the relation between words (language signs) and
parts of the extralinguistic world (denotata) is only indirect and
going through the mental concepts⁴.

The
concepts being strongly subjective and largely different in
dif­ferent
languages for similar denotata give rise to one of the most
difficult problems
of translation, the problem of ambiguity
of translation equivalents.

Ш*
Another
source of translation ambiguity is the polysemantic
nature
of the language signs: the
relationship between the signs and concepts
is very seldom one-to-one, most frequently it is one-to-many or
many-to-one, i.e. one word has several meanings or several words
have similar meanings.

These
relations are called polysemy
(homonymy) and
synonymy,

accordingly.
For example, one and the same language sign bay
corre­sponds
to the concepts of a
tree or shrub, a part of the sea, a compartment in
a building, room, etc., deep barking of dogs, and
reddish-brown
color of a horse
and
one and the same concept of high
speed corresponds
to several language
signs: rapid,
quick, fast.

The
peculiarities of conceptual fragmentation of the world by the
language
speakers are manifested by the range
of application of the lexi­cal
meanings (reflected
in limitations in the combination of words and stylistic
peculiarities). This is yet another problem having direct relation
to
translation —
a
translator is to observe the compatibility rules of the lan­guage
signs (e.
g. make
mistakes,
but
do
business).

The
relationship of language signs with the well-organized material
world and mostly logically arranged mental images suggests that a
lan­guage is an orderly system rather than a disarray of random
objects. The language
system and its basic rules are the subject of the next lecture.

For
more information see, for example, a classical work of Ogden C.K.,
Ivor
A. Richards. The Meaning of Meaning. —
London,
1949.

10

11

03
QUESTIONS

1. What are the basic elements
   of the relationship between a language and extralinguistic world?

2. What is a language sign, a
   concept and a denotatum? Give defini­tions. Show the relation
   between them?

3. What is a lexical meaning, a
   connotation and an association? Give definitions and examples.

4. What is the range of
   application of a word? Give examples.

5. What are the main sources of
   translation ambiguity stemming from the sign-concept relationship?

(§J EXERCISES

Ex.
1.
Using
a dictionary define the lexical meanings of the following words and
word combinations. Find Ukrainian or English equivalents. Compare
the
lexical meanings of the English words and their Ukrainian
equivalents and
vice versa.

1. anticlimax;
   arms; bottom; bout; concert; concoct; date; detail; end; engineer;
   fulcrum; fun; the gist; give and take; world; worldly; peer
   pressure; peer-bonded; rapport; task force; track record; power
   broker; odds; home; war.

2. аматор — любитель
   — дилетант; аналізувати — розглядати
   -розбирати; банкір — фінансист; засновник
   — основоположник -фундатор — батько;
   малий — невеликий — нечисленний —
   обмежений

• мізерний —
  нікчемний; неймовірний — неправдоподібний
  — дикий

• парадоксальний
  — анекдотичний; простий — щирий —
  простодуш­ний — грубий — звичайний.

Ех.
2. Describe
connotations of the following words and word combinations. Suggest
Ukrainian translations with similar connotations.

malady —
disease
—
illness;
unusual —
off-beat;
efforts —
travails;
work

— toil,
gun —
piece;
corpse —
stiff;
rich —
well-to-do;
quit —
buzz
off; liqui­

date —
iron
out.

Ex.
3.
Consider
regular associations between English words (concepts) in the word
combinations given below, suggest Ukrainian equivalents of the
latter. Observe similarity or difference of the associations in the
Ukrainian equiva­lents.

white
knight; white heat; yellow press; common sense; die hard; soft
(hard)
figures; pipe dream; red tape

Ex.
4.
Suggest
the missing parts of the expressions below; say where the
associations
are similar in English and Ukrainian.

»
…. Tom,
…
Tom;
…
Rouges,
…
Rouge;
…
sky,
….
sky;
….
apple;
…
Apple,
apple …,
apple
….,
Apple
…,
Apple,
apple …,
apple
…

Ex.
5.
Take
three homonyms and synonyms in Ukrainian, translate them into
English, point to the cases of similar and different use.

12

13

Lecture
2.
LANGUAGE
SYSTEM: PARADIGMS AND
SYNTAGMAS

•* In any language
system two general planes are usually distin­guished: the formal
plane, comprising spoken or written language signs (words and word
combinations as well as minor elements, morphemes) and the semantic,
comprising mental concepts (mean­ings) the language signs stand
for.

This
Lecture:

• introduces the concepts of a system;

• introduces the notion of language as a system existing in formal
  and se­mantic planes;

• attributes linguistic signs to morphological, lexical or syntactic
  levels;

• depending on meaning or function, defines what paradigm a unit
  be­longs;

• analyzes syntactic and semantic valence;

• shows how different syntagmas are activated in English and
  Ukrainian in the course of translation;

• gives a definition of translation as a specific coding-encoding
  process.

So, there is a system underlying seemingly random signs of a
lan­guage. One may note, for instance, that not all the words
are compatible with each other, their range of application has
certain limitations, and through their lexical meanings and
associations they may be united into individual groups.

For example, to take an extreme case, in English
speech one will never find two articles in a row or in an official
obituary an English speaker will never say that the
minister pegged out. An evident
example of grouping by meaning and association gives the group of
colors in
which even a little child will easily include black,
red, blue, etc.

Thus, one may conclude that there is some order
organizing hun­dreds of thousands of words making it easier to
memorize and properly use them in speech. This order is called the
system of a language. Any
sys­tem is an organized set of objects and relations between
them, but before discussing objects and relations in the system of a
language it is worth­while to describe the traditional approach
to language system descrip­tions.

— As a simplified
example one may again take words from a dictionary {formalplane)
and their definitions (semanticplane):

corps — 1. one
of the technical branches of an army; 2. —
military force made up of two or more
divisions

correct — 1.
true, right; 2.
— proper, in accord with good taste and
conventions.

This example is, of course, simplified since the real semantic
content corresponding to a word is much more complex and not that
easy to de­fine. The general relationship between these planes
has been described in the previous lecture.

•► A language system is traditionally divided
into three basic levels: morphological (including morphs and
morphemes as objects), lexi­cal (including words as objects) and
syntactic (comprising such ob­jects as elements of the sentence
syntax such as Subject, Predicate, etc.)

For example, -tion,
-sion are the English word-building
morphemes and belong to objects of the morphological level, book,
student, desk as well as any other
word belong to objects of the lexical level, and the same words
(nouns) book, student, desk in
a sentence may become Subjects or Objects and thus belong to the set
of syntactic level objects of the lan­guage.

14

15

•►
At each
language level its objects may be grouped according to their meaning
or function. Such groups are called paradigms.

The
following paradigms were used to form these sentences and the
following paradigm elements were activated in syntagmas during their
formation (viz. Table below)

Comparing
the paradigm sets used to form the above English and Ukrainian
sentences and paradigm elements activated in the syntagmas of
these sentences one may easily note that both the sets used and the
set elements
activated are often different.

They
are different because English and Ukrainian possess different
language
systems. It goes without saying, that this fact is very important
for translation and explains many translation problems.

For
example, the English morphemes s and es
enter the
paradigm of Number (Plural). Words spring,
summer, autumn, and
winter enter
the lexico-semantic paradigm of seasons.
All verbs may be
grouped into the syntactic (functional) paradigm of Predicates.

One may
note that one and the same word may belong to different levels
and different paradigms, i.e. the
language paradigms are fuzzy sets with
common elements. As
an example, consider the lexico-semantic paradigm
of colors
the
elements of which {black,
white, etc.)
also belong to
the syntactic paradigms of Attributes and Nouns.

It
is important to note that the
elements of language paradigms are united
and organized according to their potential roles in speech (text)
for­mation.
These
roles are called valences.
Thus,
words black,
white, red, etc.
have
a potential to define colors of the objects (semantic
valence) and
a potential
capacity to serve as Attributes in a sentence (syntactic
valence).

•► The
paradigms of the language brought together form the sys­tem
of the language which
may be regarded as a kind of construction material
to build sentences and texts. Language
paradigms are
vir­tual
elements
of the language which are activated in syntactically in­terdependent
groups of sentence elements called syntagmas.

Names
of Paradigms Used to
Form the Sentences

Personal
Pronouns Paradigm Verbs Paradigm Verb
Tense Paradigm Particles
Paradigm Prepositions Paradigm Noun Paradigm Adjectives
Paradigm Adverbs
Paradigm Noun Cases Paradigm Adjective
Cases Paradigm

Elements Activated in the
Sentence

English	Ukrainian
he	він
used, come	приїздив
Past Indef.	минулий час
to	none
to	до
Italy, spring	Італія, весна
each	кожний
none	зазвичай
Common Case	род. відм.
none	род. відм.

In
simple language a syntagma is a pair of words connected by the
master-servant relationship⁵

As an
example, consider sentences in English and in Ukrainian: He
used
to come to Italy each spring and
Зазвичай
кожної весни він приїздив до
Італії.

ШЬ
Any
language has a particular multi-level organization: its ele­ments
are organized in sets (paradigms) at various levels and a lan­guage
speaker is using the elements of these sets to generate a mes­sage
intended for communication with other speakers of this lan­guage
and entirely incomprehensible for those who have no com­mand of
this language.

_P

⁵
This is an approach
typical for Immediate Constituents (IC) Grammar.

16

Б І Б Л
і
З
«і 6КЙ

Луганське!
о державного цзгогічного
університету
мені
Тараса Шевченка

_7?2№

The
latter fact is easy to illustrate by a sentence in a language
pre­sumably
unfamiliar to the readers of this Manual. Consider Dutch sen­tence:
Dat
vat ik niet. One
will understand it if he knows that:

ik is
a Personal Pronoun, first person singular (English I);

vat
is
the first person singular of the verb vatten
(English
catch,
get);

niet
is
the negation (English not,
no);

dat
is
a Pronoun (English it,
this).

Then being
aware of the relevant English words (paradigm ele­ments)
one may render this sentence in English as I
do not get it.

From the
above one may conclude that a language is a code
under­stood
only by its users (speakers)⁶.
Then, may be, translation is a process of
decoding a message in one code and encoding it in another which is
understood by another group of users using a different code. However,
this is the subject of the next lecture.

⁶
This
viewpoint is widely accepted by computational linguistics (viz., e.;
Grishman
R. Computational Linguistics: An Introduction —
Cambridge,
1987).

18

Ј?3 QUESTIONS

1. What are the two main
   planes of a language? What is the relationship between them?

2. What levels are traditionally
   distinguished in a language? Give ex­amples of the objects of
   each level.

3. What
   is a language paradigm? Give examples of lexico-semantic and
   grammatical
   paradigms.

4. -What is a syntagma? Qive a
   definition.

5. What
is the language system? fiive a definition.

(§}
EXERCISES

Ex.
1.
Give
the elements ofthe following lexico-semantic paradigms.

1. furniture, colors, time,
   times of the day, seasons

2. вибори; судова
   система; переговори; фінанси

Ех.
2.
Compare
the grammatical paradigms which enter the following Eng­lish
words and their Ukrainian equivalents.

house, man, easy, do-little,
easy-going, white

Ex. 3.
In
the text below, name as many lexico-semantic and grammatical
paradigms as you can find.

BOTH SIDES WILL MAKE SURE
AMERICAS CULTURE WARS

CONTINUE
The
Internaitonal Herald Tribune. April 12,
2001. ByNeal
Gahler.

The culture
wars that so enlivened the 1980s
and
1990s
in
America are said to be over. The savage fights that raged full-scale
as recently as two years ago over gay rights, abortion, gun control,
environmental pro­tection and general permissiveness, and that
culminated in the Antietam of
culture battles, Bill Clinton’s impeachment and trial, seem to have
just petered
out.

19

Pundits
say the combatants, exhausted from all the verbal shelling, have
accepted compromise rather than press on for total victory, and this
has led to a new spirit of accommodation. One observer writes that
the «crackle of cultural gunfire is now increasingly distant.»

It makes you wonder what country they’re living in.

Ex. 4. Compare
the paradigm sets used to form the following English and Ukrainian
sentences and paradigm elements activated in the syntagmas of these
sentences.

Jack is an early riser. Джек
рано встає.

Lecture
3.
LANGUAGE
AS A MEANS OF
COMMUNICATION

This Lecture

• introduces
the concepts of:

_•
(a)
communication;

• (b) components communication consists of
  (message, message sender, message recipient);

• (c) ways of communicating;

• shows
the difference between bilingual communication and translation;

• shows
which tools are helpful in coping with ambiguity of messages
and

gives their
definitions.

Thus, a language may be regarded as a specific
code intended for in­formation exchange between its users
(language speakers). Indeed, any
language resembles a code being a system of interrelated material
signs (sounds or letters), various combinations of which stand for
various mes­sages. Language
grammars and dictionaries may be considered as a kind of Code Books,
indicating both the meaningful combinations of signs for a
particular language and their meanings.

For example, if one looks up the words (sign
combinations) elect and
college in
a dictionary he will find that they are meaningful for Eng­lish
(as opposed, say, to combinations ele
or oil),
moreover, in an English grammar he
will find that, at least, one combination of these words: elect
college is also meaningful and forms a
message.

Ш*
The process of language communication
involves sending a mes­sage by a message
sender to a message
recipient — the
sender en­codes his mental message into the code of a particular
language and the recipient decodes it using the same code
(language).

20

21

The
communication variety with one common language is called the
monolingual
communication.

If,
however, the communication process involves two languages (codes)
this variety is called the bilingual
communication.

Bilingual
communication is a rather typical occurrence in countries with two
languages in use (e. g. in Ukraine or Canada). In Ukraine one may
rather often observe a conversation where one speaker speaks
Ukrainian and another one speaks Russian. The peculiarity of this
com­munication type lies in the fact that decoding and encoding
of mental messages
is performed simultaneously in two different codes. For exam­ple,
in a Ukrainian-Russian pair one speaker encodes his message in
Ukrainian
and decodes the message he received in Russian.

the
Bible, a code,a book, etc. as
a noun) but one will easily and without any doubt understand this
message:

1. as
   Book
   tickets! in
   a situation
   involving
   reservation of tickets or

2. as
   Give
   that book! in
   a situation
   involving
   sudden and urgent necessity
   to be given the book in question

So, one of the means
clarifying the meaning of ambiguous messages is the fragment of the
real world that surrounds the speaker which is usually called
extralinguistic situation.

Another
possibility to clarify the meaning of the word book
is
pro­vided
by the context
which
may be as short as one more word a
(a book) or
several words (e.g., the
book I
gave you).

In
simple words a
context may be defined as a length of speech (text) necessary
to clarify the meaning of a given word.

•►
Translation
is a specific
type of bilingual communication since
(as
opposed to bilingual communication proper) it obligatory in­volves
a third actor (translator) and for the message sender and re­cipient
the communication is, in fact, monolingual.

^ The
ambiguity of a language makes it necessary to use situation and
context to properly generate and understand a message (i. e. en­code
and decode it) Since translation according to communicational
approach
is decoding and encoding in two languages the significance of
situation and context for translation cannot be overestimated.

Translation
as a specific communication process is treated by the
communicational theory of translation discussed in more detail
else­where in this Manual⁷.

Thus, a
language is a code used by language speakers for communi­cation.
However, a language is a specific code unlike any other and its
peculiarity
as a code lies in its ambiguity —
as
opposed to a code proper a language
produces originally ambiguous messages which are specified against
context,
situation and
background
information.

Let
us take an example. Let the original message in English be an
in­struction
or order Book!.
It
is evidendy ambiguous having at least two grammatical meanings (a
noun and a verb) and many lexical ones (e. g.,

⁷
See
also: Kade O. Kommunikationswissenschaftliche Probleme
der Translation
//
Grundfragen
der Uebersetzungwissenschaft. —
Leipzig,
1968.

22

There is
another factor also to be taken into account in communica­tion
and, naturally, in translation. This factor is background
information, i.
e. general awareness of the subject of communication.

To
take an example the word combination electoral
college will
mean nothing
unless one is aware of the presidential election system in the USA.

Apart from
being a code strongly dependent on the context, situa­tion and
background information a language is also a code of codes. There
are codes within codes in specific areas of communication
(scien­tific,
technical, military, etc.) and so called sub-languages (of
profes­sional,
age groups, etc.). This applies mosdy to specific vocabulary used by
these groups though there are differences in grammar rules as well.

23

As
an example of the elements of such in-house languages⁸
one may take
words and word combinations from financial sphere (chart
of ac­counts,
value added, listing), diplomatic
practice {credentials,
charge d’affaires,
framework agreement) or
legal language (bail,
disbar, plaintiff).

All said above is undoubtedly
important for translation and will be discussed in more detail
elsewhere during this lecture course, however, it is high time to
answer the seemingly simple question «What is transla­tion?».
And this is the subject of the next lecture.

(??)
QUESTIONS

1. What is language
   communication? What actors does it involve?

2. What is monolingual
   communication? What is bilingual communi­cation? Give examples.

3. Describe translation as a
   special kind of bilingual communication. Why is it called special?

4. What is peculiar about a
   language as a code? Which factors specify the meaning of a message?

5. What is context, situation
   and background information? Give defi­nition of context. Give
   examples of extralinguistic situations and items of background
   information that would clarify a message.

(§]
EXERCISES

Ex.
1.
Suggest
the elements of the context that clarify the meanings of the
italicized
words in the following phrases (messages). Translate into Ukrain­ian
and English, accordingly.

1. You are
   doing well
   Water
   is deep down the well.
   Top-to-bottom structure.
   The submarine lies on the sea bottom.
   College vote.
   University college.
   Drugs plague
   modern society. The drug
   is
   to be taken with meals.

2. Він пишався своєю
   рідною землею, що дала світу так багато
   видатних людей. У цій частині країни
   всі землі придатні для вирощування
   пшениці. На чорній землі біла пшениця
   родить. На чиїй землі живеш, того й воду
   п’єш. Колос плідний до землі гнеть­ся,
   а пустий — вгору дереться. Земля багата
   — народ багатий.

Ех.
2. Describe
situations and/or items of background information that clar­ify
the meanings of the italicized words in the following phrases
(messages). Translate
into Ukrainian.

Bottoms
up!
Her Majesty man-o’-war
‘Invincible’.
Bugs
in
the room. Global
net.

¹
The
term used by some scholars for sub-languages.

24

25

Ex.
3.
Describe
situations and/or items of background information that clar­ify
the meanings of the following Ukrainian words. Suggest English
equiva­lents.

презентація, КВН,
бомж, зачистка, прем’єріада, ЖЕК.

Ex.
4.
Translate
the text into Ukrainian. Suggest items of background in­formation
necessary for its proper translation.

HAS
THIS BEEN A TERM OF ENDEARMENT? The
Observer, Sunday April 29,
2001. Andrew
Rawnsley, columnist of the year.

Tony Blair’s government has
made history. What it has yet to demonstrate is the capacity to
change the country’s destiny.

A
week is a long time in politics; 48
months
is an eternity. Four years ago
this Wednesday, Tony Blair stood before the black door on his
sun-dappled first day in office. ‘Enough of talking,’ said the man of
action. ‘It is time now to do’. ‘Strip off the hype which has gushed
from Number 10
ever
since; blow away the froth of the daily headlines. How has his
gov­ernment
actually done? Let us try, as clinically as is possible, to assess
the performance
of New Labour.

The starter
test of any government, I would suggest, is that it is rea­sonably
accomplished at governing. This sounds an undemanding hur­dle,
but it is a first fence many previous governments have failed to
sur­mount. The Blair government has made serious, self-inflicted
mistakes -the
Millennium Dome blasts them still. The unexpected has come close to
blowing them over. Foot and mouth has not been —
I
am being chari­table —
a
textbook example of how to handle an emergency. The Gov­ernment
teetered on, the lip of the abyss during last autumn’s fuel
pro­tests. It is natural that we should curse their blunders more
than we offer credit for the mistakes they have avoided. But the
Blair government has eschewed perpetrating any spectacular errors.

The novices
to red boxes who took office four years ago have broadly run a
competent government. Its life has been punctuated by crises,
which have been invariably generated not by dissident backbench­ers
or off-message Ministers, but erupted from the inner core of the re-

26

gime. There have been gripping
soap operas, none more so than the double resignations of Peter
Mandelson. But the damage done has been to the actors, not to the
country at large. There has not been the eco­nomic calamity or
civil crisis which destroys governments and wrecks countries.

The Blair
government has not inflicted upon us a Suez, a Three Day week or a
Winter of Discontent. There has not been the vicious social conflict
of the inner-city riots and the miners’ strike in the Eighties. There
has not been anything approaching the ruinousness of Thatcher’s poll
tax or Major’s Black Wednesday. Just by being reasonably adept at
ruling,
the Blair administration is lifted above the average run of postwar
governments.

The next
test of any government is whether it has been true to its promises.
Generally, the so-distant People’s Prime Minister has fulfilled the
rather low expectations the people had of him. Blair was elected on a
paradoxical
prospectus. The subtext of his campaign was: everything is appalling;
we will change it very slowly. The Conservatives may have left office
in May 1997,
but
their term of power did not properly end until just
two years ago, when Gordon Brown finally released the Government from
the Tory spending corset. Transformed schools and hospitals await
realisation. If not delivered in the second term, the punishment of
the electorate may be terrible.

Blair’s
most reckless pledge was to restore faith in public life. Back on
May Day 1997,
even
the most cynical observer did not anticipate they would
have quite so much sleaze in them. In other respects, this
gov­ernment has delivered more than it promised. The last
manifesto pledged nothing about child benefit —
it
has actually risen by 25
per
cent. They did not claim to be able to create full employment, yet
they have achieved that historic goal of Labour.

Any set of
rulers with an eye on claiming a large place in posterity must aspire
to be more than competent deliverers. The superior rank of government
is occupied by those which make changes lasting beyond their
lifetime.
It is not conceivable that the Conservatives could unravel

27

devolution to Scotland and
Wales, an aspiration of progressive govern­ments dating back to
Gladstone.

One of the
ironies of Blair is that, for all his relentless emphasis on the
modern, his bigger achievements have been based on ambitions set by
long-dead predecessors. A settlement in Ireland has eluded every
pre­mier since the nineteenth century. The minimum wage was a
Labour goal when Keir Hardie founded the party. The Tories have been
com­pelled to accept it, just as they have been forced to
support independence for the Bank of England. This government could
come to a full stop to­day —
and
would leave enduring legacies.

There
are other elements of the Blair record which the Right accepts
because
they are as amazed as many on the Left are disgusted that they have
been enacted by a Labour government.

Which takes us to my next
test of a government: has it permanently altered the framework of
political choice? The verdict here is mixed. With a little help from
the grisly pantomime that is William Hague’s Conservative Party, New
Labour commands the centre ground and swathes of territory on both
flanks. Harold Wilson’s unrequited dream of making Labour’the
natural party of government’ is closer to realisa­tion by Tony
Blair than under any previous Labour Prime Minister.

But
he has achieved it more by following the consensus than by
chal­lenging
the status quo. His government has pandered to illiberality more
often than it has confronted prejudice. It has become a little less
bashful about making the case for the active state and a fairer
society, but re­mains coy of full candour.

Since
the Third Way was giggled to death, it has become ever clearer that
this is a government which moves by inches rather than leaps. There
is nothing intrinsically wrong with that: small steps, provided
there are enough of them, can take you on a long journey.

Baby
bonds are an eyecatching device to give the poor an asset stake in
society. But this is the safest sort of radicalism. The first
beneficiaries of
the scheme will not come into possession of their modest endowments
until
Mr Blair is eligible for his pension. He, Qordon Brown, David

Blunkett and Alistair
Darling, along with the Institute for Public Policy Research and the
Fabian Society, all claim paternity over baby bonds. When one good
notion has to be spread around four Cabinet Ministers and two think
tanks, it tells us that New Labour is not bursting with bold and
innovatory ideas.

This brings me to the last
and most demanding test. The out­standing governments are those
which alter the country’s destiny. The project to secure the
exclusion of the Conservatives from power for a generation has
withered as Blair’s enthusiasm for changing the Westmin­ster
voting system has shrivelled. In terms of the private goals he set
for his premiership, the most evident failure has been Europe.
Towards Europe as a whole, and towards the single currency
especially, public opinion is more aggressively hostile than ever.

The greatest wrangling
between the Prime Minister and the Chan­cellor about the next
manifesto is not over what it says about tax, but about the warmth
of the phraseology towards the single currency. The fiercest
struggle about that is within Mr Blair himself. Will he hedge his
self-perceived destiny with deadening qualifications or will he
articulate the belief that his epochal role is to make Britain a
fully engaged partner in Europe?

The Blair government has
demonstrated that it can make history. Only in its second term will
we discover whether it has the capacity to change the future.

28

29

Lecture 4.
TRANSLATION
DEFINITION

1. What is Microsoft Word?

Microsoft Word or MS Word is a popular word-processing program used mainly for creating documents, such as brochures, letters, learning activities, quizzes, tests, and students’ homework assignments. It was first released in 1983 and is one of Microsoft Office suite’s applications. Word is one of the most widely used and familiar pieces of office software in the world. It has grown in power and complexity over the years, and its integration with Office 365 and Microsoft OneDrive makes it even more versatile for businesses, both large and small.

2. The Microsoft Word Ecosystem

Microsoft Word exists as part of a suite of software tools that includes other titles such as the Excel spreadsheet and PowerPoint presentation software. The full collection of Microsoft software that includes Word and these other programs is known as Office 365.

Word is also integrated with online features that enable users to create and store documents in the cloud. This lends even more versatility to Word and its related programs.

3. What is Microsoft Word used for in your Business?

Here are some useful features available in Microsoft Word to make your Business more versatile and effective:

• Letters and Mailings

  • Businesses use Word to manage their outgoing correspondence needs. Mail merge functions can automatically populate a letter template with contact and address information, using databases you create in Word or other Office programs such as Excel or Outlook, which you can import. Word can also print address labels and envelopes.

• Creating Documents and Forms

  • You can create any business document, including presentations, proposals, company reports, plans, and budgets. Word’s design features are simple and easy to use so that you can build a library of key forms such as memos, agendas, invoices, and statements.

• Producing Promotional Materials

  • Word helps you create promotional and marketing materials like brochures, flyers, and newsletters you can send out to prospects and clients. You can also format and produce your own letterheads and business cards. This may be particularly useful for small businesses that may struggle to pay third-party design and print costs.

• Brand Building

  • You can standardize a letter or memo format that you design and save as a template that the entire company can use. This ensures consistency of color, fonts, and effects. You can also download free Microsoft templates. Microsoft groups some templates into style sets, so you could apply the same theme to a range of marketing materials, documents, and forms, giving you a consistency of branding.

Related Article: Why Should You Learn Microsoft Office? Here Are 6 Benefits

Also Read: How an Employee Communication App will Transform your Employee Engagement

4. Advanced Word Document Features

Word also offers the following advanced features, saving you the hassle of performing tedious tasks – thus enabling you to devote your attention to more critical areas.

• Adding Graphics

  • A key advantage of MS Word is its ability to incorporate photos, illustrations, and other visual materials to break up the text’s monotony. These can be repositioned in a document with the program’s drag-and-drop capabilities. You can also incorporate material from other programs, such as a spreadsheet table into your Word document.

• Spell and Grammar checks

  • Word checks spelling and grammar to keep your document error-free and professional, offering alternative wording suggestions in many cases.

• Creating Table of Contents

  • The Table of Contents is ideal for situations where the user wants to provide a visual guide for readers by giving associated page numbers and direct links to different headings.

• Auto-Formatting

  • Microsoft Word allows users to automatically format their documents as they are typing, by applying associated styles to text.

Related Article: Why Improving Your Microsoft Office Skills Are Important in the Workplace

5. Collaboration Tools

Business documents are often written in different sections by different people, and both staff and managers make suggestions for revisions to a document. Word’s collaboration and review features make this process manageable due to the integration of Word with OneDrive and internet-enabled features. Users can access the most recent version of a document online, see what changes were made to it by other reviewers, and add their edits directly to the text or as comments that appear separately from the main text.

Word also stores a good deal of the history of the made changes, so if you or your team decide to revert to an earlier version of a document, it is still available to you.

Conclusion

Microsoft Word allows you to create simple word processing documents like letters and reports effortlessly, allowing you to add color and clip art. Writing in various fonts and sizes and using tables, borders & bullet formatting reduces tediousness and increases productivity. Decrease your workload and become more productive today!

Coggno has a wide range of Microsoft Office Word online corporate training courses. You can explore them here.. Learn more about Coggno Prime Subscription and Private LMS.

You might like: What Is A Learning Management System?—Everything You Need To Know 

• #2

I forgot to mention that you need to enable Microsoft Word in references for this script to start working.

The error that I get is «Argument not optional». I have read a lot about this in the forums but I just don’t understand how to overcome it here?

• #3

Regarding the Microsoft Word references, I strongly discourage enabling this option (called early binding) and rather going with a late binding strategy as in this way your code will be more robust and able to run on a wider range of environments (different versions of MS Office, etc). You can read up on this more here, but basically the two steps you need to do are as follows:

1) Define your Word objects differently in a more generic sense, which is called late binding. Namely:

2) Additionally (And I realize it is somewhat a pain), you will need to replace all the Word enumerations you have in your code with their literal number representations (I like to keep the ‘wd’ enumeration name close by in a comment for posterity too). To get these numeric values, you can either print/debug the code as you have it with the Word reference temporarily enabled, or run it right in Word, OR (my preference) simply look up the enumeration definitions in MS documentation (I find Google is easiest to find them).

Note also that if you do the late-binding approach, you will loose the nice editor features like ‘intellisense’ where it will auto-complete Word object properties while you type. Thus you are essentially making your life a bit more difficult up front in order to make the code more robust later .

• #4

Regarding the Microsoft Word references, I strongly discourage enabling this option (called early binding) and rather going with a late binding strategy as in this way your code will be more robust and able to run on a wider range of environments (different versions of MS Office, etc).

What a load of nonsense. You clearly don’t understand the benefits of early binding.

• #5

Below is working demonstration code within Word. The first 2 lines type «Hello and Goodbye» for you and the remaining ‘real’ code selects everything between Hello & Goodbye, ie » and «. (in my real case there are up to several pages between both keywords)

Code:

Sub SelectRangeBetween()

' Types the text
Selection.HomeKey Unit:=wdStory
Selection.TypeText Text:="Hello and Goodbye"

' The Real script
Dim myrange As Range
Selection.HomeKey wdStory
Selection.Find.ClearFormatting
    With Selection.Find
        .Execute findText:="Hello", Forward:=True, Wrap:=wdFindStop
        Set myrange = Selection.Range
        myrange.End = ActiveDocument.Range.End
        myrange.Start = myrange.Start + 5
        myrange.End = myrange.Start + InStr(myrange, "Goodbye") - 1
        myrange.Select
    End With
End Sub

Now for the Excel conversion part! I have adapted the script to the best of my ability below:

Code:

Sub SelectRangeBetween()

Dim wrdApp As Word.Application
Set wrdApp = CreateObject("Word.Application")

With wrdApp
.Documents.Add
    .Visible = True

' Types the text
.Selection.HomeKey Unit:=wdStory
.Selection.TypeText Text:="Hello and Goodbye"

' The Real script
Dim myrange As Range
.Selection.HomeKey wdStory
.Selection.Find.ClearFormatting

   With .Selection.Find
      .Execute findText:="Hello", Forward:=True, Wrap:=wdFindStop
      Set myrange = Selection.Range
' Problem is here:
      myrange.End = wrdApp.ActiveDocument.Range.End
      myrange.Start = myrange.Start + 5
      myrange.End = myrange.Start + InStr(myrange, "Goodbye") - 1
      myrange.Select
   End With

End With
End Sub

Any help very gratefully received!

There are multiple problems with your code. For example, both:
Dim myrange As Range
and
Set myrange = Selection.Range
refer to an Excel range, but then you’re trying to point it’s end to the end of the Word document. Working with Slections is also very inefficient. Try:

Code:

Sub SelectRangeBetween()
Dim wrdApp As Word.Application, wrdDoc As Word.Document, wrdRng As Word.Range
Set wrdApp = CreateObject("Word.Application")
With wrdApp
  .Visible = True
  Set wrdDoc = .Documents.Add
  With wrdDoc
    .Range.Text = "Hello and Goodbye for now"
    With .Range
      With .Find
        .ClearFormatting
        .Text = "Hello"
        .Forward = True
        .Wrap = wdFindStop
        .Execute
      End With
      If .Find.Found = True Then
        Set wrdRng = .Duplicate
        With wrdRng
          .End = wrdDoc.Range.End
          .Start = .Start + InStr(.Text, "Goodbye") - 1
        End With
      End If
    End With
  End With
End With
End Sub

• #6

What a load of nonsense. You clearly don’t understand the benefits of early binding.

Thanks for pointing out the error of my ways Paul. I’d be interested in knowing more details as to where I went wrong here. As I said in my post, I acknowledge that both early and late binding have their respective benefits.

• #7

Your contention was that late binding makes the code «more robust and able to run on a wider range of environments (different versions of MS Office, etc).» Both statements are patently false.

You also calimed:

need to replace all the Word enumerations you have in your code with their literal number representations

which is also false. The simple expedient of declaring any Word constants that be used is sufficient.

• #8

Your contention was that late binding makes the code «more robust and able to run on a wider range of environments (different versions of MS Office, etc).» Both statements are patently false.

You also calimed:

which is also false. The simple expedient of declaring any Word constants that be used is sufficient.

Hmm, I guess I am just a little confused then because I myself have had experienced (i.e. not second-hand) the first point of «early-binding not working in some different MS Office environments». It was a while ago but my recollection is that I was writing VBA in an Excel .xlsm file and also manipulating Powerpoint files in that same code. Therefore I added the necessary PPT references to make early binding work, then ran into some breakage when trying to run the same tool on another computer. Rather than once again setup different PPT references on the 2nd computer, I opted to refactor the tool to utilize the more generic late-binding (as I support many users whom expect tools to work out-of-box and don’t know how to setup VBA references themselves). Perhaps there is a way to programmatically have VBA code establish the necessary references in various environments? I believe the two environments I was working in were both some Office 20## variant.

And I see now on the 2nd point of «enumerations»; I concur that defining the necessary constants up front makes more sense to me too.

• #9

Perhaps the problem you encountered was because you compiled your early binding code on a later version of Office than the one you subsequently encountered problems with. This has nothing to do with the robustness of the early-binding code or the range of environments it can be run on but everything to do with violating an early-binding maxim: always set the references and compile your code on the earliest version you intend to support.

When you compile early-binding code, the application references are forwards-compatible but not backwards compatible.

• #10

See: Use early binding and late binding in Automation — Office | Microsoft Docs
According to Microsoft (and who am I to argue):

Early binding is the preferred method. It is the best performer because your application binds directly to the address of the function being called and there is no extra overhead in doing a run-time lookup. In terms of overall execution speed, it is at least twice as fast as late binding.

Early binding also provides type safety. When you have a reference set to the component’s type library, Visual Basic provides IntelliSense support to help you code each function correctly. Visual Basic also warns you if the data type of a parameter or return value is incorrect, saving a lot of time when writing and debugging code.
…
The advantages given to early binding make it the best choice whenever possible..