What is word chain in grammar?
A word chain consists of words of a certain category that begin with the letter, that the previous word has ended with. For example: music ends with c so next word will be -courtyard-d and den……
What is word chain in English?
Word chain, also known as grab on behind, last and first, alpha and omega, and the name game, is a word game in which players come up with words that begin with the letter or letters that the previous word ended with. The version of the game in which cities are used is called geography.
What is the English meaning of chains?
1 : a series of connected links or rings usually of metal She wore a gold chain around her neck. 2 : a series of things joined together as if by links a chain of mountains a chain of events. 3 : a group of businesses that have the same name and sell the same products or services a chain of grocery stores.
What is word chain example?
The idea for ‘Word Chain’ was born. The rules of the game are simple, the voice assistant, in this case Google, says a word and the user must speak another word that begins with the letter that the previous word ended with. For example, the Google Assistant says “Television” and then the user would say “Necklace”.
What are the different types of chain?
The Different Types of Necklace Chains
- Ball. This is the type of necklace chains you see with cheap necklaces and dog tags.
- Cable Type Of Necklace Chain. The cable chain is one of the most common types of necklace chains links.
- Rolo.
- Curb.
- The Figaro necklace chain.
- Byzantine.
- 7. Box.
- Mariner.
What is the strongest chain style?
Rope chains
What is chain and its types?
A chain is a series of connected links which are typically made of metal. A chain may consist of two or more links. From a theoretical viewpoint, a chain is a continuous flexible rack engaging the teeth on a pair of gears. A sprocket, being a toothed wheel whose teeth are shaped to mesh with a chain, is a form of gear.
What are the disadvantages of chain drive?
Disadvantages of chain drives
- They can not be used where slip is the system requirement.
- They require precise alignment compared to belt drives.
- They require frequent lubrication.
- They have less load capacity compared with gear drives.
- Their operation is noisy and can cause vibrations.
What are chain sizes?
Chain standards
| Size | Pitch | Maximum Roller Diameter |
|---|---|---|
| 41 | 0.500 in (12.70 mm) | 0.306 in (7.77 mm) |
| 40 | 0.500 in (12.70 mm) | 0.312 in (7.92 mm) |
| 50 | 0.625 in (15.88 mm) | 0.400 in (10.16 mm) |
| 60 | 0.750 in (19.05 mm) | 0.469 in (11.91 mm) |
What is the purpose of using steel chains?
1. What is the purpose of using steel chains? Explanation: In belt and rope drives, it is observed that slipping may take place. In order to avoid the issue of slipping, steel chains are being used.
What does a chain consist of?
A chain is a serial assembly of connected pieces, called links, typically made of metal, with an overall character similar to that of a rope in that it is flexible and curved in compression but linear, rigid, and load-bearing in tension. A chain may consist of two or more links.
What is a chain maker called?
A modern chain shop could just as easily be called a steel mill or simply a “forge welder”.
What are the different types of chain links?
Links chains types
- Cable chain cable.
- Round link chain.
- Flat link chain.
- Twisted curb chain.
- Figure of eight chain/ Infinity.
- Rolo/Cascade/belcher chain.
- Venetian link/Box chain/briolette chain/square link chain.
- Gourmette chain/Cuban link/ Curb.
Which gold chains are the strongest?
Out of all the types of chains we mentioned above, the strongest ones are those made of LINKS, such as cable, figaro and anchor. These are the strongest for the following reasons: The links are soldered individually. They can be made thicker (and more durable) and still retain that flexibility of a rope chain.
How do I know what kind of chain I have?
How to Tell What Size Chain You Have
- The distance from the center of one pin to the center of the next pin, also known as the “pitch” of the roller chain.
- The diameter and width of the roller.
- Plate thickness, determined by measuring the plates from one flat side to another.
- Plate height is the dimension from the bottom to the top of the plate.
What is the most popular gold chain style?
The Rope Chain This gold chain is uniquely beautiful and durable among all chain types. It is made up of chunky metal segments that are twisted and connected to resemble a real rope. It is the most popular chain by being significantly trendy and worn all over the world.
What kind of gold chains are in style?
- All Gold Chains Cuban Link Chain Franco Chain Rope Chain Figaro Chain Curb Chain Herringbone Chain Dog Tag Chain Mariner Chain Rosary Gold Chain.
- Custom Pendants.
The Word Chain game for ESL students can be used to help build their vocabulary using a variety of themes. It can be used with larger groups or even in pairs.
Student Level: Beginner, Intermediate
Age Group: Kids, Adults
Word Chain ESL Game Preparation:
Not much pre-class preparation is required for the Word Chain game. If you want, you could think of a few different vocabulary themes based on the words in the textbook that you are using for the class, but it isn’t really necessary.
Word Chain ESL Game Guidelines:
To explain to the class how to do the Word Chain activity, first, think of a theme like “movie stars” or something simple like “colors” if it is a very basic level of students.
Let’s use the “colors” example to start for the explanation. Grab a board marker and write the word “yellow” on the board so that everyone can see.
Now, underline the last letter of the word yellow and draw an arrow to the next word that they need to think of that starts with “W”. Tell them it has to be a color word only. They should come up with “white” fairly easily.
With the last letter of “white” being “E”, draw another arrow to start the next color word beginning with “E”.
Give students some time to answer. If nobody can think of a color that begins with “E” then suggest that they could have said the color “emerald green” and carry on with “N”. This should be enough to give them the idea of what to do for the game.
Next, have the students form a circle standing up or sitting at their desks in some kind of circular arrangement.
When everyone is ready, tell them that they are going to do the same activity, but this time they have to think of the words quickly and individually one after the other taking turns. Any student who cannot think of the next word fast enough is out of the game.
Try different themes to keep it interesting and challenging for the students. The rules can be varied somewhat, but this is the general aim of the Word Chain game.
Once you have completed a number of rounds, you could award the best student with a prize for positive reinforcement, especially if they are children.
Follow-Up ESL Activities:
As an extension to the word chain game, you could give the students five words from the activity and have them write sentences using the words.
Alternatively, you could try to find movie scenes that use words from the game and try the Movie Dialog Listening Activity as an extension to the lesson.
For a fun discussion extension to the lesson, most students really enjoy the Funny or Die ESL Speaking Activity.
More ESL Vocabulary Games for Kids and Adults:
- I Spy
- No Harm No Vowel
- To Be
- Halloween
- Comparatives
- Prepositions
- Body Parts
- Toilet Paper
- Have You Ever
- Tic Tac Toe
- Word Whack
- Hangman
- Hot Seat
- Simon Says
- Pass the Marker
- Memory Race
- Board Race
- Mystery Word
- 20 Questions
View the vocabulary games archive.
View more ESL activities.
Related ESL Resources Online:
- ESL Games for Kids on ESLkidsStuff.com
Цепочка существительных – это вид словосочетания, представляющий собой ряд трех или более существительных, определяющих одно понятие.
В таких словосочетаниях главное существительное, выполняющее непосредственно функцию существительного, стоит всегда в конце цепочки, а все предшествующие слова, связанные с ним, являются определениями. В начале словосочетания, как правило, стоит артикль или другой определитель. Впервые понятие noun chain было введено юристом Ричардом Уайдиком (Richard Wydick).
Такие словосочетания являются характерной спецификой английского языка. Они строятся по схеме:
Определение 1 Определение 2 … Определение N Главное слово
Существительные, выступающие в роли определения, переводятся:
— существительным в родительном падеже
saturation pressure – давление насыщения
pump modification – доработка насоса
an institute building — здание института
— прилагательным
a pump house – насосная станция
light waves — световые волны
— предложным оборотом
an exchange contract – договор об обмене
— причастным оборотом
war damage — ущерб, нанесенный войной
Существительные-определения чаще всего используются в единственном числе, даже если по-русски имеется в виду множественное число:
a test result indicator – индикатор результатов контроля
В следующих случаях множественное число у существительных-определений сохраняется:
— если необходимо подчеркнуть множественность предмета, в этом случае определяющее существительное во множественном числе никогда не переводится прилагательным. При этом также можно использовать конструкцию с предлогом of:
a documents list – перечень документов
— если существительное-определение в данном значении употребляется только во множественном числе и без окончания мн.ч. имеет другое значение:
the futures market — рынок товаров, покупаемых на срок
the future market — будущий рынок
Внутри самой цепочки могут встречаться существительные, определяющие одно из существительных цепочки, но не главное существительное:
a super high voltage transmission line — линия передачи сверхвысоких напряжений
home market prices — цены внутреннего рынка
Слово home определяет market (внутренний рынок), но в конечном счете оба слова определяют последнее слово prices.
Цепочка может состоять из трех слов, среднее из которых – прилагательное, причастие или герундий. Перевод такого ряда следует начинать с последнего слова и придерживаться строго обратного порядка. При этом грамматическая форма среднего слова в переводе соблюдается не всегда.
the round-feeding system (feeding – причастие I) – система подачи снаряда
an air-cooled system (cooled – причастие II) – система, охлаждаемая воздухом
a job scheduling problem (scheduling – Gerund) – проблема планирования (составления графика) работ
Если среднее слово в такой цепочке выражено прилагательным, например:
dependent – зависимый (от)
free – свободный (от)
то при переводе можно вводить предлог
a dose-dependent effect — зависимый от дозы эффект
или переводить без предлога:
a fault-free device – исправное устройство
Встречаются очень сложные цепочки, включающие несколько глагольных форм. При переводе на английский следует избегать таких цепочек, поскольку они затруднительны при чтении и понимании текста:
a domestic market oriented goods serial production – серийное производство товаров, ориентированных на внутренний рынок
В цепочке определений могут дополнительно участвовать прилагательные, которые могут относиться, как к существительным-определениям, так и непосредственно к главному слову.
Если в цепочке первым стоит прилагательное, то оно обычно относится к последнему слову, например:
The interesting space issue is now discussed in the community. – Эту интересную проблему, касающаяся космоса, сейчас обсуждают в сообществе.
Прилагательное, стоящее первым в цепочке, может также определять следующее за ним существительное, а не последнее в цепочке:
The gear must perform straight line motion. — Этот механизм должен выполнять движение по прямой линии.
В английском предложении слов-определений в словосочетании может быть много. Особенно этим отличаются научные и официальные английские тексты. Это еще большее затрудняет разбор структуры предложения. При этом при переводе с русского на английский следует упрощать предложение, делать словосочетания удобочитаемыми. Рекомендуется использовать не более трех существительных определений к одному существительному.
Статью см. посылке: http://www.englishelp.ru/translator/articles-for-translator/398-translating-nouns-chain.html
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The sequence between semantic related ordered words is classified as a lexical chain.[1] A lexical chain is a sequence of related words in writing, spanning short (adjacent words or sentences) or long distances (entire text). A chain is independent of the grammatical structure of the text and in effect it is a list of words that captures a portion of the cohesive structure of the text. A lexical chain can provide a context for the resolution of an ambiguous term and enable identification of the concept that the term represents.
- Rome → capital → city → inhabitant
- Wikipedia → resource → web
About[edit]
Morris and Hirst[1] introduce the term lexical chain as an expansion of lexical cohesion.[2] A text in which many of its sentences are semantically connected often produces a certain degree of continuity in its ideas, providing good cohesion among its sentences. The definition used for lexical cohesion states that coherence is a result of cohesion, not the other way around.[2][3] Cohesion is related to a set of words that belong together because of abstract or concrete relation. Coherence, on the other hand, is concerned with the actual meaning in the whole text.[1]
Morris and Hirst[1] define that lexical chains make use of semantic context for interpreting words, concepts, and sentences. In contrast, lexical cohesion is more focused on the relationships of word pairs. Lexical chains extend this notion to a serial number of adjacent words. There are two main reasons why lexical chains are essential:[1]
- Feasible context to assist in the ambiguity and narrowing problems to a specific meaning of a word; and
- Clues to determine coherence and discourse, thus a deeper semantic-structural meaning of the text.
The method presented by Morris and Hirst[1] is the first to bring the concept of lexical cohesion to computer systems via lexical chains. Using their intuition, they identify lexical chains in text documents and built their structure considering Halliday and Hassan’s[2] observations. For this task, they considered five text documents, totaling 183 sentences from different and non-specific sources. Repetitive words (e.g., high-frequency words, pronouns, propositions, verbal auxiliaries) were not considered as prospective chain elements since they do not bring much semantic value to the structure themselves.
Lexical chains are built according to a series of relationships between words in a text document. In the seminal work of Morris and Hirst[1] they consider an external thesaurus (Roget’s Thesaurus) as their lexical database to extract these relations. A lexical chain is formed by a sequence of words 
appearing in this order, such that any two consecutive words 
present the following properties (i.e., attributes such as category, indexes, and pointers in the lexical database):[1][4]
- two words share one common category in their index;
- the category of one of these words points to the other word;
- one of the words belongs to the other word’s entry or category;
- two words are semantically related; and
- their categories agree to a common category.
Approaches and Methods[edit]
The use of lexical chains in natural language processing tasks (e.g., text similarity, word sense disambiguation, document clustering) has been widely studied in the literature. Barzilay et al [5] use lexical chains to produce summaries from texts. They propose a technique based on four steps: segmentation of original text, construction of lexical chains, identification of reliable chains, and extraction of significant sentences. Silber and McCoy[6] also investigates text summarization, but their approach for constructing the lexical chains runs in linear time.
Some authors use WordNet[7][8] to improve the search and evaluation of lexical chains. Budanitsky and Kirst[9][10] compare several measurements of semantic distance and relatedness using lexical chains in conjunction with WordNet. Their study concludes that the similarity measure of Jiang and Conrath[11] presents the best overall result. Moldovan and Adrian[12] study the use of lexical chains for finding topically related words for question answering systems. This is done considering the glosses for each synset in WordNet. According to their findings, topical relations via lexical chains improve the performance of question answering systems when combined with WordNet. McCarthy et al.[13] present a methodology to categorize and find the most predominant synsets in unlabeled texts using WordNet. Different from traditional approaches (e.g., BOW), they consider relationships between terms not occurring explicitly. Ercan and Cicekli[14] explore the effects of lexical chains in the keyword extraction task through a supervised machine learning perspective. In Wei et al.[15] combine lexical chains and WordNet to extract a set of semantically related words from texts and use them for clustering. Their approach uses an ontological hierarchical structure to provide a more accurate assessment of similarity between terms during the word sense disambiguation task.
Lexical Chain and Word Embedding[edit]
Even though the applicability of lexical chains is diverse, there is little work exploring them with recent advances in NLP, more specifically with word embeddings. In,[16] lexical chains are built using specific patterns found on WordNet[7] and used for learning word embeddings. Their resulting vectors, are validated in the document similarity task. Gonzales et al. [17] use word-sense embeddings to produce lexical chains that are integrated with a neural machine translation model. Mascarelli[18] proposes a model that uses lexical chains to leverage statistical machine translation by using a document encoder. Instead of using an external lexical database, they use word embeddings to detect the lexical chains in the source text.
Ruas et al.[4] propose two techniques that combine lexical databases, lexical chains, and word embeddings, namely Flexible Lexical Chain II (FLLC II) and Fixed Lexical Chain II (FXLC II). The main goal of both FLLC II and FXLC II is to represent a collection of words by their semantic values more concisely. In FLLC II, the lexical chains are assembled dynamically according to the semantic content for each term evaluated and the relationship with its adjacent neighbors. As long as there is a semantic relation that connects two or more words, they should be combined into a unique concept. The semantic relationship is obtained through WordNet, which works a ground truth to indicate which lexical structure connects two words (e.g., hypernyms, hyponyms, meronyms). If a word without any semantic affinity with the current chain presents itself, a new lexical chain is initialized. On the other hand, FXLC II breaks text segments into pre-defined chunks, with a specific number of words each. Different from FLLC II, the FXLC II technique groups a certain amount of words into the same structure, regardless of the semantic relatedness expressed in the lexical database. In both methods, each formed chain is represented by the word whose pre-trained word embedding vector is most similar to the average vector of the constituent words in that same chain.
See also[edit]
- Word sense disambiguation
- Word embedding
- Cohesion
- Coherence
References[edit]
- ^ a b c d e f g h MorrisJane; HirstGraeme (1991-03-01). «Lexical cohesion computed by thesaural relations as an indicator of the structure of text». Computational Linguistics.
- ^ a b c Halliday, Michael Alexander Kirkwood (1976). Cohesion in English. Hasan, Ruqaiya. London: Longman. ISBN 0-582-55031-9. OCLC 2323723.
- ^ Carrell, Patricia L. (1982). «Cohesion Is Not Coherence». TESOL Quarterly. 16 (4): 479–488. doi:10.2307/3586466. ISSN 0039-8322. JSTOR 3586466.
- ^ a b Ruas, Terry; Ferreira, Charles Henrique Porto; Grosky, William; de França, Fabrício Olivetti; de Medeiros, Débora Maria Rossi (2020-09-01). «Enhanced word embeddings using multi-semantic representation through lexical chains». Information Sciences. 532: 16–32. arXiv:2101.09023. doi:10.1016/j.ins.2020.04.048. ISSN 0020-0255. S2CID 218954068.
- ^ Barzilay, Regina; McKeown, Kathleen R.; Elhadad, Michael (1999). «Information fusion in the context of multi-document summarization». Proceedings of the 37th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics on Computational Linguistics. College Park, Maryland: Association for Computational Linguistics: 550–557. doi:10.3115/1034678.1034760. ISBN 1558606092.
- ^ Silber, Gregory; McCoy, Kathleen (2001). «Efficient text summarization using lexical chains | Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Intelligent user interfaces»: 252–255. doi:10.1145/325737.325861. S2CID 8403554.
- ^ a b «WordNet | A Lexical Database for English». wordnet.princeton.edu. Retrieved 2020-05-20.
- ^ WordNet : an electronic lexical database. Fellbaum, Christiane. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. 1998. ISBN 0-262-06197-X. OCLC 38104682.
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: others (link) - ^ Budanitsky, Alexander; Hirst, Graeme (2001). «Semantic distance in WordNet: An experimental, application-oriented evaluation of five measures» (PDF). Proceedings of the Workshop on WordNet and Other Lexical Resources, Second Meeting of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL-2001). pp. 24–29. Retrieved 2020-05-20.
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: location (link) CS1 maint: url-status (link) - ^ Budanitsky, Alexander; Hirst, Graeme (2006). «Evaluating WordNet-based Measures of Lexical Semantic Relatedness». Computational Linguistics. 32 (1): 13–47. doi:10.1162/coli.2006.32.1.13. ISSN 0891-2017. S2CID 838777.
- ^ Jiang, Jay J.; Conrath, David W. (1997-09-20). «Semantic Similarity Based on Corpus Statistics and Lexical Taxonomy». arXiv:cmp-lg/9709008.
- ^ Moldovan, Dan; Novischi, Adrian (2002). «Lexical chains for question answering». Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Computational Linguistics. Taipei, Taiwan: Association for Computational Linguistics. 1: 1–7. doi:10.3115/1072228.1072395.
- ^ McCarthy, Diana; Koeling, Rob; Weeds, Julie; Carroll, John (2004). «Finding predominant word senses in untagged text». Proceedings of the 42nd Annual Meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics — ACL ’04. Barcelona, Spain: Association for Computational Linguistics: 279–es. doi:10.3115/1218955.1218991.
- ^ Ercan, Gonenc; Cicekli, Ilyas (2007). «Using lexical chains for keyword extraction». Information Processing & Management. 43 (6): 1705–1714. doi:10.1016/j.ipm.2007.01.015. hdl:11693/23343.
- ^ Wei, Tingting; Lu, Yonghe; Chang, Huiyou; Zhou, Qiang; Bao, Xianyu (2015). «A semantic approach for text clustering using WordNet and lexical chains». Expert Systems with Applications. 42 (4): 2264–2275. doi:10.1016/j.eswa.2014.10.023.
- ^ Linguistic Modeling and Knowledge Processing Department, Institute of Information and Communication Technology, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences; Simov, Kiril; Boytcheva, Svetla; Osenova, Petya (2017-11-10). «Towards Lexical Chains for Knowledge-Graph-basedWord Embeddings» (PDF). RANLP 2017 — Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing Meet Deep Learning. Incoma Ltd. Shoumen, Bulgaria: 679–685. doi:10.26615/978-954-452-049-6_087. ISBN 978-954-452-049-6. S2CID 41952796.
{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) - ^ Rios Gonzales, Annette; Mascarell, Laura; Sennrich, Rico (2017). «Improving Word Sense Disambiguation in Neural Machine Translation with Sense Embeddings». Proceedings of the Second Conference on Machine Translation. Copenhagen, Denmark: Association for Computational Linguistics: 11–19. doi:10.18653/v1/W17-4702.
- ^ Mascarell, Laura (2017). «Lexical Chains meet Word Embeddings in Document-level Statistical Machine Translation». Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Discourse in Machine Translation. Copenhagen, Denmark: Association for Computational Linguistics: 99–109. doi:10.18653/v1/W17-4813.
Word chains are really important for all children learning to read, especially struggling readers. Some programmes call this activity ‘Sound swap’ (Sounds-Write) or ‘Switch it’ (Reading Simplified).
Why word chains are a useful teaching tool
Word chains offer children practice of the underlying skills of reading: blending, segmenting and phoneme manipulation (adding, deleting and swapping sounds in words). These skills come under the umbrella term ‘phonemic awareness’ which is one of the most accurate predictors of reading difficulties. Children with good phonemic awareness are most likely to be good readers. Children who struggle with phonemic awareness may be are risk of reading difficulties. So, word chains should be part of every phonics programme to ensure that children get sufficient practice in all these underlying skills.
How do word chains work?
In a word chain activity the teacher has a list of words that entail only one change from one word to the next. This could be adding a sound, deleting a sound or swapping a sound. The teacher needs to make letter cards of use letters (make sure that digraphs come stuck together). He/she will ask the pupil to build a word and then to read it, e.g. build the word ‘dog’. Then the teacher will instruct the pupil to change the word from ‘dog’ to ‘log’. The teacher moves his/her finger under the word and says the new word. The pupil identifies where the change in the word has occurred and adds/deletes/replaces a letter. The pupil now blends and reads the new word. This activity can be done with all age-groups. What we are teaching children is that the letters they see match the sounds they hear. With time the pupil can do this faster, skipping the blending and reading word steps.
It is important to note that this is an activity that develops phonemic skills and not code knowledge. It can only be done once the pupils have automatic recall of the letters used in the activity, and are developing their blending and segmenting 3-5 sounds in words. If they don’t have automatic recall call and some blending skills they are likely to experience cognitive overload.
Here is an example of a word chain ‘am – sam- sat’. (note that on this occasion a lower case ‘s’ is used for a name and this can be discussed with the pupil).
How to write your own word chain
You can write your own word chains but it is important to stick to these principles:
- stick to 1 syllable words
- include only the simple part of the code. It gets too confusing if vowel digraphs and trigraphs are included.
- make only one change at a time
- use real or non-words (let the child know if you are using non-words)
- avoid using words with irregular spelling patterns, e.g. ‘pik’ which is spelled ‘pick’ in English
- include only the letters needed for this activity to minimise confusion.
You can start by using these word chains which are free on our website.
Click on this link to download them. Word Chains – Phonic Books
#phonicactivities #phonicsteacher #readingintervention #phonemicawareness #funphonics #phonicsfun
-
-
December 26 2004, 21:36
Word Chains
In a word chain, each word must begin with the last letter of the previous word. Each word must also fit the category of the word chain.
For example, suppose the category of a word chain is fruits. If the first word is pear, the next word must be a fruit that starts with the last letter, r, such as rhubarb.
Here is an example of a short word chain:
Fruits
pear
rhubarb
banana
apricot
tangerine
Directions:
Now you try it. Continue the word chains started below. Make each chain as long as you possibly can, but add a minimum of 5 words to each.
Do not use any word more than once in a single chain.
Be sure to spell correctly. A misspelled word can ruin your entire chain.
Animals Foods 5-letter words Makes of Cars
deer pizza front Chevrolet
rhinoceros apple train Toyota
________ _________ _________ _________
________ _________ _________ _________
________ _________ _________ _________
________ _________ _________ _________
________ _________ _________ _________
Possible answers:
Animals: deer, rhinocerous, snake, elephant, tiger, rabit, tapir
Foods: pizza, apple, egg, granola, asparagus, sugar, rhubarb
5-letter words: front, train, nerve, earth, haven, nasty, youth
Makes of cars: Chevrolet, Toyota, Audi, Impala, Accord, Dodge, Edsel
© 2023 Prezi Inc.
Terms & Privacy Policy
You know the kind: a «fee» becomes a «processing fee» — clear enough, that’s a fee for processing something, and very different from «fee processing», which is something you do to fees.
But then words start to accrue, like barnacles on a fouled hull. «Fee», «processing fee», «double processing fee», and so on. And on.
For the translator, the problem compounds: is a «double processing fee» a «double fee» for «processing», or a «fee» for «double processing»?. Depending of what we are talking about, either reading could be correct, but usually not both at the same time. The translator, in most languages, needs to make a choice.
Asking the customer helps less than one would think: the technical writer or programmer who was the author of such a gem as «special ad-hoc double processing fee handling program safety time log» may no longer be around. Even if he is, he has no idea what it means, or which word modifies which other.
When I worked for a software company we had a competition in the translation department for spotting the longest such word chain. The eventual winner was a whopping thirteen words long, without article or preposition.
English is such a concise language you can often omit articles, prepositions and other functional words, but by doing so «maybe we can eventually make language a complete impediment to understanding».
—
(No: «special ad-hoc [etc.]» is not a string from some actual translation. I made it up for this post — but I have seen even worse)