Warning! Language can waste your time!

In my opinion, I don't need to tell you what the picture is all about. Most of those translations are pretty good. I know this because they conform to standards, not because I know most of those languages. I can translate well or adequately from eight of them into English. Of the others, I can translate badly and very slowly from a further three.

Okay, that came out wrong. I was trying to be self deprecating but it actually just looks immodest. Let me try to explain why I can do what I can do.

My mother is trilingual in English, French and Italian, so although I wasn't formally raised multilingual, I've always had a familiarity with the second two of those languages. At school, I studied (among other things) French, Italian, Latin and Russian. Today I live and work in France, my wife is French and my children are formally bilingual.

These factors lead to several of these languages being readily accessible, as follows:

(British English) and  (French, France) because I read and write in these every day. Not very interesting that one…


E (Spanish), P (Portuguese), I (Italian) and RO (Romanian) because they are all direct descendants of Latin (romance languages), and share most of their structure and most of their vocabulary. They are more curious in their differences than their similarities. We could add to this list BG (Bulgarian) which is usually written in cyrillic (Russian) characters, and although it "belongs" to the slavic group of indo-european languages is actually so stuffed full of romance vocabulary that translation into English is relatively straightforward.

DK (Danish) and (N) Dutch share a great deal of vocabulary with eachother and with English. Dutch often sounds like English spoken with a strong accent. Once you've got to grips with the spellings and diacritics (accents), these two start to reveal themselves, though I can't do either without a dictionary, even for relatively short sentences.

D (German) is my problem language. In spite of its obvious similarities with English and Dutch, and the presence of some of the most beautiful and the ugliest words I know, I have a hard time understanding written german. ERSTICKUNGSGEFAHR is a lovely word. It means "the presence of a risk of getting stuck".

H (Hungarian). My maternal grandmother was Hungarian, and when I hear it spoken it sounds familiar, and I can even read it aloud with passably correct pronunciation, however with the exception of the few words that I learned as a small child, I can't translate it at all. In the text, I know három éves is 'three years' as my grandmother used to count aloud in Hungarian, and add up aloud too during card games, though eventually she had to stop doing this as my sisters and I started to work out what the numbers meant.

PL (Polish). I can, very slowly, translate Polish as it has strong links with Russian, though it is structurally weird (though not as impenetrable as Hungarian).

So this has turned into a sort of ego-massaging biographical post, when I meant to spend it looking at the curious similarities and differences between the languages listed on the warning notice.

The point about the title of this post is I suppose that I spent an enjoyable half hour reading the warning notice from a box of Christmas crackers, with much the same pleasure that you get from doing a crossword puzzle or watching Mastermind or University Challenge*.

I also spent an hour this morning researching this post, and I will likely spend more than that tomorrow, going into the details of each language.

A number of linguistics scholars have published the opinion, and I suspect it is an idea that develops in everyone who is multilingual eventually, that there is really only one language in Europe, and around the world, only a small handful of languages in all. This thought would be more readily accessible to all had not the early twentieth century passion for national identity cause so many nations to pursue and reinforce their differences.



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* Maybe someone can tell me what the US equivalents of these are

On the Feast of Stephen

Today is Saint Stephen's day. As a teaser and a technology test for the readings and tellings I will be doing next year, I have recorded a little Stephen's day treat: my short story, Good King Wenceslas.

I have a slight head cold, so my accent is a little posher than usual, but don't let that bother you. I'm also trying out different editing software and some fancy camera features. Try to ignore the artefacts that arise from this. If necessary, shut your eyes.

Planning is a waste of time

:: Edit 2012-09-07 ::

I would love to know why this essay gets so many hits still. Any visitors care to comment?

:: end of edit ::





I have been asked to justify a remark I tweeted recently, and farbeit from me to refuse an excuse to blog, here goes:

I stated that "Planning is the worst waste of time ever invented". Some people think that this is a little unfair, but it may be worth stating that this comes from the mouth of a trained and experienced project-manager, who has worked in the highly regulated and highly documented world of clinical trials, who today works in the entirely unregulated though equally documented world of literary fiction.

In project management, Project Plans exist for one reason and one reason only: to convince those with the money to part with it, and fund the project.

In warfare, battle plans exist for one reason and one reason only: to dispose your troops on the field in such a way that they will cause as much difficulty to the enemy as possible. In modern warfare, there are no battle plans, since modern warfare has a much more civilized aim, namely to bring every confrontation to as swift a conclusion as possible.

Planning whose purpose is to decide what to do, and in what order, is strictly for novices - and a necessary part of the learning process.

(Even the logistics of the quantity surveyor are concerned with satisfying a consensus as to requirements, such that all parties submitting a tender will base their prices on the same set of materials; however when it comes to undertaking construction, the actual materials purchased and consumed will not be identical to the quantities specified by the QS.)

"Whenever a truly complex and difficult situation presents itself, the people with the money will always want quantification of the cost and the time needed to deal with it."

This is axiomatic in so many fields of endeavour today that a whole consultancy industry has grown up around the practice and principles of quantification before the fact. The promise of such quantification is to tell you exactly what is needed in terms of time and materials, and hence in terms of money, before you commit to beginning activity.

But any project is (as the etymology implies) an act of anticipation - of throwing yourself into the future. And it is akin to packing for a family holiday. Often akin to packing for a family holiday in the north of England.

You have a fixed, limited amount of space in the car, and you can be certain of some of your needs (like a change of underwear), but much, much less certain of your other needs, especially in terms of outer clothing. If every seat is occupied, is it even possible for everyone to bring everything he needs, let alone everything he might need.

Now most people, very sensibly, don't sit around a whiteboard brainstorming, before producing a twenty-page risk analysis, and a detailed list of items that each person is bringing ranked in order of priority-by-volume.

There are a number of reasons why they don't do this, but the primary reason is that it is not necessary. The fundamental reason for why it is not necessary is the same in every situation where risk is quantified and qualified, whether formally or otherwise:

The only future events likely to cause real difficulties are those that are impossible to anticipate.

By definition, you haven't thought of them in advance, and have done nothing to mitigate them. Any risks that you are capable of anticipating, you will already have acted to reduce. In real world project management, an "emergency fund" is set aside and ringfenced 'for the unexpected only'. These are the future events that test the success of any undertaking, and on which hang the success.

That is why a successful project depends much more on the experience of the people involved than on the thoroughness of the planning.

This doesn't - or shouldn't - turn preparation for future events into a dark art. If anything, it should turn it into an educational experience. Wherever possible, when mounting a project, the person with the main responsibility should look to involve people of varying levels of experience, so that all can learn both from eachother, and from any novel or unanticipated incidents or accidents that occur. As such, you continuously create people with the skills and experience necessary for future undertakings.

Well all have an extraordinary ability to create stories about future events, telling them to ourselves, in order to better prepare both for the expected and the unexpected. The storytelling urge that drives so many people to write fiction is a natural extension, sandbox and playground for this, our most important survival tool.

This is why when I do project mentoring (which I still do from time to time), I encourage all members of the project team to sit down somewhere comfortable, and tell eachother the story of the project as if they were telling a bedtime fairytale.

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I really can turn almost anything into a discussion of storytelling.