Language, Feminism and Translation

Hi All,

Today, I gave a mini presentation to the humanities faculty, mostly German, English and British lit instructors. The lone Americanist, Michael Prince, specializes in the Beat movement. (The University, in fact, has the single largest collection of artwork from the period outside the U.S. In the 1950s, a Norwegian dentist collected the work as payment for performing free dental work on Beat artists in San Francisco.)

In any event, as I spoke I saw that everyone in the room was, at least, bi-lingual if not tri or quad? lingual, and I felt keenly self-conscious of my own, characteristically WASPish American monolingual solipsism. (Okay, a mouthful ....I'm retreating to big words to compensate for my own sense of linguistic inferiority:)

In any event, everyone was gracious, and I learned that the University includes a "Center for Excellence" on Gender Equality. As part of Norway's effort to become a leader in higher education in Europe, it has developed various Centers of Excellence at all of the major universities. Next week, I'll have lunch with two of the faculty who teach in that program. As we made arrangements to get together, I commented that Norway seems to have won all of the battles that American feminists are still fighting (reproductive rights (abortion is fully covered by the national health care system), generous maternity and paternity leave, affirmative action measures that help remedy past discrimination(what they called the 40% rule--any Norwegian governing body must contain at least 40% of the underrepresented gender.)

If you're interested, check out:

http://www.norway.org/aboutnorway/society/Equal-Opportunities/gender/politics/

But the women I spoke to also felt strongly that sexism still exists in Norway. Several of the women said that they had felt, on occasion, taken less seriously as female academics. Another said that equal pay for equal work was still a problem. With the exception of one graduate student, everyone in the room was white, and I would expect experiences with sexism would be significantly greater for the growing percentage of Pakistani, Polish and African immigrant women.

On the home front...Walter has discovered that the way to become a self-sufficient eight year old in Norway is to look for left-over money in the vending machines. Apparently, a lot of Norwegians don't bother to retrieve their change, for Walter has already found 30 or so NOK and spends it immediately on Diet Cokes (ah well). Mark enjoyed his cooking class yesterday (when has school sounded so fun). Bill posted an ad today in the Kristiansand newspaper for bikes. He is also doing heavy duty Norwegian language teaching to the kids and trying to carve out time to write his proposal for WI.

When I sat down with Walter tonight to work on Norwegian, it didn't go so well. He's doing a unit on comic books and had to write a sentence in Norwegian using "snakkeboble" or talk bubble. So I had the great idea of going to the web so we can see how real Norwegians would use it in a sentence. Here it is:

Med våre topptrente snakkebobler kan du og dine ansatte prate mer for mindre!

So Walter dutifully copies it down. But when I hit the translate button, we get "With our highly trained speech bubbles, you and your employees to talk more for less!"

Ugh!! I need to get a serious Norwegian dictionary, or maybe just a live-in Norwegian.