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English language (monolingual) [PRO] General / Conversation / Greetings / Letters
English term or phrase:Happy Independent\'s Year
I actually would like to discuss the choice for "Happy Independent's Year" (not my own translation).
Would you, as a native, prefer Independents, Independent's or Independents'? I personally would have never chosen Independent's. And is it correct to use Independent here while we're talking about self-employed people? Not sure if those words fully overlap...
Explanation: Zelfstandig means self-employed or freelance or (as Barend suggested) entrepreneur, but "independent" is wrong. The entire campaign, and even the name of a website, happyindependentsyear.be, is built around a mistranslation.
I know most Dutch to English is done by non-native speakers, but sometimes we do it better :-)
-------------------------------------------------- Note added at 40 mins (2018-03-09 16:40:31 GMT) --------------------------------------------------
While it's a mistake, it may not seem that way for Belgians. See my comments in the discussion box.
Vielen Dank fuer deiner super "link". Wirklich. Mein Gott! Latein ist nicht kaputt, das sage ich auch. Verum, et in minimis latina lingua adiuvat, superius in maximis et in difficultatibus. Vale, frater.
What a paramount and educated discussion! [And, btw, translating educated into Italian as "educato", would be a good example of a misnomer! "Colto" should apply, instead.]. I surmise KelseyR got the best of service. I praise her / him for being so dedicated to good usage.
Après avoir jeté à la poubelle, dans ce contèxte, "indipendent", car il-y a n'a de plus belles... thanks Charles for your ever useful resume about Saxon genitive and adjectival usage in English. To me at least. And a tip of the hat on your British pun "speakers of different European languages mangle English in different ways"; still ROFL. It reminded me of a Monty Python's sketch about, I believe, "the architects": "...and the mangled flesh slides down the chute...". Aw, "intercourse the penguin!". ;-) Maurice
Thanks, and good catch! I belong to this "select" group of people who chose to abandon their last name and adopt their partner's name instead. But try to get someone in Germany to pronounce it the American way (even though it's originally a Dutch surname)!
I think the emergence of some kind of Eurish would not be the sort of development learners of English were hoping for. It would only add to the confusion that already exists. Recently, I had to visit one of these EU research pages to try and figure out what a certain grant is used for. The English text on that page was hardly comprehensible; the German translation, based on the EN version, was of abysmal quality.
I think this happens in Italy too, doesn't it? We've had people in EN-DE ask about the meaning of some paragraph which had been translated from Italian into English and the translation was just wrong. So I had to resort to GT and my knowledge of Latin to figure this out.
I can't speak for the Germans in Belgium, but as a native speaker of German, I can tell you that I would have had no clue what this was about. Like Barend, I'd have thought this was some political statement; I believe Germans would try to make some connection to "Independence Day" in the States.
The apostrophe would have been my doom, anyway. What Charles said... "just as you would put 'Happy Women's Day', not 'Happy Woman's Day' or 'Happy Women Day'"
...is equally true for German. It's "Muttertag," but [Edit] there shouldn't be a "Tag der Frau"--it sounds funny, at least to me. You say "Frauentag" and "Männertag" (plural). And you don't say "Frauenjahr" or something, that would sound more than just a little bit odd. As said before, that'd be like you could ignore all women next year (not that I'm advocating for this).
Funny, but refreshing! After reading just the heading I had the same notion you had concerning the possible play with sound similarity between Indipendent's and Independence. I am a native Italian speaker, you, notwithstanding a Scandinavian name (= Bear) and Neerlandish surname, are a native German speaker, but I do believe either of us tries to refrain from "European English". Und das erfreut mich sehr! Tschuess. Maurizio Bianco
I'm not translating this, I'm writing a text about it in my native language and - as a translator - it struck me that they chose that name, it seemed incorrect. That's why I asked the question. Most Belgians (Dutch / French / German natives) probably won't even realize it's wrong and I'm sure everyone understands it perfectly. Yet it's kinda ridiculous to have this as a campaign name... it's simply not professional. They chose English probably cause it sounds fancy and because you only have to register one domain name instead of two or even three with a French, Dutch and German one.
Thanks! I agree with you about "Mother's Day". I hadn't noticed that Barend implicitly answered the question in his first discussion entry; I'm glad we agree. "The Year of the Self-Employed" could be said, but you can't use this def. article + adjective structure with a possessive. While "Independent's Year" seems unidiomatic to me, I wouldn't rule out "Independents Year", without an apostrophe, though I think the apostrophe should be there. English is very fond of using nouns as pre-posed adjectives, though usually singular nouns. "Patients association", with no apostrophe, is common. I use "patients' association".
@Charles I was waiting for someone to reply to this second part of the question. The three ENS examples I linked did not use an apostrophe after "Independents," but I think this was done so that the word closely resembles "Independence," whether or not it's grammatically correct.
Bernard had put the apostrophe in the same spot in his first discussion box entry, BTW, and I would agree with both of you. Tell me if I'm mistaken, but I think you say Mother's Day because you typically have only one mum. And I know that you can use the definite article + adjective to describe a group, e.g., the old, the young--or, as Allegro did--the self-employed. But "the independent" as a group sounds a bit too general and is less clear.
If most of you don't like "Celebrating 50 Years of XX," though I can show you a multitude of examples on UK pages, there's another option (in AmE). You could say "Happy Anniversary"+the name of the act/law. E.g.: https://blog.epa.gov/blog/2012/04/happy-anniversary-clean-wa...
May I come back to the first part of your original question, which was about the apostrophe? Setting aside the question of whether "independent" is a suitable word to use and whether "Happy [X] Year" is a suitable way to phrase it, should there be an apostrophe, and if there should, where should it go? I would say that there should be an apostrophe and that it should go after the s: "Happy Independents' Year", just as you would put "Happy Women's Day", not "Happy Woman's Day" or "Happy Women Day". The generic use of the singular is standard in languages like French and Spanish (e.g., Jour de la Femme, Día de la Mujer), where English prefers the plural (e.g., International Women's Day).
and indeed it is rather naff, even though it may be compehensible. Maybe "happy 50th birthday to the self-employed" would be better....but who knows, it's from the land of Tintin and Miss Peregrine
"Free agent" sounds more like an undercover operator, but "independent contractor" although not a term usually used by self-employed people, is more of a legal definition. As I said before, having myself worked for the EU, I can understand the term, and I think English-speakers in say, Benelux counties, France, Spain, Italy, etc. would probably do so. At the end of the day, all depends on the target audience. If are they UK/Irish expatriates living in Brussels I don't think they will have a problem. But definitely not for UK or Ireland.
Are you native English speakers familiar with this concept:
In business, a free agent refers to someone who works independently for oneself, rather than for a single employer. These include self-employed workers, freelancers, independent contractors and temporary workers, who altogether represent about 44 percent of the U.S. labor force. The term free agent is believed to have been coined by Daniel H. Pink, author of a 1997 cover story in Fast Company titled “Free Agent Nation.”
I can view the article again; I really seem to have access to it at random intervals. Maybe luck's on your side too this time. One point the author made, and I think the one who wrote the article to which Phil linked didn't, is the lack of figurative expressions in what he calls "Eurish."
Here, we seem to be faced with the opposite. It's some attempt at a wordplay, but it just doesn't seem OK to me. I wouldn't know how to translate this into German. It's "Alles Gute zum Muttertag" = "Happy Mother's Day"; "Alles Gute zum Geburtstag" = "Happy Birthday"; but "Alles Gute zum Selbstständigenjahr/Jahr der Selbstständigen"?!? Sounds like you get one year, then you're doomed.
What you could say is "Alles Gute zum 50-jährigen Bestehen..."--basically, like Happy Anniversary messages. It does say "50 jaar sociaal statuut" next to the phrase in Dutch and "50 ans du statut social" in French, which is quite similar to the German "50 Jahre..."
I believe there would be no issue here if something had actually been translated.
What we have here, though, is some kind of hodgepodge that may sound like something, but doesn't mean anything.
In a rough and ready way the "Euro-English" of, say, Dutch and German speakers and that of Spanish speakers may be more or less mutually intelligible, but not when you get down to details. We regularly get English-Spanish questions here in which the Spanish translator simply doesn't understand the English, because it's been badly translated from (for example) German and you can only make sense of it if you know German.
I think this would only be self-explanatory to those living in a French-speaking country. I must confess I didn't get it straight away, though as soon as I saw the explanation I remembered that indépendent is French for self-employed. If it had said "the autonomous" I would have understood immediately.
And that, to me, illustrates one of the fallacies of "Euro-English". I don't think there's any such thing; speakers of different European languages mangle English in different ways.
Thank you, Phil. I apologize; I don't have a subscription, so I can only assume they allowed me to view this article on a whim (it's not like the NY Times website, where you can read a certain number of articles for free each month).
Even I can't gain access to it anymore! Doesn't matter, really. Your link is just as good.
Though that's "day." I agree that "Year" sounds a bit odd. Come to think of it, it would sound just as odd in German. I wonder whether that's the real issue.
It's clearly Eurobabbbbble but it kind of works (les indépendents = the self-employed) and I would expect any English speaker living in continental western Europe to be able to understand it.
Frankly, American vs British spelling strikes me as a trivial issue, but the last paragraph is mind-boggling:
“In the act of recognising the validity of Euro-English,” Dr Modiano wrote, “one liberates continental European [second language] users of English from the tyranny of standard language ideology.”
I altered this to English-English, but then changed my mind. It's about an English term, but it's hard to understand the question without knowing Dutch. I'd be interested to know what native speakers of Dutch (and French, because "indépendant" means the same thing) think of this. Will the average Belgian know or care that "independent" is, strictly speaking, a mistake? Or does it work because this is not really English, but a hybrid of the three languages? And are you actually translating this, KelseyR, or just curious? If it's the former, it might need a translator's note.
Explanation: Zelfstandig means self-employed or freelance or (as Barend suggested) entrepreneur, but "independent" is wrong. The entire campaign, and even the name of a website, happyindependentsyear.be, is built around a mistranslation.
I know most Dutch to English is done by non-native speakers, but sometimes we do it better :-)
-------------------------------------------------- Note added at 40 mins (2018-03-09 16:40:31 GMT) --------------------------------------------------
While it's a mistake, it may not seem that way for Belgians. See my comments in the discussion box.
philgoddard United States Native speaker of: English PRO pts in category: 119
Grading comment
Thanks a lot everyone for your interesting contributions :-)
peer agreement (net): +5