Lost in Translation?

The names of the translators of books written in a foreign tongue, and critical acclaim for their work, are rarely seen on the covers or title pages of English editions published in the UK or the USA. I learnt from Jennifer Croft, a translator writing for The Guardian, that although the Man Booker International Award decided in 2016 forthwith to split the £50,000 prize between author and translator, nevertheless, not one of the six winning works of fiction published since then has the translator’s name on the front.

Translation is a highly skilled art. It calls for a deep knowledge of both languages and a sensitive ear for literary style, social context, idiom and narrative mood. Take the first page (in the original) of your favourite foreign-language novel, cut and paste it into Google Translate, and compare what Google suggests with the first page of an accredited English translation. Convinced?

Jennifer Croft translates into English from Polish, Argentine-Spanish, and Ukrainian and is perhaps best known for translating the Polish novelist Olga Tokarczuk's Flights, mixed-genre work for which Croft and Tokarczuk won the above-mentioned prize in 2018. As she says: "Generally speaking we are also the most reliable advocates for our books, and we take better care of them than anybody else. Covers simply can’t continue to conceal who we are. It’s bad business, it doesn’t hold us accountable for our choices, and in its wilful obfuscation it is a practice that is disrespectful not only to us, but to readers as well."

The urge to correct

Scientists who analyse large amounts of data in their research often store it in Excel spreadsheets. Excel has for decades been a standard component of the suite of applications in Microsoft Office, but, despite regular upgrades, it has not lost the irritating urge to correct what it often dumbly supposes is one of your errors. Although it's not too difficult to turn off autocorrect, not everyone knows how to or can be bothered to find out. Also, in normal circumstances it can be a helpful tool, provided that you carefully read through what you thought you had written before you launch it into the public domain. (And let's be grateful that Clippy was put back in the box.)

It seems that autocorrect is a particular problem for geneticists. A gene called Membrane Associated Ring-CH-type finger 1, commonly known as MARCH1 for short, is, for instance, frequently corrected to the date March 1st. Something similar happens to genes known as SEPT1 and  DEC2 and there are many other examples both in English and other languages.

Although the problem was first noticed in 2004, it wasn't until 2016 that Mark Ziemann drew wider attention to this hazard. Then, last July he and some colleagues published a paper in the open source journal Public Library of Science (PLOS) Computational Biology entitled “Gene name errors: Lessons not learned". He and his co-authors surveyed 166,000 genomics-related papers published between 2014 and 2020, and they found that the number of papers using Excel had steadily increased and the proportion plagued with autocorrect errors still hovered around 30%. Various remedies have been proposed: a change in the official names of genes to make them less tempting targets for correction, the use of bespoke scientific software for data processing, ...  and (my naive idea) to make the Excel default "autocorrect OFF". (My thanks to The Economist of 1st September 2021 for telling me about this.)

Sonnet for Silenced Singers

 “Bare Ruin’d Choirs”

The church hall sleeps in evening silence now

The singers’ cars no longer line the lane

The maestro’s voice that rucked the tenor’s brow

No longer snaps “Repeat that last refrain”.

A speckless microbe felled the human giant

Who’s now confined to languish in his den.

With Government instructions e’er compliant

No consort, choir or chorus sings Amen.

From data coming in they’re getting wiser,

And lab-coats warn the virus “We’ll subdue ya”.

With jabs from AstraZeneca and Pfizer,

They can now let rip again with “Alleluia!”

    Their joyful choral cadences restored,

    In four-part harmony they’ll “Praise the Lord”.

Graduate longevity: cause or correlation?

The year of my birth was a perfect square, and y years ago my age was the fourth power of y. I started university when I was 21,  There were 143 in the cohort of undergraduates starting that year at Christ's College, Cambridge. An actuarial friend has kindly estimated that only around 32% of males born in Britain in the same year as me are still with us; taking that as the average should mean just (32 x 143)/100 ≃ 47 of the Christ's cohort remain among the quick. In fact, 83 of them are still alive and more or less kicking - 36 more than would be statistically expected if longevity were distributed evenly through society. If you wish to live longer, it seems you should get a degree, or perhaps partake of the waters and the wine at Christ's.

A Ton

This is my hundredth post (although from my laptop’s point of view it’s post number 1100100 since 100 = 64 + 32 + 4).

... and Statistics

The number 360,960 looks frighteningly large. It’s the headline-grabbing number of new confirmed cases of covid-19 in India on 22nd April 2021. It was thus reported in The Guardian, a UK newspaper. as “a world record for any single country since the pandemic began”. By the time you read this the daily total may even be over 400,000 but that doesn’t significantly change the comparison we make below.

These sensational headlines are as dramatic as they are dishonest: They convey the false idea that India’s a basket case when it comes to daily covid figures getting out of control. 

But let’s look more closely. On 9th January 2021 the United Kingdom reached a peak of 89.3 new daily cases per 100 thousand. The corresponding figure in India on 22nd April was 26.4 (or 29.3 if you use the 400K figure). In either case the comparable daily rate in the UK was over 3 times worse than India’s, and England’s alone was even higher. Since the population of India is over 20 times greater than the UK’s, it’s hardly surprising that the country clocks up an alarmingly huge grand total even when it’s doing quite well on a daily basis compared with other countries.

The more honest headline might have been: “India’s medical infrastructure struggles to cope with a comparatively modest daily rate of covid-19 cases.” and this similarly serious but less eye-catching observation should also raise no eyebrows given how poor India is in per capita terms. Unfortunately the sober truth doesn’t keep the presses rolling and the anchors watched.

The Long and the Short of it

One of our sons (D) and his partner (L) had covid-19 at the start of the pandemic in March 2020. They both had the standard covid symptoms but there were no available tests to confirm the diagnosis at that time. D was off-colour for all of three days with symptoms no worse than a cold,  whereas L, our de facto daughter-in-law, has been laid low for over a year and is still suffering the debilitating consequences.

Like L, many long-covid sufferers have not had a positive test for SARS-CoV-2 virus or for antibodies against it, either because tests were not available when they were ill or because  the antibody tests they had were not sensitive enough (a problem with several of the early tests). 

Broadly speaking, there are three types of long-covid symptoms: 

1. The first type is characterised by “exercise intolerance”, whereby the sufferers have little stamina and get exhausted from even the smallest tasks involving physical activity.
2. The second type involves cognitive disturbances, such as a sensation of ‘brain fog’ and memory problems. 
3. The third type affects the autonomic nervous system, which controls things like heartbeat, breathing and digestion. Patients in this group can experience heart palpitations and dizziness for example.

L has endured an extreme case of type 1 symptoms, as well as some symptoms of type 2. There are some first-hand accounts from sufferers in this Royal Society video.

Medical researchers are exploring three possible biological explanations:

Hypothesis 1. Long covid is a lingering viral infection which can hide out of reach of the immune system (like malaria, chickenpox and HIV), perhaps producing some active viral proteins not detectable by PCR and other antigen tests.

Hypothesis 2. It is an auto-immune disorder. There is strong evidence of cases of an over-reaction of the immune system in the acute stage of covid when many patients died from so-called cytokine storms

Hypothesis 3. It is due to tissue damage caused by inflammation during the initial acute stage, damage for example to the lining of blood vessels restricting blood flow to the brain.

To date there have been almost 4.5m confirmed cases of covid-19 in the United Kingdom and in reality probably many more. The Zoe Covid Symptom Study based in King’s College London found that 1 in 50 covid sufferers still had symptoms 12 weeks or more after the acute phase. This means that getting on for 100,000 UK citizens have post-covid-19 syndrome, and that many of them will need long-term treatment and possibly be unable to work. These cases will place a significant burden on the economy and the medical services over and above the existing negative impacts of the acute covid-19 cases. For this reason, there is hope that more research funding will be channelled towards research into long-covid in particular and post-viral illnesses in general, attracting more medical scientists to direct their efforts to understanding these conditions and finding treatments. That could bring relief and credibility to the many others who have found themselves languishing in similar ways after other viral or bacterial infections. “It’s an ill wind …”

(This blog post is informed by an excellent three-page article entitled “Post-covid syndrome — The sting in the tail” published in the print edition of The Economist on 1st May 2021, page 69.)

Double Definition

If it were from a standard synonym crossword, the solution of following clue

Newspaper offence (5)

might be LIBEL. However, this double definition clue is inspired by a cryptic crossword in the Sunday Times created by Robert Price, and the answer begins with the letter T. It might help solve it to know the name of a British broadsheet famous for its salmon pink newsprint.

PS I now realise that Robert Price's actual clue: Newpaper taking offence was better than my doctored version because the solution is a "taking offence".

Pick of The Week

In addition to Tim Morey's cryptic crossword puzzle in every issue, The Week magazine (UK version) sets its news-hounds fossicking through other journals' crosswords for their "Clue of the Week". Here are three nuggets of cruciverbalist gold they dug up recently.

I take sustenance after ten (6 letters, from The Times Jumbo)

As we know, each cryptic clue has both a definition and some cryptic word play, which together point to the answer. Moreover, the definition is always a string of words at the very beginning or at the very end of the clue; thus in the above clue the definition could be "I take", or "ten" or "after ten" and so on; the definition can even be the whole clue with the word-play embedded in it -- these are known as "&lit" clues. To solve the above clue, it helps to know, or consult, the periodic table, and to realise that when "ten" is written in digits, it can also be read as two letters.

The second clue is due to Kairos in The Independent.

Fun was had in bed cavorting as newlyweds? (7,3,4)

Look out for the anagram signifier.

And finally, a very lateral clue with some gallows humour devised by Imogen for The Guardian.

Death - by hanging? (8, first letter C)

Good Books Lately

The English (and subsequently British) East India Company was founded in 1600 to trade in East and Southeast Asia and India, and it was so ruthlessly successful that by1750 half of the World’s trade passed through its ledgers. Its army of over 200,000 soldiers, which outnumbered Britain’s army, was used to impose military and administrative rule over large parts of India. Its brutal, high-handed and insensitive behaviour to towards Indian cultural and religious traditions led to the Indian Mutiny of 1857. A year later, realising that the East India Company had grown too big for its boots and become an embarrassment, the British Government brought in an Act of Parliament to transfer direct control to the Crown. This marked the start of the British Raj, which absorbed the Company’s armies and took over its governing and administrative powers (and continued to exercise them until Clement Attlee’s post-war Administration granted Indian independence in 1947). 

I am grateful to two reading groups in my South Warwickshire town for some outstanding books I have read this year. There was The Sealwoman’s Gift, which I praised in a February post below, and now our April read: The Siege of Krishnapur by J G Farrell. When the sepoys (Indian soldiers) stationed in the garrison at Captainganj are asked to bite the bullets for their new Enfield rifles, they suspect that the bullets are greased with a mixture of ox and pig fat, anathema to India’s great religions, and turn on their British officers. Those officers left alive run to the nearby town of Krishnapur, remotely situated on the vast North Indian plain.(Although the town is fictional, the story has roots in the notorious North Indian town Lucknow, which underwent a 6-month siege in 1857, as part of the Indian rebellion. The author acknowledges his debt to a large mass of diaries, letters and memoirs written by eyewitnesses in Lucknow, Cawnapore and elsewhere during the Mutiny, which spread to many parts of the country)

The few officers that escape with their lives join the British representatives of the Krishnapur Raj, who retreat to the Residency compound and dig themselves in for the long haul. They manage to hold their hurriedly-fortified enclave for four months against constant assaults from the sepoys, but as their supplies of food and ammunition dwindle and the rains wash away their improvised defensive mud wall, so their layers of ‘civilised’ conditioning, their social hierarchy and their body fat are slowly stripped away too.

This novel is beautifully written with great wit and intelligence; it is well paced and is a sensible length too. It has a rich cast of memorable characters, embodying so many clearly-recognisable human types; it abounds in dramatic action; It combines tragedy, comedy and farce without compromising its serious intent; It is a universal story, raising many issues that are relevant to the world we live in now. Above all, is a brilliant commentary on the human condition.

Vax Fax

There is a misconception that getting a Covid-19 vaccination stops you catching the disease. It does not. It is not designed to do so. What it does is prime your body's weapons to be ready to move on the virus quickly and cut it off at the pass. As soon as the virus invades, the antibodies, B-cells and T-cells in your alerted immune system will instantly leap into action and descend in force to neutralise it and render it harmless. It is given no chance to multiply inside your cells and wreak havoc around your body. Your symptoms, if any, will be mild and will soon disappear. But you have to 'catch' it first before your immune system can send it packing.

A vaccination has the following beneficial effects:

• It reduces the number of serious cases needing medical intervention
• It minimises the viral load in those infected and reduces transmission in the community
• It can be targeted at those most at risk

It has the same effect on the unvaccinated as catching the disease and recovering. Immunity confers protection against dangerous consequences of becoming infected but not from being initially and very mildly infected when exposed.

Slavery

The year is 1627, Shakespeare is but a decade in his grave and Charles 1 in the second year of his reign. It was an annus horribilis for the people of Iceland, then a Danish protectorate. In two raids that summer, slave traders in their corsairs from Algiers, led by two renegade Dutchmen, brutally attacked settlements along Iceland's southern coast, in particular in the Westman Islands, killing dozens, burning villages and eventually carrying off 400 Icelanders to be sold into slavery in the markets of Algiers, an audacious round-trip journey of 5,400 miles under sail; 400 human souls represented 1% of Iceland's sparse population at the time, and even today its population is only 364,000

Sally Magnusson is the author a wonderful novel, which brings vividly to life the surroundings and experiences of those captive slaves. The Sealwoman's Gift is imaginatively conceived, beautifully written and carefully researched.  She marries the bares bones of the historical record to a fully realised and thoroughly believable 17th century world. Her story spans the impoverished wind-swept landscape of dour Lutheran Iceland and the luxuriant cosmopolitan Islamic diaspora of Moors and Arabs in North Africa, and the narrative is colourfully embellished with many stories and sagas from both those cultures. She writes simply but with poetic intensity and in a few sentences can transport you almost physically into the sights, smells and sounds of her scenes and into the very presence of the men and women she so finely and sensitively observes.

The dramatic events of those times are seen through the eyes, thoughts and lived experiences of Åsta, a remarkable Icelandic woman at the centre of the story and a talented story-teller herself. This slice of history is vividly depicted from a woman’s point of view, one which is so often neglected in the telling of our past. There are many engrossing themes, especially the importance of story-telling, the meaning of love: How do you measure it? and loss: What price must you pay for losing your children forever, even losing the prospect of meeting them in heaven?

Hung out to dry?

 This nice clue from Robert Price appeared in The Sunday Times:

Jeans and shirt put outside to air (8).

All you need to solve it is a brand name for jeans and a 3-letter word for a type of shirt.

The same either way

 A week or so ago, the date was palindromic, provided one subscribes to the format DD/MM/YYYY that is. There will be another palindromic date in February next year, but then a long wait until the earlier 2030s for more. Will they go on forever? If humanity is still around at the end of the 10th millennium and still keeping track of the days in a similar fashion, it will depend on the new format. If it's DD/MM/YYYYY, then yes, they will continue to the same old irregular way.

By coincidence  this morning, I clicked on that seemingly endless source of unpredictable entertainment and bizarre novelty, Greg Ross's  Futility Closet website, and discovered some verbal palindromes that were new to me. Mathematicians Peter Hilton and Henry Whitehead, who had been codebreaking colleagues at Bletchley Park during WW2, got into a palindrome exchange in 1947. Whitehead began with STEP ON NO PETS, to which Hilton retaliated with SEX AT NOON TAXES and after a sleepless but very creative night improved upon with DOC, NOTE, I DISSENT. A FAST NEVER PREVENTS A FATNESS. I DIET ON COD. Not surprisingly that 51-letter sequence brought the exchange to an abrupt end. It certainly trumps the old one about the Panama man with his canal.

I met Peter Hilton briefly when visiting  the University of Binghamton in the 1990s. He wrote a seminal book on Topology with Shaun Wylie, another Bletchley alumnus, whose inspiring Cambridge lectures on Real Analysis (rigorous Calculus) I was privileged to attend in 1957. While at Binghamton Hilton wrote a charming book with Jean Pedersen connecting algebra to special kinds of paper folding; the title is A Mathematical Tapestry (CUP, 2010,  ISBN 0-521-12821-8).

The Challenges of 2021

Welcome to the twenty-first year of the second millennium.  When I was a boy, 21 meant coming of age, when you got the “key of the door” and were free to go off and do your own thing. Of course, Mum and Dad were usually still around to come to the rescue if things didn’t work out first time. Well, today the United (but for how much longer?) Kingdom has set off to do its own thing, free from the thraldom of Brussels. Only time will tell if we are up for the task. If only we could pull up our island's anchor and set sail to more congenial climes, and seek out new neighbours who don't want to snaffle our fish.

The number 21 also has gambling connotations. It is the number of spots on a standard die, and the name of a card game adopted by the British as Pontoon (or Vingt-un if they wanted to sound posh). Are we still a gambling nation, are we again willing to take risks for the sake of enterprise and prosperity? Or are we lost in dreams of our “glorious past” when the sun never set on the possessions and peoples we then held in our thrall, now too tired to summon the energy, initiative and ambition to make a fresh start? We shall see. Meanwhile, let’s indulge in some trivial distractions with the number 2021 itself and briefly postpone the big challenge of facing up to a new future in an unfriendly world.

Is 2021 a prime number? To check that we only need look for prime divisors up to the square root √2021 = 44.9555… There are 14 primes less that 45 and you have to go to the wire to discover that the 14th prime 43 is the smallest prime divisor of 2021. In fact, 2021 has only two prime factors: 2021 = 43 x 47 and is not quite a perfect square. (We will have to wait four more years to find a year that is a perfect square, namely 2025 = 45² — the previous one, 44² was the year of my birth.) Anyway,, the answer to our initial question is “No”, 2021 is not a prime number.

We can represent the familiar decimal form of our current year 2021 in different bases, for example:

                    Base-2 (binary):  11111100101

                    Base-3: 2202212

                    Base-16 (hexadecimal): 7e5 = 7 x 16² + 14 x 16 + 5

Or we can devise other recipes, such as finding expressions that use the four operations of arithmetic and the digits 1 — 9 in order as follows:

                    2021 = 1 - 23 - 4 + (5 x 6 - 7) x 89 

                    2021 = 12 × (3 × 4 + 5 + 6) × 7 + 89

                    2021 = 1 x (2 + 3 ) - (((4 x 56) x (7 - 8)) x 9), or

                    2021 = (1^23 + 45) x 6 x 7 + 89 using a fifth operation exponentiation

                    2021 = (9 × 8 + 7 + 6) × 5 × 4 + 321

Instead of using all the digits, we can stick to just one digit and try to find the most efficient expression (i.e. the one with fewest  occurrences of the digit). Here are some examples:

                    2021 = ((11 - 1) - 111) x ((1 - 11) + (1 - 11)) + 1 = 

                                2/2 + (22/2 - 2) x 222 + 22 = 

                                333 x (3 + 3 ) + 3 x 3 x 3 - 3 - 3/3 =

                                (44 - 4/4) x (44 + 4 - 4/4)

or, most inefficiently, 2021 = 9/9 + 9/9 + .. (2021 terms)..  + 9/9

So I will leave readers who, like me, are amused by such bagatelle with the 2021 challenge of finding the shortest single-digit expression(s) for 2021. You have the rest of the year to improve on my best short score, which is 9.