Final Blog post

I had to look up when David Bello’s essay on “Foreign-Soundingness” was written because it felt outdated to me. (it’s 2013) This perhaps has less to do with his technical point, which is that maintaining the source language (in part or in whole) is the best way to retain the authenticity of the source text rather than attempt to make the target language fit the conventions of the source language. (although I’m actually quite open to both approaches) What felt outdated to me is the way this idea is discussed. Bello uses this language of introducing foreignness to a text, or of retaining some authenticity of foreignness, or adding “a flavor of foreign coloring,” the same language used by Diderot and Schleiermacher in the 1700s. (and he is certainly not the only to have done this since of course) Reading it today, I find it not only reeks of Orientalism (esp. for those "small" languages), but also assumes a flawed dichotomy of foreign vs native that I just don’t think can be justified anymore. Bello at one point says of a certain translation of Hindi words – “a linguistic anomaly in English” – that it would require “a translator’s footnote - because we do not know any Hindi.” Given that many of the ~570 million Hindi-speaking people know English, it seems many of those “we” do know Hindi. It turns out, “we” do contain multitudes.

I guess I’m ready for us to change the language around these ideas; do away with foreign and native, foreign and domestic, of equating whatever doesn’t sound “native” as “a representation of the funny ways foreigners speak,” etc. Perhaps moving towards the language of defamiliarization like Bruna Dantas Lobato did in her lecture, or thinking in terms of “translingualism” (“writing that crosses linguistic boundaries and thereby unsettle monolingual norms”) as another speaker, Eugene Ostashevsky has written about. Perhaps doing so would help liberate the translation process/practice to become more fluid and less locked into this binary of making one thing sound like another.

As for book covers, I am very much against placing a snapshot of the movie remake on them.

- Lois

Foreign Words and Familiar Images: Cover Design and the "Foreignisation" of Translation

These texts had me sitting with the idea that every act of communication is, in a way, a translation—whether you’re switching languages, explaining a concept, or even just presenting yourself. Reading David Bellos’s “Fictions of the Foreign” and Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Clothing of Books alongside Chip Kidd’s TED Talk “The Hilarious Art of Book Design” helped me understand how layered, and sometimes frustrating, that process can be.

Bellos’s essay focuses on how translators manage the “foreignness” of a text. Do we want Dostoyevsky to sound like someone we might bump into at a coffee shop, or like someone undeniably Russian? Bellos warns that too much fluency risks flattening cultural difference. But leaning too hard into foreignness can feel artificial, even comical or mocking. I found myself thinking about times I’ve tried to translate things from one language to another—not just words, but emotions, references, humor—and how often I’ve failed to make them feel right. Bellos made me realize that the translator isn’t just moving a story across language barriers—they’re also negotiating cultural expectations.

Lahiri takes this idea of translation and applies it metaphorically. For her, book covers are the clothing we wrap around stories—and sometimes they fit badly. She describes the sting of seeing her books dressed in exoticized, stereotypical imagery simply because of her name or background. I think for many people, especially those whose languages would experience this kind of treatment, there’s something familiar about being misread based on appearance, or having your story interpreted before it’s even heard. Lahiri’s longing for a uniform—a neutral outfit that avoids judgment—is a very interesting approach to solving this issue in a way that doesn't rely on the knowledge or good decisions of each publisher and translator.

And then comes Chip Kidd, who brings humor and design savvy to the same dilemma: how do you represent a book without reducing it? His TED Talk shows how a good cover doesn’t just decorate a book—it translates its tone, spirit, and purpose into visual language. Some of his designs are playful, others serious, but the best ones spark curiosity without giving everything away. I loved his point that the cover is not the story itself, but an invitation to open it. That tension between intrigue and integrity really stuck with me. I think the idea of cover design being a sort of translation from both Kidd and Lahiri is a different way of framing the issue than I'm familiar with. It's almost like the way many people use clothing as an extension of their identity—and reminds me of how some schools require a uniform so everyone is seen equally. 

What ties all three of these perspectives together is the idea that every form of translation—linguistic, visual, or cultural—is inherently interpretive. It involves decisions about what to keep, what to emphasize, and what to let go. It’s a form of storytelling in itself. And it’s never neutral. As someone who’s still learning how to articulate ideas clearly, and who sometimes worries about being misread or misunderstood, this all feels deeply personal. Whether I’m sharing my work, choosing how to present myself, or just figuring out how to bridge different parts of my life, I realize that I’m constantly translating—not just between languages, but between selves.

Reflections on Jhumpa Lahiri's "The Clothing of Books" (Tennant)

Jhumpa Lahiri’s essay The Clothing of Books made me think about the dominant aesthetic of book covers in France, where white is king. Immediately, my mind conjures the sober stock design of Gallimard jackets with their eggshell palette, clean rectangular lines, and signature red typeface. Gallimard's influence as a publisher is so imperial that their book covers now belong to the nation’s iconography. If you ask me, there is a quintessentially French logic to their style in the same way that the dazzling superabundance of graphic covers in the U.S. reflects a quintessentially American tradition of XL consumer culture and optionality (i.e., the paradox of choice). Given that French history has been molded by secularism and French culture born out of related values, the nation's publishing mechanisms favor the preservation of the author (justified as “faithfulness”) over concessions to a more collaborative and diversified final product. The ubiquity of the Gallimard cover in the French marketplace speaks to (and perpetuates) an underlying belief that illustrations pollute the reading experience, restraining readers' freedom to imagine. The singularity of Gallimard's aesthetic does away with the question of function that troubles Lahiri: "Once the cover exists it's part of the book, and has an effect, either positive or negative. It either attracts or repels the reader." It aims to eliminate the middleman. 

However, as Lahiri points out, the conventions of contemporary publishing show a relationship between reader and book that is "far more mediated.” I cannot help but appreciate the industry's impulse to elevate books into fuller packages adorned with accessories: cover art, blurbs, author bios, milestone banners, anniversary editions, and so on. The jacket represents the designer's investment in the writer’s work and earnest desire to see it succeed. If the book is bad, there is no saving it: the reader remembers a bad book. To quote Roland Barthes: "The brio of the text (without which, after all, there is no text) is its will to bliss: just where it exceeds demand, transcends prattle, and whereby it attempts to overflow, to break through the constraint of adjectives---which are those doors of language through which the ideological and the imaginary come flowing through." It may be naïve and romantic of me, but I find that bliss to be a utopian force that transcends any superficial dressing like a book cover.

What Do the Stories Look Like?: Distillation, Belonging, and Looking Pretty

What Do the Stories Look Like?: Distillation, Belonging, and Looking Pretty

by Meghan Miraglia

Even before I'd reached that part of the TedTalk where Kidd says that book designers have to be interpreters and translators, I thought that covers are a translation of a story - “a distillation” of the text. Book designers take what they interpret to be the emotional core of the text, and they render it the most visible. 

I get really fussy about the physical interaction that the reader has with the book: paper, covers, text, the way the book sits on a table/in your hand…all of that matters, and it impacts the reading experience. I remember the IQ84 cover! The TEDTalk made me curious about what sells in the United States versus in other countries - for instance, on Bookstagram, lots of users will lust over UK book covers because they “look prettier” than the American iteration. Did the book itself matter? Sure. But not as much as the cover.

Lahiri is right - book covers, though not of an author’s choosing, are “another part of me [that have] to be dressed and presented to the world” (10). I’m interested in her conversations around covers as awakening and defining of a text (objectification). I love her early mention of a uniform, which makes me wonder about Fitzcarraldo, with their signature minimalist blue/white uniform. It’s the “branding” of the text as “belonging” to this publisher, not the author. 

Translating "Foreignness"

 I was really intrigued in the reading by the idea the "'The translator’s task is to “transmit this feeling of foreignness to his readers.'” This, in a sense, rubs against Bly's notion of translating into "American" as one of the steps. This way, the source language's vibe or aura is retained rather than erased. This does, as the article states, require some level of familiarity with the language, but I feel the reader could intuitively perceive the retained quality of a language, even if they are barely familiar. I like the notion that we should preserve a certain level of "foreignness" in our translations. It is easy to want a text to feel "American" and perhaps may be more marketable, but at the end of the day, the text was not originally in english and most likely was not written in the context of American culture, and it is okay if the cultural temperature and references are not so surfacely accessible, I don't know think that is the point. Obviously, a translation should not be completely out of reach, and stealth glossing is a helpful tool, but I think to disguise it as something it is not is a disservice to the author and the reader. 

Staged for the Market


The challenge of capturing the "foreign" in translation lies in balancing the text's smoothness and familiarity, as if it were originally written in the target language, with the need to preserve elements of its difference and origin. Translators have long debated this choice. In the past, keeping foreign words or phrases in the text was more acceptable, especially when there was an established cultural familiarity. But representing foreignness isn't straightforward. Often, it depends less on the original language and more on what the receiving culture imagines foreignness to be. This becomes especially complicated when translating from languages that lack a shared history with English, such as Yoruba, where we just have no idea how they are meant to sound. In many cases, making something sound "foreign" in translation only works when it isn't really so foreign to begin with.

Jhumpa Lahiri shares a similar concern when she writes about book covers as an outer layer that introduces the book to the world. Covers speak in a visual language shaped not by the writer, but by designers, editors, and marketing teams. Their choices are often driven by aesthetics, but increasingly by market demands. Like translations that try to preserve the essence of the original, covers aim to convey something of the book's spirit. Yet they, too, are filtered through the tastes, assumptions, and expectations of a particular audience. Lahiri has seen this firsthand in the covers of her own books, images that often reflect stereotypes or simplified projections of who she is. In both translation and cover design, what reaches the reader is shaped by more than the original text. It is shaped by the world the text enters, and by what that world is ready to see.

~Ibrahim 

Last Blog Post

 Chip Kidd Talk: The hilarious art of book design

His job was to tell stories, and talks about book design in relation to understanding what the book is about. The Hepburn is presented as pure content and form form side by side. His emotes with his hand, pointing to the screen passionately about the Jurassic Park graphic he created. I enjoyed his occasional dry humor. His audience loved the book design in relation to phallic drawings, denoting the audience's engagement with the book design. Throughout the talk, he captured the audience with both his jokes and his outfit. It's clear that his work pertains to entertainment of his audience.

Bellos, Fictions of the Foreign:

"No less than 40 percent of all headwords in any large English dictionary are imports from other languages."

This semester, I've been really interested in how language changes with immigration and, perhaps more aggressively, colonization. This quote stood out to me as it points to how current languages are not what they were a few mere centuries ago. In translating Persian for my project, I realize how imperfect my reading of Farsi is, but also that deciphering old Persian is much more difficult. Language changes. We as translators can choose what languages we want to deal with.

Bellos talks about "foreignness" in translations, and the consideration of words translating from one language to another. This is all subjective, as we've discussed with other considerations in class, like the concept of faithfulness. To me, I would need to have a deep understanding of linguistic and history to comment on Bellos's argument.

Jhumpa Lahiri, The Clothing of Books

I am a huge fan of Lahiri's work. I attended a reading in undergrad where she spoke about self-translating her fiction from English to Italian. When she was asked why she chose to translate it herself, she answered along the lines of, "because I could." 

In her talking about "the clothing of books," I was drawn to her talking about "optical echoes." She writes, "I would like it if, even once, a cover for one of my books were designed by someone who knew me well, who deeply knew my work, for whom it really mattered." It's interesting to think about the non-intimate parts of creative writing, mostly in the editorial sphere. A book cover is the first thing I see, and if it's particularly horrendous, it might ruin the book for me. However, if it's a recommendation from a friend, I don't care about the appeal of the book cover as much. Lahiri makes me think about how a book could be an author's life work, but the author may not have much say in what goes on the cover. Where is the balance? I appreciated how this reminded me to stand up for myself when I am face-to-face with a publisher. Lahiri is continuously inspiring me.

                                                                                                                                        Hanan

Blog Post 9 by Drew

Chip Kidd is so funny. I don’t know what I was expecting from a Ted Talk on book design, but it wasn’t a campy sass master dressed like a sea captain who delivers roughly one joke per ten-second increment. His image vs caption vs image + caption (content/form) discussion was super interesting, and I think the takeaways resonate for writing too. There’s a constant evaluation, at least for me, of how much to explain, vs how much to imply via (hopefully) resonant images. I love the book design with removal pants, and how he compares a cover to a distillation, or a haiku (shoutout Basho, shoutout Tawara).

The David Bellos essay was really fascinating to me, particularly in two contexts: 1) translating Yanitsa Radeva’s poems 2) writing my own poems while I’m still in a translation headspace. He writes, “Foreignizing translation styles bend English into shapes that mirror some limited aspect of the source language, such as word order or sentence structure” (39). I definitely feel that, whether I take an I want this to sound foreign approach or not, the existing syntaxes and constructions in the source language force me to do interesting things in English, which fortunately bears a massive lexicon and a notable openness to experimentation (if not in readership’s aesthetic preferences, at least in the extent to which things can be puzzled out).

Gosh, I love Jhumpa Lahiri. The Clothing of Books is wonderful. May all current Boston University MFA students (or at least… one…) experience a similar level of literary stardom in their alumni futures. Given her interesting pivot to the Italian language, and her essay collection Translating Myself and Others, I was sort of anticipating to see her show up among the readings in this class, though not necessarily in relation to this topic. I am always impressed when nonfiction makes me feel emotional (which has happened a nonzero number of times this semester, so nice work curating readings, Professor!), and the ending here really does the trick. The serendipity of the Morandi and the Matisse—and the resonances they hold, not only for Lahiri, but also outside of her, for us—is such a perfect closing image.

Thank you so much!

Best,

Drew Rollins

Final Blog Post

 On “Fictions of the Foreign” by David Bellos

My primary takeaway, which I think the piece leads me to, is that ultimately “foreignness” is in the eye of the beholder— what is a maintained “foreign sound” to one reader won’t be to another. I understand both the value of maintaining phrases are structures across translation that produce oddities in the target language as a means of suggesting that the work is translated, and I understand that translation has the goal of making a text reachable not only across language but across culture, and by maintaining those oddities a text can be become less accessible for the target audience. 

On “The Clothing of Books” by Jhumpa Lahiri

I appreciate Lahiri’s point that the cover of a book is never a neutral feature, no matter its original form or intention— this doesn’t need to be a nefarious thing, obviously. It makes me think about how many books from the 80s have that futuristic/ neon vibe, which scares me away, but realistically the content does not always (or even most of the time) fully match the energy of the cover. They can also reflect the political or social implications of when/where the book was published, which I had never considered before.

 

                                                                                                            Samantha 

In praise of glowing mushrooms and Virginia Woolf's sister

In “Fictions of the Foreign,” David Bellos speaks to the challenge of preserving difference in prose without exoticizing (or otherwise diminishing) the text. To flatten a book stylistically into an imagined neutral English might be to lose something critical—but, on the other hand, he points out, to attempt to render something as “foreign-sounding” can often be an equally harmful endeavor, relying on the target culture’s idea of what the source language/culture’s foreignness looks and sounds like. At best, it's not quite true (a foreign text is not foreign in its source language and culture); at worst, tropey, reinforcing existing stereotypes.

Thinking about translating for an American readership, a lot of this strikes me as an issue not with translation, but with the literary landscape at large. Not only is English, as Bellos points out, a dynamic language that has borrowed much of its vocabulary from other languages and continues to evolve and absorb words and characteristics from other languages, but the US is also a culture of many cultures, each with unique storytelling and literary traditions. The idea that there’s a standard or neutral literary English, and that deviation from this immediately screams foreignness, strikes me as false, and maybe also points to a kind of failure of imagination, a sign that the American literary landscape may not yet fully reflect or embrace the diversity of languages, cultures, thought, storytelling traditions, styles/genres, etc, that exist across its readership and authorship. 

Chip Kidd and Jhumpa Lahiri speak to the translation work of designing book covers. The designer, Kidd articulates, has to be an interpreter and a translator. They are charged with (yet another delightfully impossible!) translation task: rendering the essence of a book into a single image. In “The Clothing of Books,” Jhumpa Lahiri speaks not only to this (oftentimes opaque) process, but also its re-translation across borders. According to editors, she writes, “a cover in one country never works in another.” I am skeptical of these editors. Having spent so much time with Uds. brillan en lo oscuro—where I find the cover of the Spanish language edition hauntingly beautiful and the English language one kind of appalling—I find myself wondering if this industry standard is a correct one. I love those glowing mushrooms, and personally think they transcend borders and visual vocabularies :)

I think both these issues— “readability” and the imagined appeal of the cover — speak to the tension that arises in trying to make art marketable, in one country or many, which—what a privilege to (hypothetically) create art and live off of it!—but also, how limiting to have market forces so significantly shape what's produced. Not a unique thought, I know. One thing I loved reading about in "The Clothing of Books" that felt like it pushed gently against this prioritization of marketability was the example of Virginia Woolf sitting down with her sister and giving an oral synopsis of the book for her sister to distill into a cover. That stayed with me, the beauty of translation that arises from a conversation, a relationship, a shared moment. 

Abbey

Visual Translation

Chip Kidd's TED Talk, "The hilarious art of book design," is particularly fascinating to me when I consider children's literature. He calls book design, a haiku, a "distillation," and a translation of the book's content. I hadn't really considered it, but truly, art is a visual translation of one's own understanding of a concept. I also appreciated Jhumpa Lahiri's addition that visuals are cultural, and presentation is precious. In translating children's literature, not only does a translator have to consider the child reader's understanding of words and phrases, but they also have to consider the child non-reader's understanding of the visual elements of the story. I am adding small visual representations of the poems I am translating, and will take into account that much like the words, the visuals are also translating my own understanding from one culture to another. The beauty of doing this with children's literature, though, is the trust that what is not understood can be learned.

- Lila

A Decision We Should Make in the Translation Process: The Cover of the Book

 Reading Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Clothing of Books and watching Chip Kidd’s The Hilarious Art of Book Design Ted Talk, introduced another type of trnalsation which can either attract or push away the target readers. Jhumpa Lahiri describes the right cover of a book as a beautiful coat. ‘’The right cover is like a beautiful coat, elegant and warm, wrapping my words as they travel through the world, on their way to keep an appointment with my readers. The wrong cover is cumbersome, suffocating. Or it is like a too-light sweater: inadequate. A good cover is flattering. I feel myself listened to, understood. A bad cover is like an enemy; I find it hateful.’’ Learning more about how a cover can influence the way a book looks was really interesting. Engaging with the cover and finding the right one is as important as stressing over the quality of the translation. A cover of a book is a part of a translation and it plays a key role for the success or failure of the book or translation. Seeing the examples of Osamu Tezuka’s Buddha and Augusten Burroughs’ Dry supports this idea. Lahiri’s example, ‘’During the period in which I was writing this essay, I found myself in a bookstore in Holland. The books all around me were in Dutch, a language in which I can’t read a word. It made no sense to open any of the books and glance at the first page. As I looked at the books, I could take in only their visual impact.’’  proves the power a cover may hold. The cover should be related to the context of the book and still attracts the readers and make them curious about what’s in it. 

Additionally, David Bellos mentions the concept of foreign-soundingness in his article, which I find increasingly significant nowadays. It makes me think of this question: should we, as translators, keep the foreignness or adapt it into the target culture? For now, for me, it depends on the context. I sometimes try to keep the strangeness of the source text and convey it as it is. But sometimes I feel the urge to adapt it to make sense for the target readers who may not be familiar with the source language and its culture. 

Ece Celikkol

The cover as translation

    I recently read a novel called If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English by Noor Naga, and it is one of the best books I have ever read. I’ve been thinking about it every day, and as I was reading Jhumpa Lahiri’s essay and watching Chip Kidd’s talk, I realized that I have no idea what the cover of If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English is supposed to represent. It looks like a sort of Caravaggio-style portrait of a handsome young man in armor, and does not appear to have anything to do with the book (at least, not that I can think of). One of my favorite parts of this book is the vivid characterization, and in my mind, I can see the characters perfectly clearly. I know how they walk, how they sleep, how they comb their hair; I know it based on the words I read. As I was listening to Chip Kidd describe the cover of Murakami’s 1Q84, it occurred to me that I may not want the cover to tell me something about the contents of the book. I want to decide for myself what the book holds, not hold it in comparison to some interpretation I have of the cover art. This reminds me of what Lahiri says, how she wishes her covers could be a still life by Morandi or something of the sort, and I like this idea. I completely recognize, as Lahiri discusses, that books are objects that need to be sold, and therefore, the cover does not serve merely the book but rather the needs of its material value. 

I know that my attraction to the abstract and opaque in book covers is reflective of my own taste, and I am not attempting to argue solely for them as opposed to other styles and approaches. Lahiri writes that “A cover that one person cherishes is devoid of meaning to another. What does this mean? I fear that, even in a globalized world, it signals an inability to recognize oneself in the other.” (53) This idea reminds me of the Bellos article, which deals with one of the most unanimously difficult questions of translation: what to do with the ‘foreign’? Is mediating the foreign not at the core of what we, as translators, set out to do? I understand Bellos’ argument that preserving foreign elements in translation relies on the reader’s relative understating of the functionings of the source language, and therefore, for more underrepresented and marginalized languages, the impact of foreignizing can actually do more harm than good, in further ‘othering’ the source language and marginalizing it from the speakers of the target language. There is no easy or correct solution—that is for sure. But I am trying to have a more positive view on this, and think of creative solutions. Bruna Dantas Lobato inspired me when she advocated for “keeping the weirdness” of the source text and language: a goal that can manifest itself in a variety of different outputs. Perhaps it could just be an effort to mirror repeated vowel sounds from the source into the target (something I often try for in Arabic to English). Sure, the reader of the translation likely won’t make the connection that this is mirroring the original Arabic sonics, but at least they are feeling a sort of similar aesthetic experience, even if it is not overt. Isn’t it enough to just let the reader feel something new and different, without them necessarily having to be able to recognize it as a feature of some language? 

- Luisa

What Happens if No One Knows French Anymore?

David Bellos's chapter on "The Paradox of “Foreign-Soundingness”" is what finally changed my mind about re-translations of canonical texts. Before reading this chapter, I believed that translations contemporary with the source text would always be the most effective because they exist in the same temporal context as the source text. However, the evolution of which other languages English readers are familiar with makes it impossible to understand the text in both translations and source texts. As Bellos tells us, the use of French for dialogue in Russian and English novels for readers that are no longer able to read French is paradoxical. Conversely, while the ability to actually read French has declined, its status as a language associated with prestige and high culture has remained the same. Thus, it is effective at communicating these qualities even though it is no longer effective for communication. Based on this relationship, it does make sense to retranslate so that English readers will be able to understand. 

As far as book covers, one aspect I wish the texts we read would've talked about  is how book covers are used to indicate genre. A photographed face tells me it's a memoir; a pair of cartoon figures indicates a romance. The translations I see often have simple, abstract covers, like those from Archipelago Books. What does it say that these covers often shy away from the main descriptor covers are used for?

Grace Ashton

But, in the TED Talk, why did his glasses only have one temple?

Okay, covers etc. and foreignization are the main themes of the readings for this (final) week. I’ll take them one at a time. The Knopf designer is quite funny, almost all of his jokes work well, his covers seem to work well too, although it might be a case of picking covers that were especially especial and thus suggested approaches that were successfully successful. See, as a counterexample, the (hopefully attached) cover of Knopf’s A Century of Poetry in The New Yorker, where the butterfly feels a bit disappointing. He also looks a little silly next to the much more earnest treatment that Jhumpa Lahiri gives the subject in The Clothing of Books. Lahiri is good on the details, her title even reminds us of the wonderful cloth of a clothbound edition, even as it aims at the larger issue of the physical presentation of the book in general. I like her remarks about editorial series, just thinking about rows and rows of uniform covers, the contents left mysterious, is the stuff that my own personal-library dreams are made of. I also have a fondness for the academic library rebinding of books into very heavy, identical green or red volumes with the titles and authors depressed into the spines. Certain publishing houses seem to do better than others as far as her issues of overdressing go—I am partial to New Directions, especially before they started allowing color on their covers. Recycling a cover wholesale from one book to another is nightmarish, as far as I’m concerned. Lahiri’s points are also specifically well informed by her multi-lingualism, her familiarity with non-American publishing markets, and her experiences of publishers trying to exoticize her covers along stereotypical, foreignizing lines. These days, even large swathes of the reading public seem daunted by the difficulty of books and need all the encouragement they can get to actually make it from one cover to another, and if that means over-ornamenting the books, it seems, to me, like an acceptable trade off. About the David Bellos article, his ultimate conclusion seems reasonable, translating the content of the book is enough of a challenge that trying to affect a style which represents the foreign language context is maybe a losing battle. One of the most convincing reasons for this is that the audience who is meant to benefit from the supposed French-ness of a French novel in English translation, for example, is exactly that group of people who are unequipped to make an informed judgement about the success or failure of such an effort, that is to say, English speakers who are not familiar with the French context. (One could try to argue that they have, at one time or another, visited France, and thus can evaluate such things “quite well, actually,” however language is an important element of culture. Additionally, a speaker of both French and English could pass such a judgement, but only in a way which is already informed by their familiarity with the French. That is, it's a Catch 22.) I especially like the implication that Bellos makes that, because English has become the dominant (leading) international language of media and business, everyday phrases from other languages are less commonly learned and naturalized into the knowledge basis of English monoglots.

-Elijah

Here is the cover of that book I mentioned from Knopf: