Re: in collaboration with

Garrett Wollman wrote:

In article
<ea2e9ab6-c917-460d-b262-7b0ef4e33b24@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
John Kane <jrkrideau@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Aug 12, 1:05 am, woll...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Garrett Wollman) wrote:
Apropos the original subject, is it time once again to start flaming
the German-L1 ESL teachers who teach their students to translate
"bzw." as "resp."?

It might be but what does 'resp." mean?

I am very fond of H.W. Fowler's article on "respectively" [1]:

"respective(ly). Delight in these words is widespread but depraved. Like
soldiers and policemen, they have work to do, but, when the work is not
there, the less we see of them the better; of ten sentences in which they
occur, nine would be improved by their removal. The evil is widespread
enough to justify an examination at some length. Examples may be sorted
into six groups: A, in which the words give information needed by
sensible readers; B, in which they give information that may be needed by
fools; C, in which they say again what is said elsewhere; D, in which
they say nothing intelligible; E, in which they are used wrongly for some
other word; and F, in which they give a positively wrong sense."

He then goes on to present and discuss examples of the above.

Thank you for stepping forward as Exhibit A.

Near as I can tell, it means "whatever a German thinks 'bzw.' means".

Often, this is the case -- or "whatever a (writer of) German wants it to
mean". "Bzw." (beziehungsweise) can sometimes be translated
as "respectively" in sense A above. Frequently, it makes more sense to
translate it as "and" or "or"; occasionally "but" is appropriate, and
leaving it out altogether is often better than any of these alternatives.
The Germans, thorough as they are, have also come up with Case G, which
means: "I have a series of values for a series of parameters which are
inter-related in various ways. I am too idle (or challenged) to summarise
these relationships clearly for the benefit of my readers; I shall simply
throw them into a sentence and place "bzw." somewhere in the middle.
Anyone smart enough to be reading my publications will surely be able to
figure things out for themselves."

Often, the best way to translate a Case G sentence is to distill out the
meaning and rewrite it from scratch.

[1] A dictionary of Modern English Usage by H.W. Fowler, Second Edition
revised by Sir Ernest Gowers, p.521 (ISBN 0-19-281389-7)

--
Les
Exhibit B
.

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