Words matter because words have meaning.

In this age of internationalism. Where people around the world constantly translate from one language to another. The importance of the meanings of words can make a great difference, to the impression, the writer gives to an article.


Case in point is the highly interesting article on Sergey Shipov's review of 2015.

link

and the original Russian article

link.

Checking the article, google translates some of the article from Russian as below :

"...
Sergey Shipov: I think the 2015-th year as a whole:

Year was not dull. Battle chess tournaments with a lot of interesting games were followed by political scandals.The computer could sit and watch without stopping. But even more interesting was on the ground.
The major sporting events of the year I think, and the accession of Mary Muzichuk determination of the composition of the new Candidates tournament in men. In fact, it is an introduction to the more important events of the next year.
As for the scandal - will talk about them in detail, answering questions.
..."

The phrase "on the ground" is translated in chess24 as being "at the scene of events". The better phrase of course is "on the ground", implying someone working hard for the viewer and listener to keep up with the stories.


"You could sit at your computer and watch and watch without a break, but it was even more interesting to be there at the scene of the events." Was how the sentence was translated.

The phrase "at the scene of events" is a bit vague and non specific and of course conjures up all sorts of other events. The phrase "...at scene of the events" also is a phrase often used in crime scenes, which is not a nice image to conjure up. Event is the right word to describe a tournament. Any tournament is an event. But whether being at an event is better is a question and an argument and more importantly is often not possible.


Of course google translation of the subsequent sentence to "The major sporting events of the year I think, and the accession of Mary Muzichuk determination of the composition of the new Candidates tournament in men." is jumbled and is well translated by chess24 as

"I consider the year’s main sporting events to have been the crowning of Mariya Muzychuk and determining the line-up for the men’s Candidates Tournament."

However translations can be subjective as well as literal. And one might also translate it as, "The major sporting event of the year was the accession of Mary Muzichuk and the determination and composition of the World Chess candidates tournament."

I do apologies if this article has turned into a lesson in English phraseology and grammar. However word are words and as is implied by the title of this article words have meaning. English is a complex and ever evolving language that absorbs many words and phrases from around the world. Two words that are important in english grammar is simile's and metaphors.

Simile is where you make a comparison between two things. For example, she was as brave as a lion, he moved like a tin man. She is like a dove, he is like a tornado.

Metaphor is very similar to simile in that you are making a comparison between two things but where the comparison is much more elaborate and the use of "as" and "like" are omitted.

(examples to follow)

There are of course shorthand phrases like Murrayisms. Named after Murray Walker a famous f1 commentator from the 70's, 80's and 90's on the BBC. He would say something comic, e.g. say some event would never happen and for 5 seconds later the event would. An example appeared in a tweet during a tata steel match.

Hammer on Norwegian TV: "Magnus will never ever take on g6. It's not going to happen.". Magnus just took on g6. #TataSteelChess #c24live

— Tarjei J. Svensen (@TarjeiJS) January 22, 2016

Another thing I will write about is the use of tense.