Beirut Day 16 – July 9, 2009

Yesterday in dialect class we watched another Lebanese music video. It’s called “Niswanji” which essentially means “Womanizer”. It was quite sexist, although not as bad as another one by the same artist I found on YouTube. Obviously the best line was “The man who doesn’t like women, may God send him illness”. Despite the sexism, it was quite catchy.

Yesterday was also the day of a class presentation on Mahmoud Darwish, the Palestinian poet. We were divided into groups and each of us took a different part: Sarah and I got his poetry, Suleiman and Emily got his life and death and Jessica, Teresa and Stephanie got his prose. I worked a decent amount on it, finding stuff about his style to talk about and extracting a video of his performance of one of his most famous poems (Record! I am an Arab, also called Identity Card).

The problems started the next morning when I went to the library. To print one requires a print card. The print card machine only takes 5000LL bills and I had engineered that morning to get one. Unfortunately it was too old and crumpled, the machine wouldn’t take it and no one around had any change. One of my dialect classmates was there copying his homework to turn in and he graciously lent me his card.

I took my USB drive to the printing computers. I logged in only to discover I couldn’t find the USB drive on there. The girl next to me told me I couldn’t use the ones on the screen but that I had to use the ones on the CPU. Unfortunately it still wouldn’t recognize it. I logged out and tried another computer. It could find the USB just fine but there was a printing jam, so I went to a third computer. The printing worked just fine there but I discovered to my horror that I had not put my write up of my presentation on the USB drive and I did not have time to get it. By the time I got to class I was 20min late, but the teacher was very understanding. The presentation went well aside from some brief technical problems and I managed to drag some sentences from my memory.

The high point of class was obviously when I got my ID back. Teresa had been at the cafeteria and the lady asked if it was hers and she said no, but she knew me. And luckily I had not acquired or paid for my new ID so that saved me 25,000LL. For lunch Sarah, Teresa, Jessica, Stephanie and I went to Lina’s for lunch. It was a nice place and the food was mostly French. Unfortunately we simply could not catch the waiter’s eye and it took us forever to get the bill so we ended up being 15 minutes late to class…and we are 5/7 of the class.

So after lunch it was time for the prose section and the group had photocopies of three pages of Darwish’s prose which they had translated and had apparently been very difficult. Although we probably shouldn’t, a lot of the time we use Google Translate to figure out a word. This had some up when the group was working with Hussein to try and figure it out. His response was the amazing “Google Translate doesn’t have a degree in Arabic”.

I have many problems with Google Translate but I still use it because it’s quick, on the internet and it’s not always wrong. My main opinion is you absolutely have to know what you’re doing. In Arabic especially it phrases things wrongs, it ignores gender, it often ignores proper conjugations, etc. There is no real way to conjugate the feminine plurals (you all feminine, they all feminine) and often the dual. Sometimes the words are just wrong in that you can’t always check if the meaning matches your intention like you might be able to do in a paper dictionary. Google also often will translate something using an older definition that is no longer in use.

So Arabic does not write short vowels: when you see written Arabic what you are seeing are all consonants and three long vowels. The short vowels, usually only written in texts where exactitude is required such as the Qur’an or to teach such as in children’s books, are not usually written and when are written appear above or below the letters in much smaller print. There are also diacritical marks that are also not written that elongate a letter or represent a stop. Unfortunately these don’t usually appear on Google. The prose group found this out when Google translated a word due to the lack of diacritical marks as “coincidence” when in reality the word was “shell”.

If you know what you’re doing and you just wanted to remember how to spell a verb or check that your translation of a word was correct, you’ll be fine…so long as you already know a significant amount of Arabic grammar. Other than that be very very careful and get your translation checked.