IVP - Strangely Dim

Ticked Off

By David A. Zimmerman

Part of my church’s ministry to the community these days is a program called Alpha. If it were a macro in Microsoft Word, it would look a little something like this:

For n = 1 to 15
1. Enjoy a meal together.
2. Sing together.
3. Watch a forty-five-minute video together.
4. Talk together.
Next
End

As weird as that may seem to you, it’s pretty standard stuff. Ask any programmer. The really weird thing about the program is that the speaker on the video is British. Now, I don’t hold it against anyone for being British, but they shore do talk funny. It’s cute, in a way, like watching public television on Sunday nights.

My line of work puts me in contact with lots of British books. For roughly the same amount of time that I’ve been going through Alpha, I’ve been busy translating two British books from English to English. As weird as that may seem to you, it’s pretty standard stuff. British grammar, for example, calls for single quotation marks around quoted material: ‘Four score and seven years ago’. It also calls for terminating punctuation (that’s “periods” for all you laypeople) to be placed outside quotation marks, as you can see in the same quoted material above. To translate the phrase from English into English, then, I would render it thus: “Eighty-seven years ago.”

Subtle, I know. It can take some time, but in general most English-to-English translation is relatively straightforward. Where it gets dicey is in the arena of idiom.

British people call the subway the ‘tube’. They call the bathroom the ‘wc’. They call a line a ‘queue’ or something like that. They say things like ‘quite right’ and ‘tally ho’ and ‘jolly well good’. None of these has a direct equivalent in English. It’s my job to decipher their meanings and make them meaningful to American readers.

I find myself applying this skill to my experience at Alpha. The most notorious example thus far comes when the speaker starts talking about lists. Several things on his lists have invariably been ‘ticked off’, which seems on the surface to be unlikely—unless, I suppose, his list included the job of ‘ticking off my American audience’, for example.

For Americans, intentionally ticking something or someone off is offensive, a willful act of malice. For a British speaker to go around ticking things off so cavalierly should lead us to count his message as not worth hearing.

But wait a minute: the context of his comment tells me that ‘ticking off’ may require translation from English to English. I sleuthed it out a bit and concluded that ‘ticking off’ is English for “checking off,” as in “I’m so excited to be checking this week’s Strangely Dim off my list—even though it is a bit hard to understand and for the most part meaningless.”

So there’s hope for us yet, we Americans and our British neighbors. As long as they don’t tick us off, everything will be jolly well good.

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