2023年经济学人 牛津英语词典背后的故事

（单词翻译）

    Culture

    文艺版块

    Book review

    书评

    Spelling glee

    词语的欢乐

    The Dictionary People. By Sarah Ogilvie.

    《编写词典的人》，萨拉·奥格尔维

    In July 1915 an ailing¹ James Murray, one of the early editors of the Oxford² English Dictionary (OED), defined one final word.

    1915年7月，《牛津英语词典》的早期编辑之一詹姆斯·默里强撑病躯，给最后一个单词撰写了定义。

    He had dedicated³ 36 years to the dictionary; his toil⁴ had taken a toll⁵.

    他为这本词典奉献了36年的时间，他的辛劳也让他的身体健康付出了代价。

    Knowing he would not see the project complete, he wrote his last entry: for “twilight”.

    默里知道自己看不到词典完成的那天了，而他写下的最后一个词条是“日暮”。

    The poetic⁶ pathos⁷ of Murray’s final days is one of many memorable⁸ tales in “The Dictionary People”.

    默里生命最后的这段充满诗意悲伤的故事是《编写词典的人》中许多令人难忘的故事之一。

    Conceived in 1857, the OED was a huge crowdsourcing project—“the Wikipedia of the 19th century”—comprising 3,000 people.

    编写《牛津词典》的构想在1857年提出，是一个规模庞大的众包项目，堪称“19世纪的维基百科”，共有3000人参与其中。

    The idea was to create a “descriptive” dictionary that tracked words’ use and meaning over time (unlike its “prescriptive” 18th-century predecessor⁹ by Samuel Johnson, which told readers how to say and use words).

    最初的想法是创建一部“描述性”词典，追溯单词的用法和词义如何随时间而演变(不同于塞缪尔·约翰逊在18世纪编写的“规范性”词典，约翰逊的词典告诉读者单词如何发音和使用)。

    Volunteers read widely, mailing in examples of how “rare, obsolete¹⁰, old-fashioned, new, peculiar” words were used.

    志愿者们进行了广泛阅读，将各种“罕见的、淘汰的、老式的、新式的、奇特的”单词例句邮寄过来。

    What is surprising about this fairly random¹¹ method is that it worked, achieving order through the large number of contributors.

    令人惊讶的是，这种相当随意的方法竟然奏效了，因为贡献例句的人数众多而形成了秩序。

    The origin story of Sarah Ogilvie’s book is almost as improbable as that of the dictionary itself.

    萨拉·奥格尔维这本书的起源故事几乎和词典本身的故事一样离奇。

    Ms Ogilvie, a former lexicographer¹² who served as an editor for the OED, went into the archives of Oxford University Press and stumbled across an old notebook.

    奥格尔维曾是一名词典编纂者，曾担任《牛津英语词典》的编辑。有一天她走进牛津大学出版社的档案馆，偶然发现了一本旧笔记本。

    It had belonged to Murray and contained the names and details of the dictionary volunteers, most of whom had previously¹³ been unknown.

    这是默里的笔记本，里面记录了词典志愿者的名字和详细信息，其中大多数人都藉藉无名。

    “The Dictionary People” is her work of detective scholarship, evoking¹⁴ the lives behind the names.

    《编写词典的人》是她的学术侦探之作，钩出了这些名字背后的人生。

    The dictionary’s contributors are an engaging cast, including three murderers, a vegetarian¹⁵ vicar, one of Karl Marx’s daughters and J.R.R.Tolkien.

    词典贡献者的阵容十分有趣，包括三名杀人犯、一名吃素的牧师、卡尔·马克思的一个女儿和J.R.R. 托尔金。

    Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, aunt and niece, were lifelong lovers and successful writers, who co-wrote plays under a male pseudonym¹⁶.

    凯瑟琳·布拉德利和伊迪丝·库珀是姑侄关系，但两人也是相伴一生的恋人和成功的作家，她们用男性笔名共同写作剧本。

    For some, the dictionary was an obsession¹⁷: one contributor supplied 165,061 quotations¹⁸.

    还有一些人对词典无比痴迷：一位贡献者提供了165 061条引文。

    Murray, too, was assiduous.

    默里本人也极其勤奋。

    He once wrote to George Eliot of “Middlemarch” fame to ask about a word choice in “Romola”, published 17 years earlier.

    他曾写信给以《米德尔马契》闻名的乔治·艾略特，询问她17年前出版的《罗慕拉》中的一个选词问题。

    (She responded courteously¹⁹.)

    (她彬彬有礼地给予了回复。)

    Yet he also found time beyond his Herculean project to be humane²⁰, paying several visits to one contributor imprisoned²¹ in Broadmoor, a high-security psychiatric hospital.

    然而，在完成这一艰巨项目之余，默里还留出时间做了一些仁慈之举，他多次探望了一位被关在布罗德穆尔的贡献者，布罗德穆尔是一所戒备森严的精神病医院。

    Through the multitude of stories, snapshots of a society in flux²² emerge: an age of scientific discovery, growing transport and communication links and increased professionalisation of scholarship.

    从众多的故事之中，一个变动中的社会的图像浮现出来：众多科学发现、不断发展的交通和通信联系，以及学术的日益专业化。

    Yet many of the dictionary’s contributors were autodidacts.

    然而，这本词典的许多贡献者都是自学成才。

    The project’s popularity reflected a growing community of people eager for intellectual pursuits but excluded from conventional academia.

    该项目大受欢迎，说明当时越来越多的人有智识追求，却被传统学术界拒之门外。

    Ms Ogilvie’s book is full of quirky titbits.

    奥格尔维的这本书充满了奇闻轶事。

    Many dictionary obsessives engaged in another crowdsourcing vogue²³: collecting and measuring rainwater.

    许多痴迷于词典的人还参与了另一种很时尚的众包工作：收集和测量雨水。

    The presentation of the book is unconventional, too, taking its structure from the work it describes.

    这本书的呈现方式也是不同寻常的，借用了《牛津英语词典》的结构。

    There are 26 alphabetical²⁴ chapters, each celebrating a group of contributors (memorably, “K” is for “kleptomaniac”).

    全书有26个按字母顺序排列的章节，每个章节都是为了纪念某一群贡献者(让人印象很深的是K代表“盗窃狂”)。

    This is a cunning conceit²⁵, though it sometimes means that broader issues emerge only piecemeal²⁶.

    这是一种别出心裁的巧思，但这种结构也导致有时更宏大的问题只能零零碎碎地呈现。

    “The Dictionary People” will appeal to logophiles.

    《编写词典的人》将会吸引词语爱好者。

    Pages abound²⁷ with wonderful words: absquatulate (to abscond), couthutlaughe (a person knowingly concealing²⁸ an outlaw) and zwodder (a drowsy²⁹ feeling).

    精彩的词汇在书中俯拾皆是：absquatulate(逃遁)、Couthortleh(故意窝藏罪犯的人)、zwodder(昏昏欲睡的感觉)。

    But Ms Ogilvie’s book is also a story of omissions³⁰.

    但奥格尔维的这本书也是一个关于遗漏的故事。

    The OED aimed to record English as it was used across the world; it was a product of empire.

    《牛津英语词典》旨在记录英语在世界各地的使用情况，它是帝国的产物。

    “The published sources of those words drew originally on the language of members of black and indigenous³¹ communities, whose names never made it into the pages of Murray’s address book,” Ms Ogilvie writes.

    奥格尔维写道：“有些单词最初来自黑人和原住民的语言，但他们的名字从未出现在默里的通讯录上。”

    In addition, many words were kept out of the OED: “homosexuality” was included in 1933, “lesbian” not until 1976.

    此外，许多词曾经被《牛津英语词典》排除在外：“同性恋”一词于1933年被收录，“女同性恋”一词直到1976年才被收录在内。

    When it came to slang, Murray was cautious about obscenity laws; first editions of the “C” and “F” volumes remain clear of the obvious culprits.

    对于俚语，默里对淫秽语言的态度十分谨慎，第一版词典的C和F部分十分清白，没有那两个众人皆知的词。

    Above all, though, this is a story about ordinary people.

    不过，最重要的是，这本书讲述了普通人的故事。

    It is a powerful testament³² to those who, to cite dictionary-helper George Eliot, “lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs”.

    引用曾为词典提供帮助的乔治·艾略特的话来说，这本书是那些“生前忠实地过着无名的生活，生后于无人来访的坟墓中安息”的人们曾存于世间的有力证明。