15 April 2012

Barbara at Cafe ZaVtra (Moscow)

Barbara Partee writes:

On Thursday April 19 I'll give a talk in Russian for a general audience at the Cafe ZaVtra in Moscow, on formal semantics as the offspring of linguistics and philosophy. (Formal’naja semantic oak porozhdenie lingvistiki i filosofii.) There will be a live video broadcast over the website of the hosting organization, polit.ru. The website with both the announcement of the talk and the link for the streaming video is here:  http://polit.ru/article/2012/03/28/anons_partee/ . The talk starts at 7pm Moscow time (11am Amherst time); the talk will be followed by an hour of questions and answers – doing that in Russian is the part I’m most nervous about, so I’m doing a couple of rehearsals of that part. And Volodja and other colleagues will be there to help when I can’t find the words I’m searching for or absolutely can’t understand some question.

By the way, both Google translate and Facebook were tremendously useful as I worked on my first draft. Google translate has to be used with caution – you can’t just turn it loose. It wanted to translate ‘validity’ with a term relating to the expiration date on medicines and warranties; and when I gave it David Lewis’s famous sentence, “Semantics without the treatment of truth conditions is not semantics”, it wanted to translate ‘treatment’ in the sense of medical treatment, as if we needed to cure semantics of the ailment of truth conditions. (Like.) But with care and some iterations between the two languages and a few tricks, it can really help. And bilingual friends on Facebook helped at many crucial points as I worked. This weekend I’ll revise the talk and make the slides, then a couple of rehearsals and I’ll be as ready as I’ll ever be. Volodja is helping in many ways, including discussing this stuff in Russian with me at dinner every day. (I must confess that up until now, the great majority of my discussions of semantics with colleagues and students have been in English, and I’ve had to do a lot of homework for this talk! But although I’m a little bit nervous, I’m really looking forward to it!)