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subjectively speaking
15 Jan 2007 03:53 pmdude. snowing. the word is almost an understatement. seriously, seriously snowing, pouring snow, and it's above freezing. in other words, what it's really doing is slushing. i fucking hate slush.
Professor Surprise today expressed disdain for the popular (swedish) social sciences terms for the person you interview: "informant" and "respondent". the former, she feels, smacks of espionage, and the latter of - well, to me it smacks of gallup polls or just possibly lab experiments, but she hadn't thought of that; she had an incoherent babble that i didn't follow, there. she laments that the swedish language does not allow for the term "interviewee", and advocates for "intervjuperson". then she put me on the spot: what does "audacity" mean? i couldn't for the life of me express it in swedish. for my future reference, lexin says it's "fräckhet", which is also more directly "shamelessness".
this reminds me of how the direct translation to english of the preferred psychiatric healthcare jargon for psychiatric patients is "users", which the Norwegian stubbornly clung to as a translation for a long time, before being corrected to "clients" eventually by an international journal editor somewhere. "patients" is completely beyond the pale, and so is any language that sounds like you're talking about patients or medical procedures (such as "treatment"), even when you are, in fact, talking about medical procedures (eg hospitalisation or medication for psychosis).
Professor Surprise today expressed disdain for the popular (swedish) social sciences terms for the person you interview: "informant" and "respondent". the former, she feels, smacks of espionage, and the latter of - well, to me it smacks of gallup polls or just possibly lab experiments, but she hadn't thought of that; she had an incoherent babble that i didn't follow, there. she laments that the swedish language does not allow for the term "interviewee", and advocates for "intervjuperson". then she put me on the spot: what does "audacity" mean? i couldn't for the life of me express it in swedish. for my future reference, lexin says it's "fräckhet", which is also more directly "shamelessness".
this reminds me of how the direct translation to english of the preferred psychiatric healthcare jargon for psychiatric patients is "users", which the Norwegian stubbornly clung to as a translation for a long time, before being corrected to "clients" eventually by an international journal editor somewhere. "patients" is completely beyond the pale, and so is any language that sounds like you're talking about patients or medical procedures (such as "treatment"), even when you are, in fact, talking about medical procedures (eg hospitalisation or medication for psychosis).
