A lot of what you read has been simplified for you. The instructions you got when you left the hospital. The letter telling you your appeal was denied. Consent forms, terms of service, the text on the wall next to a painting, the news if you’re under twelve. And then there’s a different kind of thing that gets the same treatment: Great Expectations cut down to eight hundred words of vocabulary, Molière with the verse taken out, a Brazilian novel you’re reading in somebody else’s English because you can’t read the Portuguese yet.
We use the same word for all of it, and it isn’t all the same.
The first kind is a real discipline. There’s an international standard for plain language now, and in the US there’s been a law since 2010 requiring federal agencies to write in it. People do this for a living. A benefits form written at a graduate reading level fails the people who most need to fill it in, and fixing that is real work that takes real skill.
And it works. That’s not a concession I’m making reluctantly. If you’ve ever stood at a pharmacy counter trying to figure out a dosage schedule you know what a clearly written one is worth.
But think about what plain language actually is. It’s a way of writing nobody uses with a friend. It’s flat on purpose. It avoids ambiguity on purpose. It has no rhythm, because a form is supposed to mean one thing and a scared person shouldn’t have to work for it. All of that is right for a form. It starts to be a problem when the thing you’re simplifying was made out of the stuff plain language removes.
The same idea, applied to a novel
Somebody reads Machado de Assis, or Romeo and Juliet, and thinks more people should get to have this. So they make a version in language a fourteen-year-old or a learner can get through. That comes from a good place, and it mostly works. You read a modernized Shakespeare and you understand the play. You follow the story, you get the jokes, you know why everybody dies.
You’re also no better at reading Shakespeare than you were before. Next time you’ll need the same help.
And something else drops out that’s harder to see. Take the Pardoner in the Canterbury Tales. He isn’t a general point about hypocrites. He’s Chaucer going after one specific practice, for readers who knew exactly what he meant, and the joke depends on them recognizing it. If you modernize him you have two choices. You can leave the target where it is, in which case it lands on nobody, because who has an opinion about indulgences now. Or you can find a modern equivalent, and now you’re running a six-hundred-year-old argument through an institution it was never about, and the reader is getting a comment on a comment. Neither option is dishonest. Both of them lose something the original had.
You can be given the whole story and still miss what it was doing, who it was aimed at, and why anyone at the time would have laughed.
What actually goes missing
Translation and simplification tend to lose the same things, which is why it makes sense to talk about them together.
The first is the exact word. Writers don’t pick unusual words to be difficult. They pick them because the usual word is a little bit wrong. A character who sauntered is doing something a character who walked isn’t. He has time, or he wants you to think he does. Change the verb and the plot is fine and the man is gone. One substitution doesn’t matter. A few hundred of them and you have a book where nobody moves like themselves.
The second is the form. This is easiest to see in Shakespeare because he wrote in meter and the meter is doing work. A line hits differently when a character breaks the pattern. A sonnet isn’t just a short poem. Clueless and 10 Things I Hate About You keep the plots and they’re both good movies, and nobody comes out of either one having read Shakespeare. The story moves across fine. The shape it was written in doesn’t, and the shape was a lot of what it was.
The third is the way people actually talk. One of the most common greetings in Korean is 밥 먹었어?, which word for word means did you eat? Translate it that way and you’ve got all the words and none of the meaning, because it isn’t about food. It means something more like are you doing okay, is somebody taking care of you. No good translator renders it literally. The literal version is correct and wrong at the same time. Every language has hundreds of these, and they’re the first thing to go when you’re trying to make every sentence make sense on its own.
One sentence, two ways
Here’s a line from Tudo que o rio sabe, chapter 1. It was written in Brazilian Portuguese for readers at B1:
Depois pegou o telefone e leu de novo, mais devagar.
Then he picked up the phone and read it again, more slowly.
Every word is ordinary. Eight months into Portuguese you know all of them. And the sentence tells you the man is worried, that he’s not sure what he just read, that he’s checking himself before he says anything. It doesn’t say any of that. It’s all in mais devagar, two of the simplest words in the language.
Now simplify it. Not badly, just efficiently:
Roberto ficou preocupado com a mensagem.
Roberto was worried about the message.
Shorter. Probably easier. It has the information in it. It also isn’t a scene anymore. Nobody picks up a phone, nobody reads anything twice, and the small bit of figuring-out you were going to do yourself got done for you.
What we do instead
We aren’t going to give you a shortened Dom Casmurro. We aren’t going to take the ten best-selling novels in the language you’re learning and make careful, reduced versions of them. Omorphos Publishing writes the book at the level in the first place.
Writing to a constraint is a normal thing to ask of a writer. Poets write in meter. Screenwriters write to a page count. Picture-book authors work with a vocabulary far smaller than anything a B1 reader has, and nobody thinks Where the Wild Things Are is a cut-down version of a better book.
Starting from the constraint is also what makes the rest of it possible. The language can sit a little ahead of you on purpose, understandable but not comfortable, because a book you find completely easy doesn’t have anything left to teach you. Chapter thirty can be harder than chapter three without anyone pointing it out. A word can show up early and then come back two hundred pages later in a different context, so you end up knowing it instead of having looked it up. The glosses can thin out as you go, because the point was always for you to stop needing them.
Here’s how we build them, if you want the whole argument, or just look at the catalog and read a sample.
Comments