About connotations
‘Invitation to an insult-fest’

Words can carry invisible baggage, and potentially emotive baggage at that. Translators cannot simply ditch the baggage.

By Tove Andersson

While dictionaries and encyclopaedias have considerable power to define, they do not tell the whole story.
When a group or individual in Norway reacts to a word, comments sections and newspaper headlines are quick to proclaim an ‘insult-fest’.
‘Insult-fest’ [Nor. krenkefest] is an example of a word with baggage. There are words that generate good feelings (positive words), words that have adverse associations (negative words) and words that are neutral – and in some cases, the same word can have different associations.
At issue is the right to express yourself, including the right to humiliate or offend, versus the right not to be exposed to hate speech. The Norwegian word krenke comes from Middle Low German krenken [make ill] and krank [ill/weak] via Norse krankr (Norsk Akademisk Ordbok).
But when the website Great Norwegian Encyclopedia (Store Norske Leksikon, SNL) changes words, it is not for fear of making someone ill.

The n-word

The 2016 documentary film I Am Not Your Negro, based on author James Baldwin’s unfinished book Remember This House, tells the story of the USA through the three famous civil rights campaigners Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr.
Using previously unpublished texts, film and news clips, director Raoul Peck creates a powerful essay on the historical reality of Afro-Americans. Baldwin (1924-1987) made the following comment on American stereotypes:
‘It comes as a big shock, around the age of five, six or seven, to see Gary Cooper killing off the Indians and although you are rooting for Gary Cooper, that the Indians are you.’
The film – and its theme – remains topical today.
Hang on, do we still say ‘Indians’?
‘This is a word that is on the verge of falling out of use. We recommend using the word sparingly,’ Lotta Ederth, language consultant at the national broadcaster Sveriges Radio, told news website Sveriges Nyheter.

Apology from Swedish TV

In 2011, the Swedish newspaper Expressen wrote about an unknown ‘tribe of Indians’. Five years later, regional news programme SVT Nyheter Öst was criticised – and duly apologised – for referring to two ‘tribes of Indians’.
The word was more loaded than they had thought.
If you try to sell a book with ‘Indians’ in the title on Swedish websites, it will be removed; this is not the case in Norway, however.
Språkrådet – Norway’s national expert body for linguistic issues – does not advise against using the word, writing in 2017, ‘if we were to clean up every change and potential misunderstanding, we would have our hands full.’

Indians in the encyclopedia

In the same year, a delegation from the indigenous peoples of the Americas asked for the word indianer [Indians] to be removed from the Great Norwegian Encyclopedia. ‘I think we received around 10,000 fairly angry comments on social media. There are many older white men who feel we’re stealing their childhood, and who are afraid the game of “Cowboys and Indians” will disappear,’ explained Erik Bolstad of SNL. The headword indianer is still there, though now it links to ‘indigenous peoples of the Americas’.
‘It was a question of accuracy and modern language usage rather than political correctness,’ he told the regional newspaper Fædrelandsvennen. ‘Neither does SNL decide which words people “can” or “must” use; if people want to say or write indianer, they can do so – the word is still in the dictionary.’ (Leksikonbloggen SNL, 2017)

Who has the right to define?

This example prompted a dialogue, but what happens when we come from different cultures, when we invest the terms with different values?
This problem is neatly illustrated by the rapper Chuck D in the film James Brown – Mr. Dynamite: ‘I defined myself initially as “negro”, then “coloured”, then “black”.’
In December 2020, a football match between İstanbul Başakşehir and Paris Saint-Germain was suspended when the fourth official used the N-word. The official called out ‘negru’ in Romanian; the word does not mean ‘negro’, but ‘black’. But, people asked, why refer to black players by their skin colour and not white ones? The former Manchester United player Rio Ferdinand said that football needs to make a huge stand. He was referring to an incident where Millwall players took the knee in support of the Black Lives Matter movement, while fans booed.

Rich in melanin

In the 1990s, the organisation ‘African Youth in Norway’ stepped into the breach in a campaign against words such as neger [negro], farga [coloured] and mulatt [mixed-race] with its brochure ‘Kall meg hva jeg vil’ [“Call me what I want to be called”]. For Thomas Talawa Prestø, former leader of the organisation and winner of Viken County’s 2020 Culture Prize, ‘rich in melanin’ is nothing new. His great-grandmother, Borghild Rud (1910-1999), illustrator of Alf Prøysen’s Mrs Pepperpot books, used to say it. The equivalent melaninrik is a fairly new word in Norway.

When Jazz  arrived in Norway

Blackface entertainment was part of popular culture.
Charleston i Grukkedalen (National Library of Norway, 2019) is a 400-page illustrated chronicle and doctoral thesis by Erlend Hegdal that illuminates a forgotten chapter in Norwegian musical, cultural and media history. The book explores Afro-American artistes performing in Norway during the 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries. The illustrations bear witness to both the joy of music and racism. The National Museum points out ‘the pictures are used in a context that is potentially offensive’.

Pippi Longstocking

In the 1997 animated film Pippi Longstocking, ‘negerkung’ [King of the Negroes] was replaced by ‘kurre-kurre-dutt-kung’ [King of Kurre Kurre Dutt Island] in Sweden. The Norwegian equivalent became ‘sydhavskonge’ [South Seas King]. There was no shortage of reactions, but author Astrid Lindgren had actually wanted to remove the word as early as 1970. Her daughter, Karin Nymann, wrote a foreword to the books explaining why the word negerkonge was used, but would later change her view. ‘In recent years, I naively thought that the N-word was simply a word that belonged to the past and could be left in the books. But I’ve changed my mind about that now, because unfortunately it’s a word that is still used today. It causes harm, so we quite simply can’t keep it in the Pippi books.’(source: VG)

Neutral or sensitive           

 

In 2002, Professor of Nordic Linguistics, Finn-Erik Vinje (born 1936), asserted that ‘there is a tradition in Norway for the word neger [negro] to be non-discriminatory’ and that it was a neutral description.He believes the impact of this is open to debate ‘since unwanted connotations quickly attach to the new designations, and renaming as such must continue. It’s known as political correctness, PC.’(Journal of the Norwegian Medical Association)

Sprakradet 

The Language Council of Norway has been criticised for making the same claim as Vinje and has moved from the designation ‘neutral’ to ‘sensitive’. Under ‘sensitive words’, we find the following:
‘As a starting point, the word neger [negro] is not only racist; there is no question it can both be used and perceived as such. It is best to choose other words. Where necessary, e.g. if translating the English words “black” or “African-American” into Norwegian, svart and afroamerikansk or afrikansk-amerikansk respectively can be used. Mørkhudet [dark-skinned] may also be appropriate in some contexts.’
The search for contexts where the word is used positively is a futile one: negro work, Australian negro, negro slave, negro servant and a pejorative term for a journalist [bladneger]. The exception is negro spiritual, with the Norwegian word negrospiritual cited by Yann de Caprona in Norsk Etymologisk Ordbok (2014).  
‘In several languages, the word “negro” came to mean “black slave” and is thus usually perceived as extremely derogatory – particularly if used by white people – and must be avoided.’
The translator’s dilemma is recognising the ‘baggage’ such words carry.                                           
A good dictionary provides first a descriptive explanation (denotation), before then adding information about any negative secondary meaning (connotation) in parentheses.