The following is an adapted version of an article written by Gergely Póla, originally published in Hungarian in Magyar Krónika.
A reader leafing through a high-quality newspaper might not even imagine how much editing most press articles require. What does an editor cut out, and what is the purpose of doing so?
A copyeditor is a despicable character: a significant part of his job consists of chopping words and sentences out of other people’s texts, disregarding their hard work. The majority of the press—to put it mildly—is not characterized by the quality of its writing at all. Often, the principle of quantity prevails: producing as much content as possible in a given amount of time, which frequently results in verbosity—filling the character limit with empty sentences and words. In worse cases, passages are copied from others, from the author’s own earlier writings, or even from another paragraph of the same article—a tiny rephrasing here and there, and perhaps no one will notice…
Of course, the perceived pressure to fill space is not always behind this phenomenon; it could also be the forced delivery of a message or sensationalism. But even then, there may be plenty of words in the text that should be cut, even if the author is not guilty of padding, hammering home a point, or exaggeration. For now, let us focus primarily on this specific case—the translation of superfluous elements that constitute grammatical errors in Hungarian texts.
What Else Is There?
Even someone with an average sense of language would cringe at some of our imported words that already have a foreign prefix, since this means that the plus Hungarian prefix is not needed. Similarly, the superlative form is unnecessary in cases like ‘most minimal’ and ‘most maximal’; after all, the base form already expresses the extreme value.
Interestingly, relatively few people in the press dare to use these superfluous word elements, yet superfluous words are running rampant. Surely the newspaper delivery person drops the printed blog pages and Facebook news feeds into the mailboxes every morning of those who are capable of writing phrases like ‘online blog’, ‘online news portal’, ‘internet news portal’, ‘online social media’, and ‘internet website’. We wonder if the authors have calculated how old the person, association, or building is that they claim is celebrating its ‘100th centennial’? We are also curious how many villages in the Budapest area the person who writes ‘small rural settlements’ has actually visited. And what is it like when ‘the price of bread gets more expensive’?
Besides, we can read that, since its production no longer meets demand, Germany ‘imports’ energy from other countries—in other words, it does not rely on domestic imports. From articles about the war raging in Eastern Europe, we learn that one side is carrying out a ‘military operation’ (that is, not a civilian one), while the other side is preparing for ‘compulsory conscription’ (that is, not voluntary), furthermore, the conflict is causing ‘geopolitical problems on a global scale’ (that, it does not affect only local regional politics), and establishing peace could be a politically ‘strong trump card’ (so no one should imagine some low-level or ninth-rate trump card).
‘There may be plenty of words in the text that should be cut’
One of today’s buzzwords is the phrase ‘on-the-scene report’—is this meant to prove that the journalist actually ventured outside the four walls to produce a piece that, by the very nature of its genre, can only be recorded on location? Another popular term is ‘political party’, which, logically speaking, refers to a ‘political political organization’—clearly, we are dealing with a sloppy literal translation, as in the case of ‘foot pedal’.
When It Backfires
Mistakes like this do not always stem from carelessness. People often hope that using ‘political party’ and similar pedantic, pretentious terms—‘speaker of the parliament’; ‘factual information’; ‘plans for the future’; ‘Hungarian National Assembly’; ‘German Bundestag’—will make the text sound more professional and authoritative. In reality, however, excessive precision tends to make the text more cumbersome and even confusing, as demonstrated by the following examples that attempt to rigidly express the past tense: ‘From 1964, Brezhnev led the former Soviet Union’; ‘the former suppressor of the 1848 revolution’; ‘the former president was removed from office’; ‘tens of thousands were killed in the liberated camp’.
It also happens that the author feels the chosen Hungarian word is not forceful enough, so he or she adds a foreign-origin word with roughly the same meaning—or vice versa—only to find that the resulting gibberish actually weakens the message. ‘Migratory immigration’ often involves ‘illegal border crossings’, which is why border protection is a ‘fundamental basis’—we can piece together a vivid example from three sources. Other gems: ‘top priority’; ‘visual spectacle’; ‘traditional custom’; ‘response reaction’; ‘typically characteristic’; ‘preventive forestalling’; ‘new novelty’.
Sometimes people expect an emotional boost from a superfluous adjective or even a subordinate clause. Phrases like ‘completely disregarded’, ‘highly successful bestseller’, ‘terrible tragedy’, or ‘both sides agree that’ may be forgivable in spoken language, but should be avoided in writing. This is especially true of verbose phrases like these: ‘at least as important, if not more important’; ‘the lowest revenue in the last three years, and even lower than last year’s’.
Cell Phone into the Trash!
This phenomenon, known in technical terms as a pleonasm, is not the same as—more or less—objective spelling. Some redundancies are cleverly disguised, and perhaps not everyone considers them mistakes—but that does not change the fact that the first word in phrases like ‘originally native to Southern Europe’ or ‘4pm in the afternoon’ is just as much a spare filler as in ‘negative disadvantage’ or ‘electric electricity’. Even an experienced copyeditor sometimes finds themselves scratching their head, wondering how a particularly cunning linguistic impostor could have fooled them for years with phrases like ‘approximately 10–15 thousand’, or ‘further continue’.
Conjunctions are also excellent at disguising themselves; at least, most editors do not notice when there are more of them than necessary: ‘although the nominal amount is increasing, but the real value is decreasing’; ‘since the mayor resigned, therefore new elections had to be called’; ‘our athletes won 18 medals in London, while 15 in Rio, and 20 in Tokyo’. The most reckless ones can even cram three or four conjunctions with similar meanings into a single sentence: ‘although the Merkel cabinet was not exactly a friend of the Hungarian government, but it was nevertheless closer to it in terms of worldview’; ‘although the situation has improved—albeit paradoxically from the perspective of poverty—however, new challenges have emerged’.
And just how heartless an editor can be: he even crossed out things that are not actually mistakes. The word ‘phone’ rarely refers to a landline device these days, so the compound elements ‘cell’ or ‘smart’ can generally be omitted—just as the adjective ‘colour’, which still had a distinguishing function 40 years ago, is no longer needed before the word ‘television’. It is highly recommended to shorten the phrase if a compound element is attached to it.
In everyday contexts, the word ‘coronavirus’ refers to the strain that triggered the 2020 pandemic; thus, in most cases, ‘coronavirus infection’ is sufficient instead of the wordy phrase ‘novel coronavirus infection’. Similarly, the term ‘franc loan’ is simpler, more concise, and more elegant than ‘Swiss franc loan’, and the reader is also unlikely to think of the Djibouti franc.
As editors maintain, anything that lacks informational or stylistic value is best omitted. When readers pay for content partly or entirely with their time, it is essential that the texts be streamlined and free of all kinds of ‘unnecessarily redundant ballast’.
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