Found in Translation

By now you've probably heard about, if you haven't actually read, a new book that's been drawing a lot of attention to translating, Found in Translation (FIT). The title is yet another take on what's become one of the most hackneyed of contemporary buzz expressions, but never mind: it's a book after my own heart. Because its avowed purpose is to make ordinary people aware of the universality of translating (in the broad sense that includes interpreting) and of its importance in human affairs.

It's made up of a collection of true stories, with some comments, about translators spread over place and time. Each item is only a few pages long, and the reader can pick up and put down anywhere among them. So it's easy reading and ideal for filling in time on short journeys.

Though there's a common educative purpose, there is however a fundamental difference of approach and emphasis between FIT and this blog. The authors of FIT are both Professional Experts and they write as such. I've followed one of them, Jost Zetzsche, for a long time as a blogger who runs a very useful blog on translation technology (see References). He's an accredited English-German translator. The other author, Nataly Kelly, is a certified court interpreter for Spanish in the Boston area. No doubt because of Nataly, the first item is a ‘day in the life of’ description of a Professional Telephone Interpreter. This is followed by a story with the intriguing title 'The Seventy-Million-Dollar Word', intended to support the contention that Professional Expert Interpreters (PEIs) should always be called in for doctor-patient medical communication; and that despite the cost, it may be much more expensive in the long run not to do so. I agree in principle, although the PEI's and the funds to pay them aren't always available, even in these days of telephone interpreting for covering emergencies.

Take as an example the story 'And the Oscar for Best Interpreter Goes to...' (p. 167). It begins with a couple of paragraphs about how an Expert Sign Language Interpreter, Jack Jason, became an infant trilingual in American Sign Language, English and Spanish. There's also a paragraph about him as a Language Broker (p. 168). But then, "Fast forward to today," and the rest is about his Expert and Professional work:

"One moment you'll find him rendering an acceptance speech at the Academy Awards. The next you'll see him standing next to Hollywood stars at galas and charity events. Turn on the television, and there he is, speaking to Larry King, Ellen, or Donald Trump [or] President Obama."

This blog would have been more interested in his trilingual language brokering.

But the difference is only one of emphasis, and in fact FIT has stories of Native and Natural Translators too. For instance, the young Japanese hotel employee who created a welcoming environment for visiting Japanese businessmen in Detroit (p. 87). Or the Chinese mothers who have

"formed online groups at websites such as Dreamkidland.cn, where English-speaking mothers can translate children's books into Chinese for their children. Many of the translations have been used by publishers to produce actual books. And because the mothers ask for input from the children, kids actually have a say in which books get translated" (p. 72).

It's very debatable, however, whether "Most translation is not done on a volunteer basis" (p. 73), even Expert Translation, because paid translation is measurable ($33 billion a year, p. 73) whereas the unpaid translation is not; and with the advent of crowdsourced translating, the proportions are shifting.

Another plus, from my viewpoint, is that FIT attributes due importance to the translation of religious texts, Buddhist and Muslim as well as Christian. And yet another is its chapter on 'Waging War and Keeping the Peace'. As long-time Followers know, religious and military translation are two of the bees in my bonnet.

For laughs there's a good sprinkling of translation howlers.

It's a pleasure to recommend this book, both for personal reading and as a present to give to others. For more academic and more affluent readers, it's not in the same league with Translators through History (see References), but then it's not addressed to the converted. Indeed my only gripe is not against the authors or the content but against the publishers. I wish there were a hard-cover edition printed on decent paper and with some illustrations. The book deserves it.

References

• Nataly Kelly and Jost Zetszche. Found in Translation: How Language Shapes Our Lives and Transforms the World. Foreword by David Crystal. New York: Penguin-Perigree, 2012. 270 p. Preview here.
• Jost Zetzsche. Tool Box Newsletter. 219th Basic Edition, 2013. See it here.
• Jean Delisle and Judith Woodsworth. Translators through History. Revised edition. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2012. The Benjamins catalogue page is here.

The Engineer Who Upended Technical Lexicography

This is about a man who was not a Professional Lexicographer but a Professional Engineer. He was trained as an electrical engineer and he inherited a successful engineering factory from his father. But he became a self-taught Expert Lexicographer who was internationally recognised as such, and he revolutionised one major area of lexicography, that of technical terms.

His name was Eugen Wüster, he was Austrian, and he lived from 1898 to 1977.

He became interested in his teens in overcoming barriers to international communication. That was one of the driving motives in his career. In that spirit he learnt Esperanto and wrote an Esperanto-German dictionary. However, he wrote his dictionaries to spread his ideas and not to make money.

The other main inspiration was his observation that multilingual technical terminology, starting with that of his own speciality, electrical engineering, was constantly hindered by imprecision. There were too many synonyms, or near synonyms, for the same referent, and terms were translated by terms in other languages whose referents were not exactly the same. Wüster's answer for electrical engineering was to seek international agreement on the standardisation of terms. As a result, the Committee for Terminology Standardisation of the International Standards Organisation (now ISO/TC 37) was established in 1936. But how to ensure that the terms thus standardised would have exactly the same meaning?

It’s generally believed in linguistics that words have two facets that are welded or linked together mentally. One is their outward spoken or written form, their signifier, and the other is their meaning or concept, their signified. Mentally we may access a word by either, but traditional lexicography accesses them by form. (Yes, I know about thesauri, but that’s another story.) Hence we look up a word by its written form, and in a monolingual dictionary the concept follows as a written description or less often as a graphic. In bilingual dictionaries, however, it’s different. We still look up the source language word by its form, but what follows is the target language form or forms that is/are deemed by the lexicographer to be its equivalent. The concept isn’t provided, so we can‘t judge whether it's the same and often we don‘t fully apprehend it.

Wüster's answer can be stated simply as: Start with the concept. First define or describe the concept precisely, and then look for the word form or forms that express it; not vice versa. From that follows the principle: no term to be presented without its concept. It's a procedure that can be applied far more widely than to standardised terms; because even if a word in Language A doesn't have exactly the same meaning as a word substituted for it in Language B, explicitation of their concepts enables us to see and make allowance for the differences. He made other contributions to a new 'science' of terminology as practised by a new profession, that of terminologist, but this was the most important.

His ideas came at the right time, because of important changes in the 'ecology' of technical vocabulary.

•  The 1950s saw the first wave of what was called 'the documentation explosion': an enormous increase in the volume of technical documents in circulation. Sustaining it was an explosion in the technologies themselves. New terms were required for the novelties. Typically they appeared first in English and then equivalents had to be devised in other languages.
• The advent of computers increased the amount of information that could be stored and presented about a term far beyond what was practicable and affordable in paper dictionaries. Furthermore, computers provided new tools for finding concepts without having to know the signifier form.

 Let's take a real-life example.

Last week I was translating the degrees of a Spanish doctor who's going to Canada. The Canadian medical authorities are very fussy about such translations. The doctor has a degree as especialista en aparato digestivo. Aparato digestivo is usually translated as digestive system, digestive organs or sometimes digestive tract. So on the face of it, i.e. according to the signifiers, I might have translated this as "specialist in the digestive organs," and people would have understood. However, it didn't seem right, because other branches of medicine have Greek and Latin based terms for them that are the ones used professionally , e.g. ophthalmology for the medicine of the eyes and vision. A doctor's degree diploma in that field wouldn't be inscribed specialist in vision and the optic system. What was the professional term in this case? I had no idea. So I tried the Wüsterian approach. I needed a term that expressed the following complex of concepts:

• A branch of medicine
• Treatment of disorders of the digestive organs. (Note that the concepts of treatment and disorders are missing from the Spanish wording, according to which the referent might well have been a branch of anatomy.)

So I Googled for definitions that contained the keywords medicine and digestive organs, and quickly found a term whose concept matched exactly what I was looking for. It was gastroenterology. Several medical dictionaries define it as a branch of medicine focused on the digestive system and its disorders. (Furthermore, it's derived from Greek. But the Wüsterian system has its drawbacks, and one of them is that it ignores etymology.)

  

Wüster was supported by Unesco and left behind him an international organisation of his followers, Infoterm. Today there are many professional terminologists who work according to his principles and consign their findings to computerised term banks. In Canada there are enough of them for them to be considered a branch of the translation profession alongside written translators and interpreters. You can take a look at a large Canadian term bank by clicking here.

  

Would he, I wonder, have ventured to upend technical lexicography if he hadn't been trained as  (to quote Kevin Lossner's comment) "a  practical engineer".

  

This post concludes the mini-series on Native Lexicographers.

 References

• Eugen Wüster. Wikipedia, 2013.
• Eugen Wüster. Enciklopedia Vortaro Esperanta-Germana [Esperanto-German Dictionary]. 4 vols. Leipzig: Hirt, 1923-1929. Considered a classic, but hard to find.
• Eugen Wüster. Introduction to the General Theory of Terminology and Terminological Lexicography. Vienna: Springer, 1979. English translation of his Einführung in die allgemeine Terminologielehre und terminologische Lexikographie. There are also French, Japanese and Spanish translations.
• Eugen Wüster. The Machine Tool: An Interlingual [English, French, German] Dictionary of Basic Concepts , comprising An Alphabetical Dictionary and a Classified Vocabulary. London: Technical Press, under the auspices of the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, 1968. An application of his principles in a paper format. Second-hand copies on offer from Amazon UK.

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Source: Österreichische Nationalbibliothek

Native Lexicographers (2)

The flourishing of Native Lexicographers is even more marked in the area of specialised technical dictionaries. Here are a few examples. Canadian financial translators all know ‘Le Sylvain’, Dictionnaire de la comptabilité, whose lexicographer, Fernand Sylvain, was a chartered accountant. French legal translators know the Dictionnaire juridique français allemand and Dictionnaire juridique français anglais (‘Le Quemner‘) by Thomas Quemner, a lawyer. Others still use 'Le Ginguay', a pioneer French/English dictionary of computing whose author was a translator at IBM and which has been through 14 editions since the first one in 1970:

“Ce travail d'envergure a contribué à l'implantation d'un vocabulaire français dans un domaine particulièrement vulnérable à l'anglicisation." (This important work has helped gain acceptance for a truly French vocabulary in a field that is particularly open to Anglicisms.)

Further afield both in place and time, one of the earliest English-Japanese dictionaries was produced in the late 19th century by a British diplomatic interpreter, Ernest Satow (the same Satow as in the previous post) and a Japanese informant, an official at the Japanese Foreign Ministry; then revised by two other British consular officials, and dusted off and reissued in 1943 for use by Americans in the Second World War (see References).

It seems to go like this. Somebody who’s a practitioner in a specialised field and is faced with having to do translations finds that the existing dictionaries for that field are inadequate and decides to work on a better one as a sideline to their main professional work, for the general benefit. Their dictionaries are usually one-off enterprises, though they may go through several editions; and they tend more to the simple paired word list than the more expert products.

The Native Lexicographers are not necessarily such luminaries as the ones mentioned above. Here's an example that not only makes this point but shows how dictionaries are no longer limited to words:

Allyson Hayes

"An overwhelming majority of the parents of children who are deaf or hard of hearing are not fluent in American Sign Language, reflecting a communication disconnect that could be critical in a medical emergency. Now, a simple pamphlet created by University of Delaware nursing student Allyson Hayes is available to help these children tell their caregivers how they’re feeling.

"Hayes wrote some brief explanatory text and collected images of signs for nine symptoms—including cough, itchy, temperature, nausea and dizzy—as well as seven terms connected with hospitals, such as nurse, doctor, emergency, medicine and allergy.

"The resulting brochure, Important Signs for You and Your Child, was sent home to parents of children attending the school, but it also caught the attention of a school administrator, and plans have since been made for it to be used by Delaware’s Statewide Programs for the Deaf, Hard of Hearing and Deaf Blind Services.

“Allyson has made a great impact in her accurate assessment of the needs of the deaf population and created a visually pleasing and accurate brochure that will stay in use with this population,”

There's a brief video about it here.

References

• Fernand Sylvain C.A., et al. Dictionnaire de la comptabilité et des disciplines connexes. Toronto, etc.: Institut canadien des comptables agréés, 1977. There's a digitised copy here if you have the software to open it.
• Thomas A. Quemner, licencié en droit (Bachelor of Laws). Dictionnaire Juridique Français-Anglais: Droit, Finances, Commerce, Douanes, Assurances, Administration (French-English Legal Dictionary). Paris: Éditions de Navarre, 1955. Second-hand copies from Amazon.
• Michel Ginguay. Dictionnaire d'informatique, bureautique, télématique anglais-français (English-French Dictionary of computing, data processing and telematics), 1970. More recent editions available from some Amazon sites.
• E. M. Satow and Ishibashi Masakata, An English-Japanese Dictionary of the Spoken Language, 1876, 366 pages. Revised by E. M. Hobart-Hampden and Harold Parlett, Yokahama, Kelly and Walsh, 1904; reprinted Perkins, South Pasadena CA, 1943. The Yokahama edition is online here. Surprise! A reprint of the original 1876 edition was published only a few months ago: details here. It's a facsimile of the copy in the Bodleian Library at Oxford. Since it bears no publisher's imprint, it looks like Satow had it privately printed in the UK. It would be interesting to see how spoken Japanese has changed in the last 150 years. Already by 1876, he says, for beer, "The word beer (pr. birû) has been adopted by most Japanese."
• Diane Kukich. University of Delaware nursing student produces pamphlet of medical terms in sign language. UDaily, 2011. The article is here.

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UD nursing student Allyson Hayes, right, and Terri Boothe, a nurse with the Delaware School for the Deaf, demonstrate sign language detailing medical condition symptoms with student Brandon Crosson.
Source: University of Delaware Research.

Perfect Bilinguals. Interpreters as 'menials'

This is by way of an interlude while I prepare the continuation of the previous post.

Over at his blog The Liaison Interpreter, Lionel Dersot wonders what a perfect bilingual is. It's true there are several definitions, but my favourite description is the one I got from a doctoral thesis by a well-known French diplomatic interpreter, Christopher Thiéry. He proposed the following as a test protocol. Seriously.

1. Put the Subject (S) for 15 minutes among a group of native speakers of language A and get a conversation going. To avoid bias, the group mustn't include any acquaintances of S.

2. After the conversation, ask the participants (other than S of course) whether S is a native speaker of their language.

3. If so, put S for another 15 minutes among a group of native speakers of language B and repeat steps 1 and 2.

4. If both groups have answered in the affirmative, then S is a perfect bilingual. Simple and realistic.

Personally I don't think I'd pass in any of my second languages. Perhaps French on a good day. Thiéry, who studied Professional Expert Interpreters who were members of the International Association of Conference Interpreters (AIIC), thought few of them would pass it; but I believe the results would be quite different with subjects from a naturally bilingual community.

Elsewhere Lionel recounts his efforts to encourage a good Japanese interpreting student who is inhibited by the way Japanese society regards liaison interpreters as 'menials'.

"I told her how derogatory interpreting in consec mode inside entities can be perceived. An enabler is a servant, an in-between, meaning for those acting as leaders a menial job."



Satow in the 1860s

This is by no means a new problem. Ernest Satow, a British Professional Expert diplomatic interpreter in Japan in the 1860s, was constantly annoyed by the low status which the Japanese accorded to interpreters.

"On one occasion, some Japanese officials at a conference had written up our official titles over the doors of the rooms intended for us, and mine had been rendered by 'tongue-officer,' a euphemism for interpreter; this I immediately had done away with, and my name substituted, for in Japan the office of interpreter at that time was looked upon as only fit for the lowest class of domestic servants, and no one of samurai rank would ever condescend to speak a foreign language. I had often to fight pretty hard with Japanese of rank to ensure being treated as something better than a valet or an orderly."

The problem was aggravated by the fact that interpreters were associated with foreign trade; up till then the Japanese had only needed interpreters to deal with the traders from overseas, and commerce was considered demeaning for samurai. Obviously the Japanese attitude to trade has changed a lot since then, but not their attitude to interpreters.

References

• Lionel Dersot. A short course report. The Liaison Interpreter, 2013. Click here.
• Christopher Thiéry. Bilingualism in Professional Conference Interpreters. Translated from French by Susan Stillinger. Monterey CA: Monterey Institute of International Studies, 1980.
• Ernest Satow. A Diplomat in Japan: The Inner History of the Critical Years in the Evolution of Japan When the Ports Were Opened and the Monarchy Restored. London, 1921. One of the later editions is available here.

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Yokahama Archives of History

Expert and Native Lexicographers




Murray amidst his crowdsourced paper slips


There was a previous post on this topic back in 2010, but that's a long time ago. To find it, enter native lexicographers in the Search box on the right.

Dictionaries are the translators' prime tools. Therefore, how to find and use dictionaries effectively should form part of an Expert Translator's training, and it requires some understanding of what dictionaries contain and how they are structured. So lexicographers, the people who compile and write dictionaries, are the translators' boon companions. Indeed, writing a bilingual dictionary is itself a special kind of translating. Just as there are Native and Expert Translators, so too there are Native and Expert Lexicographers.

In the beginning there are the 'dictionaries' we all – including Natural Translators and Language Brokers – carry round in our heads. Without them, translating would be intolerably onerous and slow. Imagine having to look up every word! Linguists prefer to call that kind a lexicon, whereas the -graphy in lexicography implies a written form. Written dictionaries too have been around since ancient times: for more, enter ebla in the Search box. But they have come a long way since the simple lists of paired words found on the clay tablets.

The development of modern dictionaries began in the Renaissance and then received a great boost in the 19th century.  At the same time, thanks to printing and education, their popularity increased, and to the point that they have become mainstays of major publishers like Larousse and the Oxford University Press (OUP). However, very few of the millions of dictionary users pause to give a thought to their lexicographer authors. Hence this post.

It was in the 19th century that the figure of the Professional Expert Lexicographer (PEL) emerged. Noah Webster (1758- 1843) in the United States and Émile Littré (1801-1881) in France were early examples. Note that though their dictionaries were monolingual, both Webster and Littré were also translators. Expert Translators use both bilingual and monolingual dictionaries. Today the major dictionary publishers (Larousse, Langenscheidt, etc.) employ whole staffs of PELs.

One archetype of the PEL was James Murray, the founding editor of the great Oxford English Dictionary (OED). He was employed on it full time by the OUP from 1878 until he died in 1915. He had a good preparation for it as an expert in philology ("the study of the structure, historical development and relationships of a language or languages"). He introduced innovations in lexicographic method that were way ahead of their time. For example, he used crowdsourcing to gather good material. Yes, there was crowdsourcing before there were computers, but it was painstakingly slow. With no email, Murray's crowd had to send him their contributions by ordinary snail mail on slips of paper.

"Anything addressed to ‘Mr Murray, Oxford’ would always find its way to him, and such was the volume of post sent by Murray and his team that the Post Office erected a special post box outside Murray’s house."

The red post box is still there. And he pioneered corpus-based lexicography, again without computers. Yet his crowd mined manually a corpus that was enormous even by today's standards, nothing less than a thousand years of English literature.

So much for the PELs. All in all, there aren’t that many of them, and there are surprisingly few university courses or diplomas that train them. Many, perhaps most, of the 19th and early 20th-century bilingual dictionaries were put together by Native Lexicographers who learnt their skills from the dictionaries that they were using and who made their livings in other professions, typically schoolteacher or university professor. Thus Karl Breul, the main author of Cassell’s German and English Dictionary, was Reader in German at Cambridge. Jean Edmond Mansion, whose magnum opus was Harrap’s Standard French and English Dictionary, taught French in an English school. Hans Wehr, whose corpus-based dictionary set a new standard in modern Arabic bilingual lexicography, was a university professor of that language and his dictionary was translated into English by another professor. (Yes, the dictionaries themselves are sometimes translated.)

To be continued.

References
Noah Webster. greatsite.com, 1997-2013. Click here.

"Noah Webster published his first dictionary of the English language in 1806, and in 1828 published the first edition of his An American Dictionary of the English Language. The work came out in 1828 in two volumes. It contained 12,000 words and from 30,000 to 40,000 definitions that had not appeared in any earlier dictionary. Webster changed the spelling of many words in his dictionaries in an attempt to make them more phonetic. Many of the differences between American English and other English variants evident today originated this way. Webster's dictionary was so popular that 'Webster's' became synonymous with dictionary to many Americans. As a result, the Webster's name lost trademark protection and is now used by numerous publishers in the titles of their dictionaries."

Émile Littré. Dictionnaire de la langue française (Dictionary of the French Language), popularly known as Le Littré. Paris: Hachette, 1863-73, after nearly 30 years of work. 4 volumes. A digitised copy is available here.

James Murray (lexicographer). Wikipedia, 2012. The article is here.
James A. H. Murray et al. (eds.). A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles, later renamed The Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1884-1928. 10 vols. There's an up-to-date revision online here. Translators beware! The overwhelming mass of historical data in this dictionary makes it unsuitable for translators of modern texts. It should not be confused with the many other English dictionaries published by the OUP.

Karl Breul. A New German and English Dictionary / Compiled from the best authorities in both languages. Revised and considerably enlarged. London: Cassell and New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1906.

J. E. Mansion. Harrap’s Standard French and English Dictionary. London: Harrap, 1933-1939. The introduction describes the corpus that was used. Later revised editions are still available.

 Hans Wehr (University of Münster). A Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic. Translated and edited by J. Milton Cowan (Cornell University) from Arabisches Wörterbuch für die Schriftsprache der Gegenwart, Wiesbaden, Harrasowitz, 1961. Online here.

Image: Wikipedia

A Very Happy, Healthy and Prosperous New Year to Everyone, and especially to my 146 supportive Followers.


This year the blog will continue to proclaim that

irrespective of language, place, time, type, training, age, circumstances and language proficiency; insofar as bilingualism is universal, so too

TRANSLATING IS A UNIVERSAL HUMAN CAPABILITY.

Or, to put it more simply:

ALL BILINGUALS CAN TRANSLATE TO SOME EXTENT.

Nutcracker (conclusion)

This is the continuation of the previous post.

Nutcracker, for reasons mentioned in the previous post, didn't enjoy the same success as Sleeping Beauty and it therefore took longer to reach the West as a complete work. (Even the story was little known in Britain and America, though an English translation of the Dumas version had existed since the late 19th century and one by a better-known translator was published in 1919 – see References)

"Although it was not considered much of a hit in Russia The Nutcracker kept being performed throughout the theatre year (at that time it was not yet heavily associated with the Christmas season). In the West, however, it boomed... in scattered pieces, with the Arabian dance transplanted [for Diaghilev] into the Ballets Russes’s Sleeping Princess and with Anna Pavlova‘s take on The Waltz of the Snowflakes.
"The first complete Nutcracker was staged in London by the Vic-Wells Ballet in 1934, based on choreographic notation by Nicholas Sergeyev."

Sergeyev was a former dancer and stage manager at the Mariinsky who'd emigrated in 1918. The transcription of this and other ballets into systematic choreographic notations constitutes yet another example of intersemiotic translation, but we won't dwell on it here.

"Ten years later saw the first US version by San Francisco Ballet (1944) and another ten years brought George Balanchine’s blockbusting version for NYCB (1954), now staged every year by several US ballet companies. By the 1980s, 300 separate productions were touring the US."

Balanchine was another Russian émigré, who, like Sergeyev, knew Nutcracker from his younger days at the Mariinsky and stayed close to the original, although he did make changes because he was himself very creative. Indeed his greatest creation was his dance company, the New York City Ballet (NYCB), which has had a great influence on ballet in the United States. His is an example of the contribution that the flight of Russian artists after the Revolution made to the transfer and implanting of Russian culture in the West.

Meanwhile, the music that Tchaikovsky had extracted from the full ballet score to form an orchestral suite made its own successful way through the concert halls on both sides of the Atlantic. And then, in the United States, it underwent yet another surprising intersemiotic transfer.

Between 1938 and 1940, Walt Disney and his team of graphic artists made the animated film Fantasia, and it included the Nutcracker Suite. It was among the most original and pioneering films of all times for a number of innovations: the use of classical music as the basis (music film instead of film music), the recording thereof by a first-class orchestra and conductor using the best audio available at the time (it was the first American film to use stereo), its uncompromising concert length (there was a 15-minute interval when I saw it), its combination of animated and human actors, use of the most advanced animation resources in the world, and above all the free rein given to the graphic artists.

"During production, the animators were given no instructions for coloring. Walt Disney instructed them to use any colors they wanted, a first."

I was lucky enough to see Fantasia during its 1941 first release, before cuts and restorations and with the original soundtrack recorded by The Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Leopold Stokowski. Despite his Russian-sounding professional name, Stokowski himself might be considered a cultural export to the USA, since he was born Leonard Stokes in London, England. He threw himself into the project, and the result was phenomenal. Like many masterpieces, Fantasia is uneven, but at its peaks it's brilliant. For very young children, there's no doubt that its most brilliant idea of all was the casting of Micky Mouse as The Sorcerer's Apprentice. But the film was mainly pitched at older children and at adults. And that's where the music of Nutcracker came in.

Fantasia was released four years before the American premiere of the ballet, yet in the visuals of Nutcracker there is clear ballet influence.

"Over the decades, much has been written about the relationship between Disney and dance.
Upon the 1940 premiere of Fantasia at the Broadway Theatre in New York, Dance Magazine said, 'the most extraordinary thing about Fantasia is, to a dancer or balletomane, not the miraculous musical recording, the range of color, or the fountainous integrity of the Disney collaborators, but quite simply the perfection of its dancing.'”

My own mental accompaniment to the music of Nutcracker was formed and imprinted indelibly by Fantasia long before I saw the ballet or read the story.

References

• Alexandre Dumas. Princess Pirlipatine and the Nutcracker. Translated and adapted from Dumas' version of Hoffman's story by O. Eliphaz Keat (pseudonym of Philip Bertram Murray Allan). London, 1919. With illustrations. The British Library has a copy.
• Nicholas Sergeyev. Encylcopaedia Britannica, here.
• 'Emilia'. The Nutcracker. The Ballet Bag, 2009. This very complete article is here.
• There are full details and many comments on Fantasia at the International Movie Database (IMDb) site. Click here.
• 'Storyboard'. Fantasia in eight parts: The Nutcracker Suite. The Walt Disney Family Album, 2012. The article is here.

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From The Nutcracker Suite sequence in Fantasia. Source: cornel1801.

Goodbye 2012!