Translating Orcs

I've been reading Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf. It's fantastic. In both senses of the word. I've always liked this kind of stuff, and it's only a coincidence that the movie has just come out. I mean, I would have been reading it anyway.

Something early on in the verses has caught my eye. Mr. Heaney translated "orcs" (actually orcneas) as "evil phantoms." I wonder if he was tempted to translate it as simply "orcs." I bet that a lot of Beowulf readers wouldn't be thrown by the word orcs. And those that were would probably be curious enough to look it up.

The Pragmantic Programmers give a presentation about the Dreyfus Model of communication. Workers (whether in nursing, cooking, or programming) can be divided into five categories ranging from beginner to expert. The less skilled require detailed rules. Bake in the oven at 450 for 30 minutes, then remove the pan using insulated potholders. The more skilled don't require such rules, and embrace intuition. Whip up some fritters.

It's suggested that communication across too many levels is difficult. A novice cook would have trouble following the latter directive. An expert would chafe at having to issue the former one. One of the catch phrases when considering the Dreyfus Model is "legalize intuition." In other words, good organizations tend to defer to experts' intuition.

I have to quibble with that, though.

In our profession, one of the phrases we hear too much is: "I have n years experience, so you have to just trust me." Well, first of all, there's a difference between having twenty years experience and having one year of experience twenty times in a row. Most of us overestimate our expertise.

But even when the person making that argument really is an expert, I feel that it's still a cop out not to articulate the logic behind one's point of view. If you really are such an expert, you should be able to convey why the solution you advocate is best. I just don't buy that the expert can't make himself understood to the novice.

Of course, that doesn't mean that the novice will believe him. Or embrace the direction given. But that's different from being unable to communicate.

I've been blessed with a number of very talented professors over the years. A great many were brilliant. None of them met the stereotype of solipsist genius that couldn't teach worth a darn. In fact, the most gifted were exactly the ones who communicated best.

Nobel laureate Richard Feynman remarked that if a Physics topic could not be explained to freshmen, then physicists really didn't understand the topic.

So, to my fellow architects out there, the next time you are charged with putting a little extra effort into defending your point of view, resist the temptation to take it as a challenge to your role in the group. Instead, welcome the opportunity to reify your intuition into a coherent explanation. And trust your audience to be bright enough, or at least curious enough, to know what orcs are.