Lost in translation: We live with nonsense placenames thanks to poor adaptation from Irish to English

In Belfast for a short period a few months ago, there was an outbreak of nonsense. There, on a hard-won bilingual street sign off the Ormeau Road, an entirely new Irish word was coined. Where it should have read Ascaill Pháirc an Fhéir, it instead read Ascaill Pháire an Fhéir.

The former means Haypark Avenue, as a quick cross-check with the English wording would prove to even the most self-effacing Gaeilgeoir. The latter doesn’t mean much of anything.

The word “páire” even appeared elsewhere, on five signs across three streets, in what a Belfast City Council subcommittee described as an “absolutely unfortunate” incident.

Belfast being something of a mecca of modern urban Irish-speaking, the mistakes were noticed quickly, and they will be fixed at no additional cost to the ratepayer. It was a pity, but also perhaps a symptom of success at a time when Irish-language translations are making rapid headway into areas that want them across the North.

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“We would much have preferred the council spent their time dealing with the significant backlog in applications, rather than revisiting old ground and rectifying mistakes that never should have happened in the first place,” Cuisle Nic Liam, language rights co-ordinator at Conradh na Gaeilge, said. It was an “isolated incident” and is less of an issue than vandalism for campaigners.

Of course, not every misstep on the North’s signage will be as simple as a misprint. Bilingual signage in Ireland dates back to before partition, and the evolving tastes and dead ends of policy are still visible on older signs around the country today.

One problem faced in the early 20th century, and faced also in the North now, is the question of how to render obviously English placenames into Irish when there is no Irish root.

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Dr Tom Spalding, a consulting historian and author of the book Layers: The Design History and Meaning of Public Street Signage in Cork and Other Irish Cities, recounts some of the options available to the first generations to Gaelicise city streets.

“They could try and transliterate names from English; although the lack of k, w, v, z and j in the Cló Gaelach presented problems. For example, Washington Street in Cork was rendered in 1918 as ‘Sráid Bashington’ with a ‘ponc’ or dot over the B,” he said.

Sharman Crawford Street, also in Cork, is rendered phonetically in Irish as Sráid Searman Cráford.

“Other times, a back translation from English would be attempted, and occasionally, where the name was initially a Gaelic place name, it would be easier: e.g. Sráid an tSean-Dúna [Old Fort Street] for Shandon Street.

“In the first decade of the last century in Cork, Irish spellings were provided by Conradh na Gaeilge. On one occasion, the branch in which Tomás Mac Curtain, later Lord Mayor of Cork and murdered by the RIC, was active provided a ‘translation’ for Coburg Street [named after the royal house of Prince Albert] to Sráid Uí h-Uigín, probably referencing the Latin American freedom fighter Bernardo O’Higgins.”

After writing about Dublin street signs earlier this year, I received a steady stream of examples and questions from the Gaeilgeoirs I encountered. There is a sign in Dundalk, I learned, that says Sráid na Mainistreach (Abbey Street) in Irish but Castle Street in English. Many people live on roads where the signs disagree with each other. And what did I think of the ship vs sheep debate in the translation of Dublin’s Ship Street Great?

Everyone who thinks to look finds one eventually. “I wouldn’t have the level of Irish required to pick errors in someone else’s translation or transliteration, but I am particularly fond of Bóthar Bhóthar na gCloch, the ‘Road of the Road of the Stone’ ie Stannaway Road, Crumlin, in Dublin,” says Spalding. The vast and invaluable official database at Logainm.ie, for its part, acknowledges that this particular example might “at first glance appear tautologous”, but says it’s an occupational hazard.

One I have become stuck on myself for a few months is Ballyfermot, which Logainm calls Baile Formaid. Not Tormod, or Thermod, or any other T name, as the earliest sources in English and Latin, going back to the 12th century Norman invasion say. And not Diarmait, after local dignitary Diarmait Mac Giolla Mocholmóg, as the historians reckon.

It’s an odd one. “If you were to translate the word ‘formad’, it means envy,” says Dr Emma Nic Cárthaigh, a UCC academic who has worked on the Historical Dictionary of Gaelic Placenames since 1996 and sits on the Coiste Logainmneacha, the expert panel that advises the minister of the Gaeltacht on Irish placenames. “But clearly envy has nothing to do with it. It’s a person’s name. With the ‘ballys’, you would rarely get an abstract name, it tends to be a person’s name. It could well be a Diarmaid, going way back.”

Nic Cárthaigh did not sit on the Coiste Logainmneacha when the decision was made, but she traces a possible process as follows: “In the 1840s, in the Ordnance Survey letters, someone comes along and puts Ballyfermot in pen, and then in the 1960s, someone from the Post Office puts Baile Formaid, where they’re interpreting it as envy, but they haven’t looked at the previous evidence clearly.”

The Coiste, perhaps mindful of local upheaval, left it alone.

Some of the more obvious bad Irish on display over the years was documented by the long-running Gaeilge Dána Facebook group, which had 1,300 members before being shuttered due to spam. Pádraig Ó Mealóid, its administrator, says that amid the unavoidable blitz of the written word, there was “something powerful in being able to share our annoyance at all the myriad ways that the Irish translations can and do go wrong”.

The mood varied from humour to fury, he says, but the posts, which captured everything from absent or backwards fadas to a sign translating Swords’ Airside as ‘Slios an Aeir’ – the side of the air – provided “a constant reminder that, after a hundred years, the State has still not managed to impart a good grounding in our national language to its citizens”, Ó Méalóid says.

As for solutions, he adds: “What we really need is an Irish equivalent of the Académie Française, with absolute authority over the language, with powers to publicly censure all transgressors, both public and private. A month in the Gaeltacht being only allowed to speak Irish would soon soften their coughs. I am, of course, available for a reasonable fee.”

Ultimately, from shopping streets to rural villages to supermarket aisles, all of this is a consequence of the Englishing of Ireland. By the time attention turned to rigorously naming the places of the English-speaking parts of the country, the names in the mouths of the people were already closer to the ones on the official documents than the ones that would have been spoken hundreds of years before.

The way it turned out wasn’t actually inevitable: the biggest towns in Ireland with names in Irish form are ones that were renamed, like Portlaoise (30th) and Cobh (53rd). In Wales, Llanelli, Rhyl and Merthyr Tydfil are in the top 10, despite English domination even longer-lived than that in Ireland.

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“It’s very funny, if you get talking to Welsh scholars or Welsh speakers, they are mesmerised and enraged by the wholesale anglicisation of Irish placenames,” Nic Cárthaigh says. “They didn’t go so far in Wales, and the Welsh are really bolshy about it.

“I’ve a Welsh friend who really annoys me because he always says ‘how are things in Corcaigh’. That’s really unnatural to our ears – cop yourself on and say Cork – but he has a point as well. It was a major act of vandalism on some level.”

So we live on with nonsense placenames that sound more familiar to us than their originals, and the experts continue their efforts to ensure we can know where they came from if we want to.

Some places in Ireland, however, robustly resist any efforts at direct translation whatsoever. A few, in fact, won’t reveal any meaning at all, in any language.

Take Finner, Co Donegal. A townland between Ballyshannon and Bundoran, it is just over two square miles in size and is home, in the modern day, to the 28th Infantry Battalion of the Defence Forces at the eponymous Finner Camp.

It has a long history as an encampment in fact – in 1536, according to the Annals of Loch Cé, the Ó Domhnaill mustered many men with the intention of fighting an equally impressive army of Ó Conchobhair men in Sligo. Arriving at Finner, he “rested and remained in that place until the rising of the sun on the morrow”.

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The problem is, that’s the only mention of it. “It’s spelled in that reference as Findir. We’re providing it [according to the historical dictionary’s spelling standard] as Finnir. It’s been anglicised as Finner. We have no idea what it means,” says Nic Cárthaigh.

The scholar Edmund Hogan in 1910 suggested that that it should be interpreted as Fionnabhair, a character from Táin Bó Cuailgne. “It’s the same name as Guinevere from King Arthur and Lancelot – that would be a Welsh version of the name.” This works well enough for some, but for Nic Cárthaigh and the academics “nobody can be sure”.

“We don’t know what it means, so we’re leaving it untranslated.”

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