Lost In Translation

Mamet In Japanese

There was an interesting article in The Daily Yomiuri about a playwright who translated Mamet's seminal play Glengarry Glen Ross into Japanese. it seems it was a challenging task:

"I was overwhelmed by the amount of dialogue. On the first reading, I could barely understand what was going on. But I could feel the power in the dialogue," Emori said. "Even though I'm not a native English speaker, I got a real sense of the lively, aggressive atmosphere of the story through word choice and alignment."

Glengarry, written in 1982, tells the story of four real estate agents over two desperate days. They need to unload some undesirable properties onto unsuspecting customers. They flatter and lie to their prospective buyers, while swearing, yelling and backstabbing each other in the hope of beating out the others for promotion.

The title comes from two of the developments--Glengarry Highlands and Glen Ross Farms. Better salesmen get better leads, which means better properties and a higher class of customer. One of the agents tries to get good leads through bribery, while the other plots to steal the leads and sell them to a competitor.

The play was performed in London and the United States, and in 1992 was adapted into a film of the same name (Japan title: Matenro o Yumemite), with a cast that included Al Pacino, Jack Lemmon, Alex Baldwin, Ed Harris and Kevin Spacey.

Glengarry is a dialogue and jargon-heavy piece that requires a lot of work and energy from its actors, and, of course, its translator.

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Mother-tongue proficiency key

Like most Japanese, Emori studied English until high school. From that point onward, however, he studied on his own. He says he is not a literary man, and has never lived or worked abroad.

Despite his lack of formal education in the field, he chose to take on a play that had never been translated into Japanese before. With little information about the story and the incredible amount of dialogue, he found himself in over his head at first. But after getting a grasp on the atmosphere of the play, he started to understand the desperation the middle-aged men were feeling as they tried to get their piece of the American Dream. After reading the story, he was determined to have it performed before a Japanese audience.

"The most important thing when translating is to be proficient in Japanese," Emori said, adding that a translator needs to have a wealth of linguistic knowledge stored up to know which words or expressions would best fit the nuances of the original.

According to Emori, choice of personal pronouns is one of the most difficult things when it comes to translation.

"When you translate the word 'I,' beyond the gender difference, you must choose between words such as 'boku,' 'ore,' 'uchi' and 'washi,' for example," he said.

"And the other interesting thing about Japanese is [even in the same character], the way they use pronouns changes. For example in English, 'you' will be still 'you,' but the tone of voice used when saying 'you' may differ based on the character's emotional state. In Japanese, on the other hand, the words can be switched from 'anata' to 'anta' as the speaker becomes enraged. These subtle changes can completely influence the feeling of a conversation," he said.

Despite the rough language spoken by the characters, this interviewer found Emori's 135-page Glengarry script elegant and old-fashioned. Images of stylish, aggressive men from a period drama speaking like Emori seem to float from the pages. The dialogue does not have the feeling of a translation, instead reading as if it was written in Japanese, not diligently converted from English.

Emori also discussed the problems raised by the variety of verb endings found in Japanese, as opposed to English, which tends to stick to one easier pattern, the so-called "be verb."

During translation for Glengarry, Emori struggled with the word "lead," a word and concept key to the entire story. He needed to find a short, punchy word for the script, as it is repeated frequently throughout. In his theater company's previous productions, he simply chose to stick with the original, "leads," but in this latest version, he chose to go with the word "tama," an expression that Japanese often use like English speakers would use the expression "good one." The film's translator--the famous Natsuko Toda--however, chose to go with the word "neta," a word reporters, for example, often use when they receive a tip-off or lead.

Murakami Accepts Award In Israel With Message Of Dissent

Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami goes to Israel to give his message of fighting the machine reprinted at Salon:

Today, however, I have no intention of lying. I will try to be as honest as I can. There are a few days in the year when I do not engage in telling lies, and today happens to be one of them.

So let me tell you the truth. In Japan a fair number of people advised me not to come here to accept the Jerusalem Prize. Some even warned me they would instigate a boycott of my books if I came. The reason for this, of course, was the fierce battle that was raging in Gaza. The U.N. reported that more than a thousand people had lost their lives in the blockaded Gaza City, many of them unarmed citizens -- children and old people.　

Any number of times after receiving notice of the award, I asked myself whether traveling to Israel at a time like this and accepting a literary prize was the proper thing to do, whether this would create the impression that I supported one side in the conflict, that I endorsed the policies of a nation that chose to unleash its overwhelming military power. This is an impression, of course, that I would not wish to give. I do not approve of any war, and I do not support any nation. Neither, of course, do I wish to see my books subjected to a boycott.

Finally, however, after careful consideration, I made up my mind to come here. One reason for my decision was that all too many people advised me not to do it. Perhaps, like many other novelists, I tend to do the exact opposite of what I am told. If people are telling me -- and especially if they are warning me -- "Don't go there," "Don't do that," I tend to want to "go there" and "do that." It's in my nature, you might say, as a novelist. Novelists are a special breed. They cannot genuinely trust anything they have not seen with their own eyes or touched with their own hands.

And that is why I am here. I chose to come here rather than stay away. I chose to see for myself rather than not to see. I chose to speak to you rather than to say nothing. 

Two From The New Yorker

Here's an entertaining little vignette from Noah Baumbach (director of Kicking and Screaming & The Squid and the Whale) in Shouts & Murmurs:

August 24, 2008
I uncork a 2003 Haut-Médoc, which has a delightfully oaky nose, and pour a glass for myself and a bowl for my subject, Louis, the gray-and-white mouse I’ve selected for this study. I’ve chosen him for his serious and restrained demeanor—among the other rodents, he keeps to himself. Cautious by nature, he sniffs the wine apprehensively, but after a sip or two he laps it up eagerly.

The Château La Croix opens up in the glass, developing a full body and a luscious texture, and really hits its stride by the sixteenth bottle. Once we get a good head on, Louis is able to do the treadmill for twice his normal length of time and I do a pretty solid forward roll.

The Wire creator, David Simon, has an interesting pop culture-related obituary as well:

In February of 1963, twenty-four-year-old William Zantzinger, armed with a toy carnival cane and wrecked on whiskey, made a spectacle of himself at the Spinsters’ Ball at the Emerson Hotel in Baltimore. He was a drunken country mouse in the big city, at a time when the notion of racial equality had barely shown itself in the neighborhood of his father’s tobacco farm. When the hotel’s black waitstaff was slow to serve Zantzinger another drink, he yelled racial epithets at Hattie Carroll, a barmaid and a fifty-one-year-old mother of eleven, and he rapped her on the shoulder with his cane. She became upset, then collapsed and died of a stroke.

Bob Dylan read about the case in the newspaper. He wrote the magnificent “Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” with the paper splayed on the table of a Seventh Avenue luncheonette. Zantzinger was then and forever after a master villain.

Most Likely To Succeed

Malcolm Gladwell takes on the teaching issue. I basically agree with a lot of the things he says about teacher sand teaching, but it is unlikely there will be any radical reform because the Teacher's union is too strong.  I think teachers ought to become more professionalized as they progress with additional pay to keep the best and brightest around. Here's what Gladwell has to say in a piece from The New Yorker:

One of the most important tools in contemporary educational research is “value added” analysis. It uses standardized test scores to look at how much the academic performance of students in a given teacher’s classroom changes between the beginning and the end of the school year. Suppose that Mrs. Brown and Mr. Smith both teach a classroom of third graders who score at the fiftieth percentile on math and reading tests on the first day of school, in September. When the students are retested, in June, Mrs. Brown’s class scores at the seventieth percentile, while Mr. Smith’s students have fallen to the fortieth percentile. That change in the students’ rankings, value-added theory says, is a meaningful indicator of how much more effective Mrs. Brown is as a teacher than Mr. Smith.

It’s only a crude measure, of course. A teacher is not solely responsible for how much is learned in a classroom, and not everything of value that a teacher imparts to his or her students can be captured on a standardized test. Nonetheless, if you follow Brown and Smith for three or four years, their effect on their students’ test scores starts to become predictable: with enough data, it is possible to identify who the very good teachers are and who the very poor teachers are. What’s more—and this is the finding that has galvanized the educational world—the difference between good teachers and poor teachers turns out to be vast.

Eric Hanushek, an economist at Stanford, estimates that the students of a very bad teacher will learn, on average, half a year’s worth of material in one school year. The students in the class of a very good teacher will learn a year and a half’s worth of material. That difference amounts to a year’s worth of learning in a single year. Teacher effects dwarf school effects: your child is actually better off in a “bad” school with an excellent teacher than in an excellent school with a bad teacher. Teacher effects are also much stronger than class-size effects. You’d have to cut the average class almost in half to get the same boost that you’d get if you switched from an average teacher to a teacher in the eighty-fifth percentile. And remember that a good teacher costs as much as an average one, whereas halving class size would require that you build twice as many classrooms and hire twice as many teachers.

Profile: Naomi Klein

I've been a fan of Naomi Klein since reading No Logo. She has a new book out that I need to read, The Shock Doctrine, and there a really great in-depth profile of her in The New Yorker online:

The central thesis of the book is that capitalism and democracy, free markets and free people, do not, as we’ve been told, go hand in hand. On the contrary, capitalism—at least fundamentalist capitalism, of the type promoted by the late economist Milton Friedman and his “Chicago School” acolytes—is so unpopular, and so obviously harmful to everyone except the richest of the rich, that its establishment requires, at best, trickery and, at worst, terror and torture. Friedman believed that markets perform best when freed from government interference, so he advocated getting rid of tariffs, subsidies, minimum-wage laws, public housing, Social Security, financial regulation, and licensing requirements, including those for doctors—indeed, virtually every measure devised to protect people from the market’s harsh logic. Klein argues that the only circumstance in which a population would accept Friedman-style reforms is when it is in a state of shock, following a crisis of some sort—a natural disaster, a terrorist attack, a war. A person in shock regresses to a childlike state in which he longs for a parental figure to take control; similarly, a population in a state of shock will hand exceptional powers to its leaders, permitting them to destroy the regulatory functions of government.

Friedman once observed that much of the time societies are too paralyzed by the “tyranny of the status quo” to accept real reform, and that only a crisis can convince people that the way things are done needs to change. This idea is not particularly controversial. But from Friedman’s words Klein concludes that the Chicago School is “a movement that prays for crisis the way drought-struck farmers pray for rain.” Worse, Friedmanites are impatient—sometimes too impatient to sit around praying for acts of God. Natural disasters are tricky to engineer, but coups and terror are always possible. “Some of the most infamous human rights violations of this era,” she writes, “which have tended to be viewed as sadistic acts carried out by antidemocratic regimes”—Pinochet’s in Chile, for instance, or the Argentinean junta—“were in fact either committed with the deliberate intent of terrorizing the public or actively harnessed to prepare the ground for the introduction of radical free-market ‘reforms.’ ”

Klein first formulated her thesis in 2004, when she was reporting in Baghdad and noticed that Paul Bremer’s goal seemed to be to establish a perfect capitalist state in Iraq while its population was still reeling from the “shock and awe” bombing. Then she noticed that soon after the tsunami in Sri Lanka the coastline that had been inhabited by fishermen was being sold off to hotels. Then she noticed that Friedman had suggested taking advantage of Hurricane Katrina to replace New Orleans’s disastrous public schools with charter schools. The pattern was striking. But now that a shock had shaken Washington itself, something slightly different seemed to be going on. On the one hand, the initial reaction to the economic crisis followed her theory—the shock (the bank failures and the market’s nosedive) had inspired the government to attempt to seize unprecedented power (seven hundred billion dollars with no strings attached), claiming that in such a crisis everyone should simply trust it to do the right thing, even though the actions it wanted to take would seem to enrich the wealthiest at the expense of everybody else. That was the textbook part. But the plan wasn’t working. Constituents wrote thousands of outraged letters, and bloggers wrote about how this felt familiar, like the aftermath of September 11th, and how the bailout was the economic equivalent of the Patriot Act. It was just as she had written at the end of the book: memory was shock’s antidote. (Another difference, of course, was that the government wanted to enact not Friedman-style reforms but the opposite: enormous interference in the market. Still, since the point of this interference was to bail out banks, this difference did not strike Klein as of much importance.)

Suffering Souls

There was a fascinating article about psychopaths by John Seabrook last month in The New Yorker:

At thirty-eight, Kiehl is one of the world’s leading younger investigators in psychopathy, the condition of moral emptiness that affects between fifteen to twenty-five per cent of the North American prison population, and is believed by some psychologists to exist in one per cent of the general adult male population. (Female psychopaths are thought to be much rarer.) Psychopaths don’t exhibit the manias, hysterias, and neuroses that are present in other types of mental illness. Their main defect, what psychologists call “severe emotional detachment”—a total lack of empathy and remorse—is concealed, and harder to describe than the symptoms of schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. This absence of easily readable signs has led to debate among mental-health practitioners about what qualifies as psychopathy and how to diagnose it. Psychopathy isn’t identified as a disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the American Psychiatric Association’s canon; instead, a more general term, “antisocial personality disorder,” known as A.P.D., covers the condition.

There is also little consensus among researchers about what causes psychopathy. Considerable evidence, including several large-scale studies of twins, points toward a genetic component. Yet psychopaths are more likely to come from neglectful families than from loving, nurturing ones. Psychopathy could be dimensional, like high blood pressure, or it might be categorical, like leukemia. Researchers argue over whether tests used to measure it should focus on behavior or attempt to incorporate personality traits—like deceitfulness, glibness, and lack of remorse—as well. The only point on which everyone agrees is that psychopathy is extremely difficult to treat. And for some researchers the word “psychopath” has been tainted by its long and seamy relationship with criminality and popular culture, which began with true-crime pulps and continues today in TV shows like CBS’s “Criminal Minds” and in the work of authors like Thomas Harris and Patricia Cornwell. The word is so loaded with baleful connotations that it tends to empurple any surrounding prose.

Kiehl is frustrated by the lack of respect shown to psychopathy by the mental-health establishment. “Think about it,” he told me. “Crime is a trillion-dollar-a-year problem. The average psychopath will be convicted of four violent crimes by the age of forty. And yet hardly anyone is funding research into the science. Schizophrenia, which causes much less crime, has a hundred times more research money devoted to it.” I asked why, and Kiehl said, “Because schizophrenics are seen as victims, and psychopaths are seen as predators. The former we feel empathy for, the latter we lock up.” 

More On Malcolm Gladwell

There was an in-depth profile about Malcolm Gladwell by Jason Zengerie for New York Magazine:

Gladwell is offering this modest self-assessment while seated at the kitchen table of the apartment he rents in a stately West Village townhouse. He’s wearing jeans and one of those wickable running shirts, which fits snugly over his thin frame. His hazel eyes are red-rimmed. His trademark Afro, which he had cut about a month ago, is at frizz-level yellow. He looks, in short, like a caricature of Malcolm Gladwell. He is a well-known figure around his neighborhood, fond of tapping away on his laptop in coffee shops and cafés. His writer’s life is part anachronistic, part futuristic. His Lexus IS—a car, he concedes, he rarely drives—is parked down the street in the space he pays a small fortune to lease. A couple of miles north in Times Square are Gladwell’s editors at The New Yorker,who don’t see him in the office very often—owing to his self-professed “aversion to midtown”—but who grant him a license to write about whatever he chooses and accommodate him with couriers to pick up his fact-checking materials, lest he be forced to overcome that aversion. Not far from The New Yorker are the offices of Little, Brown—the publisher of Gladwell’s two best-selling books, The Tipping Point and Blink—which paid him a rumored $4 million for Outliers. (“The hardcover ofBlink sold three times what the hardcover of Tipping Point did,” says Geoff Shandler, Little, Brown’s editor-in-chief, “so his audience has grown and grown.”) Across the river in New Jersey is the Leigh Bureau, which fields Gladwell’s speaking requests and negotiates his stratospheric fees. (“He was by far the most expensive speaker we ever contracted,” says Charles Cohen, the president of a dental-supply company, whose trade group paid Gladwell $80,000 to address its annual meeting. “There wasn’t one person afterwards who said he wasn’t worth the money.”) And then, in New York and New Jersey and all over the United States, there are the booksellers, who are hoping that, amid fears of a global recession, Outliers will prompt their customers to do that thing that’s become a rarity these days—plunk down $28—and thus offer a slim reed of hope to the sagging publishing industry. (“I don’t care that it’s Little, Brown’s book,” says one rival publishing executive. “We all desperately need some good news.”) 

The AV Club also had an interesting interview with Gladwell recently:

Even though he cut his teeth in newspaper journalism withThe Washington Post, Malcolm Gladwell was surely born to write for The New Yorker, where his nonfiction essays on subjects ranging from Ron Popeil's infomercial empire to computers that analyze pop songs could serve as a model for the house style. His previous books—The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make A Big Difference and Blink: The Power Of Thinking Without Thinking—not only topped the bestseller lists, but also spawned concepts that wormed their way into media discussions of politics, business, sports, and history. His newest book, Outliers: The Story Of Success, examines people who achieve the highest levels of their chosen fields—the Bill Gateses, Wayne Gretzkys, and Nobel Prize winners of the world—and argues that their accomplishments reflect not so much their intrinsic genius as the conditions that happened to govern their lives. As part of our annual Books Issue, Gladwell recently talked with The A.V. Club about social engineering, Barack Obama, and the public appetite for complex explanations.

I'm A Liberal And Proud Of It

Let's take back the "liberal" label. Salon's Michael Lind tells us why we need to take it back:

If the conservative era is over, can liberals come out of their defensive crouch and call themselves liberals again, instead of progressives?

In the last two decades, Democratic politicians, including Barack Obama, have abandoned the term "liberal" for "progressive." The theory was that Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush -- and Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Pat Buchanan -- had succeeded in equating "liberal" in the public mind with weakness on defense, softness on crime, and "redistribution" of Joe the Plumber's hard-earned money to the collective bogey evoked by a former Texas rock band's clever name: Teenage Immigrant Welfare Mothers on Dope.

I've always been uncomfortable with this rather soulless and manipulative exercise in rebranding, for a number of reasons.

Objection No. 1. Futility. It's not the name of the center-left that the right objects to, but the policies and values. Suppose the defeated Republican minority decided that it needed to rebrand itself by replacing "conservatism" with "traditionalism." Would anybody on the left or center be fooled, if traditionalism was defined by exactly the same synthesis of free-market radicalism, anti-Darwinism and support for a neoconservative foreign policy?

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Objection No. 2. Progressivism as neoliberalism. Some have sought to distinguish progressivism from liberalism in content. This was the project of the disproportionately Southern "neoliberals" like Bill Clinton and Al Gore and Dave McCurdy and the Democratic Leadership Council and Progressive Policy Institute in the 1980s and 1990s. Instead of using the obvious term, "moderate" or "centrist," they sought to co-opt the term "progressive," even though they weren't very. In their analysis, liberalism was too identified in the public mind with organized labor and big-city machine bosses like the first Mayor Daley. They struggled and largely succeeded in creating a new Democratic Party based among upscale suburban whites and financed by the Industry Formerly Known as Wall Street rather than private-sector labor unions.

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Objection No. 3. Progressivism as the radical left. What made all of this even more confusing was the fact that the term "progressive," which center-right Democrats like Will Marshall of the Progressive Policy Institute sought to capture, had been identified with Marxists and other groups on the extreme left during the previous half-century. If you were a progressive in the '30s and '40s, like many supporters of Henry Wallace's Progressive Party, you were likely to find redeeming qualities in the Soviet Union's social experiment and to think that FDR was a pawn of the capitalists. If you were a progressive in the '60s and '70s, you were likely to think that Truman and Johnson were warmongering "corporate liberals" under the control of the "military-industrial complex" and that the Democrats and Republicans were indistinguishable. For the moderate and conservative Democrats of the DLC to call themselves the new progressives was the equivalent of moderate, secular Republicans calling themselves the new fundamentalists.

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Objection No. 4. The early 20th century progressives. Now that "progressive" is widely used as a euphemism for "liberal," there is a natural tendency to link the progressives of the early 2000s with the Progressives of the early 1900s, like Woodrow Wilson and John Dewey. The problem is that while the modern center-left is the child of mid-century Roosevelt-Truman-Kennedy-Johnson liberalism, it is only the grandchild -- or perhaps grand-nephew or grand-niece, twice removed -- of the Progressives of the 1900s.

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Objection No. 5. It's too German. The term "progressive" entered English from 19th century German politics. The first progressive party in the world was the Deutsche Fortschrittspartei, founded in Prussia in 1861 ("Fortschritt" means "progress"). The American Progressives like Woodrow Wilson who translated the term into English believed that Bismarck's Imperial Germany was superior in many ways to the United States and Britain. They sought to graft German-style bureaucracy onto what they considered to be an antiquated political system crippled by 18th century Enlightenment notions of local government and civil rights. In other words, they saw statist, technocratic German progressivism as an advance beyond Anglo-American liberalism.

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Objection No. 6. "Progressive" implies progress. Like "conservative," "progressive" is a term associated with a particular view of history. The conservative wants to stand still or go back; the progressive wants to move forward. Progressivism implies a view of history as perpetual progress; conservatism, a view of history as decline from a better world in the past. Needless to say, nobody who actually thinks this way could function. In the real world, self-described progressives aren't mindlessly in favor of everything new, just as self-described conservatives aren't indiscriminately in favor of everything that's old.

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But don't listen to me. Listen to John F. Kennedy, accepting the endorsement of his presidential candidacy by New York's Liberal Party on Sept. 14, 1960:

What do our opponents mean when they apply to us the label "Liberal?" If by "Liberal" they mean, as they want people to believe, someone who is soft in his policies abroad, who is against local government, and who is unconcerned with the taxpayer's dollar, then the record of this party and its members demonstrate that we are not that kind of "Liberal." But if by a "Liberal" they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people -- their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, and their civil liberties -- someone who believes we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad, if that is what they mean by a "Liberal," then I'm proud to say I'm a "Liberal."

The Uses Of Adversity

There's another well-written and stimulating piece by Malcolm Gladwell available online at The New Yorker:

The rags-to-riches story—that staple of American biography—has over the years been given two very different interpretations. The nineteenth-century version stressed the value of compensating for disadvantage. If you wanted to end up on top, the thinking went, it was better to start at the bottom, because it was there that you learned the discipline and motivation essential for success. “New York merchants preferred to hire country boys, on the theory that they worked harder, and were more resolute, obedient, and cheerful than native New Yorkers,” Irvin G. Wyllie wrote in his 1954 study “The Self-Made Man in America.” Andrew Carnegie, whose personal history was the defining self-made-man narrative of the nineteenth century, insisted that there was an advantage to being “cradled, nursed and reared in the stimulating school of poverty.” According to Carnegie, “It is not from the sons of the millionaire or the noble that the world receives its teachers, its martyrs, its inventors, its statesmen, its poets, or even its men of affairs. It is from the cottage of the poor that all these spring.”

Today, that interpretation has been reversed. Success is seen as a matter of capitalizing on socioeconomic advantage, not compensating for disadvantage. The mechanisms of social mobility—scholarships, affirmative action, housing vouchers, Head Start—all involve attempts to convert the poor from chronic outsiders to insiders, to rescue them from what is assumed to be a hopeless state. Nowadays, we don’t learn from poverty, we escape from poverty, and a book like Ellis’s history of Goldman Sachs is an almost perfect case study of how we have come to believe social mobility operates. Six hundred pages of Ellis’s book are devoted to the modern-day Goldman, the firm that symbolized the golden era of Wall Street. From the boom years of the nineteen-eighties through the great banking bubble of the past decade, Goldman brought impeccably credentialled members of the cognitive and socioeconomic élite to Wall Street, where they conjured up fantastically complex deals and made enormous fortunes. The opening seventy-two pages of the book, however, the chapters covering the Sidney Weinberg years, seem as though they belong to a different era. The man who created what we know as Goldman Sachs was a poor, uneducated member of a despised minority—and his story is so remarkable that perhaps only Andrew Carnegie could make sense of it.

Undecided

Here's a great little piece by David Sedaris in The New Yorker: 

I don’t know that it was always this way, but, for as long as I can remember, just as we move into the final weeks of the Presidential campaign the focus shifts to the undecided voters. “Who are they?” the news anchors ask. “And how might they determine the outcome of this election?”

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To put them in perspective, I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. “Can I interest you in the chicken?” she asks. “Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it?”

To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked.

I mean, really, what’s to be confused about?