If only the world would adopt Esperanto or some other universal language, life would be so much simpler for people in the news business. (Shown above & below this letter, for example, are just 15 ways in which people of other nations say "Dear Sir" when writing about the news to our editors.)

The job of translating such letters and a host of foreign periodicals ranging from the Russian Krokodil to the Neue Schweizer Rundschau may fall to almost anybody in TIME'S employ--in or out of the Editorial Departments. TIME'S Personnel Division keeps a file of everyone in the company who speaks any foreign language fluently. (In case there is a sudden need for quick translation, we can be fluent at the drop of a telephone in 28 languages ranging from Afrikaans to Ukrainian.)

But only seldom must our researchers go outside their own ranks for translation help, for 85% of them speak one or more foreign languages. This versatility gets more useful every day now that foreign publications are reaching America again in almost prewar quantity--and, of course, articles written for foreign audiences in their native tongues are a rich source of background information and local color. (Most difficult to translate, observes one Foreign News researcher, are the captions under the cartoons. The reason is a wry one coming from TIME--she says the lines are "too condensed, too colloquial.")

Naturally, proper names are one grand mal de tete. Unfamiliar names of newsmakers erupt into the headlines almost daily--Marshal Fevsi C,akmak. Princess Sukhodhaya, Sir Ofori Atta. And rare is the week that strange place names don't pop up, as the news shifts around from earthquakes in the Caribbean to incidents in the air over Yugoslavia. For months now the research librarian in charge of the Biography files in our Morgue has been working on a great continuing project to assist researchers in checking the proper names and titles of foreigners. It's a tough job. For example, one Siamese name, recently added to the files, was transliterated seven different ways by various news sources--and more than half of the folders in our files (there are over 300,000 in all) contain names that cannot be found in Who's Who or in any other standard reference work. TIME'S record for getting foreign names spelled right has been none too spotless, but as this tailor-made directory moves toward completion, we expect to do better.

But not all of our language problems grow out of news-gathering and news-writing: Readers overseas write us in their native languages asking us to do all sorts of things for them--to find a long-lost brother in Wisconsin, to get an interview with President Truman, to tell them how to buy a Fifth Avenue trousseau for a daughter bride-to-be. Two girls in our Letters Department spend most of their time just translating and trying to follow through on such requests.

Then there is the business of overseas production for TIME'S foreign editions and getting supplies across the oceans--translating and converting weights and measures, postal rates, etc.--and watching to see that foreign printers do not just use hyphens like that last one (putting them in wherever the line ends) instead of following the rules of English syllabification.

It seems to be a sort of Tower of Babel around here sometimes. This language problem has its fun side, too. The Circulation Department is currently working on a greeting for the coming holiday season in which world-wide TIME may try to say "Merry Christmas & a Happy New Year" to its readers in 31 languages. In Tagalog it goes this way: MALIGAYANG PASKO AT MASAGANANG BAGONG TAON."

James A. Linen

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