Mixing It Up

Recently, the editors of one of my favorite recent projects wrote to ask for help with an author’s English translation of a Yiddish sentence. The original translation:

The specificity of Yiddish consists not in the fact of mixing, but in the way and through the mixing of which languages Yiddish, English etc. arise, because absolutely all languages are mixed.

The editors said “arise” was not accurate. Together, we came up with a better version:

The specificity of Yiddish consists not in the fact of mixing, but in how and with which languages it, English, and other languages were mixed, because absolutely all languages are mixed.

This removed the problematic word, and also eliminated “etc.,” which I had never liked, but which I had been reluctant to change because maybe it accurately reflected the Yiddish (a language I don’t know). But the solution left us with three mixs in one sentence. I turned to the thesaurus and proposed this:

The specificity of Yiddish consists not in the fact of mixing, but how and with which languages it, English, and other languages were blended, because absolutely all languages are amalgamations.

As editors, it wasn’t our job to “fix” the awkwardness of the original. Still, we came up with a version that takes advantage of all that English has to offer.