Mots Maudits 3.0: Suitcase Words

At this point, I have written 17 blogs on mots maudits and troublesome words, and I have at least as many more in the pipeline. So, why are these terms such a headache for translators?

The problem is often that they are so-called “suitcase words” or “catch-all words.” Words like this have many potential meanings, and their interpretation is highly context-dependent. It’s like doing a puzzle with half the pieces missing. Sometimes you might be familiar with the company, the project, or the author, so you can be fairly confident of the intended meaning. Sometimes it’s for a slogan on a poster and there is zero context. Lovely stuff.

But today, I wanted to go full meta and think about translating the term suitcase word itself.

Coined by American cognitive scientist Marvin Minski, the term is apt, because you can pack anything into a suitcase. Similarly, a word can carry many meanings, but you don’t know what’s inside until you open it.

Amusingly, the literal French translation of suitcase word — mot-valise — doesn’t mean the same thing at all; it refers to what the English call portmanteau words, which are amalgamations of two other words (think smog from smoke + fog). And portmanteau itself, coined by Lewis Carrol, comes from a French word meaning hat stand (or coat rack)! Following so far?

Good. So, we have established that a suitcase word is not the same thing as a mot-valise or portmanteau, but how do the French refer to suitcase words? There are actually several French terms that could do the job.

Firstly, “mot fourre-tout”: this is a common idiom in French, literally meaning a word that you can stuff anything into — quite close to Minsky’s intended sense. Then there’s “mot tiroir” (drawer word), which is similar; you can put anything in a drawer, and its contents remain a mystery until you open it. Schrödinger’s word, if you like.

“Mot passe-partout” is an idiom that English speakers may recognise from the character in Jules Verne's novel Around the World in Eighty Days. In fact, passe-partout itself is a kind of suitcase word in French; it can refer to a skeleton key or, by extension, someone or something that is versatile and can adapt to many roles. A jack of all trades but master of none.

A more generic, descriptive term is simply “mot polysémique” (polysemic word), which is just a term with multiple meanings.

With this meta-linguistic ball of string suitably untangled, I would like to finish with a word on AI. As Mélanie rightly points out here, the difference between an AI and a human translator, is that a human is more likely to recognise the inherent ambiguity of a suitcase word and seek out clarification where necessary, and a translator is trained to do precisely that. Translation is not just about switching out one word for another, it’s about unpacking meaning. And for now, you still need a human to unpack that suitcase.