Translation and Journalism

When reading newspaper articles about the recent elections in France, I kept noticing something interesting. Interviews with French citizens always quoted them in English. But I doubt these people all spoke English, so what I wonder is: why was there no mention of the fact that the interviews were (presumably) conducted in French and translated to English? The same is true of nearly all articles that cover “foreign” events. Doesn’t this influence the reader’s understanding? Shouldn’t readers know which parts of an article were translated and what strategies and goals were used in the translation?

The NY Times had a short piece from the Public Editor about this awhile back, focusing on the use of interpreters in reporting from other countries, but I don’t think this is a matter that most readers think much about. Wouldn’t it be useful to have a second byline, or even a sentence at the end of the piece, saying who performed the interviews and in which language or who translated the texts that were mentioned and how the translator went about it? Not only would that increase the translator’s visibility, but it would also remind readers that not everyone speaks English and that it is worth thinking about how the people or documents – the items that make up the news, that is – quoted in the article were shaped by the culture and language that they come from.

The Violence of Translation: Conquering and Colonizing a Text

To continue with the metaphor theme, I was intrigued by the book Translation and Empire by Douglas Robinson, which discusses postcolonial theories of translation. One chapter quotes from Jerome, Dryden, and other major figures from translation studies, and it is interesting to see their comparison of translators to conquerors or pillagers, who take what they want from a text and then make it over as they see fit in the target language. The text is thus rather violently colonized. In some instances, it seems that (male) translators view languages as female; it is, therefore, acceptable to “rape and pillage” a foreign tongue – to take what the translator thinks most important or useful – in order to protect the native language.

Translation as a Log Cabin

Readers of this blog know that I like metaphors for translation. So I was happy when, while reading The Translator as Writer, an interesting book I will surely mention again soon, I noticed an essay called “Metaphors for the Translator” by translator Michael Hanne. In this piece, he reviews some of the many metaphors people have suggested for translators and the translation process and analyzes them. Here is one example:

“She [translator Margaret Sayers Peden] suggested that the best translators of literary texts act like curators transporting an old timber structure such as a log cabin to another location: ‘Carefully we mark the logs by number, dismantle them, and reconstruct them in new territory, artfully restoring the logs to their original relationships and binding them together with a minimal application of mortar’. She insists that the translator must avoid the temptation to ‘slather on the plaster’ beyond the point which is essential (Peden 1989: 14). Translation involves a demolition job followed by a reconstruction. This is an attractively ingenious image, which, on further consideration, turns out to be fundamentally mistaken. The problem is that, when you come to ‘reconstruct’ the text in new territory, you have to undertake the task, not with original logs, but with timber (language) that is indigenous to the target culture, has a different grain, a different colour, and is supplied in different lengths. Moreover, as literary scholars from Mikhail Bakhtin to Julia Kristeva and Roland Barthes remind us, all language is second-hand, which means that every literary text is made of fragments of earlier utterances. So, when we translate, the lengths of timber with which we reconstruct the log cabin are not only of a different species, but they have also been recycled and bear the marks of the previous uses to which they have been subjected in that territory/culture.” (212)

Embargo on Translation

Here is an article about Circumference, a journal that publishes poetry from other countries in English translation. Jennifer Kronovet, one of the founders and editors of the journal, describes the decision to publish poems from certain countries, despite a U.S. trade embargo that bizarrely and misguidedly forbade it.

Thank you to Erika Dreifus for sending me this article!

A Polychromatic World, or Against Ethnocide

Those who know me are well aware that anthropology is one of my big interests. My choice of a career in translation makes sense in the context of this deep enthusiasm for cultures and languages; translation can be considered a form of anthropology. As I’ve said before, translation does not simply involve finding an equivalent word in the target language for a word in the source language; rather, it is about conveying the whole culture that has helped shape each word, each phrase, each concept in a text. That’s why it isn’t enough to study a bilingual dictionary or a list of vocabulary in order to consider oneself fluent in a tongue; a deep understanding of the culture and the people is necessary.

Wade Davis is an anthropologist and National Geographic’s Explorer-in-Residence (an oxymoronic title, as he points out!). Someone sent me this link to a speech Dr. Davis gave a few years ago. In it, he mentions that there are currently 6000 languages on our planet, but only 3000 are still used regularly and taught to children. Dr. Davis claims that every 2 weeks, an elder who is the last speaker of his or her language dies and with that elder, the language is gone. And when a language is lost, so are the beliefs, feelings, and culture behind that language. In an interview, Dr. Davis points out that “now languages, like cultures, like species, are being lost so quickly that they don’t have time to leave descendents.”

Dr. Davis says in his speech that genocide is condemned while ethnocide (which includes the loss of cultures and languages) is not; instead, it is “celebrated as part of a development strategy”. But a “polychromatic world of diversity” is to be preferred. Anthropologists, he said, believe that “story-telling can change the world” and that “this world deserves to exist in a diverse way, that we can find a way to live in a truly multicultural, pluralistic world, where all the wisdom of all the peoples can contribute to our collective well-being.” Certainly, we translators (who are, after all, people devoted to intercultural communication and understanding, and people who help others have a voice) believe this as well.

Just for Fun – Machine Translations or Novel Excerpts?

Can you tell the difference between machine translations from German and sentences from novels by William Faulkner? It is hard to know if this silly page is a harsher criticism of Faulkner or of machine translation!

Team Translation

This weekend, I was reading Translation and Power, edited by Maria Tymoczko and Edwin Gentzler. In an interesting essay by Lin Kenan on translation’s role in China, there was a section on the history of translation in the country. Translation in China began two thousand years ago with Buddhist religious texts; such translation was done in teams and it included what perhaps can be considered a form of sight translation, the subject of the last post.

Dr. Kenan writes: “First, a foreign monk recited from the scriptures. As he was doing so, a native speaker of the target language translated orally what was heard into Chinese. Then someone else transcribed it into written script before it was polished and finalized by a stylist.”

This is quite a different method of operation than most translators follow these days, at least in Europe and the United States. It is true that many religious documents are translated in teams or at least the translation projects are run by editorial boards, but otherwise, team translation is not common, and interpretation/sight translation (I assume that the interpreters in China had access to the scriptures being recited from) usually is not part of the process. One wonders if the translations suffered or were improved because of the multitude of people working on them. Having several people to share ideas with and/or to look over a translation is generally beneficial for translators and their work, but there is also the question of style, since all people have different vocabularies and different ways of writing, so it might be difficult to make a text consistent if each of the translators on a team has his or her own translation techniques and his or her own sense of the text and its style.

Dr. Kenan mentions that team translation is still practiced regularly in China; a recent example he gives is James Joyce’s Ulysses.

Sight Translation

The previous post described a translator training program I learned about during a lecture at Swansea University. There was also another interesting lecture at my school last week. Professor Gloria Sampaio from the Catholic University of São Paulo in Brazil spoke about sight translation.

Sight translation is something I had never thought much about and it is not one of the more researched areas of translation studies, so I appreciated her talk. Basically, sight translation is doing a translation on the spot orally from a written text. Sometimes a translator or interpreter might have a couple of minutes to prepare, but often she or he simply gets a text and has to read and translate it aloud at once. In other words, it is oral translation, a combination of translation and interpretation, of the visual and the vocal. Professor Sampaio said that it should sound as though the translator is just reading aloud something in the target language.

Historically, she explained, it was used a pedagogical tool for teaching classic languages. Some language courses still do use this technique. Now, it can frequently be part of an interpretation assignment, such as during a court case when there are documents being discussed, or if an interpreter is doing a simultaneous conference interpretation and someone is reading aloud from an essay (so the interpreter has the paper and also has to listen in case the speaker deviates from the text in some way). In other situations, an interpreter or translator might be handed a text and asked to summarize or analyze it, rather than perform a straight translation.

Professor Sampaio made it clear that sight translation is a challenging activity, since it requires so many different skills at once (reading comprehension, analysis, terminology, quick-thinking, memory, speech production, and so on), and that it could be a useful part of interpreter training programs. She also thought it was a good way of testing and assessing translation/interpretation/language students or applicants for language-related jobs.

A University Translation Bureau: Training Translators

The last post mentioned a way of training translators in the United States. Last week, Marcel Thelen from the Department of Translation and Interpreting of the Maastricht School of International Communication of Zuyd University in Maastricht, in the Netherlands, spoke here at Swansea University about an interesting program he has set up.

As a way of training his undergraduate translation students, Dr. Thelen has started a translation bureau at the university. He explained that it is mostly for the fourth-year students, the ones who will soon graduate and hopefully get jobs as translators, but some of the younger students are involved too. When he first started the bureau, it was all simulated role-play, with the result being that it felt fake and there was no incentive for taking it seriously, since all students had to do to get credit was participate. So, he changed it to a real bureau.

Students have to write CVs and cover letters in order to apply for positions (office manager, project manager, IT expert, translators, editors) and then they go on interviews. Those who want to work as managers interview with Dr. Thelen and then they interview and hire the translators and editors. Unfortunately, the students have to stick with whatever position they’ve chosen for the whole term, so they don’t get a chance to switch, which would be even better, because then they would get experience with a range of translation-related jobs. Not all those who train as translators then work as translators; for example, they can go on to be project managers at translation agencies or become localizers. So that is why getting the chance to train or intern in a variety of roles could be interesting.

The bureau gets job assignments from professors on their university campus or from other schools with similar programs (they are each other’s clients, in a way). They also get samples of already-completed work from agencies, which means that they then can compare their own translations to the professional ones, and such analysis is a useful exercise for them. Finally, they also do free work for the non-profit sector. The jobs they do are not just translations, but also include terminology or scanning or other such assignments.

A manager receives the assignment and gives it to a translator. An editor goes over it when the translator has completed it. The bureau receives fake payment for the job, but on a sliding scale, depending on whether the client is satisfied. The students involved in each assignment get class credit based on the satisfaction and payment, as well as on their attendance and their reports on their work. If a student is not doing a good job with the assignments, she or he can get warnings or extra work, and can even be dismissed, if the circumstances call for it.

Dr. Thelen explained that his students get a lot of useful practice out of this bureau. As already mentioned, they learn how to write CVs and application letters and how to interview, and they also learn how to work at a translation agency, and, of course, how to handle the specific requirements of whichever job they get at the agency. Many of the students improve their translating and editing skills, end up working more efficiently, practice using CAT tools, and also get experience with problem-solving, bureau management, workflow management, personnel issues, negotiation, dealing with clients, meeting deadlines, handling financial issues and balancing books, and so on.

I think Dr. Thelen’s program sounds like a good one. It would be interesting to know if alumni from such programs are hired at bureaus more frequently and/or if they are more successful in their translation careers. I’d like to see more university programs in translation include such real-life (or, at least, simulated real-life) practice along with what they already offer, i.e. translation theory, training in using computer programs, and language courses. Perhaps it makes sense to also have a sort of mentoring system in which students intern with and/or have study visits at bureaus and/or with freelance translators and/or at other places that employ translators.

Students training to be translators and/or to work with translation in some other way need this hands-on, pragmatic experience and not just the more academic courses.

Three Lacks and a Partial Solution

In this Chronicle of Higher Education article, three distinct lacks are highlighted: the lack of trained translators and interpreters in the United States, the lack of translation and interpretation programs there, and the lack of funding for such programs.

An interesting partial solution to these problems is that the National Virtual Translation Center sends “unclassified government documents to translation professors at several universities to give to their students as course work”. That means that students get more translation practice and the government gets its documents translated. It seems to work well as an additional way of training new translators, even though more funding is needed.

The United States is pretty far behind Europe in terms of the number and content of translation training programs (not to mention translation studies programs, which are not the same thing). The little interest shown there for languages has already been discussed on this blog, but clearly this is a problematic situation.

The next post will be about another way of training translators, this one a program in the Netherlands.

Thank you to Erika Dreifus for sending me this article!

Fairness in Payment Practices

I recently came across this website, which compares English texts with their translations. It claims to give information on how 100 English words translate to other languages. I can’t attest to the truthfulness of most of the figures here, but as for the Swedish amount given (103), I have to disagree. Generally, an English text becomes shorter, in terms of word counts, in Swedish, because Swedish allows for longer words (created by putting two or more words together into one).

Despite the possible inconclusiveness of the numbers on this site, it relates to an interesting and important issue. Since translators get paid by the source word, should the pay be different depending on which direction a translator works in? How does, or should, this asymmetry in word count affect translators’ fees?

For example, if a Swedish to English translator gets 12 cents per source word, should an English to Swedish translator get a lower amount per word (since s/he will have more source words)? Or should the English to Swedish translator get paid per target word instead? Or is the system fair as it is?

Revise inglish spelling by Guest Blogger Theo Halladay

Recently, I began a correspondence with Theo Halladay about English spelling. Ms. Halladay graduated from Bryn Mawr College in 1948 and is a “retired Montessori scool teecher, artist, art teecher, composer of 30+ songs & coral anthems” with “riting credits in 23 publications.” You will notice from that description that Ms. Halladay uses simplified spelling. That’s why I asked her to be a guest blogger and to tell us about spelling reform. I hope readers will respond to her post about reforming English spelling!

Revise inglish spelling by Theo Halladay:

Brett has askd me to rite sumthing about the movement to update & reggularize inglish spelling. I am activ in the Simplified Spelling Society, based in London, England & founded in 1908. We ar a group of educators & uthers in inglish-speeking cuntrys all over the world, who ar concernd about the massiv illiteracy problem – between 20 & 40 million functional illiterats in the US alone. We note that uther european cuntrys hav updated their spelling sistems so words ar speld the way they sound. English has never dun this, with the result that italian children, for example, lern in 2 yeers wot menny anglo children fale to master in 12, namely how to spel their own language corectly. Unemployment, crime & the high cost of scooling ar the results.

Eleetists & stubborn “inglish traditionalists” jellusly gard a mishmash of uneddited spellings from 4 difrent language roots - words wich must all be individdualy memmorized, since spelling patterns ar not at all consistent. e.g. do we realy need 11 difrent ways of spelling the sound ee?

We solicit ideas from people like yurselvs as to wot & how menny changed spellings would be tollerated the best, not only by angloes but also by foreners. Chek out our magnificent archives on the history of spelling reform, & join us as we argue the subject & plan for our CENTENNIAL convention in England next yeer!

The London Book Fair and the Case of the Missing Rights

Yesterday, as I was reading this article about the London Book Fair, learning how the agents and editors “schmooze,” as the article puts it, and make deals at this fair (which doesn’t seem to include many actual writers, not to even mention translators), I came across the following sentence: “They do so [that is, schmooze and make deals] every fall at the Frankfurt Book Fair, but increasingly London is their gathering place in the spring, above all for the lucrative part of the publishing industry that involves selling foreign rights for English-language books.”

“Foreign rights for English-language books.”

So what happened to the English rights for foreign-language books? Does anyone else find it sad (but, unfortunately, not surprising) that a major international book fair is focused on spreading English-language material rather than (or in addition to) on making it possible for publishers to expose English-speaking audiences to all the great books in other languages? I’ve said before, I find it lamentable, and worth working to change.

More on Translating Harry Potter and Other Children’s Literature

Awhile back, I posted a link to an article on translating the Harry Potter books. Here is another article (in two parts) and it goes into some specific issues more in-depth. I still haven’t read the books in question, but I nevertheless find that this article gives me a lot to think about.

Thank you to Gili Bar-Hillel for sending these links to me. Ms. Bar-Hillel is the Hebrew translator of the Harry Potter books and other works and I met her at the conference recently described. She is mentioned in this article: “Gili Bar-Hillel, the Hebrew translator, agrees that the pressure is intense but in her case believes that this actually contributes to the quality of her translations, for two reasons: first, she must by necessity be single-mindedly focused on the task, and second, everyone around her—including her family—is geared to helping her work as fast and as effectively as possible.” Lucky Gili to have such a supportive family and to be able to work so well under pressure!

Here are a few comments on part one of this article:

“…translations of the first four volumes into Russian had been widely criticized for inaccuracies, a lack of fantasy, and inserted moralizing…” – I find it interesting that children’s books (okay, adults read Harry Potter, too, but they are still children’s books) have added moralizing. This has been a common issue in the translation of children’s literature (which happens to be my primary research field), but I would have liked to believe that translation these days had moved beyond this idea of adults thinking that they know best what children ought to read, and what they ought to get out of their reading. Would this happen in a work of fiction for adults? In my experience, generally not. I wonder if this has occurred in any other translations of these books.

As for cultural issues: “Translators have several options, including de-Anglicizing the text, leaving names and concepts as they are (but including explanations of particularly difficult notions, such as Christmas crackers, Halloween, and Cornflakes—the latter having earned a footnote in the Chinese translation, to indicate that these are consumed immersed in milk for breakfast), or some combination of the two.” I’d be curious to know if any readers of the Harry Potter books in other languages have noticed any particular strategies for cultural topics. Some people think that domestication (the term for when a translator removes the foreign elements from a text and adapts the work to his or her own culture) might be more common in texts for children, because of the idea that children will find “exotic” items, such as kinds of cereal or holidays, confusing. My personal view, however, is that exposing people – whether children or adults – to new things is generally beneficial.

A somewhat related topic is UK versus US English. J.K. Rowling’s comments here are interesting (though I am not sure why American children would be confused by the idea of a philosopher – does that say something about the US educational system?): “Along with her American editor, J.K. Rowling decided that beyond Americanizing the spelling (flavour/flavor, recognise/recognize, etc.), words should be altered only where it was felt they would be incomprehensible, even in context, to an American reader. “I have had some criticism from other British writers about allowing any changes at all, but I feel the natural extension of that argument is to go and tell French and Danish children that we will not be translating Harry Potter, so they’d better go and learn English,” Rowling says. Thus dustbin becomes trashcan and a packet of crisps is turned into a bag of chips. Dumbledore is barking in Britain but off his rocker across the Atlantic. Most importantly, at the suggestion of the American editor, the title of the first book was altered from Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone to Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, both to avoid what might be thought of as a reference to misleading subject matter, and to reflect Harry’s magical powers. The choice of Sorcerer’s Stone was Rowling’s idea.”

As for part two of the article:

I found this comment somewhat odd: “Contact with J.K. Rowling is not an option, as the author has generally not made herself accessible to the translators, nor has her agent been especially forthcoming on problematic areas of the translations.” – One would think an author would want to be helpful, in order to help make the translations of his or her work as good as possible. Some may expect the work to speak for itself, but the fact is that translators may still have questions, and thus contact with the author would be a great book.

And, finally, let’s end on a slightly depressing note: “Torstein Hoverstad, the Norwegian translator of Harry Potter, is among the many who have described the experience of being a literary translator as that of attempting something inherently impossible, being badly paid, and remaining virtually invisible—and that’s if you’re successful.”

Translation Issue of Poetry Magazine

Poetry magazine’s April issue is all translation. A few of their poems are online (including one by one of my favorite poets, Pablo Neruda) and what I especially liked about the issue is that the translators (including Paul Muldoon and Robert Pinsky) have written notes to go along with the poems.

Charles Simic jokes in his note that hell is full of translators of poems, but one of the things that I found interesting here is the variety of ways the translators view their work – some took liberties (Michael Hofmann added what he termed an “opportunistic refinement,” a reference to Fox News in Gunter Eich’s poem, which I found jarring, and A.E. Stallings felt more liberty because she made the translation for someone who knew Alcman’s original poem in Ancient Greek), while others, such as Mr. Simic, seemed anxious to not make any changes or additions at all (he frets over having broken one of Novica Tadic’s lines into two), though most are somewhere in the middle.

In their notes, the translators discuss word choices, the sounds of the poems (such as the sensuousness of Coral Bracho’s Spanish), the formal qualities of the work (Robin Robertson says that Pablo Neruda’s ode to tuna is shaped like Chile, and Peter Cole describes Yitzhaq Alahdab’s “four monorhymed distichs in the Hebrew deployed in a quantitative meter”), and how their languages compare to English (Shawkat M. Toorawa, the translator of Adonis’ poem, mentions that Arabic has no capital letters, which means that it differentiates between God and god by using different words, while J.M. Coetzee feels that Afrikaans and English are both Germanic and thus there are no structural difficulties). Also described are their roles as translators (Kathleen Jamie minimizes her efforts, since she says all Gaelic writers know English and could easily translate their own work), how they work (Mr. Robertson apparently referred to a previous translation of the same poem, and others worked with the poet and/or with a rough English draft provided by the poet), and even why they translate (Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough writes in the note to her translation from the Polish of Janusz Szuber’s poem that “Reading a poem and loving it aren’t enough for translators; they have to translate it, since translation brings them closest to owning the object they love. But the translator’s love has nothing selfish about it: he or she desires to possess the object of that love only to share it with others.”)

It’s also nice to see a variety of languages included, even some less common ones, such as Korean, Belarusian, Gaelic, Swahili, and Hungarian. I, of course, would have liked to see one of the Scandinavian languages represented, however.

Perhaps more literary magazines will begin to focus on translated works as well now; if so, publishing the original text alongside the translation and commentary from the translator seems like the ideal situation. Reading the translators’ notes on the poems added to my understanding and enjoyment of the work.

Thanks to Erika Dreifus for telling me about this issue of Poetry and also to the kind person who sent me the issue!

A Year of the Blog

Today is the blog’s first anniversary, so I want to thank you for reading, and also for all the responses I’ve gotten, some on the blog itself, but mostly by e-mail. It’s great to see how many people are interested in translation!

More on the Conference

In the last post, I wrote about what I presented on at the Child and the Book conference in Istanbul. Now I’d like to tell a little more about the conference in general.

The keynote presentation was by Professor Zohar Shavit from Israel. She spoke about the development of children’s literature and children’s culture. Initially, children were viewed simply as small adults with special needs, and gradually childhood became a concept of its own, and children were recognized as distinct from adults in many respects. However, Professor Shavit pointed out that among the upper classes, both children and the lower classes (often service people) were viewed as dependent, and in need of help. This connection between children’s culture and people and things that were service-related or on the (espeically lower) periphery of adult culture is primarily what she discussed. Examples include the trend for sailor outfits for children and rocking horses as toys. One positive aspect of all this, she thought, is that the ambivalent status of children’s literature allows it to discuss issues that are not considered appropriate in literature for adults.

The guest author at the conference was Swedish writer Åsa Lind, whose work has been translated to many languages, but unfortunately not English. She told many entertaining stories about her background and career and how she writes, but also mentioned the literary hierarchy and how children’s authors are often lowest. Little importance is attached to children’s literature, for a variety of reasons. But on the contrary, Ms. Lind thought, this shouldn’t be the case, since writing for adults excludes children, while people who write for children include everyone. Children’s literature is thus inclusive and deserves more respect. She also said, “Stories are essential for kids. It’s a question of democracy. When you have the language, you can be part of the society in which you live.”

Throughout the conference, there were parallel presentations on a multitude of issues related to the translation of children’s literature. Many of the lectures sounded interesting (although despite the fact that the theme of the conference was translation, a surprising number seemed only tangentially related), so it was hard to choose which to attend, and perhaps the conference should have been longer so there were fewer choices to make. My favorite presentation was by Belgian Professor Jan van Coillie, who spoke about translating poetry for children, which he views as “the ultimate challenge”. He identified several strategies for translating poetry: repetition (literal translation), addition, deletion, submission, and transmutation. Poetry is especially challenging because the translator must pay careful to attention to the formal, semantic, and pragmatic levels, whereas in other kinds of translation, there isn’t as much interplay between the three levels, nor necessarily as much emphasis on each of them. In addition, Professor van Coillie mentioned how literature can be used for the transmission of norms or morals, and also how there are many different possible text functions (such as recreative, creative, emotive, and educative). He is working on creating a general comprehensive methodology and strategy for translating poetry for children, so his research is fascinating.

Besides all the academic presentations, during the conference, there was also a panel on the history of Turkish children’s literature, a performance of karagöz (traditional shadow puppet theater -- see the photo below), and a presentation on a special Turkish anthology used to educate teenagers about violence.

The Child and the Book Conference and Translating Dialects

I am back from Turkey now and eager to tell you about the the Child and the Book conference, which is an annual conference on children’s literature that focused on translation this year.

I gave a presentation on the translation of dialects in Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Alan Garner’s The Stone Book Quartet. In my analysis of those books and their Swedish translations, I identified four major strategies for translating the dialects: standardization (removing the dialect and using standard language in its place), orthography and grammar (using grammatical and orthographic ‘mistakes’ and/or eye dialect), replacement (replacing the source dialect with any target dialect, or one that is geographically, socioeconomically, culturally, or stereotypically a relatively close match), and compensation (employing temporal or regional dialect in different places/amounts). Another possible strategy is omission (deleting any phrases or sections containing dialect), but I didn’t notice that in those two books, probably because not much would have been left if the translators had done that.

What is especially interesting to study in the translation of dialects in children’s literature versus that in literature for adults is whether translators feel more freedom and/or responsibility. Many adults – parents, writers, librarians, teachers, publishers, and so on – believe that children ought not be exposed to dialects; they think that the standard dialect of a language is the only correct one, or the only useful one to know. So I wonder if authors of books for children might feel more hesitant about employing dialects and also if translators of such books might be more likely to standardize the language. My opinion is that if an author has chosen to use a dialect, the translator should attempt to find a way of portraying it in the target text, but that is unfortunately not what always happens.

In the next post, I’ll write more about the conference in general.

Off to a Conference

I am off to a conference in Turkey now, so I will be away from the blog for a couple of weeks, but I will post all about it when I return!

How Journalists Work With Interpreters When Reporting

Journalists reporting from foreign countries often have to rely on translators or interpreters when they want to use documents or interview people in the language spoken in the country in question. Many papers (in English and in Swedish, at least – I am not familiar with the newspapers in other languages) just quote from sources as though they spoke in the language of the newspaper; in other words, they don’t name the interpreter or even mention the fact that one was used. For greater transparency, this perhaps ought to be done.

In the New York Times, the Public Editor recently posted to his blog about this topic, and invited staff editor Andrea Kannapell to comment. She wrote, “When there is the luxury of time, and The Times considers the investment worthwhile, we send correspondents for a year of language training before they take up a foreign assignment. We have begun such training for one correspondent who has already spent a good deal of time in Iraq. A year of training, of course, will not make anyone truly fluent, but it does enable the correspondent to get a sense of what people are saying — as well as a sense of whether a translator is up to the job.”

However, that is not always the case, and journalists may still need to rely on interpreters (note: not translators – the people at the Times seem a little confused about the difference between a translator and an interpreter), so one technique they have is to “ask questions more than once, or ask in a slightly different way, if they feel the translator has skipped something or offered a garbled passage.” A comment from translator Daniel Garcia Pallaviccini after this post brings up the issue of what an interpreter is to think if the journalist behaves a little strangely and keeps asking the same questions; the point here is that the journalist ought to attempt to have as good a relationship as possible with the interpreter and perhaps should discuss his or her concerns or methods of working with this person. In the post, Sabrina Tavernise, a correspondent in Iraq, is quoted on her relationship with her interpreter, whom she says has never “purposefully mistranslat[ed].” Of course, clients working with interpreters or translators must always be cautious and aware, but some of these comments do sound a little overly suspicious, as though most interpreters would mistranslate on purpose.

In political situations, finding and using a reliable interpreter is naturally very important, but it is also quite tricky, and it was interesting to read about how one newspaper views the process. I still think that giving information about the interpreter (or translator, in the case of documents) and the methods employed would increase the trustworthiness for editors and readers.

Thank you to Erika Dreifus for sending me this link!

Translating the Koran

According to an article in the New York Times, Laleh Bakhtiar spent seven years on a new translation of the Koran from Arabic to English. The article discusses some of the translatorial decisions and difficulties she faced, including the fact that she had to spend three months on the Arabic word “daraba” alone. According to the article, “[s]ome analysts hold that the verse [i.e. the one containing “daraba”] cannot be rendered meaningfully into English because it reflects social and legal practices of Muhammad’s time.” In other words, some people consider it untranslatable. However, many translations involve significant barriers – linguistic, cultural, and temporal among them – and most translators do find ways of solving them. So though such issues are difficult, a translator can’t merely claim something is untranslatable and then give up.

Eventually, after research, Ms. Bakhtiar came to understand the word “daraba” in a way other than the traditional interpretation and she decided to use that understanding in her translation. As the article points out, “[d]ebates over translations of the Koran — considered God’s eternal words — revolve around religious tradition and Arabic grammar.” Obviously, this is a problem for nearly all religious texts, and translators of holy books have been challenged, threatened, and even killed because of their work. “Ms. Bakhtiar said she expected opposition, not least because she is not an Islamic scholar. Men in the Muslim world, she said, will also oppose the idea of an American, especially a woman, reinterpreting the prevailing translation.”

Translator Edith Grossman

According to today’s Writer’s Almanac, today is “the birthday of one of the few translators who has become something of a literary celebrity herself, Edith Grossman, born in Philadelphia (1936).” In a speech Ms. Grossman gave in honor of Gabriel García Márquez, she said of translation that it “is an act of critical interpretation” and she goes on to discuss the idea of fidelity.

Here is the rest of today’s entry in the almanac, which is interesting because it talks a little about how she got into translation and what choices she made while translation Mr. Márquez:

“Her parents were Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, but for some reason Grossman became obsessed with the Spanish language when she was in high school. She said, “My high school Spanish teacher just reached me. I said whatever this woman is doing I want to do.”

Grossman won a Fulbright grant in 1963 and went to Spain to study medieval Spanish poetry. But when she began to read the poetry of Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, Grossman decided that contemporary Latin American literature was too interesting to ignore. She began translating contemporary Spanish novels, and then in the mid-1980s, she got her big break when she got a chance to translate Gabriel García Márquez’s novel Love in the Time of Cholera.

She knew that one of Márquez’s favorite English authors was William Faulkner, so she decided to use Faulkner's style as a guide for her translation. She said, “I didn’t use any contractions in the narration, and I used Latinate words, polysyllabic words, instead of German monosyllables.” When Grossman's translation of Love in the Time of Cholera came out, it was such a success that Grossman was able to quit teaching and begin translating full time. She has since translated all of the new books that Márquez has published.

In 2003, she published a translation of the Spanish classic Don Quixote. Grossman wasn't sure she could do it until she finished the first sentence. Her version of the sentence is, “Somewhere in la Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember, a gentleman lived not long ago, one of those who has a lance and ancient shield on a shelf and keeps a skinny nag and a greyhound for racing.”

When it came out in 2003, it was hailed as the best English translation of the novel in decades, perhaps the best American translation of the novel ever completed.”

The Lord Conrad Black Trial, Translation, and Learning Languages

Someone recently sent me an article from the International Herald Tribune. It has nothing to do with translation (instead, it is about the Lord Conrad Black trial, in which my father happens to be serving as an expert witness), but I noticed something interesting next to the content of the piece. Besides the usual features, such as “e-mail this article” or “print,” there is a “translate” function. A reader can choose this function in order to get either detailed English definitions of the words in the piece or translations of the words to Spanish, Italian, French, Portuguese, or German. The service is run by Ultralingua, a company I had never heard of before.

The definitions/translations serve a purpose; namely, for readers for whom English is not their native tongue, this helps them understand any difficult words they come across. However, the service doesn’t recognize numbers or names (“Conrad Black” is suggested to be “Consanguíneo Negro” in Spanish!), and of course there is no way for the machine translations (really just words copied from bilingual dictionaries) to understand or work with the context, which means that the words are translated out of context (i.e. many possible translations are given) and the translations do not become a coherent and complete text. Rather than attempting to be a translation tool, I think this service could instead be exploited for language learning. It would be useful (and fascinating!) for many of us to be able to click on any word on any website and be able to immediately access a detailed definition and translations to a multitude of languages.

Some Recent Reading on Languages

Here are a few interesting, recent articles about language, three from the New York Times and one from the Financial Times.

The first is a book review of two books about English. Readers of this blog already know I am interested in books about language, and I plan to check out When You Catch an Adjective, Kill It by Ben Yagoda and The Fight for English: How Language Pundits Ate, Shot, and Left by David Crystal, who has previously been mentioned heree.

The second piece is about the Oxford English Dictionary, and it touches on how the dictionary was created, how words make it in there, word formation, the sources of the citations in the OED, and other topics. As one person says in the article, “It’s not just about the language. It’s about tracking history through the language.”

The other two articles are about the endangered Manchu language of China. The first of these articles details the history of the Manchu people, the dynasty, and the language. Only the oldest generation in a particular region of China seems to use Manchu; an older lady, Meng Shujing, interviewed in the article thinks that only “five or six of her neighbors” can speak it fluently. She is quoted as saying, “I don’t have much time…I don’t even know if I have tomorrow, but I will use the time to teach my grandchildren. It is our language; how can we let it die? We are Manchu people.” The article states that the “disappearance of Manchu will be part of a mass extinction of languages that some experts forecast will lead to the loss of half of the world’s 6,800 languages by the end of the century.” This is a really unfortunate fact. What happens when those languages are gone?

Well, much of the history and culture that were embedded in and preserved in each lost tongue is sadly lost, or become the province of a few experts and/or people have to rely on translators to make the information available to the general public. The second of these two articles on Manchu mentions just this issue. There are apparently many documents about the Qing Dynasty in Manchu, but since so few people know the language, there are only 40 translators working on translating them (presumably to Chinese, although that is not specified): “Scholars estimate that about 20 percent of the 10 million files in the massive Qing archive in Beijing are written in Manchu.” Imagine how long it will take those 40 translators to translate all those files!

Enjoy these varied articles on language!

Translatorial Censorship

In the last post, I quoted from Dr. Marjorie Garber’s book Vice Versa: Bisexuality and the Eroticism of Everyday Life, in which she mentioned some translatorial/editorial changing/censorship (or “gender bowdlerization”) of work featuring homosexuals and bisexuals. Unfortunately, this is not a unique or altogether rare phenomenon.

In the special Translating Humour issue of The Translator magazine from 2002, in an article entitled “Francoist Translation Censorship of Two Billy Wilder Films,” Jeroen Vandaele writes about how, during Franco’s regime, translatorial censorship took place of work that was considered inappropriate or immoral. For example, Some Like it Hot might be considered amoral because of issues relating to its portrayal of cross-dressing, the potential gay implications of the movie, and other sexual topics (especially, it might be noted, sexual issues that are outside the realm of what is accepted as “normal”). Dr. Vandaele says that some of the sexual humor in Some Like it Hot and The Apartment was “changed or deleted because of immorality” or “replaced by morality,” and one can assume that if this sort of censorship happened to films, it was part of a general view of culture and society that also affected literature.

Whether for political or other reasons, translators and editors (and other people with power, such as teachers) sometimes censor or change material that they consider improper or otherwise unsuitable. I remember someone who grew up in Iran telling me about seeing foreign films in Iran and then, once she had moved to Europe and later to America, seeing the same movies and being surprised at how much longer they were; in other words, “inappropriate” material had been deleted or changed before the films were deemed acceptable in Iran.

Personally, I’m a strong believer in having as little as possible come between the audience and the text (or film or whatever) as the author (or director or whoever) envisioned it, and I hope that we translators will be cautious about (ab)using the power the wield.

Translating Homosexuality

To continue with the gender theme from the last post…

If you didn’t know it already, translation is everywhere. While reading Vice Versa: Bisexuality and the Eroticism of Everyday Life by Dr. Marjorie Garber (yes, it’s shocking, but I do actually read books on topics other than translation!), a fascinating book that I didn’t expect to relate to translation, I noticed a brief discussion of how translators and editors changed Plato’s Symposium and Shakespeare’s sonnets when they found the genders or sexual identities inappropriate or discomfiting, i.e. when they were not explicitly heterosexual.

Dr. Garber writes: “Thus the Greek word eromenos, meaning “male beloved,” became “mistress,” and the “army of lovers” that would have its historical counterpart in the famous Theban Band of warrior-companions becomes, by implication, a bevy of knights and ladies. The word “boy” in Greek was simply translated as “maiden” or “woman,” thus making same-sex love invisible to the non-Greek reading eye.” On the next page, Dr. Garber mentions Lord Byron who “like the timid translators of Greek…often chose the path of gender bowdlerization in his writing” and she creates the term “textual heterosexual” to refer to those who pass as heterosexual through this “gender bowdlerization” in their writing, or by implication, in translation.

She also points out that correct, non-bowdlerized translations of this sort of material later helped make homosexuals and bisexuals more visible and more accepted.

To be blunt about it, translators have a lot of power, and abusing it by significantly changing texts, including by deleting anything not “appropriate,” is, in my opinion, wrong.

Gender in Translation and Other Challenges

An article by Vivian Eden includes reviews of translations of poetry from Hebrew and French to English, and Dr. Eden, herself a translator, writes that translation is a good way of conversing with and learning from other writers:

“After many years of ruminating on this conundrum, I have come to the conclusion that it is indeed possible to get dead writers to listen to you, in three steps: Read, read, read again and again; formulate your questions or observations very precisely (Do you really need that third drink?); and then again, read, read, read. The texts will tell you what you want to know and confirm, deny or comment on your observations. One of the best ways of carrying out this three-step procedure is by translating.”

Some of the issues this article, and the three books reviewed, brings up are fascinating. For example, what can a translator, whether of poetry, fiction, or non-fiction, do when faced with a word in the source text that has more than one possible meaning? How can the translator decide which meaning to highlight, which one/s to sacrifice?

And what about gender in languages? Linda Stern Zisquit, a poet, describes how she began to translate Yona Wallach’s poetry from Hebrew: “In 1982 I translated several of Yona Wallach's early poems in response to the request of a friend then editing an issue of Hebrew poetry for The Literary Review. I had reservations: My Hebrew was new, and Wallach's reputation - as a masterful poet who fragmented syntax with demonic power and broke laws of male and female conjugation - was intimidating.” The gender aspect is fascinating and it would be interesting to know how translators to and from other gendered languages deal with these issues. How can a translator represent gender, and the breaking of gender rules, in a non-gendered language? Similarly, number is something that can be played with by writers and that can be difficult for translators to portray in the target language. Ms. Zisquit includes notes in the book on the translation and challenges involved in working on Yona Wallach’s poetry, and that is a helpful idea that more translators might want to adopt.

And finally, to continue with the theme of gender, French poet Jacques Reda introduces a volume of his poetry in English translation with an implication that male and female translators are different – one wonders exactly what he meant by that. Mr. Reda, referring positively to his translator, writes: “Perhaps the convergence of these qualities comes as less of a surprise in a woman translator than in a man.”

So what do you think about these issues? Do male and female translators differ, and are they suited for different kinds of work? And what can translators do about gendered languages, numbers, and the multiplicity of meaning that some words or sounds have?

The Translation of Harry Potter

I may be one of the few people not to have read any of the Harry Potter books, but I nevertheless found this article by Daniel Hahn about translating J.K. Rowling’s work interesting.

He writes: “Of the 325 million Harry Potter books sold around the world, some 100 million copies don't contain a single line of JK Rowling’s prose. They’re mediated by the work of other writers who set the tone, create suspense and humour, and give the characters their distinctive voices and accents. The only thing these translators have no impact on whatsoever is the plot, which of course is Rowling’s alone.”

Frankly, I disagree with Mr. Hahn’s description. It’s rather melodramatic, and it makes it seem as though translations have very little in common with originals. The plot is the only thing he mentions, but most translators work very hard to recreate the same “tone,…suspense and humour” and other features of each text; if they are creating new tones or new kinds of suspense or humor, then it seems to me that the translation becomes a different book. Also, of course, some translators do unfortunately change the plot of books they work on. And in some cases, even if the translators don’t change the plot outright, some of the changes they have to make for linguistic or cultural reasons do of necessity affect the plot.

Mr. Hahn also touches on an issue that has been mentioned here before: the invisibility of the translator. He says: “The job of any translator requires that they be simultaneously present and absent; altogether sympathetically embedded in the work and yet totally invisible. And for the most part that invisibility is well maintained.” Today, some people disagree with this idea of translation and the related one of fluency. Personally, I wonder if the concept of in/visibility remains stronger in the translation of children’s literature than in that for adults.

At any rate, whether you are a Harry Potter fan or not, you might want to read about some of the special difficulties Ms. Rowling’s translators face, such as names and invented words. It’s also interesting to consider how today’s technology affects translation; Mr. Hahn mentions some of the requirements that making films out of these books imposes on the translators.

PEN’S Translation Site

PEN has updated their translation page.

Thanks to Erika Dreifus for passing on this resource!

Learning Welsh on St. David’s Day

Today is St. David’s Day here in Wales. David, or Dewi, is the patron saint of the country and it is believed that he died on this day in 589.

So in honor of the holiday, I thought I’d post a few links for sites that will help you learn Welsh. And just as a word of advice, Welsh is not a language to attempt to learn if you are not willing to spend a lot of time memorizing (and, yes, I know, all languages require significant study and memorizing) – together, the various verb forms, the many mutations, and all the ways you can say “yes” or “no” in Welsh make this a challenging language!

Learn Welsh on the BBC’s website

A beginning Welsh course

Enjoy learning Cymraeg!

The Humor (and Poetics!) of Mistranslations

While reading Walter Nash’s The Language of Humour: Style and Technique in Comic Discourse, I noticed a short passage on mistranslations. Mr. Nash refers to the humor that can come from the “excessively literally or misguidedly ambitious” translation. Surely we’ve all sniggered at poor translations in users’ manuals for items manufactured in other countries or while on vacation, whether in hotel rooms or on menus. Maybe some of us have even attempted to politely inform the managers of the restaurants or hotels that the translation was not correct. What’s interesting is that these mistranslations can inspire artists, as in the poem by Robert Graves referred to by Mr. Nash.

Apparently Mr. Graves noticed a badly translated tourist guide and let himself be inspired by it:

«¡Wellcome, to the Caves of Arta!» by Robert Graves

‘They are hollowed out in the see-coast at the muncipal terminal of Capdepera at nine kilometer from the town of Arta in the Island of Mallorca, with a stuporizing infinity of graceful colums of 21 meter and by downward, which prives the spectator of all animacion and plunges in dumbness. The way going is very picturesque, serpentine between style mountains, til the arrival at the esplanade of the vallee called «The Spiders». There are good enlacements of the railroad with autobuses of excursion, many days of the week, today actually Wednesday and Satturday. Since many centuries renown foreing visitors have explored them and wrote their elegy about, included Nort-American geoglogues.’ [From a tourist guide]

Such subtile filigranity and nobless of construccion
Here fraternise in harmony, that respiracion stops.
While all admit thier impotence (though autors most formidable)
To sing in words the excellence of Nature's underprops,
Yet stalactite and stalagmite together with dumb language
Make hymnes to God wich celebrate the stregnth of water drops.

¿You, also, are you capable to make precise in idiom
Consideracions magic of ilusions very wide?
Already in the Vestibule of these Grand Caves of Arta
The spirit of the human verb is darked and stupefied;
So humildy you trespass trough the forest of the colums
And listen to the grandess explicated by the guide.

From darkness into darkness, but at measure, now descending
You remark with what esxactitude he designates each bent;
«The Saloon of Thousand Banners», or «The Tumba of Napoleon»,
«The Grotto of the Rosary», «The Club», «The Camping Tent»,
And at «Cavern of the Organs» there are knocking strange formacions
Wich give a nois particular pervoking wonderment.

Too far do not adventure, sir! For, further as you wander,
The every of the stalactites will make you stop and stay.
Grand peril amenaces now, your nostrills aprehending
An odour least delicious of lamentable decay.
It is poor touristers, in the depth of obscure cristal,
Wich deceased of thier emocion on a past excursion day.

Translating Primo Levi

Readers of the New Yorker might have noticed that quite a few recent issues have included stories by late authors, two of which were by Primo Levi. Ann Goldstein translated one of those stories from the Italian (Alessandra Bastagli translated the other one) and she talks about his work and the translation of it on the New Yorker’s website.

In this interview, Ms. Goldstein discusses, among other things, Mr. Levi’s “precise” language and his use of scientific terms; she says that she chooses scientific words in English that the reader may not know rather than simplifying them because she is aware of the fact that Italian readers, too, wouldn’t necessarily recognize all those terms. Thus, she attempts to retain Mr. Levi’s intentions.

An interesting note is that Ms. Goldstein seems to say that her first translation from Italian was published in the New Yorker. I’m sure many of us who work as literary translators, or would like to, don’t ever get published in that magazine, much less with our very first job! She is now one of the translators of the forthcoming collected works of Primo Levi.

Translation and Censorship

I’ve never compared translation to censorship before, but this interesting quote from poet Joseph Brodsky, which I noticed in the book Translating Milan Kundera by Michelle Woods, does just that:

“What translation has in common with censorship is that both operate on the basis of the ‘what’s possible’ principle, and it must be noted that linguistic barriers can be as high as those erected by the state.”

Obviously, the major difference is that censorship attempts to keep something out, whereas translation has to find a way to get around the cultural and “linguistic barriers”. That’s the challenge involved in being a translator – you have to escape the censorship that cultures and languages attempt to impose, whether they do so intentionally or not.

Learn a New Language and Concentrate Better

Like many people, I have heard it said that those who speak two or more languages aren’t really fluent in any language. That has never made much sense to me, and when parents have used that reasoning as an excuse not to teach their children their native tongues, I have thought it was misguided and sad. Well, this recent article says that research into bilingual people suggests that they are in fact able to operate in more than one language, and also that they are better able to concentrate. So while it is true that there can be interference between or among languages (and I have certainly spoken or written the wrong language to people more than once, so I know what an embarrassment it can be), the potential benefits seem to be stronger. Hopefully there will be more research on this soon, but in the meantime, we can all safely continue learning foreign tongues!

More on the Ethics of Translation

I always find the ethics of translation to be a fascinating topic, so it was interesting to see it come up for the second time within a year in Randy Cohen’s Ethicist column in the New York Times Magazine.

In Sunday’s column, a woman writes that her father, a translator, was hired to translate pages from a diary of a woman whose husband suspected she was cheating on him. Was it ethical to translate the diary pages? Mr. Cohen says that the translation was legal, but not moral.

I agree with his assessment and I hope I would have turned down the assignment, but the fact is that translators don’t always get to see (or know much about) the work before they accept it, although certainly a translator could turn down the job once she or he sees the document in question. Also, some freelancers might truly be desperate for money and unable to say no to any work.

What do you think? Would you have accepted this job? When does something cross the line for you from being an acceptable job to one you feel obligated to refuse?

Translating Milan Kundera

In the last post, I quoted from a review of I.B. Singer’s work, which makes it clear that he rewrote as he translated, thus blurring the definition of translation. In the book Translating Milan Kundera, Michelle Woods describes how Mr. Kundera does the same thing, constantly translating his work and his biography in a variety of ways.

Milan Kundera is a Franco-Czech novelist who, it can be argued, primarily has readership though translation. Ms. Woods analyses his oeuvre and the various functions of translation within it through the prism of the four kinds of translation that she sees there: translation in the traditional sense (that is, between languages and cultures), rewriting (Mr. Kundera rewrites his books, reworks his earlier writings into later ones, and redefines his bibliography), writing (all writing can be considered translation, and this is especially applicable to Mr. Kundera, since he mostly writes for a non-Czech audience), and reception (how publishers and readers both in the Czech Republic and abroad understand and receive his work). Woods compares and studies Kundera’s Czech, French, and English writings, and uses them as a case study to understand all the different ways translation is involved in authorship.

What is interesting about Mr. Kundera, as with Mr. Singer, is that he changes his books as he reviews and works on the translations (he does not translate himself, but works with and supervises his translators closely – some say too closely. The books aren’t changed so much that they become unrecognizable, but they are clearly not just ‘straight’ translations. So they are some combination of rewriting, adapting, and translating. Perhaps we could call it transwriting, writing across cultural and linguistic boundaries.

Translating and Rewriting

Speaking of Yiddish, I noticed this review of a biography of Isaac Bashevis Singer in December. Interestingly, the biography itself is a translation, which is never mentioned, but the review does briefly discuss the translation of Mr. Singer’s work:

“Fame in America came to Singer shortly after, when The Partisan Review published his story “Gimpel the Fool.” Here too, though, sweetness came with bitterness. Saul Bellow had translated the work at the request of Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg. “I had seven names in all: imbecile, donkey, flax-head, dope, glump, ninny and fool,” Gimpel begins, sounding more like Augie March than someone from the old country. It’s hard not to wonder about the effect on Singer of this side door to renown. We know he never let Bellow near another story of his, doing his own translations from that time on with the help of not-so-famous assistants.

“These translations — “second originals” as Singer called them — grew to be quite different from the Yiddish texts. Singer often stripped much of the metaphysics and verbal density out of his native-language efforts, leaving a simpler mix of the imaginative and the quotidian, the carnal and the concrete, that he felt would appeal to the tastes of English-language readers. And they — especially American Jews — responded. Singer became for them an appealing combination of home-grown mystical realist and approachable modernist. In addition, he was the beneficiary of their guilt and grief over the fate of the people they had left behind in Europe.”

In other words, Mr. Singer changed his works as he ‘translated’ them, perhaps just to make small adjustments or improvements at times, and for other works, changing them for the target audience. Is something still a translation if it is a new, changed version in a new language? Where is the line drawn between translating and rewriting, or translating and adapting?

This will be discussed more in the next post.

Books on Language – Yiddish

Continuing with books on language, this post will be on Yiddish.

I read two books on the subject not long ago, and they complemented each other well. The books were Words on Fire: The Unfinished Story of Yiddish by Dovid Katz and Outwitting History: The Amazing Adventures of a Man Who Rescued a Million Yiddish Books by Aaron Lansky.

Mr. Katz’s thick, instructive book gives the history of Yiddish, explaining where it came from, how it was used in different situations than Hebrew and Aramaic (that is, for Ashkenazi Jews; other Jews did not traditionally speak Yiddish), and how it was viewed. He also looks at Yiddish literature, who speaks Yiddish today, and other related topics.

Mr. Lansky’s book is about his personal journey with Yiddish and how he helped save Yiddish books. He was a doctoral student when he realized that as elderly, Yiddish-speaking Jews died, their children, who generally did not know Yiddish, threw out their Yiddish books. Mr. Lansky quit his program in order to save the Yiddish books, travelling around the world to do so, eventually starting the National Yiddish Book Center in Massachusetts as a library, center, resource place, and shop for Yiddish books. He has helped save over 1.5 million Yiddish books and his adventures are both fun and sad.

It was interesting to read the two books together, because first I learned about what the mamaloshen meant – and means – to Ashkenazi Jews, and then I read about Yiddish in modern times and what has happened to Yiddish books.

Let me know about other good books about languages!

Books on Language – Latin

To continue with the theme of books on language, I’d like to look at Latin.

I studied Latin in middle school and high school and I realized immediately that it was a really useful language for any speaker or learner of English or Romance languages (and, of course, it has influenced other tongues as well). Even though I unfortunately can’t read it today, what I remember still helps me, both as a teacher of English and also as a user of the language myself.

But though I learned the language (including all those declensions), I didn’t get a good sense of the culture surrounding it. Tore Janson’s book A Natural History of Latin fills that need. Mr. Janson explains the origins of Latin, how and why it became important, and why it is relevant today. I wish his book had been available when I was in school, because it would have helped me understand Latin in the context of its cultural and historical background.

Books on Language – English

As a certified “language nerd,” I really enjoy reading books about the history and culture behind languages. As a translator, you have to understand the grammar and vocabulary of a language, of course, and having a sense of the cultural is also important, but learning about the history of a language is not only helpful, but also fascinating. Unfortunately, I’ve noticed that many people who teach languages too often ignore the cultural and historical aspects, which I happen to think would entice students and get them more excited about their language learning. Language is not just a way to communicate (unless you’re speaking Globish!), but also offers a whole culture and a worldview.

In this post and the following two, I’ll write about some of the interesting books on language that I’ve read.

My all-time favorite book on English is Bill Bryson's Mother Tongue. Mr. Bryson is an excellent, entertaining author who could probably make any subject interesting. His book enthusiastically describes the history of English, how it has become a global language, and so forth, but it also includes chapters on word play and swearing, and has examples of bad English. I admit that I laugh aloud as I read (and re-read) Mother Tongue, and I’ve shared the book with students, who found it both amusing and interesting.

The Stories of English by David Crystal has a different perspective than most language books in that it doesn’t just discuss the history of standard English but instead includes many varieties of English. Hence, the title is not The Story of English but rather The Stories. Many people view the standard varieties of languages as the only correct ones (in part because that is what is taught in school), but the fact is that the majority of the speakers of any language do not speak the standard. This book looks at the development of English, in all its varieties, over time. The prolific Mr. Crystal, by the way, has recently started a blog.

What about you? Do you have favorite books on languages?