Chinglish: Leaving Values Far Behind

Shanghai was an interesting choice of location for the FIT conference. I must say that China does not seem to be a country that places much emphasis on professional translations.

One of my particular interests is bad menu translations. Here are a few of the items I saw in China:

beef pulls noodle

frying without adding anything shrimp

sheet iron Germany salty pig's hoof

liquor rice with mini-bums

the seafood is harsh

cowboy bone

fried how delicious crab

vegetarian ham

the tea tree mushroom roasts the winter bamboo shoot

syrup carbon fever pork

social beef

marinated three white

vermicille with wild fangs

soft-shelled turtled cooks ox whip

peaceful is big prawn

characteristic fish gluten

crab ovary

the chinese flowering quince the clam gentlemen frog

sichuan taste gluttonous frog

crosses the bridge spare ribs

pot pan

sandwich calcium cake

fragrant tasty entry

best tasty

high fly pizza

crystal-like cake

On tour buses, I repeatedly heard “Don’t leave your values on the bus.” And I saw the motto “We service you whole-heartedly” throughout the country. I just wonder if that whole-hearted service really extends to translation. I think many people in China left their translation skills on the bus.

The Visual Made Verbal

As I mentioned in the last post, at the FIT conference, I learned about a different kind of translation.

Joel Snyder gave a very interesting presentation on audio description, which can be said to be a form of translation for blind people. He defines audio description as “a verbal version of the visual image.” In other words, while visually impaired people listen to a tv show or movie or even a live performance, they not only hear the dialogue, but they also hear a description of what is being shown.

Mr. Snyder gave an entertaining and informative presentation and since his website offers a lot of details on audio description, I won’t repeat it here. However, what I want to emphasize in this post is that learning about this field broadened my understanding of translation. Mr. Snyder may not translate from one language to another, but he does translate from one format to another and he transfers cultural and visual elements for his customers.

On the FIT Conference

Earlier this month, I attended the FIT conference in Shanghai. It was a huge event, with over 1500 attendees from 70 countries, 4 keynote lectures (including one by Karl-Johan Lönnroth, the Director-General of the Directorate-General for Translation of the European Commission), and 8 parallel sessions with ten or so choices per session (i.e. 80+ parallel sessions, some with 5 speakers per session).

There were presentations on everything from the translation of Chinese medicine to terminology, from interpretation studies to translation and culture, from corpus-based translation studies to the translation industry, from publishing and copyright to translation criticism. I myself spoke about translating allusions in children’s literature. Talks were given in Chinese, French, and English, and despite this being a translation conference, only the keynote speeches were interpreted, unfortunately.

There were also poster presentations, including one by Yann Foucault, who translates accounting texts between English and French. His conclusion was relevant to fields far beyond accounting, however: Mr. Foucault felt that by translating texts and not just keeping them in the international language of English, one was both expanding the target language and allowing new, useful ideas to be created in that language.

In the next post, I will discuss a new kind of translation I learned about at FIT.

Another Round-Up of Articles

The first article is by Hillel Halkin, whom I mentioned just a few posts ago. Thank you to Erika Dreifus for sending me this article!

The second piece is on Sweden, where I lived for a number of years, and its literature. Thank you to Professor Duncan Large for sending me this article!

The next article is about online writing.

A Reference Website

h2g2 is a website put out by the BBC. It is a bit like Wikipedia in that anyone can contribute to the information, but the focus is somewhat different. It calls itself “an unconventional guide to life, the universe, and everything

There are around 200 articles in the language section, on topics such as alphabets and usage. An interesting article is on the letter thorn.

About WALTIC

At the beginning of July, I attended the WALTIC conference in Stockholm. It is a bit late to write about it, but I did want to say that it was an enjoyable opportunity for translators, writers, and others interested in literature and literacy, to meet and discuss things.

There were several sessions on translation and I attended as many of those as I could. Some were rather disappointing, as people were not always as well-prepared as they should have been, but I enjoyed learning about, for example, Russian literature (as I mentioned in my last post) and about writing in Mongolia. The latter presentation was read by a translator on behalf of Khaidav Chilaajav, a Mongolian poet who started the Union of Mongolian Writers. Mr. Chilaajav passed out copies of The Poetry of the Steppe, which afforded us a chance to experience Mongolian writing.

The keynote speeches by authors Mia Couto and Nawal El Saadawi were enjoyable. Around the city during the conference, there was a free literature festival as well. I attended one on children’s literature that included authors and/or story-tellers Philip Pullman (who spoke well about age banding, among other issues), Gcina Mhlophe, and Sonia Nimr.

My biggest criticism is that the conference was very expensive to attend, and I knew many people who would have liked to go but could not afford it. Since many writers and translators don’t necessarily earn much money, I think the price of future WALTIC conferences would have to be significantly lower.

Russian Writing in Translation

I have written nothing about the WALTIC conference so far (see the next post!), but I would like to mention a publisher I learned about there called Glas Moscow. Glas publishes contemporary Russian writing in English translation, including quite a few interesting anthologies, and their catalog is worth a look.

Books with Translators

We know that translators translate books, but are translators ever characters in books? I don’t believe that it is too common for “translator” to be a character’s job title. Why is that?

I recently read The Liberated Bride by A.B. Yehoshua (I read it in translation by Hillel Halkin) and was happy to see that one character, though a fairly minor one, was a translator. Hannah Tedeschi, referred to as “the translatoress”, is the second wife of the main character’s former mentor, and she translates from Arabic to Hebrew. In fact, she does some on-the-spot translations that the main character judges to be excellent and moving. The reader never sees her working (except in the one scene where she translates as a poet reads the poems, though her actual labor is not portrayed), but we do experience her actual translations.

Can you think of other books with translator characters?

Contest for Japanese-to-English Translators

Japanese-to-English translators may be interested in the Kurodahan Press Translation Prize, “awarded for excellence in translation of a selected Japanese short story into English”. See this website for more details.

A Question about Ergonomics

As someone who runs her own business and works very hard, I often find that I spend long days (sometimes as much as 16 hours) in front of the computer. Like many translators, editors, and writers, I have suffered from carpal tunnel and other pains in my arms, hands, neck, and back.

I’ve tried different things (physical therapy, buying a more comfortable chair, an ergonomic keyboard, voice-recognition software – well, that was some years ago and I wasn’t patient enough to keep training the software), but I still have the same problems. Now the best thing I’ve come up with is to force myself to step away from the computer and take breaks, either by doing something else in the house or by getting out for a walk. This helps to some extent, but doesn’t really solve my problems.

I saw this website, which offers many products to make your work station more ergonomic. What products do you use and what do you recommend? Do you have any pain-reducing or pain-avoiding tips to share with your fellow translators?

Ideology and Translation

I want to quote from Clifford E. Landers’ book Literary Translation: A Practical Guide once more.

Regarding translation and ideology, he writes “What does the profession of translation do? Obviously, it translates. If a translator allows ideology to color anything he or she translates, the profession suffers. And when translation is stifled ether by repression or self-censorship entire nations are deprived of a glimpse into the mind of the Other.”

Clearly, his comment refers to the ideal of translation. In this ideal world, ideology would not color our translations. But sometimes (especially for texts that are not primarily factual, such as contracts) it is impossible to avoid. We translators must simply be hyperaware of the fact that our opinions and experiences do influence and they may make us choose certain translatorial strategies or words or styles of writing that perhaps are not exactly right for the text.

Mission: Possible?

I have mentioned Clifford E. Landers’ book Literary Translation: A Practical Guide several times on this blog before. He includes the well-known quote from writer Kurt Vonnegut: “All I require of a translator is that he or she be a more gifted writer than I am, and in at least two languages, one of them mine.”

I know the comment is partly tongue-in-cheek, but it does reveal how high the demands are on translators. Of course, based on some books I have read, this goal is not only possible to reach, but almost impossible not to!

A Round-Up of Articles

Time for another round-up of articles!

The first article is on the translation of Chinese menus. As you know, I love menu translations.

The next piece is on literary lists. I personally love to make lists so I was interested in this article. What would be on a list of books about translation and/or language?

The third article is about the Pennsylvania Dutch (actually German, not Dutch) language/dialect. What words sound like home to you?

Next, we have an article on the disappearance of the semi-colon.

This BBC piece is about the perfect voice.

Learning languages is another of my interests, so I enjoyed this article on that topic, specifically on learning Hebrew.

Continuing with Hebrew, this article is about translating to and from that language. Thank you to Erika Dreifus for sending me this article!

Much Ado About Language Books

I like to read books about language. Often the books are rather serious (not so for “Mother Tongue” by Bill Bryson, but in general). So I enjoyed getting the chance to read something much lighter.

Richard Watson Todd’s “Much Ado About English” is a short, easy-to-read, and entertaining book about the English language. Sure, it is educational, too (for example, many chapters have little exercises, although they are mostly fun), but basically you just find yourself giggling and shaking your head at how illogical English can be.

Every brief chapter (usually around three pages) is about a different topic, such as slang, wordplay, British versus American English, pronunciation, making plurals, and much more. You learn a lot of random but interesting facts, such as that the word “penguin” comes from the Welsh “pen gwyn”, which means “white head”, and that “bizarre” comes from the Basque word “bizar”, which means “beard.” Then you are invited to try out your new knowledge by making guesses about other words or phrases.

The section on “self-contradictory sentences” is quite amusing, when you consider sentences such as “This vacuum cleaner really sucks” (is that good or bad?) and “Her intelligence is legendary” (does that mean the legend is true or false?). You’ll be wondering how people actually communicate in English.

I’m always looking for suggestions for books about language, so email me if you have any ideas. During the summer, I’d especially like to read some entertaining books, like Todd’s was.

No to Age Banding

Last month, on one of my children’s literature lists, the writer Philip Pullman posted a note, wondering what list members thought of age banding. Age banding is when publishers place an age recommendation/restriction on the book, much like what generally occurs with films.

I believe everyone who responded on the list (including me) was against age banding. Naturally, publishers may find that it boosts sales and is also a way of protecting themselves against parents or teachers who complain about (or who even threaten to sue over) books that they feel are not age-appropriate for their children or students. However, there are many reasons against this.

Mr. Pullman and a group of other writers, including David Almond, Aidan Chambers, Terry Pratchett, Helen Dunmore, and Melvin Burgess, then decided to write an explanation of why they are against this. Their letter has now been published in the Bookseller. In addition, they have started a website that serves both to express their view on this subject and also to collect signatures of those who agree with them about it.

Their sensible reasons include:

“Each child is unique, and so is each book. Accurate judgments about age suitability are impossible, and approximate ones are worse than useless.

Children easily feel stigmatized, and many will put aside books they might love because of the fear of being called babyish. Other children will feel dismayed that books of their ‘correct’ age-group are too challenging, and will be put off reading even more firmly than before.

Age-banding seeks to help adults choose books for children, and we're all in favour of that; but it does so by giving them the wrong information. It’s also likely to encourage over-prescriptive or anxious adults to limit a child's reading in ways that are unnecessary and even damaging.

Everything about a book is already rich with clues about the sort of reader it hopes to find – jacket design, typography, cover copy, prose style, illustrations. These are genuine connections with potential readers, because they appeal to individual preference. An age-guidance figure is a false one, because it implies that all children of that age are the same.

Children are now taught to look closely at book covers for all the information they convey. The hope that they will not notice the age-guidance figure, or think it unimportant, is unfounded.

Writers take great care not to limit their readership unnecessarily. To tell a story as well and inclusively as possible, and then find someone at the door turning readers away, is contrary to everything we value about books, and reading, and literature itself.”

SpråkPortalen

Translators to and from Swedish might be interested in this new website, which proclaims itself to be a meeting place for those who translate or work with language.

BookTrust’s Translated Fiction Website

BookTrust here in the UK has recently started a new website dedicated to translated fiction. It is definitely worth a look, and I think that BookTrust is open to suggestions for how to improve the site.

Also, I noticed that translator Eric Dickens, who has previously provided this blog with information about Yiddish, has an article on the new website.

Resource: The PEN Website

The PEN site has a lot of useful and interesting information on translation (and other topics, of course). There is a page for translation and this includes a translation handbook and a model contract. There is also a report called “To Be Translated or Not To Be”, with a foreword by novelist and translator Paul Auster.

Thanks to poet and translator Rika Lesser, who helped write the model contract and reminded me about what a good resource PEN is!

He died writer Chingiz Aitmatov

It is, of course, cruel to use someone's death as an example. However, this article, translated by machine translation software and sent to me by translator Eric Dickens, is yet more proof of what a mistake it is to rely on translation software.

He died writer Chingiz Aitmatov

writer Chingiz Aitmatov died in a clinic in Germany on June 10, 2008. He had not lived to 80 - anniversary a few months. Classic Kyrgyz and Russian literature, he was one of the most famous and beloved writers for many millions of people, Bakililar.AZ passes with reference to the BBC.

His novels and novels, "Farewell, Gulsary "," White steamer "," Pegy dog, running the edge of the sea "," I lasted longer than a century day "," Plaha "made him well-deserved glory and entered the textbooks and hrestomatii.

In one interview, Chingiz Aitmatov said that love - this is the true home of vitality. And in his works seen a tremendous love for the author's rights is part of nature, which, in turn, inform, acquiring human traits.

According to Tatar Ravilya Buharaeva writer, "his home, his world, in which it was, is the world of mythology and folklore Kyrgyz mountains and space .... Because mythology - a reflection of mythology in everyday life. And in this sense he was a consummate craftsman ".

C stigma "enemy of the people " Torekulovich Chingiz Aitmatov was born in 1928, in Kyrgyzstan. When he was nine years old, in 1937, his father was arrested. After another year of his shot.

Chingiz son grew up with the stigma enemy of the people. That played a big role in shaping the identity of the writer. His Uzbek counterpart Hamid Ismailov believes that this probably was the "initial impetus to the fact that he was able to trust their feelings only white sheet of paper, where he was able, so to speak, vyplesnut himself ".

At the age of 20 years Aitmatov received by the Agricultural Institute in the city of Frunze (the current Bishkek). Even a student, Aitmatov was published in the periodical press their first stories in Kyrgyz language.

Joined the highest literary courses in Moscow, he was able only in 1956, after HH CPSU congress. That is, after being exposed Stalin's personality cult, a repressed, including his father Aytmatova, have begun to rehabilitate.

At the end of the year courses in 1958, Aitmatov published a story, "Jamil" That brought him worldwide fame.

"Jamil" - the thing is so great that even a genius for its communist leaders were unable to recognize the danger in which it lies - believed Hamid Ismailov. -- When rereads Aytmatova, amazes his literary genius ".

Novels and Aytmatova novels written over the next 20 years, read throughout the world.

" What would he nor wrote, either, "White steamer", where he makes this great image of mother-olenihi, or wild camel from "Burannogo polustanka ", or - this great thing, absolutely not afraid of the word - "Pegy dog, running edge of the sea ", which refers to the north, are all seen a single vision. This is - an attempt to find a common language of all humanity "- Ravil writer believes Buharaev.

Titulovanny Writer

Over the next quarter-century Aitmatov wrote a number of novels and novels, which are now classics of Russian and Kyrgyz literature.

This "Topolek in my red kosynke " "first teacher", "Farewell, Gyulsary! " "White steamer", "Pegy dog, running the edge of the sea", "I lasted longer than a century Day" (novel, which was renamed the "stop Burana"), "Plaha ".

In these works Aitmatov raises the eternal questions: about a man, his soul, feelings, conscience. That's what Chingiz Aitmatov told himself: "Conscience - is a great heritage, the great legacy of the human race, human consciousness, the human spirit. Thanks to a person becomes a man of conscience ".

Chingiz Aitmatov was one of the most Soviet writers to style: Hero of Socialist Labor, the winner of many awards, deputy leader or member of many groups and committees ...

In 1990, Aitmatov is becoming a diplomat. First, he was Ambassador USSR, and later the Ambassador of Kyrgyzstan in the Benelux countries.

Biograf Abdyldazhan Akmataliev writer believes that the diplomatic service Aytmatova gave Kyrgyz much: " Since Soviet times world to know about Aytmatove more than about Kyrgyzstan. He embodies our spiritual passport, our calling card ".

However, in March 2008, Aitmatov was dismissed without explanation from the post of Ambassador of Kyrgyzstan in Europe.

In the middle May writer, while in Kazan on film shooting in the novel "I lasted longer day century", was hospitalized with a diagnosis of "kidney failure ".

Then he was sent to continue treatment City of Nuremberg (Germany). I

n one interview, Chingiz Aitmatov said: "I do feel life as a tragedy. Since zhizneutverzhdayuschim finale ".

" Upasi you about people from the ills nelyudskih - Upasi fire neugasimyh, From the bloody Battle irresistible, Forbid you from irreparable Affairs, Upasi you about people from the ills nelyudskih ... "Aytmatova end of the book" Cry of migratory birds

So You Think You Can Translate

The popularity of reality TV shows has sometimes made me wonder what a reality show about translation would involve. Note that I don’t have a television, so I may be a bit off on what the average reality show is all about, but from what I understand, it involves challenges and each week someone is kicked off the show.

So we have a group of eager wannabe-translators. What would they face on So You Think You Can Translate?

Every week, our eager contestants would pick a new style of text out of a box (financial report, poem, academic article, medical records, play, essay, speech, contract, short story, etc.) and they would have to translate that on their own. To make this even more difficult, they could also pick references from a box, so they would be limited to using one or some combination of the following: computer tools, dictionaries, Internet references, encyclopedias, or libraries. Contestants might get a total of two special links for the entire season, and that would mean that if they were really stuck on a translation, they could decide to call a professional translator or some other expert (a professor, language teacher, botanist, lawyer, novelist, editor, architect, etc.) for help.

In addition, there would be group, pair, and individual challenges. Challenges might include learning a new language, performing a sight translation, working on a relay translation, subtitling, interpreting, giving a presentation on some aspect of translation, learning how to use a new computer tool, reviewing a book on language or translation, negotiating with a customer, handling an angry client, advertising their services, and putting together a literary magazine of new translations.

The contestants’ translations would be critiqued by a panel of experienced judges, but the viewers would vote on who the winners of the other challenges should be. Each week, the contestant with the least votes would have to leave the show.

As the season draws to a close, the ultimate winner would be pronounced the nation’s Best Translator and she or he would get help starting her or his own freelance business. This would include an office with the works (computer, big desk, ergonomic chair, coffee machine, full sets of dictionaries and encyclopedias, etc.) plus a year’s worth of advice from an accountant, a mentor, and membership in any appropriate translators’ association.

I know I’d watch this show! Anyone else? What else should be on it?

Summer Break

Now that it's summer, I'm going to be posting a little less frequently. I'll be travelling for part of the time (seven different countries in a matter of months!) and I'll be attending various conferences, including two translation-focused ones (WALTIC in Stockholm later this month and FIT in Shanghai in August -- let me know if you're going to be there!). But I will keep posting, so check back.

And stay tuned for my version of Translation: The Reality TV Show!

Have a great summer!

More Humor

I am a fan of bad translations – not in a professional sense, of course, but just because I find them amusing. This funny website is primarily for those who know Swedish, but there is a section that can be read by everyone (at least the bad translations can; the commentary can not be). Click “äldre inlägg” at the end of each page to get to the next one.

A Round-Up of Articles and Videos

Time for a round-up of interesting articles and videos.

Here is an article on words meaning what they say/how they sound.

The next piece is on standardizing English and it relates to a guest post featured on Brave New Words last year.

This brief video is about how Aramaic is still being used in some villages today.

Ars Magna, short documentary, is about about anagrammist Cory Calghoun.

Finally, this parody song, “I Am Thesaurus,” is a play on the Beatles’ “I am the Walrus.”

Learn Vocabulary and Help Others

I freely admit that I love word games. Scrabble is probably my favorite (and if you’re on facebook, feel free to join me in a game – scrabble is about the only good thing I think facebook has - but make sure you let me know who you are when you "friend" me!).

Anyway, a word game I found not long ago is Free Rice and it is addictive and also is a way of donating to charity. You correctly define words and rice is donated through the UN World Food Program. That’s a game worth playing!

On Loan Words

An article in the Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet about Finland Swedish claims that “loan words are the spice of a language.” On the other hand, some languages are staunchly against loan words and try to create new words rather than borrow ones from other tongues. What do you think?

What are your favorite loan words? Or words that you think should be loaned from one language to another?

I have written here before about my desire to see the Swedish word “sambo” adopted to English. Share some of your favorites!

Summer School for Translators

Here is some information on a summer school for translators:

The British Centre for Literary Translation has been offering the International Literary Translation Summer School, the highlight of our annual programme of activities, since 2000. Every year acclaimed writers and translators are gathered together for an intense week of translation workshops, panel discussions, and talks, culminating in multilingual readings of the work accomplished. This residential programme takes place from 20-26 July at the University of East Anglia, with participants coming from many different countries. The languages represented change from year to year, and in 2008 will include the following:


Arabic to English
Translator/Workshop Leader: Paul Starkey. Writer: Hassan Daoud

English to Italian
Translator/Workshop Leader: Susanna Basso. Writer: Giles Foden

German to English
Translator/Workshop Leader: Shaun Whiteside. Writer: Lena Gorelik

Irish-English/English-Irish
Translator/Workshop Leader: Paddy Bushe. Poet: Gabriel Rosenstock

Portuguese to English
Translator/Workshop Leader: Daniel Hahn. Writer: José Eduardo Agualusa

Spanish to English
Translator/Workshop Leader: Cecilia Rossi. Writer: Carmen Posadas

Registration is now open and bursaries are available.
For more information and registration details, please visit the BCLT website: www.uea.ac.uk/bclt .

Avoiding the Influence of English

I’ve recently discovered a great site for those who translate to Swedish or use Swedish in any way. It looks at English words that are being used unnecessarily in Swedish and gives the Swedish equivalents of these words. While some countries reject the influence of English and other languages, others, such as Sweden, seem to absorb too much, to the point that people use English words rather than perfectly acceptable Swedish ones. This site tries to rectify that. I wonder if there are websites like this for other languages.

A Possible Solution to Language Education

I’ve posted some here about learning languages and there’s been a guest post about language education in the United States, so this article on a solution to teaching languages in the U.S. is quite relevant.

Thank you to Erika Dreifus for sending me this article!

Writing for Young Adults

Writing for young adults is a relatively new genre (a genre, some say, that has been created by the pressures of marketing) and recently, I've had two opportunities to learn more about it. The first was a workshop I attended several weeks ago at the Arvon Foundation (at their center in beautiful Yorkshire), taught by writers Linda Newbery and Nick Manns (with the entertaining, controversial Melvin Burgess as a guest speaker), and the second was a lecture yesterday by Scottish writer James Jauncey, the author of a new book for young adults entitled The Witness.

What I've found is that authors themselves aren't always certain they are writing for young adults. They feel they are just writing books, period. That the texts may have characters who are young adults does not necessarily mean the work should be limited (in terms of marketing and readership, that is) to young people. Mr. Jauncey pointed out that if books such as The Catcher in the Rye or To Kill a Mockingbird had been labelled as being for children or young adults, they might never have become as popular or well-read as they did. The label limits the work.

What all the writers I heard or spoke to in recent weeks have mentioned is that creating a category of books for young adults is generally a choice made by publishers, teachers, parents, and other adults, and some believe that it stems from two major issues: the desire to make money and the idea of reducing risk. For the former, having another genre creates more opportunities for marketing (and also for producing side products, films, tv shows, etc.). As for the latter, people today do not want to make choices or to have to be accountable. A parent may not have the time or interest to read and vet their children's reading choices. So a little label on a book that says which age group it is suitable for removes responsibility from the adults. And it also supports publishers; some parents complain to the publishers if their children are exposed to words or themes they do not deem appropriate. Now, publishers can say, "Well, there was a label on there, so if your child read a book that was not age-appropriate, that was your fault, not ours."

Besides the genre reducing responsibility, it also imposes limits. Many authors say their publisher makes them aware of words or topics they must avoid. Mr. Jauncey claimed he did not consider language or appropriateness; all he thinks about when writing is being honest to the story and the characters and telling the tale as authentically and truthfully as he can. Other writers are not so lucky, however, and this is something people must consider when working on a book that they think may be aimed at children or young adults.

A point Ms. Newbery made is that children tend to read up, so they can learn what is coming next in their lives. She felt that 9-12 year-olds wouldn't read the books labelled as being for that age group; instead, they'd books for the 13-15 year-old set, because they are looking towards that time in their lives.

But does all this mean that children and young adults don't read about adults? Or that adults don't read about young people? I really don't think so, even if publishers seem to believe that. Why is there so much separation in literature now? Mr. Jauncey reminded us that there are no books for 30-year-olds or for 80-year-olds. In a way, of course, one can understand that the childhood and teenage years are a challenging time and that young people like and need to read about others their age. But when I was young, I certainly read voraciously about people of all ages, not to mention all backgrounds, religions, genders, races, and so on, and I know I am not alone in this. Are we underestimating young people? Are we doing them a disservice by deciding what books and topics they should have access to?

A Bad President Under a Crowd

Not long ago, I was somewhere that had several flat-screen televisions lining the walls. The volume on the tvs was off, but programs were playing anyway, and closed-captioning was used so those watching could know what was being said.

I know that closed-captioning, unlike subtitling, is generally in real-time, but I was still surprised by the number of mistakes -- there were errors in nearly every sentence. Some were really odd, though many were clearly based on phonetic confusions. Sometimes a caption was corrected, but usually the viewer was left to puzzle it out (and to giggle, as in my case).

Here are a few of the wrong captions I recall:

“This sets a bad president” instead of “This sets a bad precedent”
“Now things are under a crowd” instead of “Now things are under a cloud”
“This is about award” instead of “This is about a war”

Bad closed-captioning and bad subtitling can definitely set a bad president.

Pirated Translations

I recently started getting the bi-monthly email newsletter called “Annogram”, sent out by Ann Cefola, whom I met at the AWP conference in January. The newest issue has the following interesting information:

Free translations lead to book sales

Thanks to translator Ruth A. Gentes Krawczyk (www.krawczyktranslations.com) for this fascinating piece of marketing insight:

Brazilian novelist Paulo Coelho has grown his readership with free translations. Fortune says, "Intrigued by his growing sales in Russia, Coelho used the Bittorrent site—a favorite for illicit distribution of media—to seek out and download online translations of his books as well as audio versions. By 2006 he was hosting an entire sub-site he called The Pirate Coelho, with links to books in many languages."

His newsletter is said to have 200,000 subscribers and Coelho indicates he gets about 1,000 e-mails from fans every day. "I don't understand why publishers don't understand that this new medium is not killing books," Coelho says. "I'm doing it mostly because the joy of a writer is to be read. But at the end of the day, you will sell more books."

I’ve heard a lot about the music and software industries being upset about torrents, but there hasn’t been as much news about how the publishing industry is dealing with this technology. So it is interesting to see what one author is doing with pirated transläted editions.

An Editor’s Rant: On Using Foreign Languages in a Text

Today’s post is more of a rant. Why do authors who want to include words or phrases in foreign languages not check that they are using the correct spelling and grammar (unless, of course, there is a reason for using something in the wrong way, such as to show that a character is pretentious but really ignorant)? Why don’t editors check these things?

In recent weeks, I’ve been reading a lot of work in Swedish. In Sweden, it can be considered cool to include English in a poem or short story, or an author may genuinely find that there is something she or he must say in English rather than in Swedish. But often, I find serious mistakes. And to be honest, the author has lost me as soon as I see that she or he (or the editor or publisher) couldn’t be bothered to have an editor check over the text.

A Round-Up of Articles

For the next week, I am going to be away attending a workshop and there is apparently no internet access there. I am sure I will go through withdrawal, but I’ll look forward to posting upon my return.

Here are a few articles for you to read in the meantime.

This article is about learning specialized vocabulary and includes the following quote: “Sailing is just one more thing I’ve taken up as an adult but wish I’d begun doing as a child. The reason for wishing that isn’t just the experience that would have accrued by now. It’s the innateness you feel for things you have been doing a long, long time, the utter lack of self-consciousness with which you inhabit a language that seems outlandish to newcomers.”

The next piece is a review of Indo-European Poetry and Myth by M.L. West and it discusses the language of asterisks, i.e. the ur-Indo-European language:
“West reconstructs the Indo-European world on increasingly complex levels: first language (grammar and vocabulary); then poetry; then myth. Poetry, with some of the formal solidity of language and some of the inspirational idiosyncrasies of myth, mediates between them. The poetic parallels can be quite striking, and West makes the most of them. Of a certain pattern of three proper names, for instance, he says: ‘It is hard to avoid the inference that this was a traditional formula from the common poetic inheritance. Here we seem to find a remnant of the Indo-European storyteller’s building work: a recognisable structural component, with the lineaments of its verbal patterning still in place.’”

Finally, this article discusses a way of writing that might become popular in the future. Here is the man who wrote 200,000 books!

Translation Subsidies

For my initial description of the London Book Fair see Erika Dreifus' blog Practicing Writing. In this post, I just want to expand on something I mentioned in the other one: translation subsidies.

Many of the literary organizations I spoke to, such as Finnish Literature Exchange, Arts Council of Sweden, Norwegian Literature Abroad, Icelandic Literature Fund, and Danish Arts Agency’s Literature Centre (I am just mentioning the ones from the Nordic countries here, since I know the most about them, but I spoke to others as well), offer subsidies to publishers for translation, sometimes for as much as 75% of the cost. Usually, only publishers are allowed to apply, though translators (especially those who have a contract with a publisher) can sometimes apply for grants, too, such as to travel to meet the author whose work they are translating.

In The Deal, the magazine of the book fair, Israeli author Amos Oz is quoted as having said: “As you read a foreign novel, you are actually invited into other people’s living rooms, into their nurseries and studies, into their bedrooms. You are invited into their secret sorrows, into their family joys, into their dreams. Which is why I believe in literature as a bridge between peoples. I believe curiosity can be a moral quality.”

So, I suggest all you translators to find books you love in whatever languages you translate from, and then to try to get publishers to publish these works; telling them about these subsidies, information about which is not always easily accessible, may encourage them to take a chance on books they would otherwise claim not to have money for. Subsidies may also ease the translator’s work, too.

Two Years On

Well, Brave New Words is celebrating its second birthday today with its 232nd post.

I thought it would be nice to spend the day laughing (or maybe crying, depending on your point of view), so here's a link to some badly translated signs.

Can We Can-Can With Cans? Or, Educating Customers About Machine Translation

A few weeks ago, someone from a publishing company sent me an email. She said that a book she was working on included one sentence in Swedish and she wondered if I could edit that sentence (for free, natch).

So, though I had a lot of (paying) work and was out of the country, I looked at the original English and compared it to the Swedish. It was bizarrely bad. It was one of those sentences that includes words that can have multiple (non-related) translations and it was as though someone had just picked the first possible word from the dictionary rather than paying attention to the context and to parts of speech (for example, in the sentence I just wrote, I used the word "can" as a verb. "Can" can also be a noun, as in "a can of beans". And then there's the "can-can", but that's a different story.). There was no way that the sentence she sent me could have been translated by a professional translator.

I asked the editor who had done the translation and I also mentioned how terrible it was. She responded that it was, of course, from the internet. She didn't seem at all aware that machine translations might not be reliable. And she told me, rather shortly, I felt, to just fix it up right away.

Now, I am someone who believes in always responding to emails I receive and I am also someone who believes strongly in educating customers and consumers whenever possible. But in this case, I was so annoyed by her attitude (just assuming I was going to do work for her for free, especially given that I was out of the country and away from my desk, which she knew from the fact that I had an away message on) and by her somewhat snobby ignorance that I just couldn't bring myself to reply to her. I should have turned it into a lesson for her, but I had so much else going on and was so offended by her messages that I let it go. I regret that now.

But my regret is not really the point here. The point is -- how can we wean people off machine translations? How can we teach them what translation really is and what it involves? And how can we get people to understand that our time and expertise don't come free?

Just think about this -- everyone reading this will know what I meant by those questions. But if you run them through a machine translator, you'll probably get some nonsense about tin cans instead. That's simply not good enough.

Creoles and Pidgins

This is a topic I have not yet mentioned on this blog.

First, here is a definition of pidgins and Creoles, as offered in this review of Bastard Languages by Derek Bickerton, who sounds like an interesting man who has written what promises to be a fascinating book.

“Pidgins are contact languages invented by people who don’t share a language to use. Pidgin speakers, Bickerton explains, will “use words from your language if they know them; if not, they’ll use words from their own, and hope you know them, and failing that, words from any other language that might happen to be around.” Some pidgins, like Chinese Pidgin English (once spoken along China’s coast) or the Chinook jargon of the American Northwest, originated in voluntary trade contexts. Others arose from the slave trade and plantation economies.

Compared with pidgins, Creoles have bigger vocabularies and more grammar; the conventional view is that they are pidgins that became someone’s native language (though some linguists disagree). Many Creoles — like Saramaccan, an English/Portuguese Creole spoken in Suriname, and Seselwa, a French Creole spoken in the Seychelles — have more features in common (like their verbs) than you’d expect from languages that have never been in contact. Is this because they were created when English, French or Portuguese words were laid onto the same bed of grammar as African languages? Or because later generations learned both the pidgin and their parents’ languages, mingling the two? Or because a pidgin was created once, perhaps in a West African slave trade outpost or by sailors, and then transmitted elsewhere?

Bickerton swats down all these theories and explains how he arrived at his own solution, the language bioprogram hypothesis, which he elaborated in the book “Roots of Language” (1981). According to this idea, a pidgin becomes a Creole when children learn it, filling in the grammatical gaps with patterns and words that come not from any specific language but from some universal language template they all carry in their heads. This was an extension of Noam Chomsky’s influential claim for an innate universal grammar possessed uniquely by humans.”

Next, here is an interesting article on Sranan Tongo, one of the languages in Suriname.

Finally, this website offers information and many useful resources for teaching and researching about Creoles and pidgins. I couldn’t find anything on this website about translation, however, and it seems that if a language is translated to, that gives it more legitimacy in some ways. Perhaps that is an area for future research.

Hans Christian Andersen and Translation

At the Nordic Translation Conference last month, our featured Danish author was Stig Dalager, who read from his novel Journey in Blue. This novel is about Hans Christian Andersen, who is, of course, most famous for his fairy tales. Mr. Dalager’s novel did not exactly make Andersen seem like the kind of man I’d want to be friends with, but I did enjoy learning about the person behind “The Little Mermaid” and other such works.

So I found it interesting to read about Andersen in today’s Writer’s Almanac, especially because the information includes a brief discussion of translation, and how translation affected our pereception of his work.

Here is a long quote:

It's the birthday of the author of many of our best-known fairy tales, Hans Christian Andersen, born in Odense, Denmark (1805). His mother was an uneducated washerwoman and his father was a shoemaker who died when Hans was 11 years old. He grew up in poverty.

At the age of 14, he moved to Copenhagen to start a career as a singer, dancer, and actor. He knocked on doors of famous producers and directors, introducing himself as a poet and a playwright. Finally, he landed a spot in the Royal Theatre singing school and later the Royal Theatre ballet. The director of the theater saw that Andersen was a talented child and paid for him to go to grammar school when he was 17. There he studied with 10- and 11-year-olds and made up for his lack of an education as a younger child. He had a beautiful soprano voice, but had to leave the Royal Theatre school after his voice began to change.

He was extremely neurotic. One of his fears was that he would be buried alive, and to reassure himself each night he would prop a note next to his bed that read, "I only appear to be dead."

Andersen finished his first novel, The Improvisatore, in 1835. He was waiting for it to be published and he desperately needed money for rent, so he quickly wrote and published a pamphlet containing four fairy tales. It was such a big success that he published a new collection of fairy tales every Christmas for the next few years. They were cheap paperback editions, and they grew to be extremely popular. He started off by retelling the stories he had heard from his parents as a child, but then he began making up his own. Between 1835 and 1872, he published 168 fairy tales, including "The Little Mermaid," "The Emperor's New Clothes," "The Snow Queen," "Princess and the Pea," and "The Nightingale" and "The Ugly Duckling."

People often think of Andersen's fairy tales as light-hearted and optimistic, but he wrote many tragic tales with unhappy endings. The first English translations of the tales were done by a woman who deleted disturbing passages and made them more sentimental than Andersen intended. Many children today only know the fairy tales through cartoon movie spin-offs or simplified versions in children's picture books.

Learning Hebrew

The last post featured links and other information on Yiddish. So it seems appropriate to point out that a few weeks ago, on Erika Dreifus' My Machberet blog, I noticed this information about learning Hebrew. (Note: I have recently been a guest blogger on this site, so feel free to check out my post there).

More on Yiddish: From Translator Eric Dickens

The last post was on Yiddish. In response to that, translator Eric Dickens very kindly sent me an email with a lot of helpful websites. He graciously agreed to let me share it with you. Here it is:

YIDDISH WORLDWIDE - anno 2008

Yiddish, once the language of European Jews, especially the poorer, less assimilated ones in the small towns or shtetls in Poland, Lithuania and Ukraine, may never again become the international lingua franca it once was, but it has lately been undergoing something of a revival. There are currently various courses in European cities ranging from Vilnius in Lithuania, to Paris and Oxford, as well as in the United States. See, for instance: http://www.mod-langs.ox.ac.uk/yiddish/ and http://www.judaicvilnius.com/en . The latter website has the programme for the Vilnius Summer Course in Yiddish 2008.

The language is basically old German, written in the Hebrew alphabet (!) and with quite a few words borrowed from Hebrew (see below). If you see it in transliterated form, the Germanic nature of the language is much in evidence, something kept hidden when written in Hebrew characters. There is a standard system of transliteration into the English language called the YIVO system.

Those interested in the language and Yiddish culture as a whole may be interested in a magazine, written mostly in English, called Pakn-Treger: http://www.yiddishbookcenter.org/+10024 . This publication is aimed at the enthusiast with little knowledge of the language itself, but a general interest in the history of Yiddish and, for instance, the efforts made nowadays to rescue old books written in Yiddish from a number of cities in Uruguay and Argentina, where the communities of Yiddish speakers are dwindling. Pakn-Treger is published by the National Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, MA, USA.

Students of Germanic languages who are more adventurous may even want to get a basic knowledge of Yiddish. This is best done from the primer College Yiddish which was written by Uriel Weinreich in 1949 and reprinted several times until at least 1976. It is a good, old-fashioned text book with a reading passage, vocabulary and grammar. He also produced a very serviceable two-way dictionary called Modern English-Yiddish, Yiddish-English Dictionary, in 1968. Both books can still be found in second-hand bookshops and on Amazon.

A knowledge of German helps considerably when you learn Yiddish. But as implied above, the alphabet needs a bit of learning, not least on account of the Hebrew loanwords. These are tricky for the beginner, because while the ordinary part of Yiddish has vowels and consonants, like most European languages, the Hebrew loanwords have no written vowels and, just to make things doubly tricky, are not even pronounced the same as in Biblical or Modern Hebrew, but in a Yiddish way. So in addition to your Weinreich, you need the book by Yitskhok Niborski entitled Verterbukh fun Loshn-Koydesh-shtamiker verter in Yidish which means "Dictionary of the Words With Hebrew Roots in Yiddish" (1999). And one more dictionary is very useful, if you happen to know French. This is Niborski's large Dictionnaire Yiddish-Français http://www.yiddishstore.com/yitnibdicyid.html that appeared as recently as 2002.

If you do make a serious attempt to learn Yiddish, a very helpful periodical, published in Paris by the Medem centre that publishes the Niborski dictionaries, is Yidisher Tam-Tam which is for beginner or lower intermediate level, and gives the vocabulary to a variety of reading passages in English and French translation: http://www.yiddishweb.com/tamtam.htm . You can print it off the internet or subscribe.

One of the reasons for learning Yiddish can be to read the literature written in the language. But translations do, of course, exist of most of the leading authors, such as Nobel Prizewinner Isaac (or: Yitskhok) Bashevis Singer, his brother Israel Joshua Singer and their sister Esther Kreitman. One fine poet is Abraham Sutzkever and a Modernist prose writer now being revived is Dovid (or: David) Bergelson whose books are translated by Joseph Sherman and others. Students of Yiddish can also obtain an anthology of shortish Yiddish literary passages called Mit groys fargenign, compiled by Heather Valencia of the University of Stirling in Scotland, with a couple of CDs that give you an idea of the pronunciation.

Finally, a bookshop specialising in Yiddish: http://www.yiddishstore.com/index.html .