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 .

Yiddish and Translation

I have posted on this blog about Yiddish before. Over this past weekend, I had the opportunity to read Astrid Starck-Adler’s book Yiddish: Continuity and Change, which was published in 2007 as part of the Endangered Languages and Cultures series by the Centre for Multiethnic Research at Uppsala University in Sweden. It is a short book, and there are a surprising number of typos, but there was a lot I found interesting in it, not least because there was some discussion of translation.

The book is composed of three sections. The first is on Yiddish today and possibilities for revitalizing it. The second is on gender and Jewish literature (since Hebrew was traditionally the religious language, the one for men, while Yiddish was for women, for “men who are like women”, and for the home). The last part is on contemporary Yiddish literature.

Starck-Adler mentions a variety of interesting topics in the book, such as transmitting the language to younger generations, “familial” and “convivial” ways of helping the language live on, films in or about Yiddish (such as The Last Holocaust Survivors in Eastern Europe, Castings, and Voyages), using the internet for learning Yiddish, Yiddish writers, and works such as Mayse-bukh, which were used in part to teach women about the bible (and of course this raises issues of translation and adaptation from Hebrew to English). She also discusses how the “most interesting thing about Yiddish is that it plays a twofold role: as a Jewish language, Yiddish is a factor of identity; as a language based on German it is a vector of alterity.” (26)

As for translation, Starck-Adler believes that “[s]ince the circle of Yiddish readers is so small, translation of little-known writers into other languages outside the small Yiddish world is very important for allowing their works to be more widely known” (59-60) and that “[t]ranslation from or into Yiddish or making available in a bilingual edition some important texts is one of the essential means of promoting the survival and renewal of an endangered language like Yiddish.” (48) She seems to be a strong advocate for bilingual editions, since they allow the reader to “compare the two versions of the same text, to ‘verify’ the accuracy of the core text, and, in the absence of good reliable dictionaries, we can then have access to different registers of language, which are more elaborate and more complete.” (49) Also, seeing the original language may encourage curious readers of the translated text to study it.

Finally, here is a somewhat odd comment on translation: “The importance of translations has been pointed out by Dovid Katz who thinks that a better translation than the original would help to gain interest from a bigger readership!” (19)

Usually, books on language don’t discuss translation, so it was refreshing to read a scholar’s thoughts on how translation is necessary for keeping Yiddish literature and language alive.

And Now For Something Completely Different…

Here is a link to a video that definitely shows some bad translation, but will probably only be funny to those who know Swedish. Thank you to Arne Elander for sending me this silly link!

Nordic Translation Conference Report, Part 2

Let me start with some statistics and basic information about the conference. The conference offered six workshops (on translating poetry, computer tools for translators, tips of the trade, translating songs, keeping language skills up to date, and contrastive linguistics) on 6 March. On 7 and 8 March, we had the bulk of the conference, which included: a publisher's panel (which discussed issues of finding and publishing Nordic literature in English); keynote presentations by Amanda Hopkinson, Douglas Robinson, Janet Garton, Geoffrey Samuelsson-Brown, and Kirsten Malmkjær; around 30 presentations on literary or technical translation or subtitling; five readings by authors from Nordic countries (Alexander Ahndoril from Sweden, Douglas Robinson from the US/Finland, Sjón from Iceland, Stig Dalager from Denmark, and Izzet Celasin from Norway); and a variety of exhibits, including one by the authors of Outside In, in which they displayed Nordic children's books in English translation. The conference dinner was at the House of Commons, hosted by MP Martin Linton, who was born in Sweden, and there was also a reception at the conference hosted by Norrtelje Brenneri, a Swedish liquor company. Other sponsors included the Nordic Culture Fund, the five Nordic embassies in London, Scandinavian Airlines, UCL's Department of Scandinavian Studies, and Swansea University.

Since I was the organizer, I had to deal with a lot of the practical issues, which meant that I missed some of the presentations (maybe people who attended the conference can write in the comments about the presentations they went to), but I certainly got a lot out of what I did attend, and I also enjoyed all the socializing. Many of us who work on Nordic languages tend to feel rather alone, since the languages are small and often forgotten, which is why it was so great to get an opportunity to come together.

I knew next to nothing about the Faroe Islands and its literature, so I was grateful to hear Turið Sigurðardóttir's presentation, in which she discussed the influence of Danish on Faroese and how the islands have developed their children's literature. Subtitling is another issue I have little experience with, and the panel presentation by Tina Engström, Helena Johansson, Erik Skuggevik, and Kenn Nakata Steffensen was entertaining and interesting. Though some of the facts they offered about the subtitling industry were depressing, I nevertheless started to think that it might be fun to try to work on subtitling at some point.

One of the highlights for me was the readings. Hearing authors read from their work is always a special treat that really brings the text alive in a new way. In this case, we had authors read from their work in the original languages and their translators (or, in two cases, someone else) read from the translations. Most of us attending the conference do not know all of the Nordic languages, so one might think that it could be frustrating, say, or dull, to hear the Icelandic author read in Icelandic if one doesn’t know the tongue. On the contrary, though, I felt that I could understand something of the text just from the way each author read (of course, it didn’t hurt that I had read all but one of the books in advance, and also that the translated text was a nice cheat sheet).

Speaking of Icelandic, our featured author Sjón made some interesting comments about writing and translating. When asked whether he has begun to write for translation (as his texts can be very Icelandic-specific, and since the vast majority of the people in the world have never been to Iceland and know little about the country, one might think he’d start to soften the Icelandicness of his work), he said no, and that he felt it was important for writers to stick to their own language and own culture. His translator, Victoria Cribb, said that she has spent so much time in Iceland and speaking Icelandic that it has lost some of its exoticism to her, which is why she feels that it is useful for translators to have other people review their texts; a translator may no longer always know what s/he is domesticating or foreignizing, or what s/he has made overly clear or not clear enough. Sjón joked then that since translators are so familiar with the source language and culture, it is up to writers to make the job of translating even more challenging, by using ever more difficult words and concepts.

This post is getting long, so I will close it with a few photos from the conference (and if anyone has more pictures, please email them to me).

This first picture is from the dinner at the House of Commons on Friday night.



This is Douglas Robinson, who both gave a keynote lecture and also read from his novel, which has been published in Finland and is about the Finnish poet and translator Pentti Saarikoski.



The next picture is of Geoffrey Samuelsson-Brown, who gave a keynote lecture. Here, he is discussing the process of detective work that a translator must sometimes go through while translating.



Here you can see one of the exhibits. This one is on Nordic children's books in English translation, and the woman who arranged it is seen in the picture. Her name is Deborah Hallford and she is a co-author of Outside In, a guide to children's books in translation.



This photo shows Swedish author Alexander Ahndoril and his translator Sarah Death, discussing his novel based on the life of Ingmar Bergman (the novel is called "The Director" in English).



This last photograph shows Anna and Jessica Anerfält from Norrtelje Brenneri, which sponsored the conference's reception on Saturday night. It was great to have a real Nordic conference at the event.

Nordic Translation Conference Report, Part 1

Well, the Nordic Translation Conference is now over, and I am pleased to say it was a great success. It brought together a diverse group of people: translators of technical, legal, and financial texts; translators of literary fiction or poetry; interpreters; subtitlers; editors; publishers; authors; people from embassies or from government agencies; translation agencies; booksellers; librarians; and more. The two things we all had in common were that we worked with or were interested in translation in some way and that we were involved with one or more Nordic languages. And yet, throughout the course of the weekend, we found that we could learn from one another, and that we had much to share with each other and explore together.

This conference was a first for the Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies in four ways: 1) it was the first conference they had that was organized by a PhD student (that would be yours truly); 2) it was the first conference they had on the Nordic languages (despite the fact that they are called GermanIC, they previously only had German); 3) it was their first conference on translation they had; and 4) it was the biggest conference they have had (we had around 150 participants, and many more were turned away, though we had expected about half that).

It was also a first in general for there to be a major international conference on all the Nordic languages and their translation, and people seemed to enjoy having the opportunity to meet colleagues.

In the following post, I will write about some of the highlights for me and I will try to include some photos as well.

Off to the Nordic Translation Conference

I am leaving for London shortly to attend the Nordic Translation Conference. I hope I will see some of you there; if so, please introduce yourself to me. If you haven't yet signed up, I am afraid it is too late, as the conference is completely sold out.

After the conference, I am going to Sweden to do research for which I received a generous grant from Stiftelsen Karin och Hjalmar Tornblads fond in Sweden.

So, my upcoming travels mean that I will be posting less often. However, I will likely post about the conference early next week, and keep checking back for other posts as well.

The Theory-Practice Relationship

Last weekend, I attended a conference at the University of East Anglia in Norwich. The focus of the conference was on the theory and practice of translation. The question discussed was basically what relationship translation theory and the practice of translation have, or should have.

It often surprises me to find translation theorists who don’t actually translate themselves. Of course I know that, for example, movie critics aren’t usually directors or actors themselves and literary critics aren’t always writers, and that you can learn a lot about a topic by reading about it. Still, I feel that it is hard to create theory or to work as a critic without some active knowledge of the practice.

Many theorists get annoyed about how practicing translators tend to ignore the theoretical work. Translators sometimes feel that they learn hands-on and don’t have to read what seems to be dull and irrelevant and distant from their work.

In other words, there is a divide between theorists and practitioners. Some of us do both and want to see more of a connection. But why? My feeling is that theorists would greatly benefit from doing and not just thinking and critiquing, while practitioners might get some new ideas or understanding from reading some of the theoretical ideas. Yes, it sounds obvious, but apparently a lot of people are still missing the point.

My own presentation at the conference was about how certain theories (in this particular case, postcolonial theories) could inform a translator’s decisions for a text and choice of strategies by making the translator more aware of certain issues (here, the role of power). As a practicing translator myself, I’ve certainly found that not only is it interesting to learn about translation theory, but it can also improve my work, although there are definitely some ideas that I have dismissed.

A Round-Up of Articles

Here are a bunch of articles on language and translation; not all are recent, but that doesn’t make them less interesting or relevant.

First, here is an obituary for Icelandic translator Bernard Scudder. I had contact with him because he was going to speak at the Nordic Translation Conference next month, and I was saddened to hear of his premature death.

Next, here is an article on the evolution of language.

For those of you who can read Swedish and who have been following the situation with funding for translation in Sweden, you will want to read this article for the latest news.

This article by Chinese to English translator Howard Goldblatt is a few years old, but still worth a read. Interesting quotes include:
-“the unavoidable fact that a translation can only complement, not replicate, the original.”
-“And yet the relationship cannot help but be fragile, given an author's desire to have his work reach the broadest possible audience with the exact effect it had on its original readers. Too often, that desire is accompanied by absolute ignorance about the nature of translation, or a disdain for it, or a combination of the two.”
-“Translation is inadequate, but it’s all we have if good writing is to have its life extended, spatially and temporally.”

The next article is by Israeli author Etgar Keret and is on two Hebrew words that “do have English equivalents, except that in Hebrew—or maybe it would be more accurate to say "in Israeli"—they carry completely different values.”

Sticking to the Middle East, here is an article on learning Arabic.

For a completely different language, this piece talks about Hawaiian making a comeback.

Finally, a bit of humor. Here is a sketch entitled “The Impotence of Proofreading.”

Italian Translation Award

I saw this announcement about an award for a translation from or to Italian on the MODLANGSRT list:

PATHS OF CULTURE 2008 TRANSLATION PRIZE

IPOC Press, the Milan, Italy-based publisher, invites translators to participate in the 2008 Paths of Culture Translation Prize by submitting translations in the following categories:
-- Translations into Italian from any language
and
-- Translations into English from Italian.
Competition entries may include translations in any of the following disciplines: cultural anthropology, autobiography/memoir, philosophy, management, pedagogy/educational sciences, psychology, sociology, history, and fiction/literature.

Highlights:
* Winning entries will be published by IPOC Press;
* The winning Translator will receive a prize of EUR150.00 as well as a contract that includes a royalty provision. (NB: In the event of works translated by multiple translators, the prize is intended as "per manuscript" and not per translator.)

Deadline:
Submissions must be postmarked (not received) by: 30 September 2008.
For full details and a manuscript submission form, please download the complete announcement from the IPOC Press site:http://www.ipocpress.it/eng/Concorso.pdf

News on Children's Literature

Some of you who read this blog know that children’s literature is one of my special interests. So I thought I’d share two bits of children’s lit-related news with you.

First, the most recent issue of Transcript is devoted to children’s literature. Transcript describes itself as “the trilingual European Internet Review of Books and Writing” and it is “published by Literature Across Frontiers at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth,” and “funded by the European Union's Culture 2000 fund.”

Second, Stories, the Centre for Children’s Books has launched a new website which gives “access to records of its extensive collection of artwork and archives.” Seven Stories is in Newcastle upon Tyne and people can see exhibits and do research there.

Nice Pants: On Differences Between UK and US English

I've posted here about differences between UK and US English, but just because I've studied up on the topic doesn't mean I always remember my lessons.

A few days, while chatting with a Welsh woman at my university, I said to her, "I like your pants! They're quite nice!"

Well, naturally, she looked pretty shocked. I had forgotten that "pants" in UK English refers to underwear. She looked down, to make sure her underwear wasn't showing, and then she burst into laughter and said, "You mean my trousers, right?" We had a laugh then about my mistake and about UK versus US English.

It was a good reminder that translation doesn't always occur between two distinct languages; it can also take place between two versions or dialects or registers of the same tongue.

WALTIC Conference

Some readers of this blog might be interested in the WALTIC conference that will take place in Stockholm this summer. Here is some information I received:

Welcome to WALTIC – the Value of Words!
A global arena for collaboration, creating opinion and achieving change

In June 2008, the Swedish Writers’ Union will launch WALTIC - the Value of Words, the first literary world congress of its kind. Between 29 June and 2 July 2008 one thousand writers, translators and scholars will gather for a mutual manifestation of the value of words and in support of human rights.

The key philosophy of WALTIC is to consider literature as a source of knowledge with political strength. The written word and the inherent power of the narrative is the basis for global society as a whole. That is why, in the words of Philip Pullman, “dictators and tyrants hate literature: the secret democracy of reading is too strong for them to withstand.” It is our conviction that the writers and translators of the world play an important role as mediators of knowledge, creators of opinion and as achievers of public change.

WALTIC will focus on three urgent global issues: Literacy, Intercultural dialogue and Digitalisation. The program offers a wealth of seminars, lectures and best practices. Among the speakers you will find leading writers and scholars as well as translators and innovative poets – with even numbers of women and men represented.

WALTIC will take a stand to: Increase literacy, safeguard freedom of expression, and strengthen authors’ rights.

We hope to see you in Stockholm at WALTIC 2008!

Call for Best Practice & Call for Stories now open!

Call for Best Practice
The Best Practice program will include a number of topics that concern writers and literary translators, as well as practical work related to the main themes of WALTIC. The program will hold everything from Writers’ and Translators’ Issues and Creative Writing to Literacy and Intercultural Exchange.

Call for Stories
WALTIC is a unique literary congress insofar as it also engages high-profile academics from around the world. Alongside independent writers and translators, we therefore particularly encourage researchers and academics to share their work within WALTIC’s exclusive Stories program.

The oral presentations are 15 or 30 minutes for both programs and submitters are welcome to indicate their preference. For more information and topics, see www.waltic.com

Deadline for on-line submission 3 March, 2008

Resident of a low-income country? Please look into the WALTIC scholarship program.

WALTIC 2008 is arranged in close co-operation with SIDA, The Swedish National Commission for UNESCO and SI (Svenska Institutet)

Versioning vs. Translating

Last week, I attended the conference for the Association of Writers and Writing Programs in New York City. There were several panels on translation, which was exciting to see. However, it seems quite obvious that not everyone really understands what translation is.

At the first panel I attended on translation, one woman (who shall remain nameless) was introduced as "a poet and translator." However, it quickly became clear that this woman was a monolingual. She didn't know the language she was "translating" from, nor did she know much about the culture, and she had never visited the country. How, then, did she translate?

Well, she is a professor at a university. She found a professor in the psychology department who was a native speaker of the language in question; that professor wrote a literal translation of the poem, and our "translator" then rewrote it as she saw fit. In other words, she took word-for-word translations and wrote versions of them.

Versioning is indeed a form of creative writing, but it is not translation. To truly translate, one must know the language the work is written in and the culture that informs the work. There is team-translation, but this doesn't seem to fall into that category.

It was surprising and disappointing that at a major conference, there was such confusion about what translation is.

The Chimaera's Found in Translation Issue

A short story I translated by Swedish author Mats Kempe and a short essay I wrote on translation have now been published online in a new journal called The Chimaera. This issue of the magazine focuses on translation, and I look forward to reading the other works in it.

Translation Studies Summer School

From a translation studies list, I noticed the following information on a summer school that would be useful for those who want to begin to do research in the field:

Announcing a funding opportunity for the Translation Research Summer School
2008

Two full scholarships (covering fees, travel and accommodation) are now available for current or future PhD students to participate in the 2008 Translation Research Summer School which will take place in Manchester, UK, from 16 to 27 June.

The Summer School offers intensive research training in translation and intercultural studies for prospective researchers in the field, over a two-week period. The units collaborating in the Summer School are the Centre for Translation and Intercultural Studies at the University of Manchester, the Centre for Intercultural Studies at University College London (UCL), and the Translation Studies Graduate Programme, School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures, University of Edinburgh.

The deadline for scholarship applications is 22 February.

These scholarships are specifically designed to provide assistance to students from countries with lower GDPs. For further details and an application form please consult the Translation Research Summer School website: www.researchschool.org

The Times Stephen Spender Prize for Poetry in Translation

On the Modern Languages Research Training list, I saw the following announcement:

THE TIMES STEPHEN SPENDER PRIZE
for poetry in translation
Translate a poem from any language, classical or modern, into English
Three categories: Open, 18-and-under and 14-and-under. Cash prizes
All winning entries published in a booklet
Last posting date for entries Friday 23 May 2008
For details and entry forms go to www.stephen-spender.org
To read last year's winning entries, visit the website or email
info@stephenspender.org for a free copy of the booklet

Robina Pelham Burn, Director, Stephen Spender Memorial Trust
3 Old Wish Road, Eastbourne, East Sussex BN21 4JX 01323 452294
info@stephenspender.org
www.stephen-spender.org