[…] This is the point of TED’s Open Translation Project, a global volunteer effort that enables the amplification of ideas across languages and borders. When a talk goes live on TED.com, translators around the world have an open invitation to subtitle it in their language. Over time, OTP volunteers subtitle each talk in more and more languages.

Speakers are taking notice and reaching out to thank translation volunteers for their efforts. Rocero, for example, took to Facebook to publically thank the OTP network for amplifying her idea. Meanwhile, TEDxUNLV speaker Cortney Warren (watch her talk “Honest liars—the psychology of self-deception”) was so thrilled to find out that her talk was being translated by volunteer Adrienne Lin that she sent her a copy of her book and offered to do the same for anyone else who worked on the talk. “That’s such a generous service,” Warren said.

Repeat TED speaker Mikko Hypponen also sends personal thank-yous to his translators. He even translated two of his talks—“Fighting viruses, defending the net” and “Three types of online attacks”—into Finnish. “These translations made my talks accessible to a group of people that would otherwise miss them completely,” he says. “For example, my father has never studied English and wouldn’t be able to follow my talks.” More.

See: TED Blog

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A RECENT Johnson column on the treatment of Catalan sparked hundreds of comments. My colleague argued in favour of multilingualism in Spain on the grounds that speakers of Castilian Spanish should be “proud to learn their country’s other languages”. This post will offer a different proposition: though this form of multilingualism is clearly useful, it may be more valuable for Spaniards to concentrate on learning languages spoken outside their own country.

Given that there are roughly as many speakers of Catalan as there are of Swedish, Castilian speakers considering how best to use their language-learning time might prefer to focus on a tongue that yields broader opportunities. Spain is still re-orienting its economy towards export competitiveness and away from over-investment in housing: France and Germany are its largest export markets and English remains the default language for international business. Yet the number of Spaniards able to speak English, German or French fluently is not high. They are moderately proficient in English, according to Education First’s (EF) index, which puts them at the lower end of the spectrum compared with other Europeans.

With unemployment stuck above 20%, many Spaniards are making the effort to gain additional skills or to take advantage of the EU’s free movement of labour. Castilian speakers may well feel that learning Catalan does not provide the benefits of studying English, French or German—or indeed Portuguese, Arabic or Chinese. More.

See: The Economist

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British readers are devouring foreign fiction in record numbers amid a mini-boom in translated novels, inspired by the success of Scandinavian authors such as Jo Nesbø.

Among a string of high-profile launches, Penguin Classics is soon to publish a collection of Arabic short stories, entitled Tales of the Marvellous and News of the Strange, translated by the Cambridge academic Malcolm Lyons. It is the first time in 1,000 years that the earliest-known Arabic stories will have been printed in English.

Harvill Secker, a mainstream publisher focused on translated literature, is this year publishing authors from 18 countries including Haruki Murakamiand Nesbø, the Norwegian crime writer who has sold more than 23 million copies internationally. Next year they release the fourth of a six-book autobiographical series by Karl Ove Knausgård. In Norway alone, the volume has sold 450,000 copies.

Liz Foley, Harvill Secker’s publishing director, said: “There used to be a feeling translations were ‘good for you’ and not enjoyable … like vegetables … But actually they’re wonderful books.” Translations had “become more mainstream”, said Foley, with competition for translation rights intensifying.

Surging interest in foreign literature in recent years has been sparked partly by the success of Scandinavian fiction – notably Stieg Larsson, whose Millennium books have sold more than 75 million copies in 50 countries, and popular television dramas such as The Killing. More.

See: The Guardian

Related Translation News articles:

• Books in translation take off in the U.K.; can they do the same in Canada?

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Scholar and translator Oliver Ready talked to RBTH about the methods he used to tackle such a challenging book and explained why “Crime and Punishment” is as powerful now as ever.

What unites Cervantes’s “Don Quixote” and Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment”? Both are centered on the perception of reality through literature. As translator Oliver Ready argues, Raskolnikov, the anti-hero of “Crime and Punishment,” is most at home in the world of words, whether books, newspapers or letters from acquaintances and relatives that he analyses like a literary critic or a detective. He is not just a student and a murderer – he is a reader and a writer, whose literary debut, an article about crime, is one of the great missing clues in the novel.

The very fact that Raskolnikov is a man of letters is what makes it so important to get as close to the original as a translation allows. Out this year in Penguin Classics, Oliver Ready’s new translation of Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment” aims to preserve the original’s troubled and polyphonic narrative, and the varying language and vocabulary of its different characters.

In his translation, Ready, a research fellow in Russian society and culture at St. Antony’s College, Oxford, chose not to use 19th century English or contemporary language. Instead, his vocabulary belongs somewhere in the middle of the 20th century, and he tries to avoid words that appeared after the 1960s. This makes the new translation’s language “modern, but not contemporary.” More.

See: Russia Beyond the Headlines

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Translator Max Shmookler, who is currently co-editing a collection of Sudanese short stories with ArabLit contributor Raphael Cormack, explores the tension between what Sudanese readers think is a great story and the story that will appear “great” in English translation. This post is the first in a series, and originally ran on Baraza:

One of the unexpected benefits of preparing an anthology is the chance to read through enough mediocre literature to begin to ask yourself what “mediocre” actually means. This summer, as Raph Cormack and I co-edit a book of Sudanese short stories in English translation, we are finding out that our attempts to distinguish the great stories from the mediocre raises interesting questions about competing literary aesthetics. Figuring out which stories to include and how to justify our selections to the publisher has been a hands-on lesson in how a literary canon, even a marginal canon such as Sudanese Arabic literature in English translation, is formed.

In our work, the basic tension is that some stories generally regarded among Sudanese readers as “good” do not translate into “good” literature by Anglo-American standards. It’s not that Anglo-American standards are superior to the Sudanese, largely because that way of speaking presumes we have some outside standard by which these two literary aesthetics could be properly compared. We don’t. But we do know that some of what is written, printed, appraised and ultimately bought and sold in the Arabic speaking parts of Sudan is quite different than what is appealing to English readers. As translators, we must either conceal or explain that difference to our imagined English readers. These essays are a first attempt to do the latter: to explain those aspects of my encounter with Sudanese Arabic literature that I cannot properly translate. In large part, I’ll be looking at different aspects of the marvelously complex relationship between the two literary critical traditions, call them for the sake of convenience Sudanese and English, brought together by global trade relations, colonial dominance, educational and cultural exchanges, and the emergence of specific technologies and revolutions in literary form that they entail. More.

See: Arabic Literature (in English)

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It’s a high-stakes, multibillion-dollar industry with tight deadlines, demanding clients and lives at risk. Any miscommunication could cause a deep financial loss or death. Some in the industry work in war zones while others have cosy home offices.

“The stakes can be huge,” said Lillian Clementi, 55. “There’s tons of time pressure.”

The business is language. And it’s booming.

The number of jobs for translators and interpreters has doubled in the past 10 years and their wages have steadily grown – before, during and after the recession.

Jobs are expected to grow 46 per cent between 2012 and 2022, according to the US Labor Department, making it one of the fastest growing occupations. More.

See: Yahoo Finance

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Perfection is unattainable: Learning English as a lingua franca (ELF) involves approaching the language as a tongue shared by non-native speakers around the world rather than as a lingo that must be mastered to native-speaker level. Letting go of the idea of speaking ‘perfect English’ could do wonders for Japanese students’ confidence.

According to EF Education First’s English Proficiency Index for 2013, English ability among Japanese is flat-lining — and may even be falling — “despite enormous private investment.”

In a damning assessment, EF concludes that “In the past six years, Japanese adults have not improved their English. If anything, their skills have declined slightly. During the same period, other Asian countries, most notably Indonesia and Vietnam, have made enormous progress. Despite being a far wealthier and more developed country, Japan is struggling to teach its students English for use in a competitive global economy.”

Newspaper headlines constantly speak of tweaks and reforms to English education here, yet school lessons remain teacher-centered and grammar-heavy, with much of the instruction conducted in Japanese. This means “students have no opportunity to practice or apply new skills,” EF says, meaning many Japanese lack confidence when it comes to speaking English despite spending years learning the language. More.

See: The Japan Times

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Translate Your World, developers of linguistic and mobile marketing technologies, today announced the release of the latest update to its groundbreaking TYWI-Live (“tie-wee”), the voice translation software that translates what people say in real-time into 78 languages. The update adds cutting-edge WebRTC capabilities to its speech translation software capacity. WebRTC is designed to enable web browsers to transfer spoken words over the internet in addition to text. WebRTC is expected to revolutionize online communication, and has certainly revolutionized Translate Your World’s already jaw-dropping speech translation software.

Often described as a leap in the direction of Star Trek’s Klingon Translator, Translate Your World has been used to provide automatic subtitles and interpretation in multiple languages for major conferences; to speak over Skype across languages, and to turn webinars into truly global experiences while using WebEx, Adobe Connect, Blackboard, GoToWebinar, or any other web conferencing software. More.

See: Examiner.com

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Two of the year’s biggest bestsellers thus far have something in common – something that may come as a surprise to those who haven’t really considered it.

At first blush, Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century, an 800-page tome about income inequality, and Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle, a multi-volume autobiographical novel, may seem completely different from one another, and in most respects they are. One aspect they do share: neither was originally published in English. Piketty’s book first appeared in France in 2013 as Le Capital au XXIe siècle; Knausgaard’s six-volume opus, which runs to more than 3,000 pages and has so far had the first three volumes appear in English translation, was published in his native Norwegian between 2009 and 2011.

Conventional wisdom has it that books in translation are a tough sell, though this attitude may be changing, thanks to Piketty, Knausgaard, and such best-selling foreign authors as Stieg Larsson, Jo Nesbø, Herman Koch, and Haruki Murakami. According to the Guardian, British readers lined up to get their hands on copies of Murakami’s latest, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage. (The queues are testament to Murakami’s international rock-star status, and belie naysayers like Janet Maslin, who wrote in The New York Times that the new novel “is as short on explanations as it is long on overwrought adolescent emotion.”) More.

See: Quill & Quire

Related Translation News articles:

• British readers lost in translations as foreign literature sales boom

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SOFIA, Bulgaria (AP) — Valeri Petrov, Bulgaria’s most prominent contemporary poet, who translated the complete works of Shakespeare, has died at age 94.

Petrov’s family said he died Wednesday in a Sofia hospital following a stroke.

Valeri Nissim Mevorah, better known by his pen-name, Valeri Petrov, was born on April 22, 1920, in Sofia to a Jewish father and Bulgarian mother.

Besides poems, novels and translations from Russian, Italian and English, Petrov authored numerous film scripts and plays — both for adults and children. More.

See: Newser

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Edinburgh Fringe Festival is the world’s largest arts festival and attracts artists and visitors from around the globe.

Comedy is big business and a successful Edinburgh run can make a comedian’s name.

It is vital to connect audiences and reviewers to get noticed amid fierce competition.

International artists have the additional hurdle to clear – the language barrier.

BBC World visited the fringe and spoke to comics from across the globe to see if comedy is lingua franca.

Watch the video here: http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-28935074

See: BBC

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On Thursday August 28, Oxford University Press will celebrate the print and digital publication of the Oxford Arabic Dictionary.

Produced by an international team of expert translators and advisors using Oxford’s renowned language research program, the Oxford Arabic Dictionary is the first of its kind to be based throughout on real modern evidence of both English and Arabic usage, says a press release received here.

The unique Arabic corpus, developed specially for this project, provides evidence of the latest vocabulary used in computing, business, the media, and the arts, making the resource the most up-to-date bilingual Arabic and English dictionary available.

The dictionary focuses on the standardized variant of Arabic used in writing and formal speech, commonly known as Modern Standard Arabic.

One of the key strengths of this project is the 70,000 real example phrases that illustrate the dictionary entries.

These examples help the user interpret everyday modern meaning and usage accurately, and cement the Oxford Arabic Dictionary as the most pragmatic work of its kind. More.

See: Arab News

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15-16 December 2014 : On translated meaning

ON TRANSLATED MEANING
Geneva, 15-16 December 2014

Faculté de Traduction et d’Interprétation, Université de Genève, CH
New Zealand Centre for Literary Translation, Victoria University of Wellington, NZ

Abstract

Meaning is a crucial aspect of the theory and practice of translation.

Over the last few years, scholars from various disciplines interested in the process of translation – linguistics, literary studies, cultural studies, philosophy, semiotics, cognitive sciences and information technology – have theorized the concept of meaning and developed methodologies.

Each field of study applies its own methodology in order to advance our understanding of translation from a theoretical as well as practical point of view. Consequently, methodology nuances the meaning of the concept of translation and of the idea of text. In short, different perspectives and approaches unfold specific meanings.

The very notion of meaning, of translated meaning, has shifted and changed over time and across cultures, contexts and media.
The aim of this conference is therefore to explore the notion of translated meaning from different perspectives:

• Translated Meaning across Time and Space: Methodologies and Theories – an interdisciplinary approach.
• Translated Meaning in Different Forms of Translation – written and oral translation of technical, scientific, economic and legal texts.
• Translated Meaning and Multimedia – audiovisual translation, intersemiotic translation (comics; book covers; ecphrasis), localisation, funsubbing.
• Translated Meaning, Ethics and Aesthetics – the separation and reunion of signifier and signified in the negotiation of texts, contexts, contents and forms.

See: University of Geneva

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You have finally finished writing your article. You’ve sweat over your choice of words and agonized about the best way to arrange them to effectively get your point across. You comb for errors, and by the time you publish you are absolutely certain that not a single typo survived. But, the first thing your readers notice isn’t your carefully crafted message, it’s the misspelled word in the fourth sentence.

Typos suck. They are saboteurs, undermining your intent, causing your resume to land in the “pass” pile, or providing sustenance for an army of pedantic critics. Frustratingly, they are usually words you know how to spell, but somehow skimmed over in your rounds of editing. If we are our own harshest critics, why do we miss those annoying little details?

The reason typos get through isn’t because we’re stupid or careless, it’s because what we’re doing is actually very smart, explains psychologist Tom Stafford, who studies typos of the University of Sheffield in the UK. “When you’re writing, you’re trying to convey meaning. It’s a very high level task,” he said.

As with all high level tasks, your brain generalizes simple, component parts (like turning letters into words and words into sentences) so it can focus on more complex tasks (like combining sentences into complex ideas). “We don’t catch every detail, we’re not like computers or NSA databases,” said Stafford. “Rather, we take in sensory information and combine it with what we expect, and we extract meaning.” When we’re reading other peoples’ work, this helps us arrive at meaning faster by using less brain power. When we’re proof reading our own work, we know the meaning we want to convey. Because we expect that meaning to be there, it’s easier for us to miss when parts (or all) of it are absent. The reason we don’t see our own typos is because what we see on the screen is competing with the version that exists in our heads. More.

See: Wired

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He’d sold two companies to Google by his mid twenties and now Luis von Ahn has created an app that he hopes will allow anyone with internet access to learn a language for free

Luis von Ahn is a man of many titles: computer science professor, entrepreneur, crowdsourcing pioneer to name but a few. He sold two companies to Google while still in his 20s and his latest creation, Duolingo, is well on the way to revolutionising language learning across the world.

“What I wanted to do was create a way to learn languages for free,” says von Ahn. “If you look at language learning in the world, there are 1.2 billion people learning a foreign language and two thirds of those people are learning English so they can get a better job and earn more. The problem is that they don’t have equity and most language courses cost a lot of money.”

Duolingo launched in 2012 and the app now has 40 million registered users, making it one of the most popular ways to learn languages in the world. Put another way, in America there are more people using Duolingo than learning a language through the US public school system. More.

See: The Guardian

Related Translation News articles:

• Translating the web with millions: Luis Von Ahn answers your questions
• How smartphone apps are revolutionising language learning
• Duolingo, the free language-learning app that’s addictive and fun

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Steve Dolph is the translator of three books by the late Argentine novelist Juan José Saer, who died in Paris in 2005. All three were published by Open Letter Books, the most recent (June ’14) being Saer’s final, unfinished novel,La Grande. Mr. Dolph is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Hispanic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, where his research treats Renaissance ecopoetics and the pastoral tradition. His most recent translation, of Sergio Chejfec’s “El entenado” / “The Witness,” is available in the July 2014 issue of Asymptote.

This interview was conducted via e-mail over the early summer months, rambling like “a long afternoon’s conversation,” as Dolph commented, which is perhaps the most apposite way to approach an author so devoted to the vagaries of unfocused thought, and the ways its wandering through time and space makes itself manifest in language.

—Jeremy M. Davies

Would you mind sharing how you first became involved with Juan José Saer’s work, as reader or translator? I mean, was he an extant enthusiasm even before your association with Open Letter?

I can’t really say when as a common reader I first came to know Saer, but I was aware of his work well before the translation project came along. I know I had seen the translations from Serpent’s Tail even before I became seriously interested in translation at all. In the constellation of contemporary Latin American novelists, he figures prominently as a kind of anti-Márquez, insofar as the mythical place he most often visits in his fiction—the city of Santa Fe—is strongly affected by globalization, and fractured. In Márquez the force of history is basically recognizable, and solid, which produces a more or less reliable narrative memory and sense of place. The opposite is the case in Saer. Everything is in doubt, especially the narrative’s ability to recreate a reliable sense of place. But for me that sense of contrast only came much later, when I’d been working on the translations for a while. Before that, he was just another monster in the vast bestiary of Latin American fiction. It took a happy accident for me to get to work on his writing in translation. More.

See: Asymptote

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Our friends at the National Endowment for the Arts have done a tremendous amount to support literature in translation and individual translators. They are one of the largest funders of translation presses like Two Lines, Archipelago Books, Open Letter Books and others; and they award generous grants to translators—all to the tune of more than $8 million over the past 30 years.

The NEA also funds research into American’s reading habits, and just recently released a collection of essays about translation. We admit it, we’re biased (we owe some of Two Lines’ growth and success to grants we’ve received from the NEA), but still think this is a great read for any fan of literature in translation.

“The Art of Empathy” includes almost 20 personal essays from translators, teachers, and publishers. Many of them beautifully illustrate how translation brings us together—despite our diverse array of language, cultures, and traditions—and helps us understand each other.

Center for the Art of Translation founder and Italian translator Olivia Sears writes in her essay that “translation allows us to know each other better, and therefore feel more connected to one another, here at home” and across our increasingly diverse neighborhoods. Translator Johanna Warren poetically talks about her belief that “this connective quality of translation is essential to the spiritual evolution of our species.”

Inspired? Read or download the report here.

Looking for a reading list? We’ll post the more than 50 suggestions from the report later this week.

See: The Center for the Art of Translation

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As I hinted at in one of my previous blog posts, this summer has largely been dominated by three projects I worked on: the book, Negocia Vende Traduce and… my dissertation. Over the past few months or so I was looking at how freelancers incorporate technology in their work patterns and what are the underlying tech developments shaping these trends. Cloud computing is one of those developments and I’m sure you’ve heard about it before, especially in relation to CAT tools working in the cloud. Very briefly, you’re using cloud solutions if you’re accessing data or using software that’s not installed on your computer but somewhere out there in a huge data centre.

What I wanted to talk about in this post is what tech resources you can use to run your office, including cloud-based solutions.

The biggest benefit of the cloud is that everything you need is available from wherever you are. I travel quite a lot and often end up spending a considerable amount of time in public transport, so it’s important for me to have access to my files and my resources on the go. But of course the cloud is great also for backup and in emergencies, when you lose internet access at home and you have to work from somewhere else (happens everywhere). Moving to the cloud can also help you in organising your office, or decluttering it, as suggested by Sara Colombo.

Having said that, there still are many obstacles and problems related to the use of the cloud. One of them is service availability, e.g. when Google doesn’t work for a few hours, I’m left without my email, calendar, and searches (happens every now and then). Data confidentiality is often raised as a concern and it shouldn’t be ignored. Data transfer issues can affect the use of Dropbox, or simply the lack of internet access can leave you crippled (I can’t even issue an invoice without access to my cloud-base service). More.

See: WantWords

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Forty-five years.

That’s how long it took Clayton Eshleman to translate the complete poetry of renowned Peruvian poet Cesar Vallejo.

Eshleman is professor emeritus in the English department at Eastern Michigan University. He is a poet and a translator. His decades of work have become a book titled “The Complete Poetry: Cesar Vallejo.”

Vallejo was born in the Peruvian Andes more than a century ago and died in 1938 at age 46. Eshleman says the terribly hard life Vallejo led still holds some key lessons today.

“A poet must learn how to become imprisoned in global life as a whole, and in each moment in particular,” says Eshleman.

Reflecting on his own undertaking over the decades, Eshleman says he was surprised that he had the stamina to do this, and he had no idea his “Vallejo journey” would involve a frustrating nine months in Lima, Peru, and a decade of rewording old translations. More.

See: Michigan Radio

Direct  link to podcast: http://cpa.ds.npr.org/michigan/audio/2014/08/ss_8_25_14_Eshelman-Vallejo-poetry.mp3

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A study called the Spoken British National Corpus 2014 reveals how our use of language is evolving. Is British English succumbing to American influence?

Almost nothing is marvellous these days, but everything is awesome. According to a study by Lancaster University and Cambridge University Press, Britain has all but abandoned the former adjective in favour of the latter.

Early evidence from their project, the Spoken British National Corpus 2014, shows that “awesome” now turns up in conversation 72 times per million words. “Marvellous”, which 20 years ago appeared 155 times per million words, now appears just twice per million. “Fortnight” is also on the endangered list, as is “cheerio”. (That’s “cheerio” meaning goodbye, young people, as opposed to the singular form of the breakfast cereal, which you would only tend to use if you got one stuck up your nose.)

The study is the linguistic equivalent of that regularly updated shopping basket they use to determine the Retail Price Index: out goes whale meat and suspenders, in comes SIM cards and hummus. They aren’t like-for-like substitutions, just signifiers of a fast-changing culture. More.

See: The Guardian

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