More than 50 third and fourth grade Alice Birney Elementary School students were each given a dictionary delivered to their school recently by Rotary Club of Southwest Eureka members Meghann Broadstock and Sid Noyes, pictured. According to club president John Vandermolen, the books are provided annually by the club as part of its decades-long commitment to supporting education, literacy, students and schools. In addition to the dictionaries, Redwood Capital Bank supplied canvas book bags and piggy banks and Coast Central Credit Union contributed a desk kit with school supplies to each student.
The plays and poems of William Shakespeare are broadly popular in Russia, not because so many Russians read English, but because of brilliant translations by Boris Pasternak (1890–1960), author of “Doctor Zhivago” and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Reciprocally, Pasternak’s Zhivago novel has been well-served in English with two excellent translations and a quite fabulous motion picture. (Ah, Julie Christie!)
Translations are an essential part of literature, and while this column is regularly dedicated to poets who have written in the English language, that proudly includes many who have translated works from foreign languages and given them a life of their own in English.
In England, as early as the 14th Century, Geoffrey Chaucer was translating and drawing on French and Italian texts as sources for his own works in English. Among American poets we can point to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s significant translation of Dante’s “Divine Comedy.” And in more recent times we have had a distinguished group of poet translators including Ezra Pound, W.S. Merwin, Richard Wilbur, Robert Lowell, and John Ciardi.
W.S. Merwin
Of these, the most prolific is W.S. Merwin (1927-2019), who wrote translations of poems from numerous languages. He said these were undertaken “with the clear purpose of introducing readers to works they could not read in the original by authors they might very well never heard of, from cultures, traditions and forms with which they had no acquaintance.” Here is his English rendering of a poem in Spanish by the Argentinian, Jorge Luis Borges. The lack of punctuation is intentional.
To have watched from one of your patios
the ancient stars
from the bank of shadow to have watched
the scattered lights
my ignorance has learned no names for
nor their places in constellations
to have heard the ring of water in the secret pool
known the scent of jasmine and honeysuckle
the silence of the sleeping bird
the arch of the entrance the damp
—these very things may be the poem.
Borges once wrote, and I rather like the idea, “I always imagined Paradise to be some kind of a library.”
* * *
Richard Wilbur
Here now is Richard Wilbur stylishly translating the rollicking French verse of Molière from the play “Tartuffe”:
Ah, there you go – extravagant as ever!
Why can you not be rational? You never
Manage to take the middle course, it seems,
But jump, instead, between absurd extremes.
You’ve recognized your recent grave mistake
In falling victim to a pious fake;
Now, to correct that error, must you embrace
An even greater error in its place,
And judge our worthy neighbors as a whole
By what you’ve learned of one corrupted soul?
Be cautious in bestowing admiration,
And cultivate a sober moderation.
Don’t humor fraud, but also don’t asperse
True piety; the latter fault is worse,
And it is best to err, if err one must,
As you have done, upon the side of trust.
Based on Voltaire, Richard Wilbur also provided the primary lyrics for the Leonard Bernstein musical, “Candide.”
* * *
Looking back through the years, almost certainly the most famous poetic translation has been Edward Fitzgerald’s English version of the Rubáiyát, a poem in Persian by Omar Khayyám (1048-1131). T.S. Eliot said he began to write poetry as a teen-ager after reading this translation. (See video link below.) It includes the famous lines:
A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,
A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread—and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness–
Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!
The Rubáiyát. Calligraphy by William Morris. Illustration by Edward Burne-Jones.
* * *
Irreverent Note:The esteemed Broadway writers, Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe (“My Fair Lady”) once had a pop hit called “A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread and Thou, Baby.” It embraced the legend that any piece of poetry could be turned into a successful song simply by adding the word “Baby.” Might we consider “To Be, or Not to Be, Baby” or Tennyson’s “Forward the Light Brigade, Baby!” Just musing.
* * *
Never were translations more appreciated than during the 17th and 18th centuries when Alexander Pope turned Homer’s “Iliad” and “Odyssey” into heroic couplets and John Dryden did gilt-edge translations of the Roman poets Virgil and Horace. Considering Horace, it’s hard to imagine that the original could surpass Dryden’s memorable English version including these lines:
Happy the man, and happy he alone,
He, who can call to-day his own:
He who, secure within, can say,
To-morrow do thy worst, for I have lived to-day.
Be fair or foul or rain or shine
The joys I have possessed, in spite of fate, are mine.
Not Heav’n itself upon the past has pow’r,
But what has been, has been, and I have had my hour.
Pope, who was careful to look after his finances, did his “Iliad” translation after receiving advance subscriptions from 17 dukes, 3 marquises, 49 earls, 7 duchesses and 8 countesses! It was a royal success.
Incidentally, we should note that there had also been an earlier translation of Homer by the Elizabethan playwright, George Chapman, a version not much remembered today except that it inspired John Keats to write one of his finest sonnets, “On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer:”
Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-brow’d Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star’d at the Pacific—and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
* * *
Perhaps you would like to try a translation yourself. This is from the Gustav Leberwurst Manuscript. Please read it aloud. Helpful hint: Jahn is pronounced Yahn.
Jahn Kid Dudel kämmte tauen
Reih’ Ding’ ohne Bohni.
Stuka Vetter inne satt
Und Kohl Titt’ mag er roh nie.
* * *
VIDEO. In our video the First Poetry Quartet presents three important poems in translation. First, the “Rubáiyát by Omar Khayyám” translated by Edward Fitzgerald (1809-1883). Then “The River Merchant’s Wife” by the Chinese poet, Li-Bo (701-762) translated by Ezra Pound, and then “In a Steelworker’s Home” by the Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko (1933-2017), translated by John Updike. Please note that this poem was written about events in 1945. It is included here for the power of the poetry without necessarily considering the politics.
CLICK ON THIS LINK FOR VIDEO: Poetry in Translation
Ludhiana: An online workshop on “Understanding cultural nuances in translation” was organised by the Postgraduate Department of English under the aegis of the head of the Department, Dr Tanvir Likhari. The resource person for the workshop was Dr Hina Nandrajog, principal, Vivekananda College, New Delhi, and the recipient of the prestigious Katha Prize for Translation and the Sahitya Akademi Prize in Translation. TNS
Lecture on gender sensitisation
Women development cell and the youth club of Shree Atam Vallabh Jain College organised an extension lecture on “Gender sensitisation and legal awareness”. Dr Neelam Batra, University Institute of Law, Panjab University Regional Centre, Ludhiana, was the resource person for the lecture. She said: “We need to increase awareness about women’s issues such as harassment in educational institutions, workplaces and public places such as transport systems in cosmopolitan cities.” TNS
Mozilla is working on a machine-based translation engine, codename Project Bergamot, that is funded by the European Union. One of the main distinguishing factors of the project is that it does not require a connection to an online server for its translations.
The extension has been renamed to Firefox Translations, and released as version 0.4 recently.
Firefox Translations 0.4 introduces several improvements and changes, compared to version 0.3 which the development team released in April 2021.
First, the basics. Translation functionality is limited to a handful of languages currently. You can translate English, Spanish and Estonian currently, and also from English to German (but not from German to English). The extension can be loaded in Firefox Nightly only, and you need to make configuration changes to do so.
Load about:config in the Nightly address bar.
Select that you will be careful.
Search for xpinstall.signatures.dev-root and create the BOOLEAN preference if it does not exist with a click on the plus-icon.
Make sure it is set to TRUE.
If you have other extensions installed, search for xpinstall.signatures.required and set the preference to FALSE.
You need to remove the old Project Bergamot extension from Firefox before installing the new one. Also, make sure that the preference dom.postMessage.sharedArrayBuffer.bypassCOOP_COEP.insecure.enabled is set to FALSE.
You can download Firefox Translations 0.4 from this link.
Note that Firefox Translations will send Telemetry data to the project, if Telemetry sending is enabled in Firefox. If you don't want that, disable Telemetry in Firefox.
The first thing that you may notice is that the extension's size has been reduced significantly. It had a size of more than 120 Megabytes previously thanks to the inclusion of the language data.
The new version has a size of less than 4 Megabytes as language data is now downloaded on demand when the first translation job for a language is started.
Firefox displays a translate toolbar on foreign language pages, if the language is supported by its translation feature and not one of the display languages of the browser.
You may select to translate the page right away, or use the options menu to hide translation prompts for the site or the source language. An option to always translate a language is not available yet.
The extension divides pages into different parts and translates them one by one. The translations take a bit longer than cloud-based translations of Chrome or Edge, but you can start reading the translated content right away as translations happen from top to bottom. The translation speed has been improved significantly, especially the first attempt.
In version 0.3, the first attempt could take between 10 and 30 seconds as data needed to be loaded; this has been reduced to a second or two in the new version. There is still room for improvement, but the experience is much better already.
Closing Words
Firefox Translations is on a good way. Version 0.4 introduces significant improvements, especially in regards to the initial loading of translation data, translation speed and transparency, and the separate downloading of language packs instead of bundling them with the extension.
Translations work well already. Next up is support for more languages and ongoing performance improvements.
Now You: do you require a translation feature in your browser? (via Sören)
Summary
Article Name
Firefox Translations 0.4 released: offline machine-based translations for Firefox
Description
Firefox Translations 0.4 is the latest version of the offline machine-based translation feature for Mozilla's Firefox web browser.
You can listen to the companion audio version of this and other essays in the series using the player below or on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Stitcher or Audible.
Distressed at the dearth of civic understanding in the United States, Ed Hagenstein worked for over two decades to create The Language of Liberty: A Citizen’s Vocabulary. Its purpose is simple: the constitution demands consensus and our form of government requires discourse, which depends in turn on a precise and nuanced vocabulary of its own. Hagenstein has set out to recover 101 words that are essential to the American experiment, many largely lost to disuse or misuse.
Billed by its author as “an owner’s manual for American citizens,” the book takes its readers through 101 political terms that Hagenstein thinks any citizen needs to understand in order to actively and intelligently participate in civic life. The Language of Liberty provides definitions that are clear, direct, and stripped of partisanship, but the work is more than a lexicon. Hagenstein explores each term in the context of American political life and history, providing unexpected insight into even the most recognizable terms. Governing.com Editor-at-Large Clay Jenkinson recently spoke with Hagenstein about his book and the current state of civic understanding. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Edwin C. Hagenstein is an independent writer and editor with decades of experience in educational publishing. He lives in northern New Mexico.
Source: Ed Hagenstein
The Constitution as the Mother's Milk of the Republic Governing: Our civic culture appears to be in disarray. The average American would not understand much that's in your book, and even fairly well educated Americans would make a lot of mistakes. How bad is America's civic understanding?
Ed Hagenstein: It's very bad. It's been bad at least since I was in high school. When I was about 22, I thought I knew everything about politics. I was happy to spout off. At some point I became aware that what I thought of as being politically informed really just meant that I had a grab bag of opinions about issues of the day. I realized at some point that I knew almost nothing about what was in the Constitution, let alone its underlying logic. That was four decades ago now, and I went to what was considered a very good public high school outside Boston. So it's been going on for a while. I do fear the trajectory we're on. John Adams said that the founding generation, the whole American population, more or less imbibed constitutional thought with their mother's milk. Everybody had a constitutional understanding. The Constitution was out in the populace before it was written in Philadelphia. It’s a daunting task to recreate that sensibility.
One of the things about the constitution, of course, is that it's there in a sense to frustrate us ...
Governing: There’s a sense now that the American people don't mind not being civically intelligent, and yet they have strong opinions about such matters in every direction.
Ed Hagenstein: That's right. One of the things about the constitution, of course, is that it's there in a sense to frustrate us, and nobody wants to be frustrated. We have a government that's structured around the idea of discourse and reaching some kind of a consensus. That demands that we acknowledge other people as having legitimate points of view and trying to work with that. At a time when the country is huge, 330 million people, and extremely diverse, consensus is really hard. It's frustrating to knock your head against the wall trying to convince others. A lot of people don’t feel compelled to engage in that way, yet that's what has to be done.
Governing: The events of recent years suggest that our lagging proficiency in civics is far more dangerous than simple public stupidity. When Barack Obama was legislating largely by executive order in his second term, why wasn't there more nonpartisan outrage at that violation of the Constitution? Then Donald Trump took it in a much graver direction. Shouldn’t people have stood up to them, irrespective of their party affiliations, and said this is not good for our country?
Ed Hagenstein: I wish there were more voices out there saying that. It's frustrating watching the executive order. I regret that I didn't include it as a term in the book. What’s going on now is no way to govern, and they’re doing this on some serious issues. We've always had executive orders, which are probably necessary for running the executive branch. But for determining something as important as immigration, it’s not a healthy way to govern.
The cover of the book, Language of Liberty. (Image courtesy of Rootstock Publishing)
Governing: It seems that if we really understood your book, we would do everything in our power to maintain a republic. The other possibility is that a republic can't govern a nation of 340 million and a world of cruise missiles and cyber terror. If we’re adjusting towards a post-republican world, it wouldn't do us a lot of good to get prickly about war powers and executive orders and such. What do you think?
Ed Hagenstein: I'm of two minds about that. Adrain Vermeule, a constitutional law professor at Harvard, says that we evolved away from the Madisonian Constitution during the 20th century with the development of the administrative state, and there's no going back. He contends that it's not necessarily a bad thing, that it's been an organic transition to this point. I see his point. I can understand there is probably no going back. But I want to hold on as much as possible to some of the aspects of self-government. None of us have a whole lot of control over what happens in Washington. But I want to hold on to as much control as we can over our lives, to not feel that we're at the mercy of obscure powers that descend on us from who knows where. I want to hold on to the notion of a citizen as somebody who does, in fact, have some sort of say over how he or she is governed.
Governing: Do we no longer agree on a set of norms? Do millions of Americans just want their point of view to dominate, even if it rides roughshod over the Constitution?
Ed Hagenstein: I'm afraid so. I don't necessarily blame Trump and his administration. It's a symptom of a deeper problem, of some sort of disruption in our civic life that goes back quite a way. A scholar named Samuel Huntington wrote a book on the issue of national consensus called Who are We? He made a point that has stuck in my mind ever since. He said that if you ask anyone over a certain age, maybe 40 or 45, about the American way, everybody knows what you're talking about. They would all define it in more or less the same way. But if you ask anyone under a certain age, and it might have been 30, you get exactly the opposite. You get nothing but blank stare, head shaking, what on earth are you talking about? I'm at the age that I can't remember something like the American way being talked about when I was a kid. It really did disappear at some point. There is something very serious there, a real disruption in terms of the Constitution and the American system as a whole.
Civic Illiteracy as a Casualty of the Speed of Change
Governing: What do you think it means?
Ed Hagenstein: It seems partly to be an international thing. It's not just us suffering through this. You get a sense from the news from Great Britain and France and elsewhere in Europe. It's a broad matter, but I can put it in an agrarian context. Since the industrial revolution, we've been on an accelerating path of change. We're not really used to that. I'm not even sure humans can live naturally with so much change. In writing the entries for The Language of Liberty, I often found myself going back to the late 19th century, to the huge challenges we faced then and the governmental response, the Progressive movement, the rise of the presidency into a more powerful institution than Congress, and various other things. The rise of the administrative state and regulatory agencies. All of that to me was a response to massive industrialization and huge changes in how we lived.
The entry for Administrative State in the book, Language of Liberty
Governing: One argument is that we are living with an 18th century Newtonian constitution, designed for a three mile-per-hour world, that it doesn't really work in this universe.
Ed Hagenstein: Woodrow Wilson said you can't look at a Newtonian constitution through a Newtonian lens. You have to use a Darwinian lens, and the Constitution has to evolve or die. I’m a little reluctant to agree with Woodrow Wilson, but I see his point. With the massive changes that came with industrialization, the mass immigration and urbanization, it's tough to imagine that we wouldn't respond somehow. And it doesn't seem unnatural that we've evolved the way we have constitutionally, with the administrative state and regulatory powers and all that.
Governing: It would be difficult for a reader of The Language of Liberty to discern your politics, which is a rare and good thing. But is it fair to say that there is a lot of the Jeffersonian in what you say in the book?
Ed Hagenstein: That's fair. I’m attracted to the agrarian tradition and more comfortable there than with the Hamiltonian tradition. A man named Leszek Kolakowski wrote an essay titled “How to be a Conservative Liberal Socialist: a Credo” that was especially important to me in forming my mind for the book. I find it very easy to be all three of those things at once. My politics are all over the place, and I'm glad they seem hidden. But I do have a strong attraction to the Jeffersonian and agrarian heritage.
Teetering Between Failed State and Getting By
Governing: Are we a failed state, or are we doing pretty well?
Ed Hagenstein: Somewhere in between. We're going to be facing storms somewhere in the future. I end my entry on conservatism by talking about ordinary, day-to-day conservatism. The habits of people who get up and go to work and do their thing and treat their neighbors well and do all that. We’re in for some stormy constitutional weather ahead, and it'll test us. Whether the constitution holds and whether we remain a constitutional people is an open question. An awful lot depends on our leadership, which has not been good, and I don’t just mean in the political sphere. But I trust that the American people have pretty terrific reserves of decency and regard for others and for lawfulness. Some of that's dissipated over the years and over the decades, but there are real reserves there.
Governing: Archimedes said, “Show me where to put the lever and I'll move the world." Where would you put the lever? Where could we gain the most ground?
Ed Hagenstein: My mind keeps coming back to legislatures. We've seen a deterioration, certainly at the national level, of the strength of Congress in relation to the executive branch and the judicial branch. But there's something that a legislature has that the other branches don't. It’s comprised of the representatives of the people. You've got all these people in the country who are fighting mad. Take their representatives and lock them in a room and tell them they have to talk to each other. I consider legislatures as places of discourse and compromise. It can't happen without engaging other people, and legislatures are where opposing points of view are expressed and discussion has to happen. Debate is built into the Constitution and into the rules of the House and the Senate. Maybe it’s with legislators that we might place a bit of hope.
You can hear more of Clay Jenkinson’s views on American history and the humanities on his long-running nationally syndicated public radio program and podcast, The Thomas Jefferson Hour, and the new Governing podcast, The Future In Context.
It is an interjection “inviting assent,” “expressing inquiry or surprise,” “asking for something to be repeated or explained” or “ascertaining the comprehension, continued interest, agreement, etc., of the person or persons addressed.” The last listing is “the only usage of eh that can be categorized as peculiarly Canadian,” according to the definition, “all other uses being common amongst speakers in other Commonwealth countries and to a lesser extent in the United States.”
Windows 10’s flagship browser Microsoft Edge has finally been graced with in-line dictionary functionality, which was previously available on Microsoft Edge legacy. In addition, Microsoft also appears to be working on a mini context menu and improved password monitor tool.
Microsoft is currently testing these new features in the Canary version of Chromium-based spin of Edge. The first new feature is mini menu, which offers a clutter-free experience by surfacing important options like copy, Bing sidebar search and dictionary. You can enable this handy piece of functionality in the Settings menu.
Thanks to mini menu integration, Microsoft Edge has also received dictionary functions, which means you can now select and highlight a word and get a definition from Bing-powered sources. This feature is not exclusive to web pages and users can also open a PDF file within Edge, and view floating text descriptions for selected words.
Once enabled, you don’t have to copy a word and paste it in another tab and then search on Google/Bing for definition. As you can see in the below screenshot, you can view definitions within the web pages or PDF.
As mentioned at the outset, this functionality was first added to the legacy version of Edge in 2019 and it was removed when Micorosft switched to Chromium-based Edge.
Microsoft has stripped numerous features and functions legacy as it started to rebuild the browser from scratch. However, Microsoft is now slowly adding Edge legacy’s features back, and the company is also working on a new password monitor.
Microsoft Edge password monitor to get even better
In 2020, Microsoft Edge was updated with a feature that informs users when passwords have been compromised. Password Monitor in Edge is able to grab passwords from the Microsoft account and it can also inform users when one of their passwords was involved in a third-party data breach.
Microsoft is now introducing a new feature that will reveal your weak and reused passwords across accounts. This feature is currently rolling out in preview versions and Microsoft believes that it will allow users to stay informed about online security standards.
Like other password protection features, Edge’s Password Monitor will allow you to change the password for the password if it is weak.
In addition, Microsoft is also considering Windows Search and audio settings integration for Chromium Edge, but both features are currently unavailable in the preview channel.
