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Rotary Club continues tradition of gifting dictionaries to county third graders Brownwood NewsMonday, October 4, 2021
Dr. Jeff Kane: 'Gullible' has been removed from the dictionary - The Union of Grass Valley - Dictionary
Have you heard? Last week a whistleblower revealed that the new president of Ireland can’t speak a word of English.
If you believe that, friends might consider you either crazy, ridiculously ignorant, or, depending on how they think, in possession of a scandalous truth.
Every month I meet on Zoom with four psychiatrists. It’s not that I’m a high-maintenance patient; these are medical school classmates in regular reunion. I recently asked them this question:
“What do you call it when someone insists on believing what plainly isn’t so, or is less likely than a trout singing opera? What do you say to someone who insists that cannibals lurk in the library or that Italian satellites are tweaking our thyroids? Do you call that psychosis? Delusion? Lucid dreaming? Fear porn?”
Of the variety of answers these shrinks offered me, one made especially compelling sense. “Crazy as it seems,” my classmate said, “that’s normal human behavior. So-called Homo sapiens has always been that way. When times are confusing, we need a frame, a map, some way to organize apparent chaos. So when we’re desperate we reach for the simplest answer, whether it makes rational sense or not. We’ve always done that, and probably always will.”
Given, then, that such porous credulity is all too human, never mind trying to convince your cousin that corndogs won’t cure psoriasis, or that there’s actually no North Korean colony on the dark side of the moon. No one can change a made-up mind.
We inevitably direct our lives according to our beliefs, such as they are. My psychiatrist friend has convinced me, once and for all, that we believe whatever we jolly well want, independent of facts. Often our beliefs serve us nicely, bringing contentment, but sometimes they deliver unpleasant consequences.
Genuine truth, like cream, will eventually rise to the individual and popular surface. When that happens–and provided we’re mentally healthy — we reconsider our less fruitful beliefs, and so change our course. In fact, such flexibility is a hallmark of mental health.
Jeff Kane is a physician and writer in Nevada City
A Spectrum of Possibilities: A Conversation with Michael Cooperson on His Translation of al-Ḥarīrī's “Impostures” - lareviewofbooks - Translation
MICHAEL COOPERSON IS a professor of Arabic at UCLA and an acclaimed translator of classical Arabic texts. His latest work, Impostures, is a wildly imaginative transculturation of classical Arabic poet al-Ḥarīrī’s seminal 12th-century Maqāmāt. Al-Ḥarīrī’s Maqāmāt is a work of maqāmah, an Arabic literary form that literally means “assembly,” combining rhymed prose with verse. The result is a rich, evocative demonstration of the Arabic language’s possibilities and intricacies.
Al-Ḥarīrī’s Maqāmāt consists of 50 sequences, all involving a clever roguish figure by the name of Abū Zayd. A swindler, thief, and fraud, Abū Zayd marshals his command of the Arabic language on the unwitting in order to play tricks and gain personal rewards. Because of the exhaustive nature of Abū Zayd’s language games, al-Ḥarīrī’s Maqāmāt became a tool to teach people the Arabic language as Islam spread throughout the world in the medieval period. However, because of its reliance on the uniqueness of Arabic prose and verse, the work has long left translators largely stumped. After initial attempts at straightforward translations, scholars eventually arrived at a more effective method, that of transculturation: leveraging the intricacies of one’s own language and culture in order to dutifully capture what is so exceptional about the original.
In Impostures, Cooperson masterfully achieves this transculturation by traversing the vast scope of the English language and choosing distinct styles for each particular sequence. He employs the English literary canon in order to achieve this — the first “Imposture,” for instance, is in the style of Mark — as well as corporate middle management memos, Old New York crime dictionaries, and dense legalese, using different global English dialects throughout the world for various episodes.
Cooperson received Sheikh Zayed Book Awards’s 2021 translation prize for his achievement. We spoke about his efforts in transculturation below.
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JOE AMENDOLA: The scholar Matthew Keegan has done work on al-Ḥarīrī’s Maqāmāt as well. Keegan made a point that maqāmah were partly intended to train readers how to interpret more difficult texts, including the Qur’an. How does Keegan’s point relate to your own study of Arabic? And how does it relate to the spread of Arabic as a global language as it spread out from the Arabian Peninsula to the rest of the world?
MICHAEL COOPERSON: Matthew and I take a slightly different view of this. Matthew, as you said, emphasizes how reading a difficult book like the Maqāmāt is supposed to make you a better reader of fundamental, foundational religious texts. And I’m sure he’s right. But the part of it that I emphasize is the role that a text like this plays for people who are learning Arabic as non-native speakers. Because before you can get to the point where you’re even reading and understanding the Qur’an, and other kinds of religious texts, you actually have to learn the language first. One of the things that’s really weird and counterintuitive about this culture is that I think that people actually learned Arabic, once they reached a certain age, from books like this, which is a bit like learning English from Finnegans Wake, or some other kind of highly contrived and elaborate text.
It’s not something that would seem to make sense right off. But we have manuscripts of the Maqāmāt where you can see people scribbling the meanings of words in the margin. So they’ve got this text — the same text that we have, with the same 50 stories — and above certain words, they’ll write those words’ synonyms. So we know that people who weren’t native speakers were actually learning Arabic using this book. That, to me, ties in with the notion that once you have a global language, two things happen: one is that a lot of people who couldn’t communicate before suddenly can. So you have, you know, people from Nigeria, people from New Zealand, people from Ireland, from Scotland, from the United States, who are all able to communicate more or less easily.
But then at the same time, people all have their own regionalisms, accents, and local knowledge. They’re pulling the language in different directions, so you have these different varieties, different Englishes. The thing about Arabic is that it tried really hard for a long time to kind of keep that down to not let people sound different. So people from Morocco or Central Asia were supposed to be speaking the same language. In some cases, they could and did communicate; they were able to achieve relationships, whether personal or scholarly, or whatever it is, across this huge distance, thanks to this obsessive fixation with standard error. But at the same time, we know that in real life, when they were at home or in the street, they weren’t speaking the same Arabic as each other. So I wanted to replicate that on some level in translation.
Impostures is a translation of al-Ḥarīrī’s Maqāmāt. The maqāmah genre is meant to show off what Arabic can do as a language through rhymed prose and verse word games like palindromes programs, things like that. As you note in the introduction to the book, it has made its translation quite difficult throughout the centuries. Can you trace the history of various attempts at translation, or transculturation? How did you manage to arrive at your approach?
If you look at the different translations into English, or into various languages, there are two main ones: one is to just write down the content — that is, what the text says. Unfortunately, that’s what was done in French. There’s a well-known Arabic-to-French translator who’s done many classical Arabic works, and this was his approach. He simply says, “Here’s the content.” He’ll even have footnotes like, “This rhymes,” or, “This was a pun,” which to me is a cop-out.
For translations of the Maqāmāt that have been successful in their respective languages, we can look to the Hebrew, German, and Russian ones. The medieval Hebrew translation spawned a whole genre of travel writing that is based on the Maqāmāt and is one of the foundations of classical Hebrew literature. The German translation was done by a very well-known 19th-century Romantic poet, and is one of the foundations of German romantic literature. The Russian translation is actually a well-known book among Russian readers and was apparently a best seller in Russia at some point. It keeps the rhymes, the puns, the palindromes — all the features of the original. So, in Hebrew, in German, in Russian, when the translator took this tack of transculturation, of actually replicating the puns and the jokes and the wordplay as best they could using the resources of their own languages, what you got was something people actually picked up, read, and enjoyed.
On the other hand, the word-for-word translations — which exist in French, English, and several other languages — have never made a mark. No one’s ever heard of this book in English, unless you are a scholar of medieval Arabic literature. So as I went to translate it, I thought, You know what? Even if what I do is crazy and bad, at least someone will have heard of it, and then someone else can do a better job. To make your mark, you have to try something different than this timid word-for-word approach.
How did you go about finding the best fit for a particular sequence and imposture? Were some more difficult to find a fit for than others?
It was an interaction of two forces. The first was those examples of English that everyone finds amusing and memorable and impressive. I think about that Gilbert and Sullivan song about the Modern Major General, which actors like to recite very, very quickly. And I thought, You can’t show off English unless you have a modern Major General moment somewhere. And then, obviously, you need Chaucer, Shakespeare, Virginia Woolf, Mark Twain, Jane Austen — the big names. So part of it was knowing that there were certain boxes I had to check if I was going to properly display a spectrum of possibilities in English.
The other force was the themes of the stories themselves. The idea was to find a match between the styles that I wanted in English and the themes of the original. Sometimes the theme of the original sent me in a direction that I wouldn’t have gone otherwise. For example, one of the episodes has a speech: when you read it from beginning to end, it means one thing, and if you read it from the end backward, it means something else. I thought, What do I do with that? Turns out there was a comic writer — well known in the 19th century but totally forgotten now — called Jerome K. Jerome, whose name is reversible. So I translated the speech in the style of Jerome K. Jerome. So it was really a matter of finding themes and matching them with that aforementioned list of writers. When drawing from that list, I used different attempts to look at the range, possibility, liveliness, and creativity of different varieties of English, so that meant going beyond the traditional literary canon.
You are, of course, a scholar of Arabic, but in the course of completing this work, what did you learn about English and its dynamism and intricacies?
From a historical perspective, there was this real break that happens around World War I where — for reasons I think we can probably speculate about pretty fruitfully — collective consciousness changes in a way that is really marked. You can read Margery Kempe and Chaucer all the way through to the end of the 19th century, but suddenly right around 1915 or so, something cracks. That just became really obvious to me in a way that it just wouldn’t have otherwise.
From a linguistic perspective — and I’m not a linguist, but I read a lot of linguistics — you see that the notion that some varieties of English are standard or correct is purely social. There’s nothing more expressive, articulate, or better suited to describing reality about one form of communication as opposed to another. I was hit with that between the eyes as forcibly as possible. There used to be this little pamphlet that the UCLA linguistics department used to put out every four or five years, the “UCLA slang book.” Undergrads who were trained by linguist Pamela Monroe would compile a dictionary of their own slang. And I remember the 2008 or 2009 edition of it actually had in it a range of vocabulary rich enough to replicate what is considered to be the most verbally complex form of writing and the Arabic language. People my age are always supposed to deplore the alleged inarticulateness of young people. But no — people who are 19 and 20 actually have as many words at their disposal and can make as many specific distinctions of meaning as the greatest writer in the Arabic language. Now I really do understand that every language has in it an absolutely complete range of expressiveness. I thought I knew that, but no, I really know it now.
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Joe Amendola is a writer living in New York. His work has appeared in The Outline, Thrillist, and The Stony Brook Press.
Netflix's 'Squid Game' Subtitles Allegedly Incorrect, Korean Translation Reveals - Esquire.com - Translation
There's a reason that the term "lost in translation" exists, but usually it isn't so on the nose in its meaning. As the Netflix series Squid Game continues to pick up popularity on the streaming service, a relatively big issue has come up: the Korean-to-English translation may not be as true to the story as you'd hope. As most Americans aren't fluent in Korean, the K-drama features English subtitles (or English-dubbing for those who prefer), but those are most effective when, you know... they're correct. At least one viewer noticed some inconsistencies worth pointing out.
The issue first gained traction on September 30, when New York-based comedian Youngmi Mayer tweeted out that the context of the translation was largely incorrect. She said, in part, "I watched Squid Game with English subtitles, and if you don’t understand Korean you didn’t really watch the same show. Translation was so bad. The dialogue was written so well and zero of it was preserved." The tweet, at the time of publication, has nearly 24,000 retweets.
Mayer then said she would head over to TikTok to do a more involved illustration of how Netflix's translators missed the mark when it came to getting the context of the series down. She focuses specifically on the character of Mi-nyeo, whose brash behavior and irreverence toward the guards in Squid Game comes off as, honestly, a bit bonkers considering that if you don't win this game, you die. But with additional context from Mayer, Mi-nyeo's character makes a lot more sense.
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As explained by Mayer, certain pieces of dialogue are slightly mistranslated, which makes a huge difference when meaning is considered. In one clip, the character says (as told via subtitle), "I'm not a genius, but I still got it work out. Huh." Translation is close-ish, but upon review from Mayer, she says the line is more like, "I am very smart. I just never got a chance to study," which, as Mayer explains, is a huge trope in Korean media. It's not just a mistranslation; it's a lack of understanding of Korean pop culture.
Netflix has not released a statement on the mistranslations, but as Mayer explains it, the misunderstood translations happen frequently enough that if you don't speak Korean, you're watching a slightly different series from start to finish. The sad part of that is that Netflix potentially missed an opportunity to take one of its most-viewed properties and really introduce audiences to some staple aspects of Korean film. The silver lining is that if you really apply yourself and learn Korean over the next year or so, you'll have a whole new show to watch and also be ready for the inevitable Season Two (God help us).
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Crow Museum presents U.S. debut of ‘The Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia’ - The Dallas Morning News - Dictionary
“Southeast Asia is a region ... characterized by an unruly plurality of languages, ethnicities and belief systems,” according to artist Ho Tzu Nyen. He delves into this plurality in an exhibit called “The Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia,” which is making its U.S. debut at the Crow Museum of Asian Art. A moving-image installation that weaves together texts, photos, music and found footage, the exhibit explains from A to Z the impressive diversity in the region.
“By looking at the history of the region, Ho Tzu Nyen presents an endless view of possible ‘Southeast Asias’ to consider,” says Jacqueline Chao, curator of the exhibit and a senior curator at the Crow Museum.
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She adds, “This constantly shifting, multisensory installation experience questions the power of shared belief and interrogates the nature of ‘facts’ and what we think we know while simultaneously opening the door to new readings, interpretations and discovery.”
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Nyen, a native of Singapore, is known for creating films, installations and performances that have been presented in Japan, Germany, Taiwan, Hong Kong and other countries.
The exhibit, which includes text on adjoining walls, will run through Jan. 30 at the Crow Museum of Asian Art of the University of Texas at Dallas’ Arts District location, 2010 Flora St. Learn more at crowmuseum.org.
You could be watching Squid Game wrong – all because of a Netflix error - Gamesradar - Translation
Squid Game has taken the world by storm, topping Netflix's most-watched lists in dozens of countries around the world. But, if you're watching with English subtitles, you may be watching Squid Game all wrong.
The show, which was produced in South Korea, centers on a group of down-on-their-luck citizens who are chosen by a mysterious organization to participate in a lethal tournament consisting of various children's games. There are many nuances within the script, but some of these have not been fairly translated into English – if you're watching with the wrong translation settings.
Comedian Youngmi Mayer took to social media to criticize the Korean-English translation of Squid Game. She points to a scene featuring Han Mi-nyeo (played by Kim Joo-Ryoung), whose dialogue appears to have been changed drastically.
In the segment, the character's quoted in Netflix's close captions as saying "I’m not a genius, but I can work it out", yet the direct translation is: "I am very smart – I just never got a chance to study."
Change the settings in Netflix, though, from "English [CC]" to "English" in the menu, and the translation now reads: "I never bothered to study, but I'm unbelievably smart." That's a much more accurate translation of the original text.
See the comparison between the two settings below, the more accurate one (bottom) being the non-closed caption translation.
How come the "English" and "English [CC]" captions are so different? The "English [CC]" translation comes from the dubbed version of the series – and if you're watching with English dubs, the voice actor during the above scene reads the line: "I'm not a genius, but I've still got it where it counts."
The "English [CC]" translation is meant as an accessibility option for the English dub of the series, while the English subtitles for the Korean are much more accurate to the original text. Therefore, if you're watching Squid Game and are looking for an accurate English translation that doesn't lose the nuances of the script, make sure you have the proper English subtitles on – "English" and not "English [CC]".
And if you've already devoured Squid Game whole, then make sure to check out the best Netflix shows and best Netflix movies available to stream right now.
Sunday, October 3, 2021
Bears’ Matt Nagy says he’s in charge. Translation: not really. - Chicago Sun-Times - Translation
The best sight Sunday was not David Montgomery running, Justin Fields throwing, Darnell Mooney making great catches or even the Lions showing up on the schedule.
It was Matt Nagy, hands on knees, exhorting. That’s a nice way of saying, “The best sight Sunday was Matt Nagy not calling plays.’’
The Bears’ head coach cheered on his team, letting offensive coordinator Bill Lazor do the play-calling, and the result, possibly a complete coincidence (no), was a 24-14 victory.
What does it all mean? That’s a very broad question, but forced to give an answer, I would offer three: We’re all alone in this universe, we need to be kind to each other and the microphone on Nagy’s headset should never be turned on again. That’s not based on last week’s atrocity against the Browns but on the sickly body of his work as a play-caller for the Bears.
“Bill did a great job’’ calling plays, Nagy said after Sunday’s game. “At the same point in time, it’s important that we understand that I felt good out there as a head coach. That’s real. But we all get together [during the week]. We talk through how we’re going to call the game. . . . We do it together. I get a great opportunity to say, yes, I like this or, no, I don’t — as the head coach, right, in charge of all that.’’
To sum up: Nagy is the head coach. He’s in charge of everything. But if you’re going to be a quibbler, no, he wasn’t in charge of calling the plays during Sunday’s game. So not really in charge of everything.
OK?
Good things happen when Montgomery is able to run the ball. It stops opponents from teeing off on the quarterback, the way Cleveland did the previous week in Fields’ first NFL start. Lazor gets this. He got it last season at times when he took over the play-calling from Nagy.
So the Lions got a heaping helping of Montgomery right from the start. He rushed seven times in a 12-play drive, including a four-yard touchdown run to help give the Bears a 7-0 lead. There are few running backs who run harder than this guy. Lazor gets that, too. The Bears finished with 188 rushing yards, Montgomery with 106.
It can’t be overstated: When it came to generous, true-blue Friends of the Program, the Bears had no bigger supporter at Soldier Field on Sunday than the 0-4 Lions. But this also can’t be overstated: Fields was sacked nine times the week before, so who cares how giving the Lions were? All that matters is that Nagy’s lack of creativity was not allowed to ruin the possibility of a gimme.
Fields needed a confidence builder. He got it because Montgomery softened up the Lions’ defense and because the offensive line . . . what’s the word? . . . blocked. He was sacked just once. The rookie made some very nice throws that were doable because he had time to throw.
The previous week, the Browns were on him before a neuron could fire. On Sunday, he had connections of 64, 32 and 21 yards with Mooney and 28 and 27 yards with Allen Robinson. He looked like he belonged. His numbers — 11 of 17, 209 yards, no touchdowns and one interception off a tipped pass — said the same thing.
“I feel like before the game I know when I’m in a rhythm and I know when I’m feeling good,’’ he said. “I felt good just coming into the game throwing the ball. So I knew it was going to be a good day.’’
The Lions drove inside the Bears’ 10-yard line three times in the first half and came away with no points. That’s a testament to the Bears’ defense and to the Lions’ inherent Lions-ness. On one first-quarter play, quarterback Jared Goff wasn’t prepared for the snap, and the ball bounced off his right knee into the hands of Bears defensive lineman Bilal Nichols. It’s like that, being the Lions.
Of course, the 2-2 Bears are in no position to mock anyone. Last week’s embarrassing loss led to days of public outrage over the direction of the franchise.
And if you’re looking for your weekly dose of darkness, it came when Montgomery went down with a knee injury in the fourth quarter. He walked off the field with help and seemed to be in considerable pain. The Bears will be, too, if he’s out for an extended period.
“Got down and prayed,’’ Mooney said when asked what he did when he saw Montgomery down.
That was the right approach. A lot rides on the running back’s health.
Nagy said he won’t answer any more questions this season about who is calling the plays. Maybe he thinks it will be a distraction. Maybe he knows it would reflect poorly on his past performances if Lazor does well. Maybe he’s embarrassed because he was hired based on his know-how on offense.
Or maybe, just maybe, we simply need to appreciate that Nagy feels good as a head coach and that he’s in charge. That’s real. Reportedly.
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