Smartling lands $160M to help companies translate their content automatically - VentureBeat - Translation

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As the pandemic drives businesses online, translation is becoming a key part of the digital transformation equation. One large-scale behavioral study in 2014 showed that 75% of consumers are more likely to buy products from websites in their native language. Another, this one by Localize, found businesses that invested in translation were 1.5 times more likely to observe an increase in revenue.

Against this backdrop, Smartling, a self-described cloud translation company, has raised $160 million in a venture capital round led by Battery Ventures. CEO Jack Welde says that the proceeds will be used to expand Smartling’s headcount while supporting product development and marketing efforts.

Smartling, which was founded in 2009 by Welde and Andrey Akselrod, is a language translation company that enables customers to localize content across devices and platforms. Smartling leverages a combination of AI-powered translation tools and human translators, localizing content for particular markets to ensure its intended meaning and connotation remains the same — and isn’t misunderstood.

“Two truisms have emerged about today’s enterprises: all business is global, and content drives global business,” Welde said in a statement. “The third leg of that stool is translation, since nearly all customers want to buy in their own language. This is a tremendous opportunity, and we are excited to realize it together with Battery.”

Localizing content

Smartling uses automation to quickly translate content into different languages. New content on customer sites and apps is flagged for translation and sent to translators for rewriting; when changes to the original language are detected, all foreign-language versions are flagged for translation. The changes are then delivered to front-end users through the backend of a customer’s system, independent of app updates.

In 2017, Smartling launched a mobile delivery network designed to deliver updated translations to smartphone apps decoupled from updates to the app’s core code. The idea is that international users see translated content faster without having to update the app beforehand. Instead, updates and new translations can appear as soon as the user opens the app.

Smartling claims to work with a few thousand translators in addition to an in-house staff of about 160 to provide text and video translation services. Translators perform their work in a computer-aided translation tool, which is followed by a translation review, legal review, and editing process.

Smartling relies partially on machine translation — i.e., AI-powered translation — for “high volume, low priority” content translations. While generally accurate, studies show that machine translation systems can produce text that’s less “lexically” rich than human translations — and more prejudicial. Google recently identified (and claims to have addressed) gender bias in the translation models underpinning Google Translate, particularly with regard to resource-poor languages like Turkish, Finnish, Persian, and Hungarian.

We’ve reached out to Smartling for more information about its AI bias mitigation efforts and will update this article if we hear back.

Opportunity for growth

In a boon for Smartling, the market for online translation services continues to climb steeply upward. According to Statista, it’s doubled in size from 2009 to 2019, reaching $49.6 billion two years ago. The machine translation market alone could be worth $230.67 in the next five years, Mordor Intelligence projects, growing at a compound annual growth rate of 7.1% from 2021 to 2026.

Underlining the opportunity, over 361 million people around the world participate in cross-border ecommerce. A study by Standard Chartered found that nearly half of U.S. businesses today say that their best growth opportunity is outside the U.S. And according to Common Sense Advisory, 76% of buyers say that they prefer to purchase a product with information in their own language when faced with the choice of two similar products.

Smartling has competition in Language I/O, a startup providing AI technologies for real-time, company-specific language translations. Unbabel and Lilt are among other rivals in the segment. But Smartling has managed to attract “hundreds” of large business-to-business and business-to-consumer customers including InterContinental, Pinterest, Shopify, and SurveyMonkey.

“Enterprises generally succeed on the strength of technology, supply chains, people, and workflows. As content has become essential to go-to-market strategies, content distribution has in some sense become its own supply chain and workflow. And, as that content supply chain extends globally, translation at scale has become the critical last mile for global enterprise growth,” Battery Ventures general partner Morad Elhafed said in a press release.

Smartling has raised over $220 million in venture capital to date.

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NYC expands translation of special education plans - Chalkbeat Colorado - Translation

Parents of students with disabilities who don’t speak English have long struggled to get their children’s learning plans translated into their native language, a crucial barrier to advocating for extra help or ensuring they are receiving the correct services.

Officials are now taking more significant steps to address the issue. Last school year, the education department quietly launched a citywide effort to centrally translate students’ individualized education programs (or IEPs) instead of leaving the process up to individual schools that didn’t always have the capacity to conduct the translations or find an outside vendor to provide it.

The citywide program, which scaled up a small pilot program announced two years ago, will be permanent, officials recently said.

IEPs are essential documents that spell out a student’s individual goals and the services they’re entitled to receive, such as speech or occupational therapy or a smaller class size with specialized instruction. Without translated versions, families may struggle to know whether their children are getting the services they’re entitled to and effectively advocate on their behalf.

But even as advocates said the centralized process is a step in the right direction, the burden is still on families to request that the documents be translated, and families may not know they can request a translation. For now, there is a large gap between the number of families who may need translated IEPs and the requests.

About 78,000 students with disabilities live in homes where English is not the primary language, according to city officials. Last school year, 7,078 IEPs were translated, the first year the centralized translation process was available citywide.

About 1,100 IEPs have been translated so far this school year, a 70% uptick compared with the same period last year, officials said.

It is unclear to what extent the pandemic may have curtailed families’ requests for translated IEPs or how those figures stack up historically, since the education department did not track how many IEPs were translated by individual schools before the process was centralized.

Nevertheless, advocates said the new translation process represents progress.

“It’s way overdue,” said Lori Podvesker, a policy expert at INCLUDEnyc, an advocacy group that focuses on special education. “If special ed documents are not translated that prevents families from being a part of the decision-making, and that equates to inferior outcomes.”

Relying on schools to translate IEPs resulted in a patchwork system. Individual schools may not have anyone on hand to translate the documents or may struggle to find a translator who can provide high-quality translation of documents that often include jargon and other technical language.

Department officials have argued that centralizing the process would create a more streamlined process and lead to better translations, since the city could use translators with more practice reviewing the highly technical documents and reuse boilerplate language for certain parts, freeing them up to focus on sections that are unique to each student. (The city is using an outside company, Lingualinx, to conduct the translations.)

Paola Jordan, who co-directs Sinergia, an organization that helps Spanish-speaking families navigate special education services, said many families — and even schools themselves — may not know they can request translations.

“I am still seeing Spanish-speaking parents who have [IEPs] in English,” Jordan wrote in an email. “The burden still is on the parent to request the service.” She also raised concerns that families may have to wait several weeks for the documents to be translated.

Education department officials did not immediately indicate how long translations typically take, saying only that they are completed as soon as possible. Nor did they respond to a question about why the city won’t automatically translate IEPs for families who primarily speak other languages.

They did, however, say they are working to get the word out through letters, text messages, and advertisements to “promote the availability of language access services.”

Families who want to request an IEP translation can contact their school, call 718-935-2013, or visit the department’s website.

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Conference on translation examines language and power - ASU News Now - Translation

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December 1, 2021

The School of International Letters and Cultures hosted a conference in November, sponsored by Arizona Humanities and Arizona State University, about the theory and practice of translation and interpretation.

“Engaging Translation: Questions of Language and Power in Arizona and Beyond” was held on ASU’s Tempe campus Nov. 12–13. Attendees included professors, students, translation professionals and other community members. The conference’s program included individual presentations, keynote addresses, panel discussions and workshops. The panelists and moderator stand together on stage before their discussion on language and power in Arizona as part of the two-day "Engaging Translation" conference held on ASU's Tempe campus. Photo by Tim Trumble Download Full Image

The two-day event concluded with a panel moderated by Fernanda Santos, a Southwest Borderlands Initiative professor of practice in ASU's Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. The discussion featured federal public defender Milagros Cisneros, Valencia Newcomer School Principal Lynette Faulkner, The Welcome to America Project Agency Director Mike Sullivan, ASU’s American Indian Studies Director Stephanie Fitzgerald and ASU’s Center for Latina/os and American Politics Research Director Rodney Hero.

The professionals on the panel talked about the various ways language has been used by and against the communities they work with. For example, Sullivan discussed how the refugees served by his nonprofit are supported upon arriving in the United States. The organization’s goal is not for the refugees to assimilate into their new communities, but for them to integrate and interact so that they can experience their new language and culture while continuing to celebrate and share what is familiar to them.

“You’d be surprised how a simple word can open up a door and relax a setting,” Sullivan said.

Similarly, Faulkner described how the multilingual students at her school – which serves young immigrants and refugees who are new to the U.S. educational system – and their families are reassured that their native languages and cultural heritage won’t be swept aside as they learn English and make a new home in the U.S.

“Their culture is strong, and it is celebrated,” she said, noting that in the students’ interactions outside of class, they share their native languages with each other while relying on English as a common tongue.

Fitzgerald connected this to her work at ASU, whose American Indian Studies program includes classes on the Navajo and Oʼodham languages. Many students come into the program unfamiliar with these languages as a result of governmental and educational policies that punished students for not speaking English and displaced Indigenous people from the communities where their ancestors had lived.

Having the opportunity to learn their native languages, Fitzgerald said, “is immensely rewarding, and it provides this emotional connection. It’s beyond words to be able to recapture something that was not available previously.”

All of the panelists agreed that language offers an ability to bridge gaps in society and connect groups of people, whether they are alike or different.

The School of International Letters and Cultures hosted a conference titled "Engaging Translation" last month on ASU's Tempe campus.

Photo by Kimberly Koerth

Conference attendees listen to the final panel discussion, which dealt with questions of language and power in Arizona.

Photo by Tim Trumble

Jaime Fatás-Cabeza, a member of the conference's planning committee and the director of the Undergraduate Translation and Interpretation Program in the Spanish and Portuguese Department at the University of Arizona, presents his research on the second day of the conference.

Photo by Kimberly Koerth

The Welcome to America Project Agency Director Mike Sullivan speaks during the panel discussion on language and power in Arizona.

Photo by Tim Trumble

Conference attendees, some of them fellow presenters, listen as the Rev. John Jacob Collins speaks during one of the conference sessions.

Photo by Kimberly Koerth

Some of the panelists speak with School of International Letters and Cultures Director Nina Berman at the conclusion of the conference.

Photo by Tim Trumble

Associate Professor of Japanese William Hedberg presents his research on the second day of the conference.

Photo by Kimberly Koerth

Earlier in the day, several School of International Letters and Cultures professors participated in some of the conference’s concurrent panel sessions.

Associate Professor of Japanese William Hedberg gave a talk on “Meiji-Period Translations of Chinese Narrative into Vernacular Japanese” during a session on “Sacred and Vernacular Languages in Asia” that put his work in conversation with that of several scholars from around the world. And Assistant Professor of French Isaac Joslin presented his research on “Multi-Lingual Poetics: Mediating the Mind in Francophone Africa” as part of a session centered on “Orality, Narrativity and Translations of Afro-Diasporic Thought.”

Both their presentations engaged with the tensions between languages when texts are translated from one to another to reach a target audience, or when pieces of one language are included in texts written in another tongue. The question of audience is a long-standing one for African literature, Joslin said, although perhaps not the most important factor for writers to consider.

“Rather than focusing on one’s public, whether one is writing for a global or a local audience, the question should address first and foremost the author, who writes for him or herself as a means of expressing his or her memories, thoughts, emotions and reflections on life,” Joslin said. “The question that follows then is which language is best for accomplishing this feat, again, regardless of the potential audience.”

This emphasis on language as, above all else, a powerful tool for self-expression was underscored in many of the presentations throughout the conference. It is clear that language inflects many facets of everyday life, from conversations with friends and family, to interactions in legal or medical settings, to experiences in educational and governmental environments.

Kimberly Koerth

Content Writer, School of International Letters and Cultures

kkoerth@asu.edu

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ClickLearn and Andovar create new automated translation service - Technology Record - Translation

ClickLearn has partnered with Andovar to launch a new in-app professional translation service, making it quicker and easier for enterprise customers to translate business documents and recordings. 

Andovar, an international translation and localisation firm, uses over 5,000 vetted translators to capture context and subtleties correctly.  

"The whole team at Andovar is excited about our collaboration and this great opportunity to provide professional training translation solutions to ClickLearn's customers,” said Steven Bussey, vice president of marketing at Andovar. “Translation automation is the hot topic in localisation these days, and ClickLearn makes the entire process so simple by providing a translation ecosystem right inside their solution!"  

Users click a button within ClickLearn's app to receive a translated quote from Andovar. Once the users selects a translation, ClickLearn distributes the translations to the correct places across all their recordings and structures. This helps users to save time and money when translating.  

“This is the first time we are making external services available for our customers inside the ClickLearn application,” said Joachim Schiermacher, CEO of ClickLearn. “Having professional translations available at the click of a button can mean a world of difference to many of our global customers.”

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ClickLearn partners with Andovar on training translation services - MSDynamicsWorld - Translation

Business applications training and adoption vendor ClickLearn announced a new partnership with Andovar, a provider of international translation and localization services.

Andovar will provide professional training translation solutions to ClickLearn's customers. ClickLearn offers templated translations of all user actions, chapters, and notes, but any content that customers create requires added translation, the company explained.

The translations provided by Andovar are not automated, so probably a little slower than AI in terms of raw speed, but they say they are still very fast while also being accurate and affordable. Andovar works with over 5,000 translators around the world and its clients include Spotify, NetSuite, Uber, and Travelocity. 

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12 Books in Translation From Central Africa - Book Riot - Translation

I started making these lists because it’s harder than it should be to track down books in translation. That became especially apparent as I tried to find books in translation from Central Africa. The region has a storied literary history, and I had a long, long list of novels to read. Except…I couldn’t find them. There were a host of books that have not yet been translated into English despite their importance to their country’s literary history, works by authors such as Pepetela and Inongo-vi-Makome that I wanted to include but couldn’t.

I am using the definition of Central Africa that consists of Angola, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, and São Tomé and Principe. I will be listing the language that each book was translated from; the colonial and imperialist histories of these countries has influenced the main languages that authors are writing in and using.

Particularly, there is a dearth of books by Central African women that have been translated into English. This is always especially painful because I can see that the books exist, I can read about books I would love to read myself, but I can’t access them, and so can’t include them. Just as examples, I was frustrated by the inability to read works by Olinda Beja, Nadia Origo, Calixthe Beyala, Marie Claire Matip, and María Nsué Angüe. Many of the introductions and forwards to the books I was able to access referred to this issue as the “empty canon”: while there is an established canon of works by African women authors, they tend to be unreferenced, ignored, and untranslated, creating the illusion of a lack of texts.

But despite all the frustrating online searching, library hold attempts, and bookshelf wanderings, I did in fact manage to put a fantastic list of book recommendations together. Here, I have given you 12 books in translation that hail from Central Africa.

Please note that while I took great care to list content warnings where I could, sometimes things fall through the cracks. Please do additional research on the recommended titles if needed.

Awu’s Story by Justine Mintsa, Translated from French by Cheryl Toman

In a small village of Gabon, the driven, loving Awu marries Obame Afane, the local schoolteacher, after his first wife is unable to grant him any children. In this short but epic novel, Mintsa digs into the toxic, hypocritical sexism that permeates Awu’s world, populating a complex and fascinating cast of female characters, mothers, and friendships. She refuses the binary of pitting tradition and progress against one another, showing how both, on their own, can bring heartbreak. It is a beautifully written book that feels much longer (in a good way!) than its 111 pages, and the introduction by the translator and forward by Thérèse Kuoh-Moukoury allow readers to dig deep into the fabric of the text.

Content warnings for infertility, sex shaming, torture, sexual assault and coercion, and colorism.

Black Moses by Alan Mabanckou, Translated from French by Helen Stevenson

Mabanckou is one of the most prolific contemporary writers of Francophone African literature. In his novel, young Moses grows up at an orphanage on the edge of Pointe-Noire, as a revolution changes the world outside. In a thread of absurd authoritarian figures and the long life stories that people find themselves sharing with young Moses, he learns of the injustice and sadness packed behind the People’s Republic of Congo’s stories. And he begins to wonder if there’s justice to be found. This tragicomic is compelling and strange, a boy growing up in the 1970s who is trying to find out if he can serve some sort of justice after all.

Content warnings for ethnicity-based prejudice, infanticide, colorism, grooming, rape, necrophilia, animal cruelty, deportation, and use of the R-slur.

La Bastarda by Trifonia Melibea Obono, Translated from Spanish by Lawrence Schimel

La Bastarda features Okomo, a teen girl struggling under the weight of Fang cultural norms. When drawn into a gang of “indecent” girls, she stumbles on to a world of queerness, nonconformity, and acceptance — a world that includes her “man-woman” uncle Marcelo. This short read is the first novel by an Equatorial Guinean woman to be translated into English — but because this fantastic novel is queer, it is actually banned in Equatorial Guinea. Obono, a bisexual journalist, academic, political scientist, and queer activist, has written another book that I wish I could include here but that is not available in translation: Yo No Quería Ser Madre: Vidas Forzadas de Mujeres Fuera de la Norma, in which she interviews 30 women from her country, the majority of whom are gay or gender-nonconforming, about their experiences.

Content warnings for sexual assault, homophobia, and corrective rape.

Tram 83 by Fiston Mwanza Mujila, Translated from French by Roland Glasser

A writer named Lucien, fleeing violent censorship, arrives in this African city in secession from its country, ready to find refuge. But the place is not what he expected, and he finds that his childhood friend and new roommate, Requiem, isn’t what he expected either — he’s become a respected gangster in the city, swindling others to survive. Tram 83 is a club that is a cacophony of noise, the center of this city, a lawless place where children are exploited for prostitution, music plays, and fights break out, where the miners come to forget their troubles after long days of trying to find big payloads.

Content warnings for rape, sexual assault of minors, blackmail, false accusations, suicide mentions, violence.

Essential Encounters by Thérèse Kuoh-Moukoury, Translated from French by Cheryl Toman

This 1969 novel is considered a crucial text in the “empty canon,” but the book by Francophone author Kouh-Moukoury of Cameroon was not translated into English until 2002. It features a woman struggling with infertility, and how it tears her marriage apart — their struggles expose all kinds of problems in the changing landscape of Cameroon, from the way women are shamed for being unable to produce children, to issues of polygamy, interracial relationships and ethnic groups, sexism, and other social issues, all through the lens of this one couple.

Content warnings for infertility and prejudice against infertile women.

Transparent City by Ondjaki, Translated from Portuguese by Stephen Henighan

An epic cast of characters populates the Luanda apartment block at the center of this novel — from Odonato, who appears to be turning transparent, to the Mailman, always sending letters to government officials to try and get a motorized vehicle, to the Seashell Seller, all living in their world of corruption and money changing hands. It’s a poetic, chaotic web of a book, hilarious and touching, written in a compelling run-on narrative, flowing and sensory. It has a wide scope and won’t be for the faint of heart, but those willing to take the leap will happily swim through the rushing current of this strange, dark comedy, with its tender characters and bizarre tales.

Content warnings for drug addiction, anti-Asian sentiment, animal cruelty, homophobic language, shooting, violence.

Dark Heart of the Night by Léonora Miano, Translated from French by Tamsin Black

Ayané returns to her town after years of studying abroad, in order to visit her dying mother. When a militia forces villagers into a horrific ceremony, she becomes a witness. It is a compelling, dark novel about fear, complicity, and how larger structures normalize violence — about trauma, silence, and what people will do in order to survive. The scars of imperialism pit villagers against one another, and force Ayané into a toxic internalized racism, judging the silence of the villagers through her own privileged lens of having been away and apart from their way of life.

*Readers should skip the introduction by Terese Svoboda if their edition includes it, as the author is firmly opposed to its conclusions and does not consider it at all representative of her text.

Content warnings for stillbirth, racism, imperialism, rape, body horror, suicide, violence, cannibalism.

Johnny Mad Dog by Emmanuel Dongala, Translated from French by Maria Louise Ascher

Lao is a young woman who wants to become an engineer, but today she is preoccupied with survival: pushing her mother in a wheelbarrow, carrying their valuables in her pagne, and keeping an eye on her little brother as they flee from an incoming clash of military forces. Meanwhile, Matiti Mabé is a fighter working to help his side win. The book is a dark and painful satire of war, of its absurdity, of the thoughtlessness and blindness of violence and the posturing of power, of the so-often performative actions of journalists, foreign nationals, and organizations like the Red Cross.

Content warnings for torture, shooting, violence, graphically depicted rape, use of the R-slur.

Co-Wives, Co-Widows by Adrienne Yabouza, Translated from French by Rachael McGill

This witty novella is about two widows, Ndongo Passy and Grekpoubou, who find themselves fighting over what’s important to them after their husband dies unexpectedly — even though their dilemma is serious, Yabouza’s dry humor makes the book an entertaining book that U.S. readers will be thrilled to find finally available in English. McGill’s translation won an English PEN translation award in 2019, although the book can still be hard to track down. Yabouza herself is self-taught — she was born in Central African Republic, found asylum in France with her five children during the civil war, and later returned to the country of her birth. She writes fiction in Sango, Yakoma, Lingala, and French.

A General Theory of Oblivion by José Eduardo Agualusa, Translated from Portuguese by Daniel Hahn

An agoraphobic woman named Ludo moves to the city of Luanda with her sister and brother-in-law. When they disappear in the midst of fighting, she walls herself into her apartment, forging a careful existence for herself and her dog Phantom. It’s a poetic, compelling novel that dips into a variety of stories to combine for a series of coincidences, a vaguely surreal tale that tells a small history of the city. It’s a beautiful collage, Ludo piecing together stories from her terrace, the reader and narration filling in the rest, all of it eventually coming together. Agualusa also has The Book of Chameleons available in translation.

Content warnings for agoraphobia, trauma and PTSD, rape and shame, violence, death, animal death.

Mr. Fix It by Richard Ali A Mutu, Translated from Lingala by Bienvenu Sene Mongaba

Ebamba (whose name means “mender,” hence the title) is a hell of a frustrating protagonist. The nearly 40-year-old man living in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, is trying to scrounge up the money to fulfill the ambitious dowry demanded by his fiancé’s family. But it’s awfully hard to do so when he keeps being manipulated into tough situations, and can’t seem to get a job. The star of the show — other than your embarrassed sympathy for Ebamba as he stumbles from mishap to mishap — is the city of Kinshasa and its music. It is the first novel to be translated into English from Lingala, a Bantu language used by more than 8 million people.

Content warnings for homophobia, suicide, and sexual harassment, coercion, and assault.

The Fury and Cries of Women by Angèle Rawiri, Translated from French by Sara Hanaburgh

Emilienne’s marriage is falling apart. She’s a career-oriented woman who makes more than her husband; they married despite parental opposition. Now, she’s dealing with multiple miscarriages, a hateful mother-in-law, and an adulterous husband; then her only daughter, Rékia, is unexpectedly murdered. Emilienne is a disobedient woman, and she at once tries to refuse the sexist pressures imposed on her, and desperately wants motherhood and to keep her marriage together at all costs. This book explores queerness, internalized sexism, and the struggle to have children. Rawiri is considered the first novelist of any gender from the country of Gabon, and this is the only one of her novels I could track down in English translation.

Content warnings for fatphobia, infertility and prejudice against infertile women, tribalism, miscarriage depiction, child’s death, AIDS fear, disordered eating, alcoholism, homophobia.

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Want more books in translation content? I have lists for you of books in translation from Catalonia, Argentina, France, and Mexico. If you have recommendations or requests for future lists of books in translation, or if you want me to know about a book I might have missed, let me know on Twitter.

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Translation Is Hard Work. Lydia Davis Makes It Thrilling. - The New York Times - Translation

Lydia Davis learned German after being plopped into a classroom in Graz, Austria, at the age of 7. Her immersion began at home with breakfast: If she woke early, she received Schokolade mit Schlag (hot chocolate with whipped cream), and if she slept late she got Schokolade ohne Schlag (no whipped cream). After moving back to the United States not long after, she studied French, Latin and Italian. A lifetime of work as a translator (and novelist and short story writer and essayist) has followed.

Her new book, “Essays Two,” is organized around translation. As Davis points out in a preface, the book is more focused in its material than was her previous collection, “Essays One.” With “Two,” it helps to have a pre-existing interest in translation, or at least a general curiosity about language, whereas to enjoy the earlier collection you needed only a pre-existing interest in “stuff.” But whatever the topic, Davis is always superb company: erudite, adventurous, surprising.

In addition to translating Proust and Flaubert, she has tackled “books of all degrees of excellence and nonexcellence, of interest and no interest” — among them a sentimental biography of Marie Curie, art catalogs, travel essays and histories of China. Whatever the source, Davis finds innumerable joys in its conversion. The first essay here enumerates 21 of these pleasures. Translation, she notes, puts a person in intimate communion with an author, removes the anxiety of invention that attends most writing work and presents eternal (but often solvable) riddles. It also offers a form of hard-core armchair travel: To puzzle through “Madame Bovary” is to shoot through a wormhole from America of the 21st century into France of the 19th.

In an essay about translating Proust’s letters, Davis voyages to the apartment where he wrote much of “In Search of Lost Time.” The apartment has not been maintained as Proust left it, with his furniture and artifacts intact, but has instead become the location of a bank. Davis receives a tour of the writer’s former apartment from an employee who occasionally has to run off and deal with banking questions. Client meetings are held in Proust’s bedroom, and the bank’s waiting room is where the writer once warehoused an unruly pile of inherited possessions. “An imaginative financier with a little information might be haunted, sitting next to the lone potted plant, by the lingering ghostly presence of a crowded accumulation of heavy fin de siècle furniture and bric-a-brac, imbued with Proust’s personal associations,” Davis writes.

Although she learned German by immersion, Davis’s preferred method of language acquisition is quite different, and, to an outside observer, demonically challenging: She finds a book published in a language that she does not fully or even partially understand and then tries to figure out what it means.

Lydia DavisTheo Cote

To improve her Spanish, she digs into a copy of “Las Aventuras de Tom Sawyer.” In some cases the decryption proves easy. Words like “plan” are the same in English and Spanish. In other cases she inductively reasons the meaning of a word after noticing it in different contexts. Hoja initially stumps her when it pops up in the phrase hoja de papel — “hoja of paper.” Later in the book, it occurs in the context of a tree. Finally, Huck wraps a dry hoja around something to make a cigarette, and Davis realizes that only one meaning would work as well with paper as with a tree or a cigarette: “leaf.” Of course, it would be possible to solve the hoja enigma in two seconds by plugging the word into Google, but that would destroy the fun.

Norwegian is a tougher case. For this, Davis selects a perversely difficult family saga by the writer Dag Solstad. At 426 pages, the novel consists of “almost unbroken blocks, with no chapters and few paragraph breaks.” Davis reads at a snail’s speed with a sharp pencil in hand, scribbling lists of vocabulary. The word sarkastisk (sarcastic) provides her with a trick for unlocking others: If she mentally replaces the k’s with c’s, Davis finds, certain foreign words become more easily deciphered: kusine is now legible as “cousin,” and kom as “come.”

Trying to learn a language from scratch by reading a book is like trying to write a complicated cake recipe by sitting and staring at the finished cake for several hundred hours. Is it the most efficient form of pedagogy? No, but Davis extracts endless thrills from the painstaking process. Her essays do a beautiful job of transmitting that satisfaction to the reader, although I was occasionally tempted to exercise my skimming muscles in places where she dove deep into the weeds. Skimming, however, would be the wrong move in a book that contains an incredible amount of life-enhancing morsels, such as the fact that the sound of a sneeze in Norwegian is spelled atsjoo.

In a piece about the French city of Arles, we learn that Arles not only receives the icy northwesterly mistral wind that is rumored to drive people insane, but that there are old diagrams called “wind roses” that include up to 32 named winds, each blowing from a specific direction. Unless you are a person whose activities heavily involve wind — mariner, surfer, kite enthusiast — it is unlikely that you will have considered such nuances of air movement in your daily life. “Never too soon to start!” you might think, considering whether you might be able to chart a wind rose tailored to your own neighborhood.

Davis’s essays are packed with these windows of opportunity to think more deeply — or at all — about many subjects. Others include paving stones, Gascon folk tales, parataxis, punctuation, cognates, medieval architecture and sheepdogs.

I enjoyed the book’s plenitude so much that I wasn’t distracted by its squat physical shape, which is adorable to hold but designed in such a way that the book tries to flip itself shut as you read. No amount of violent spine-cracking would break the object’s resistance, and around Page 300 I turned a corner and became charmed by its antagonistic construction. I will read you and you will like it, I warned my copy of “Essays Two.” And lo, I liked it, too.

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