New English translation of classic Chinese children's book published - Xinhua - Translation

LONDON, Jan. 25 (Xinhua) -- A new English translation of a modern classic Chinese book for children, "I Want To Be Good" by Huang Beijia, a well-known author in China, has been published this month by UK-based New Classic Press.

The book, which was translated by Nicky Harman, a UK-based prize-winning literary translator, had been picked as a "Top Children's Book in Translation" by the International Committee of the Children's Literature Association, Alicia Liu, an advisor to the Nanjing-based publisher, Phoenix Juvenile and Children's publishing Ltd, in Jiangsu province, China, told Xinhua on Tuesday.

"I Want To Be Good" became an instant classic when it was first published in 1996 by the Chinese publisher and has sold over 5 million copies in China. It has also been adapted for the cinema, television and stage, and translated into nine languages including English, French, German, Russian, Korean, Vietnamese and Arabic.

The book tells the story of a ten-year-old girl who is under constant pressure to do better and pass important school exams.

The author said the story was inspired by her personal life, specifically "the complicated relationship between mother and daughter," and challenging "the traditional thought of being a Tiger Mother in the competitive learning environment in China."

According to the Chinese publisher, the book has been much loved in China as it has encouraged a generation of young readers to be ambitious, resilient, and most importantly to be themselves.

Nicky Harman said: "It's a book with a lot of heart and I thoroughly recommend it." Enitem

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Opinion: Why we need to remove 'waste' from the dictionary - CSO Magazine - The Global CSR & Sustainability Platform - Dictionary

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Opinion: Why we need to remove 'waste' from the dictionary  CSO Magazine - The Global CSR & Sustainability Platform

How minority languages found an unlikely ally in translation companies - OpenGlobalRights - Translation

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Our mother tongue is part of our identity. The first language we learn connects us with the world and shapes our perception of reality. 

There are more than 7,000 languages spoken worldwide, but a majority of them will become extinct in the next century. Minority languages are dying off at an alarming rate as quickly as one language every two weeks, and many blame globalization and the internet for being their "main killers." While these factors have made the world a more interconnected place, they have also had a homogenizing effect on culture and language. It is estimated that 60.4% of content on the internet is in English alone.

Anthropologists and indigenous groups are now in a race against time to preserve vulnerable languages before they completely fade away, along with the knowledge and culture contained within them.

The outlook may be grim for these groups, but they have found an unlikely ally in translation companies, which have been a significant player in the rise of globalization over the years. Developments of machine translation (MT) and artificial intelligence (AI) have helped propel the industry to new heights, but with their power to greatly promote language access, what's the role of these technologies in keeping endangered languages alive?  

Language rights are human rights

Some question if saving minority and endangered languages is worth it. Some people have gone on to point out that the loss of language is "simply a fact of life," especially in this ever-changing world.

However, such a perspective ignores the fact that people have the right to participate meaningfully in public life with the languages they speak. A report from UNESCO argues that this is a basic application of the fundamental right to freedom of expression and non-discrimination.

This "fact of life" is thus a crisis that needs to be addressed through policy interventions on all levels. As of 2020, the World Economic Fund has reported that there are roughly 2,895 languages endangered worldwide. This is alarming because that's roughly around 41% of all languages, some of which have around 1,000 or fewer speakers. 

Anthropologists and indigenous groups are now in a race against time to preserve vulnerable languages before they completely fade away, along with the knowledge and culture contained within them.

Jordi Bascompte, a researcher from the University of Zurich, has said that "every time a language disappears, a way to make sense of reality disappears," and along with it, how we interact with and relate to nature. 

Bascompte and other researchers have pointed out that we will continue to lose bodies of generational knowledge if nothing is done to protect these languages.

To this end, UNESCO has declared a Decade of Indigenous Languages beginning in 2022 to support initiatives geared toward preserving minority languages. Such initiatives go a long way to mitigating the language crisis and ensuring that people who speak these languages are able to access their rights. And alongside these initiatives, translation companies have become integral in promoting and implementing these languages in various mediums. 

Bridging the gap between language and opportunity

Translation companies have made great technological strides in developing MT and AI solutions in just the past decade.

The majority of the translation sector uses these technologies as part of their work management, making translation easily applicable in digital applications and content, like in apps, websites, and software. Translation technology made it more convenient and quicker to translate from one language to another due to the machine's algorithms determining their pattern.

But translation technology isn't accurate as it still lacks the cultural context of the language pairs, especially for minority languages. For this reason, any translation company that utilizes these technologies still relies on linguists to ensure the quality of the translated content. By translating minority to majority languages and vice versa, like the Cherokee-English language pair, professional translation companies are promoting minority languages within the minority groups and to the broader global audience.       

Through their services, translation companies play a role in facilitating the direct connection between people who speak minority languages and the larger public sphere where majority languages predominate, making it easier for people who speak these languages to access services and opportunities than before.

The biggest contributing factor to language loss is when children stop learning their mother tongues in favor of majority languages, where these services and opportunities are most available.

There is a divide between majority and minority languages due to the disproportionate number of support, services, and opportunities available in majority languages. For example, future generations are encouraged to learn English (a majority language) because of the job opportunities it offers compared to their parents' languages. 

In recent years, there has been more emphasis on preserving one's native language. As young people are increasingly becoming aware of the importance of their cultural heritage, it's vital to provide them with resources to continue using their own languages. In most cases, government policies that support the preservation of minority languages have a greater impact than solely relying on nonprofit initiatives. 

An example of this is the Irish Gaelic language. In the mid-19th century, the number of Irish Gaelic language speakers had dwindled. Through the initiatives of the Gaelic League, it sought to use the language as a medium of instruction in school, in different subjects, which helped preserve it. 

Translation as a language education tool

Aside from encouraging younger people to learn their parents' mother tongues, AI-based translation is now better suited to provide resources for education than ever before. Many initiatives from government and nonprofit organizations have already begun partnering with a translation company to use these technologies in a bid to preserve endangered languages through education.

An example of this is the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language (CoEDL), an organization that aims to preserve indigenous languages in Australia, that has built an AI and robot to teach children their mother tongue through class lessons and stories while monitoring the children's learning progress.

Creating an archive through translation

There is a lot of potential in helping preserve endangered languages, even if only in the form of a record. Professional translation companies working with AI maintain voluminous libraries of linguistic data, and many companies with the means to do so are making efforts to include languages with rare linguistic features in order to improve their MT models.

This may represent the most far-reaching kind of documentation of rare languages that will be available. As AI language processing becomes more refined, this may give linguists the possibility to study these languages based not only on extant linguistic artifacts but also through what comes closest to being a "living archive" of texts made possible through translation.

And even if these technologies from translation companies still have yet to attain the same level as humans in the present context, the data retained will become like a Noah's Ark of cultural and linguistic heritage for future generations to examine and piece back together with the parts that have become "lost in translation."

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A New Translation Brings “Arabian Nights” Home - The New Yorker - Translation

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A New Translation Brings “Arabian Nights” Home

The most striking feature of the Arabic tales is their shifting registers—prose, rhymed prose, poetry—and Yasmine Seale captures the movement between them beautifully.Art work by Laleh Khorramian, “Sudden Onset” (2006) / Courtesy the artist 

King Shahriyar and his brother King Shahzaman suspect their suffering to be unique in this world. Their wives have slept with other men, and this drives them to grief, to madness—Shahzaman skewers his wife and her lover with a sword—and to a quest to find someone unluckier than them. One morning, after waking up on a wooded beach, they see a woman standing next to a sleeping jinni. “Make love to me and give me satisfaction, or I will set the jinni on you,” she says. The men, reluctantly, oblige. The jinni has kept the woman locked in a glass chest, deep in the sea, but that hasn’t stopped her from sleeping with ninety-eight other men. “He thought he had me and could keep me for himself,” she says, “forgetting that what fortune has in store cannot be turned, nor what a woman wants.”

The brothers, unhinged by these words, run back to their thrones. Shahriyar begins to take a new bride each night, only to have her killed the following morning. Parents grieve; the kingdom darkens. Eventually, Shahrazad, the vizier’s daughter, comes up with a plan. She offers herself as a bride, but holds Shahriyar’s attention, night after night, with stories that end on a cliffhanger. With every dawn, the king decides to let her live, burning to know what comes next.

This is the frame story for the loose collection of tales known, in English, as “Arabian Nights,” as narrated in an electric new translation by the British Syrian poet Yasmine Seale. Beyond the frame tale and a few core stories, there is little agreement on what belongs in the “Nights.” The collection has no single authoritative manuscript. No known author. As the scholar Paulo Lemos Horta, the editor of this new edition, explains in an introduction, we know a book by its name was circulating, in Cairo, as early as the twelfth century, but that copy has never been found. The most famous manuscript—the “Syrian” manuscript, as it’s known to scholars—comes from the fourteenth or fifteenth century, and there is a fragment of a manuscript from the ninth century, believed to be an early adaptation from Persian. (Many of the tales are believed to have travelled from India and Persia to the Arab lands where they flourished.) Most frustratingly, no Arabic manuscripts for the stories that most people know—“Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp,” “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves,” “Prince Ahmad and the Fairy Pari Banu”—seem to exist. Their first known printing was in French, in the eighteenth century, by the Orientalist scholar Antoine Galland, and he was long believed to be their legitimate author.

Without an Arabic text to work from, contemporary translators often resist including these popular tales in their work. Seale and Horta take a different approach. For some time now, it’s been known that the French stories have an Arabic source, a man that Galland met in 1709. At the time, Galland had come out with seven volumes of his “Nights” translation, which were based largely on the Syrian manuscript. (A friend gave him the document in 1701.) The books sold terrifically well, and Galland’s publisher pestered him for more—but he had reached the end of his manuscript, and was at a loss for material. That spring, at a friend’s apartment, Galland was introduced to Hanna Diyab, a traveller from Aleppo who knew some “beautiful Arabic tales,” as Galland wrote in his diary. In the course of a month, Diyab told his stories and Galland scribbled them down. (Galland’s notes survive.) Diyab never indicated that these stories were part of the “Nights.” He never explained whether he’d heard them somewhere or whether he’d made them up.

Diyab’s memoirs were rediscovered in the Vatican Library in 1993 and published, in French, in 2015. They were finally released in English last spring. Horta and Seale’s volume, in turn, pairs Diyab’s stories with a collection of the most influential tales from Arabic manuscripts. Each page is adorned with illustrations and photographs from other translations and adaptations of the tales, as well as a wonderfully detailed cascade of notes that illuminate the stories and their settings. “Only such a selection would offer the reader, whether new to the tales or already an expert, the chance to read them meaningfully in relation to one another,” Horta writes.

An erasure poem by Yasmine Seale, based on Edward William Lane’s translation of the “Nights.”Art work by Yasmine Seale / Courtesy the artist 

I am both new to the tales and not. Translations of “Arabian Nights” have had many devoted readers, from Marcel Proust to Charles Dickens, James Joyce to Charlotte Brontë. But the stories never held much stature among Arabists. The originals are often written in what’s considered “Middle Arabic,” and they’ve rarely been embraced by the classical canon. “It is Arabic and at the same time it is not,” one scholar Horta cites insisted, in 1956. “Every connoisseur of the genuinely Arabic will feel in the complex whole of the modern ‘1001 Nights’ something diluted, impoverished, superficial and fictitious.”

But I grew up in Egypt, where the stories’ influence, as cultural touchstones, is overwhelming. Between the “Nights”-based stories I heard as a child and the “Nights”-themed soap operas that flood TV during Ramadan, I assumed that many of the tales would ring a bell. In fact, very few did, and they were mostly the tales added by Galland. Even then, certain details seemed new. I didn’t know that the flying carpet belonged not to “Aladdin” but to “Prince Ahmad and the Fairy Pari Banu,” nor did I know that Ali Baba is not actually the protagonist of his story. The tale that Diyab told Galland is about a female slave who saves Ali Baba, and it was originally titled “Marjana’s Perspicacity, or The Forty Robbers Extinguished through the Skillfulness of a Slave.” To my greatest surprise, I had almost no recollection of the Arabic stories.

And yet those older, unfamiliar tales felt nearer to me, their lulling cadence recalling the rhymed folk tales that thrive in Egypt’s villages to this day. The most striking feature of the Arabic tales is their shifting registers—prose, rhymed prose, poetry—and Seale captures the movement between them beautifully. Nomad warriors descend on a city “as many as grains of sand, impossible to count and to withstand.” Three characters break a chest open, and find “inside a basket of red wool, and inside the basket was a stretch of carpet and, beneath it, a shawl folded in four, and, beneath it, a young woman like pure silver, killed and cut in pieces.”

Many descriptions remain distinctly Arabic. Seale, instead of idiomatically resolving them, transports us to their native soundscape. A woman's naked body is “like a slice of moon.” A character who dies is “taken to her Maker,” and another tells us that his soul is at his feet. Seale evokes the ambiguity of the Arabic prose—we see “ten couches spread with blue”—and she has an uncanny talent for preserving its strangeness, too. In one arresting passage, she enumerates the pastries at a bustling market:

Honey lattices and almond rings, dumplings filled with cream and spiced with musk, soap cakes, anemone floss, pudding and fritters, amber combs and ladyfingers, widows’ bread, eat-and-thanks, judge’s bites, pipes of plenty, broth of wind, and delicacies of every description.

Many of these sweets, including the apparently fantastical ones, are real, and can be found in medieval Arabic texts. Seale had to coin “inventive names for desserts that have no English equivalents,” a note explains. By the time we get to “eat-and-thanks,” it’s her patterning of sound, rather than her description, that helps us understand what a treat might look or taste like.

In the stories from the French, Seale tries to rescue a brisk narrative quality from Galland’s ceremonial cadence, but the stories that emerge are still much tidier than the Arabic ones. Characters are better developed, and we get a deeper glimpse of their interiority. But, read in comparison with the Arabic characters, who often break into verse, they feel flat, tonally sterile. One scholar counted 1,420 poems in the “Nights,” many of which belong to established poets from the tenth to fourteenth centuries. Famous English translators often disagreed about whether to include them; Seale, thankfully, translates dozens of them, and they’re one of the great strengths of this edition. Wrecked by escalating misfortunes, one man weeps, “My fate is like an enemy: / It shows me only hate. / If once it stoops to kindness / It soon mends its mistake.” Another character, on the edge of despair, says these lines:

Life has two days—peace and menace.

One part happiness, then grief.

To those who hold the blows of fate against us

Ask: does fate help those it does not also test?

Do you not see that storms attack

Only the highest trees?

Earth has many places dry and green

But only those with fruit have stones to fear.

And in the sky are many stars, but none

Suffer eclipses like the moon and sun.

You thought well of the days when they were good

And did not care what fortune had in store.

The nights were still and tricked you into ease

Yet in the calmest night does trouble come.

For a collection so sprawling, fate is a remarkably enduring protagonist in the “Nights,” a fact at once calming and terrifying. Aladdin, a lazy ne’er-do-well, accumulates great wealth; women and men of character are driven to ruin. (“Decent, I / Did not thrive / They, deceitful, did,” a man exclaims on the brink of his execution.) I read Seale’s book at a time when I’d begun to question certain meritocratic values, the belief that success and happiness flow from hard work or inherent talent. The stories of the “Nights” were a gentle reminder that “winds don’t blow as the ships desire,” as the Arabic proverb goes. There is horror in this, but there is also license, to enjoy good tidings when they come. As one half-prince, half-stone once said, “For whom has time been fair? / For whom the world unchanged?”

An illustration included in Seale and Horta’s edition.Art work by Ali Khan, “Queen of Serpents” / Courtesy Ulrich Marzolph

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Opinion: Why we need to remove 'waste' from the dictionary - CSO Magazine - The Global CSR & Sustainability Platform - Dictionary

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Opinion: Why we need to remove 'waste' from the dictionary  CSO Magazine - The Global CSR & Sustainability Platform

New translation reveal Mukherjee Commission ignored Renkoji temple's nod for DNA test of ashes: Netaji kin - Devdiscourse - Translation

A new translation of a letter in Japanese written by the chief priest of Tokyo's Renkoji temple, keeper of an urn containing ashes and bone fragments believed to be those of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, to the Indian government in 2005 revealed that permission was given for DNA test to the Justice MK Mukherjee Commission.

However, for inexplicable reasons this portion of the letter was not translated and a bland edited English version was attached to the Justice Mukherjee Commission's report on the disappearance of Bose as evidence that ''on account of the Temple Authorities reticence... the commission could not proceed further (on the issue of DNA tests)''.

The Commission later used this to conclude that the ashes were not of Netaji's, giving credence to speculations that he may have survived to become an ascetic or prisoner in a Russian prison.

Madhuri Bose, the legendary freedom fighter's grand-niece -- the grand-daughter of his brother Sarat Bose, told PTI, ''We recently commissioned the fresh translation after we found inconsistencies in the Mukherjee Commission report and found several paragraphs in the letter written in Japanese missing from the official English version in the Justice Mukherjee Inquiry Report.'' The new translation by a Japanese language expert revealed that Nichiko Mochizuki, the chief priest of the Renkoji Temple -- a 427-year-old Buddhist temple, had written ''I agreed to offer my cooperation for the testing. The same was agreed upon at the meeting with (Indian) Ambassador (M.L) Tripathi (to Japan) last year (2004)'' in the omitted portion.

The translation could not be independently authenticated by PTI.

''We do not understand why this permission was not made public earlier or why DNA tests were not conducted,'' said Madhuri Bose, who has served in the Commonwealth Secretariat and at the United Nations, besides authoring books on the Bose brothers.

The Mukherjee Commission, which tabled its report in Parliament in 2006, had concluded that Bose ''did not die in the plane crash, as alleged'' by eye-witnesses, including his close confidantes from the INA, and that ''the ashes in the Japanese temple were not of Netaji''.

Eye-witnesses, including Col Habib-Ur-Rahman of the INA, had said Bose died in a plane crash in August 1945 in Taipei.

Theories that he survived or was never on the aircraft that crashed gained ground as a result of the report, as also a hypothesis that he may have turned into an ascetic or imprisoned in a Russian gulag.

A movie suggesting that he might have become someone called 'Gumnami Baba' was also made in the recent years, while several news reports indicated he might have been imprisoned by Russian leader Joseph Stalin in Siberia.

''We had great faith in the Mukherjee Commission and we saw a glimmer of hope at one time that the truth about Netaji's disappearance will come out with the final report... However many glaring discrepancies in the report forced us to look at it again,'' said Madhuri Bose.

''What we find is that the Japanese temple wanted a DNA test and we (India) never conducted one,'' she said.

The portion of the chief priest's letter, which was omitted from the official translation, also said that after the Japanese lost the war, conditions under US-UK occupation were severe, yet the temple authorities undertook the then dangerous task of preserving Netaji's ashes as sought by an Indian delegation, which included ''Col Raman (Habib-ur-Rahman), Mr (SA) Iyer and Mrs (Sati) Sahay'', and by the Japanese foreign minister.

The letter went on to say ''therefore, I strongly believe these to be the same remains, the ashes of Subhas Chandra Bose without a doubt''.

Mochizuki also said that his late father, then chief priest, ''would sleep while embracing them (the urn with the ashes) in his arms so no tampering or harm would come to them''.

Three members of the Bose family, including Netaji's daughter Anita Pfaff, Dwarka Nath Bose -- a well-known physicist and son of his elder brother, and Ardhendu Bose -- another nephew of Netaji, wrote to Prime Minister Narendra Modi in October 2016 and December 2019, asking him to order a DNA test of the ashes at Renkoji.

The letter written in December 2019 said that ''in view of the fact that some Indians, also some members of our family, have previously voiced their doubts regarding the death of Netaji in Taipei, we hope the scientific evidence of such a test will bring closure to the discussion in India''.

However, Madhuri Bose said no response has yet been received by the family for ''a DNA test and final closure'' to the mystery of Netaji's disappearance and the ashes.

(This story has not been edited by Devdiscourse staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)

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An Indigenous warrior. An enduring mystery. A long-overdue translation - London Free Press (Blogs) - Translation

'All of the wisdom that is held in the language unlocks the key to culture and history of the Munsee people'

Publishing date:

Jan 22, 2022  •  1 hour ago  •  3 minute read

Tecumseh

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A longtime Southwestern Ontario mystery about a towering historical figure is at the heart of a new project designed to pique the interest of those learning to speak an endangered Indigenous language.

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Educator Ian McCallum, who grew up listening to relatives converse in their native language of Munsee on Munsee-Delaware Nation near London, has finished the translation of a 1931 London Free Press article about the death and burial of Shawnee chief Tecumseh – and the mystery surrounding it – into that little-spoken language.

“I did some digging and I thought this would be a really good story to translate,” said McCallum, who lives near Barrie. He’s one of about three or four people who speak fluent Munsee as a second language and he teaches about 50 beginners, he said.

“We were looking for community stories to translate into the Munsee language, and I started with my own family because COVID didn’t allow for a lot of communication with the elders.”

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In the 1931 Free Press story, McCallum’s great-great uncle, Jacob Logan, described the death and burial of Tecumseh, who was killed near Chatham in 1813 while fighting for the British in the War of 1812.

The final location of Tecumseh’s body has long been debated, with some believing his corpse had been secretly disposed of by his own warriors. Logan, who died in 1935 at age 100, recounted in the article having overheard as a 14-year-old where Tecumseh was buried.

At that time, the Logan family’s cabin – which still stands in the Longwoods Conservation Area near Delaware – was visited by a group of War of 1812 veterans, including an Indigenous man named Jacob Fesson, McCallum said.

Logan’s mother told him to go upstairs but, recognizing the importance of their visit, told her son to keep his ears open.

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Fesson told the story of Tecumseh’s death near Thamesville and how he and other Indigenous warriors had been instructed by the revered chief to hide his body from the enemy after he had been shot and wounded – an event he had foreseen in three dreams – during a battle.

The men used their tomahawks to dig a grave at the roots of a toppled tree and, once buried with his weaponry, the warriors covered it back up with the roots of the tree to avoid detection, Logan said.

Logan later attempted to find Tecumseh’s burial place.

“The topography of the land had changed so much from when he heard the story, so was unable to do so,” McCallum said.

Ian McCallum is shown with an early draft of his book, a translated-into-Munsee retelling of a 1931 London Free Press article about Tecumseh.

McCallum, 50, is an education officer with the province’s Indigenous education office. He says many Munsees lost their language due to residential schools, where anything but English was prohibited.

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The translated account, which will soon be made into an illustrated book, is designed to mark the start of the United Nations International Decade of Indigenous Languages, McCallum said. He hopes school boards and others will use it as a learning tool.

“All of the wisdom that is held in the language unlocks the key to culture and history of the Munsee people,” said McCallum, who also regularly tweets in Munsee under the user name @IanMcCallum3.

The Munsee people settled in southern Ontario after being pushed out of the east coast of the United States by colonists and settlers in the 1780s. McCallum’s ancestors settled on the Munsee-Delaware reserve, about 25 kilomeres southwest of London.

The son of an English immigrant father and Munsee-Delaware mother, McCallum split his time growing up between Munsee-Delaware and Barrie, where his father taught school.

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After graduating from teachers college at Queen’s University, McCallum was required to take a course at Western University, which had just begun to teach the Mohawk language. After picking up a Munsee-English dictionary, he found a teacher at Moraviantown, another Munsee settlement in Chatham-Kent, and spent a couple of summers learning the language.

“I re-learned the language from that speaker,” said McCallum, who first learned to speak the language as a child.

Munsee is one of more than half a dozen Indigenous languages considered at risk in Southwestern Ontario. Others are:

• Oneida
• Ojibway
• Ottawa
• Mohawk
• Cayuga
• Onondaga
• Seneca
• Cree

HRivers@postmedia.com

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