Doctors often turn to Google Translate. They want a better option - STAT - Translation

The patient had just undergone a cesarean section, and now was struggling to put words to her pain in her native Taiwanese. The physician making rounds, Natasha Mehandru, was used to communicating with patients who didn’t speak English as a first language at her county hospital in Phoenix. But this time, calling in an interpreter by phone wasn’t working.

“The service was not really good,” she said — and soon, she realized the patient and the interpreter weren’t even speaking the same dialect. “It was difficult to communicate, even with the interpreter.”

So Mehandru turned to a familiar tool: Google Translate. Typing translations back and forth — Taiwanese to English, English to Taiwanese — she and the patient slowly came to an understanding with the help of the interpreter still on the line. Her pain wasn’t from the C-section, in her abdomen, but from a separate and long-standing issue, lower in her body. “That changed how I managed her that day,” said Mehandru, who was at the time a gynecological resident and is now a surgeon at Kaiser San Jose Medical Center. With the help of the machine translation tool, “we changed around medications, and then over the course of a couple days she ended up feeling better.”

Like many health systems, the hospital complied with federal requirements for meaningful access to language services by staffing in-person interpreters for frequent needs like Spanish, and could call up interpreters for less commonly spoken languages. But it was an imperfect system — there were sometimes delays, or a dialect that it was difficult to track down a translator for — and Google Translate came to serve as a fallback.

Google Translate has become a ubiquitous, if under-examined, part of patient care. “It’s sort of [used] under the table,” said Elaine Khoong, an internist and assistant professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. The practice is hidden in part because it is formally discouraged by health systems and state medical registration boards that see it as a liability. There’s a growing push by Khoong and other researchers to bring it to the surface — both to study Google Translate’s use and risk in the clinic, and to build better versions to backstop traditional language services.

“I do think it is the future,” said Breena Taira, a clinical emergency medicine researcher at UCLA Health whose recent study evaluated Google-translated discharge instructions in seven languages. Tech giants like Google and Microsoft, which have invested heavily in voice recognition software, have expressed interest in exploring medical translation.

“We just have to be really aware of what the limitations are,” Taira said, including significantly lower accuracy rates for languages that aren’t widely spoken. Machine translation could fill an especially large gap in services to provide personalized written instructions for non-English speakers. Sanjana Rao, a doctor at a family medicine practice in Tacoma, Washington, said she’s seen colleagues provide patients with after-visit notes they’ve translated in full with Google Translate with no vetting, a practice she doesn’t trust. 

“We have to do the work to make sure that we can convey written information in non-English languages in a safe way,” said Taira.

Research from Khoong, Taira, and others has highlighted that Google Translate can specifically be unsafe to use to translate emergency room discharge instructions, delivering inaccurate results that could lead to serious errors. While the tool has gotten more accurate since Google switched its algorithmic approach, mistakes are still common when the acronym- and jargon-filled lexicon of clinical communication collides with an algorithm trained on everyday language.

Related:

Google, eyeing a broader market for medical software, strikes a deal with major health records player

“Obviously, Google Translate wasn’t built for health care applications,” said Nikita Mehandru, a Ph.D. student in clinical artificial intelligence at the University of California, Berkeley and the sister of Natasha. “Maybe something should be.”

Along with fellow student Samantha Robertson and human-computer interaction researcher Niloufar Salehi, Mehandru recently surveyed 20 health care providers about their interpretation and translation resources, aiming to understand the scope of communication challenges before trying to design something like a Google Translate for doctors — starting with the written instructions emergency doctors give patients when they’re discharged.

They plan to train their tool on the text it aims to translate: more than 1,500 emergency discharge records from UCSF, accessed in collaboration with Khoong. “One of the things that makes it a hard problem is that almost none of these black box deep learning models are trained on medical data,” said Salehi. “They’re mostly trained on web form data, so they don’t work really well with medical information.”

But they’re not simply turning neural networks loose on a new clinical corpus. Discharge instructions are often very structured and modeled after a template, “so it doesn’t really make sense to use a black box deep learning model,” said Salehi. Instead, they’re trying to combine deep learning with a pre-translated dictionary of common phrases, making certain results highly reliable and leaving the potential to show providers where uncertainty remains. “We could say, 80% of this discharge info is verified translation, and we could even mark the parts where we’re not so sure,” said Salehi.

Like other clinical decision support tools, such a system could nudge clinicians toward smarter actions rather than providing a pat solution. A tool could prod doctors to write their English instructions in simpler ways, for example, making the machine translation more likely to be accurate, said Khoong.

Related:

AI gone astray: How subtle shifts in patient data send popular algorithms reeling, undermining patient safety

Even if machine translation tools prove accurate enough for clinical use, there are still significant regulatory and legal hurdles for companies to make them and for health systems to embrace them. The tools would have to be HIPAA compliant, and providers and developers would have to sort out who is liable for failed translations that cause harm — potentially in very public ways.

“We’re already using ML and AI tools in health care, but it’s usually hidden on the backend where people don’t see it — for image interpretation, risk stratification tools,” said Khoong. “But when you bring it up to the front end where patients can see it, the legality issues and the liability issues are a lot more concerning.”

That’s one reason why Khoong is calling to advance the type of research done on medical machine translation systems. In a paper she recently penned with Jorge Rodriguez, a hospitalist and technology equity researcher at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, they lay out a framework for analysis that focuses not just on translation accuracy, but patient outcomes.

The viability of machine translation, they argue, should be judged not just by comparing it with gold-standard interpretation, but current practice — which sometimes is nothing at all.

“For a lot of patients who have non-English language preference, what actually happens is either the clinical team doesn’t talk to them, or they use sign language, or they try to mime,” said Khoong. Interpretation can be especially scarce in safety net facilities, which often end up paying higher rates for call-in services. And physicians can be reticent to call in an interpreter for anything but the most mission-critical moments in a patient’s stay, like surgical consent, because it can take away precious minutes from their interaction with a patient.

Related:

Can open datasets help machine learning solve medical mysteries?

That leaves out many of the small moments that make up a patient’s care. “If you want to ask the patient, ‘Are you cold?’ ‘Open your eyes, take a deep breath,’ the time it can take to prepare for those two sentences can be untenable,” said Won Lee, an anesthesiologist at UCSF who is investigating Google Translate’s accuracy in those interstitial moments of care. Research consistently shows that patients who do not share a language with their provider fare more poorly.

“Is [machine translation] better than what’s going on there?” asks Khoong. “I think we don’t have a good sense, and that’s what we should evaluate.”

Understanding patient outcomes is especially critical because of the potential for machine translation to introduce new disparities in health care. If a validated but imperfect technology makes it easier for health systems to avoid calling on interpreters, non-English speaking patients could still get shortchanged on care and communication. “I don’t want it to feel like once we have Google Translate validated, interpreters will go by the wayside,” said Rodriguez. Research will be necessary to understand how to use the tools without undermining patient care and when human interpreters are needed.

That’s why, once Salehi and her team finishes building their discharge translation tool, they hope to conduct a randomized controlled trial of patient outcomes, testing to see “whether giving people information in their own language is more helpful,” she said.

It’s the kind of expensive research that commercial developers — with their deeper pockets and broad reach — could help conduct. “The technology is there to be able to build these algorithms,” said Rodriguez. “It’s just a matter of getting all the right players in the room, and incentivizing it.” 

For Nuance Communications, the voice recognition company that was acquired by Microsoft earlier this month for $16 billion, the incentives may already be in place. The company has a tool, DAX, that listens into doctor’s appointments and produces automatic English transcriptions to feed into visit records. Machine translation of those transcripts into other languages is a leading request from its users, said Peter Durlach, chief strategy officer for Nuance. 

“It’s one of the first things we’re going to be looking to integrate with Microsoft, since they have world class machine translation,” he said. “Since DAX is already recording the conversation, it already identifies the different speakers, why couldn’t it automatically translate in real time? It’s not a massive technical lift to do it.”  

For patients and providers still wrestling to understand each other, validated clinical machine translation could be a boon. “We’ve wanted this for so long, and it’s just not there,” said Rao. “We’re doing last resort things like Google Translate because different providers have to make different calls,” knowing that they’re underserving many patients who speak less common languages. “This technology is absolutely imperative to be launched and be used as soon as possible.” 

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The Dying Dictionary - Madras Courier News - Dictionary

Reading is an act. A process. An act of understanding the black on white. A process of understanding the calligraphy that forms a particular text. Everyone reads; whether it is a book, a piece of newspaper that held steaming pakoras, a magazine in a doctor’s clinic, a pamphlet handed over by an agent, a signboard along the road, an advertisement banner on a wall, the nutritional contents on a food packet, name boards of shops, quotes at the back of cars and trucks, almanacs, horoscopes and so on.

Blind people read with their fingers. There are certain reading groups where a book, journal or magazine is read aloud to groups of people. Words are fascinating. They make up the fabric of so much of our life. No matter which book we read (in whichever language we read), we are bound to come across a word we may have never heard of before or a word that has slipped away from the clutches of human memory. Only then do we turn to the repertoire of words and their meanings- the dictionary.

Talking about human memory, do you remember the time you first came to know about a dictionary? Do you remember the first word you looked up in a dictionary? Yes? No? I remember. It was ‘funny’. How old would I have been at the time when I did not even know what funny meant! Or perhaps I did?

I was reading a book of short stories, covered in a chocolate brown cover, when I came across the word funny. As I did not know the meaning of the word, I asked my father to explain its meaning to me. He did not say anything. He got up, went straight into the room and brought out a huge book with him. It was red, bound.

I had seen this book before among his other books. I had drawn flowers and different artistic designs on its pages with pens and pencils but I did not know what the book was. It was a 1991 edition copy of the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary which has survived till date. It was the first time I came to know about a dictionary.

As I write this article, I have with me the same dictionary and I leaf through its pages till I stop at page number 502. The headword at the top left corner of this page reads ‘funk.’ Below it, following two other words, is written the word ‘funny’ /ˈfʌni/ – adj (-ier, -iest) 1 causing amusement, laughter, etc.: funny stories. a funny man. That’s the funniest thing I’ve ever heard. 2 difficult to explain or understand; strange. A funny thing happened to me today. That’s funny- he was here a moment ago and now he’s gone. The engine’s making a very funny noise.

For some reason, the second meaning of the word has been underlined with a pencil. Perhaps, this was the context of the word ‘funny’ which was used in the story that I was then reading. There are more definitions of the word listed which I choose not to mention here.

This is the oldest copy of the dictionary (after a Thesaurus) that I have and it is a hand-me-down copy from my father. I remember it exactly as it was more than a decade ago – red, bound. I remember its texture, its material, its colour. At that time, the binding had started to come off at many places and the threads had become loose, rhizoid-like in appearance. The copy survived with the tattered binding for many years after that.

It was not until a couple of years ago that I got the binding changed. The new binding was purple in colour, like that of a sweet potato with repetitive patterns of a cross, with arms equal in length and perpendicular to the adjacent arms, each bent midway at a right angle — like the Nazi Hakenkreuz with white flowers.

From a distance, the pattern, combined with the background colour, looks like the onion cells as seen under a microscope when stained with safranin. There is a rectangular name tag on the front face of the binding (10 cm * 6.5 cm) with the writing ‘Sudesh Book Binders’ in bold. The name tag has blanks against the following and an advertising statement with the owner’s mobile number at the end.

Years after getting the copy bound, it now stays on my desk just like it had stayed a decade ago on my father’s desk — in a worn-out condition. The binding has started to wear out again. Its cover has faded, lending it a charming old-world look. The green linen net that had covered the spine of the dictionary is now in rags.

The front panel of the dictionary is adorned with red, navy blue, turquoise and white colors. There is a lot of scribbling on the pages, which I had done as a child. The memories resurface with a stark realization of the ephemerality of time and the impossibility of seizing it.

Most of us have at some point or another in our life purchased a dictionary and used it. But what exactly is a dictionary? In simple terms, it can be described as a wordbook arranged in alphabetical order. There are different definitions of a dictionary. Different dictionaries offer different definitions for a dictionary.

For instance, according to the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, it is: (a) book that lists and expands the words of a language, or gives translations of them into one or more other languages, and is usually arranged in alphabetical order: an English dictionary. (b) similar book that explains the terms of a particular subject: a dictionary of architecture.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), it is defined as  “a book dealing with the individual words of a language (or certain specified classes of them), so as to set forth their orthography, pronunciation, signification, and use, their synonyms, derivation, and history, or at least some of these facts: for convenience of reference, the words are arranged in some stated order, now, in most languages, alphabetical; and in larger dictionaries, the information given is illustrated by quotations from literature; a word-book,  vocabulary, or lexicon. Dictionaries are of two kinds: those in which the meanings of the words of one language or dialect are given in another (or, in a polyglot dictionary, in two or more languages), and those in which the words of a language are treated and illustrated in this language itself. The former were the earlier”;

According to Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, it is “a reference book containing words, usually alphabetically arranged along with information about their forms,  pronunciations,  functions,  etymologies,  meanings, and syntactical and idiomatic uses”;

According to Collins Concise Dictionary, London, 1989, it is “1 a. a book that consists of an alphabetical list of words with their meanings, parts of speech, pronunciations, etymologies, etc. b. a similar book giving equivalent words in two or more languages.  2. a reference book listing words or terms and giving information about a particular subject or activity. 3. a collection of information or examples with the entries alphabetically arranged.”

In the opening paragraph of Chapter V of his book, ‘Manual of Lexicography’, Ladislav Zgusta writes: ‘One of the best definitions I know of the term dictionary was given by C.C.Berg: “A dictionary is a systematically arranged list of socialized linguistic forms compiled from the speech-habits of a given speech-community and commented on by the author in such a way that the qualified reader understands the meaning . . . of each separate form, and is informed of the relevant facts concerning the functions of that form in its community.”’

But a dictionary is also a collection of all the works man has ever produced, since he invented the art of writing, in one form or another. A dictionary is also the raw material for all the literary works that are yet to take birth.

The dictionary is a paragon. It is a guide to clarity and the language. It is a large and complex book. It is a catalogue. It is an essential work. It is a scholarship. It is an awe-inspiring work. It is a book that possesses the meaning of everything.

There are various other types of dictionaries as well. Dictionaries can be classified depending upon the content such as dialect, general-purpose, subject-specific, or slang. They can further be classified based on the number of words such as unabridged, semi-unabridged, or abridged. Then there are commercial and academic dictionaries, a learner’s dictionary, dictionary of peculiar words, dictionary of quotations, encyclopaedic dictionaries, linguistic dictionaries and so on and so forth.

Dictionaries are never complete. They are never perfect. They do not–and cannot–contain all the words of any language. Dictionaries evolve. They don’t remain the same as they were a few years ago. Language evolves. New words are formed, borrowed or adapted from other languages and added to the great list. Dictionaries are prone to mutations.

The dictionary tells the story of the sheer madness of the highly talented and ambitious people who had dared of dreaming the impossible and eventually set out on a journey of great risks for accomplishing it. Until last year, I had seen it just like any other book. I had never taken a moment to reflect upon what might have undergone into the making of this scholarship and who could have been the people that had made the impossible possible.

It was only at the beginning of this year that I came across the works of Simon Winchester and was astounded by the history and the story that lies behind the making of the Oxford English Dictionary which is no less than a great thriller. There is anger, there is enthusiasm, there is fantasy, there is fear, there is madness, there is murder, there is mystery, there is pathos, there is romance, there is sadness, there is thriller, there is a plethora of emotions that ultimately bloom into the OED.

As fascinating and intriguing the OED is, so is the story of its making and its makers – a kleptomaniac, a homicidal lunatic, an Esperanto enthusiast, a recluse and hermit, a man who taught Latin to cattle and many more. I had never imagined nor would I have ever imagined, had I not read about its making, that a person, the eldest son of a tailor and liner-draper; an autodidact who left school at the age of fourteen would become the great and famous editor of the great dictionary. Nor could have I imagined that the major contribution to the OED would have been made from a prison cell of an asylum for the criminally insane by a former army officer and surgeon who in the asylum came to be known as Broadmoor Patient Number 742, a certified criminal lunatic.

The Oxford English Dictionary is a result of seventy years of sweat and blood from all the people who were associated with it. It is the result of numerous volunteers that read books of different periods and made a word list with details of the work. It was indeed an excruciating task that demanded mental and physical exertion. It was work, a commitment, for some. For others, it became therapy. Anyone who has read about the extraordinary story of the OED is bound to treat and use it with respect for it is a work of sheer genius, a heroic creation, a masterpiece of some of the world’s brilliant minds.

It is unfortunate that, in the present time, a physical dictionary has lost its charm among the masses. The culture of using dictionaries is dying. It is a pity that people nowadays, especially the kids, do not use dictionaries anymore. Even if there are some people, their numbers are significantly low.

Children do not have competitions in schools where they are asked to find certain words in the dictionary. They do not know how to search for words in it. Looking up a word in a dictionary is also an art that is constantly dying with the present generation.

Digital dictionaries have taken place of the physical copies. Moreover, nowadays, Google does everything. Electronic devices have taken over the physical copies of books. .pdf and .doc have taken over hardcovers and paperbacks. No doubt looking up a word in a dictionary app or online is easier, time-saving and preferred. However, it can never replace the experience of finding a word in the dictionary.

Before this legacy may die, it is time we bequeath it to our coming generations by ensuring that children are made familiar with dictionaries and how to use them.

-30-

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Translation Certification Documents - San Mateo County Assessor-County Clerk-Recorder & Elections - Translation

Pursuant to California Government Code 27293

Process to obtain a translation certification document

To obtain the translation certification document, the customer must present the following to the County Clerk:

1. Original document in the foreign language
2. Document translated into English by a certified/registered court interpreter that is registered at one of the following websites:
   - California Courts-Court Interpreter Program (CIP)
   - American Translators Association
3. Original Declaration and Certification (Declaration of Translator) of the certified/registered court interpreter that must include the following:

• Their name and declaration that they are a certified/registered court interpreter
• The language that they are certified/registered to interpret and translate from and to
• Their certification/registration number(s)
• Specific description of the document translated
• Declaration and Certification that they have translated the attached document from whatever language it was in to the English language, and that the translation is true and accurate
• Be executed under Penalty of Perjury and include date and location where the Declaration and Certification was executed and signed by the certified/registered court interpreter
• Original signature of certified/registered court interpreter
• The Declaration and Certification must be notarized by a notary public.

What is a court interpreter?

A court interpreter is anyone who interprets in a civil or criminal court proceeding (e.g., arraignment, motion, pretrial conference, preliminary hearing, deposition, trial) for a witness or defendant who speaks or understands little to no English.

Court interpreters must accurately interpret for individuals with a high level or education or an expansive vocabulary, as well as persons with very limited language skills without changing the language register of the speaker.

Interpreters are also sometimes responsible for translating written documents, often of a legal nature, from English into the target language and from the target language into English.

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A-List 2022 Best Agencies: Translation - AdAge.com - Translation

Last year, Translation was awarded Ad Age’s 2021 Small Agency of the Year, boasting new hires and revenue gains when others were shrinking, powered by a portfolio of work that spoke powerfully to broader conversations. Now, the agency has outgrown the criteria for that title and joins the Ad Age A-List after another consistent crop of new business and impressive creative.

See all of Ad Age's 2022 A-List winners here.

Delivering on its motto of translating the language of culture for brands, Translation decoded the elusive aura of 2021—a year that may have felt lost between the despair of 2020 and hopefulness of 2022—through its creative. A series of spots for SiriusXM imagined a cast of celebrities including Dave Grohl centered around indulgence and humor. A campaign for the NBA’s 75th anniversary focused on how professional basketballers’ careers can inspire future generations. And an evolution of 2020’s profound “You Love Me” campaign for Beats by Dre, an award-winning response to the growing Black Lives Matter movement, explored unity through the common language of music.

“Historically, we had always been able to hit a high note and then go missing a little bit and then hit a note again,” said Jason Campbell, Translation head of creative. “And I think what we've done consistently—fingers crossed—is hit the high notes all the time, and be sort of true to ourselves at the same time in terms of the work we deliver.”

An evolution

“It’s the Music” examined the ways music can empower and inspire an individual through a series of films inspired by the aesthetic of “You Love Me.” But rather than making a statement for inclusion and a challenge to bias, it focused on representing the diverse global community of music fans through what they love. Uniting influential brand ambassadors from Serena Williams to comedian Druski, the campaign gave product features the back seat for the launch of Beats Studio Buds and focused instead on the music that inspires each personality (the former chose “Black Magic” by Kelly Rowland, the latter “Forever After All” by Luke Combs), to express how song can form a community of its own.

“It was a dark year,” said Steve Stoute, Translation founder and CEO. “And giving people entertainment, optimism, the feeling of joy—we made some dark work, some thought-provoking work for Beats … and then post-that statement, I think creatively [we said] let's bring joy, let's bring optimism. We're coming out of this thing—we're coming out of the protests, we're coming out of the pandemic—let's make work that makes people feel good.”

The result was tremendous: 28 million organic social interactions and 300,000 clicks to purchase Beats Studio Buds, resulting in the most successful product launch for Beats by Dre in more than a decade.

Buy your ticket for the Ad Age A-List & Creativity Awards Gala at AdAge.com/ACGala.

“The ‘You Love Me’ work put the entire ad industry on notice, put the world on notice and it was really celebrated—but it wasn't selling headphones,” said Chaucer Barnes, Translation's chief marketing officer. “What it was doing was resetting a brand so that it could be adopted and advocated by a new generation consumer who’d aged up and didn't know anything about Dr. Dre. So the proof-point of whether or not that positioning worked really came with ‘It's the Music.’ ‘It's the Music’ is not about the stopping power of culture. It's about the shopping power of culture. It was the most successful skew in company history.”

A culture

After three-quarters of a century, the NBA has become more than just a sport to many. Its players' stories inspire and its events bring people together. But during a time when many have been hesitant to venture out in public, that sense of community has had to emerge in venues other than the arena. So, Translation created its own fantasy world to gather fans: “NBA Lane.”

The spot brought together more than 30 current and former NBA stars, who playfully interact among a horde of Easter eggs for viewers to hunt. The video’s guide is played by Michael B. Jordan, who drives the Hoop Bus, a real nonprofit that empowers communities through basketball. The video gained more than 83 million views within hours and scored engagement across social platforms as fans teamed up to decode its many references, all resulting in an 8% increase in year-over-year TV ratings.

“NBA Lane is one of those things that we really measure in cultural response,” said Barnes. “And when we talk about cultural response, we're talking about the memes and the participatory elements and the fact that whole Reddit threads and forums would come together to pick apart the launch spot to figure out that the Kobe and Devin [Booker] sequence was eight seconds long, which, of course, was Kobe’s jersey number for so long.”

“Basketball had shut down, people were watching it in a bubble, fans weren't in arenas, and so we needed to find a way to celebrate what this ecosystem of basketball was,” Campbell added. “It wasn't just a sport, it was a culture.”

The growth

Campbell was part of a huge hiring wave for the agency that began in 2020 and resulted in a total of 124 new Translation employees in 2020 and 2021 combined, plus a new office in Los Angeles that joined its existing locations in San Francisco and Brooklyn.

“The people that we've been able to attract have been really nothing short of extraordinary … and how they maintain our laser focus on diversity of everything—diversity of mindsets, diversity of culture, diversity of just representing almost everything you could possibly think of to ensure that we really are able to stay true to who we are,” said Ann Wool, Translation president. “I've talked to numerous clients and they point to that fact: The difference of our talent compared to our competitors is one of the main attractions to them.”

See all of Ad Age's 2022 A-List winners here.

In addition to its growth internally, the agency grew its clientele with wins for American Express’ NBA work, WhatsApp, TicTac, insurance group TIAA and pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly’s metastatic breast cancer prescription Verzinio.

Overall, Translation experienced a 97% increase in revenue from $30 million in 2020 to a projected $59.3 million in 2021.

The future

All of the growth, financially and in staff and clients, also led to an ideological realization for Translation. The agency hadn’t found success fitting into already-formed frameworks for how an agency should look or operate. Barnes said that “2020 could have felt like an exception,” but now that the industry has seen what Translation is capable of, it’s the agency's job to keep pushing their work forward.

“Pop culture was clearly in tatters,” Barnes said, citing the pandemic, the nation’s racial awakening and its political conflict. “2021 was really about not being exceptional anymore, but normalizing what had happened in 2020, finding the right partnerships, the right canvases and the right moments to continue the momentum amount of 2020 in such a way that even as the world attempted to bounce back to normal, we were able to hold on to not just the clients, but also the brand of work that we're most proud of.”

When asked what these years of success have taught him, Stoute’s response is “focus.”

“Really focusing on doing what we do best,” Stoute said. “I think there was a period of time where we started trying to be things that we weren't. And when we became things that we weren't, we haven't performed well.”

“It takes guts to say no, it really does,” said Wool. “People dangle very big prizes and it’s easy to chase.”

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14 Incredible Brazilian Books Available in English Translation - Book Riot - Translation

Brazil is the largest country in South America, covering more than 47.3 percent of its land area. It was colonized by Portugal and achieved independence in 1822, so Brazil’s official language is Portuguese. For years, Brazilian authors have been writing stories about love and pain, about corruption and the cacao plantations, about loneliness in the country and the chaos of city life.

You might not see all the authors or works you would like to see on this list. I’ve skipped the famous Paulo Coelho and his well-known The Alchemist in favor of novels the casual reader is less likely to know. Some fantastic books by Brazilian authors were written in English, so they aren’t “in translation” — for example, graphic novel Daytripper by Fábio Moon and Gabriel Bá.

And, as with all of these lists, there were authors I had to leave off the list because they either weren’t translated or their work was no longer in print — for example, I spent quite a while trying to find book-length translations of the work of Lygia Fagundes Telles, who was Brazil’s official nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016, and who many consider to be Brazil’s greatest living writer.

Over the past month, I did research, visited my local library, and read a big stack of books to discover this list of 14 Brazilian books available in English translation. Enjoy!

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.

Symphony in White by Adriana Lisboa, Translated by Sarah Green

Of all the books on this list, Symphony in White surprised me the most — it’s a new favorite. Clarice and Maria Inês are growing up in an oppressively silent country house in rural Brazil. They break out, each in their own way, from the world of their parents, surviving the recklessness and pain that blossoms from the trauma of their youth. Now, decades later, Maria Inês is coming back to the farm, her daughter alongside her, to see Clarice. The two, in coming together, will have to face all of their demons, old loves, and bittersweet nostalgia. It’s a story of survival: two women experience a future that is nothing like what they expected, but they made it there nevertheless.

Content warnings for mob violence, domestic violence, fatphobia, anti-Blackness, r-slur, substance abuse, rape, child abuse.

Rilke Shake by Angélica Freitas, Translated by Hilary Kaplan

In this small collection of poetry, Freitas plays with language, turning out lines of queer, bold, humorous lines, evoking the good posture her mother tried to teach her, the rite of passage of getting her head shaved. In one of my favorite poems of the collection, “siobhan 4,” she wonders what happened to an ex-lover, catching glimpses of their courtship, wondering what trains she takes, in what library does she read. She evokes the names of countless writers, from Shakespeare to Gertrude Stein, in irreverent fun. Translating the musicality of poetry is never easy, and Hilary Kaplan does a superb job of it here.

Content warnings for mentions of drug use, violence.

We All Loved Cowboys by Carol Bensimon, Translated by Beth Fowler

Years ago, Julia and Cora were best friends who hooked up for a while. They always dreamt of an aimless, epic road trip around Brazil, but never did it, and then they had a falling out that put an end to the possibility…until now. The two come together, quiet Julia from Canada and fashion student Cora from Paris, to finally go on their trip, exploring small towns and trying to figure out what they’re actually looking for on this adventure. It’s a short novel packed with nostalgia and longing, a coming of age that’s immensely fun to read.

Amora: Stories by Natalia Borges Polesso, Translated by Julia Sanches

Emerging author Polesso shines here in a collection of 33 stories all about women who love women. In “Como Te Extraño, Clara,” a woman sleeps with a woman behind her husband’s back; in “Flor,” a young girl is told by her mother that she should stay away from their neighbor who has a strange disease. A particular favorite for me was “Catch the Heart Red-Handed”: in a poetic short tale, it melds the passion of love with the protagonist’s heart problems. All these stories are sapphic tales bound into one strong collection.

Content warnings for suicide, overdose, homophobic language, self-harm, BDSM, a person being outed.

The Jaguar and Other Stories by João Guimarães Rosa, Translated by David Treece

Rosa is one of the best Brazilian writers of the 20th century, and is criminally under-translated, but available here in English thanks to the work of Treece. In this collection, we get eight poetic, inventive stories, exploring the liminal spaces — between city and the wild, between madness and sanity, in the mind of a child, in the midst of places that are in the process of decaying. His novel, The Devil to Pay in the Backlands, has an older translation but is considered his masterpiece.

What are the Blind Men Dreaming? by Noemi Jaffe, Translated by Julia Sanches and Ellen Elias Bursac

This book begins with the emotional, vivid diary of Lili Stern, written after her time in the concentration camps. A teenage girl narrating what happened to her, matter-of-fact, and also describing the lesser-told story of what happened after: the celebration, the reintroduction to food, the constant displacement as they were slowly shuttled across Europe. After the diary, Jaffe writes about being the daughter of a survivor, trying to piece together her mother’s story, confronting this history that is not-quite accessible.

Content warnings for violence, hunger, abuse, torture, trauma, antisemitism, Holocaust narrative.

Blue Flowers by Carola Saavedra, Translated by Daniel Hahn

In this epistolary novel, a recently divorced man named Marcos begins finding letters to an unknown man in his mailbox. He isn’t the best father, and wasn’t the best husband, and in his uncertain, introverted sadness, he finds himself growing increasingly obsessed with the passionate, disturbing letters that are being hand-dropped in his mailbox. They describe an abusive, manipulative relationship, the elusive writer talking directly to her ex-boyfriend, in a challenging, bold tone. It’s uncomfortable and dark.

Content warnings for abusive relationship, suicide mention, obsession, sexism, domestic violence, g-slur.

There Were Many Horses by Luiz Ruffato, Translated by Anthony Doyle

In this contemporary novel, Ruffato portrays May 9, 2000, across São Paulo: a mosaic of scenes touring the city in all of its life, in 68 short chapters, using all kinds of techniques, from lists to description to stream of consciousness to a weather report. He doesn’t shy away from the tougher episodes going on in Rio every single day, diving into the minds of the people struggling to get by or survive, evoking the city through visions and fragments.

Content warnings for prostitution, poverty, drugs, corruption, alcoholism, substance abuse, violence.

Spilt Milk by Chico Buarque by Allison Entrekin

As Eulalio Assumpcao, a 100-year-old man, lies in a Rio hospital bed, he narrates his life story — sometimes to his daughter, and sometimes just to the room. As he tells of his fall from grace, as he talks about his “grand” ancestors who built empires, his father, a senator, who squandered the family fortune, and his great-great-grandson who deals drugs, he never stops breaking from one thread: Matilde, the girl who came into his life and then disappeared, the one who got away. Where did she go? Did she run away? Did she always love him, or was she unfaithful? His narrative all ties in and out of a critique of upper-class Brazil itself, and of its leaders, in the 1940s and 1950s.

Content warnings for drug use, grief, slavery, sexism, violence, racism.

The Chandelier by Clarice Lispector, Translated by Benjamin Moser and Magdalena Edwards

In this hypnotic, poetic sometimes-dense novel, Lispector describes the oppressive loneliness of an isolated country home on a young girl who is just discovering her own unique vibrance and soul. When, after a painful, slow childhood, Virgínia moves to the city as an adult, she hopes that her escape will finally mean that time no longer feels like a trial, but unfortunately, she finds more solitude there, a deep depression nipping at her heels, her memories of her home and her cruel brother warped in retrospect. Lispector is a Ukrainian-born Jewish journalist and writer who has become the best known and most widely translated woman author of Brazil — she also wrote The Passion According to GH and Água Viva.

Content warnings for suicidal ideation, emotional abuse and manipulation, sex shaming.

Three Marias by Rachel de Queiroz, Translated by Fred P. Ellison

Iconic author Rachel de Queiroz writes of three girls coming of age in a restrictive, sexist society. The book dawns as our protagonist Maria enters into a boarding school attached to a convent, where she quickly makes friends with two other girls named Maria. The three grow up with romantic ideals, grating under the repressive rules of their world, and when they escape it as young women, they are desperate to discover independence and love for themselves, outside of the conservative ways they’ve been taught.

Content warnings for sexism, suicide, sexual assault, manipulation, abortion/miscarriage.

The Alienist by Machado de Assis, Translated by William L. Grossman

In this 1881 book — which is part of Melville House’s Art of the Novella series, with its brilliant minimalist covers — physician Simão Bacamarte decides to give up his career to go home and dedicate himself to the still very, very new field of psychology, opening the first asylum in Brazil. But then, bored, hoping to fill his new hospital, Bacamarte starts to identify signs of madness in the people of the town. And in the 98 satiric pages, the reader is forced to ask themselves who should have control, and who is actually “insane.”

Content warnings for mental illness, forced institutionalization.

The Body Snatcher by Patrícia Melo, Translated by Clifford E. Landers

It all begins when the narrator is fishing and witnesses a plane crash on the banks of the Paraguay River. The pilot is dead, but has a kilo of cocaine in his backpack — and the narrator decides to pocket it to make some quick money. But given that his girlfriend is a detective and that his new partner is not very discreet, it’s not long at all before the narrator is in way, way over his head, owing thousands to a Bolivian drug gang and being blackmailed by his cousin’s wife. This book is not for a reader who will be turned off by an unlikable narrator: the protagonist’s string of awful decisions quickly mire him into a swamp of steadily multiplying lies and wounds. But it’s an intriguing crime novel that will have you shaking your head.

Content warnings for police brutality, racism, suicide, substance abuse, Islamophobic comment, r-slur, ableism.

Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon by Jorge Amado, Translated by James L. Taylor and William L. Grossman

As the town of Ilhéus in 1925 hits a record cacao crop, it is moving forward into more modern times. But while the old cacao planters want to enforce a rigid, traditional status quo, newcomer Mundinho wants to usher in a new era of progress. The rights of women are at the center of the rising tension, between the sexual, sunny Gabriela and the intelligent, bold Malvina. Amado tells a wide, cinematic narrative of a small town populated with an exciting cast of characters and a web of gossip. The book moves forward in a series of good twists and rising suspense. I couldn’t put it down!

Content warnings for violence, homophobia, suicidal ideation, sex shaming, age gap/grooming, racism, domestic violence, use of the g-slur, misogynoir, fatphobia, sexual assault, and rape.

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Want more books in translation content? I have lists for you of books in translation from Catalonia, Argentina, France, Mexico, Central Africa, Japan, and Southeastern Europe. 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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PocketHealth, platform to digitally share medical images, launches terminology dictionary for users - FierceHealthcare - Dictionary

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PocketHealth, platform to digitally share medical images, launches terminology dictionary for users  FierceHealthcare

Scholardle is super hard Wordle for people that swallowed a dictionary - Metro.co.uk - Dictionary

Do you know what a logos is? (pic: Rex / Getty)

While maybe not as fiendish as Octordle, Scholardle is another tougher Wordle variant that specialises in more obscure words.

So far, when it comes to more challenging versions of Wordle, the likes of Quordle and Octordle arguably have you covered. However, their challenge lies in the fact that you have to multitask and solve multiple Wordle puzzles at once.

What if you want the exact same game as Wordle but significantly tougher? Well, original Wordle offers a hard mode, but it still pulls from the same library of words. Scholardle, on the other hand, narrows its word pool down.

You might think that would make it easier except Scholardle only uses the most commonly used words in academia. So, its answers will be far more obscure, especially if you’re not an academic yourself.

It otherwise functions exactly like Wordle and while answers are unlikely to be words such as ‘table’ or ‘house,’ you can still use them to narrow down what the real answer is.

Unlike some of the other Wordle clones, this one tracks your stats like regular Wordle and there’s an option to share your answer on social media. It even has Wordle’s hard mode, where you must use any revealed hints in subsequent guesses, and a dark mode and high contrast accessibility mode for those with visual impairments.

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However, it also only offers one puzzle a day, with no option to replay previous ones. There is a demand for such a feature though, as evidenced by the fan-made Wordle archive – even if The New York Times requested it be shut down.

Considering all the Wordle clones and variants remain available, those are probably safe from suffering a similar fate, especially since they’re free. Although there are a few cheeky Wordle knock-offs on app stores that offer in-game purchases.

We struggle enough with regular Wordle (pic: Scholardle)

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