Monday, April 11, 2022

Deezer launches in-app lyric translation feature for over 10,000 songs - 9to5Mac - Translation

Starting today, Deezer users can have more than 10,000 songs translated as an in-app feature. With that, the music streaming service is the first one to offer this function, which usually requires users to look for them online or with third-party apps.

According to its press release, Deezer users can view real-time lyric translations of the most popular English songs in French, German, Spanish, and Portuguese. The company says only 10,000 of the most popular songs streamed on the platform will display this new “Lyrics Translation” function.

“Music fans have always been able to immerse themselves in the thoughts and feelings of the artist with our widely popular lyrics function. But with our new ‘Lyrics Translation’ feature, they can now discover the artist’s true meaning behind their favorite tunes, and even sharpen their language skills, or totally learn a new language in the process,” explained Alexandra Leloup, VP Product – Core Products at Deezer.

Deezer will keep adding more translations of songs from other languages into English in the near future. The company also notes that users whose phone’s settings are in English need to update their language preferences in settings to French, Portuguese, German, or Spanish to view translations from English in either of the mentioned languages.

Here’s how to try Deezer’s “Lyrics Translation” feature:

  1. Access ‘Lyrics’ via the microphone icon
  2. Select ‘with translation’ 
  3. To disable this feature, select the ‘without translation’

“Easy on Me,” by Adele, “Levitating,” by Dual Lipa, and “Woman,” by Doja Cat are only a few of the 10,000 songs available with this feature. And, as you would assume, they are part of the top 10 songs on the platform streamed with lyrics.

iOS, Android, web, and desktop users can start enjoying this feature starting today. What do you think about it? Share your thoughts in the comment section below.

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Russia scolds Google after alleged 'dead Russians' translation option - Reuters - Translation

A sign is pictured outside a Google office near the company's headquarters in Mountain View, California, U.S., May 8, 2019. REUTERS/Paresh Dave/File Photo/File Photo

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April 11 (Reuters) - Russia on Monday demanded Google (GOOGL.O) take immediate steps to remove "threats" against Russians after it said Google Translate had offered some users the option to translate the phrase "dead Russians" instead of "dear Russians".

Russia's communications regulator said it had demanded Google "immediately take measures to exclude statements of threats against Russian users".

The regulator said that when "dear Russians" was typed into Google's translator, it had also offered the variant "dead Russians" under the "Did you mean" section.

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The regulator, known as Roskomnadzor, said it did not offer such variants for the phrase with other nationalities. Google did not immediately reply to a request for comment.

Google Translate did not appear to be suggesting such a variant when Reuters tried out the translator.

Russia's regulator "demanded that the American company take comprehensive measures to prevent such situations against Russian users, as well as to inform the agency about the reasons for the appearance of such messages."

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Reporting by Reuters; editing by Guy Faulconbridge and Susan Fenton

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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Machine Translation: 5 Implementation Tips To Get The Best Results - Analytics Insight - Translation

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Machine Translation: 5 Implementation Tips To Get The Best Results  Analytics Insight

Excel Dictionary: Stay current on currency - Morning Brew - Dictionary

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Excel Dictionary: Stay current on currency  Morning Brew

Sunday, April 10, 2022

Trouble in the translation trail - The New Indian Express - Translation

Express News Service

CHENNAI:  In my native place, when people go to Varanasi, they take a tumbler of water from the Tungabhadra and pour it in the Ganga, and bring back a tumbler to pour in the former…Translation is like that. English is the River Nile and so, what I can do is take some water from it and give back in my own language,” shared Vasudhendra, author and publisher, Chanda Pustaka. He was one of the four panellists from the South Indian publishing industry in the recently conducted talk ‘Translation and the Politics of Languages in India’. The talk discussed the challenges of translators in India as explored by ‘India Literature and Publishing Sector Study’, commissioned by British Council and conducted by The Art X Company.

While Vasudhendra’s analogy poetically describes the art of translation in its simplest form, the reality of the same is far more complex. As the study finds, lack of international awareness of what the Indian literary market offers and the inability of Indian publishers to access these spaces and opportunities for international translation are two primary challenges the industry faces, revealed moderator Neeta Gupta, publishing director, Tethys Books. 

Fighting for awareness
Vasudhendra finds that the recognition of books like Tomb of Sand by Geetanjali Shree — the first Hindi language book to have been shortlisted for the International Booker Prize — may be the push needed to popularise local languages. But Kannada translation to English seems to prove still difficult despite the success of books like Ghachar Ghochar by Vivek Shanbhag. “My observation is that English translations often happen in states where people have strong connections to the UK or the US, or where there is a sizable Christian population. Unfortunately, Karnataka has an insignificant population of the same,” he explained.   

Gita Ramaswamy of Hyderabad Book Trust worries that the Telugu market is shrinking; people can understand and speak the language, but not read it. She elaborated, “Once a script dies, I don’t know how long the language remains. I often see that English language publishers get a lot of help in terms of grants, subsidies, travel etc, whereas unless you are well-connected here, you don’t get any such offers. If we want to keep languages alive, we need  (national and international) institutions that support ventures in local languages, especially those which deal with authors and translations from the marginalised sections.” Historian and translator J Devika added that a troubling trend of not giving due credit to translators on covers has been on the rise. 

A change in the tides
Despite finding a thriving market, Devika notices that the same in Malayalam translation has also brought certain limitations. She noted a shift in the demand towards young and articulate authors and a heavy preference towards realism. This, coupled with a shift in literary style is cause for concern, it would seem. “In literature, right now it is about rediscovering local idioms, dialects and I find it alarming that all this is being rendered into flat, standardised English. These local idioms are included in the text as a political act.

So the question is whether you can carry the politics of what is happening in Kerala into English,” she added. Politics does not only find a roadblock in literature, but also in non-fiction. Tamil Nadu-based publishing professional Kannan Sundaram found that while, over the years, a few Tamil (Indian languages in general) novels have found an international audience there is still an uphill battle for non-fiction works. 

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Reading a New Translation of Rumi - Hyperallergic - Translation

Saturday, April 9, 2022

'Translation is itself a kind of writing' - Deccan Herald - Translation

Bengaluru-based Srinath Perur is the acclaimed translator of Ghachar Ghochar, a Kannada novel by renowned writer Vivek Shanbhag. The book won the 2020 Sahitya Akademi award for English translation. He is also the translator of Girish Karnad’s memoirs, ‘This Life at Play’ published last year. As a travel and science writer who writes for various publications, Perur’s own work, If It’s Monday It Must Be Madurai, is a delightful travelogue about 10 conducted tours in India and abroad. DHoS spoke with him about the joys and perils of the difficult task of translation. Excerpts from an interview

A national award for your debut translation. What does it mean to you?

I was generally looking for a closer engagement with Kannada, and when Vivek Shanbhag, who had read some of my writing, asked if I wanted to try and translate Ghachar Ghochar into English, I thought I’d give it a shot. I was somewhat bemused by the award because Ghachar Ghochar came out in 2015, but it’s always nice when one’s work is appreciated. Since you need a good book to have a good translation, it’s also an acknowledgement of the Kannada original. And since good books emerge from literary cultures, it’s a useful reminder of the riches that exist in our languages.

What was the experience of translating Ghachar Ghochar and what were the challenges? 

It was good fun. I wanted to produce an English text that was enjoyable to read, and Vivek was happy to give me the space to try and do that. My main challenge was finding a voice that would carry the book. I translated the first few pages repeatedly until I thought I had such a voice. After that, it was a smooth enough process.

You are also a writer. Is there a difference between the work of writing and translation?

Translation is itself a kind of writing. A lot of the craft and sensibility needed to write fiction applies to translating fiction too. In some ways, the simultaneous presence of two languages makes the mechanics of writing harder and it becomes easy to produce sentences that are warped by some sort of force field from the original. It takes effort, at least for me, to produce a translation that reads naturally, and I often struggle with this. But then, you (mostly) don’t have to make stuff up while translating, so it’s usually a more tractable activity.

Why hasn’t Kannada gained as much prominence as some Indian languages in translation circuits?

Translations into Indian languages other than English and between them have been happening for a long time and it’s a complex landscape that I can’t claim to understand well. Speaking of translations into English in India, maybe what gets published has to some extent been determined by where the people in publishing come from. And understandably so — how do you know what translations to commission without some sense of a book’s place in its culture? I think many things are changing now. People are buying more translations, authors are keen to have their books translated, new translators are emerging, and publishers are looking more widely. I think we’ll have a more even representation of Indian languages soon.

Is there any work in Kannada that you would like to see translated or like to translate?

I’ve recently been thinking of two of Poornachandra Tejaswi’s novels, Carvalho and Chidambara Rahasya. Written in the 1980s, they’ve been hugely popular in Kannada and seem particularly powerful now with the climate crisis properly upon us. Both novels have the natural world — beautiful, mysterious, deeply interconnected — as their backdrop as well as a kind of protagonist. People try to control this natural world but their attempts are short-sighted and blundering with occasionally tragic consequences. For all that, these are fast-paced and funny books. At least one of them has been translated into English, though it doesn’t seem to be easily available. I’d love to see them both read more widely. 

Some say translations can never be faithful to the original. Certain dialects and idioms cannot be translated into English. Comment?

Even the original text is not faithful to the original text. As in, something can always be read in multiple ways. A translator’s way is just one of them. There’s no escaping the fact that a translation is the product of both the author’s and the translator’s sensibilities.

One of my favourite translators is Anthea Bell, who (along with Derek Hockridge) translated the Asterix comics from French to English. She had to deal with puns and cultural references that would make no sense in English, so she made up different ones that fit the panels. In many cases, her solutions to the problem of untranslatability produced something richer than the original. It’s never as simple as ‘lost in translation’. The target language has its own possibilities too.

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