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Thursday, May 5, 2022
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Moneyhun honored for translation in poetry - Boise State News - Boise State University - Translation
The University of Massachusetts Amherst chose English professor Clyde Moneyhun’s translation of “Ídols” by Gabriel Ferrater (1922-1972) as the winner of the 2022 Sant Jordi Translation Contest. The selection committee included guest judges from Catalonia, Smith College, and the University of Massachusetts Departments of Spanish and Portuguese Studies and Comparative Literature.
Moneyhun is currently on sabbatical translating Catalan poetry on the Spanish island of Menorca and recently read his translation of the poem at an event to honor his work. The University of Massachusetts Amherst’s Translation Center and Catalan Studies Program, and the Institut Ramon Llull, which promotes Catalan language study at universities abroad, support the annual Sant Jordi program.
Unconditional Love — Jhumpa Lahiri and Translation - Town Topics - Translation
By Stuart Mitchner
I keep returning to that impassioned sentence from Jhumpa Lahiri’s Translating Myself and Others (Princeton University Press $21.95). The sense of spontaneous energy behind Lahiri’s use of the word “love” is in stunning contrast to the standard “I was struck by” or “I admired” used in other, earlier contexts; in one of the translations she quotes from, the word love is “merely ‘a container we stick everything into,’ a hollow place-holder that justified our behaviors and choices.” Here it comes across as fresh, reinvigorated, uncontained, unconditional, and even heroic, given the challenges she brings tumultuously into play.
The Cracked Kettle
Lahiri’s embattled devotion to language brings to mind Gustave Flaubert’s performance on a similar theme in Madame Bovary: “Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to when we long to move the stars to pity.” In the original it’s “la parole humaine est comme un chaudron fêlé ou nous battons des mélodies à faire danser les ours, quand on voudrait attendrir les étoiles.”
The English version has a Shakespearean kick that makes Flaubert’s mot-juste French appear unwieldy; but that’s how the words look on the page: say them aloud, and it’s another story, another song.
Looking in the Mirror
Lahiri says that “to translate is to look into a mirror and see someone other than yourself.” Even when you’re not the translator, you can imagine Constance Garnett’s bespectacled face in the mirror when reading Chekhov. You know and trust her, she’s given you the Russians, and in Chekhov’s stories and letters, which you come back to again and again, her translations bring you closer to him than any other. Of Garnett’s Turgenev, the first of the Russian giants she brought to English-speaking readers, Joseph Conrad said “Turgenev is Constance Garnett and Constance Garnett is Turgenev.” Ernest Hemingway makes essentially the same point in A Moveable Feast. For him, the language of Tolstoy was the language of the Englishwoman who began to go blind while translating War and Peace. D. H. Lawrence recalls seeing her sitting in her garden “turning out reams of her marvelous translations from the Russian. She would finish a page, and throw it off on a pile on the floor without looking up, and start a new page. That pile would be this high — really, almost up to her knees, and all magical.”
Dealing With the Subjunctive
In an early chapter titled, “An Ode to the Mighty Optative,” Lahiri describes the subjunctive as “the grammatical repository for all things imprecise, uncertain, or otherwise incapable of being pinned down definitively.” As someone whose high school English experience was plagued by sentence diagramming, dangling participles, and unruly subjunctives (not to mention a grammarian father who wrote but never published a book glorifying the Mighty Diagram), I’m thankful for Lahiri’s solution. Why diagram sentences when you can put all those confounding, tormenting, all-consuming participles and gerunds in the storage locker of the subjunctive?
Roller Coaster
Along with Translating Myself and Others, I’ve been enjoying the stories in Lahiri’s 2008 collection, Unaccustomed Earth. The various positive reviews quoted in the Vintage paperback observe that she “handles her characters without leaving any fingerprints,” that she “allows them to grow as if unguided,” and that she “steps back from the action, gets out of the way.” There’s also praise for her “modulated prose.” Yet when she’s expounding on translating and translations, her fingerprints are all over the place. Of translating Ovid’s Metamorphoses, “Though I read slowly and haltingly, I also fell headlong into the poem.” She also soars and glides, she even gropes: “To translate is to walk down numerous scary corridors, to grope in the dark,” like “walking through a hall of mirrors.” She finds a “teeter-totter element” running through novelist Domenico Starnone’s Trust, one of the books she translated from the Italian, wherein she describes “high adrenaline” diversions like roller coasters: “Starnone often pauses at the precise moment in which the roller coaster, creeping upward on its trajectory, briefly pauses before hurtling back down.” Each time “the moment of drastic transition signals a plunge, a lurch, a swoop, a turning upside-down.”
In the afterword to her translation of Trust, Lahiri comes right off the page exulting about Starnone’s “breathtaking panoramas … heart-dropping anxiety, primal screams, and hysterical laughter.” When she says, “Something tells me that Starnone has a hell of a good time laying down these tracks,” he’s obviously not the only one having a good time.
With a Wary Eye
This is the 100th anniversary of the publication of T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland and James Joyce’s Ulysses. If you discovered Eliot’s “Prufrock” and Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist” on your own around the time you were reading J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, you gazed ahead to the famously “difficult” later works with a wary eye. The fact that I might need a guide, or even a translator, roused my inner Holden Caulfield, and when, at 16, I saw the Latin epigraph on the first page of The Wasteland, I swaggered into the “the cruelest month” with a chip on my shoulder, like Holden in a theater lobby full of “phonies” swooning over “the marvelous Lunts.” In “Prufrock” Eliot simply pulls you aboard (“Let us go then, you and I”) and in Portrait Joyce disarms you with the bedtime storyline of the moocow coming down the road.
What actually brought on my Wasteland-epigraph déjà vu was the sight of the two masses of untranslated ancient Greek looming like a closed double gate to the “Mighty Optative” chapter. Lahiri opened the way, however, locating both citations in different sections of Aristotle’s Poetics on the way to discussing the future games of the optative in reference to the doomed couple in Ernest Hemingway’s story “Cat in the Rain,” which is set in Italy, the country where Lahiri found the language she loves.
Translating a Country
One thing that animates Lahiri’s writing about translating and translations is the way she plunges into the task as if the language and the country were one living element, air, light, music, and ambiance. Although Italy was also the first foreign country I felt that way about, then Greece, the most momentous experience was India, about which I’ll paraphrase Lahiri: you love it so much that you let it confound and torment and threaten to swallow you whole; and out of the concatenation of forces that make the subcontinent so immense an experience, it’s the language that immediately engages and amuses and amazes you, not Hindi or Urdu or Bengali, but the ungainly transplant formed from Victorian-era English on posters and sign boards and newspapers and books (Lahiri might see it as an example of “grafting,” from the Italian word innesto). On my way overland from Trieste I felt at home for the first time in India’s never never land of language, part-British Empire, part rock ’n’ roll America, part Hollywood. One of my favorite examples turned up above the title of a yellowed paperback of Northanger Abbey that I bought at an Indian Railways newsstand: “Cunning! Compassioned! Strangely Touchy!”
“Every Word Twisted”
Franz Kafka enters Translating Myself and Others in the third chapter, when Lahiri mentions Gregor Samsa in the context of Kafka’s “obsession with the body, physical discomfort, weakness, and disease.” She mentions the Diaries in particular, as “a heterodox merging of observation and storytelling,” marked by Kafka’s “charged relationship to physical space.”
For years now I’ve been reading and living in the charged space of Diaries 1914-1923, which was translated by Martin Greenberg “with the cooperation of Hannah Arendt.” The final entry is dated June 11, 1923, about a year before Kafka’s death in June 3, 1924: “More and more fearful as I write. It is understandable. Every word twisted in the hands of the spirits — this twist of the hand is their characteristic gesture — becomes a spear turned against the speaker. Most especially a remark like this. And so adinfinitum. The only consolation would be: it happens whether you like or no. And what you like is of infinitesimally little help. More than consolation is: You too have weapons.”
The first two sentences make sense in the context of a book about translation. But any translator might feel a chill, even a touch of vertigo, confronting a sentence referring to words twisted and turned “against the speaker.” And given the spreading plague of disinformation in May 2022, and the war in Ukraine, whatever’s impending on Kafka’s “physical space” feels unnervingly resonant.
Tuesday, May 3, 2022
from Translation of Lillies – The Brooklyn Rail - Brooklyn Rail - Translation
12.23.15
1. Other things occur, bands tight across the head.
2. I was wrong to use a circular motion.
3. What it’s really like to do one thing at one time.
4. If you pick up a receiver now it will invariably be the wrong time for the person you are
trying to reach. How not to forget one’s own origins? If a day is not a number it sometimes
behaves like a bad animal. I mean like humans.
5. I’d rather not go today because there will be lines out the door in thin gray drizzle.
6. She looked different when she was there to meet anyone else—than when she was there
to meet me. Will I be invited again? We hope certain parties will repeat themselves, with the
same persons.
7. Is it possible that they’d never met?
8. The entire room then became a person I knew, in many bodies.
9. She was sorry that this year she cannot contribute and I offered to contribute in her place.
10. Faux instructions are the way to go.
11. I asked him to help me with a small software problem that had to do with filling out
poorly designed government forms. He said he had administrators who could fill out those
forms when he applied for grants. But in the arts things are different.
12. It seems important to train oneself to extend in the most unlikely of directions especially
when that involves poor chances and badly designed forms.
13. I have not yet begun.
14. People disagree about whether or not it is polite or just adding to clutter to send
messages via email to say thank you. But I must say thank you.
15. We never used to meet this way.
16. This one is impossible so I don’t know why I even bothered to write it down. Possibly
because persistence is the only clear course to survival.
17. And when I do the mailbox will be full. The message will say, if you can, send me a text.
18. I should just do this. It won’t take long.
19. Lascivious.
20. Balconies, terraces, charming streets, very affordable, more and more alluring.
21. He resists practice.
22. This might be for much younger kids.
23. Write a note of encouragement and make it so convincing that this person decides to stay.
24. Help with mortality issues and something we should have done decades ago.
25. Does silence mean I’m not in your thoughts?
Reese Witherspoon’s May Book Club Pick Is An Inspiring Piece of Historical Fiction — & It’s Less Than $20 on Amazon - SheKnows - Dictionary
If you purchase an independently reviewed product or service through a link on our website, SheKnows may receive an affiliate commission.
We’ve been waiting so long for Reese Witherspoon’s next book club selection. Actually, scratch that, we’ve been waiting a month. At the start of each month, the self-proclaimed bookworm announces the next read for her beloved book club, and this one will not disappoint. For fans of historic fiction and inspiring tales set in the early 19th century, Witherspoon’s latest book club pick is perfect for you — and it’s currently less than $20 on Amazon right now.
Witherspoon’s latest literary selection is The Dictionary of Lost Words
by Pip Williams. Set in the early 19th century as the suffrage movement is well underway and the Great War looms, a young girl named Esme hides under tables and away from prying eyes while her father and his cohorts collect words for the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary at the revered university. But Esme, whose mother died when she was a baby, begins to notice something about the words going uncollected.
After finding the word “bondmaid,” meaning slave girl, discarded, Esme begins to collect even more words that have been neglected by her father and the men selecting the words for inclusion in their dictionary. As she grows up, Esme decides to set off on her own, leaving the sheltered world of the university where she grew up behind. What she encounters are the people and words she will add to her very own dictionary: The Dictionary of Lost Words.
'The Dictionary of Lost Words: A Novel' by Pip Williams $17.00 on Amazon.com Sign Up
For anyone who’s a student of history, and loves a bit of a twist, The Dictionary of Lost Words is an ideal read. This page-turner is already an award-winning piece of literature, earning the Australian Book Industry Award among other notable honors. If you’re not wholly convinced, let’s fill you in on the price point — you can buy a copy of The Dictionary of Lost Words for less than $20. It doesn’t matter if you want the paperback copy or the hardcover; both are less than $20 on Amazon right now. So, what are you waiting for? Summer is nearly here, and we know you want to stock your bookshelf with more TBR picks for those quiet summer days and nights.
Before you go, click here to see 10 of Reese Witherspoon’s best book club picks.
Llandudno Welsh road sign translation error branded an insult - BBC - Translation
A mistake in translating a car park sign into Welsh has been branded "an insult".
Dim cofnod has been used as a translation for no entry three separate times near an Aldi store in Llandudno, Conwy county.
While dim cofnod does literally translate to no entry, it is in the context of book-keeping, not traffic.
Resident Nerys Hewitt said she was "horrified" at the signs, which should have read dim mynediad.
It is unclear if the car park sign was commissioned by Aldi or if the responsibility lies with British Land, the company which manages the Mostyn Champneys Retail Park.
Both have been asked to comment.
- Welsh language road signs up in error in Worcester
- E-mail error ends up on road sign
- Asda mistakenly offers free alcohol in translation mix-up
"Cofnod is a list in a document," said Mrs Hewitt, adding she believed the mistake was due to someone relying on translation software.
Mrs Hewitt posted a picture of the mistranslated signs on Facebook, drawing hundreds of reactions from residents.
'An expensive mistake'
"Nobody checked," she said
"The word they've put down is entry but it means entry into a document. So it has a totally different meaning.
"It's an expensive mistake to have to redo it. It's very insulting to Llandudno."
Mrs Hewitt said she was surprised such mistakes were still being made "because getting a translation is so easy these days and surely somebody should have checked it before writing it down".
Swiss Startup Vidby.com Helps Achieve Up to 99% Accuracy in Video Translation Thanks to Artificial Intelligence - Yahoo Finance - Translation
Rotkreuz, Switzerland , May 03, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- vidby AG has created a service that translates and voices videos in 70 languages in a couple of minutes and costs from $0.9 per minute of the original video. vidby empowers bloggers, media, international companies, and educational organizations to scale their content and business worldwide.
vidby is easy to use - it only takes a couple of minutes to place an order, and the price is fixed at ordering. Thanks to the 8-year experience of the team in speech technologies, vidby allows its customers to eliminate errors in translation and make voiceovers of the highest quality.
“Our company’s mission is to make all video content understandable while preserving the linguistic diversity in the world,” says Alexander Konovalov, one of the co-founders of vidby AG.
vidby’s customers are already enjoying the following benefits of the product:
Ease of use: Ordering takes about one minute and doesn’t involve calls, letters, or clarifications, unlike the traditional approach. Therefore, you can save not only thanks to the speed and price of translation but also thanks to quick order placement.
Speed: vidby offers fully automatic translation and voiceover, which gives almost an immediate result (one minute of waiting time per one minute of the video.) It’ll be useful when you want to urgently bring video news to the world, understand what the video is about or select the necessary segments from a large amount of source material.
Quality: Thanks to vidby’s 8-year experience in speech technologies, the translation accuracy can reach up to 99%. We do this by involving people in post-editing of the source text after automatic speech recognition. Translation and voicing remain fully automatic.
Price: vidby boasts a transparent and fixed price at ordering. Automatic translation costs $0.9 per minute of translating into the first language. Semi-automatic translation with 99% accuracy costs from $2.9 per minute of translation into the first language plus $0.9 for each subsequent language (for source videos in Ukrainian and other languages of the Slavic group), from $5.9 for English and other languages of Western Europe, and $7.9 for languages with a specific dialect.
Eray Muller, Senior Communications Manager at Siemens Schweiz AG, used vidby to translate employee instruction videos. He appreciated the practicality, speed, and quality of translation.
“Practical, fast and good translation solution for internal employee videos,” says Mr. Muller.
Silvan Merki, Chief Communications Officer at Implenia AG, tried vidby to automatically translate videos into rare languages.
“The translation is very fast and amazingly good in quality - the whole context is clearly understandable,” he says.
Product release date
The first vidby prototype was launched in April 2021, and the first commercial version was released in September 2021. From April 2022, the company launches sales to the whole world. The cost of translations depends on the video's original language and the desired quality, starting from $0.9 per minute of translation and dubbing of the video into the first language and plus $0.9 for each subsequent language.
Check out the product here: https://vidby.com/. Each new customer gets a one-time discount of up to $10 with a minimum payment of $1 per order.
About vidby AG
vidby AG was founded in September 2021 in Rotkreuz, Switzerland, by Eugen von Rubinberg and Alexander Konovalov and was financed by its co-founders and private investors. vidby AG has now launched the sale of tokenized shares https://ift.tt/BFMgqHd.
Find out more about the company here: https://vidby.com/.
CONTACT: Eugen von Rubinberg vidby AG support@vidby.com
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