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A DICTIONARY OF EMOTIONS IN A TIME OF WAR Comes to the Finborough Theatre Broadway WorldFriday, June 10, 2022
Thursday, June 9, 2022
The Ever-Shifting Challenge of Promoting Literature in Translation - Publishers Weekly - Translation
How can independent publishers get works of translated literature to readers in an era marked by media saturation and increased dominance by major companies over the book business, all after years of general apathy from consumers toward books in translation? That was the central question at an industry roundtable on "How to Promote Italian Literature in the USA" held by Multipli Forti, the Italian literary fiction festival, at the Italian Cultural Institute in New York on June 6.
The panel, moderated by Roman publisher Minimum Fax's editorial director, Luca Briasco, and Michael Reynolds, the editorial director of Europa Editions, brought together a number of key figures in the translated literature sector: Terrie Akers, Other Press marketing director; Beniamino Ambrosi, foreign rights director and agent at the Cheney Agency; Tynan Kogane, senior editor at New Directions Publishing; Sarah McNally, owner of McNally Jackson Bookstores; and Dan Simon, publisher of Seven Stories Press.
At Seven Stories, Simon said, “We believe in that slow work” of discovering authors and then sticking by them. “Once we fall in love, then we’re kind of stuck.” In terms of how those authors are discovered, New Directions’ Kogane said foreign rights departments at literary agencies, translators coming to them directly, and the recommendations of friends all play a role: “We like to take things from people who we trust,” he said. Akers added that literary scouts also played a big role in recommending potential acquisitions at Other Press.
Ambrosi and McNally, for their part, pointed out that bigger publishers are starting to take more of an interest in publishing works of translation over the past decade. “There are publishers for whom this is a mission, then there’s a more commercial track,” Ambrosi said. “I think [publishing in translation] used to be a smaller pool in the U.S., and the history of it is a little bit random, made up of sporadic successes.” But such surprise bestsellers as Elena Ferrante, Han Kang, and Karl Ove Knausgaard, he said, helped to open up the market: “Every one of these books widens the scope a little bit.” As a result, Ambrosi noted, agents and acquiring editors both have gotten used to seeing these names frequently as comp titles during the acquisition stage.
McNally cited Knopf as one of the Big Five imprints starting to get better at presenting these books for American readers. Still, she said, publishers have a ways to go, at least from a bookseller’s perspective. “If you’re publishing international books, you could really seduce somebody, the way a travel brochure could,” she said.
In terms of discovery, Simon said that the “Amazonification” of the book business has made things more difficult than the sheer number of promotional tools available to publishers today might imply: “You can do everything right, right now, and it might still not work.” He wished, he said, that the commercial houses would go back to publishing commercial books only, calling imprints like Riverhead “unfortunately very good.” He added that he hoped that the bigger houses' attention span for international literature will prove “short, and they’ll move onto something else.”
Kogane's philosophy is a bit different, relying more on longevity than buzzworthiness. "New Directions has always sort of thought about publishing writers' writers, and writers who appeal to other writers," he said. "Publishing so many great mid-century American writers enriched Italian literature through translation. I think we're trying to approach Italian literature in the same way. With a writer like Natalia Ginzburg, I think so many American writers, both young and old, have found some model for what fiction could do in the English language."
How influential a book’s reception in its native market is to publishers’ promotions was a matter of debate. When it comes to countries like France, Italy, and Spain, Simon said, people “love the films, they love the food, they want to visit, they love the landscape, and then it suddenly gets all blurry when it comes to literature.” For books in translation on these books, it’s better to get American blurbers, he said: “I believe in publishing up to people in terms of the quality of the work, and publishing down to them in terms of the marketing. They just want to hear from some movie star or influencer they love…. They want it made American.”
McNally disagreed. “Maybe Dan's thinking nationally and I'm just thinking of New York, but when I find out that something was, say, the biggest book in Norway last year, I find that interesting, exciting, and I think my customers do too.” She added that highlighting a title's country of origin has proven successful in selling books at her stores.
“I have always [organized] the literature section in my stores in terms of countries, and at one point, when the original store was maybe five or six years old, I thought, maybe I'm wrong,” she said. “When I switched the organization to A-Z [by author], [sales] numbers [for international literature] went down by about 30% immediately, so we switched them back. Now, what we've been doing at our stores, more and more, is switching the front tables from [showcasing] fiction and nonfiction to American and international [books], and international book sales have gone up.”
Akers split the difference. Other Press does use press and bestseller placement from native countries on their books, and "sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't." She conceded that, when it came to blurbs, “an American author is more likely to make it on the cover, and foreign press is more likely to go on the back cover.”
Opportunities for promotion of international literature in the U.S. and how they’ve changed over the past two decades was also a point of contention. Kogane and Ayers were mostly upbeat on the situation. Thanks to Ferrante and Knausgaard, Kogane said, publishers are more willing to take chances on translated literature: “success,” he said, “begets success.” Akers pointed to the increasingly “robust community” of publishers of literature in translation in the U.S., calling it “a bit of a ground swell,” although she hedged that by saying that they “need to get past that 3%” market share for translated books.
Simon and McNally were a bit less optimistic about avenues for promotion, despite McNally’s nod to TikTok. That skepticism centered on the diminished influence of bookish publications. “A lot of the things that would move the needle in terms of books, like the New York Times Book Review, are not as important than they used to be,” Simon said.
McNally agreed, and noted that, despite the welcome nature of an increased number of prizes highlighting books in translation—the Booker International Prize and the National Book Award for Translated Literature among them—she wasn’t sure that they were quite making up for what was lost.
“In the last 15 years, we've watched almost every place from which people used to get book news stop providing book news,” McNally said. “So yes, I think they do make a difference, but it also feels like something as simple as, as the tides recede, something else is left on the beach. Back in the day, a cover review in the New York Times [Book Review] would have sold more than the Booker, but a cover review at the Times isn't impactful anymore. So the Booker International is what's still on the beach."
A Guangxi County Removes Xinhua Dictionary Over 'Vulgar' Content - Sixth Tone - Dictionary
A county in the southern Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region has withdrawn the country’s most authoritative Chinese language dictionary as local authorities initiated a campaign to “purify the reading environment for minors.”
The 11th edition of the Xinhua Dictionary, along with a few other children’s books, were removed from the shelves in Quanzhou County for including “vulgar content,” according to a now-deleted article posted by the local procuratorate Thursday. Authorities didn’t specify the dictionary entries that were deemed vulgar, but many online had accused the dictionary of using sexist explanations to describe certain words.
For example, the word “tease” was explained using derogatory references to women.
The move came after a county-wide inspection of school textbooks and children’s books on June 1.
Last week, China’s top education authority issued a nationwide review of school textbooks in response to controversial illustrations in sixth grade math textbooks. However, the inspections in Quanzhou were initiated by local authorities instead of the central government.
The deleted article was accompanied by several photos, showing two local procuratorate officials in uniform flipping through a copy of the Xinhua Dictionary at a bookstore and photographing the content deemed objectionable. Many online criticized the action as “performative law enforcement.”
On Sunday, the municipal procuratorate in Guilin, which administers Quanzhou County, determined the action as a “misconduct.” The statement didn’t elaborate further and asked Quanzhou officials to make the dictionary available again in stores.
Editor: Bibek Bhandari.
(Header image: Local procuratorate officials in uniform check a copy of the Xinhua Dictionary at a bookstore in Quanzhou County, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, June 1, 2022. From Weibo)
Wednesday, June 8, 2022
Rotary Club Has Donated 15K Dictionaries To Montclair, Verona Schools - Patch - Dictionary
MONTCLAIR, NJ — The following news release comes courtesy of the Montclair Foundation. Learn more about posting announcements or events to your local Patch site.
The Montclair Rotary Club has helped a generation of elementary school students in Montclair and Verona get a jump start in building their vocabulary. Over the past 18 years the club has donated more than 15,500 student dictionaries to third-grade students in both communities. The first groups of students to receive their dictionaries have graduated from high school and finished college.
Montclair Rotarian Georgia Brown brought The Dictionary Project to the two communities in 2004 and has coordinated the effort the entire time. Annually, Ms. Brown and volunteers from the club distribute student dictionaries to pupils at 15 private, parochial, and public elementary schools in Montclair and Verona. This winter and spring, Ms. Brown and the club's team delivered a total of 1,401 dictionaries to third and fourth graders in both communities.
Students from the following schools received dictionaries this year:
- Montclair: Bradford Elementary School, Charles H. Bullock School, Edgemont Montessori Elementary School, Hillside Elementary School, Lacordaire Academy, Montclair Cooperative School, Northeast Elementary School, St. Cassian Elementary School, Watchung Elementary School
- Verona: Brookdale Avenue School, Forest Avenue School, Laning Avenue School, Our Lady of the Lake School, Spectrum360 School, F.N. Brown School
Ms. Brown's enthusiasm for the project earned her the nickname "Dictionary Peach," a reference to her home state of Georgia.
The Montclair Rotary Foundation, which is a nonprofit, has funded the purchase of dictionaries along with contributions by individuals. The Foundation also supplies financial grants to hunger relief efforts, affordable housing initiatives, and international youth exchange programs. The Montclair Rotary Club is celebrating 100 years of serving the local community during 2022.
Pandemic Disrupts Dictionary Distribution
Typically, the Rotary club gives dictionaries to third graders. But when the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted that schedule during 2020 and 2021, Ms. Brown decided to expand the project this year to include fourth grade classes in the dictionary distribution.
Longest Word in the English Language
The soft-bound books have more than 370 pages of words and definitions plus maps, biographies of U.S. presidents and information about America's states and nations of the world. In the past, Ms. Brown brought dictionaries to each classroom and encouraged to lookup a word each day. She showed students that the dictionaries included the longest word in the English language, which has more than 1900 letters.
Ms. Brown said, "I was a natural choice to chair The Dictionary Project committee because I have always loved words. And I am a curious person and good dictionaries have thousands of words plus an abundance of useful information."
The late Robert Pityo, a longtime member of the Cedar Grove Rotary Club, mentored Ms. Brown in the dictionary project. Brown embraced the project because she believes that learning is a lifetime habit. Dictionaries, she added, are tools people can always use.
During a recent dictionary delivery to Verona's Lanning Avenue School, Principal Howard Freund said, "I am grateful for the opportunity to give our third and fourth graders their own dictionaries. They hold the dictionary in their hands and flip through pages filled with thousands of words. Students get to discover different words and find out what they mean."
Marking the End of an Era
Ms. Brown, who is retired from the U.S. Postal Service's office in Montclair, is completing her last year as chairperson of the annual dictionary project. She said, "I have many wonderful memories meeting and speaking with students at each of the local schools. When I hand the dictionary to students, I often see a sparkle of gratitude in their eyes and that makes all the effort worthwhile."
The Rotary Club is marking its 100 Anniversary year in 2022. The club that serves the communities of Montclair and Verona by supporting not-for-profit organizations, schools, and community groups. Rotarians volunteer their time and contribute resources to aid local hunger-relief and food insecurity programs, affordable housing efforts, the local animal shelter, and programs for veterans and the elderly. Members also sponsor community service projects. For more information about the Rotary, which meets each Tuesday at 12:15 p.m., contact Club President Paul Metcalfe at montclairrotaryclub@gmail.com. The club currently alternates between virtual meetings and in-person sessions held at the Greek Taverna Restaurant in Montclair.
Don't forget to visit the Patch Montclair Facebook page. Send local news tips and correction requests to eric.kiefer@patch.com.
Digital justice through data dictionaries | River Campus Libraries - University of Rochester - Dictionary
Anyone who has ever used a computer to search a library’s collection has benefitted from or been let down by metadata, the information which librarians, archivists, and researchers create to make resources findable and accessible.
Historically, collections have been described in ways that reflect not only academic priorities and academic privilege, but also the frequently white, heterosexual perspective of the academy. So, the chosen terminology may also not reflect what is important to particular communities about content they may have created or resources that address their experiences. For members of the Black or LGBTQAI+ communities, this practice could make some resources virtually undiscoverable.
The River Campus Libraries (RCL) is participating in a new University of Rochester project that seeks to bring long-overdue change to this realm.
Led by principal investigator Joel Burges, associate professor of English and visual and cultural studies, the Rochester Digital Annotation Project (RDAP) will explore the process of creating metadata that better reflects the sometimes complementary and sometimes competing interests of scholars and communities.
The RDAP team includes the following members:
- Maggie Dull, director of Metadata Strategies for RCL
- Steven Fullwood, archivist and cofounder of the Nomadic Archivists Project
- Miranda Mims, archivist and cofounder of the Nomadic Archivists Project
- Tara Nelson, curator of Moving Image Collections for Visual Studies Workshop
- Emily Sherwood, director of Digital Scholarship and Studio X for RCL
They will use a selection of materials from the Portable Channel collection held by the Visual Studies Workshop (VSW) to prototype five “data dictionaries”: two grounded in the interests of Black and LGBTQAI+ communities and three in the interests of Black studies, queer studies, and media studies.
Five data dictionaries, two primary objectives
RDAP has two primary objectives in prototyping these dictionaries. The team will first explore how digital annotation can empower community members and scholarly researchers to understand the racial and sexual histories contained in local audiovisual archives such as the VSW’s. The second objective is to investigate the possibilities for generating accurate and inclusive data and metadata about those archives, over which community members and scholarly researchers will have shared authority.
With a seed grant from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), the RDAP team will begin developing the five data dictionaries around the Portable Channel videos using Mediate, a time-based media annotation tool developed by Burges in partnership with RCL Digital Scholarship.
“To find those documentaries online, you would have to know to Google ‘Portable Channel’ or maybe ‘Rochester history’—something specific like that,” Sherwood says. “To make them more accessible, we’ll look to scholars for terms they would use to describe and document the collections, but we’ll also go out into the community and ask them how we should be talking about, describing, and teaching these histories.”
The ACLS grant is part of the Digital Justice Grant Program, which is designed to promote and provide resources for digital humanities projects that aim to diversify the digital domain, advance justice and equity in digital scholarly practice, and contribute to public understanding of racial and social justice issues, especially those that elevate the interests and histories of people of color and other historically marginalized communities including Black, Latinx, and Indigenous communities; people with disabilities; and queer, trans, and gender-nonconforming people.
RDAP is among the first eight projects to receive this award.
“The inaugural ACLS Digital Justice Grantees highlight a wonderful convergence between publicly engaged humanities and digital humanities,” said Keyanah Nurse, ACLS program officer of Higher Education Initiatives. “These teams exemplify the move away from extractive practices around data collection and towards collaborative knowledge production with those outside the academy. ACLS is proud to support the robust engagement with data ethics at the core of these projects.” ∎
To learn more about Rochester Digital Annotation Project or Mediate, contact Emily Sherwood, director of Digital Scholarship, at esherwood@library.rochester.edu.
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Machine Translation Market to value USD 7.5 billion by 2030, Says Global Market Insights Inc. - PR Newswire UK - Translation
The increasing complexity of customer translation requirements will propel the hybrid machine translation segment growth. In this technology, multiple MT processes are used and combined into one machine translation system to obtain high-quality content. With an increasing focus on improving the customer experience, the deployment of single-translation systems is not always effective. It can impact the overall accuracy of the translated data. The technology is categorized into different methodologies including multi-engine translation, statistical rule generation, and multi-pass. These approaches are used to address the issues related to a single translation system and build a custom model for industry-specific solutions.
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The BFSI sector will witness growth in the market owing to the introduction of new policies & subsiding loans for the agriculture industry. Government authorities are focusing on supporting farmers through these initiatives. For instance, in February 2022, the Indian government increased the agricultural credit target to around USD 232.2 billion for FY 2022-23 from USD 212.9 billion in FY 2021-2022. It will entice more farmers to set up bank accounts, from different rural locations in the country, for leveraging the monetary support. This factor will encourage the banking sector to incorporate its web pages or applications with advanced machine translation systems with multiple languages to allow the users to understand the information clearly.
The growing automobile sector in Europe will fuel the machine translation market demand during the estimated timeframe. Global vehicle manufacturers are increasing their presence in the region to strengthen their positioning and expand their customer base. For instance, in March 2022, Tesla inaugurated a new Gigafactory in Berlin to cater to the demand for Electric Vehicles (EVs) in Europe. The factory is estimated to produce nearly 500,000 vehicles at the site annually, employing over 12,000 people. Companies in the sector use machine translation technology for corporate communication, training materials for operations, and technical document translation. MT helps them in streamlining communication and reducing the overall cost.
Some major findings of the machine translation market report are:
- The integration of AI in machine translation solutions will drive market growth. AI-based technology enables accurate, smooth, and automatic translation of one natural or written language into another target language. It estimates the quality of the machine-translated content.
- A growing focus on content localization for better communication across businesses will boost the industry growth. Several companies from different sectors are investing in the technology for translating documents, manuals, and key information to prevent any financial & operational loss.
- Increasing utilization of machine translation technology in the e-commerce sector will drive the industry expansion. Through these solutions, the market players are focusing on offering multi-lingual applications to the end-users, enabling a broad range of customers to understand the terminology in their preferred language.
- Growing emphasis from technology providers on expanding their language and dialect lists will accelerate the market size. This factor will allow more customers to use these services for different applications.
- Rising adoption of cloud services across SMEs and large organizations will spur machine translation technology deployment. Companies in different sectors utilize cloud technology due to its scalability, flexibility, and data security aspects. MT solutions can be easily integrated with the existing cloud infrastructure.
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Partial chapters of report table of contents (TOC):
Chapter 2 Executive Summary
2.1 Machine translation industry 360º synopsis, 2018 – 2030
2.1.1 Business trends
2.1.2 Regional trends
2.1.3 Technology trends
2.1.4 Deployment model trends
2.1.5 Application trends
Chapter 3 Machine Translation Industry Insights
3.1 Introduction
3.2 Impact of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic
3.3 Ukraine-Russia war impact
3.4 Industry ecosystem analysis
3.5 Technology & innovation landscape
3.6 Regulatory landscape
3.7 Industry impact forces
3.8 Investment portfolio
3.9 Growth potential analysis
3.10 Porter's analysis
3.11 PESTEL analysis
About Global Market Insights
Global Market Insights Inc., headquartered in Delaware, U.S., is a global market research and consulting service provider; offering syndicated and custom research reports along with growth consulting services. Our business intelligence and industry research reports offer clients with penetrative insights and actionable market data specially designed and presented to aid strategic decision making. These exhaustive reports are designed via a proprietary research methodology and are available for key industries such as chemicals, advanced materials, technology, renewable energy and biotechnology.
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Vermonter Daisy Rockwell wins the International Booker Prize for her translation of 'Tomb of Sand' - Vermont Public Radio - Translation
Daisy Rockwell comes from a family of artists — some of whose work may be displayed on your kitchen calendar, or the surfaces of your chinaware, or hanging on the walls at your local doctors office.
Rockwell is the granddaughter of Norman Rockwell, who spent his later years living in Arlington, Vermont. She learned to use a paintbrush before a pencil. Her artistic work is truly inspiring, but it’s her work in translation that has brought new fame to the Vermont-based artist, writer and translator.
Rockwell has won the prestigious International Booker Prize for her translation of the novel Tomb of Sand, by Geetanjali Shree, from Hindi to English.
VPR’s Mitch Wertlieb spoke with author, artist and translator Daisy Rockwell. Their conversation below has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Daisy Rockwell: It's very exciting for me, because I have been translating for many years, decades in fact, but all my work has been published in India. It has been very difficult to find a publisher outside of India. So I was commissioned to do this project by Tilted Axis Press in the U.K. And the success coming from the long-listing and short-listing and subsequently the award makes it possible to publish the work in the United States for the first time. And that deal was just announced with Harper Via.
Mitch Wertlieb: I'd love to hear more about the relationship between translator and author. How did you two find each other? And how was this translation work done?
I was actually approached by a Bangla translator, who had been contacted by the U.K. publisher — [Shree] wanted to have this book translated. So he was kind of a matchmaker between me and the author.
So, initially she agreed to allow me to translate it. And then I did an entire first draft, which takes a long time. Then I started sending her questions, and I was going to go to India to work with her on it in person, because it was a very difficult novel to translate. But then the pandemic hit. So we ended up exchanging hundreds and hundreds of emails. We never Zoomed or spoke on the phone. And we actually met for the first time last week in London.
"... illustration and translation are very similar, because in both cases, you are transferring one thing into an entirely different medium. And even though translation is words, it's still a completely different set of words. The translator rewrites the entire book in a different language, so they've written every word of the book, they've reinterpreted it."
Daisy Rockwell, winner of International Booker Prize
What was that like, when you actually finally got to meet each other after this two-year correspondence of translation? It must have been amazing.
It was amazing, but we also felt like old friends. I mean, we had been through so much together already. So it was in some ways just like meeting someone I had known forever.
If you had to describe this book to someone, what about it stood out to you? What makes it a great book, in your estimation?
This book is extremely experimental, and Geetanjali plays with conventions and crosses borders in all different ways. And lately, I've been thinking that the English book that it most resembles for me is Ulysses by James Joyce. So think about that totally unconventional use of language, that pushing of the borders of the language that you're using.
And you know, plot is there. But for example, it's for some readers consternation, the main character doesn't get out of bed for the first 200 pages, while her family is swirling around her doing their thing, because it's a big Indian, joint family. And it's in that way kind of pushing the conventions of storytelling: What do you expect a story to be? What is a plot? You know, what are protagonists supposed to do? And then on top of it all, just those constant word-play and linguistic pyrotechnics.
Daisy Rockwell, Courtesy
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I'm so curious too, about your journey from artist to translator. I mean, right in your bio, you say you made a detour into academia in the late 90s. And I'm wondering if that's when you started to get into translation work?
Yeah, I mean, I always enjoyed studying languages from middle school on. I then went on to college and eventually started studying Hindi, kind of on a whim. And it just drew me, and it was very challenging for me, because I had no background or previous knowledge about Indian culture.
But I just was drawn in, and I ended up getting a Ph.D. in South Asian languages and literature and pursuing kind of an academic career for some time. So I did start to translate at that time, when I was in graduate school.
I wonder if you think translation is a kind of artwork in that you are painting a picture from something else. I mean, these words are going to be translated into languages that people are familiar with and that they can understand. But it's not the original. You're painting a kind of picture in a way, aren't you?
Absolutely. And I've been thinking about this a lot, because I also painted the image that's used on the cover of the Indian edition of the book. And I started to think about how illustration and translation are very similar, because in both cases, you are transferring one thing into an entirely different medium. And even though translation is words, it's still a completely different set of words. The translator rewrites the entire book in a different language, so they've written every word of the book, they've reinterpreted it. So in some senses, I think there is a lot in common between translation and illustration.
I want to ask just one more question. And this is not related to your translation of this book. But you know, Rockwell is a fairly common name. I'm just curious, though, when people do meet you, if it does come up in conversation from someone you've never met before that, "Oh, I, you know, Norman Rockwell was my grandfather." What is the reaction to that? Is it overwhelming in some ways? And what is it like to be the granddaughter of someone so famous?
It was a bit overwhelming, you know, to be an artist myself, and to have that kind of hovering over my head. But what's interesting to me is that a lot of people, when they find out I studied Hindi, and now that I'm a translator, they somehow think it's a contradiction in a way — that Norman Rockwell is so American that it's kind of contradictory that I would study an Indian language.
And it's funny, because they don't realize what a cosmopolitan man he was. And he in fact, traveled to India and Pakistan, and he painted the portrait of India's first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru. So that's really not contradictory in my mind at all.
Have questions, comments or tips? Send us a message or tweet Morning Edition host Mitch Wertlieb @mwertlieb.
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