To Foreignize or to Domesticate: Notes After Leading a Translation Seminar - lareviewofbooks - Translation

WHILE WE ARE INTRODUCING ourselves, one of the participants, Christopher Woodall, says that although he dislikes the words “foreignize” and “domesticate,” he recognizes that they are useful descriptions of two contradictory pulls he has always felt in his work. I at once find myself saying that I mistrust any translator who doesn’t feel both of these pulls. On the one hand, we want to bring a work into English in order to make it accessible; on the other hand, it may well be something about the work’s otherness that attracted us to it in the first place. There may be little point in our translating it unless we can preserve some of its otherness.

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I begin by quoting a passage that Walter Benjamin quotes in his seminal essay “The Task of the Translator”:

The basic error of the translator is that he preserves the state in which his own language happens to be instead of allowing his language to be powerfully affected by the foreign tongue. […] He must expand and deepen his language by means of the foreign language. It is not generally realized to what extent this is possible.

What most strikes me as I read this is the last sentence. I have often, I say, worried away for months about whether or not a particular sentence of a translation is possible in English, or whether it is over the top. Then I have seen it in proof, or in a published volume, and wondered what on earth I was anxious about.

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One of the finest prose translations of the last century, I believe, is the S. S. Koteliansky/D. H. Lawrence/Leonard Woolf translation of Ivan Bunin’s short story “The Gentleman from San Francisco.” Koteliansky provided a literal version; this was edited first by Lawrence, for publication in The Dial, then by Leonard Woolf, for a book published by the Hogarth Press. Lawrence and Woolf both had a light touch as editors; they knew when to leave well alone. They understood that an intelligent literal translation often needs only the most delicate of adjustments to become poetry. Wanting to move from generalities to discussion of a specific text, I hand out a page with a few excerpts from this translation.

a) “Naples grew and drew nearer. The brass band, shining with the brass of their instruments, had already assembled on deck.”

This is strikingly vivid and almost literal, though the repetition of “brass” is not in the original. Bunin has muzykanty (musicians) where the translators have “brass band.” I am surprised that this pleasingly brassy repetition attracts criticism from some of the group. I have often noticed how often people want me to edit out any repetitions, any archaisms, any inversions from my own translations. Is there perhaps today an element of the puritanical in many people’s attitude towards language?

b) “strings of bare-shouldered ladies rustling with their silks on the staircases and reflecting themselves in the mirrors”

“Reflecting themselves” is both brilliant and outrageously literal — the Russian is a standard reflexive form which most people would have translated simply as “being reflected.” “Reflecting themselves” suggests that the ladies are engaged in an activity, perhaps making the tiniest of movements as they scrutinize themselves. It also carries a hint of “reflecting upon themselves”; on their way down to dinner, the ladies feel self-conscious.

c) “A heavy fog hid Vesuvius to the base, and came greying low over the leaden heave of the sea”

Russian often uses verbs of color where English uses the verb “to be.” “A tree was greening at the end of the garden,” for example, is a literal translation of an entirely normal Russian sentence. “Came greying low” seems to me very successful indeed. A literal translation would be “was greying low.” Changing “was” to “came” does just enough to accommodate the un-English idiom, without making it any less strange or vivid. Rhythmically, the second half of the sentence is perfect.

d) “he began to make preparations as if for his wedding. He turned on all the electric lights, and filled the mirrors with brilliance and reflection of furniture and open trunks.”

The millionaire thinks he is getting ready for dinner; rather than getting married, however, he is about have a heart attack and die. The translators have rightly chosen not to add articles to any of the nouns at the end of this sentence. Russian has neither definite nor indefinite articles; a more plodding translator would have written something like “filled the mirror with the brilliance and reflections of the furniture and open trunks.” The transcendental — or mock-transcendental — quality of this moment would have been lost.

e) “where the lonely parrot woodenly muttered something as he bustled himself in his cage”

Here, I think Lawrence slipped up. “Bustled himself,” like “reflecting themselves,” is hyper-literal. Unlike “reflecting themselves,” it is odd without being interesting or expressive. I imagine that Leonard Woolf felt the same. By the time of the story’s second publication “bustled himself” had been changed to “bustled about.”

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While preparing for the seminar, I realized that today’s debates about translation contain little that is new, little that was not said — usually more clearly — during the great 16th- and 17th-century debates on translating the Bible. The vivid language of those debates was, to a striking degree, dominated by a single central metaphor: that of light. The Puritans, in their Bible as in their churches, wanted clarity above all; they had no time for deliberate mystery or obscurity, for stained glass or its literary equivalent. The Catholics and High Anglicans, on the other hand, were more afraid of creating an illusion of clarity, of misleading people into thinking they understand mysteries that lie beyond understanding. In today’s jargon, they were foreignizers. The Rheims-Douai Bible, the Catholic translation published in 1582 (The New Testament) and 1610 (The Old Testament) has been described by Benson Bobrick in his study Wide As the Waters (2011) as “an eminently learned, often excellent English version of the text studded with Latinate terms and phrases in which words were either transliterated or retained in their original form.” Some of their coinages have entered the language; some, like “inquination” and “correption,” are as incomprehensible to most people today as they were at the time.

These translators were following in the footsteps of one of Henry VIII’s most conservative bishops, Stephen Gardiner. According to Bobrick, Gardiner came to a 1542 meeting about the translation of the Bible with a list of 99 Latin words,

“which for their genuine and native meaning, and for the majesty of the matter in them contained,” he thought should not be translated at all, but only Anglicized. The list included: poenitentia (penitence or penance); caritas (love or charity);  gratia (favor or grace); ecclesia (congregation or church); sacramentum (mystery or sacrament); simulacrum (image); idolum (idol); spiritus sanctus (holy ghost); benedictio (blessing); adorare (to worship); and elementa (rudiments).

These words, in Gardiner’s view, were so important, and so sacred, that it was better not to translate them at all than to translate them imperfectly. The Protestants, not surprisingly, had little time for this way of thinking:

“Wanting the power to keep the light of the Word from shining,” one of them wrote, “[Gardiner] sought, out of policy, to put the light of the Word in a dark lantern … to teach the laity their distance; who, though admitted into the outer court of common matter, were yet debarred entrance into the holy of holies of these mysterious expressions, reserved only for the understanding of the high priest.”                              

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I recently encountered the same arguments as those put forward by Gardiner and the Catholic translators of the Bible in a book by a Polish journalist, Mariusz Wilk. The original, Polish text of his Journals of a White Sea Wolf, an account of two years he spent in the Solovky Islands in the White Sea, is — like the Catholic Bible — studded with foreign words and phrases; Wilk’s untranslated words, however, are not Latin but Russian. Wilk feels torn between two opposite wishes. On the one hand, he passionately wants to understand and explain Russia; after traveling huge distances and feeling that the country always somehow escaped him, Wilk thought he might do better to stay in one place and explore it more deeply — and the Solovky Islands, he felt, were a microcosm of the entire country. On the other hand, Wilk clearly has a deep feeling that Russia will always resist both his own understanding and that of his readers. It is precisely in order to emphasize Russia’s alienness, to prevent readers from glibly translating Russian reality into their own familiar terms, that he leaves so many words untranslated, as well as leaving peculiarly Soviet bureaucraticisms or awkward bits of slang in the original Russian; he even chooses not to translate the word for potato, “kartoshka.” It is impossible, he says, for foreigners to imagine the almost transcendental importance of the “kartoshka” in the lives of the inhabitants of the islands. And so, like a contemporary Bishop Gardiner, he has studded his Polish with words from an alien tongue.

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Shortly before the Passover, according to Saint Mark, a woman pours “ointment of spikenard” over Jesus’s head. In the King James Bible, the story continues as follows:

And there were some that had indignation within themselves, and said, Why was this waste of the ointment made? For it might have been sold for more than three hundred pence, and have been given to the poor. And they murmured against her. And Jesus said, Let her alone; why trouble ye her? she hath wrought a good work on me.

This story encapsulates the perennial battle between puritanical good sense and the love of ritual and celebration. Exactly the same battle, curiously, has been fought with regard to the question of how the “murmurers” complaint should be translated. Martin Luther quotes this sentence as it appears in the Vulgate, “Ut quid perditio ista unguenti facta est?” and continues,

If I follow those literalist donkeys, then I have to render it as “Why has this losing of the ointment occurred?” But what sort of German is that? What German person would say, “Losing of the ointment has occurred”? And even supposing he can make sense of it, he will think that the ointment has been lost and that perhaps he should go and look for it […] What a German would say is […] “Why such a waste?” [or] “It’s a waste of good ointment.” That is good German.

Luther, as always, writes clearly and sharply, but he ignores the fact that the language of the Vulgate has been deliberately heightened. Clearly no lover of mystery and extravagance himself, Luther would, I suspect, have been one of those who “murmured against” the woman. Four hundred years later, the translators of the New English Bible followed his lead with their clear, idiomatic, no-nonsense “Why this waste?’

The translators of the King James Bible, however, achieved something different — and perhaps more profound. “Why was this waste of the ointment made?” might seem to be exactly the kind of translation Luther was criticizing; it is certainly not idiomatic English. Considered more deeply, however, this literal translation is eloquent — both rhythmically and through its suggestion that the woman who pours ointment on Christ’s head has not wasted something but has acted creatively, has made something. She is, without knowing it, preparing Jesus for his final drama, for the Last Supper and Crucifixion. As Jesus himself says, she has “wrought a good work.” [1]                                      

¤

In principle, I say, my sympathies are on the side of the foreignizers. All too often, however, I see their arguments being used in order to defend poor translations. Plausible statements about reproducing the original “in all its uniqueness” or “in all its oddity” serve to introduce work that looks as if it has been dashed off with no thought at all. As I say this, there is a general murmur of assent; the participants in the seminar, mostly practicing translators rather than academics, clearly feel the same.

It is easy enough to write odd English; it is harder to write English that is convincingly odd. The best translators, I suggest, are those who are willing to be bold and extravagant when this is appropriate but who also know when to be simple. The King James Bible, for example, is full of eloquent Hebraicisms, but it does not employ a large vocabulary, and many of the most memorable verses, like the following, are remarkably simple: “When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy.”

Another important point is that, for the main part, interesting English versions are likely to emerge not so much because translators want to write unusual English as because they feel they have no choice; they are compelled to write unusual English because more ordinary English cannot convey what is important in the original. Mary Phil Korsak’s translation of the Book of Genesis, for example, is shockingly different from any previous translation, but what motivates her to disrupt normal English syntax and vocabulary is not simply a love of exoticism. On the contrary, she justifies what might seem high-handed treatment of English vocabulary with convincing clarity:

In some rare cases, the systematic adoption of one and the same word in the target language involves an adaptation of English to Hebrew usage. By way of an example I will take the verb yalad, which I have translated by “to breed.” In Hebrew yalad is used for men, women, and animals. […] I suggest that the use of a single verb for humans and animals implies kinship between the species. […] The noun toledot is formed from the same root as the above-mentioned verb yalad. […] I have translated toledot by “breedings”:
          These are the breedings of the skies and the earth at their creation.
          This is the record of the breedings of Adam.
The breedings of Noah […] of Esau, of Jacob! A single root links animal life, human life, and the life of the universe. Through these cross-connections the whole of creation and the whole of human history are seen to be united in a single process of birth.

Korsak has not, like the early translators of the Bible and the classics, brought new rhythms and intonations into English literature. The power of her work arises from something different — from the unusual degree of attention she has brought to bear on each individual word of the original text.

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Advocates of foreignizing often say that a translation should sound like a translation; it is wrong, they say, to assume that a perfect translation into, say, English should sound as if it were originally written in English. This view may be dangerous if taken too far; nevertheless, there are certainly occasions when it is helpful to be honest, to lay bare the nature of the genre in which one is writing. Mary Phil Korsak, for example, can emphasize her point about the kinship between humanity, the animal kingdom, and the universe as a whole only by drawing the reader’s attention to the foreign words she is importing from a foreign world.

I have myself been trying for some time to introduce the word toskà into English. In our translation of Platonov’s Happy Moscow, my collaborators and I have consistently left the word untranslated. In my preface I quote Vladimir Nabokov’s explanation of this quintessentially Russian word, a word that is central to Russians’ understanding of themselves:

No single word in English renders all the shades of toskà. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody or something specific, nostalgia, lovesickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom.

After my reading of this quotation, one of the participants in the seminar remarks that no one expects Nabokov to explain the word ennui. At some point, however, it must have seemed as alien as the word toskà does today.

What I have come to realize more and more, however, is the complexity of the factors that determine whether or not a particular foreign word is acceptable in a particular context. In Happy Moscow, one of Platonov’s most complex and discordant works, my collaborators and I felt able to use toskà quite frequently. Sometimes this is because Platonov himself calls attention to the word. Here, for example, the word toskà is not necessary to the sense of the sentence and therefore attracts considerable emphasis in the original: “[The musician] said he was playing for himself now, because he felt melancholy and full of toskà; he was unable to go to sleep until dawn, and that was still a long way off.” Sometimes it is because of the power and strangeness of Platonov’s imagery that it seemed right to use an unfamiliar word:

In the daytime Sartorius was nearly always happy, satisfied by the work he was doing, but during the nights, as he lay on his back on heaps of old files, toskà was born inside him, a restless yearning that grew up from beneath the bones of his chest like the tree that climbed towards the vaulted ceiling of the Old Merchants’ Arcade and rustled its black leaves there.

Sometimes the unfamiliar of the word in English serves to intensify a horror that is present in the original but which could easily be lost in translation: “It was impossible for him to remain the same uninterrupted person, he was being gripped by toskà.”

To our surprise, however, we found ourselves unable to use the word toskà when we came to translate Soul, Platonov’s Central Asian novel. Soul is a more coherent, more optimistic, and less jagged work than Happy Moscow. The language is less rebarbative; it calls less attention to itself. Platonov uses the word toskà a number of times, but it does not represent such an inescapable and overwhelming force as in Happy Moscow. Perhaps for these reasons, perhaps for reasons I cannot articulate, it never felt right to use toskà in our translation of Soul. Each time we tried to use the word, it unbalanced the sentence. Here, for example, it seems merely distracting: “[A]nd his heart grew exhausted from wandering, from the memory and toskà he felt for Ksenya, Aidym, and Khanom.” We ended up replacing toskà with “longing.”

Another occasion when I have deliberately left a word untranslated is in my translation of Eugène Guillevic's Carnac. This poem cycle is a meditation on the megalithic site in Brittany, on the stones and the sea, on time and space. As well as frequent irregular rhymes on père and pierre, there is a repeated background pun on mère and mer. Most of the time it seemed acceptable to glide over this, since the association between the sea and the mother is clear enough to the reader even without this pun. The following short poem, however, obstinately refused to be turned into English; every possible version seemed limp and lifeless:

Si par hasard tu crois à la valeur des sons
Tu dois bien frissonner
A ce seul nom de mer.

It was only as I was going through the proofs that I realized there was a solution, one that was simultaneously simple and complex:

If you happen to believe in the power of sounds,
Then you must surely shiver
At the mere word: mer.

Incorporating one tiny word of French, which every reader is sure to understand, allows the word “mere” to fill with meaning. As well as the surface meaning, the word evokes not only the French mère but also the old English “mere” meaning “lake” or “sea.” It is a triple pun, and every meaning is relevant. To acknowledge the impossibility of translation does not always mean to admit defeat.

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Amazed as I am at how seldom people mention Ezra Pound these days, I rarely miss an opportunity to mention him myself. I ended the seminar by reading the opening of his translation from the Anglo-Saxon, “The Seafarer.” More than any other translator I know, Pound succeeds both in seeming fresh and modern (even though it is now 90 years since he translated “The Seafarer”) and in evoking another time and another world:

May I for my own self song’s truth reckon,
Journey’s jargon, how I in harsh days
Hardship endured oft.
Bitter breast-cares have I abided,
Known on my keel many a care’s hold,
And dire sea-surge, and there I oft spent
Narrow nightwatch nigh the ship’s head
While she tossed close to cliffs. Coldly afflicted,
My feet were by frost benumbed.
Chill its chains are; chafing sighs
Hew my heart round and hunger begot
Mere-weary mood.

¤

Robert Chandler’s translations from Russian include works by Alexander Pushkin, Vasily Grossman, Andrey Platonov, and Teffi. He has also written a short biography of Pushkin and compiled three anthologies for Penguin Classics: of Russian short stories, of Russian magic tales, and, with Boris Dralyuk and Irina Mashinski, The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry. His latest translation is Vasily Grossman’s The People Immortal (NYRB Classics, 2022).

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Featured image: “The Anointing of Jesus at Bethany” by Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld (1794–1872).

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[1] I am indebted for much of this paragraph to Adam Nicolson’s fine Power and Glory: Jacobean England and the Making of the King James Bible (2003).

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Hot Summer 2022 New Releases by Women in Translation - Book Riot - Translation

August is Women in Translation Month! Less than 31% of books published in English translation are written by women, according to numbers pulled from the translation database started by Three Percent and Open Letter and now hosted by Publishers Weekly. Founded by literary blogger Meytal Radzinski and now in its ninth year, Women in Translation Month was started to promote women writers from around the world and combat this dreadfully low statistic. As summer rolls around each year, I go through catalogs and read a stack of galleys and pick out some of the titles by women in translation I’m most excited about published in June, July, and August.

With each new year, Women in Translation Month gets bigger, and it’s a joy to see the bookstore displays, literary events, excitement on social media, special sales, and all of the books published around this time of year, often by small independent publishers who make it a priority to include and increase the amount of books they publish by women in translation. This year’s list is a fascinating mixture of debut novels, some returning favorites like author Sayaka Murata and translator Ginny Tapley Takemori, short story collections, poetry, and so much more so I encourage you to check out these hot summer 2022 new releases by women in translation!

Summer 2022 New Releases by Women in Translation

Dogs of Summer by Andrea Abreu, translated by Julia Sanches

I love novels of summer. The kind that capture the sticky heat and restlessness that seeps into everything. Everything is just a little more intense in the summer. The emotions a little closer to the surface. It’s as if someone forgot to turn the volume down even though the pace of the world has slowed. Set in a working-class neighborhood on the Canary Islands, high near the volcano of northern Tenerife, Dogs of Summer is a perfect summer novel that follows two best friends as they come of age and their friendship begins to simmer with desire and violence. The writing is a crave inducing mix of bachata lyrics, Canary dialect, and the language of girlhood — gritty, wild, poetic — an exquisite feat by debut author Andrea Abreu and renowned translator Julia Sanches.

Chinatown by Thuân, translated by Nguyễn An Lý

Acclaimed Vietnamese author Thuận is a recipient of the Writers’ Union Prize, the highest award in Vietnamese literature and Chinatown is her twelfth novel, but her first to be released in English, although I doubt it will be the last. This novel is an intense and propulsive stream of consciousness journey through Hanoi, Leningrad, and Paris as one woman recounts and tries to make sense of her life and past. The question she spins around is: Is it actually possible to forget in order to live? Chinatown is a rich and surprising novel of love, memory, and loss.

When the Night Agrees to Speak to Me by Ananda Devi, translated by Kazim Ali

Acclaimed Mauritian writer Ananda Devi, who readers may know from Eve out of her Ruins and The Living Days, both translated in staggeringly gorgeous prose by Jeffrey Zuckerman, returns with a collection of poetry, this time translated by writer, poet, and translator Kazim Ali. “Let the truth leave these bodies” writes Devi in a complex and personal collection that blends poetry and autobiography and speaks in powerful truths to desire, violence, and aging. This beautiful bilingual collection also includes a translator’s note, a fascinating interview between Devi and Ali, and a short essay on reading Devi’s poetry by academic Mohit Chandna.

Witches by Brenda Lozano, translated by Heather Cleary

Paloma is dead. Her death brings together city journalist Zoe and Paloma’s cousin Feliciana, a renowned Indigenous curandera or healer in the mountain village of San Felipe. Together the two women explore trauma and healing in the wake of deeply engrained societal violence against women and gender-nonconforming people. Brenda Lozano is one of the most striking voices of a new generation of Latin American writers and I’m in awe of her thoughtful blending of these two narratives and styles. And Heather Cleary’s razor sharp translator’s note examines the political and cultural implications of the choices translators make in their work.

Bad Handwriting by Sara Mesa, translated by Katie Whittemore

I adored Sara Mesa’s sharply written and atmospheric novel of power, privilege, and violence, Four by Four, also translated by Katie Whittemore, and was thrilled to see this new short story collection exploring many of the same themes. And while there was sustained terror and tension in Mesa’s novel, these stories feel even stranger and more unsettling in all that is left unsaid inherently in a short story, each pause and ending feel like a sudden drop into darkness. Bad Handwriting is also notably one of the books in Open Letter’s new Translator Triptych program, along with Wolfskin by Lara Moreno and Mothers Don’t by Katixa Agirre, all translated by Whittemore. The program is designed to honor and empower literary translators by emphasizing their role in the discovery, curation, and promotion of international literature.

Talk to My Back by Yamada Murasaki, translated by Ryan Holmberg

Drawn & Quarterly has the most fantastic offerings of literature in translation and so I was thrilled to hear about this first English translation of Yamada Murasaki’s groundbreaking alt-manga Talk to My Back. The comics were originally serialized in the influential magazine Garo from 1981–1984 when few women were creating alternative manga. Yamada details the interior lives of women in the collection, addressing domesticity, womanhood, and the failures of the nuclear family in startlingly fresh and poignant observations. I’m grateful to translator Ryan Holmberg and the publisher for bringing this book and Kuniko Tsurita’s critically-acclaimed The Sky is Blue with a Single Cloud to readers who can now enjoy the work of previously unpublished women of the alt-manga scene.

Where Dogs Bark With Their Tails by Estelle-Sarah Bulle, translated by Julia Grawemeyer

Where Dogs Bark with Their Tales is a stunning novel that is both one family’s story and a sweeping epic of Guadeloupe and its diaspora that spans decades and oceans. I haven’t stopped thinking about the novel’s characters since I finished it — each is written so intimately and vividly, especially the matriarch Antoine. And while there’s a lot that’s hard to read here, as Guadeloupe’s history is marked by colonialism and capitalism and we watch this family search and struggle to find their way in the world, it is a powerful and compelling novel from debut author Estelle-Sarah Bulle and brilliantly translated by Julia Grawemeyer.

Life Ceremony: Stories by Sayaka Murata, translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori

Sayaka Murata is widely admired for her short stories in Japan so it’s thrilling to see Life Ceremony, Murata’s first short story collection available in English, out this summer in another striking translation by Ginny Tapley Takemori. In the same vein as Convenience Store Woman and  Earthlings, this strange, beguiling, and unconventional collection looks closely at societal expectations and pressures to conform to dizzying effect. Her characters are often outcasts and loners, or they exist just on the edge of cultural norms and traditions, and Murata, with humor and brilliance, teases out startling truths about relationships, belonging, individuality, and ultimately the nature of humanity.

For more great reads by women in translation, check out this list of 50 Must-Read Books by Women in Translation.

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Become the ultimate perpetual student with these translation earbuds - Mashable - Translation

TL;DR: As of August 13, you can get the Mymanu CLIK Translation Earbuds(opens in a new tab) for just $157 instead of $220 — that's a 28% discount.

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Whether you’re still in school or long since graduated, every time you touch down in a place you’ve never been, you have a new chance to learn. However, if there’s a language barrier, things might be a little difficult. While you could spend months cultivating a rudimentary mastery over another language, you could also skip a few steps and use a wearable translator(opens in a new tab). 

As of 2021, a little over 20% of the United States was bilingual. The number of people who speak 37 languages is likely considerably less. However, a pair of Mymanu CLIK Translation Earbuds could make you feel like a regular polyglot. These wearable translators could give you real-time speech-to-speech translation in 37 languages, and during our Back to Education Event, they’re on sale for $157 (Reg. $200) until August 24. 

Get almost-instant text and speech translations

If you have plans of traveling the world, these headphones might make it a little easier if you meet someone who only speaks Arabic, Catalan, Czech, German, Spanish, French, Hungarian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Dutch, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, or any of 13 other languages. 

To translate, just pair your CLIK S with the Mymanu Translate app (for iOS or Android). If you want to translate your own language, select your language, then the language you want to translate to on the app. Hold the button on the earbud and speak. A translated version of your speech(opens in a new tab) will appear on the screen and be read aloud automatically. To hear a translation from someone else, complete the same process and hear their words translated automatically in your earbud.

Along with being an incredible translator that might help you connect with people and places around the world, these can also function as a pair of wireless earbuds. They are built for up to 10 hours of listening from a single charge and 20 more hours with the charging case. Listen to your tunes in HD or answer calls and hear your notifications. Plus, they don’t look half bad in sleek matte black. 

Connect to speakers of other languages and learn more about the world

Listen to music and listen to people from around the globe. These Mymanu earbuds(opens in a new tab) can “speak” more languages than 99% of the world, and during our Back to Education event now through August 24, they’re marked down to $157 (Reg. $200), with no coupon code needed. Every unit purchased gives 50 cents to a school or children's charity you can vote on via email after your purchase. 

Prices subject to change.

Credit: Mymanu

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A dictionary transforms a son's grief - KUOW News and Information - Dictionary

After his father's death, Byron Au Yong turned to paper folding.

Chinese paper folding revolves around making objects for the dead. Byron folded some of his father’s personal belongings like vintage textbook pages, magazines, and even retired receipts. The process was meditative and comforting and helped Byron mourn his father. It also helped him connect to his own Chinese American heritage.

The Blue Suit is produced by KUOW in Seattle. Our host, writer, and creator is Shin Yu Pai. Whitney Henry-Lester produced this episode. Jim Gates is our editor. Tomo Nakayama wrote our theme music. Additional music by Byron Au Yong as well as Tony Anderson and Jordan Critz.

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Firefox Translations is going to be a game changer, if... - Ghacks - Translation

Firefox Translations is a translation service for Firefox that Mozilla is working on currently. It is already available as a limited preview that supports a handful of languages and can be installed in any recent version of Firefox. What sets it apart is the fact that the translations happen locally on the user system, and not in the cloud.

At its core, Firefox Translations works similarly to how Chrome's Google Translate or Microsoft Edge's Bing Translate features work: when the user visits a foreign language website, as identified by the languages used on the system or in the browser, translate suggests to translate the content to the system language. When that happens in Chrome or Edge, data is submitted to servers that the companies operate. With Firefox Translations, no such data is submitted. Mozilla does not know the URL of the website, when you accessed it, your IP address, information about your system, or the information that the site contains.

Another difference between the two translations systems is that Firefox Translations needs to download language information the first time a language is selected for translation; this may be a bit inconvenient for users who have access to slow Internet connections only, but it is a one-time process for each language.

Firefox Translations is a game changer

Firefox Translations improves privacy significantly when using translate services. Vivaldi Browser offers the next best thing, by hosting translate servers that users of the browser use. While you could argue that this is not really that different from Google hosting its Translate servers, it is clear that both companies have a different stance on user privacy. Google is an advertising company first and foremost, and data is what increases the company's revenue.

Firefox Translations fills a feature gap in the Firefox browser. Translate functionality is important to many users, and Google's integration of Google Translate in Chrome was a game changer at the time. It improved translations by making them convenient in the browser. No longer was it necessary to install a browser extension or open a translate website manually to get a translated version of a site.

Mozilla's service is a work in progress, and there are several restrictions and limitations currently that hold it back. If Mozilla manages to address these, Firefox Translations could very well become another game changer when it comes to in-browser translations.

The ifs...

Language support is still a work in progress; this is without a doubt the main limitation right now. Firefox Translations supports a dozen or so languages, including English, French, Spanish, German and several others, but it lacks support for hundreds of others, not even counting languages such as Klingon or Borg. It takes time to get support added for these, which, in the meantime, limits the reach of Firefox Translations.

Firefox integration is provided via a browser extension currently. Native support improves the usability, as translate functionality is built-in then and not dependent on the installation of a browser extension. To compete with Chrome's translate service, Firefox Translations needs to become a native feature of Firefox.

Translation options need an option to always translate a particular language; this does not seem to be supported at the time. While users may select the "never translate language" option, no such option to always translate a specific language or site is provided.

Last but not least, there needs to be an option to translate specific text parts such as a paragraph or a sentence.

Closing Words

Firefox Translations is a huge undertaking that improves Firefox already and will improve Firefox for lots of users in the future. Time is an issue, as language support is lacking and needs to expand. While Mozilla is working on that, the organization can't afford to continue working on the service for several years before it is ready to compete with the cloud-based translation services in regards to language support.

Several Chromium-based browser makers may be interested in Firefox Translations. Brave Software, for instance, decided against integrating Google Translate natively in the browser. It displays a prompt to users to install Google Translate, but that has privacy implications and reduced functionality when compared to Chrome's native offering. It is unclear if these companies could integrate Firefox Translations in their browsers.

Now You: what is your take on Firefox Translations?

Summary

Article Name

Firefox Translations is going to be a game changer, if...

Description

Firefox Translations is a local translate feature that Mozilla is working on for the Firefox web browser that could become a game changer.

Author

Martin Brinkmann

Publisher

Ghacks Technology News

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Translation errors in police interviews could send innocent people to jail - BBC Science Focus Magazine - Translation

Picture this. You are in a foreign country. The police arrest you and realise that you don’t speak the language. So, they organise someone to translate. If you’re lucky, the person they contact is a professional interpreter. If you’re unlucky, the person is a multilingual police officer who happens to speak your language just well enough to scrape through an interview. Either way, you are now having to talk through someone else.

Does this interpreter-mediated interviewing put you at a disadvantage? If so, how much? The answer to this lies at the intersection of criminal psychology and cognitive linguistics, where researchers have realised that interpreters are an overlooked barrier between suspects and their freedom.

One of the most active researchers looking at these issues is Luna Filipović, a professor of language and cognition based at the University of East Anglia. She has been studying the effects of multilingual police interviews for more than a decade.

She writes that having someone to translate can be taken for granted, and that it’s enough to make a police interview fair, but this is incorrect. It ignores how difficult translation is, and the problems that come from the logistics of translating in typically high-pressure, highly emotional legal settings.

An interpreter might not speak both languages equally well, so important words or descriptions can get mistranslated. Some words don’t have equivalents, and turns of phrase translated literally can become nonsensical or misleading. Then there’s the issue that if everything is translated without emotion, words lose context… but acting things out theatrically can equally distort how statements are perceived.

Filipović has found various kinds of errors which can creep in and influence trustworthiness. In an example Filipović lists in her 2007 research, the Spanish word amigo is translated by an interpreter into the familiar friend instead of the unfamiliar guy. When the police officer then asks what the name of this friend was, the suspect says he doesn’t know, to which the officer reacts with suspicion.

This kind of error can lead to a general feeling that a suspect has something to hide, when really all that’s happening is a language barrier that neither side realises is there.

Then there’s the problem of “inadvertent confessions”. An inadvertent confession happens when someone seems to be giving a confession to police, without realising that’s what they are doing. It can also happen when police think they have a confession, or an admission of guilt for part of a crime, when that’s not actually the case. In other words, it’s a statement that incorrectly gets translated into, or understood as, a confession.

In 2021 Filipović published research on UK and US police interviews. She provides an example of a real US case, in which a suspect is accused of murder who only speaks Spanish. The following is a transcription of the interaction, with the translation in brackets added afterwards by another person who speaks Spanish and English.

Police Officer: Okay, and then what did you do with her?

Interpreter: Y que pasó? [And what happened?]

Suspect: . . . se me cayó en las gradas.

Interpreter: . . . I dropped her on the steps.

Police Officer: Where did you drop her?

Interpreter: Donde la botaste? [Where did you throw her?]

Suspect: Aqui. . . [Here. . .]

This doesn’t seem like much, but as Filipović explains, the suspect was using a Spanish sentence that makes it clear that he let the woman fall by accident. Because there isn’t a single word for this in English, the interpreter went for the closest alternative, dropped.

However, in this context it makes it sound like he did it on purpose. Presumably not noticing the swap, the suspect then inadvertently confesses to the much more serious crime of murdering a woman by throwing her down the stairs rather than dropping her by accident. This nuance that was lost in translation could potentially cost him life in prison.

Because of such problems, Filipović has found that those who speak no or little English are more likely to incriminate themselves inadvertently in the US or UK than people whose first language is English.

If you do ever find yourself accused of a crime in a foreign country, try to get a professional interpreter as opposed to multilingual relatives, friends, or police. Regularly double-check that you really understand what the police officer is asking.

And, you could ask for a transcript of the interview to be made available afterwards, which can also help police, lawyers, and judges, see any mistranslations that may have crept in.

Be that slightly annoying person who asks too many questions because the alternative is likely much, much, worse.

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Become the ultimate perpetual student with these translation earbuds - Mashable - Translation

TL;DR: As of August 13, you can get the Mymanu CLIK Translation Earbuds(opens in a new tab) for just $157 instead of $220 — that's a 28% discount.

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Whether you’re still in school or long since graduated, every time you touch down in a place you’ve never been, you have a new chance to learn. However, if there’s a language barrier, things might be a little difficult. While you could spend months cultivating a rudimentary mastery over another language, you could also skip a few steps and use a wearable translator(opens in a new tab). 

As of 2021, a little over 20% of the United States was bilingual. The number of people who speak 37 languages is likely considerably less. However, a pair of Mymanu CLIK Translation Earbuds could make you feel like a regular polyglot. These wearable translators could give you real-time speech-to-speech translation in 37 languages, and during our Back to Education Event, they’re on sale for $157 (Reg. $200) until August 24. 

Get almost-instant text and speech translations

If you have plans of traveling the world, these headphones might make it a little easier if you meet someone who only speaks Arabic, Catalan, Czech, German, Spanish, French, Hungarian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Dutch, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, or any of 13 other languages. 

To translate, just pair your CLIK S with the Mymanu Translate app (for iOS or Android). If you want to translate your own language, select your language, then the language you want to translate to on the app. Hold the button on the earbud and speak. A translated version of your speech(opens in a new tab) will appear on the screen and be read aloud automatically. To hear a translation from someone else, complete the same process and hear their words translated automatically in your earbud.

Along with being an incredible translator that might help you connect with people and places around the world, these can also function as a pair of wireless earbuds. They are built for up to 10 hours of listening from a single charge and 20 more hours with the charging case. Listen to your tunes in HD or answer calls and hear your notifications. Plus, they don’t look half bad in sleek matte black. 

Connect to speakers of other languages and learn more about the world

Listen to music and listen to people from around the globe. These Mymanu earbuds(opens in a new tab) can “speak” more languages than 99% of the world, and during our Back to Education event now through August 24, they’re marked down to $157 (Reg. $200), with no coupon code needed. Every unit purchased gives 50 cents to a school or children's charity you can vote on via email after your purchase. 

Prices subject to change.

Credit: Mymanu

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