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PM Modi releases Tok Pisin translation of ‘Thirukkural’ in Papua New Guinea Times of IndiaMonday, May 22, 2023
Sunday, May 21, 2023
PM Releases Tok Pisin Translation Of Book 'Thirukkural' In Papua New Guinea - NDTV - Translation
PM Modi released the Tamil classic 'Thirukkural' in the Tok Pisin language.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi along with his Papua New Guinea counterpart James Marape on Monday released the Tamil classic 'Thirukkural' in the Tok Pisin language to bring the Indian thought and culture closer to the people of this southwestern Pacific nation.
PM Modi arrived in Papua New Guinea on Sunday on his maiden visit to the country, becoming the first Indian prime minister to visit here. He co-hosted with Marape a key summit between India and 14 Pacific island countries to boost bilateral ties.
Tok Pisin is the official language of Papua New Guinea.
"Indian diaspora keeping alive connect with the motherland! PM@narendramodi & PM James Marape launched a translation of the Tamil classic ‘Thirukkural' in the Tok Pisin language of Papua New Guinea," the Ministry of External Affairs tweeted.
Co-authored by Subha Sasindran and Governor Sasindran Muthuvel of West New Britain Province, the book brings Indian thought and culture closer to the people of Papua New Guinea, it said.
"In Papua New Guinea, PM James Marape and I had the honour of releasing the Thirukkural in Tok Pisin language. Thirukkural is an iconic work, which provides valuable insights across different subjects," Prime Minister Modi tweeted.
Thirukkural, a collection of couplets on ethics, political and economic matters, and love, is written by Poet Thiruvalluvar.
"I would like to commend @pngsasi, Governor of the West New Britain Province and Mrs. Subha Sasindran for their effort to translate the Thirukkural in Tok Pisin. Governor Sasindran has done his schooling in Tamil while Mrs. Subha Sasindran is a respected linguist," he said in another tweet.
Prime Minister Modi has previously released a translation of the book in his mother tongue Gujarati.
He has praised Thirukkural on many occasions.
In one of his speeches, the Prime Minister said, "Thirukkural is not only a literary masterpiece but an extraordinary guide for common living. It shows us the path of righteousness and inspires us to lead a selfless life." He also stated that Thirukkural "remains relevant even today and can serve as an inspiration for the present generation." The prime minister has often quoted Thirukkural in his speeches and tweets and even gifted a copy of the book to the late Japanese PM Shinzo Abe in 2014.
“Thirukkural is a treasure trove full of inspiring ideas that youngsters all over the world can read and benefit from," he had said.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
After reading every book at home, I read the dictionary because I was bored —Deborah Oludimu - Tribune Online - Dictionary
A 200-level law student at the University of Ibadan, Deborah Oludimu, who hails from Abeokuta in Ogun State, is a creative that’s passionate about education, good health and well-being, gender equality and climate action – SDGs 3, 4, 5 and 13. In this interview with IFEDAYO OGUNYEMI, the Team Lead for A Pad For Her, an organisation that centres around eradicating poverty in Nigeria, speaks on homeschooling which formed a larger part of her childhood and adolescent years. Excerpts;
A couple of weeks ago, you became the cynosure of all eyes on Twitter when it came to the public light that you were homeschooled. How would you describe the homeschooling process for us?
My homeschooling really started at the end of JSS 1. Before that basically, the bulk of education for me was homeschooling from preschool because I remember learning the ABCs, 123s, how to write and everything taught by my mother at home because I just refused to go to school when I was much younger just like every child cried. So, I have a bit of a medical issue, syndactyly (a condition in which children are born with fused or webbed fingers), which affected my right hand for a while wherein I was in and out of the hospital from 2010 to around 2013. I started secondary school in 2012 and I was in and out of the hospital for that JSS 1 period. I live in Ibadan but I had a surgery in Lagos. So eventually when my whole medical issue was sorted out, I missed JSS 2 and I missed JSS 3 sort of and I was supposed to start again. My mom didn’t want me to start again but to start from SSS 1 and all these schools wanted to rule me out. It was there she asked me if I’d like to study at home. And she got me textbooks, spoke to educators and people my age to know what they’re using in school, etc. And we have always been doing that during the time I was still battling the medical issue.
What kind of subjects did she teach you?
I chose to go to the arts and that means I was taking English Language and Mathematics like everyone else and I was taking Government, Economics, Civic Education, Literature, Yoruba and Christian Religious Studies. She got the textbooks. I started to read them on my own and at my own pace. The only thing I was ever really helped with was my Mathematics because even from primary school, I don’t really like Mathematics that much. Whenever I have issues with it, I’ll go to my dad to help me solve them. I just find mathematics really difficult and I avoid it. Sometimes, I go to my older brother, he was in the sciences, and he would take me through them. Every other thing, I did them myself because my parents were in the sciences just like my brother. Everything was pretty much self-explanatory for me. I just had to sit down with my books and read them and I had to do the practice questions that came with the textbooks and that was it for me.
So I also fancied myself a really competitive person. In 2017, my brother graduated from secondary school, he made all papers and had 302 in JAMB. I challenged myself to get higher than that because we always have this healthy competition at home. When it was time for me to write my final exams, my parents decided to enrol me at a tutorial centre to brush up on everything that I’d been learning while staying at home. It turned out that there hadn’t been much difference between what I did on my own at home and what they were teaching there because I could catch up. Another thing that really helped me was the internet. Growing up, we had this particular room, like a home library, that was just for books. My dad has documents on the computer, so we had access to the computer and the internet. On that computer, my dad installed this software, e-Learner, which had modules across multiple subjects that I used apart from the textbooks that I read. They are not the kind of modules that you see in regular secondary school but they are really similar. The idea for me back then was to read everything I could see because I had more time to myself. It got to a point where I picked up the dictionary to read because I was just bored and I had already read everything I saw. I eventually did three months at the tutorial, I wrote the UTME, I wrote my WAEC and made my papers in one sitting. My first UTME score in 2018 was low and it hurt me to have something around 250. I was told I can’t get into Law with that and I really studied hard for that Post-UTME. I remember that I sleep around by 7 pm, wake up by 2 am and study till 8 am. I sleep from then till 1 pm to study again. In my first post-UTME, I had 81 out of a possible 100 and in my head, I was going to make it and my aggregate score was higher than the cut-off mark for the previous year. But because OAU disaccredited law that year, a lot of people came to UI for post-UTME, and the cut-off mark went higher. It was the highest ever and I didn’t make it that year. I wrote again the following year and I had 290 in JAMB. The post-UTME was more difficult than that of my first attempt but my aggregate score was above 72% and the cut-off was around 70% and here I am now.
What did your mother, father and father who homeschooled you major in?
My brother is also in UI studying Chemistry. My dad studied Computer Science at the University of Lagos. My mum studied Economics at the University of Lagos.
What kinds of jobs were your parents involved in around the time you were homeschooled and how easy was it for them to cope?
My dad was a computer scientist doing IT stuff. My mom did not work for the first 10-12 years of my life. I don’t remember her working during those years. It was in 2014 that she started her own business. Prior to 2014, she was really active in training us. Even after 2014, she was still active with us until around 2017 when her business really broke out and it became a fast-paced thing for her and took up a lot of her time. By then, I was almost done with secondary school anyway, so it didn’t really affect me but at that time, I would say that despite the fact that she wasn’t working, I did a lot of my homeschooling myself because my field and topics are not something that she was familiar with. So, I wouldn’t say if she was working when I was homeschooled, it would have affected me. I don’t think so because she wasn’t really hands-on all of the time. She was hands-on for like 30 percent of the time. My dad was hands-on when I went to him with my mathematical problems, whenever he was around or during the weekends.
Do you think you would have found those post-UTME questions easier if you had gone through the four walls of the classroom?
The questions were much more difficult because the format was different. They changed the format for UTME after 2018 for art students. The way JAMB normally asks questions, and the way WAEC asks questions were completely changed and it was a bit more technical. I wasn’t expecting that because I felt I’d written it before, I know what to do and I know how to read.
Would you say homeschooling and the timetable with which you read naturally make you a nerd?
I wouldn’t say I’m a nerd. I think naturally I’m an introverted person and I love to read. Not all academic books, I just like to read about life. I read a lot of memoirs, I read a lot of African fiction. I basically read everything I saw, and that just made me more of an introverted person than an extroverted person.
Do you still read with that reading schedule or are there modifications to it now?
It’s not the same reading schedule I use now. That’s because I’m not a night person. I read at night then because I wanted to achieve a goal and I was home all day. Now, I get six to 8 hours of classes every day and I’m already tired by the time I get home. Now, I endeavour to read for about four hours per day. Sometimes I read between 5 am and 7 am and later in the evening, I do another two hours. Whenever exams are near, I read between 10 to 15 hours per day because I stop every other engagement including going out. I cut the reading time into two hours per session and rest for about 45 minutes and then again and again.
You were born with syndactyly, what has it been like for you?
Yes, I was born with a condition called syndactyly. For some people, it’s not a painful condition, but it caused a lot of muscle pain in the fingers on my hand. The web here was larger than it is right now and whenever I stretch my hand, the finger turns and it causes a lot of pain that can last for 30 minutes per episode. Before the surgery, I could have about five episodes per day or more, particularly when I write for longer periods. I don’t have random pains again since the surgery unless I stress the hand for too long when writing. Whenever I’m taking my law exams, it causes a lot of pain for me. I couldn’t finish my first law exam. I had to answer four questions but I could only write two and a half. And I had a B when the result came out. Imagine what I could have got if I had finished the required questions.
You had about five to six years’ break from attending regular classes and at the time you went back to classes, first through tutorials and the UI law classes, did you find learning difficult and how would you describe the experience and the transition?
Learning was not difficult for me, it was easy, it came naturally. What became difficult for me was deadlines when I came to the University of Ibadan, and you know throughout my secondary school experience, I never had deadlines, I never had a rigid system to adhere to but when I came here, I have had to go to classes, I have deadlines to meet and I have assignments and it was all just too much because I always had the time to myself and at my own pace but here, I have to do it at the pace of the university. So, that’s a little bit difficult for me to adjust to even now. I get by but I don’t really like that my time is not under my control.
Did you at any point in time get stigmatised because you didn’t come from the regular classroom?
Until the time that I made that tweet, not many people knew I was homeschooled. It was after the tweet went viral that many people expressed their surprise and disbelief at the fact that I was homeschooled.
How did you receive their reactions?
A lot of people called me and stopped me in class trying to confirm if I was really homeschooled. It was really on the WhatsApp status of a lot of my classmates. I didn’t expect it to go that viral. The tweet had about 1.3 million impressions and 13,000 likes and I didn’t envisage that.
Are you now chuffed with the popularity that came with the viral tweet?
As I said earlier, I’ve always been passionate about education. When I made that tweet, a lot of parents or people reached out to me personally saying that they’re trying to homeschool their kids but don’t know how to do it. They want to know how to go about it. They wanted to know how it affected me positively, so I called my parents and told them what I did. And I asked them if it will be possible to have a discussion with parents who fancy the idea of homeschooling so as to put them through how they did it for me. I wasn’t the only one who was homeschooled but I was homeschooled for longer. Some of my siblings were homeschooled for a year or two. Whenever they return to regular class, they are ahead of their peers. So, we want to do our first session in May. I put out a Google Form and about 150 people filled it.
Back then and now, what is your ambition?
Like every other child, I wanted to be a doctor, then I wanted to be a banker and then I realised I want to be a lawyer. If I would ever pursue a career in law, it would be in tech and IP law. I’m really passionate about intellectual property but as of now, I am heavily considering social impact. I currently run an initiative dedicated to eradicating period poverty and I really believe in the power of social impact to change the world, bring up people, pick up problems and shape the world.
Prior to 2020 when I heard about period poverty for the first time, it had never crossed my mind that people do not have what is needed to manage their menstruation or that medical practitioners dismiss period pains or that there was so much about menstruation. I began to read and speak to experts about it and I came across a UNESCO data that says two out of every ten Nigerian girls miss school as a result of period poverty. It was then that I decided to do something about it. Even when I started an organisation that sets up pad banks in school, people take it with so much triviality and say “is it not just pads” without considering how it affects the girl-child. I started by writing about period poverty, and safety tips on how to manage menstruation. For instance, when some ladies experience period pain, they resort to NSAIDs which is one of the leading causes of ulcer and ulcer is growing to be a girl thing because of the abuse of painkillers. We used shared tips in order to correct the misconceptions and communication gaps with menstruation for about six months before we had our first outreach on May 28, 2022, to commemorate World Menstrual Hygiene Day. We reached out to four schools in three different states – Oyo, Lagos and Osun States. We had market sensitisation at Bodija Market, Ibadan and people shared thoughts with us about what they didn’t know about menstruation. That fueled me to do more. In October, we had another outreach in five states – Lagos, Oyo, Osun, Ekiti and Edo States – by setting up pad banks in schools on a sustainable scale to cover SDG 4. We didn’t want the girls to miss school. Whenever parents can’t get pads for their children, the girl can go to the pad bank, drop her name, state her reason for not having a pad and get one from the bank. She doesn’t have to miss school. We have been going back to the said schools to sensitise them and collate the data from the pad banks and drop more pads for them.
Is the management of your school aware of your condition with the hope to make exams easier for you?
After I saw the result of the first exam that I said I couldn’t finish, I knew I wasn’t going to get an A but I cried to my parents and told them about it. They wanted to get my medical records and submit a letter to the dean in order to get extensions for me during exams and all sorts. But I wasn’t someone who loved public attention. I felt that it would be weird that others have submitted and I am allowed to write for extra minutes. I felt that the whole school would want to know and eventually know what was wrong with me. I wrote four exams last semester and what I do now is to practise past questions and attempt to write as much as I can to get me accustomed to the exam structure and timing. This helps me to gauge how much I can write before my hand turns. So, I time myself not to write on more than a certain number of pages when answering each question. I haven’t seen my result for that exam and I’m confident that it will be good. But if it isn’t good because I didn’t write as much as I would have wanted, I’ll tell my parents to go ahead with informing the school.
In what ways did homeschooling affect your social skills?
It affected my social skills a bit because I realised, when I started going to the tutorial, that I wasn’t really free with my peers. I didn’t know how to communicate with my peers as much. There are things that they did that were alien to me. Some of the things they brought and developed from the regular school and I’m just familiar with my mom, my dad and my siblings. I have a really good relationship with people older than me. I can communicate with adults and kids but then, it was sketchy with my peers. I’m balanced up now though. I spoke to them more and I observed them to understand how this or that is done. I’ve been in school for a while now, so that’s balanced out. For anyone who is seeking to homeschool their children, I would say that if you’re concerned about the social skills aspects, you can homeschool them and bring them in contact with their peers through other extracurricular activities. Take for instance learning an instrument, learning to swim or those children’s clubs because we didn’t have because my parents didn’t take us out that much. I just had church. I am sure if they balance homeschooling with extracurricular activities, the child will be good.
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Saturday, May 20, 2023
Action JRPG 'ASTLIBRA Revision' Improved English Translation Releasing This Month - Noisy Pixel - Translation
Publisher WhisperGames and developer KEIZO have announced that their action JRPG ASTLIBRA Revision will receive a polished English translation on May 29, 2023. Additionally, the Korean localization will release on the same date.
The full message from the teams regarding the upcoming language patch is quoted below:
Hello everyone,
We are happy to announce that thanks to the hard work of our proofreader @Chill_Guy17, a completely polished English translation will be released on May 29th!
Apart from the English text update, the official release of the Korean localization will also happen on May 29th! The Korean version is localized by Solarias and co-published by DVORA Studio.
We know you are looking forward to the DLC and Nintendo Switch version. Please be assured that we are working hard on these tasks and will share new information when the time comes.
We thank you all for your continued feedback and support!
P.S. ASTLIBRA Revision is currently participating in the Indie Live Expo event. Don’t hesitate to check the awesome indie games here!
WhisperGames Team
ASTLIBRA Revision is a unique 2D action JRPG boasting some pretty wild story beats and addictive action systems.
If you want to learn more about ASTLIBRA Revision, check out our review of it.
Copy of first English translation of Quran goes on sale at London rare book fair - The National - Translation
A first-edition copy of the oldest English translation of the Quran is to go on sale at a book fair in London.
British rare bookseller H M Fletcher is selling the Quran, which was translated as The Alcoran of Mahomet in 1649 by Alexander Ross.
Mr Ross was chaplain to King Charles I. He did not know Arabic and translated his version from a French translation by Andre du Ryer, published in 1647.
The event is being run by Firsts at the Saatchi Gallery in London.
The fair is hosting more than 100 international antiquarian dealers.
The theme of this year's event is Shakespeare: 400 Years of Influence, celebrating four centuries since the publication of the playwright’s First Folio.
A copy of the First Folio will be presented by Peter Harrington, allowing visitors to see it.
It is one of the rarest of his plays as most copies of The Third Folio were destroyed in the Great Fire of London.
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The fair will include many other artefacts from the Elizabethan age, including Queen Elizabeth I’s Second Great Seal, which was created at a time when she was trying to cement her public image.
Jonkers Rare Books will display a copy of Madagascar, the first edition of the 1638 book of poems by William Davenant, Shakespeare’s godson, which includes the poem In Remembrance of Master William Shakespeare.
Exhibitor Kagerou Bunko will be bringing a first edition of the first Japanese translation of the Merchant of Venice (1883) by Tsutomu Inoue, illustrated by the artist and printmaker Utagawa Yoshimune II.
Among other items, this year’s fair will include a handwritten letter by 16th century English statesman Thomas Cromwell organising the marriage of his son Richard; the complete handwritten manuscript of Arthur Conan Doyle’s story The Bully of Brocas Court, and one of only five handwritten pages from Charles Dickens’s manuscript of The Pickwick Papers still in private hands.
Hyraxia Books will be bringing a series of storyboard drawings made for the opening scenes of the film Superman film 1978.
Many of the books present at Firsts originate from the collections of prominent cultural figures.
Peter Harrington Books will be displaying a copy of Wisden’s Cricketer’s Almanack, the most valuable book on the sport in a copy, which was once owned by the BBC Test Match Special commentator John Arlott.
Firsts London is one of the world's leading rare book fairs and showcases unique and unusual items from more than 100 leading UK and international dealers.
Updated: May 20, 2023, 1:50 PM
Machine translations fail because we talk about violence through silence, says writer Meena Kandasamy - The Hindu - Translation
Since the research release of ChatGPT in December 2022, the number of jobs on the AI hit list has grown exponentially—at least in the public imagination. Writers, artists, and poets have been forced to reflect upon their replaceability; even Google Search cannot escape scrutiny.
But as users discovered that ChatGPT also produced quick and relatively accurate translations (though it prefers the romanised version of the source language), the human translator also joins the list of professionals who may one day be threatened by evolving models like ChatGPT.
Translator, writer, and poet Dr. Meena Kandasamy spoke to The Hindu’s Sahana Venugopal about translating the Kamattu-p-pal couplets (kurals) of the roughly 2,000-year-old Tirukkural, the ChatGPT-human paradigm, a place for AI in the world of linguistics, and those words that no machine can translate.
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Edited excerpts from the conversation:
In The Book of Desire (Galley Beggar Press, 2023) you translated the kurals of the Kamattu-p-pal, exploring love, romance, heartbreak, and human connection. We asked ChatGPT to translate a few of these kurals to see what it did differently from you. How would you rate the result?
Tamil original [Kural 1081]:
அணங்குகொல் ஆய்மயில் கொல்லோ கனங்குழை
மாதர்கொல் மாலும்என் நெஞ்சு.
Romanised:
aṇaṅkukol āymayil kollō kaṉaṅkuḻai
mātarkol mālum eṉ neñcu
Dr. Kandasamy’s translation:
My heart is tossed about:
Is she the lusty she-devil
A flamboyant peacock
Lady of heavy earrings?
ChatGPT’s translation:
“Will the wild elephant, caught in a pit, befriend
The man who dug it, and who knows not how to mend?”
Meena Kandasamy: It’s wrong. How did it translate this? Why the ‘wild elephant’.... Because ‘Anangu’ actually still means a dangerous woman, a dangerous goddess. There’s no word for ‘caught in a pit’ there. There’s no idea about the man who dug it. I think it’s possibly just written a couplet by itself. So this one is really wrong.
Tamil original [Kural 1082]:
நோக்கினாள் நோக்கெதிர் நோக்குதல் தாக்கணங்கு
தானைக்கொண் டன்ன துடைத்து.
Romanised:
nōkkiṉāḷ nōkketir nōkkutal tākkaṇaṅku
tāṉaikkoṇ ṭaṉṉa tuṭaittu
Dr. Kandasamy’s translation:
She looks, her look
A face-off to mine—
Looks like she has brought along
a shocktroop of terrifying goddesses.
ChatGPT’s translation:
“Looking at what is seen, looking at the viewer and looking at the act of seeing, the seer himself is confused.”
MK: I’m sorry, but this one is way off the mark. There’s nothing that refers to the ‘seer’ here, and the translation doesn’t catch anything about either the goddess or the attacking army she’s brought with her, or the fact that there’s a woman involved—because ‘nōkkiṉāḷ’ characterises the female gender—or about ‘nōkketir’, which is ‘direct,’ ‘eye-to-eye.’ If this was submitted by my student, it would be getting fail marks.
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Translating gender in Tamil
The letters ள் [l] or ன் [n], added to the end of words, help listeners understand whether the speaker is talking about a woman or a man carrying out an action. Tamil also uses the gender-neutral ர் [r] to show respect.
Here, Dr. Kandasamy notes that ChatGPT has taken the original word ‘நோக்கினாள்,’ (nōkkiṉāḷ) which refers to a woman gazing at something, and erased her gender in the AI-translated version.
ChatGPT’s translation of a Kural from ‘The Book of Desire’ | Photo Credit: Screenshot from ChatGPT
Tamil original [Kural 1083]:
பண்டறியேன் கூற்றென் பதனை இனியறிந்தேன்
பெண்டகையால் பேரமர்க் கட்டு.
Romanised:
paṇṭaṟiyēṉ kūṟṟeṉ pataṉai iṉiyaṟintēṉ
peṇṭakaiyāl pēramark kaṭṭu
Dr. Kandasamy’s translation:
Once, I never knew of that
which is called Death. Now
I know. It wages war with
A woman’s striking eyes.
ChatGPT’s translation:
“I have searched and found the treasure, a beloved who is a gem among women.”
MK: And this one is my favourite kural, the third one. [after reading] So, ChatGPT has written a kural all by itself.
SV: Can you perhaps see or offer a suggestion as to where these mistakes are coming from?
MK: I think what it has done, is that it understands how kurals work because it’s possibly got within its data set, ‘how kurals work.’ So it understands one or two words and goes on its own trajectory. This is a colossal failure, but at the same time, it’s made up these translations that look almost like it has some meaning. So all of these could pass off as kurals, except they are not translations of the kurals.,
SV: Is this specifically because of the Tamil language? I have seen people using ChatGPT for French-to-English or Spanish-to-English translations and they come out a lot better.
MK: That’s interesting because my partner is both a translator and an interpreter, and he translates his [French] articles on Google Translate and then fixes the mistakes. And he’s been doing this for ages before ChatGPT because it’s so good, it’s almost ready to be used—but it’s not the same for us, right? It’s not the same at all for people using Indian languages.
But I think it might be interesting because at some point, if ChatGPT can recognise Tamil and get as much data as it has for other languages in the Roman script, for Indian languages—not just of contemporary writers but of scholarly or ancient sangam language writing—if it gets that kind of data, I think it would just do a better job.
It would know what it’s talking about, because it’s not like Tamil isn’t accessible. There are wonderful lexicons online [and] all of these words that Valluvar used are alive. I would think that 60-70% are still in daily use, 10% have possibly fallen out of usage, and 20% are words we don’t commonly use. Because if someone like me can translate them, it means it’s very accessible.
SV: So you believe that as long as ChatGPT accesses more Tamil data, its translations will get better?
MK: We cannot get carried away by this, but at some point, automation will keep this language alive. I think it’s going to help languages, even though there are examples like this [the kural translations], but this is something that can be rectified. I don’t think this is a ChatGPT problem as much as a lack of data and some design construct within ChatGPT that wants to mimic structures. The content doesn’t match, but the style is mimicry of the Tirukkural.
SV: Moving from Tiruvalluvar’s time to our own, would you ever be willing to edit AI-translated copy in the future?
MK: Badly written, badly translated stuff exists as much by humans as by machines. So I don’t have any natural bias against machines.
SV: On the other hand, would you use ChatGPT to help you in your own translation work and save time?
MK: I do translation all the time, with my own writing. At some point there are things I feel very strongly about, that exist in the space between Tamil and English, and I translate myself all the time, hunting for this English word because I write in English but I’m a Tamil woman at the heart of it. So for me, that translation is a natural process, it’s a constant process. So why would I use ChatGPT? The need wouldn’t arise.
SV: You have translated works that cover gender-based violence and trauma. Are there some translations that you would never allow a tool like ChatGPT to ever touch?
MK: War crimes testimony. . . no, I wouldn’t use something like that [ChatGPT]. I wouldn’t let anybody else translate because these are issues about violence, trauma, rape. I think it’s very cultural—for example, women who have been through rape or women who have been asked to recount violence, hardly use the words for these. They wouldn’t call the rape “rape.” And it’s very re-traumatising for them so they wouldn’t describe what happened, but they would talk about it in a non-existential sense. I remember meeting a woman who just used the phrase “it happened.” So “it” meant what should not have happened— rape. But to understand this, it takes somebody from the culture, somebody who knows what has happened. A machine cannot guess that. A machine cannot guess what that silence is.
I think you either have to be a victim or you have to be a witness, or you have to have some woman’s empathy to know what’s been talked about, so I think a machine would be a failure there, because we talk about violence through silence. Because that’s how women have been trained and also that’s what I think violence is trained to do. It’s trained to break down your language, to break down your power over language. . . to make you not access these aspects of language. So much of language is unspoken.
SV: If a creator or writer you admired went on to publish a novel with the help of ChatGPT, can you see yourself reading it or supporting them?
MK: I think the thing with being a writer is that you’re so full of yourself and you’re so in love with your own individuality that you would never do that, right? Next to politicians, or possibly a little more than politicians, writers are the most narcissistic people in the world. There’s no way they are going to put a byline with a ChatGPT story—like, what kind of a writer are you? I don’t think any writer worth her salt would do that, because we are so full of ourselves.
ChatGPT’s translation of a Kural from ‘The Book of Desire’ | Photo Credit: Screenshot from ChatGPT
The romanisation and translation of the Kurals are taken from a public excerpt of ‘ The Book of Desire,’ [2023], published by Galley Beggar Press.
What is ChatGPT?
*Disclaimer: AI-powered chatbots are prone to a phenomenon known as “hallucination,” where they generate logical sounding yet completely false answers. For this reason, a response generated by an AI chatbot cannot be taken at face value as fact. This report was researched using the February and March versions of ChatGPT.
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Friday, May 19, 2023
The best-selling cookbook Croatian Classics receives its Croatian translation - Croatia Week - Translation
The best-selling cookbook Croatian Classics receives its Croatian translation
Cookbook’s author Andrea Pisac responds once again to her readers’ requests. After her first cookbook Croatian Desserts reached a worldwide audience, she said her followers asked for a cookbook of classic savoury recipes.
Croatian Classics was published in October 2021 and immediately dubbed ‘the most comprehensive and dynamic cookbook on Croatian cuisine’.
The cookbook which features 100 dishes from around Croatia also received the Gourmand World Cookbook Award earlier this year.
Now it’s available in the Croatian language too under the title Hrvatska kuhinja.
Hrvatska kuhinja
‘I didn’t plan to translate the cookbook into Croatian, but my readers asked for it’, Andrea told us. ‘They said’, Andrea continues, ‘that the Croatian version is perfect for learning the language through cooking’.
Buy the cookbook HERE.
You can also buy Andrea’s two top-selling Croatian cookbooks in English HERE.
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