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TL;DR:They’re earbuds. They’re translators. They’re awesome. And now, theMymanu Clik S translation earbudsare at a special discount price of just $89.97 (reg. $157) for a limited time.
If you’re a fan of the classic sci-fi novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, you probably remember the coolness of the Babel fish. In the book, it’s an actual tiny fish that could be released into someone’s ear to help them hear virtually any language in the galaxy translated into their own.
While that sounds fantastic, nobody is crazy about the idea of slipping a fish into their skull. So instead, modern technology worked out the next best thing: theaward-winning Mymanu Clik S translation earbuds.
Thanks to its smart AI capabilities, these earbuds can help you communicate with over 2 million people speaking 37 different languages around the world almost instantly. It all works with the MyJuno app, which is compatible with Android and iOS devices.
Just push the button on the earbud and speak. The buds feed it back to the app, which translates your message and plays it back in any of the other 37 supported languages right through your device. The foreign speaker can then respond into your phone or tablet, and the app will translate it and play it back into your earbuds.
A 2019 CES Innovation Awards honoree, the Clik S earbuds also deliver up to 10 hours of premium quality music playback. Along with the extra 30 hours you can get with the included earbuds charging case, you’re set no matter where your adventures take you.
In his 5-star review, customer Richard F. raved, “It really works! My son lives in China, and we purchased them for him as a gift. He’s home visiting, and he tried it out – and it works surprisingly well!”
You can get these Mymanu CLIK S earbuds for over $65 off. Retailing for $157, they’reavailable for $89.97 if you get your order in before11:59 p.m. PT on July 14.
We use affiliate links. If you buy something through the links on this page, we may earn a commission at no cost to you. Learn more.
TL;DR:They’re earbuds. They’re translators. They’re awesome. And now, theMymanu Clik S translation earbudsare at a special discount price of just $89.97 (reg. $157) for a limited time.
If you’re a fan of the classic sci-fi novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, you probably remember the coolness of the Babel fish. In the book, it’s an actual tiny fish that could be released into someone’s ear to help them hear virtually any language in the galaxy translated into their own.
While that sounds fantastic, nobody is crazy about the idea of slipping a fish into their skull. So instead, modern technology worked out the next best thing: theaward-winning Mymanu Clik S translation earbuds.
Thanks to its smart AI capabilities, these earbuds can help you communicate with over 2 million people speaking 37 different languages around the world almost instantly. It all works with the MyJuno app, which is compatible with Android and iOS devices.
Just push the button on the earbud and speak. The buds feed it back to the app, which translates your message and plays it back in any of the other 37 supported languages right through your device. The foreign speaker can then respond into your phone or tablet, and the app will translate it and play it back into your earbuds.
A 2019 CES Innovation Awards honoree, the Clik S earbuds also deliver up to 10 hours of premium quality music playback. Along with the extra 30 hours you can get with the included earbuds charging case, you’re set no matter where your adventures take you.
In his 5-star review, customer Richard F. raved, “It really works! My son lives in China, and we purchased them for him as a gift. He’s home visiting, and he tried it out – and it works surprisingly well!”
You can get these Mymanu CLIK S earbuds for over $65 off. Retailing for $157, they’reavailable for $89.97 if you get your order in before11:59 p.m. PT on July 14.
The Times convened five notable translators who bring literature from other languages into English, and asked them about the joys and challenges of the job.
There are as many ways of translating a literary text as there are translators. The act of carrying a work from one language to another — an art as much as a craft — is anything but mechanical: Translators’ choices are informed by their sensibilities, their emotional landscape, their background.
Literary translators have, however, historically received little recognition. Readers who love books that were rendered in their words often haven’t known their names, since they were not featured on the covers. Within publishing, they were frequently underpaid and given no rights or royalties for their work.
Efforts by translators and by organizations like PEN America, which recently issued a manifesto on literary translation, have brought the field greater visibility, helping to cement the rights of translators and to raise awareness of literary translation as a creative art in its own right.
For a frank discussion of the state of translation, The Times gathered a group of recognized translators:
Samantha Schnee, a translator from Spanish, is the founding editor of Words Without Borders, a digital literary magazine of international literature in English.
Allison Markin Powell, a translator from Japanese, also represents the PEN America Translation Committee on the organization’s board of trustees.
Jeremy Tiang, originally from Singapore, translates from Chinese and is also a novelist and playwright.
Mui Poopoksakul is a Thailand-born lawyer turned literary translator.
Bruna Dantas Lobato, originally from Brazil, is a literary translator from Portuguese and a writer.
This conversation has been edited for concision and clarity.
JULIANA BARBASSA: Over 50 years ago, at the first World of Translation Conference organized by PEN, Isaac Bashevis Singer said: “Translation must become not only an honorable profession, but an art. While I don’t like bloody revolutions, I would love to see a translators’ revolution.” He went on to say of translators that “in all of literature they have been the pariahs,” and to call on the conference to be “the beginning of a rebellion where ink instead of blood will be shed.”
What revolution was he alluding to there, and how much has been accomplished in the years since?
SAMANTHA SCHNEE: There are two ways to answer that question. One, translators' rights is something I think Singer was referring to. But I also think that the translator’s role as a conduit for literature in translation is equally important. To the first issue, I would say a lot of progress has been made in the last 50 years. It was the case that translators routinely were expected to grant copyright in perpetuity for their translations.
Famously, [Gregory] Rabassa’s translation of [Gabriel] García Márquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude” was a copyright grant, which really ignores the role of the translator as a creative aspect of the work. No two translators would ever create the same translation from the same text. So I think progress has been made in areas like that.
But I think we have a lot of progress yet to go. For example, the way I see the role of a translator today is very much as a curator. Translators are much more active in the market now: Translators are acting as scouts, in many cases acting as agents. Almost always those roles go unpaid.
By Anita Staff. Via Samantha Schnee.
“No two translators would ever create the same translation from the same text.”
Samantha Schnee
I do think translators have a lot more power than certainly 50 years ago, and I would argue even 20 years ago. Translators need to keep fighting to keep those issues at the forefront.
We as an Anglophone culture are mass exporters of all sorts of culture, and we are not importing even a fraction of that. Translators play a really critical role in helping to counteract that.
BRUNA DANTAS LOBATO: In addition to wanting fair pay, wanting our art to be recognized, our names on the covers of books, I also would like to see a push away from this very academic sentiment that comes out of comp lit departments: that it’s some white person from this culture who goes into another culture and imports these artifacts.
There is this sense that it’s a transaction, and it’s one-directional. It feels like a very anthropological impulse from maybe a couple of centuries ago. I would like instead to have more of a conversation.
JEREMY TIANG: In the English-speaking world, we are enthralled with the idea of the single author. And so conversations around translations either focus entirely on the original author, rendering the translator subservient, or else talk about the translator as if the only way the translator could have agency is to go completely rogue, disregard all notions of faithfulness and assert their own version of the book at the expense of the original. The idea that translation is a collaborative process, that the author and the translator are building something together, doesn’t really get as much airtime as I would like.
Via Jeremy Tiang
“The idea that translation is a collaborative process, that the author and the translator are building something together, doesn’t really get as much airtime as I would like.”
Jeremy Tiang
BRUNA: It’s a question of authorship, right? It’s an opportunity to hold translators accountable for the work that we do. If I don’t even know who did this, how am I going to evaluate or ask the right questions?
The other thing is that the translator as author brings so much personal baggage into the work. We can’t translate outside of ourselves. I definitely use my experiences both as a writer — my knowledge of craft — and my experiences as a reader, in everything that I translate. I also bring my emotional experiences.
It means that I won’t bring unexamined biases into the work. It means that I have an opportunity to be in genuine dialogue with the work. All of that is impossible if I am erased, my identities are erased, my experiences are erased.
ALLISON MARKIN POWELL: What a translator brings to the work of doing the translation, we also bring to the works that we’re inspired to translate. Historically that was very much a white male academic’s perspective.
I’m part of a collective called Strong Women Soft Power that promotes Japanese women writers in translation. When we formed it I started looking at the numbers — who was being translated. Despite my perception that there were a lot of Japanese women writers being translated, that was actually not the case. That led me to look at what the landscape was like in Japan. And in Japan it was a much more balanced environment between male and female writers. And that wasn’t being accurately reflected in English translation.
JEREMY: I want to mention the unevenness of the playing field, which might not be apparent to people outside of the translation world.
Someone working from, say, German could quite feasibly, if they were sufficiently established, make a living simply by waiting for publishers to come to them with German books to translate. Whereas with less represented languages or regions, the translator often has to advocate for the book or it doesn’t get translated at all. Thai literature in English translation pretty much wouldn’t exist if Mui weren’t finding these books and putting them in front of publishers.
Via Bruna Dantas Lobato
“I have an opportunity to be in genuine dialogue with the work. All of that is impossible if I am erased.”
Bruna Dantas Lobato
MUI POOPOKSAKUL: That plays into two points, like what Sam said earlier about the unpaid labor of translation. When I work on a book project, I follow it from start to finish. I read the books, I pick the books, I pitch the books, I translate the samples — initially I was never paid for samples. That is a real barrier to entry for a lot of people.
In terms of who gets to translate, I’m really excited by this movement to give more opportunities to heritage language speakers, translators from the countries of the literature that they’re translating from. This will really broaden the landscape of what becomes available in English.
JULIANA: Have you seen a shaping of what books are available in English because of this advocacy by translators?
SAMANTHA: Absolutely. If you think of publishing as an ecosystem, the translators are like the seed spreaders. We’re diversifying that ecosystem. There’s a fixed number of editors out there; they will have certain sensibilities and they will be limited by the market in the choices they can make. When you work with translators, you have whole other worlds opened up to you.
Via Mui Poopoksakul
“In terms of who gets to translate, I’m really excited by this movement to give more opportunities to heritage language speakers, translators from the countries of the literature that they’re translating from. This will really broaden the landscape.”
Mui Poopoksakul
JEREMY: The translator is often the only person who can see both sides. The source language country might have rights agents doing good work, but they don’t know the English-language publishing world as well. The Anglophone world has well-meaning publishers who would love to do more translation, but they have no way of knowing the source language landscape. And apart from basically a few large Western European cultures which are well resourced with book scouts, in general, the translator is often the only person with a clear view of both sides.
ALLISON: If a book from a language that you work from becomes successful, do you feel like that starts to color readers’ or editors’ expectations? In Japan this has been called the [Haruki] Murakami effect. Do you have that experience?
BRUNA: I definitely have that experience a lot. I was recently advocating for a book called “The Dark Side of the Skin,” about racism and police brutality in Brazil, by Jeferson Tenório. Some of the readers evaluating it for interested editors said, “I don’t know if this is the one book about racism in Brazil that we should read. There are others that are very good.”
There’s this implication of simplicity, that if I read this one thing — I mean, how much can there really be to that culture? I’m done, you know?
JULIANA: Is there still a sense from publishers that, Oh, we have our India book for the year, we have our Japanese book for the year?
JEREMY: I’ve noticed both a kind of tokenism and a kind of herding. So I’ve had, “We have our Chinese book for the year.” But I’ve also had, during the dominance of “The Three-Body Problem,” publishers saying, “We want as much Chinese science fiction as we can get our hands on.” In both cases it’s treating books as interchangeable commodities rather than individual pieces of art that you consider on their own merits. I will say that there are more and more enlightened publishers who are able to see beyond that these days.
MUI: I haven’t had that experience, but I always fear it. After my first book, which was billed as the first Thai translation published in Britain outside of an academic press, it was like, well, are they going to want another one? I worried about that.
JULIANA: One thing I find striking is that with literature in translation, what exists in English is shaped by specific factors that are not visible to readers. Some countries, for example, fund translations from their language.
Via Allison Markin Powell
“There are a lot of interesting conversations right now about who the imagined reader is, and whether a translation should be smooth or challenging.”
Allison Markin Powell
BRUNA: Publishers have such a limited budget. I’ve been really interested in books that editors said they couldn’t buy. So they will pass on it, and then instead buy a Scandinavian book or a Korean book because it got a lot of funding and they won’t have to pay out of pocket.
MUI: The playing field is definitely not level. There is some good work being done out of Anglophone countries in terms of grants, but they’re hard to come by because you’re competing with translators and translations from every language. I’ve applied for funding from Thailand a couple of times, but I have not received funding from the Thai government.
ALLISON: Despite the fact that Japanese ranks relatively high on the number of works in translation, there is actually relatively little subsidy available. None of the books that I’ve translated, or almost none of the books have really received any subsidies.
SAMANTHA: The funding tends to be quite Eurocentric, and that does have significant impact on what readers in English are offered. It’s pretty dramatic if you look at the countries that are really investing in cultural exportation.
That’s not to say that there aren’t great European writers who are worthy of being translated. There certainly are. But there are in Africa, in Asia, in Latin America as well.
ALLISON: Going back to the actual work of translation, there are a lot of interesting conversations right now about who the imagined reader is, and whether a translation should be smooth or challenging.
JEREMY: My imagined reader is myself. I translate books that I want to put out in the world because they aren’t there for me to read. And I also translate because of the process. Just as, you know, actors go after a part because it’s a great part for them and they want the experience of performing it.
BRUNA: I expect from the reader a minimum amount of curiosity, and also a bit of an ear. I want the reader to pay attention to the language, and to what I might bring from Portuguese into English. I hope they’ll get used to different voices and different accents, and appreciate all the value that’s in there. All the beauty and the language-play that’s in there, as opposed to wanting an experience that’s just going to reaffirm what they already know, who they already are.
SAMANTHA: My ideal reader is the author. I much prefer to work with an author who’s living, with whom I can have a dialogue. I’ve learned so much — not only about language, but also about the topics that the authors’ books are dealing with.
MUI: The reader I fear is the Thai reader, because they are more likely to be able to re-engineer my process. I teach at a university in Thailand, so I have students who read my translations side by side with the original. They are always sort of on one shoulder, being like, “Stay true, Mui, stay true.”
JULIANA: What brought you to this field?
MUI: Translation is just great fun, you know? The latest PEN translation manifesto emphasized how translation is a form of writing, and that for me is so true.
ALLISON: Translation is an extremely creative practice. It suits my aesthetic of creativity well. I don’t write my own work; I write translation. Working with an existing text in another language is just having different clay to mold with.
BRUNA: As a writer, I often felt like the best way for me to study any work was by translating it. It feels to my particular practice like those two are in dialogue.
But also as a person, the way I exist in the world — when I found myself as a Brazilian national in New England, suddenly my language wasn’t a part of my daily life. Translation was a way for me to put my Brazilian side and my American life in conversation, and to feel whole. So for me translation is very much a part of being truthful to who I am.
JEREMY: I grew up bilingual, biracial, I’m an immigrant, and translation is one of the few things that allow me the fluidity to explore all the areas of who I am, and not have to choose one identity or another.
Juliana Barbassa is the Book Review’s deputy editor for news and features.
CLARKSVILLE, TN (CLARKSVILLE NOW) – The Clarksville-Montgomery County School System is changing its mass notification service to a new app that gives parents many more options, including notification customization, direct messaging and language translation.
CMCSS is switching from SchoolMessenger to ParentSquare, which will let parents customize how they receive notifications and allow for notifications translated into over 100 languages.
Family engagement is a key goal for CMCSS, and recent surveys have shown increased satisfaction with that, according to CMCSS spokesman Anthony Johnson. Replacing the communications app is another step in ongoing efforts to improve that satisfaction.
Notifications, messaging
ParentSquare offers families and teachers better alternatives for how and when they want to receive information from the district and the schools. App users can choose how they get communications: by text, email, the ParentSquare app or desktop version, or phone calls, which will still be available for emergencies or other urgent communications.
Parents can disable notifications (except for emergency alerts and notices) or choose between “instant” and “digest” notifications. All post notifications will be sent in real time if the “instant” setting is used. The “digest” setting reduces the number of notifications users receive each day by sending direct messages, alerts, and time-sensitive posts immediately, but sending all other posts towards the end of the day.
With this change, CMCSS teachers will be able to post content on the platform and communicate more easily with parents. To deliver newsletters, reminders, or other crucial updates from classrooms to families, teachers no longer have to copy and paste email lists from PowerSchool or provide links for parents/guardians to sign up. Instead, ParentSquare will automatically sync nightly with PowerSchool.
Additionally, ParentSquare will provide a platform for two-way communications with real-time translations between educators and parents/guardians through a direct messaging feature. Educators will be able to set “office hours” to let families know the best time to reach them.
Making the transition
“Although schools are closed for summer and there are few communications sent during the break, we are sending invitations this week to give families time to get familiar with the new platform before we begin the 2023-24 school year,” Johnson said.
Working out the kinks for the new system is proving complicated. The school system currently has 39,137 students, 5,641 staff members, and 44,142 parents.
After having some problems with data syncing for a few weeks, the company was able to finish syncs on June 26. They are now spot-checking data to correct errors.
For more, go to the CMCSS website ParentSquare info page, call 931-648-5600 or email questions@cmcss.net.
The China Publishing and Media Journal (CPMJ), a central-level trade newspaper overseen by the Publicity Department of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, has refuted claims that the term wokou, meaning Japanese pirates, was removed from the latest edition of the Xinhua Zidian, or Xinhua Dictionary, a pocket-sized authoritative dictionary published by the state-owned Commercial Press.
The declaration came after some netizens recently claimed that the term was removed from the 12th edition of the Xinhua Dictionary, which was released in 2020. Shandong Province-based newspaper Qilu Evening News posted a video on Tuesday, which has since been deleted, confirming the absence of the term in the dictionary's 12th edition.
Wokou generally refers to Japanese pirates who repeatedly harassed and plundered the coastal areas of Korea and China during the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) around the 14th to 16th centuries. It is also used to describe Japanese invaders during the War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression (1931-45), according to the Modern Chinese Dictionary from the Commercial Press.
The claim that the term was deleted from the Xinhua Dictionary quickly went viral on Sina Weibo, sparking widespread discussion. A user expressed concern over the "removal" and stated that the term holds specific historical background and significance, saying that "deleting the term could weaken the Chinese people's understanding of history."
However, in a post on its official WeChat account on Tuesday night, the CPMJ clarified that the Xinhua Dictionary, as a small dictionary, primarily focuses on the collection of individual characters, adding that since the dictionary's initial publication in the 1950s, no version has included the two-character term "Japanese pirates."
However, the Modern Chinese Dictionary and the Xinhua Cidian, or Xinua Language Dictionary, both published by the Commercial Press as medium-sized dictionaries, have consistently included the term wokou in their various editions, according to the post.
The Xinhua Dictionary, first published in 1953, is the first modern Chinese dictionary released after the foundation of the People's Republic of China in 1949. It has served as a tool for Chinese language learning for decades. The Commercial Press has been responsible for its publication and distribution since 1957. In 2016, the dictionary set two Guinness World Records for being the "most popular dictionary" and the "best-selling regularly updated book," according to the Xinhua News Agency.
The Department of Pali and Buddhist Studies at Savitribai Phule Pune University (SPPU) based in the Indian city of Pune has launched the Dictionary of Buddhist Terms, media reports said.
This ground-breaking multilingual lexicon employs Pali as the source language for its entries and provides equivalents in English, Sanskrit, and Tibetan, reports The Bhutan Live.
Each term is rendered in Roman script, further supplemented by textual references, serving as an indispensable tool for scholars engrossed in comparative Buddhist studies.
With the third segment of the dictionary released on 9th March, the media unveiled plans for this ambitious dictionary to ultimately compile a massive 50-part collection. The inception of the first two parts of this lexicographic masterpiece took place last year. Future plans also include Chinese interpretations, setting the stage for this dictionary to be hailed as a singular multilingual dictionary in its domain.
Mahesh Deokar, the distinguished professor leading the Department of Pali and Buddhist Studies, mentioned forthcoming plans of incorporating the Chinese language.
“We are currently looking for a competent scholar to join our endeavor,” Deokar was quoted as saying by the news portal, further hinting at possibilities of presenting the dictionary in Devanagari and Tibetan scripts.
The British Museum has had to apologise after a translator’s words were used without permission. Writer and translator Yilin Wang shared on Twitter that their translations of work by the Chinese feminist poet Qiu Jin appeared in the museum’s exhibition, China’s Hidden Century, without consent.
The museum’s subsequent press release cited “unintentional human error”. It explained that it had corresponded privately with Wang and had now offered a fee for the use of the translations. Along with the Chinese poems, these were then removed from the exhibition. But the removal of the texts has also fuelled criticism of the museum, and sparked a debate about the role of translators.
Translation and copyright
Literary translation is legally recognised as an act of original artistic production. This means that translated literary texts enjoy their own copyright status, independent of the source texts. While Qiu’s work is now out of copyright because she died in 1907, Wang’s translations are not.
The role of original creativity in translation practices is frequently ignored or underestimated. It’s common to talk about reading “author X” rather than “translator Y’s translation of author X”. Even the Nobel Prize conveniently sidesteps the role of translators and their creative work when it confers its annual literary honour.
Recently, however, literary publishing has increasingly recognised the role of translators. In 2016, the International Man Booker Prize announced it would now split winnings evenly between the author and the translator. Translators are gaining visibility and it is becoming more and more difficult to pretend they don’t exist.
Read more: International Booker Prize 2023: our experts review the six shortlisted books
Translations are creative acts that take place in specific cultural contexts. They transform source texts into new, original literary works, and they can advocate for the source text and writer by introducing them to new readers.
Wang has written about the power dynamics of literary translation, including the barriers to access and participation faced by translators who are “outsiders” and translators of colour. In their essay writing, they draw specifically on their experience of systemic prejudice while translating Qiu Jin’s poetry.
A photograph of Qiu Jin from circa 1908.Wiki Commons
They describe translation as an act of “reclamation and resistance” – and talk of the barriers they and others face finding a career in translation.
Like a translation, a museum is not neutral or objective. The objects and texts on display have been deliberately selected and positioned together. Just like the objects they frame, the words in a museum belong to someone and they have been chosen to tell a particular story.
Museums increasingly face pressure to reflect on their processes of acquisition and their contested ownership of items. This latest mistake – and handling of the fallout – shows that they also need to be transparent about the origins of the words they use to build the stories they tell.
From a “hidden century” to hidden texts
Removing items from display is not standard practice for the museum. The museum made a public statement in 2020 that it would not remove “controversial objects” from display. A section of the website dedicated to “contested objects” explicitly engages with the provenance of some of its most famous pieces, such as the Parthenon marbles.
But now Wang has described the museum’s response as “erasure”, and Wang argues, it has troubling implications, both for the museum’s critical engagement with its own curatorship and for the power dynamics of its relationships with non-white contributors.
The British Museum said in a statement: “In response to a request from Yilin Wang, we have taken down their translations in the exhibition. We have also offered financial payment for the period the translations appeared in the exhibition as well as for the continued use of quotations from their translations in the exhibition catalogue. The catalogue includes an acknowledgement of their work.” Wang contests this.
Meanwhile, the story has not gone away. It has been reported in the Chinese and French media, and Wang’s still developing Twitter thread about the discovery has been shared over 15,000 times.
As momentum grows behind the criticism of the museum, it is a good time for all of us to consider how we value and engage with the work of translators, whose creative labour allows us to access worlds and imaginations far beyond our own.
