British Museum Reaches Settlement with Poet Yilin Wang After Using Translations Without Permission - ARTnews - Translation

The British Museum has acknowledged it used Yilin Wang’s translations of Chinese poetry in a major exhibition without permission or credit, and has apologized for doing so.

The apology and acknowledgment are part of a settlement agreement between the museum and Wang after translations of Qiu Jin’s poetry were used in the historical exhibition “China’s hidden century.” Wang’s poetry translations were used in a video presentation and exhibition signage, and published in a catalogue without permission, compensation, or credit.

The British Museum’s large-print guide explains that the 300-work exhibition “is the result of a four-year research project, undertaken by over 100 scholars from 14 countries.” The exhibition’s organizers, British Museum Chinese ceramics curator Jessica Harrison-Hall and University of London modern Chinese history professor Julia Lovell, also received a grant of more than $917,000 (£719,000) from the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council.

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Wang published an extensive thread on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, demanding all their translations be removed and “all materials pertaining to the exhibit (including the exhibition books, all video/photo/display materials, all signage, all digital or print materials such as brochures, and anywhere else where translations have appeared), unless the museum makes a proper offer to compensate me and the compensation is given immediately” on June 19. This prompted the British Museum to remove the translations and Qiu Jin’s poetry from the exhibition on June 20.

On July 10, Wang raised £17,380 ($22,400) on the fundraising platform CrowdJustice, enough to retain legal representation at the London law firm Howard Kennedy LLP, and file a claim against the British Museum in the Intellectual Property Enterprise Court (IPEC).

On August 4, the British Museum issued a press statement acknowledging it was “reviewing the permissions process it has in place for temporary exhibitions, particularly with regard to translations, to ensure that there is a timely and robust methodology underpinning our clearance work and our crediting of contributors going forward.”

The statement further notes that the British Museum “currently does not have a policy specifically addressing the clearance of translations and, as part of its review, will ensure that translations are specifically addressed in its clearances policies and that translators are appropriately credited in future. The Museum will complete its review by the end of this year and will implement appropriate policies and procedures to address any gaps identified in its review.”

“It’s very surprising to me that such a large institution does not have such a policy,” Wang told ARTnews in a written statement on August 7. “I hope that the British Museum follows through on their commitment to create a clearance process for translations in the future by the end of this year and to take concrete steps to ensure that the mistake does not happen again.”

Wang said outgoing British Museum director Hartwig Fischer reached out to them on July 11 with a proposal “matching the reasonable terms that I had proposed to them several times before launching my legal fundraiser.”

“I appreciate that the museum has come around,” said Wang. “It is frustrating that this did not happen until I went through all the trouble to fundraise and obtain legal representation.”

Wang said their experience with the British Museum showed them “the power of the collective in holding institutions accountable”; a lesson that museums, organizations, and publications should always obtain permission for the use of copyrighted translations, as well as the importance of naming translators and paying them professional fees for their work.

As part of the settlement, the British Museum has agreed to reinstate Wang’s translations of Qiu Jin’s poetry in the exhibition, with appropriate credit and professional payment, by August 11.

The museum has also obtained full permission from Wang for the translation of Qiu Jin’s poem “A River of Crimson: A Brief Stay in the Glorious Capital” for display on its website and reinstallation at the physical exhibition of “China’s hidden century” in the future.

“I am glad that more readers will be able to see my translations, with credit given for the first time, and am glad that more visitors will be able to learn about Qiu Jin’s wonderful poetry,” Wang wrote.

While the terms of the financial payment between the British Museum and Wang were not disclosed to ARTnews, Wang said that the museum agreed to make an additional payment matching their licensing fee payment to support translators of Sinophone poetry. “I hope my donations can help fund a series of workshops with a focus on feminist, queer, and decolonial approaches to translation, in honor of Qiu Jin,” Wang wrote.

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Speak 37+ languages with these Translation Earbuds, now $99.97 during our Back to School sale - Boing Boing - Translation

We thank our sponsor for making this content possible; it is not written by the editorial staff nor does it necessarily reflect its views.

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It makes getting around foreign countries easier and allows you to build connections with people all over the world. It also can help you pick up a new language, as you pay attention to the way the translation works. No wonder these earbuds have received CES and Red Dot awards, and even been featured at the CES Innovation Awards, which honors technological breakthroughs, multiple times

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Girls Gone Wily (in Translation) - 4Columns - Translation

Girls Gone Wily (in Translation) 4 Columns

To celebrate Women in Translation Month, a roundup of perverse prose by eight female authors from Europe, Asia, and South America.

“Traduttore, traditore,” exclaimed the Italians—translator, traitor. “La belle infidèle,” intoned the French—translation equated with women: the beautiful ones unfaithful, fidelity only possible at the cost of aesthetics. Given these centuries-old expressions, you’d think there was something inherently bad, deviant about translation (and/or about women?). Thankfully, conversation around translation theory and practice has expanded beyond the confines of those idiomatic phrases. PEN America’s recently published “2023 Manifesto on Literary Translation” (coauthored by 4Columns associate editor Bonnie Chau) calls for readers to recognize translation as a creative art, a specialized form of writing. Yet although “faithfulness” is no longer so popular a metric, the synonymous “accuracy” seems to have remained a default standard.

For translator and scholar Chantal Wright, fidelity is, for the most part, beside the point. In Literary Translation (2016), Wright asserts that “the relationship between source and target is in fact something that few people are qualified to assess.” Instead, “the ‘success’ of a translated text, rather than being a matter of accuracy—minor hiccups and miscomprehensions notwithstanding—has to do with its success as a particularly complex type of literary text rather than in terms of its relationship to its source.” A translation is distinct from a single-authored text, is intrinsically hybrid in numerous ways: dual authorship, multiple cultures, and, often, various temporalities. In their work, translators seek to understand the unique literariness of the source text, the ways in which it makes its meanings; so, in assessing a translation, we shouldn’t necessarily be asking if this is a good, or accurate, or superior translation, but rather how this translated literary text makes its meanings.

The PEN manifesto encourages us “to actively seek to read works in translation and to read them as translations.” How exactly does one read a translation as a translation? As Wright puts it, “the translator has facilitated a linguistic encounter which leaves traces in the language of the translation”—traces of both the source language and of the translator. For the close reader with a desire to do a special kind of translation reading, these traces can be detected in certain nuances of language and style.

Whatever your process of consideration, the first step is to pick up a translated book. To that end, for this week’s missive (and just in time for Women in Translation Month!), our editors have dug deep into the dark annals of the 4Columns archives and unearthed a list of eight dank works of international literature, all authored by women unafraid to sink their teeth into the roiling turmoil of fleshly existence.

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YASMINE SEALE ON AN INVENTORY OF LOSSES

What horror lurks in the hearts of women writers the world over? Disturbances and perversities of all sorts, it seems. To ease our way in, we start off with nothingness, the shift from being to nonbeing, the torment of impermanence. Perhaps what magnifies this fear is our attraction to it—l’appel du vide, the call of the void. In a review of An Inventory of Losses by Judith Schalansky, translated from the German by Jackie Smith, Yasmine Seale observes that “twelve things that no longer exist are put to work producing literature. . . . Each loss—a phantom island, an animal hunted to extinction, a work of art lost to violence or neglect—is a prompt. . . . What interests [Schalansky] is less a reconstruction of the object than the fuller encounter with its absence.” For Seale, Schalansky’s work “asks ‘which is more terrifying: the notion that everything comes to an end, or the thought that it may not.’ ”

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ANIA SZREMSKI ON THE BOOKS OF JACOB

The mutable qualities of language, too, can potentially be fearsome. Of The Books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk, translated from the Polish by Jennifer Croft, 4Columns senior editor Ania Szremski writes that the novel “is in some ways about the infinite possibilities of language itself—how words can make worlds, and also violently undo them.” The articulation of subjective experience is consistently called into question—the book is “motivated by the perils of trusting too much in any one perspective (especially your own), and Tokarczuk offers a dizzying array of ways of looking at things. . . . everything looks, and acts, like something else,” Szremski reflects. “It feels like hardly a noun is offered that isn’t followed by ‘like’ or ‘as if,’ and this figurative language enacts the novel’s thesis that nothing is what it seems: reality itself is constituted of all those different faulty perspectives as they exist in relation to one another. . . . All this simile and metaphor and subjunctive mood also gives this world its bloody animist pulse.”

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KAITLIN PHILLIPS ON SWEET DAYS OF DISCIPLINE

For our next selections, we turn to the chaos, cruelties, and uncertainties specific to girlhood and womanhood. In Sweet Days of Discipline (1989), by Swiss novelist Fleur Jaeggy, a creepy coldness manifests in the semi-autobiographical story of teen girls at a boarding school in the Alps. In Kaitlin Phillips’s review of Tim Parks’s 1991 translation from the Italian (reissued in 2019), we learn how, “À la The Magic Mountain, Jaeggy deftly situates this mountain boarding school as a breeding ground for bourgeois sterility. Pervasive is ‘this sense of tropical stagnation, a thwarted luxuriance,’ she writes. ‘You have the feeling that inside something serenely gloomy and a little sick is going on.’ ” Phillips finds that the narrator of the book, an old woman who looks back on being fourteen, “references illness, dying, religion over and over, as if massaging rosary beads in her mind. The themes are so potent and heavy-handed, their odor wafts like rotting fruit from the spine of the book. The girls have ‘a faint mortuary smell’; people she knew occupy tombs in a wall in her mind.”

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HERMIONE HOBY ON BREASTS AND EGGS

On another continent, in another millennium, the female characters in Mieko Kawakami’s Breasts and Eggs, translated from the Japanese by Sam Bett and David Boyd, are repellent in a pleasingly different way—bloody, sweaty, wet. Hermione Hoby writes in her review, “When [it] was first published in 2008, the then-governor of Tokyo, the ultraconservative Shintaro Ishihara, deemed the novel ‘unpleasant and intolerable.’ I wonder what he objected to? Perhaps he wasn’t into a scene in which the narrator, a struggling writer called Natsuko, pushes a few fingers into her vagina in a spirit of dejected exploration: ‘I . . . tried being rough and being gentle. Nothing worked. I was a little wet, but that was probably just sweat from the heat.’ Perhaps he blanched at the vehemently anti-natalist sentiments of her niece, the teenage Midoriko, who scribbles furiously in her diary, ‘It’s not our fault that we have eggs and sperm, but we can definitely try harder to keep them from meeting.’ ”

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JULIE PHILLIPS ON THE COPENHAGEN TRILOGY

Next up we recommend The Copenhagen Trilogy: Childhood; Youth; Dependency by Tove Ditlevsen, translated by Tiina Nunnally and Michael Favala Goldman. The Danish poet’s memoirs recount an expansive, life-long story of alienation, of not quite managing to be both an artist and a socially acceptable woman, of destructive relationships and repeatedly reverting to emotional chaos. As Julie Phillips reviews, “Love is a problem for her . . . one as irritating as it is all-consuming. Although she marries and has a child, she can’t figure out how to be a wife while she’s distracted by the lines of poetry that keep forming in her head. She loves her husband, she says anxiously, ‘but not in the right way. If he forgets his scarf, I don’t remind him. I don’t go out of my way to make nice food for him or anything like that. . . . When I’m writing I don’t care about anyone.’ ”

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ERIC BANKS ON TODDLER-HUNTING

From the anguish of girlhood and womanhood, we descend into the abyss of strange nightmares. In his review of Toddler-Hunting and Other Stories by Taeko Kono, translated from the Japanese by Lucy North, Eric Banks says, “From story to story Kono’s mostly female subjects go in and out of fugal states of imagined violence, or abruptly find themselves hostage to childhood memories, or shake themselves out of dreams and nightmares. Middle-class and childless, often in recovery from some illness, they inhabit freighted or loveless relationships.” But, as Banks continues, much of the tension is built by what isn’t on the page: “There is plenty of suspense, delayed and deferred, in Kono’s stories, which nevertheless refuse anything resembling a tidy ending. In fact, she often opts to end her stories with resonant but gnomic parting scenes and strikingly disjointed images, like the ‘writhing mass’ of black insects covering a slice of raw meat that mesmerizes the disturbed lawyer in ‘Ants Swarm.’ ”

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MAXINE SWANN ON MOUTHFUL OF BIRDS

In a similarly abrupt fashion, the stories in Argentine author Samanta Schweblin’s second collection, Mouthful of Birds, veer to the weird in dark, twisted ways. In a review of Megan McDowell’s translation from the Spanish, Maxine Swann writes, “Schweblin works predominantly with fears—probing them, teasing them out, pushing them over the edge into full-blown, unnerving realities. The fantastic facet is usually, though not always, a form of nightmare come true that warps the otherwise prosaic lives of her unsuspecting characters.” Here again, womanhood and motherhood are ripe for horror. “The theme of reproduction gone awry, of monstrous children and alienated parents, surfaces throughout the collection,” Swann observes.

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BRIAN DILLON ON THE PROMISE

Our final selection for this week’s roundup of women in translation is The Promise, Argentine writer Silvina Ocampo’s sole novel, begun in the 1960s and still unfinished when she died in 1993. In Brian Dillon’s review of the book, translated by Suzanne Jill Levine and Jessica Powell, he notes, “Ocampo’s narrative premise is elegantly unnerving. A nameless female narrator has traveled by ocean liner from Buenos Aires to visit relatives in Cape Town, there been taken ill, and while returning home fallen into the sea, unnoticed by passengers or crew. In her mind she makes a pact with Saint Rita of Cascia, patron saint of lost causes: if she survives, she will write and publish a book before her next birthday—‘though I’ve always thought it useless to write a book.’ ” The woman recounts this narrative—which constitutes the entire novel—while she floats alone in the sea. But the dreadful catastrophe of the present is never too far away—Dillon remarks, “A sort of horrified lyricism keeps returning . . . as the narrator is pulled back from the sea of memory to her present in the ocean. It rains on the water, fish swim around her, she wonders what else is living in the fathoms below, waiting. Her body and personality begin to dissolve into the Atlantic.”

To celebrate Women in Translation Month, a roundup of perverse prose by eight female authors from Europe, Asia, and South America.

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These Translation Earbuds Are $100 Right Now - Lifehacker - Translation

Image: Mymanu

The Mymanu CLIK S Translation Earbuds can give real-time translation in more than 37 languages, and they’re on sale for $99.97 right now (reg. $157) through August 13.

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Of course, keeping earbuds in all the time may not be the most convenient thing—it’s not like you’ll want to turn them on every time someone approaches you with a question—but they’re great if you want to put them on in advance to have a short conversation or ask a few questions. And the earbuds also work like any other wireless headphones, so you can make calls and stream music with HD-quality sound for up to 30 hours with their charging case.

The Mymanu CLIK S Translation Earbuds are on sale for $99.97 (reg. $157) through August 13 at 11:59 p.m. PT, though prices can change at any time.

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The New World Translation Is Released in Nyaneka - JW News - Translation

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The New World Translation Is Released in Nyaneka  JW News

'Godzilla' & 'Godzilla Raids Again' Novelizations Get English Translations - Collider - Translation

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'Godzilla' & 'Godzilla Raids Again' Novelizations Get English Translations  Collider

Spanish-speaking parents are asking the PRJUSD to improve translation services during board meetings - KSBY News - Translation

A special Paso Robles Joint Unified School District board meeting is coming up specifically to have parents provide input regarding the future of Georgia Brown Elementary.

“People are already walking in, feeling nervous and anxious,” said Yessenia Echevarria, Paso People’s Action Co-Founder. “It's brought a lot of stress to our local families. ”

According to the district, the administration has not proposed the relocation of the dual immersion program to Winifred Pifer Elementary.

“There has been conversation around this potential from community members and trustees; however, the administration has not put together a plan to implement,” said in an email Monica Silva, the PRJUSD spokesperson.

Bellanira Abarca has a son at Winifred Pifer and she tells me she is worried about her school because of the changes it would mean to her son. Plus, she lives nearby and can quickly get to school in case of an emergency.

During the June 13^th meeting Georgia Brown Elementary parents asked to not make decisions until they listen to impacted community members.

Another issue raised in that meeting was the lack of Spanish translation services.

“We did have a meeting with the superintendent and requested to make sure that we had a translator available,” said Echevarria. “Now, I want to clarify this because there is a simultaneous translator in the back that is translating things as they happen, but when you take a public comment, you need to have a second person to translate the person who is speaking. ”

During the meeting, Superintendent Curt Dubost responded the following:

“Our normal translator is on vacation; I wasn't aware until too late to get another one, I should have known, and that's my fault,” said Dubost. “I accept responsibility for that, that we should have had an additional translator, and I make that commitment.”

According to the California Department of Education, 93% of English Learnersat the PRJUSD speak Spanish. That’s nearly 1200 students.

Alicia Max said she prefers Spanish and oftentimes feels intimidated to ask for an interpreter in board meetings. Max who has two kids that go to Winifred Pifer Elementary said people should feel welcomed to share their thoughts regardless of race.

Silva said board meeting agendas are translated in Spanish, and they always have a simultaneous translator.

“When a Spanish speaker goes to the podium during a regular meeting, our interpreter leaves her post (as she doesn't need to translate into the devices). and attends to the Spanish speaker at the podium,” added Silva.

Gilberta Guevara said her two daughters went to Georgia Brown. She said she's always seen an interpreter at meetings, but it would be great to have more.

Data from the California Department of Education shows that in 2016, 69% of students at Georgia Brown identified as Hispanic or Latino that number rose to 77% in 2022.

At Winifred Pifer Elementary, the number has held steady from 62% in 2016 to 63% in 2022, according to the California Department of Education.

“Paso People's Action has been pushing so hard for translations and whether that's devices that are available as headsets as well as a simultaneous translator in the back,” said Echevarria. “We've been seeing a lot more Hispanic parents show up to the meetings and taking out public comments, and […] I think for the first time, the community in Paso Robles is feeling really empowered.”

The district said the meeting on Monday “is a listening session for the board of trustees.”

“They are wanting feedback from the community related to the next steps, concerns, and future ideas for the use of the site or the future of the Dual Immersion (DI),” added Silva.

Silva said the meeting will have “adequate interpreters” to make sure Spanish-speaking community members feel connected.

“There will be two translators for this meeting. One will be a simultaneous translator, and the second will remain at the podium for all our Spanish speakers.”

“We should celebrate diversity, we should celebrate multi-lingual abilities,” said Echevarria.

Both Abarca and Max hope their school remains open, and a solution is found for Georgia Brown.

“Georgia Brown has an amazing program, and it's a dual immersion program,” said Echevarria. “We also need to make sure that regardless if the program is moved or not or if it stays, we keep the 36th Street campus.”

Silva said the district plans to have a legal firm provide information regarding translation requirements at meetings to also have a recorded version. This would be an item for a future board meeting though.

The special board meeting is on Monday Aug. 7, 2023 at 6 p.m. at the Performing Arts Center at Paso Robles High School. Those interested in joining can also follow along on YouTube.

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