A new book examines the value of modern poetic techniques in the translation of the Bhagavad Gita? - Scroll.in - Translation

Bangalore Literature Festival via YouTube

Since the first translation of the Bhagavad Gita in 1789 by Charles Wilkins, there have been hundreds of translations into English. Some have translated the poetry of the Gita into prose, and some others have attempted metrical poetry. Whereas prose translations do not convey the delights of the original, good metrical translations have no choice but to compromise on fidelity. This is also why commentaries exist, but, they tend to be loaded with terminology and digressions, and however useful, deter the eager reader from a continuous reading of the text.

Reading the Gita is a happy afternoon project for a reader who knows Sanskrit; for a reader who does not know Sanskrit, old-style translations may not offer the same easy reading speed. The Gita is a teaching, it is not a pedantic text. Thought-provoking wordplay, connections and associations between words, and implied meanings are present throughout the seven hundred verses. Sometimes, the meaning is adequately conveyed only when you take in the suggestiveness and resonance (dhvani), characteristics of memorable poetry.

As languages, Sanskrit and English are different from each other – not just in terms of the conceptual worlds they rise from and refer to, but also in their linguistic structures, their ‘deep grammar.’ Sanskrit nouns are declined, and thus, have case endings; therefore, in a sentence, the parts of speech are made clear within the words. A simple example – in the sentence “A girl goes to school”, “girl” is the subject, and “school” is the object. In Sanskrit, the noun “girl” will be in the nominative case (prathamā vibhakti), and the noun “school” will be in the accusative case (dvitīyā vibhakti). Therefore, we may structure the sentence any which way, including “to school – goes – girl”. Now if all those components of the Sanskrit sentence (to school / girl / goes/) were written separately, in different corners of a single page, they would still make sense. In Sanskrit, we comprehend the words along with their roles in the sentence. In a Sanskrit stanza, then, what decides the sequence of words is rhythm, smoothness, or metrical considerations.

This is also why when we read Sanskrit poetry, we may begin with analysing the “prose order” (anvaya, or connections). This involves a reordering of the words in the stanza in a way that becomes easier to follow.

Such structural freedom inherent in Sanskrit composition opens up possibilities in translation via contemporary poetics. Like science, poetics has also become more developed, and today there are more resources available to writers and readers. Poetry was once an oral art, and belonged to the dimension of time. Even though manuscripts and inscriptions were used, the dimension of space arrived into everyone’s daily lives through the printing press and the printed page. Translating ancient texts is also a translation from a temporal, to a temporal and spatial medium. The line, for example, does not need to hang on for life to the left margin. Spacing and connections are available to be used if they help understanding. Here is an example:

In my translation, the has been deconstructed into the components and relationships between them. The vedantic idea of “neti” (‘not this’) is imitated. i.e., how discarding reveals the true you. You discard and you discard (what you are not) and that is how you find out who you are. It is by discarding (whatever is intransient) that “you are”. The analogy between old clothes and the old worn-out body is stacked vertically, so it is a quick and easy connection upon the page.

At this stage, Krishna is only speaking about the nature of ātman – it is that which has the body. Readers will notice that Krishna does not tell Arjuna directly – “you are ātman.” Krishna explains the concept of ātman, and without saying so, lets Arjuna realize his identity with ātman. What occurs here is an identity shift, a point that is communicated without being spelt out. Hence, my translation uses vertical as well as horizontal space, and presents the sub-text vertically – “this is who you really are.” The reader can take it in visually, even as she continues to read the line.

On the other hand, if something is really emphatic in a text, it can be spatially demarcated from the other words in the verse. Here is another example from my translation:

Arjuna uses the verb “see” – (I see, paśyāmi) – in every single stanza from stanza 11.14 to 11.19 11.19. Noticing this makes one much more aware that what is being described is a spectacle and an extraordinary sight. This is not just a description of Krishna’s viśvarūpam (universal form) – it is a description of viśvarūpa-darśaṇam (the vision of Krishna’s universal form). Hence, I extracted the verb “see” into a separate column, and relocated everything that was seen within its frame.

Excerpted with permission from Bhagavad Gita: God’s Song, translated from the Sanskrit by Mani Rao, HarperCollins India.

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Translating Corn - JSTOR Daily - Translation

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Americans call it corn. Hardly anybody else does. To most of the world, corn is maize, a word from the Taíno mahiz (as transcribed by Columbus) and Latinized to mays in the scientific binomial for the plant, Zea mays. Mahiz means “life-giving seed.” Linnaeus might have been a bit redundant with the Greek zea, which also means “life-giving,” but then maize was fundamental to the diet and cultures of the Americas. It literally was life-giving and civilization-building.

In the mid 1970s, Mazola corn-oil margarine started being advertised on television with the tagline “You call it corn. We call it maize.” The line lived long enough to be remembered by young Bart Simpson in a pinch.

The “we” in the Mazola ads were supposed to be Indigenous Americans. The pitch aimed to unite nature, naturalness, and Native authenticity, arguably in response to the cultural and political ferment sparked by the American Indian Movement. But television ads aren’t a notably accurate source for cultural or culinary or any other kind of history. As corn maven Betty Fussell writes, when Columbus “discovered” maize in 1492, the plant was known by many words in some two thousand Indigenous American languages.

“Corn,” meanwhile, comes from the German korn, which in turn is rooted in the Proto-Germanic *kurnam, a grain or seed. This old usage can still be found in “corned beef,” in which the corn-ing agents are grains of salt. “Corn” and its regional European variants came to mean cereal grains. What was grown locally was what was called corn: wheat in England, oats in Scotland and Ireland, rye in Germany. (The infamous British Corn Laws of the nineteenth century, which strangled the poor and reinforced the power of landowners, aimed to control the import of wheat, oats, and barley; maize was considered animal food.)

Foodways can be particularly reactionary, but (Euro-) Americans did finally take to corn and stick with it, both gastronomically and linguistically.

British colonists in the Americas called maize “Indian corn” and “Turkey corn.” Both “Indian” and “Turkey” connoted savagery and barbarism; Fussell notes that the Turks also associated the plant with barbarism. At first, the English wouldn’t eat this “type of inferior wheat” and “Salvage trash.” Hunger made them change their minds.

Foodways can be particularly reactionary, but (Euro-) Americans did finally take to corn and stick with it, both gastronomically and linguistically. Other English-speakers prefer “maize” to avoid confusion. Canned corn in American food relief shipments to war-shattered Europe was supposedly rejected on the grounds that it was considered to be animal fodder.

Fussell notes that there’s another factor in the American translation of maize into corn.

“In changing the meaning of the word ‘staple’ from a cereal grain to land and its cash equivalent, America’s colonists commodified the earth,” she writes.

Corn, with its “innate potential for kernel volume,” was turned into a “goldmine for the industrial age.” Factory farming and industrial food production, tied to petrochemicals and bioengineering, have turned corn into a commodity. In fact, very little corn is directly eaten by consumers, but the stuff is ubiquitous, interwoven throughout civilization. (We are all very much the children of corn.) “Anything made from a barrel of petroleum can be made from corn” proclaimed the National Corn Growers Association in 1987. The list is mind-boggling: insecticides, tires, shotgun shells, talcum powder, embalming fluid, ethanol, and so on.

“If eating food is our primary act of translation, it is also our most complexly civilized one in relating word to thing through the portal of the mouth,” writes Fussell, who has also authored The Story of Corn. Of course, you have to get that translation right. Columbus didn’t know anything about nixtamalization, the alkali-processing of corn developed over centuries by Indigenous Americans. Slaking corn with lime made available the vital amino acids corn lacks. A diet reduced to untreated cornmeal, which became a staple of the poor across Europe and Africa, results in “corn sickness” or pellagra. The disease was notably unknown to Indigenous Americans.

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The Guardian view on new dictionary words: a parlour game that can clarify a scary reality - The Guardian - Dictionary

When the Cambridge dictionary announced “hallucinate” as its word of the year this week, it was not referring to its existing definition as a human condition of “seeing, hearing, feeling or smelling something that does not exist”, but to the phenomenon of AI developing the capacity to make – or fake – things up. This is itself a somewhat hallucinatory concept, as Naomi Klein has pointed out. “Why call the errors ‘hallucinations’ at all? Why not algorithmic junk? Or glitches?” she asked. By appropriating the language of psychology, psychedelics and mysticism, she argued, the architects of generative AI had declared themselves midwives at the birth of an animate intelligence that they wanted us to believe would be an evolutionary leap for humanity.

The word of the year is a strange fixture – a parlour game crossed with a marketing opportunity that is enthusiastically played by lexicographers around the world. Anyone who remembers the Oxford dictionary’s choice for 2022 will know how outlandish the offspring can be: invited to make their own choice, 318,956 people – 93% of the overall vote – opted for “goblin mode”. Though this term (basically, slobbing out) has been around for more than a decade, its first appearance in a British newspaper, according to the research engine Factiva, was in the Observer in February last year.

In general, though, words of the year are crunched from searches on dictionaries’ own websites, revealing not only the concerns that are on people’s minds, but the ways in which they are trying to make sense of them. The new usage of hallucination illustrates a growing tendency to anthropomorphise AI technology, with risks of oversimplification and misunderstanding that have been well-documented within the academic world. But the adoption of humanising metaphors to conceptualise machines has been happening in literature at least since Frankenstein’s monster reared out of early 19th-century fiction.

This act of literary conjuring is not merely the preserve of technology. It is evident in a recent nonfiction book dealing with the other great current challenge to the collective imagination: global heating. The evidence base of John Vaillant’s Fire Weather, which won the Baillie Gifford prize for nonfiction last Thursday, is an inferno that engulfed the Canadian oil town of Fort McMurray in May 2016, driving 90,000 people from their homes.

In reaching for a language equal to the horror of the blaze, Mr Vaillant’s interviewees cite Balrog, the fire monster in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, and the asteroid strike in the film Armageddon. Told by one firefighter that the blaze was like a moving animal, hunting down areas that had not yet been burned, Mr Vaillant writes that the description was not fanciful. “This was how it felt to be in the fire’s presence – a hungry and motivated adversary intent on maximum mayhem.” Intention is not normally a quality attributed to fire.

The full title of Mary Shelley’s novel is Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. Written at a time of profound scientific and technological upheaval, its secondary title invoked a Greek god condemned to eternal torment for stealing the power of fire for humans. A new, or repurposed, metaphorical vocabulary is necessary to confront today’s unprecedented challenges – whether a burning world or runaway AI. We can and should quarrel with individual words.

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LA Dating Dictionary - Coveteur - Dictionary

Ghosting, zombie-ing, Caspering—there are so many nuanced terms to describe the emotional and psychological warfare of the dating scene. As a field researcher in the Los Angeles dating arena, I am here to shed light on some of the latest dating trends I’ve witnessed, endured, and inflicted on others. Below, find the most recent additions to the LA Dating Dictionary:

Ghosting (v.): Suddenly ending all communication with another person without any warning or explanation.

Zombie-ing(v.): After becoming a “ghost,” a former date will suddenly and unexpectedly come “back from the dead” in the form of a random text or DM.

Caspering (v.) a) saying something kind but straight-forward before ending communication or b) a gradual yet respectful weaning of communication before you stop speaking

Ouija Boarding (v.): Psychically contacting someone who ghosted you through candle rituals, manifesting, crystals, and tarot.

Criterion Collecting (v.): Dating people only to collect more passwords to obscure streaming services.

Soul-mating (v.): Having sex in a Kia Soul.

LAX-it (v.): Phasing out a relationship by always being “out of town.”

Getting Moby’d (n.): a) Dating someone with veganism tattoos, or b) seeing Moby pop up on Raya once a week.

Nepo daddy(n.): An industry has-been that you date for their connections.

Patty Hearsting(v.): You get so lost in a relationship that you start wearing berets.

Long-distance relationship(n.): When someone from East Hollywood dates someone in West Hollywood.

Unethical non-monogamy(n.): Dating a non-monogamous person who works at Shein.

Lesbian booty call (n.): Texting an ex, “Hey, I had a dream about you last night.”

Lea Micheling (v.): Being a theatrical woman pretending to read a book at the bar for attention.

Foster Catting(v.): When a boy who is being rehomed from his recent ex-girlfriend dates you to have somewhere to sleep.

Fuckzoning(v.): Only speaking to someone if sex is a possibility. Friendship is too intimate.

Leasing(v.): Dumping someone every time a new model hits the scene (or turns 18).

Fishfishing (v.): Posting a pic of yourself with a huge fish on your dating profile.

4100 4-1-1(n.): When you (or a friend) see someone you’re dating on a date with someone else at 4100 Bar.

Bread in captivity(n.): Hooking up with someone who compulsively makes sourdough even though the pandemic is over.

Two-Night Stand (n.): A lesbian first date.

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'YKTV' meaning: How to use the text slang (correctly) in conversation. - USA TODAY - Dictionary

Scrolling social media can sometimes feel like wading through a bowl of alphabet soup with the amount of text slang there is today. You're practically playing a game of Jumble trying to decipher each seemingly scrambled group of letters.

But there is more to these terms than meets the eye. Each has a unique meaning and usage in the realm of online communication. From "tfw" to "MBN," there's an entire dictionary of digital speech.

So, before you start drafting your next Instagram story or send off that DM, get to know the definition and how to use "yktv."

What does 'yktv' mean?

"YKTV" stands for "you know the vibe." It can be used in different ways depending on the context.

The slang term is often used to show someone is having a good time. It also can be used to express agreement with a statement. Additionally, it can be used to comment on something that is routine, mundane or normal in your day-to-day life.

"YKTV" is similar to "you know how it is" or "you know what's up."

How to use 'yktv'

Here are some examples of how to use "yktv": 

• "What do you have planned later?" "I'm headed to a concert yktv."
• "Got to wake up early for work tomorrow yktv."
• "It feels like there's something in the air." "Mercury is in retrograde, yktv."

Just Curious for more? We've got you covered

USA TODAY is exploring the questions you and others ask every day. From "How to see deleted messages on iPhone?" to "Can flamingos fly?" to "What do turtles eat?" − we're striving to find answers to the most common questions you ask every day. Head to our Just Curious section to see what else we can answer for you.

Want to learn? Catch up on more text slang explainers: 

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China Eastern Serves Up 'Dog Food' In Business Class Translation Disaster - Simple Flying - Translation

Summary

• A poorly translated menu from China Eastern Airlines has caused confusion and speculation among passengers, with one appetizer option listed as "dog food."
• Translation errors in the airline industry are common due to the need to translate from local languages to English, the default language of international aviation.
• Translation and marketing errors can have negative consequences for a brand, leading to damage to its image and potential financial losses.

A specific business class dining option from China Eastern Airlines has brought some media buzz. The Shanghai-based carrier's poorly translated menu offered a range of options, with one standout choice being "dog food" paired with okra, serving as a business class appetizer.

An unfortunate error

This month, traveler Conrad Wu shared an image of the airline's business class menu on Facebook. Among the appetizer choices were seafood, beef, and vegetarian meals. However, the inclusion of "imported dog food" as the fourth option has left the passenger wondering, 'What exactly is it?'.

Initially reported by The Independent, the social media post has received more than 1,000 likes and was shared by more than 170 people, accompanied by numerous comments. Speculation arose, with many suggesting that this was likely a translation mistake. While this is, indeed, most likely a translation error, the specific dish mentioned on the menu still needs to be clarified.

Photo: China Eastern

Another menu option that caught social media's attention was the 'dragon bone soup.' Contrary to what the name might suggest, dragon bone soup has nothing to do with dragons. It is simply a traditional soup made with pork or chicken keel bones.

Read more: China Eastern Plans To Beat Pre-COVID Operations With 1,000+ Weekly International Flights

Airline translation blunders

The default language of international aviation worldwide is English, although other languages are used if airlines are based in non-English-speaking countries. Therefore, with the need to translate from local languages to English, translation errors are only natural and may occur occasionally.

An example of this can be found when Braniff Airlines aimed to promote its new leather first-class seats in the Mexican market. The airline's 'Fly in Leather' campaign, when literally translated to Spanish, became "vuela en cuero." The term "en cueros," pronounced similarly to "en cuero," means "naked," transforming the tagline into a suggestive one: 'Fly Naked.'

Photo: Vytautas Kielaitis | Shutterstock

In another translation mishap, a French passenger experienced a moment of panic when an inaccurate announcement conveyed that the plane was about to make an emergency landing. According to a Daily Mail report, while an English-language announcement, 20 minutes after departing from Dublin, indicated the plane was entering turbulence and urged passengers to return to their seats, the pre-recorded French version wrongly stated they were about to ditch.

Translation or marketing errors can bring smiles or, on the contrary, financial losses. But sometimes, such failures can rapidly become viral, causing lasting damage to a brand's image. They may also result in dire consequences of customer boycotts, making it challenging to establish a foothold in new markets in the future.

What are your thoughts on this translation blunder? Have you ever seen or spotted any? Let us know in the comments section below.

Sources: The Independent, Daily Mail

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Test your otaku vocabulary, from 'oshi' to 'bacon lettuce' - The Japan Times - Dictionary

Nagoya –

Do the words “dōtankyohi” (同担拒否) or “irukatsu” (イル活) mean anything to you? Perhaps you’ve stumbled upon them on the internet and, squinting, closed the window.

There are, however, people for whom these terms serve as a vital way to engage with friends and fellow fans — or otaku — about their favorite idols, games, anime or other beloved media.

A new book is trying to bridge the knowledge gap: “Otaku Dictionary Daigenkai,” out Tuesday from publisher Sanseido, catalogs and defines lingo widely used among several fandoms.

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