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Sunday, December 31, 2023
How many languages have Book of Mormon translations? - Church News - Translation
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has published the Book of Mormon: Another Testament of Jesus Christ in 113 languages; 92 with full translations of the scriptural volume, and 21 include selections from the book.
The first printing, in English, occurred in 1830.
The second translation was in Danish, in 1851, followed by German, French, Italian, Welch, Hawaiian, Spanish, Swedish and Maori.
Elder Dale G. Renlund of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles recently discussed with the Church News the increasing distribution of the Book of Mormon, including its 200 millionth copy.
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The most recent full translation was into Macedonian, completed in 2021.
Following are the number of cumulative language translations in 10-year increments (during some decades there were no new language translations).
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‘Super sus!!!’: Flight attendant says man put a ‘creepy’ message into Google Translate and asked her for money. What is going on? - The Daily Dot - Translation
Flight attendant and TikToker Destanie (@destineaaa) has accumulated a staunch following on the popular social media platform sharing with viewers on the ups and downs of working in the aviation industry. She’s previously gone viral for revealing how she handles airplane passengers who try to finagle themselves into empty first class seats, and airing out some of the biggest pet peeves she deals with from passengers: From pre-boarding, mid-flight, and the preconceived notions people have about her because she’s a flight attendant.
She recently uploaded another clip that’s amassed over 10,000 views where she highlighted a strange encounter she had with a man who tried to finesse money out of her using Google Translate. She said that the scenario had all of the makings of a Liam Neeson human trafficking flick and thanks to her outright refusal to entertain the person’s exhortations and what she calls a seemingly fake nice guy shtick, she thankfully emerged from the incident unscathed.
“I had something happen to me tonight that I feel like was like a scene out of Taken. So I’m literally just getting back from my yearly reoccurrent flight attendant training so I’m already on edge right cause we did a lot of like safety and security stuff. They’re like situational awareness. So it’s like 8 o’clock, I’m waiting for the train, train’s coming at 8:10 and it’s really cold outside so I’m waiting above in the airport. There’s like an escalator to go down and an elevator to go down. This man comes up to me, and he’s like hmmm, I’m like yeah? I think he’s gonna ask for directions or something he gets super close to me,” she holds her hand up directly beside her face to demonstrate the proximity in which the man approached her, “Like this close to me, and I back up. And he gets closer to me. He pulls out his Google Translate, he’s speaking Russian into Google Translate like I saw the characters once he showed it to me, it’s Russian as she’s like getting really close to me and I keep backing up. It was just a weird vibe too, it was just like I felt a weird vibe from him. Like he was trying to give off this vibe that he was like ‘I’m a nice guy’ but it was creepy. He showed me his phone. His phone says: ‘I have been waiting at the ATM for an hour. Will you please transfer me some money and I will give you cash.’ And he shows it to me and he’s giving me this like nervous smile. And I look at him I’m like, ‘No, no,'” she says demonstrating the stern look she shot him while voicing she would not be transferring him money.
Destanie goes on to say that the strange man sighed and rolled his eyes before walking away, “He goes down to the train, walks in a circle, makes a phone call, and comes right back up the escalator. I watch him. He goes down to the train, paces around, makes a phone call and goes right back up. Am I overthinking this?” she asks at the end of the video, while also noting in a text overlay in her clip that there was no ATM machine located in the area that his mystery man kept retreating to.
Several commenters who responded to her clip did not believe she was overthinking the situation at all. One person penned: “All the comments are right – you get a weird feeling, trust your gut, trust your intuition. Happy nothing else happened”
Someone else remarked, “Weird and trust your instincts!”
While one TikTok user pointed out how strange the man’s scam was: Why in the world would he be asking for money to be transferred to his account if he had cash on his person?
Unfortunately, there are several ATM scams that are aimed at targeting travelers, however, they seem to be more complex than the one Destanie suspects she was a victim of: These cons usually involve card readers installed on ATM machines. Folks think that they’re getting their money out of the machine, and maybe they even do, but not before a device saves the card information to a microSD card that is then lifted by the con artist and used for a variety of transactions.
@destanieaaa I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt but really felt odd 😭
♬ original sound – Destanie | Flight Attendant ✈️
It seems that the particular con that Destanie is referring to is one that seems to tug on the heart strings of folks: A forlorn looking traveler is looking to have some funds transferred. They use Google Translate to create the persona of an individual who is a stranger in a strange land—who wouldn’t want to help someone in need? However, judging by the pitch offered up by the strange man, it didn’t sound like his con made much sense.
Another scam that’s gone viral on TikTok previously that travelers should watch out for, the “Paris clear cup scam” was aired by a user on the platform who said that beggars will intentionally put their money in clear cups on the floor and hope that tourists kick them over. When an apologetic pedestrian picks up their cup and their money, they will act upset and look to extort money out of folks: But it is apparently a known hustle, and one that preys on the guilt of someone who is supposedly more fortunate than the indigent beggar who just had their alms toppled over by some careless feet.
*First Published: Dec 31, 2023, 12:00 am CST
Jack Alban
Jack Alban is a freelance journalist for the Daily Dot covering trending human interest/social media stories and the reactions real people have to them. He always seeks to incorporate evidence-based studies, current events, and facts pertinent to these stories to create your not-so-average viral post.
Saturday, December 30, 2023
Lost in translation: We live with nonsense placenames thanks to poor adaptation from Irish to English - The Irish Times - Translation
In Belfast for a short period a few months ago, there was an outbreak of nonsense. There, on a hard-won bilingual street sign off the Ormeau Road, an entirely new Irish word was coined. Where it should have read Ascaill Pháirc an Fhéir, it instead read Ascaill Pháire an Fhéir.
The former means Haypark Avenue, as a quick cross-check with the English wording would prove to even the most self-effacing Gaeilgeoir. The latter doesn’t mean much of anything.
The word “páire” even appeared elsewhere, on five signs across three streets, in what a Belfast City Council subcommittee described as an “absolutely unfortunate” incident.
Belfast being something of a mecca of modern urban Irish-speaking, the mistakes were noticed quickly, and they will be fixed at no additional cost to the ratepayer. It was a pity, but also perhaps a symptom of success at a time when Irish-language translations are making rapid headway into areas that want them across the North.
“We would much have preferred the council spent their time dealing with the significant backlog in applications, rather than revisiting old ground and rectifying mistakes that never should have happened in the first place,” Cuisle Nic Liam, language rights co-ordinator at Conradh na Gaeilge, said. It was an “isolated incident” and is less of an issue than vandalism for campaigners.
Of course, not every misstep on the North’s signage will be as simple as a misprint. Bilingual signage in Ireland dates back to before partition, and the evolving tastes and dead ends of policy are still visible on older signs around the country today.
One problem faced in the early 20th century, and faced also in the North now, is the question of how to render obviously English placenames into Irish when there is no Irish root.
[ Why are there different versions of Irish place names on some Dublin street signs? ]
[ New Irish Language Commissioner pledges to improve services to Irish-speaking community ]
Dr Tom Spalding, a consulting historian and author of the book Layers: The Design History and Meaning of Public Street Signage in Cork and Other Irish Cities, recounts some of the options available to the first generations to Gaelicise city streets.
“They could try and transliterate names from English; although the lack of k, w, v, z and j in the Cló Gaelach presented problems. For example, Washington Street in Cork was rendered in 1918 as ‘Sráid Bashington’ with a ‘ponc’ or dot over the B,” he said.
Sharman Crawford Street, also in Cork, is rendered phonetically in Irish as Sráid Searman Cráford.
“Other times, a back translation from English would be attempted, and occasionally, where the name was initially a Gaelic place name, it would be easier: e.g. Sráid an tSean-Dúna [Old Fort Street] for Shandon Street.
“In the first decade of the last century in Cork, Irish spellings were provided by Conradh na Gaeilge. On one occasion, the branch in which Tomás Mac Curtain, later Lord Mayor of Cork and murdered by the RIC, was active provided a ‘translation’ for Coburg Street [named after the royal house of Prince Albert] to Sráid Uí h-Uigín, probably referencing the Latin American freedom fighter Bernardo O’Higgins.”
After writing about Dublin street signs earlier this year, I received a steady stream of examples and questions from the Gaeilgeoirs I encountered. There is a sign in Dundalk, I learned, that says Sráid na Mainistreach (Abbey Street) in Irish but Castle Street in English. Many people live on roads where the signs disagree with each other. And what did I think of the ship vs sheep debate in the translation of Dublin’s Ship Street Great?
Everyone who thinks to look finds one eventually. “I wouldn’t have the level of Irish required to pick errors in someone else’s translation or transliteration, but I am particularly fond of Bóthar Bhóthar na gCloch, the ‘Road of the Road of the Stone’ ie Stannaway Road, Crumlin, in Dublin,” says Spalding. The vast and invaluable official database at Logainm.ie, for its part, acknowledges that this particular example might “at first glance appear tautologous”, but says it’s an occupational hazard.
One I have become stuck on myself for a few months is Ballyfermot, which Logainm calls Baile Formaid. Not Tormod, or Thermod, or any other T name, as the earliest sources in English and Latin, going back to the 12th century Norman invasion say. And not Diarmait, after local dignitary Diarmait Mac Giolla Mocholmóg, as the historians reckon.
It’s an odd one. “If you were to translate the word ‘formad’, it means envy,” says Dr Emma Nic Cárthaigh, a UCC academic who has worked on the Historical Dictionary of Gaelic Placenames since 1996 and sits on the Coiste Logainmneacha, the expert panel that advises the minister of the Gaeltacht on Irish placenames. “But clearly envy has nothing to do with it. It’s a person’s name. With the ‘ballys’, you would rarely get an abstract name, it tends to be a person’s name. It could well be a Diarmaid, going way back.”
Nic Cárthaigh did not sit on the Coiste Logainmneacha when the decision was made, but she traces a possible process as follows: “In the 1840s, in the Ordnance Survey letters, someone comes along and puts Ballyfermot in pen, and then in the 1960s, someone from the Post Office puts Baile Formaid, where they’re interpreting it as envy, but they haven’t looked at the previous evidence clearly.”
The Coiste, perhaps mindful of local upheaval, left it alone.
Some of the more obvious bad Irish on display over the years was documented by the long-running Gaeilge Dána Facebook group, which had 1,300 members before being shuttered due to spam. Pádraig Ó Mealóid, its administrator, says that amid the unavoidable blitz of the written word, there was “something powerful in being able to share our annoyance at all the myriad ways that the Irish translations can and do go wrong”.
The mood varied from humour to fury, he says, but the posts, which captured everything from absent or backwards fadas to a sign translating Swords’ Airside as ‘Slios an Aeir’ – the side of the air – provided “a constant reminder that, after a hundred years, the State has still not managed to impart a good grounding in our national language to its citizens”, Ó Méalóid says.
As for solutions, he adds: “What we really need is an Irish equivalent of the Académie Française, with absolute authority over the language, with powers to publicly censure all transgressors, both public and private. A month in the Gaeltacht being only allowed to speak Irish would soon soften their coughs. I am, of course, available for a reasonable fee.”
Ultimately, from shopping streets to rural villages to supermarket aisles, all of this is a consequence of the Englishing of Ireland. By the time attention turned to rigorously naming the places of the English-speaking parts of the country, the names in the mouths of the people were already closer to the ones on the official documents than the ones that would have been spoken hundreds of years before.
The way it turned out wasn’t actually inevitable: the biggest towns in Ireland with names in Irish form are ones that were renamed, like Portlaoise (30th) and Cobh (53rd). In Wales, Llanelli, Rhyl and Merthyr Tydfil are in the top 10, despite English domination even longer-lived than that in Ireland.
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“It’s very funny, if you get talking to Welsh scholars or Welsh speakers, they are mesmerised and enraged by the wholesale anglicisation of Irish placenames,” Nic Cárthaigh says. “They didn’t go so far in Wales, and the Welsh are really bolshy about it.
“I’ve a Welsh friend who really annoys me because he always says ‘how are things in Corcaigh’. That’s really unnatural to our ears – cop yourself on and say Cork – but he has a point as well. It was a major act of vandalism on some level.”
So we live on with nonsense placenames that sound more familiar to us than their originals, and the experts continue their efforts to ensure we can know where they came from if we want to.
Some places in Ireland, however, robustly resist any efforts at direct translation whatsoever. A few, in fact, won’t reveal any meaning at all, in any language.
Take Finner, Co Donegal. A townland between Ballyshannon and Bundoran, it is just over two square miles in size and is home, in the modern day, to the 28th Infantry Battalion of the Defence Forces at the eponymous Finner Camp.
It has a long history as an encampment in fact – in 1536, according to the Annals of Loch Cé, the Ó Domhnaill mustered many men with the intention of fighting an equally impressive army of Ó Conchobhair men in Sligo. Arriving at Finner, he “rested and remained in that place until the rising of the sun on the morrow”.
[ ‘Irish is a wonderful language, it sounds so musical, the more I hear it, the more I like it’ ]
The problem is, that’s the only mention of it. “It’s spelled in that reference as Findir. We’re providing it [according to the historical dictionary’s spelling standard] as Finnir. It’s been anglicised as Finner. We have no idea what it means,” says Nic Cárthaigh.
The scholar Edmund Hogan in 1910 suggested that that it should be interpreted as Fionnabhair, a character from Táin Bó Cuailgne. “It’s the same name as Guinevere from King Arthur and Lancelot – that would be a Welsh version of the name.” This works well enough for some, but for Nic Cárthaigh and the academics “nobody can be sure”.
“We don’t know what it means, so we’re leaving it untranslated.”
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The latest Israeli-Palestinian battleground: Urban Dictionary - Forward - Dictionary
The user-run internet lexicon Urban Dictionary emerged in the early 2000s to define and occasionally create online slang — and, in doing so, has both shaped and reflected the internet, as well as indexing it.
And as dozens of one-sided entries for a new verb, “Israeled,” have appeared on Urban Dictionary after Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks — and that tens of thousands of users have battled to get the entries down-voted or deleted — the site has become an important staging ground for contests over who should control the online narrative of the war.
The 30-plus entries for “Israeled” so far submitted to Urban Dictionary more or less share a definition. One, posted Oct. 22, reads: “Verb. Use this term to refer to someone who steals something and acts like the victim.”
All Urban Dictionary entries use the word in a sentence for clarification, with many proceeding along these lines: “In a restaurant, someone asked to share my table. I agreed. After a moment, he asked me to leave because he has a meeting! I’ve been Israeled.”
The top-ranked entry had racked up more than 9,000 upvotes and 17,000 downvotes as of Dec. 29.
Only one of the entries — buried on the second page of definitions for “Israeled”— seems to take a pro-Israel tack: “When the entire world completely ignores historical facts, and justifies terrorist acts against you.” That, too, received more thumbs down than thumbs up.
Anyone with a Facebook or Gmail account can add a new definition to Urban Dictionary, and every submission is reviewed by volunteer editors before publication, according to the website’s help page. According to a 2013 article in The New York Times, only five people need to approve a new word for it to be added.
So while an advisory to down-vote and report definitions of “Israeled” to Urban Dictionary moderators circulated in some Jewish WhatsApp groups this week, the coordinated effort seems unlikely to have an effect. Urban Dictionary has a reputation for crassness and irreverence — its popularity since its founding in 1999 largely derived from its definitions of baroque sex terms and swear words — and “Israeled” hardly defies that. (One of the site’s homepage-featured words on Friday was “centaur ass.”)
Moreover, Urban Dictionary — one of the top 500 most-visited websites in the United States — has been scrutinized over the spread of racism and misogyny on the platform in recent years. The second-ranked definition of “girl” was, at one point, “The creation of satan. Designed to destroy the existence of mankind.”
Definitions can be flagged for removal, but the content moderation team that reviews the reports generally seems to take a laissez-faire approach. And a cursory review of the site’s terms of service does not find any clear-cut violations in “Israeled.” Though definitions that provide “information that is false, misleading or inaccurate,” are deemed unacceptable, the site reserves the right to not take down even definitions that are in violation.
Those offended by the entries might take heart in the knowledge that few people are going to Urban Dictionary to learn about the Israel-Palestinian conflict. But beneath that is a more troubling reality: that this is just what the internet looks like, now, and the picture it paints of Israel isn’t pretty.
Louis Keene is a staff reporter at the Forward covering religion, sports and the West Coast. He can be followed on Twitter @thislouis.
Samsung's new AI Live Translate will work on calls between Galaxy and non-Galaxy phones - PhoneArena - Translation
Samsung promotes its Live Translate Call feature
The Galaxy S24 flagship series is expected to be introduced on January 17th with pre-orders kicking off the same day. The rumored release date for the Galaxy S24, Galaxy S24+, and Galaxy S24 Ultra is January 30th.
The latest Israeli-Palestinian battleground: Urban Dictionary - Forward - Dictionary
The user-run internet lexicon Urban Dictionary emerged in the early 2000s to define and occasionally create online slang — and, in doing so, has both shaped and reflected the internet, as well as indexing it.
And as dozens of one-sided entries for a new verb, “Israeled,” have appeared on Urban Dictionary after Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks — and that tens of thousands of users have battled to get the entries down-voted or deleted — the site has become an important staging ground for contests over who should control the online narrative of the war.
The 30-plus entries for “Israeled” so far submitted to Urban Dictionary more or less share a definition. One, posted Oct. 22, reads: “Verb. Use this term to refer to someone who steals something and acts like the victim.”
All Urban Dictionary entries use the word in a sentence for clarification, with many proceeding along these lines: “In a restaurant, someone asked to share my table. I agreed. After a moment, he asked me to leave because he has a meeting! I’ve been Israeled.”
The top-ranked entry had racked up more than 9,000 upvotes and 17,000 downvotes as of Dec. 29.
Only one of the entries — buried on the second page of definitions for “Israeled”— seems to take a pro-Israel tack: “When the entire world completely ignores historical facts, and justifies terrorist acts against you.” That, too, received more thumbs down than thumbs up.
Anyone with a Facebook or Gmail account can add a new definition to Urban Dictionary, and every submission is reviewed by volunteer editors before publication, according to the website’s help page. According to a 2013 article in The New York Times, only five people need to approve a new word for it to be added.
So while an advisory to down-vote and report definitions of “Israeled” to Urban Dictionary moderators circulated in some Jewish WhatsApp groups this week, the coordinated effort seems unlikely to have an effect. Urban Dictionary has a reputation for crassness and irreverence — its popularity since its founding in 1999 largely derived from its definitions of baroque sex terms and swear words — and “Israeled” hardly defies that. (One of the site’s homepage-featured words on Friday was “centaur ass.”)
Moreover, Urban Dictionary — one of the top 500 most-visited websites in the United States — has been scrutinized over the spread of racism and misogyny on the platform in recent years. The second-ranked definition of “girl” was, at one point, “The creation of satan. Designed to destroy the existence of mankind.”
Definitions can be flagged for removal, but the content moderation team that reviews the reports generally seems to take a laissez-faire approach. And a cursory review of the site’s terms of service does not find any clear-cut violations in “Israeled.” Though definitions that provide “information that is false, misleading or inaccurate,” are deemed unacceptable, the site reserves the right to not take down even definitions that are in violation.
Those offended by the entries might take heart in the knowledge that few people are going to Urban Dictionary to learn about the Israel-Palestinian conflict. But beneath that is a more troubling reality: that this is just what the internet looks like, now, and the picture it paints of Israel isn’t pretty.
Louis Keene is a staff reporter at the Forward covering religion, sports and the West Coast. He can be followed on Twitter @thislouis.