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LEGO Star Wars 25th Anniversary Visual Dictionary With Exclusive Minifig Is Available Now ComicBook.comFriday, April 5, 2024
Thursday, April 4, 2024
How Jessica Cohen became the go-to English translator of Israeli literature - The Jewish News of Northern California - Translation
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How Jessica Cohen became the go-to English translator of Israeli literature The Jewish News of Northern CaliforniaThis Common Anime Word was Officially Added to the Oxford English Dictionary - GameRant - Dictionary
Highlights
- Isekai, a word created for anime and manga, has been added to the OED, recognizing its impact on English language and culture worldwide.
- The isekai genre, where characters are transported to a fantasy world, has roots in Japanese folklore and has gained popularity in recent years.
- With isekai's inclusion in the OED, it has become a topic of discussion beyond anime fans, showcasing its significance in global storytelling.
The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is the most widely accepted authority on the English language, and is updated quarterly with revised meanings and new words as our language continues to evolve. Sometimes these words are entirely new creations, and sometimes they are words from other languages that have been adopted for common use in English. This past quarter, 23 new Japanese words were officially added to the OED, showing how much of an impact Japanese culture has even outside of Japan.
One of these new words in particular is of major interest to otaku, because it is a word that was created entirely for anime, manga, and light novels - "isekai." These days, it is impossible to be an otaku without knowing the word isekai, considering it is one of the most popular genres for new works. But now, the word has also been officially added to the OED, making it not just a Japanese word that otaku throw around, but an addition to the English language itself, thanks to the influence it has had around the world in recent years.
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Why The Boy and the Heron’s Oscar is So Significant
The Boy and the Heron just made history at the Academy Awards for a number of reasons.The Origins and Impact of Isekai
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The word isekai is written in Japanese as 異世界, and can be translated as "different world," "other world," or "another world." For a story to be in the isekai genre, the main character has to be transported from our world into another world (usually a fantasy one), where they must learn to survive, typically without any hope of returning to our world. Usually, the protagonist has to fight to survive, and common tropes in the genre are that they are either extremely powerful in their new world, or extremely weak. Isekai as a concept started long ago in Japanese folklore, particularly in the story of Urashima Tarou, a fisherman who is transported to a magical undersea world after saving a turtle.
Isekai has been around for a while now in the anime world, and started to really gain popularity in the 2010s, but has now been brought to the forefront by the recent success of Studio Ghibli's The Boy and the Heron. The movie tells the story of a boy who is pulled into a magical world through a tower, and he has to figure out how to get back to his home. While many otaku may first think of popular titles like That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime or Konosuba: God's Blessing on this Wonderful World, it is likely thanks to movies like The Boy and the Heron and Spirited Away that isekai as a genre has been introduced to the wider world. Keep in mind that both of those movies by Studio Ghibli won Academy Awards.
Why Is Isekai's Inclusion in the OED Important?
With The Boy and the Heron's best picture win creating a stir in the world of both anime and Western cinema, isekai has moved from something only anime fans know about to something that other people are learning about, too. The genre has existed for many years in international media, including famous stories like Alice in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz, and Peter Pan all havnig the same concepts. But of course, the Japanese word was never used to describe them. Now, though, isekai has chosen to be added to the OED this quarter, showing that it is important enough that people are talking about it in English around the world.
Any word being added to the OED is significant, considering the authority that is placed in the Oxford English Dictionary. According to the OED's website;
More than a historical dictionary… over 500,000 entries… 3.5 million quotations … over 1000 years of English...The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is widely regarded as the accepted authority on the English language. It is an unsurpassed guide to the meaning, history, and usage of 500,000 words and phrases, past and present, from across the English-speaking world.
This means any word that is added to the OED has had enough impact on the English-speaking world to warrant being added to the language officially. Isekai has officially become that important, moving from something only otaku know about, to something that other people are discussing as well. The reach of the genre will likely not stop there, either, and will continue to spread and grow popular as stories continue to be successful.
You may be interested to know that some other Japanese words added to the OED with this update include "katsu," a form of frying food, "omotenashi," a word used to describe superior hospitality, "kintsugi," the art of repairing broken pottery with gold, silver, or platinum to highlight the imperfection, and more. The words were chosen by the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies along with the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary, and are now officially part of the English language.
More
The Greatest Isekai Anime Of All Time (March 2024)
True Isekai fans should make sure they've watched each of these iconic anime from start to finish.Source: The Guardian via IGN
Wednesday, April 3, 2024
Google's Circle to Search now does instant language translation - GSMArena.com news - GSMArena.com - Translation
Last week Google rolled out Circle to Search for the Pixel 6 family and the Pixel 7a, and in the same announcement it also revealed that Circle to Search would be getting an instant translation feature in the future. This is now appearing to be rolling out.
The translation happens in-line, with the translated text entirely replacing the original one, as you can see in the quick video below. It's all very simple really, you invoke Circle to Search the usual way, then simply tap on the new Translate icon that shows up to the right of the Google bar. And voila! It's all translated.
Circle to Search is rolling out in-line translation support!@Google announced last week that Circle to Search will add a new button that lets you instantly translate text onscreen, and this has now started to roll out to some users.
(Thanks to Rahul on Telegram for the tip!) pic.twitter.com/PaYOlELRYX
— Mishaal Rahman (@MishaalRahman) April 3, 2024
As usual with Google rollouts, it's unclear how wide this has spread so far. To use it right away, you might need to be using the latest beta Google app for Android, and of course it goes without saying that you need to have one of a few handsets that have support for Circle to Search in the first place - Google's Pixels from the Pixel 6 onwards, or one of Samsung's Galaxy S24 series, S23 series, Z Flip5, or Z Fold5.
If you do, and you haven't gotten the translation feature yet, be patient - Google rollouts can sometimes take weeks to conclude. But the good news is that it's now on the way.
Jennifer Croft's Hunt for a Missing Author - The New Republic - Translation
The Extinction of Irena Rey, the multilingual translator Jennifer Croft’s fun house of a debut novel, opens with a warning—not a note; not a foreword: a warning—from a translator. Quickly, readers gather that The Extinction of Irena Rey is both the real-world book we are reading and an autobiographical novel whose author, an Argentine translator named Emi, considers the woman now translating it into English her nemesis, “the monster who seems to want to ruin everything.” Alexis, the translator in question, is understandably offended by this. She also takes issue with the author’s choice to write in Polish rather than her native Spanish, whose spirit “comes whooshing through the walls of every paragraph, breaking plates and continually flicking the light switch, creating an atmosphere of wrongness and scaring the shit out of everyone’s dog.”
The Extinction of Irena Rey
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Linguistic haunting is just one of the many sorts of spookiness running through The Extinction of Irena Rey, which is set largely in Poland’s primeval Białowieża Forest. When the novel opens, the forest—full of poison snakes, mysterious mushrooms, and the memories of Nazi hunting parties; guarded by a mythic shape-shifter named Leshy—is under threat: An invasive beetle has moved in, and the Polish government has responded by tripling logging limits there. For the eponymous writer Irena Rey, who lives at the forest’s edge, this is an artistic crisis as well as an environmental and historical one. Irena, a literary legend and constant Nobel contender, has made her career writing sweeping, beloved works of climate fiction. But now she’s diminished, upset about the forest, and strangely reluctant to share her new manuscript, though she’s summoned all her translators to Białowieża to work on it.
Irena seems at first to be the center of the novel’s swirling creepiness. She is a performatively witchy figure, all black-magic jewelry and strange tinctures. In her house, objects are constantly disappearing; whole trunks and rooms are off-limits. More alarming than any of this, however, is her treatment of her translators. She forbids them to work with other authors, only lets them translate her work in her physical presence, subjects them to arbitrary rules like not discussing the weather, and demands that they refer to each other as “Spanish” and “German” instead of using proper names.
Emi, the novel’s narrator, objects to none of this. She worships Irena. She is confident that the other translators, including Alexis, feel just as strongly as she does; she informs us that each of them believed Irena was “warmth, she was moisture, she was light, she was the adamant perfection of a million billion snowflakes in a split second’s descent.” At first, Croft makes it impossible to tell to what degree the other translators share Emi’s childish reverence. But when Irena vanishes only a few days after summoning her translators to Poland, the group’s frantic efforts to locate or conjure her reveal the varying intensities of Irena’s hold on them. The novel becomes not just a literary thriller but an examination of the delicate mix of desire, impersonation, ambition, and selfishness that the art of literary translation requires.
At first, all eight of Irena’s translators are desperate to find her. They search everywhere, including in her latest manuscript, which they hope holds clues; they perform comical but heartfelt summoning rituals; they even stage a wedding. Emi, the most devoted of all, gives herself the impossible mission of saving the forest from logging in order to somehow bring Irena back. Soon, though, it becomes apparent that everyone but Emi is concerned primarily because Irena’s disappearance drastically impacts their finances: Irena has forbidden them to translate other writers, so if she’s gone, they have no way to pay their rent. For Emi, though, the trouble is existential. Without Irena, she feels profoundly lost—and her lostness shapes the book. Everything else, including the question of where Irena has gone, is less plot than scaffold, there to support Croft’s character writing, her ideas, and her gorgeously descriptive and exploratory prose.
Playful and beautiful language is not unexpected from a translator as gifted as Croft, who has worked with authors ranging from the young Argentine story writer Federico Falco to Polish Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk (a partial model for Irena Rey? Certainly Croft is tempting readers to think so, though it seems immensely unlikely that the real writer’s behavior matches the fictional one’s). Neither is it surprising that Croft plainly delights in unusual words, often turning them into Easter eggs of sorts. After the Swedish translator gets bitten by a tree adder on an excursion to the forest with Irena, his colleagues are “unable to keep from sensing the throbbing of Swedish’s hot, pomiform hand.” The basic worry here is apparent—but if you take the time to look up pomiform, or know that it means apple-shaped, the looming end of the translators’ Eden is suddenly clear.
But Croft is not a thesaurus writer. She is elastic in tone, as comfortable in low registers as she is in high ones. Her prose is as funny as it is elegant; it would be propulsive if it weren’t so packed with words, phrases, and translation debates worth appreciating. The Extinction of Irena Rey is, I’d say, the first novel since Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad to pull off a chapter written in the mode of a relatively new app or program: PowerPoint for Egan, Instagram for Croft. But though Croft’s good at both Instagram-caption-as-story and, more broadly, at integrating social media and internet research into a novel about the archetypally analog subjects of nature and literature, she shines most of all in her use of a very old technology: the footnote. The Extinction of Irena Rey’s true plot happens literally below the story, where Alexis, the English translator, footnotes as she goes. At first, she just offers catty clarifications— “perhaps it will be useful to the reader to know that the author liberally employs a very royal ‘we’ throughout”—but before long, the book’s bottom margins fill up with comments, objections, and critiques of the translation philosophy to which poor author-worshipping Emi clings.
Using footnotes is itself a philosophical choice for translators, many of whom argue that doing so is too academic; that footnoting a novel makes it an object of study, not a story to be enjoyed. Alexis would likely agree with this idea, which suggests that not only the content but the presence of her footnotes is meant to undermine the novel she’s translating. Emi would certainly think so. Emi’s enmity toward Alexis is rooted partly in envy of Alexis’s beauty and assurance and partly in resentment of her U.S. citizen’s entitlement (the novel takes pains to distinguish between American, as in resident of the Americas, and person from the United States). Alexis believes in smoothing and tidying translations to ensure her readers’ pleasure. As a translator, Alexis isn’t all about herself, but she has faith in her judgment and prioritizes her own ideas, aesthetics, and career. According to Emi, this means that Alexis violates “our sacred translation honor code”—and flagrantly, too. “She said it openly,” Emi complains: “She thought translation was also editing.” Emi, naturally, would never change a thing. She’s the model of a more old-fashioned school of translation, the translator who strives to be neither seen nor heard. Her goal is perfect fidelity to Irena’s original works—which, to Alexis, is itself a form of betrayal, since preserving meaning word by word can undermine aesthetic and emotional effect.
It’s a sign of Croft’s gift for balance that The Extinction of Irena Rey does not come down on one side or the other—not even to me, a translator very much inclined to work Alexis’s way. In my own translations, I try not to call attention to the source text’s otherness or foreignness; doing so through strategies like footnoting or italicizing words from the original language is, I think, tokenizing. Yet Emi is correct to point out that changing an original too much when translating into a world-powerful language like English can be a colonial impulse, “exactly [what] you would expect a U.S. usurper to do.” (Tellingly, this line is not footnoted, indicating Croft’s agreement, if not Alexis’s.)
Still, reluctance to change an original is often a disservice to it. Early in The Extinction of Irena Rey, Emi is shocked to discover that the author, a brilliant performer of her own prose, sings not in the “magical, mellifluous voice of an angel” but a “wobbly, frail” tone prone to breaking. In the moment, the scene seems simply to demonstrate Emi’s idol worship, but as the novel moves on, it becomes a key to the issue with Emi’s translation approach. Irena has a wonderful reading voice, but a weak, untrained singing one; so, too, she might have a wonderful Polish voice that, transposed straight into another language, needs some help.
Of course, Emi’s problems go beyond artistic philosophy. Worrying that a hookup with one of the other translators may have left her pregnant, she frets about becoming “monstrous and invaded, not even me anymore,” then adds, “Then again, I was a translator. Wasn’t not being me what I spent every day trying to achieve?” In a footnote, Alexis says, simply, “No.” This exchange contains all The Extinction of Irena Rey’s ghosts. Emi yearns to impersonate Irena, not so much to become her—hard to become your own idol—but to win her pure, total approval. Once Irena disappears, this goal, now impossible, haunts and torments Emi. She hates that Alexis can move on from Irena, since it reveals the gap between them: While Alexis wants to produce good translations of Irena’s work, Emi wants an iron grip on Irena herself.
All this may sound technical and heady for a novel, but Croft imbues the two translators’ rivalry with humor, pathos, and judicious hints of lust. The result is captivating and fun on a character level—reading Alexis’s footnotes often feels like gossiping with a friend—but it’s also a reminder to readers of a lesson that Emi needs to learn: Translation is a human act, a human art. As the novel moves toward its conclusion, Croft makes it increasingly clear that Emi does not have either her colleagues’ respect or her author’s. Her drive to translate as if she herself were absent from the text, to create perfect reproductions of Irena’s books rather than her own interpretations, likely undermines the quality of her work—and certainly skews the story she’s telling, in ways small and large, funny and sad.
The Extinction of Irena Rey is haunted by the absent Irena and by the many spirits and inhabitants of the Białowieża Forest, from the fungal networks that “coursed through the soil and stitched the plants and the trees of the forest into a united and communicating whole” to the memory of the native bison hunted to extinction by occupying Nazis. Arguably, it’s haunted by Alexis, the translator who won’t stop inserting herself. But the novel gets its emotional force from the palpable absence of Emi’s confidence, her artistic vision, her ability to pick herself over Irena. Without those things, our narrator is someone to pity: a would-be husk, a machine who wishes she had no ghost within.
Anime Genre Is So Popular The Oxford Dictionary Has Acknowledged It - Giant Freakin Robot - Dictionary
“Isekai,” which translates to “different world” or “another world,” holds a significant place in the Japanese anime world. Its inception can be linked back to the concept of “portal fantasy” and has now flourished into a subgenre that encompasses various forms such as novels, films, manga, anime, and video games. Typically, in an isekai anime, the main character is either transported or reborn into an unfamiliar and fantastical realm, where the narrative revolves around their journey of exploration and survival.
Anime Genre Is So Popular The Oxford Dictionary Has Acknowledged It - Giant Freakin Robot - Dictionary
“Isekai,” which translates to “different world” or “another world,” holds a significant place in the Japanese anime world. Its inception can be linked back to the concept of “portal fantasy” and has now flourished into a subgenre that encompasses various forms such as novels, films, manga, anime, and video games. Typically, in an isekai anime, the main character is either transported or reborn into an unfamiliar and fantastical realm, where the narrative revolves around their journey of exploration and survival.
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