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CDIAL unveils dictionary for modern words in native languages VanguardSunday, January 29, 2023
Saturday, January 28, 2023
La Plata Rotary Club hands out dictionaries to third grade students - The Southern Maryland Chronicle - Dictionary
It’s been a while since Sanya Sitkoula walked in the hallways of Indian Head Elementary School. Now an eighth grader at General Smallwood Middle School, Sanya recently returned to her former school to help her dad, Kiran, with a special project.
For nearly 20 years, Charles County Public Schools (CCPS) students in third grade have been given the gift of words when members of rotary clubs give each their own dictionary. “You will appreciate this gift for the rest of your life,” Kiran Sitkoula, a member of the Rotary Club of La Plata, said to members of Jessica Garcia’s class.
Rotary clubs around the country and other service clubs and organizations take part in a program started in 1992 by a Savannah, Ga., housewife. Soon the tradition of giving out dictionaries to third graders picked up steam when the Dictionary Project was formed three years later in 1995. Over the years, the program has been taken up by organizations around the country resulting in more than 28 million dictionaries given away. Rotarians have been handing out dictionaries to third graders in Charles County since 2004. Third grade is the golden age for the giveaway. Second grade is too young, fourth graders is a bit too old. Third grade seems to be the right age. “The level of curiosity is there,” Sitkoula said.
“The more you read, the more your brain grows bigger and bigger,” he told students. “You can’t see it, but it’s growing, and you are making connections and getting smarter and smarter.”
Though classroom configurations and hallway layouts of her former elementary school have faded from Sanya’s memory, receiving a dictionary in third grade has not. She remembered receiving one when she was third grader. “Yeah, it’s easy to go online, but with books … it’s your own book,” she said. “It’s yours to keep. And it’s not just a dictionary. It has stats, information about states, countries and other facts.” Sanya said she referred to the dictionary throughout out elementary school.
During the Monday morning presentation, Kiran Sitkoula reviewed some of the highlights within the book’s binding. The U.S. Constitution is in it, information about U.S. presidents and states, and facts about countries around the world are contained between the front and back covers. Countries like Nepal, where Kiran Sitkoula, was born. Sanya and her father taught students about Mount Everest, the tallest mountain in the world, which Sanya saw out of her bedroom window while visiting Nepal for an extended stay recently.
Students discussed the population of countries they have visited or hope to in the future. They also took a shot at saying the longest word in the English language – all 189,819 letters of it. The chemical name of titin, the largest known protein, takes up more than half of the page it’s printed on in the students’ dictionary.
“If we get that word on the spelling bee, we’re so out,” Krisstopher Garcia, a third grader in Paige Koerbel’s, class said.
Friday, January 27, 2023
Dictionary biz finally infiltrates gaming as Merriam-Webster buys Quordle - Ars Technica - Dictionary
A sample game of Quordle.
Merriam-Webster
As the name suggests, Quordle is simply a game of Wordle multiplied by four, with each guess simultaneously filling in information on all four boards. It's part of a wave of similar "multi-Wordle" clones that started with Dordle last January and has since expanded to include the ridiculous 100-fold guessing of Centordle and the absolutely ludicrous 1,000-fold Kilordle.
Apparently, "four at a time" was the sweet spot for Merriam-Webster, a 192-year-old dictionary company that isn't exactly known for daily puzzles in the same way that The New York Times is. But the Merriam-Webster website has included some basic word games and quizzes since at least 2015. And while the modern version of that Games & Quizzes landing page doesn't currently mention Quordle, the main Merriam-Webster website prominently features it as "a new daily challenge."
"I'm delighted to announce that Quordle was acquired by Merriam-Webster!" Quordle creator Freddie Meyer announced on Twitter Friday. "I can't think of a better home for this game. Lots of new features and fun to come, so stay tuned!"
While Merriam-Webster seemingly didn't even bother with a press release to announce its new game purchase, company President Greg Barlow told TechCrunch that the game is "a favorite of Merriam-Webster editors" and that it "will make a great addition to our lineup of games and quizzes."
A Quordle purchase might seem a bit silly when an outfit like Merriam-Webster could easily have made a copy-of-a-copy version for itself. But the acquisition gives Merriam-Webster access to the Quordle brand name and website, which now redirects to the dictionary maker's Games & Quizzes page. That Quordle site was popular enough to reportedly draw half a million daily players as of last April. Even now, Barlow told TechCrunch that the editors "look forward to playing along with the millions of Quordle fans every day."
Those who want to keep playing without supporting "Big Dictionary" can move over to many existing Quordle clones (i.e., Wordle-clone clones) such as Quordle-Wordle, Quordle Game, or even an unofficial iOS app (so much for Apple's "no copycats" policy). If any of those knockoffs of a knockoff are purchased by Roget's Thesaurus or something, we'll be sure to let you know.
Here are the winners of the first Albertine Translation Prize. - Literary Hub - Translation
January 27, 2023, 11:48am
At a ceremony in New York on Thursday, Villa Albertine announced the winners of the first Albertine Translation Prize, which honors “the best contemporary French literature in English translation,” as selected by a committee of independent professional experts.
“Together with the authors and publishers, [these translators] have created works of literature that communicate across cultures, each weaving a tapestry of timely questions and poetic insight that open up new perspectives for readers in France, in the US, and around the world,” said Gaëtan Bruel, Director of Villa Albertine, in a press release.
Each winning translator will be awarded $5,000, in addition to grants to support the cost of publication in the United States.
Here are the winning books:
La femme et l’oiseau (The Woman and the Falcon) by Isabelle Sorento, translated by Heather Green (JC Lattès/seeking American publisher)
Des empires sous la terre : Histoire écologique et raciale de la sécularisation (Empires Beneath the Earth) by Mohamad Amer Meziane, translated by Jonathan Adjemain (Le découverte/Verso Books)
Thursday, January 26, 2023
Prince Harry: early leaks came from a Spanish translation, causing confusion about what was really said - The Conversation Indonesia - Translation
Eight days before Prince Harry’s memoir Spare hit shelves elsewhere, copies went on sale prematurely in Spain.
Over the next few days the UK media, scrambled to acquire Spanish copies of the book, having been unable to get English versions for themselves. Their reporting on the story was initially based on these Spanish versions.
The fact that many of the quotes had been translated from English to Spanish and then back into English was barely acknowledged. Sometimes, this results in change, or different versions, as we see below. The book’s tagline is “His Words. His Story.” and part of the coverage centred around why it was important that these were Prince Harry’s own words. Yet what those words actually were, depended on where you read them.
His words?
One much quoted extract from Spare is Prince Harry’s account of how many members of the Taliban he had killed. He writes:
So, my number: twenty-five. It wasn’t a number that gave me any satisfaction. But neither was it a number that made me feel ashamed.
This was a focal point for early spoilers on the book and was quoted differently in different publications.
On Sky: “So my number: twenty-five. It was not something that filled me with satisfaction, but I was not ashamed either.”
In The Times: “So my number is 25. It’s not a number that fills me with satisfaction, but nor does it embarrass me.”
Neither of these translations is wrong. They show different ways of rendering the same idea – but the cumulative effect is important.
It was unclear whether early criticisms were responding to the published version or alternative translations. Those attacking the author for his stance may not in fact have been responding to “his words” at all.
A more detailed example comes in Prince Harry’s account – here taken from the book in English – of losing his virginity:
Inglorious episode, with an older woman. She liked horses, quite a lot, and treated me not unlike a young stallion. Quick ride, after which she’d smacked my rump and sent me off to graze. Among the many things about it that were wrong: It happened in a grassy field behind a busy pub.
Unsurprisingly, this was another of the most frequently quoted leaks. But again, the wording is not consistent. The Daily Mail quoted:
“… a humiliating episode with an older woman who liked macho horses and who treated me like a young stallion. I mounted her quickly, after which she spanked my ass and sent me away. One of my many mistakes was letting it happen in a field, just behind a very busy pub.”
There are some significant differences. Firstly, a shift in agency and responsibility: a “quick ride” is recast to position Harry as dominant (“I mounted her”), while “things that were wrong” become “my many mistakes”, suggesting self-accusation.
There is also awkwardness, in the term “macho horse” and in the reference to ass spanking: would the author who talks elsewhere about his “todger” also say “ass”?
The different word choices may be partly about different translators working on the text that appeared in different places. A translator collaborates in rewriting the author’s text, brings out its interest and value, reads carefully for hidden layers of meaning and confronts difficulties and inconsistencies.
Languages don’t map directly onto one another and there is often more than one way to translate a given word or phrase. What’s notable here is that the invisibility of the English to Spanish to English translation process leaves readers not understanding why there are different versions.
His story?
Translation theorists have talked about translation as a kind of “rewriting”. Recognising the translator as an active writing agent is key to exploring the ethical question of whose voice is heard in translated texts.
However, the participation of others in the telling doesn’t necessarily mean Spare is no longer Prince Harry’s story.
Storytelling is central to how we establish our identity, and it is social. We rely on communities to retell our stories and so, as the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre explains: “We are never more (and sometimes less) than co-authors of our own narrative.”
But how far can the ownership of Prince Harry’s narrative stretch when the words are no longer “his”? As we have seen, when fragments and differently translated snippets are all presented as “the text”, the resulting inconsistency undermines the authenticity of the story, and with it the agenda of the book.
The marketing for Spare and media appearances surrounding its publication have leaned heavily on a bid to “tell my own story” and resist “words being taken out of context”. The realities of translation show how difficult this is.
Kamen Rider Kuuga Manga's English Translation Under Fire for Errors - Gizmodo - Translation
Translating media from one language into another is always going to be a fraught process—from trying to retain a style and nuance between dialogue, to navigating fanbases that often perceive any kind of difference in localization as censorship. But there’s a difference between that, and what’s happened to Titan’s Kamen Rider Kuuga releases.
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Although the first two volumes of Stonebot and Titan Comics’ English release of Toshiki Inoue and Hitotsu Yokoshima’s Kamen Rider Kuuga manga—adapting the classic 2000 Kamen Rider series that revitalized the superhero franchise for the 21st century—have been available for a few months now, the series has come under fire this week after fans pointed out a consistent pattern of errors and awkward phrasing in the English translation of the manga. From clunky syntax to inconsistent name romanization, from awkward line breaks to printing errors cutting off art and dialogue, both volumes of Kuuga showcase a pattern of sloppiness that make them difficult to read at best.
But matters were made worse when the furor around the translation’s awkwardness revealed that Titan had been selling the Kuuga manga with an altogether different translation. Preview pages released last summer—including ones shared by io9 at the time—feature a translation that is not just different to the final release in terms of better sentence structure and phrasing, but in formatting and stylization too, utilizing different fonts and occupying more space in speech bubbles for dramatic effect, as well as stylized FX translations.
Today, Titan released a brief statement acknowledging fan concerns while also explaining the disparities between the previewed pages of both released volumes of the Kuuga manga—volumes 3-5 are currently available to pre-order—were the result of intents to get previews of the series out quickly.
“In April 2022, early draft pages (three pages for Volume 1 and four pages for Volume 2) were translated for marketing purposes, as we wanted to get the artwork out as soon as possible for the fans,” Titan’s statement reads in part. “These may still be circulating on the web. The actual translation for the printed books (approved by Titan and licensors) were worked on by two highly respected translators in the business.”
While this may explain the disparity between preview and final release, it doesn’t explain why Titan continued to use the separately translated preview pages in the run-up to, and after the release of, the first two volumes of Kamen Rider Kuuga. Tweets as recently as January 23, two days ago, continue to use the inaccurate preview images to advertise the comic, despite the fact that the worse translation was already in the hands of fans. Amazon’s U.S. store pages for Kamen Rider Kuuga volumes 1-2 also use the released translation as previews now, as opposed to the initial preview pages.
Kamen Rider has gained an international fanbase often in spite of itself across its long history, with much of the franchise—whether shows and movies, merchandise, or adapted material like manga and comics—still legally inaccessible to audiences outside of Japan. Although fits and starts have been made to bring the series to a wider audience in other countries, Kamen Rider is still an incredibly niche franchise, one supported by diehards who’ve put up with a lot in an attempt to ensure more people can legally enjoy the series they love.
But Rider fans shouldn’t have to put up with being hoodwinked in a manner such as this, and sold a sloppily translated product under the perceived onus of having to support it to prove a continued interest in the series beyond its home shores. If the difference in quality between fan-translated material and official releases is going to have such vast disparity, the companies Toei is working with to try and make Kamen Rider a mainstream superhero franchise outside of Japan are going to have to do much better to prove to the Rider fanbase that their access is going to do better for the series’ community than the work that community has been doing to sustain itself for decades beforehand.
Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.
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