The Best New Korean Literature In Translation - Book Riot - Translation

Pierce Alquist is a transplanted New Yorker living and working in the publishing scene in Boston. Don’t worry if she fooled you, the red hair is misleading. She’s a literature in translation devotee and reviewer and lover of small, independent presses. A voracious traveler and foodie, you can find her in her kitchen making borscht or covered in red pepper paste as she perfects her kimchi recipe.

View All posts by Pierce Alquist

Pierce Alquist is a transplanted New Yorker living and working in the publishing scene in Boston. Don’t worry if she fooled you, the red hair is misleading. She’s a literature in translation devotee and reviewer and lover of small, independent presses. A voracious traveler and foodie, you can find her in her kitchen making borscht or covered in red pepper paste as she perfects her kimchi recipe.

View All posts by Pierce Alquist

Pierce Alquist is a transplanted New Yorker living and working in the publishing scene in Boston. Don’t worry if she fooled you, the red hair is misleading. She’s a literature in translation devotee and reviewer and lover of small, independent presses. A voracious traveler and foodie, you can find her in her kitchen making borscht or covered in red pepper paste as she perfects her kimchi recipe.

View All posts by Pierce Alquist

Pierce Alquist is a transplanted New Yorker living and working in the publishing scene in Boston. Don’t worry if she fooled you, the red hair is misleading. She’s a literature in translation devotee and reviewer and lover of small, independent presses. A voracious traveler and foodie, you can find her in her kitchen making borscht or covered in red pepper paste as she perfects her kimchi recipe.

View All posts by Pierce Alquist

Pierce Alquist is a transplanted New Yorker living and working in the publishing scene in Boston. Don’t worry if she fooled you, the red hair is misleading. She’s a literature in translation devotee and reviewer and lover of small, independent presses. A voracious traveler and foodie, you can find her in her kitchen making borscht or covered in red pepper paste as she perfects her kimchi recipe.

View All posts by Pierce Alquist

Pierce Alquist is a transplanted New Yorker living and working in the publishing scene in Boston. Don’t worry if she fooled you, the red hair is misleading. She’s a literature in translation devotee and reviewer and lover of small, independent presses. A voracious traveler and foodie, you can find her in her kitchen making borscht or covered in red pepper paste as she perfects her kimchi recipe.

View All posts by Pierce Alquist

Pierce Alquist is a transplanted New Yorker living and working in the publishing scene in Boston. Don’t worry if she fooled you, the red hair is misleading. She’s a literature in translation devotee and reviewer and lover of small, independent presses. A voracious traveler and foodie, you can find her in her kitchen making borscht or covered in red pepper paste as she perfects her kimchi recipe.

View All posts by Pierce Alquist

Pierce Alquist is a transplanted New Yorker living and working in the publishing scene in Boston. Don’t worry if she fooled you, the red hair is misleading. She’s a literature in translation devotee and reviewer and lover of small, independent presses. A voracious traveler and foodie, you can find her in her kitchen making borscht or covered in red pepper paste as she perfects her kimchi recipe.

View All posts by Pierce Alquist

Pierce Alquist is a transplanted New Yorker living and working in the publishing scene in Boston. Don’t worry if she fooled you, the red hair is misleading. She’s a literature in translation devotee and reviewer and lover of small, independent presses. A voracious traveler and foodie, you can find her in her kitchen making borscht or covered in red pepper paste as she perfects her kimchi recipe.

View All posts by Pierce Alquist

Pierce Alquist is a transplanted New Yorker living and working in the publishing scene in Boston. Don’t worry if she fooled you, the red hair is misleading. She’s a literature in translation devotee and reviewer and lover of small, independent presses. A voracious traveler and foodie, you can find her in her kitchen making borscht or covered in red pepper paste as she perfects her kimchi recipe.

View All posts by Pierce Alquist

Pierce Alquist is a transplanted New Yorker living and working in the publishing scene in Boston. Don’t worry if she fooled you, the red hair is misleading. She’s a literature in translation devotee and reviewer and lover of small, independent presses. A voracious traveler and foodie, you can find her in her kitchen making borscht or covered in red pepper paste as she perfects her kimchi recipe.

View All posts by Pierce Alquist

Pierce Alquist is a transplanted New Yorker living and working in the publishing scene in Boston. Don’t worry if she fooled you, the red hair is misleading. She’s a literature in translation devotee and reviewer and lover of small, independent presses. A voracious traveler and foodie, you can find her in her kitchen making borscht or covered in red pepper paste as she perfects her kimchi recipe.

View All posts by Pierce Alquist

Every season I pour over the catalogs and galleys of new releases in translation and highlight some of the titles that I’m excited about for Book Riot. I was especially impressed with this spring and summer’s incredible offerings of literature translated from Korean. There were even more stunning titles than usual and much more than I could fit into my original list, where I try to highlight a wide diversity of languages and countries. So I was inspired to create a list solely of the titles translated from Korean this season as an added bonus. And because I couldn’t help myself, I also looked ahead at and included some exciting early fall titles.

Looking at this list, I’m overwhelmed by the overall quality of all of these titles — to put it simply, every single one of them is a banger. I’ve always loved Korean literature in translation, but to have more titles available than ever before, written and translated at this high standard, feels like an absolute gift. I’m also impressed by the variety of what’s currently being translated from Korean right now. There are critically acclaimed and beloved authors and translators returning with their newest book, like my most-anticipated book of the season: Phantom Pain Wings by Kim Hyesoon and translated by Don Mee Choi, alongside exceptional English-language debuts like Walking Practice by Dolki Min and translated by Victoria Caudle and Whale by Cheon Myeong-kwan and translated by Chi-Young Kim. There’s also a fascinating mixture of form and genre, from science fiction to literary fiction and novels, short stories, and poetry alike. It’s a thrilling time to be a lover of Korean literature in translation!

Best New Korean Literature in Translation

Walking Practice by Dolki Min, translated by Victoria Caudle

Walking Practice was my biggest surprise of the season! The novel follows a shapeshifting alien that is the lone survivor of their planet’s destruction, now confined to Earth’s atmosphere. To survive, they learn to use dating apps and their shapeshifting abilities to seduce and eat their suitors. The alien’s inner commentary — horrifying and strange and yet also thoughtful and endearing — about what it means to be an outsider, acting as “human,” and their desire to belong is utterly fascinating and a biting critique of social structures that discriminate against queer, gender-nonconforming, and disabled people. Victoria Caudle’s translation was striking, both insightful and utterly original, and I was grateful for her translator’s note that provided a glimpse behind the curtain. Blending humor and horror, science fiction and searing cultural commentary, Walking Practice stuns — almost as if I was its next victim. (HarperVia, March 14)

I Went to See My Father by Kyung-Sook Shin, translated by Anton Hur

I Went to See My Father follows the life of a woman reconnecting with her elderly father after the death of her own daughter. While taking care of him, she finds a chest of letters and begins to piece together stories of a life she never knew. It is a powerful and haunting novel about family, war, loss, and fatherhood. While Kyung-Sook Shin is widely known internationally for the international bestseller and winner of the Man Asian Literary Prize Please Look After Mom, translated by Chi-Young Kim, I also recommend The Girl Who Wrote Loneliness, translated by Ha-yun Jung, a haunting coming-of-age story set against the backdrop of Korea’s industrial sweatshops of the 1970s, and The Court Dancer, translated by Anton Hur, a beautifully written historical novel set during the dramatic final years of the Joseon Dynasty. (Astra House, April 11)

Greek Lessons by Han Kang, translated by Deborah Smith and Emily Yae Won

I love Han Kang’s sharp and stunning novels, including the Man Booker International Prize winner The Vegetarian, Human Acts, and The White Book, all translated by Deborah Smith, and was eagerly anticipating this new book. Of her past novels, Greek Lessons, translated by Smith and Emily Yae Won, seems to most closely resemble The White Book — a novel that uses an exploration of the color white to think about grief and loss. Likewise, Greek Lessons is a meditation on human connection told through the act of learning and sharing language, specifically Ancient Greek. It’s a pleasure to watch Kang think in this radiant translation. (Hogarth, April 18)

Whale by Cheon Myeong-kwan, translated by Chi-Young Kim

Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, Whale is the English-language debut of Cheon Myeong-kwan, an award-winning South Korean novelist and screenwriter, and translated by Chi-Young Kim, who received the Man Asian Literary Prize for her translation of Please Look After Mom by Kyung-Sook Shin. It is a multigenerational story of three women set in a remote, coastal village in the rapidly modernizing South Korea of the latter half of the 20th century. Whale is widely considered a modern classic in South Korea and has been compared frequently to One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez with its mix of magical and realist elements and its epic scale, but Whale is its own creature entirely — a strange and beguiling blend of satire, folklore, Korean Han, and something else that feels indescribable. (Archipelago, May 2)

Phantom Pain Wings by Kim Hyesoon, translated by Don Mee Choi

When I first wrote about Autobiography of Death by Kim Hyesoon and translated by Don Mee Choi, I said that it felt like one of the most important books I’ve ever read. I still feel that way, and my estimation of this author and translator continues to grow with this new collection that also grapples with death, memory, and trauma but is even more deeply personal. Kim Hyesoon writes, “I came to write Phantom Pain Wings after Daddy passed away. I called out for birds endlessly. I wanted to become a translator of bird language.” Like its predecessor, one of the best parts of this collection is watching Hyesoon and Don Mee Choi’s fiercely intelligent minds at work, and I’m grateful for the inclusion of Hyesoon’s profound essay “Bird Rider” and Don Mee Choi’s translator’s diary. (New Directions, May 2)

Counterweight by Djuna, translated by Anton Hur

Djuna is a novelist and film critic, widely considered to be one of South Korea’s most important science fiction writers. They have also published their books anonymously for more than 20 years. This is their first novel to be translated into English — and they couldn’t be in better hands than with acclaimed translator Anton Hur — and when I heard that Djuna had conceived of this work as a “low-budget science fiction film” I was immediately intrigued. Within the first few pages, I knew I was already deeply enmeshed in something special. This novel is dizzying and cinematic with corporate politics, family dynamics, an elevator into space, neuro-implant “worms,” an island nation’s fight against a colonial/capitalist takeover, and so much more. (Pantheon, July 11)

At Night He Lifts Weights: Stories by Kang Young-sook, translated by Janet Hong

Kang Young-sook is an award-winning author of many novels and short story collections and currently teaches creative writing at Korea National University of Arts. This short story collection is her first to be translated into English, by none other than the brilliant Janet Hong. I’m a great admirer of Hong’s translations of the short stories of Ha Seong-Nan and numerous graphic novels by Keum Suk Gendry-Kim, Yeong-Shin Ma, and Ancco, among others. Perceptive and subversive, the stories in At Night He Lifts Weights vary in tone and genre, but each is singularly captivating, swirling around themes of loss — ecological destruction, loneliness, and death. Each has a subtle illusion of calm that conceals what lies below in the unnerving depths. (Transit Books, September 12)

The Owl Cries by Hye-young Pyun, translated by Sora Kim-Russell

In this intense, psychological thriller, park ranger In-su Park decides to search for a missing man in the woods after a series of bizarre incidents, including discovering a mysterious note left on his desk that says, “The owl lives in the forest.” Just like in their Shirley Jackson Award–winning The Hole, Hye-Young Pyun and translator Sora Kim-Russell create a fast-paced and all-consuming story with an unusual narrator. In-su Park searches desperately for the missing man while also discovering more than he’d like in the forest, the people around him, and in himself. A novel of secrets, isolation, and pain, The Owl Cries is another tightly executed feat of writing. (Arcade, October 3)

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Looking for even more great recommendations of literature in translation from this season? Check out 10 of the Best New Books In Translation Out Spring 2023.

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The Annotated Nightstand: What Translator Emilie Moorhouse is Reading Now and Next - Literary Hub - Translation

An English translation of the surrealist poet Joyce Mansour’s work has just arrived via City Lights in Emilie Moorhouse’s thoughtful and powerful translation. Born in England in the 1920s to Egyptian-Jewish parents, Mansour grew up in Cairo as a member of Egyptian the upper-class. Her mother died when she was 15, her first husband just three years later. Mansour moved to Paris at 20 and, while there, she was swept up into the second wave surrealist scene—with André Breton as a mentor. She began writing entirely in French, despite being bilingual in Arabic and English. In her translator’s note, Moorhouse explained what provoked her to find a poet like Mansour to translate. At the height of the MeToo movement, Moorhouse realized a particular purpose when finding her next translation project. Moorhouse explains, “I decided I needed to translate the writing of a woman who spoke openly and shamelessly about her desires.” In Mansour, she found a remarkable voice that seemed to terrify many into shunning her outright. For, as Moorhouse explains, Mansour’s “favorite subject matter happened to be two of society’s greatest fears: death and unfettered female desire.” In one poem, titled by its first line “Fièvre ton sexe est un crabe”/“Fever your sex is a crab,” she writes (via Moorhouse):

Déchirent mes doigts de cuir                                       
Arrachent mes pistons 

Ma bouche court le long de ta ligne d’horizon
Voyageuse sans peur sur une mer de frénésie       

Tear at my leather fingers
Snatch at my pistons

My mouth runs along your horizon
A traveler unafraid on a frenzied sea

This captures the edge-of-your-seat urgency of Mansour. The images are like hairpin turns that never cease. It’s novel, strange, thrilling. Moorhouse complicates the poem further when she explains “the crab often represent[s] the cancer that ended her mother’s life…In Mansour’s work, love and death are inseparable.” In Tamara Faith Berger’s excellent interview with Moorhouse at The Rumpus, Moorhouse explains what, exactly, seemed to drive the lack of notable interest in Mansour’s work in France, despite the fact she published over a dozen powerful poetry collections. “I use the word chauvinistic because I think that certain French literary elite have this very precise idea of what ‘French’ literature is, and what ‘great’ literature is,” says Moorhouse. “[W]omen were allowed to write for children.” I’m so grateful to Moorhouse for her helping bring this remarkable poet’s work to English readers, and help expand our knowledge of women writers throughout the world—helping buck against the historical chauvinism Mansour endured. I know my bookshelf will be better for it. “Her work is defiant; even by today’s standards, it smashes taboos around female expression and desire,” Moorhouse explains. “She is Baudelaire minus the shame.”

Moorhouse tells us about her to-read pile, “I have a background as an environmental activist so I’m very interested in literature that weaves land and environmental themes into the narrative. I also teach literature to students who are often newcomers to Canada and I think for them it’s important to both read stories that echo their own experience and to discover unfamiliar voices, especially local Indigenous ones.”

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Cato Fortin, Madioula Kébé-Kamara, & Maude Lafleur (eds.), Il y a des joies dont on ignore l’existence (There are joys we don’t know exist)
The jacket copy for this Quebecois collection states (via Google translation…*cringe* please forgive me): “There are joys whose shimmerings and subtleties we do not know how to recognize, those joys which threaten to bring down what we had believed to be right and true until now. There are joys that cuddle us and slap us with the same hand, joys that only half relieve, but whose unusual beauty gives us the courage to stay a little longer. There are joys that make us breathe sighs of relief. I feel good here. I built a home there. A home is comfort, security, warmth. It is also the fire that inhabits us. The Diverses Syllabes editions were born from this fire. Of this fire and of a storm. From a wave of solidarity, desires to share, learn and laugh. It’s not about coming together to define who we are, but about gathering around a heart, of a core that reflects our many faces. We had to lift the veil on these joys whose existence we do not know, that they finally resonate.”

Éric Chacour, Ce que je sais de toi
Chacour, the child of Egyptian immigrants in Montreal who considered themselves Levantine, Syro-Lebanese, Chawam, or, most inclusively of “the community.” Ce que je sais de toi / What I know of you, Charcour’s first novel, just published this year, follows Tarek, a doctor in Cairo in the 1980s. Tarek’s connection with another person upends the clear path of his life. Chacour explains in an essay, “When I started writing this novel, it seemed obvious to me that one of my characters would be Muslim and the other Christian. Everything had to separate them: social status, family background, religion. My desire was not to oppose them, but rather to put a distance between them from the outset, to make their rapprochement unlikely. In an early version of the story, Tarek was a Coptic, as are the overwhelming majority of the millions of Christians in Egypt. But quickly, the idea that he could be Levantine imposed itself. Perhaps this minority within the minority seemed to me like the right setting for the story of his confinement, and that the decline it had known through the successive departures of its members added to the inner drama he was experiencing.”

Kama La Mackerel, ZOM-FAM
Artist, performer, translator, and writer La Mackerel’s poetry collection “mythologizes a queer/trans narrative of and for their home island, Mauritius.” ZOM-FAM (in Mauritian Kreol meaning literally “man-woman” or “transgender”) was a finalist for the Dayne Ogilvie Prize. The judges wrote, “Kama La Mackerel’s poetry is a sensuous and fiercely political exploration of gender, familial love, and the intergenerational impacts of colonization. Their multilingual, lyrical poems entrance with hypnotic rhythm and tell a story that spans decades and borders. La Mackerel captures the power of connections maintained in spite of the blunt, relentless pain of distance. Wooing the reader with a carefully orchestrated, gentle lapping of words, they then jolt us with earned, splashy staccatos of euphoria.”

Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower
Octavia Butler’s powerful and disturbing novel made serious rounds at the height of the pandemic as she seemed, like an oracle, to predict so much of what we were enduring or succumbing to (ubiquitous racial and class difference defined by violence as well as the fallout of climate change—not to mention a leader with “Make America Great Again” as his tagline). So many people were buying and reading it, in fact, it was a New York Times bestseller—16 years after its original publication. I was able to see an exhibit of Butler’s ephemera several years ago, which included journals and letters, the early covers of her books that bore white figures despite the fact her main characters were Black. One quotation from a journal entry I keep pinned where I can see it. “Our past…teaches most of us that it’s best to expect nothing—so as not to be disappointed when you get nothing,” she writes. “No person who has absorbed that bit of corrosive philosophy needs an oppressor to keep her down.”

Abdellah Taïa, Another Morocco: Selected Stories (tr. Rachael Small)
Taïa left Morocco for France in the 1990s and began to write and make films and also, he had hoped, to live freely as a gay man. Taïa ultimately became the first openly gay man published in Morocco when he came out in 2006, having lived in France for years. I highly recommend listening/reading an interview Taïa gave with David Naimon regarding another book. Rachael Small, the translator of this collection, describes in an interview how she ran to the library after read Taïa had won the Prix de Flore. “[I] picked up the first book I could find, Une mélancolie arabe. I was instantly seduced by the raw, unabashed intimacy of the voice, the brutal beauty of his prose and storytelling, and I immediately started translating,” Small explains. “By that point, I had fallen so deeply for Taïa’s prose that rather than search for a different author to translate, I decided to go through the rest of his catalogue and began reading Mon Maroc, his first book…These very short stories felt much more guarded than the novels, but rich in a different kind of intimacy that was expressed through the intricate detail of daily life. It’s both like listening to a dear uncle tell tales of life in the old country and speaking with a new friend who is testing the waters, trying to decide what he can or can’t reveal to you about himself.”

Iman Mersal, The Threshold (tr. Robyn Creswell)
The Egyptian-Canadian poet Iman Mersal’s new work in translation is selected from her first four books. Creswell describes in an interview the complications of translating Arabic poetry into English. He writes, “English can do wryness, but Arabic verse has musical possibilities that I don’t think contemporary poetry in English can really capture. Because written Arabic is a literary language—it isn’t spoken except in formal situations—it’s possible to be grandly symphonic or virtuosically lyrical in a way that’s hard to imagine in English…With Iman the difficulty for an English translator is different, and I would say more manageable. In a poem about her father, she wonders whether he might have disliked her ‘unmusical poems.’ I don’t think they’re actually unmusical (I don’t think Iman does either), but their rhythms and cadences and sounds have a lot in common with the spoken language.”

Michel Jean, Tiohtià:ke [Montréal]
Jean is an Innu First Nations writer and journalist whose novel Tiohtià:ke [Montréal] contends with the difficult realities of houselessness within First Nations communities in Montreal. As the jacket copy states, “Before the arrival of Europeans, the island of Montreal was Mohwak territory. Tiohtià:ke is the Mohwak name for the island of Montreal. Elie Mestenapeo, a young Innu from the Côte-Nord region of Quebec, killed his abusive father in a fit of rage. He spent 10 years in prison. On his release, banished for life by his community, he headed for Montreal, where he soon joined a new community: that of the homeless Indigenous, the invisible among the invisible. Michel Jean works through this tragic world with grace, using a minimalist style, full of sounds, smells and images and devoid of pathos.”

Michel Jean (ed.), Wapke
Jean edited this collection of short stories by Indigenous writers—the first of its kind to come out of Quebec—with the title “wapke” (“tomorrow” in Atikamekw). The description reads, “Fourteen authors from multiple nations and backgrounds project themselves into the future through fiction, tackling current social, political and environmental themes. Under the direction of Michel Jean, Wapke offers an often striking social commentary in which the hope for change emerges.” Authors include Joséphine Bacon (Innue), Katia Bacon (Innue), Marie-Andrée Gill (Innue), Elisapie Isaac (Inuk), Michel Jean (Innu), Alyssa Jérôme (Innu), Natasha Kanapé Fontaine (Innu), J.D. Kurtness (Innu), Janis Ottawa (Atikamekw), Virginia Pésémapéo Bordeleau (Cree), Isabelle Picard (Wendat), Louis-Karl Picard-Sioui (Wendat), Jean Sioui (Wendat) and Cyndy Wylde (Anicinape and Atikamekw).

Ann-Helén Laestadius, Stolen (tr. Rachel Willson-Broyles)
Laestadius’s novel, an international bestseller, follows nine-year-old Elsa, an Indigenous Sámi girl who witnesses the poaching of a reindeer she was herding. She is threatened to silence by the hunter. The Kirkus Review explains, “Previous reindeer slaughters had gone unpursued by local police since this sort of crime against the Sámi (and their way of life) was considered mere theft. Frustrated by the seeming passivity with which the group accepts the situation, Elsa sets upon her own path as she grows into adulthood: She questions traditional gender roles as well as the failure of local police to apprehend the hunter who is torturing and killing her community’s reindeer…Willson-Broyles’ translation from Swedish is matter-of-fact and incorporates many phrases and words from the Sámi language.”

Joshua Whitehead, Making Love with the Land: Essays
So many exciting books in Moorhouse’s pile, and it ends with a bang. In general, nonfiction books from University of Minnesota Press push the boundaries in ways that are exciting. Whitehead is known for his award-winning novel Johnny Appleseed. Making Love with the Land, according to PW, “examines the relationship between queerness, the body, and language in his intimate first foray into nonfiction. Billy-Ray Belcourt says Making Love with the Land “is defiantly artful. The essays are alert to so much of the beauty and the terror of the world. I imagine they cost a great deal to write. While reading, I was entirely overcome with gratitude. How lucky we all are to witness Whitehead’s kinetic thinking as well to be in pain with him. A truly dazzling feat of heart, analysis, and sentence-making.”

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Translation From Hostage Code to English of X Corp CEO Linda Yaccarino's Company-Wide Memo - Daring Fireball - Translation

Company-wide memo from nominal X Corp CEO Linda Yaccarino, sent this morning:

Hi team,

What a momentous weekend.

Everyone said to me, “Linda, what are you thinking? You don’t want to work for that guy. He’s crazy and impulsive. You’ve got a great job at NBC. You’ve got a great future ahead of you. If you take this job it’ll tank your career and your name will be a punchline.” Did I listen to them?

As I said yesterday, it’s extremely rare, whether it’s in life or in business, that you have the opportunity to make another big impression. That’s what we’re experiencing together, in real time. Take a moment to put it all into perspective.

It’s OK to day-drink. I am.

17 years ago, Twitter made a lasting imprint on the world. The platform changed the speed at which people accessed information. It created a new dynamic for how people communicated, debated, and responded to things happening in the world. Twitter introduced a new way for people, public figures, and brands to build long lasting relationships. In one way or another, everyone here is a driving force in that change. But equally all our users and partners constantly challenged us to dream bigger, to innovate faster, and to fulfill our great potential.

Twitter was a simple concept with profound impact.

With X we will go even further to transform the global town square — and impress the world all over again.

It’s not just you. I have no idea what’s going on either.

Our company uniquely has the drive to make this possible.

Fucking Elon.

Many companies say they want to move fast — but we enjoy moving at the speed of light, and when we do, that’s X.

According to Einstein’s theory of special relativity, as an object approaches the speed of light, the object’s mass becomes infinite and so too does the energy required to move it. But this holds true, in degree, for all objects in motion, and a mind-bending aspect of special relativity is that the faster an object is moving, the more slowly it experiences time. If you were able to move at the speed of light, time wouldn’t pass at all. It would be like being damned for eternity, forever caught in the current moment, while the world moves on for everyone else.

I think about this.

At our core, we have an inventor mindset — constantly learning, testing out new approaches, changing to get it right and ultimately succeeding.

We are hemorrhaging cash and our advertisers are still fleeing.

With X, we serve our entire community of users and customers by working tirelessly to preserve free expression and choice, create limitless interactivity, and create a marketplace that enables the economic success of all its participants.

I used to run all advertising for NBCUniversal. Now I’m running an $8/month multi-level marketing scheme where the only users who’ve signed up are men who own a collection of MAGA hats.

The best news is we’re well underway.

There is no hope.

Everyone should be proud of the pace of innovation over the last nine months — from long form content, to creator monetization, and tremendous advancements in brand safety protections.

Have you seen the ads we’re running these days? Last week we were filling everyone’s timeline with ads for discount boner pill chewing gum, the punchline of which ads is that you’ll bang your lady so hard she’ll need the aid of a walker afterward. That’s a video we promoted to everyone. This week it’s anime for foot fetishists. That’s what we put in everyone’s feed, every three tweets. Or X’s, or whatever we’re now calling them. I used to book hundred-million-dollar Olympic sponsorship deals with companies like Coca-Cola and Proctor & Gamble. (Thank god for Apple.)

Our usage is at an all time high

Our owner is high as a kite.

and we’ll continue to delight our entire community with new experiences in audio, video, messaging, payments, banking — creating a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services, and opportunities.

Our focus group testing suggests that while interest in trusting this platform — which, let’s face it, is not exactly known for its reliability — for banking, of all things, is, as you’d expect, pretty low overall, it’s surprisingly high amongst people who know who Catturd is.

Please don’t take this moment for granted.

Please quit. Get out. I beg you. Leave while you can put on your resume that you worked for “Twitter”.

You’re writing history, and there’s no limit to our transformation.

As if this rebranding disaster isn’t enough, our infrastructure is crumbling. Facebook took Threads from 0 to 100 million users in under a week, without a hitch, at the same time we imposed comical rate limits on usage. I mean can you even believe that shit? I still can’t. I said to him, “Elon, we are an ad-based business. Our revenue is directly commensurate to usage. This is like running a casino and turning the slot machines off to save on the electricity bill. It makes no sense.” And Elon was like “Bots!”

And everyone, is invited to build X with us.

I think I, saw on a TV show once that a hostage was able, to signal to authorities the need for help without alerting, their captors by placing commas randomly in their sentences.

Elon and I will be working across every team and partner to bring X to the world. That includes keeping our entire community up to date, ensuring that we all have the information we need to move forward.

I found out about this name change when you did, at midnight on Saturday, and I have no idea what that fucker is going to do next or when he’s going to do it. You know this. You know that I know that you know this. But I’m going to persist with the charade that these decisions are being made by a team that I’m a leader of, because to do otherwise would be even more humiliating.

Now, let’s go make that next big impression on the world, together.

Linda

I’m so sorry.

Linda

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Western Sydney councillor holds meeting in Mandarin without English translation - Sky News Australia - Translation

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Opinion | Will Translation Apps Make Learning Foreign Languages Obsolete? - The New York Times - Translation

In Europe, nine out of 10 students study a foreign language. In the United States, only one in five do. Between 1997 and 2008, the number of American middle schools offering foreign languages dropped from 75 percent to 58 percent. Between 2009 and 2013, one American college closed its foreign language program; between 2013 and 2017, 651 others did the same.

At first glance, these statistics look like a tragedy. But I am starting to harbor the odd opinion that maybe they are not. What is changing my mind is technology.

Before last Christmas, for example, I was introduced to ChatGPT by someone who had it write an editorial on a certain topic in my “style.” Intriguing enough. But then it was told to translate the editorial into Russian. It did so, instantly — and I have it on good authority that, while hardly artful, the Russian was quite serviceable.

And what about spoken language? I was in Belgium not long ago, and I watched various tourists from a variety of nations use instant speech translation apps to render their own languages into English and French. The newer ones can even reproduce the tone of the speaker’s voice; a leading model, iTranslate, publicizes that its Translator app has had 200 million downloads so far.

I don’t think these tools will ever render learning foreign languages completely obsolete. Real conversation in the flowing nuances of casual speech cannot be rendered by a program, at least not in a way that would convey full humanity. Take, for example, my announcing that “Tomorrow I start my diet.” It’s a subtle thing, but note that by leaving out the words “will” or “am going to,” I am conveying a certain additional drama, the implication that I may have delayed the diet for a while, and tomorrow I’m taking a deep breath and doing it. A typical translation would simply have me saying “Tomorrow I am going to start my diet,” which gets across the basic premise but does not carry quite the tone or implication I intended. And that’s to say nothing of typical conversational mishmashes such as “Yeah, no — what about the pesto?” or “I know — it kind of pops, doesn’t it?” Try translating those with an app.

But even if it may fail at genuine, nuanced conversation — for now, at least — technology is eliminating most of the need to learn foreign languages for more utilitarian purposes. The old-school language textbook scenarios, of people reserving hotel rooms or ordering meals in the language of the country they are visiting — “Greetings. Please bring me a glass of lemonade and a sandwich!” — will now be obsolete. And practicality is the reason most people want to learn a new language, at least beyond a few salutary words and phrases as a sign of respect or engagement.

The cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter, in a quirky recent piece for The Atlantic, argues that his diligent, Sisyphean, but joyous attempts to master foreign languages (from near-perfect Italian to approximate Mandarin) have been an expression of his humanity, one that the new technology will deprive people of engaging in. But while I am ever in sincere awe of Hofstadter’s behemothian mind, I have spent my own life learning languages to varying degrees, and I have never considered my partial successes in them to be an expression of my spirit. The first time I read a novel in a foreign language, I was missing about two words per paragraph. It was fun, but I didn’t think of my abbreviated take on the text to be my “personal version” of ”The Hunchback of Notre Dame.” I just still had work to do.

But not all people enjoy that kind of work. As the writer Graeme Wood has noted, to actively enjoy piecing together how other languages work is an individual quirk, not a human universal. Some may be surprised to learn, for instance, that even many excellent linguists are not what I like to call “language-heads” who want to learn new languages just for the joys of discovery or accomplishment. Obsessive language learners have come to call themselves the polyglot community over the past couple of decades, and I am one of them, to an extent. As such, I know well how hard it can be to recognize that most human beings are numb to this peculiar desire.

I think of how, as a linguistically excitable lad, I would have had my circuits blown by the cornucopia of foreign languages in my current Queens neighborhood. For my own kids, however, it is just a mundane daily experience. Or I think of a very well-educated and cultured person who genially told me that he skipped over the foreign words in my books on language that weren’t in French or Spanish. (After that conversation, I started using fewer of those words.) In this, he is normal, while I harbor an eccentricity.

Most human beings are interested much less in how they are saying things, and which language they are saying them in, than in what they are saying. Learning to express this what — beyond the very basics — in another language is hard. It can be especially hard for us Anglophones, as speaking English works at least decently in so many places. American pop music is in our language, and thus a foreign language rarely entices as a seductive code to help interpret our AirPod enthusiasms (although I sense a mini-movement of that kind toward Korean because of K-pop).

To polyglots, foreign languages are Mount Everests daring us to climb them — a metaphor used by Hofstadter in his article. But to most people, they are just a barrier to get to the other side of. As mesmerized as I will always be, given my personal and professional interests, by the thousands of languages out there, the Tower of Babel story gets at something. If there had only ever been a single language in the world, it is hard to imagine that anyone would wish there were 7,000 different ones, such that speakers of one couldn’t communicate with speakers of the others. The new technology is getting us past that challenge.

After all, despite the sincere and admirable efforts of foreign language teachers nationwide, fewer than one in 100 American students become proficient in a language they learned in school. Immersion programs, if begun early, can actually imprint a foreign language into a child’s brain. But there are just 3,600 such programs in nearly 100,000 public schools nationwide. Amid the endless challenges our educational system faces, it’s unclear how widespread we can ever expect them to become.

I know: A foreign language is a window into a new way of processing the world. But even beyond the fact that this idea has been rather oversold, can we really say the humble level of French or Spanish we and our classmates usually picked up in school really granted us a new lens on the world and our lives in it? And if our goals are more limited and practical — for instance, getting directions to the bus station in Rome — technology now makes that possible at the press of a button.

Because I love trying to learn languages and am endlessly fascinated by their varieties and complexities, I am working hard to wrap my head around this new reality. With an iPhone handy and an appropriate app downloaded, foreign languages will no longer present most people with the barrier or challenge they once did. Learning to genuinely speak a new language will hardly be unknown. It will continue to beckon, for instance, for those actually relocating to a new country. And it will persist with people who want to engage with literature or media in the original language, as well as those of us who find pleasure in mastering these new codes just because they are “there.” In other words, it will likely become an artisanal pursuit, of interest to a much smaller but more committed set of enthusiasts. And weird as that is, it is in its way a kind of progress.

John McWhorter (@JohnHMcWhorter) is an associate professor of linguistics at Columbia University. He is the author of “Nine Nasty Words: English in the Gutter: Then, Now and Forever” and, most recently, “Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America.”

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Large Language Models Are Valuable Assistants for Translation Project Managers - Slator - Translation

Large language models (LLMs) are capable of tackling a diverse array of language tasks ranging from text classification and sentiment analysis to information extraction and summarization. Their potential for changing workflows, resources, and market dynamics within the translation sector is underscored in the 2023 Slator Language Industry Market Report. 

The language industry delves into exploring the potential applications and use cases including machine translation, multilingual text generation, and translation quality estimation. 

Beyond translation tasks, LLMs prove to be valuable tools for translation project managers. In the intricate orchestration of tasks, deadlines, collaborations, and data-driven decisions that define translation project management, these powerful tools offer a world of possibilities, streamlining processes, and enhancing productivity. 

Embracing AI-driven language tools presents the potential to overhaul project coordination, streamline communication, and surmount challenges, ultimately elevating project efficiency, fostering creativity, and enriching communication prowess.

In an article published in June 2023 by the Marie Curie Alumni Association, Jonas Krebs, scientific project manager and coordinator of the projects area at the “Strategy and Funding” office in the Centre for Genomic Regulation, sheds light on how LLMs may empower project managers in various ways. LLMs, such as ChatGPT and Bard, have the potential to change project management workflows and simplify tasks, making them “valuable assistants in project management routines,” said Krebs.

Slator 2023 Language Industry Market Report

140-page flagship report on market-size, LLM and GPT impact, TMS, AI dubbing, interpreting, game loc, market outlook, and more.

Communication Is Key

Effective communication lies at the core of successful project management, as emphasized by Krebs. LLMs can play a pivotal role in helping project managers craft clear and easy-to-understand messages, emails, and reports. With their assistance, project managers can avoid lengthy emails, obscure jargon, and misinterpretations that can hinder progress. Furthermore, these AI tools can be beneficial for project managers who are not native English speakers, as they can help improve language skills and reduce language-related barriers.

Krebs provided in this article practical examples of prompts that project managers can use to achieve effective communication, such as:

• “Summarize [text] in exactly xx words” 
• “Shorten this email by 30%” 
• “Rephrase this text to make it [more casual/first person/humorous]”

Another critical aspect of project management is handling challenging discussions among team members, stakeholders, or upper management. Addressing performance problems, late deliveries, or missed deadlines can be daunting. Here, LLMs can offer support by providing personalized blueprints for such conversations, role-playing scenarios, and identifying potential compliance concerns. With these AI-generated insights at their disposal, project managers can approach difficult conversations with more confidence and finesse.

Forget Tedious Tasks

According to Krebs, LLMs can also serve as valuable brainstorming partners, providing alternative perspectives and data-driven insights. When confronted with unexpected challenges or roadblocks, project managers can turn to LLMs to explore a wider range of potential solutions. These AI tools can help project managers to think outside the box and drive innovation within their projects.

Furthermore, LLMs can be integrated into other applications unlocking new and exciting possibilities for project managers. Notably, Krebs mentioned two exemplary cases: Read AI and VirtualSpeech. Read AI is a dashboard for virtual meetings that uses LLMs to document meetings, and measure engagement, performance, and participant sentiment. It automates the process of creating meeting minutes, summaries, and action points, saving project managers from this tedious task. VirtualSpeech, on the other hand, is an AI-powered training tool for improving communication skills.

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Mother, the only word in the dictionary without a synonym - Modern Ghana - Dictionary

24.07.2023 LISTEN

A woman often remains a woman for society. We may have reached over the moon but when it comes to women's involvement in anything, they are always under the microscopic lens. In India, we are still at a phase where the motive of land registry in the name of woman accounts to lesser charges for the same and not because she is an indispensable member. This is the hard and most bitter truth of our community. With this bitter truth round the corner, we have more dilemmas as the addons. In recent years we have sub categorized our nomenclature for the feminine community and the most paparazzi one is the discussion for working mothers.

The Working mother is one class in the Indian society which is most discussed among every senior person’s group. The irony is the group discussing the same is a cluster of women only. A working woman aka “A Woman” first is often a villain in the story of most senior citizen’s gossip. No one looks from the perspective that she is doing her job imperfectly perfect.

What if she misses one dose of medicine for her toddler, what if she wakes up late and so the breakfast of her little one is delayed by an hour, what if she prioritizes herself over her baby for sone salon work. She would still be a loving and caring mother to her toddler no matter how careless she is in his/ her upbringing. She may leave her little one for a week with her family for some business-related work, she may leave her child to her husband to go to some kitty party, she may have slept before her kid does, but all this does not give anyone a right to assassinate the character as a mother.

The topic of my post was for Working mothers, but when I sat down to pen down the plight, I realized first that society needs to be cognizant towards mothers. The next (Working mother) is another story. We talk too much about woman empowerment but we fail to miss the essence in our daily attitude. We must understand the fact that a mother is a mother, working, non-working, full time, part time etc. are just acronyms. In the world, even if we discover some other planet supporting life the stature of mother would remain the same. She would still be the only and foremost requirement for her baby and irreplaceable entity for him/her.

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