Merlin: Translation News, Services & Directory

The popularity of reality TV shows has sometimes made me wonder what a reality show about translation would involve. Note that I don’t have a television, so I may be a bit off on what the average reality show is all about, but from what I understand, it involves challenges and each week someone is kicked off the show.

So we have a group of eager wannabe-translators. What would they face on So You Think You Can Translate?

Every week, our eager contestants would pick a new style of text out of a box (financial report, poem, academic article, medical records, play, essay, speech, contract, short story, etc.) and they would have to translate that on their own. To make this even more difficult, they could also pick references from a box, so they would be limited to using one or some combination of the following: computer tools, dictionaries, Internet references, encyclopedias, or libraries. Contestants might get a total of two special links for the entire season, and that would mean that if they were really stuck on a translation, they could decide to call a professional translator or some other expert (a professor, language teacher, botanist, lawyer, novelist, editor, architect, etc.) for help.

In addition, there would be group, pair, and individual challenges. Challenges might include learning a new language, performing a sight translation, working on a relay translation, subtitling, interpreting, giving a presentation on some aspect of translation, learning how to use a new computer tool, reviewing a book on language or translation, negotiating with a customer, handling an angry client, advertising their services, and putting together a literary magazine of new translations.

The contestants’ translations would be critiqued by a panel of experienced judges, but the viewers would vote on who the winners of the other challenges should be. Each week, the contestant with the least votes would have to leave the show.

As the season draws to a close, the ultimate winner would be pronounced the nation’s Best Translator and she or he would get help starting her or his own freelance business. This would include an office with the works (computer, big desk, ergonomic chair, coffee machine, full sets of dictionaries and encyclopedias, etc.) plus a year’s worth of advice from an accountant, a mentor, and membership in any appropriate translators’ association.

I know I’d watch this show! Anyone else? What else should be on it?

Now that it’s summer, I’m going to be posting a little less frequently. I’ll be travelling for part of the time (seven different countries in a matter of months!) and I’ll be attending various conferences, including two translation-focused ones (WALTIC in Stockholm later this month and FIT in Shanghai in August — let me know if you’re going to be there!). But I will keep posting, so check back.

And stay tuned for my version of Translation: The Reality TV Show!

Have a great summer!

I am a fan of bad translations – not in a professional sense, of course, but just because I find them amusing. This funny website is primarily for those who know Swedish, but there is a section that can be read by everyone (at least the bad translations can; the commentary can not be). Click “äldre inlägg” at the end of each page to get to the next one.

Time for a round-up of interesting articles and videos.

Here is an article on words meaning what they say/how they sound.

The next piece is on standardizing English and it relates to a guest post featured on Brave New Words last year.

This brief video is about how Aramaic is still being used in some villages today.

Ars Magna, short documentary, is about about anagrammist Cory Calghoun.

Finally, this parody song, “I Am Thesaurus,” is a play on the Beatles’ “I am the Walrus.”

I freely admit that I love word games. Scrabble is probably my favorite (and if you’re on facebook, feel free to join me in a game – scrabble is about the only good thing I think facebook has).

Anyway, a word game I found not long ago is Free Rice and it is addictive and also is a way of donating to charity. You correctly define words and rice is donated through the UN World Food Program. That’s a game worth playing!

An article in the Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet about Finland Swedish claims that “loan words are the spice of a language.” On the other hand, some languages are staunchly against loan words and try to create new words rather than borrow ones from other tongues. What do you think?

What are your favorite loan words? Or words that you think should be loaned from one language to another?

I have written here before about my desire to see the Swedish word “sambo” adopted to English. Share some of your favorites!

Here is some information on a summer school for translators:

The British Centre for Literary Translation has been offering the International Literary Translation Summer School, the highlight of our annual programme of activities, since 2000. Every year acclaimed writers and translators are gathered together for an intense week of translation workshops, panel discussions, and talks, culminating in multilingual readings of the work accomplished. This residential programme takes place from 20-26 July at the University of East Anglia, with participants coming from many different countries. The languages represented change from year to year, and in 2008 will include the following:

Arabic to English
Translator/Workshop Leader: Paul Starkey. Writer: Hassan Daoud

English to Italian
Translator/Workshop Leader: Susanna Basso. Writer: Giles Foden

German to English
Translator/Workshop Leader: Shaun Whiteside. Writer: Lena Gorelik

Irish-English/English-Irish
Translator/Workshop Leader: Paddy Bushe. Poet: Gabriel Rosenstock

Portuguese to English
Translator/Workshop Leader: Daniel Hahn. Writer: José Eduardo Agualusa

Spanish to English
Translator/Workshop Leader: Cecilia Rossi. Writer: Carmen Posadas

Registration is now open and bursaries are available.
For more information and registration details, please visit the BCLT website: www.uea.ac.uk/bclt .

I’ve recently discovered a great site for those who translate to Swedish or use Swedish in any way. It looks at English words that are being used unnecessarily in Swedish and gives the Swedish equivalents of these words. While some countries reject the influence of English and other languages, others, such as Sweden, seem to absorb too much, to the point that people use English words rather than perfectly acceptable Swedish ones. This site tries to rectify that. I wonder if there are websites like this for other languages.

I’ve posted some here about learning languages and there’s been a guest post about language education in the United States, so this article on a solution to teaching languages in the U.S. is quite relevant.

Thank you to Erika Dreifus for sending me this article!

Writing for young adults is a relatively new genre (a genre, some say, that has been created by the pressures of marketing) and recently, I’ve had two opportunities to learn more about it. The first was a workshop I attended several weeks ago at the Arvon Foundation (at their center in beautiful Yorkshire), taught by writers Linda Newbery and Nick Manns (with the entertaining, controversial Melvin Burgess as a guest speaker), and the second was a lecture yesterday by Scottish writer James Jauncey, the author of a new book for young adults entitled The Witness.

What I’ve found is that authors themselves aren’t always certain they are writing for young adults. They feel they are just writing books, period. That the texts may have characters who are young adults does not necessarily mean the work should be limited (in terms of marketing and readership, that is) to young people. Mr. Jauncey pointed out that if books such as The Catcher in the Rye or To Kill a Mockingbird had been labelled as being for children or young adults, they might never have become as popular or well-read as they did. The label limits the work.

What all the writers I heard or spoke to in recent weeks have mentioned is that creating a category of books for young adults is generally a choice made by publishers, teachers, parents, and other adults, and some believe that it stems from two major issues: the desire to make money and the idea of reducing risk. For the former, having another genre creates more opportunities for marketing (and also for producing side products, films, tv shows, etc.). As for the latter, people today do not want to make choices or to have to be accountable. A parent may not have the time or interest to read and vet their children’s reading choices. So a little label on a book that says which age group it is suitable for removes responsibility from the adults. And it also supports publishers; some parents complain to the publishers if their children are exposed to words or themes they do not deem appropriate. Now, publishers can say, “Well, there was a label on there, so if your child read a book that was not age-appropriate, that was your fault, not ours.”

Besides the genre reducing responsibility, it also imposes limits. Many authors say their publisher makes them aware of words or topics they must avoid. Mr. Jauncey claimed he did not consider language or appropriateness; all he thinks about when writing is being honest to the story and the characters and telling the tale as authentically and truthfully as he can. Other writers are not so lucky, however, and this is something people must consider when working on a book that they think may be aimed at children or young adults.

A point Ms. Newbery made is that children tend to read up, so they can learn what is coming next in their lives. She felt that 9-12 year-olds wouldn’t read the books labelled as being for that age group; instead, they’d books for the 13-15 year-old set, because they are looking towards that time in their lives.

But does all this mean that children and young adults don’t read about adults? Or that adults don’t read about young people? I really don’t think so, even if publishers seem to believe that. Why is there so much separation in literature now? Mr. Jauncey reminded us that there are no books for 30-year-olds or for 80-year-olds. In a way, of course, one can understand that the childhood and teenage years are a challenging time and that young people like and need to read about others their age. But when I was young, I certainly read voraciously about people of all ages, not to mention all backgrounds, religions, genders, races, and so on, and I know I am not alone in this. Are we underestimating young people? Are we doing them a disservice by deciding what books and topics they should have access to?

Not long ago, I was somewhere that had several flat-screen televisions lining the walls. The volume on the tvs was off, but programs were playing anyway, and closed-captioning was used so those watching could know what was being said.

I know that closed-captioning, unlike subtitling, is generally in real-time, but I was still surprised by the number of mistakes — there were errors in nearly every sentence. Some were really odd, though many were clearly based on phonetic confusions. Sometimes a caption was corrected, but usually the viewer was left to puzzle it out (and to giggle, as in my case).

Here are a few of the wrong captions I recall:

“This sets a bad president” instead of “This sets a bad precedent”
“Now things are under a crowd” instead of “Now things are under a cloud”
“This is about award” instead of “This is about a war”

Bad closed-captioning and bad subtitling can definitely set a bad president.

I recently started getting the bi-monthly email newsletter called “Annogram”, sent out by Ann Cefola, whom I met at the AWP conference in January. The newest issue has the following interesting information:

Free translations lead to book sales

Thanks to translator Ruth A. Gentes Krawczyk (www.krawczyktranslations.com) for this fascinating piece of marketing insight:

His newsletter is said to have 200,000 subscribers and Coelho indicates he gets about 1,000 e-mails from fans every day. “I don’t understand why publishers don’t understand that this new medium is not killing books,” Coelho says. “I’m doing it mostly because the joy of a writer is to be read. But at the end of the day, you will sell more books.”

I’ve heard a lot about the music and software industries being upset about torrents, but there hasn’t been as much news about how the publishing industry is dealing with this technology. So it is interesting to see what one author is doing with pirated transläted editions.

Today’s post is more of a rant. Why do authors who want to include words or phrases in foreign languages not check that they are using the correct spelling and grammar (unless, of course, there is a reason for using something in the wrong way, such as to show that a character is pretentious but really ignorant)? Why don’t editors check these things?

In recent weeks, I’ve been reading a lot of work in Swedish. In Sweden, it can be considered cool to include English in a poem or short story, or an author may genuinely find that there is something she or he must say in English rather than in Swedish. But often, I find serious mistakes. And to be honest, the author has lost me as soon as I see that she or he (or the editor or publisher) couldn’t be bothered to have an editor check over the text.

For the next week, I am going to be away attending a workshop and there is apparently no internet access there. I am sure I will go through withdrawal, but I’ll look forward to posting upon my return.

Here are a few articles for you to read in the meantime.

This article is about learning specialized vocabulary and includes the following quote: “Sailing is just one more thing I’ve taken up as an adult but wish I’d begun doing as a child. The reason for wishing that isn’t just the experience that would have accrued by now. It’s the innateness you feel for things you have been doing a long, long time, the utter lack of self-consciousness with which you inhabit a language that seems outlandish to newcomers.”

The next piece is a review of Indo-European Poetry and Myth by M.L. West and it discusses the language of asterisks, i.e. the ur-Indo-European language:
“West reconstructs the Indo-European world on increasingly complex levels: first language (grammar and vocabulary); then poetry; then myth. Poetry, with some of the formal solidity of language and some of the inspirational idiosyncrasies of myth, mediates between them. The poetic parallels can be quite striking, and West makes the most of them. Of a certain pattern of three proper names, for instance, he says: ‘It is hard to avoid the inference that this was a traditional formula from the common poetic inheritance. Here we seem to find a remnant of the Indo-European storyteller’s building work: a recognisable structural component, with the lineaments of its verbal patterning still in place.’”

Finally, this article discusses a way of writing that might become popular in the future. Here is the man who wrote 200,000 books!

For my initial description of the London Book Fair see Erika Dreifus’ blog Practicing Writing. In this post, I just want to expand on something I mentioned in the other one: translation subsidies.

Many of the literary organizations I spoke to, such as Finnish Literature Exchange, Arts Council of Sweden, Norwegian Literature Abroad, Icelandic Literature Fund, and Danish Arts Agency’s Literature Centre (I am just mentioning the ones from the Nordic countries here, since I know the most about them, but I spoke to others as well), offer subsidies to publishers for translation, sometimes for as much as 75% of the cost. Usually, only publishers are allowed to apply, though translators (especially those who have a contract with a publisher) can sometimes apply for grants, too, such as to travel to meet the author whose work they are translating.

In The Deal, the magazine of the book fair, Israeli author Amos Oz is quoted as having said: “As you read a foreign novel, you are actually invited into other people’s living rooms, into their nurseries and studies, into their bedrooms. You are invited into their secret sorrows, into their family joys, into their dreams. Which is why I believe in literature as a bridge between peoples. I believe curiosity can be a moral quality.”

So, I suggest all you translators to find books you love in whatever languages you translate from, and then to try to get publishers to publish these works; telling them about these subsidies, information about which is not always easily accessible, may encourage them to take a chance on books they would otherwise claim not to have money for. Subsidies may also ease the translator’s work, too.