Metaglossia: The Translation World

A little over a year ago, Tom Perrotta was surprised to discover he had written enough new short stories for about half of a collection.

The publication of a work of literature is in its state as a book. The publication of a work of theater takes place on the boards or whatever performance space chosen for the playwright’s vision to come to life through color, form and flesh. But a drama is first conceived as a drama script. Words written as a readable text to guide the directorial vision that creates the reality of a work of theater. A work of literature when translated to another language must deal with a number of concerns that relate to language and cultural nuances and contextualization. Do the same apply when it comes to a drama script when translated from one language to another? It is to do with the ‘translation’ of words after all.

No two languages are exactly alike. No written work can find its ‘exact’ mirror image ‘counterpart’ in another language. Perhaps a work when translated involves much consideration on the part of the translator as to what justice should be, or has to be done to the potential reader just as much as the translator’s (moral) duty owed to the work and its author not be utterly diluted and then afterwards ‘lost in translation’.

Recently, I came to know of a Marathi playwright and prominent literary figure, the late Vijay Tendulkar. In addition to the impressive body of plays he had written for the stage, his works also include a novel, seventeen film scripts, and four collections of short stories. The prolific writer had also written six children’s plays, which had got lesser attention as it is stated by Dr Ajay Joshi, the translator of five of VT’s childrens plays, in the introduction to the book – Vijay Tendulkar, Five Plays for Children.

The plays as drama scripts, of course, give the reader an idea as to how the action unfolds through stage directions and are enjoyable to envision when reading. The playwright certainly had been one who could relate well to the imaginative world of a child where trees and mailboxes converse as old friends and how children if given to interpret their world would seldom be bound by the rationalities of adult logic.

A very interesting revelation about VT was his involvement in the modern Marathi theater movement which envisioned ‘disentangling itself from the traditional musical theater’. The breakaway would be in favor of a more realistic theater states Joshi in his Introduction and further on says that VT’s children’s plays had stressed more on body language and movement rather than the spoken word. And as the translator Joshi states at the outset what concerns he had to take to account when embarking on the translation. 

The plays albeit for children deal with some very serious issues in a very subtle manner in its subtext which focused on matters as the complexities of bureaucracy and its ‘gate keeping(s)’, class divides and such. Joshi gives insight about the central premise on which his role as a translator stood through the following words – “While translating I had to keep all these layers in mind. At the same time, I did not want to create prose pieces – the plays in English had to be stage-worthy. In the process of balancing these different factors, I sometimes had to take difficult decisions and make reluctant compromises.”
Joshi’s decisions concerning names of certain characters had been dilemmatic to him perhaps since by the translator’s own admission there had been some noteworthy cultural contextual loss in the translation when names were meant to carry certain puns understood in Marathi. About the supplanting of two names with designations as ‘King’ and ‘Queen’ (purely on their functional identity one may assume) makes Joshi make amends by explaining –“In translation they would be neither funny nor meaningful.”

The tussle between dialectical variants within a language have also been part of the baggage Joshi had to deal with and explains his approach thus – “Tendulkar has used different dialects to distinguish between rural and urban people. I have tried to give each character a distinct style to capture some of these nuances.”

The legal Plain Language Library at writeclearly.org has free examples of plain language legal documents that service providers can download and use to communicate clearly with clients and the public.

The company breaks down language barriers a billion times a day, it reveals at Google I/O. On the to-do list: real-time conversation translation. Read this article by Stephen Shankland on CNET News.

L'importante université sud-africaine du Kwazulu-Natal à Durban (est) a annoncé jeudi que les cours de zoulou seront désormais obligatoires à partir de 2014 pour tous les étudiants préparant un diplôme afin de développer les compétences en langue...

Cognition causes language, not the other way around. Correlations between changes in thought with changes in language abound. But the arguments are very weak for causality from language to cognition in this context.

Lera Boroditsky likes to spread the meme language shapes thought. Others have used it too when talking about Whorfian matters.

Previously I explored what "shaping" means in this context and how it might be a metaphor. It certainly matters--why not just say language controls thought or language causes thought? I think the reason is that people want to allow thought to control language as well. Indeed this is the weak form of Whorf-Sapir Hypothesis, i.e. linguistic relativity.

So shaping means a partial control or cause which does not prevent control or cause in the other direction. Furthermore it seems that language shaping thought is not about the parts of the mind which are dedicated to language itself--those parts have to be partially language-defined in order to be able to produce utterances in that particular language.

Here we'll look at various reasons why people might believe that language shapes thought.

One argument might be that the language of thought (mentalese) is:

The reason I specified #2 is because one could posit that the language of thought is the same type but a difference instance, for example thinking in Russian but speaking in Mandarin.

I suppose it's easy to assume this given the notion of "internal dialog". But there's a big difference between mentalese and conscious imagined or remembered linguistic memories. It's a matter of abstraction levels. Mentalese is a lower level.

Thinking in language has another problem. It implies that every language you learn must be translated back into the mental mother "tongue", such as English in my case. But what about computer languages and other language-like things? What about mathematics? What about non-linguistic concepts? How would those get translated into the mother tongue (e.g. English)?

The argument that we think with language flies in the face of the computational theory of mind, which is fundamental to most of cognitive science.

As P. Schlenker [1] points out (echoing Steven Pinker):

we do not literally 'think in words': if we did, patients with a language deficit should automatically have a deficit in thought as well, which does not appear to be the case. Thus verbal language and thought should in principle be taken to be distinct.

Mentalese is symbolic and generative, but it doesn't have to be a spoken or written language. The symbols are not words or characters, they are arbitrary computational patterns which we can think of as symbols in the context of the computational theory of mind.

Counter argument: Daniel Casasanto has argued that not thinking in language does not entail that language shaping thought is false [2]. Thus this logical statement is invalid, where O is We think in language and W is Language shapes thought:


Logically, Casasanto is correct. But from a mind-software architectural approach, one wonders what the interfaces are for high level abstractions of language to define and/or influence thought. And where is the evidence of principle causes of language affecting thought? Casasanto only provides a hypothesis that the frequencies of phrases in a language can reinforce the already existing mental concepts in preference to certain others. So we have a possible weak form...of the weak form of Whorfianism.

Un diccionario escrito por niños de comunidades rurales colombianas fue el gran éxito en la última Feria del Libro de Bogotá. El texto revela la sabiduría y poesía de los niños.

Dominique Defert a traduit Inferno, le nouveau roman de Dan Brown, en collaboration avec Carole Delporte. Ces deux traducteurs ont passé près de deux mois enfermés dans un « bunker » en Italie avec des confrères venus de cinq autres pays. Catherine Perrin l'a joint à Strasbourg, en France pour qu'il raconte son expérience de traducteur cloîtré. 
 
La mise en marché au Québec du nouveau livre de Dan Brown, Inferno, est prévue pour le 31 mai. En France, la sortie se fera le 24 mai. La version originale anglaise a été lancée cette semaine. 

This week’s CSOFT Story comes to us from Sam Huang, CSOFT’s Chief Architect and Director of Technology Development. In this post, we find out about Sam’s passions as well as just how exactly he’s able to maintain the serene calm and positive attitude he’s known for. Read below to learn more!

Anees shut himself in a room at his home in the beach town, Varkala, in southern Kerala and began reading non-stop. He also wanted to be a writer. So he bought a “Brother” typewriter and started to write. “Later, my relatives told me that the only sound that came out of my room was the tap-tap of the typewriter keys,” he says. “They wondered what I was typing all day.”

This period lasted for three years. Not surprisingly, his family thought that Anees had lost his mind. Then he decided to travel. “I thought that what was standing between me and good writing was a lack of experience,” he says. So, at 19, Anees embarked on an All-India tour for several months.

“When I returned, I started writing again and my family became very cautious,” says Anees, at his third-floor apartment in Kochi. “They were scared I would disappear again.”

Soon, Anees realised that he needed a job. “I joined advertising, because it is the only industry that will accept a college dropout,” he says. And it has worked out fine. Today, Anees is the Kochi-based Creative Head of Draft FCB Ulka Advertising.

In his spare time and in the early mornings, Anees is busy writing novels. “My first readable book was Vicks Mango Tree,” he says. “The first draft was completed when I was 28, but I did not have the courage to send it out. I knew that a rejection letter was on the way. So I parked the book for some time in my drawer. Then, one day, I sent a query to an American agent and got a rejection letter.”

Anees wrote The Blind Lady’s Descendants, which took two years to complete. He sent a query letter to 50 American and English agents but was rejected. Then he wrote Tales from the Vending Machine in 2009. This time he decided to send it to an Indian agent and selected Kanishka Gupta. “I tried a trick,” says Anees. “I sent the query letter in the name of Hasina Mansoor, the 21-year-old Muslim heroine of my novel. She is a fan of Osama Bin Laden, hates Americans and Jews, and is a Muslim fundamentalist.”

Kanishka liked what he read and accepted the novel at once.

“Anees is a literary ventriloquist,” says Kanishka. “He gets under the skin of his characters, which makes them very real. He also has a wry sense of humour and unusual settings. In fact, it is hard to believe that a man could capture the voice of a young Muslim girl so effortlessly.”

Meanwhile, the tireless Anees penned his fourth novel, Vanity Bagh. “It is about the Hindu-Muslim divide,” he says. “I have seen people supporting Pakistan during cricket matches. I believe that there is a small Pakistan in every big Indian city. Essentially, a minority of the minority may support Pakistan, while a minority of the majority thinks that all Muslims are refugees.”

Today, all the four novels have been accepted by reputable publishers. Vicks Mango Tree and Tales from a Vending Machine have been taken up by HarperCollins, The Blind Lady’s Descendants by Tranquebar and Vanity Bagh by Picador. Vicks Mango Tree and Vanity Bagh have been published, the latter in April. In Vanity Bagh, the writing is lucid and imaginative.

Key to the changing economy.

For all the talk of how it's a waste to study American Literature or other majors with limited job prospects, even the Chairman of the Federal Reserve acknowledges a value to cultural pursuits.

Ben Bernanke ended his commencement speech at Bard College at Simon's Rock with the following remark:

[W]hile I have emphasized technological and scientific advances today, it is important to remember that the arts and humanities facilitate new and creative thinking as well, while helping us to draw meaning that goes beyond the purely material aspects of our lives.

From his perspective, America needs more than just engineers, scientists, and doctors. It also needs actors, writers, teachers, and others who inspire creativity, which is more important to the economy than ever.

Bernanke explains that America could be entering a period of slower growth. The industrial revolution is ending, while the information technology revolution may not generate as much growth as we have seen in the past. Success in this new economy will require "constant adaptation and creativity." Arts and humanities "facilitate new and creative thinking" and therefore play a fundamental role in the economy.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/ben-bernanke-on-the-value-of-culture-2013-5#ixzz2TgekHW3U

Demande d’asile culturel à l’UNESCO

Le mercredi 15 mai dernier à 11 h, 150 à 200 représentants des langues de France du Collectif du 31 mars sous la coordination de l’ELEN

School children are being taught how to read and write by watching Hollywood blockbusters with subtitles.

Two years ago, out of the blue, a woman I didn't know phoned and asked me to meet her for coffee. She had a proposition for me.

Tout le monde connaît et utilise le Dictionnaire des difficultés du français, plus communément nommé le « Hanse Blampain ». La sixième édition vient de paraître, profondément retravaillée. Mais LA nouveauté de cette édition réside dans le fait que la version électronique sur cédérom (qui, en 2000, avait déjà été une innovation) laisse place à une application pour iPad. 

Avec Lettres numériques 

Le dictionnaire, qu'il soit de papier ou numérique, se caractérise d'abord par la conception même de la langue. Ce n'est pas le français standard qui est privilégié, mais la langue dans toutes ses variantes, qu'elles soient sociales, géographiques ou historiques. Pour chaque mot ou expression, le lecteur peut aisément savoir son aire d'utilisation, géographique mais aussi sociale (langue familière ou langue soutenue) ou historique (la création néologique). C'est là l'occasion de mettre concrètement en évidence des processus qui font vivre la langue. Selon l'éditeur : 

Clair, vivant et pédagogique, le Dictionnaire des difficultés du français répond rapidement aux questions sur la prononciation, l'orthographe, le vocabulaire ou la syntaxe. Plus qu'un simple dictionnaire, la version iPad offre une promenade ludique dans la langue française et se glisse sous le bras, dans la serviette ou dans le cartable de l'écolier, de l'étudiant, du professionnel et de l'amoureux du français.

Les difficultés et les complexités sont expliquées dans une langue claire, ne s'encombrant pas de théorie et à l'aide de nombreux exemples. Le classement par ordre alphabétique et le système de renvoi permettent d'atteindre la réponse à l'interrogation que se pose l'utilisateur par divers biais. Et les renvois sont établis non seulement entre mots mais aussi entre difficultés identiques. Par exemple, « futur » renvoie à « conditionnel » pour l'emploi des modes, et « admettre » renvoie à « croire » pour la construction. Ou encore, à partir d'« aphérèse », on peut retrouver les clefs de la construction néologique.

La grande nouveauté de cette sixième édition est cependant le fait qu'une application pour iPad a été développée conjointement, et que l'utilisation de cette nouvelle technologie élargit encore les possibilités offertes par le dictionnaire. Il y a bien sûr les avantages liés au support même : le dictionnaire est toujours à portée de main et se transporte partout, la police de caractère peut être adaptée.

Les députés et les groupes politiques du Parlement flamand pourront dorénavant imprimer leur documentation dans d'autres langues que celle de Vondel, en vertu d'une modification du règlement de l'assemblée adoptée cette semaine en réunion du Bureau.

Sessões de comédia stand up terão tradução para deficientes auditivos.
Intérpretes de Libras estarão presentes em três apresentações no domingo.