Metaglossia: The Translation World

"On Translation as a Symmetry of Language

Camilo Brown-Pinilla, A.B. '26, Applied Mathematics

Advisors: Melanie Weber

• Please give a brief summary of your project.

When you translate a sentence into another language, the surface form that sentence takes on varies, but the underlying meaning remains unchanged. Using the language of group theory, Geometric Deep Learning describes relationships such as these as symmetries. By treating symmetries as a foundational design principle, we are able to create models that are especially robust and data efficient. This thesis approaches Natural Language Processing, which allows artificial intelligence agents to understand human languages, from this geometric perspective, treating translation as a symmetry of language and asking whether this approach can be used to improve the translation ability of AI systems.

• How did you come up with this idea for your final project?

I have been thinking about this project ever since my junior year when I took a class on Geometric Machine Learning. Starting with a background in Natural Language Processing, I was amazed by the mathematical elegance and real-world utility of the geometric learning philosophy. This project emerged as my attempt at finding a bridge between these mostly disjoint fields.

• What was the timeline of your project?

I started working on this project in April 2025. Over the summer, I conducted a thorough literature review and refined the formulation of my problem. From August to March 2026, I completed the implementation of this idea, which stitches together three distinct machine learning pipelines.

• What part of the project proved the most challenging?

The hardest part of the project was refining my initial interest in a bridge between Geometric Deep Learning and Natural Language Processing into an actionable research question. I had to dig through linguistic literature that was unfamiliar to me and think outside of the box to see how different tools and perspectives were really just instances of the same overarching idea. From there, the engineering pipeline was a challenge, requiring me to optimize and orchestrate several large models and datasets.

• What part of the project did you enjoy the most?

I thoroughly enjoyed the opportunity to spend a lot of time thinking very deeply about a problem that interests me. Every part of the project felt like working my way through the wild west. It was very exciting getting to work with so many different techniques and finding a way to link them all together.

• What did you learn, or skills did you gain, through this project?

I learned more skills than I can count. Most importantly, I learned how to think like a scientist and channel curiosity and excitement into real results.

Topics: Academics, AI / Machine Learning, Applied Mathematics"
https://seas.harvard.edu/news/camilo-brown-pinillas-senior-project-new-approach-ai-translation
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

" 'I'm American but needed a translator to understand 2 common British phrases'
An American woman who is married to a British man has outlined two things her husband says regularly which leave her confused. She appealed to her followers on social media for help to make sure she was understanding him correctly.

Ian Craig Social Newsdesk Content Editor
06 Apr 2026

Communication is key to any successful relationship. Being able to make your other half understand just what you mean is important so you're always on the same page, and to avoid any unfortunate misunderstandings.

But when two people come from completely different cultures, this can be a struggle. A phrase meaning one thing to one person may mean something completely different to the other.

One American woman who is married to a British man has outlined two things he says regularly which leave her confused. The woman, who posts on TikTok as corrinesarah, appealed to her followers for help to make sure she was understanding her husband correctly.

She posted the clip with the caption: "Married a British man and now I need a translator."

Opening the video, she said: "Two things I hear my British husband say all the time, and what they actually mean.

"If a British man says 'that's interesting', he means he hates it. It's the worst thing ever. Toss it out, start over. Just no.

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"But if a British man says 'it's alright', that is like the highest compliment ever. He loves it, it's amazing, you won. Good job."

Appealing to her followers for help, she concluded: "So, British people in my comments, tell me: am I right? Am I understanding him correctly? 'Cos I need help."

Thankfully, commenters came through with their own advice on British sayings.

One said: "'That's interesting' all depends on what happens afterwards. If he immediately starts talking about something else, he hates it. If he goes quiet for a bit and seems distracted, it really was interesting and he's devoting considerable brain power to analysing it in immense detail."

Another said: "'That’s alright' is a polite way of saying it's fine, but it can be a lot better with improvement." And someone else wrote: "'Alright' could literally mean 100 different things tbh."...

A different user commented: "The highest compliment he can give you is telling you that you're 'a bit of alright'." corrinesarah replied: "He’s said that to me before." Someone else replied: "If he has said that to you, take it from me, he absolutely loves you."

Another said: "If you ever suggest an activity or somewhere to visit, if he responds with 'yeah, we could do', that means that he does not want to do it." And someone else wrote: "'Not too shabby'= high praise."

A different user commented: "The phrase you really want to hear is that something is 'not bad'. Peak compliment!""
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/real-life-stories/im-american-needed-translator-understand-36950423
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

"By Eurasia Review

A medieval ophthalmologist who translated Greek works by Galen, Hippocrates, and Plato into Arabic played a pivotal role in shaping Western medical scholarship, according to a recent study published in the journal Cogent Arts and Humanities.

x

In the study, authors affiliated with the University of Sharjah transcribe and translate into English the Arabic text of an original manuscript by Hunayn ibn Ishaq titled In the Eye, Two Hundred and Seven Issues. The ninth-century treatise is an innovative work in ophthalmology that corrected medieval misconceptions and significantly influenced the development of medical knowledge.

Written in a question-and-answer format, the treatise supplements ten other original essays by Hunayn that together are regarded as a landmark in both Islamic and Western medical history. In these works, he provides detailed analyses of eye anatomy, including the layers of the eye and the optic nerves, demonstrating the advances that made lasting contributions to Arabic and Western medicine alike.

“In the field of ophthalmology, Hunayn ibn Ishaq demonstrated his scientific prowess, providing evidence-based explanations and proving that disagreements about the number of eye layers were merely terminological and not substantive,” said the study’s lead author Dalal H. Al-Zubi, a doctoral candidate. “He clarified that the eye consists of seven layers, with only one responsible for vision, while the others support its function.” Hunayn also meticulously described the role of each layer, including its starting and ending points.

The study further highlights Hunayn’s explanation of the muscles controlling eye movement, noting his clarification that the brain governs these muscles via the nerve connecting it to the eye. His work ‘In the Eye, Two Hundred and Seven Issues’ provides clear evidence of the distinctiveness of his methodology in this field,” added Al-Zubi.

Enduring influence
Beyond his medical contributions, the study emphasizes Hunayn’s influence as a translator. As Al-Zubi notes, he enriched the Arabic language by introducing precise medical terminology, including terms for the retina and cornea. Rather than relying on literal translation, Hunayn employed descriptive and analogous renderings and metaphors, producing Arabized terms that conveyed meaning while remaining linguistically natural in Arabic.

A Syriac Christian polymath and member of the then prosperous and far-reaching Church of the East, Hunayn (known in the West as Johannitius) earned the epithet “Sheikh of the Translators.” He played a pivotal role as both a scholar and translator at the House of Wisdom in Baghdad. His translations, often based on original Syriac and Greek manuscripts, were instrumental in preserving Greek scientific knowledge and later transmitting it to Europe.

The study examines Hunayn’s contributions to advancing the translation movement during the early Abbasid period, highlighting how he pioneered the translation paradigm that prioritized rendering the full meaning of the source text rather than adhering to the prevailing practice of word-for-word translation.

While this research marks the first time Hunayn’s Arabic manuscript In the Eye, Two Hundred and Seven Issues, has been translated into English, several of his treatises had earlier reached the West through Latin and other European translations. “Hunayn ibn Ishaq’s writings or translations were largely recognized in the West and were translated into Latin or other European languages. In fact, the medical advances brought about by the publication of Ishaq’s treatises on ophthalmology were significant,” Al-Zubi explained.

The ophthalmologist and medical historian Max Meyerhof, for example, cites Hunayn’s Kitab al-Ashr Maqalat fil-Ayn (The Ten Treatises on the Eye), noting that it represents the earliest known systemic treatment of ophthalmology. Meyerhof mentions that the text was likely used in both Islamic and Western medical schools of the period.

The research further illustrates how Hunayn developed and refined his scientific expertise in medicine. The authors observe that he possessed exceptional mastery of the Arabic language and that his translations enriched scientific and medical nomenclature. “He frequently relied on metaphorical expression, as evidenced by the Arabic term ‘al-Ankabutiyya’ for the arachnoid, explaining that it refers to a spider’s web in the original source language from which the term was derived,” Al-Zubi stated.

She added, “In other instances, he Arabized foreign terms that had no equivalents in Arabic, as he did with al-Shabakiyya for the retina and al-Multahima for the conjunctiva. He was known for coining Arabic terms for their Greek counterparts that reflected an associative relationship between the signified and the signifier. This is particularly evident in his rendering of the retina into الشبكية al-Shabakiyya, chosen because its structure resembles a fisherman’s net, given the dense interweaving of veins and arteries intertwined within it, akin to a fishing net.”

Another reason for Hunayn’s mastery of translation, according to Al-Zubi, was his careful attention to the original coinage and semantic range of Greek terms. Many of his Arabic medical designations, still in use today, were deliberately crafted to align with denotations of the source language. A case in point is Herophilus’ term ‘Amphiblēsteroeidēs,’ a Latinized form derived from ancient Greek medical terminology describing the interwoven vessels of the retina, likened to the mesh of a hoisted fishing net.

A bridge between civilizations
Hunayn’s ophthalmological treatises attest to a level of scientific sophistication that was almost unrivaled in the Middle Ages. In their study, the authors credit him with “providing evidence-based explanations and proving that disagreements about the number of eye layers were merely terminological and not substantive.”

They note that Hunayn’s anatomical analysis identified which of the eye’s seven layers was responsible for vision. He also explained “the number of muscles controlling eye movement and clarified that the brain governs these muscles through the nerve connecting it to the eye. The findings in his manuscript In the Eye: Two Hundred and Seven Questions stand as a testament to the remarkable progress of ophthalmology during the early Abbasid era.”

Asked to assess Hunayn’s place in medical history, Maamoun Saleh Abdulkarim, professor of archaeology and history at the University of Sharjah, described him as a figure of lasting significance: “Hunayn ibn Ishaq significantly influenced the development of Western medicine. He played a crucial role in translating Greek medical texts into Arabic, particularly those of Galen and Hippocrates, refining and explaining them with remarkable scholarly precision.”

Prof. Abdulkarim, who is also among the study’s co-authors, added that “these Arabic translations later served as the foundation for Latin translations used in European universities during the Middle Ages. In this way, Hunayn ibn Ishaq functioned as a vital intellectual bridge between ancient Greek medicine and the medical science that later emerged in medieval European universities.”

In academic literature, Hunayn is widely regarded as a central figure in the transmission of ancient Greek medicine to the Islamic world and in the subsequent diffusion of this knowledge to Europe. As Mesut Idriz, professor of Islamic civilization at the University of Sharjah, has noted, “Hunayn ibn Ishaq’s translations and original writings exerted influence not only within the Islamic world but also in medieval Europe.”

Prof. Idriz, also one of the co-authors, pointed out that medical historians pay particular attention to Hunayn’s work titled al-Masāʾil fī al-Tibb(Questions on Medicine for Students), which was translated into Latin under the title Isagoge (Johannitius). “This text served for centuries as an introductory medical manual in European universities,” he said. “Its wide circulation in the Latin scholarly world illustrates the important role that Islamic medical scholarship played in shaping the foundations of medical education in medieval Europe.”

Prof. Abdulkarim likewise described al-Masāʾil fī al-Tibb as a seminal work, calling it “one of the earliest and most influential didactic texts in Islamic medical history, written in a unique question-and-answer format that shaped medical education for centuries.” He emphasized that Hunayn was “not merely a transmitter of Greek medicine; he was one of the most significant intellectual bridges connecting classical knowledge with medieval European medicine.”

Hunayn’s legacy, Prof. Abdulkarim concluded, is a reminder that scientific progress has historically arisen from dialogue between civilizations rather than from the achievement of any single culture. “It demonstrates that the history of medicine is not solely the narrative of one civilization,” he said, “but rather the story of knowledge traveling across cultures and shaping global science.”

Eurasia Review
Eurasia Review is an independent Journal that provides a venue for analysts and experts to publish content on a wide-range of subjects that are often overlooked or under-represented by Western dominated media.
https://www.eurasiareview.com/06042026-how-an-eye-physician-who-translated-classical-greek-medicine-into-arabic-helped-form-western-medical-thought/

 

 

"...Laos experienced a civil war in the 1960s and 1970s between U.S.-backed royalists and communist forces supported by North Vietnam and the Soviet Union. Jeong believed Han's novel, which questions how humanity survives mass violence, would resonate with Lao readers.

Interpreter and translator Jeong Sang-hyun, second from left, speaks with readers during a book festival at the National University of Laos. Courtesy of Jeong Sang-hyun

Although a Thai translation of the novel existed, Jeong decided against using it. He said that while the languages are similar, they are distinct, and relying on the Thai version would disregard Lao cultural pride.

“In Laos, if I use proper Lao rather than Thai while interpreting, people tell me, ‘You learned it well,’ which shows how much pride they take in their language,” he said. “I felt it would be disrespectful to tell them to read a Korean book in Thai.”...

Securing the copyright presented a significant hurdle. The British agency managing Han's overseas rights initially did not respond to Jeong. He persisted by sending the agency photographs of the dilapidated facilities at the National University of Laos library. The images eventually reached Han, who personally intervened to help secure the translation rights.

Jeong paid for the translation and publication out of pocket, partnering with Lao publisher Dokked Publishing for proofreading. This self-funded project contrasts with Japan's state-sponsored cultural diplomacy, wherein the Japanese government fully funded the translation and distribution of 3,000 copies of Sayaka Murata's novel “Convenience Store Woman” in Laos.

“The translator of ‘Convenience Store Woman’ has been helping me, promoting their own book while also spreading the word about the publication of mine,” Jung said.

Korean novelist Han Kang delivers an acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in Literature during a banquet at Stockholm City Hall in Sweden, Dec. 10, 2024. Yonhap

Shared history, future hope

Jeong printed 1,000 copies of “Human Acts.” He allocated 500 copies for commercial sale and donated the remaining 500 to local schools and regional communities.

The translation has already drawn interest. One Lao reader told Jeong that the novel's “brave children” inspired them to study Korean history.

Korean Ambassador to Laos Jung Young-soo praised the initiative.

“It holds deep meaning as the first Korean novel translated into Lao,” the ambassador said.

Jeong, who interpreted for the 2025 summit between President Lee Jae Myung and Lao President Thongloun Sisoulith, underlined the book's core message.

“Korea, like Laos, had political and economic hardships. Even so, it achieved democracy and developed economically," Jeong said. “I hope Laos also finds hope that they, too, can change through this book.”

This article from the Hankook Ilbo, the sister publication of The Korea Times, is translated by a generative AI system and edited by The Korea Times."
https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/lifestyle/books/20260406/korean-behind-lao-translation-of-han-kangs-human-acts-explores-shared-war-scars
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

"Large-scale analysis shows human languages follow shared cognitive patterns.

The data set included 1,700 languages worldwide and constituted one of the greatest attempts to prove or disprove the existence of common grammatical rules among diverse nations and regions.

While languages spoken across the world vary greatly in terms of pronunciation and writing, it is clear from recent findings that there is method to this madness. After analysing more than 1,700 languages, researchers discovered that many of them have similar structures based on human psychology.

The findings challenge long-standing debates in linguistics and suggest that some “universal” grammar rules do, in fact, exist.

A global look at language
The study was carried out by an international team led by Annemarie Verkerk of Saarland University and Russell D. Gray of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany. The scientists used Grambank, which holds records for the greatest number of grammatical features ever assembled in one data set, to study 191 linguistic universal candidates.

The data set included 1,700 languages worldwide and constituted one of the greatest attempts to prove or disprove the existence of common grammatical rules among diverse nations and regions...

Traditionally, linguists attempted to minimise potential bias by including only those languages from distant geographic locations since similar grammatical rules might be due to language proximity and historical heritage. Nevertheless, this approach had limitations. They did not eliminate the underlying interconnection between languages and could not adequately describe language development.

Approach to language evolution study
The researchers employed Bayesian spatio-phylogenetic analysis to tackle these problems. With this technique, scientists can account for both the common ancestry of languages and their geographic origin, thus obtaining unbiased results.

Through this method, the scientists determined that nearly one-third of the linguistic universals are backed up by solid statistical proof. In other words, even though not all the rules are true, a considerable number of them indeed are.

Another interesting finding made by the scientists is that languages develop through patterns, not chaos.

“In the face of huge linguistic diversity, it is intriguing to find that languages don’t evolve at random,” Verkerk was quoted as saying by the website of Max Planck Gesellschaft, or the Max Planck Society. “I am delighted that the different types of analyses we did converged on very similar results, suggesting that language change must be a central component in explaining universals.”

The study highlights recurring patterns such as word order — for example, whether verbs come before or after objects — and how grammatical relationships are structured within sentences. These similarities have reappeared time after time in languages that belong to totally unrelated language families and are used in entirely separate geographical areas.

What makes this happen?
This kind of recurring phenomenon implies that something else must be driving this development. According to the scientists, similar human cognitive processes and communicative needs could affect the evolution of languages...

Through determining what linguistic patterns prove consistent even through intensive scrutiny, this research contributes to the identification of areas that require further research while providing valuable information about human cognition’s impact on communication.

Even though languages keep developing and evolving, this research shows that they are still constrained by a universal characteristic of the human species, one that dictates how humans communicate with each other all over the world."
By: Science Desk
New Delhi
Apr 6, 2026 09:07 PM IST
https://indianexpress.com/article/technology/science/study-of-1700-languages-uncovers-hidden-rules-shaping-how-we-speak-10622414/
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

Translating Poetry in a Time of War: An Aid Kit of War Songs

"Apr 16 at 5:30PM - 7:30PM

Yountville Community Center

6516 Washington Street

Yountville

94599

Amelia Glaser, a professor of Literature and a translator returns to her hometown of Yountville and shares a story of contemporary Ukrainian poets who have pushed language to its limits.

"We've packed a contraband humanitarian aid kit of war songs, and shipped it to Europe America India and China, paving the silk road with great Ukrainian literature." The Ukrainian poet Iya Kiva wrote these lines in 2022. It was a month into Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and the poem expressed something many readers around the world had begun to feel while anxiously following the news. Ukraine, in its improbable struggle to defend its democracy, had been giving something essential to the rest of the world.

 

Since 2022, the rest of the world has watched as Ukraine has articulated what matters to a young democratic state: the ability to choose one’s own leaders, to defend historical truth with a small “t”, a civic society that can accommodate multiple languages, histories, religions.

 

In this talk, Amelia Glaser, a professor of Literature who is also a translator of contemporary Ukrainian poetry, will share how translation has drawn her closer to a group of Ukrainian poets. This is the story of contemporary Ukrainian poets who have pushed language to its creative limit as a way of imagining a nation at a moment of transformation, loss, and resistance. It is a story about why poetry matters in an increasingly complex world.

 

About our presenter:

Amelia Glaser grew up in Yountville, and attended Yountville Elementary School, Redwood Middle School, and Vintage High. She is now a professor of Literature at UC San Diego, and is an expert in East European literature as well as a translator. Her books include Jews and Ukrainians in Russia's Literary Borderlands and Songs in Dark Times: Yiddish Poetry of Struggle from Scottsboro to Palestine. At UC San Diego, she founded the Translation and Poetry program, which places college students into K-12 classes to teach the art of poetic translation. She also founded Alchemy, a student-edited journal of translation published at UCSD. Since the 2022 full scale invasion of Ukraine, she has translated four books of poetry by contemporary poets into English, including work by Halyna Kruk, Iya Kiva, and Yaryna Chornohuz. She is especially interested in how poetry and the translation of poetry can unite communities in unexpected ways. She is currently finishing a book titled Ukraine: Nation of Poets, about why poetry matters in the 21st century."

https://napavalleyregister.com/events/?_evDiscoveryPath=/event/3569077-translating-poetry-in-a-time-of-war-an-aid-kit-of-war-songs

#metaglossia 

#metaglossia_mundus 

"'Translating the meanings of the Holy Quran'

OMAN NEWS AGENCY (ONA)
Published: 10:26 PM, Apr 04, 2026

MUSCAT: An international conference titled “Translating the Meanings of the Holy Quran: Methods, Challenges and the Role of Technology’ concluded on Saturday.

The conference came up with a recommendation to establish a specialised centre for translating the meanings of the Holy Quran under the supervision of the Ministry of Awqaf and Religious Affairs. The centre would serve as a national platform dedicated to developing translation, supporting scientific research and enhancing training and collaboration among translators and researchers.

The three-day virtual conference called for the development of precise scientific tools for quality of translations. — ONA

The three-day virtual conference, organised by Al Zahra College for Women in cooperation with the Ministry of Awqaf and Religious Affairs, called for the development of precise scientific tools and standards for evaluating the quality of translations, analysing the stylistic features of the Holy Quranic text, and documenting the historical development of Quranic translation.

The conference recommended revising old translations in light of modern linguistic and cultural developments to ensure accuracy of meaning and to establish specialised databases and research laboratories to support digital Quranic studies and develop scientific research tools. — ONA

Oman Observer"
https://www.omanobserver.om/article/1187276/oman/translating-the-meanings-of-the-holy-quran
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

"The book begins with a question that Sze has long pondered in his own work: “How can we deepen our understanding of poetry?” He goes on to describe his first foray into translation and his discovery that “translation is the deepest form of reading.”

Fred Shaw
Review: Drumming away
Organized into 15 zones that are anchored by a poem or two, “Transient Worlds” includes single and multiple translations. All entries include commentary by Sze that elucidate and provide helpful context in understanding not only the poem and poets, but also the choices made by the various translators.

He writes, “A good translation appeals to our ears, eyes, and heart: it is a singular endeavor and a humanizing act that makes the ancient contemporary, the foreign accessible and the emotional, intellectual, and spiritual music of the human interior universal.”

One example that demonstrates this notion of a “good translation” is the standout poem “Sólo la muerte” by Pablo Neruda and its two translations by Robert Bly and Donald D. Walsh. Both render the musicality of Neruda’s original with a propulsive momentum that builds to its startling conclusion, scintillating with sensory details and evocative imagery.

At other times, it is the commentary that illuminates the reader’s experience — such as the story Sze tells about meeting Nanao Sakaki whose translation of three haikus by Kobayashi Issa are included in “Transient Worlds.” Or there is the detailed description of the intimate translation process between Danish poet Inger Christensen and her translator Susanna Nied.

He breaks from the commentary format when discussing the work of Mirabai (1498-1546), a mystic poet and princess from Northern India. Instead, he interviews translator Chloe Martinez who shares, “I began to see my job [of translating] as less like a Xerox machine, more like a singer interpreting a song.”

The book concludes with an appendix designed for instructors who want to incorporate translation into their curricula, as well as a series of writing prompts Sze developed over decades of teaching at the Institute of American Indian Arts. These exercises encourage readers and writers to craft their own translation and original poems inspired by translation.

“As laureate I feel a great responsibility to promote the ways poetry, especially poetry in translation, can impact our daily lives,” Sze shared at the announcement of his appointment. “We live in such a fast-paced world: poetry helps us slow down, deepen our attention, connect and live more fully.”

The Library of Congress, which is the world’s largest library, will close National Poetry Month with a discussion between U.S. Poet Laureate Arthur Sze and U.K. Poet Laureate Simon Armitage, author of “Gilgamesh: A New Verse Translation.” The event will take place in Washington, D.C., but regional audiences can join a live stream on the library’s website.

Now more than ever, dismantling walls and cultural barriers will help to find the common ground that seems to be shifting and eroding underfoot.

“Translation,” Sze affirms, “builds bridges and makes connections.”

Veronica Corpuz is a workshop facilitator in the Madwomen in the Attic program at Carlow University and poet-in-residence of Anthropology of Motherhood.

First Published: April 5, 2026, 9:30 a.m."
https://www.post-gazette.com/ae/books/2026/04/05/arthur-sze-transient-worlds-translating-review-veronica-corpuz/stories/202604050053
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

"Breaking Babel
Using AI to Enable Real-Time Translation in the Classroom and Beyond

Luke M. Herrington, PhD

It should come as no surprise that diplomats and military operators routinely work with foreign nationals from allied and partnered nations, while intelligence analysts regularly access information produced by America’s adversaries. Foreign language skills and access to skilled interpreters are thus essential to American foreign policy and national security. This makes language acquisition a strategic investment. Not only does the ability to read, write, and speak another language minimize space for cultural misunderstandings that erode relationships across language barriers, but it also improves the Nation’s ability to compete in the global economy. Despite this, the Department of Defense slashed funding for 40 percent of its language programs in 2024 due to congressional budget cuts. Similarly, state universities across the United States have scaled back significantly on their own foreign language programs.1

These trends, along with the emergence of commercial services like Duolingo and the increasing prevalence of machine translation through natural language processing (NLP) and generative artificial intelligence (AI), have some sounding the death knell for the foreign language degree. However, these reductions are probably at least as much a result of declining enrollment. The Modern Language Association recorded a 16.6 percent nationwide drop in students taking foreign languages from 2016 to 2021, well before the budget cuts or the release of ChatGPT in 2022.2 Even so, these trends are helping to upend foreign language education.3 As the ability to communicate with service members from other nations is key to interoperability, they also risk degrading the warfighting and deterrence capabilities of the joint force. In other words, if they continue unabated, budget cuts and declining foreign language enrollments will undermine American national security and economic competitiveness.

Nevertheless, the situation need not be so dire. Some of the very forces driving these changes could be leveraged to make up for shortfalls in foreign language learning. Indeed, students, faculty, national security professionals, and others in fields related to foreign countries, cultures, or populations are well situated to take advantage of ongoing advances in NLP for the purpose of translation. NLP is the subdiscipline of computer science and AI that has given computers the ability to consume, interpret, and produce comprehensible human language, including the large language models (LLM) behind such chatbots as ChatGPT, Grok, and Gemini.4 It is also responsible for significant strides in machine translation that could empower many by making foreign languages more accessible. Students and scholars in professional military education (PME) are just some of those who stand to benefit most from the real-time translation capabilities now being offered through most web browsers and LLMs. National security and intelligence professionals, military and diplomatic historians, area studies scholars, political scientists in both international relations and comparative politics, and countless others who work in proximity to the world’s many language barriers (nongovernmental organizations working on human rights, social workers engaged with immigrant communities, etc.) all stand to benefit.

While most people today are probably acquainted more with recent advances associated with commercial products like Google Translate than they are with NLP more broadly, the field has a long history. The development of AI-generated translation has its origins in the Cold War. As far back as 1954, Central Intelligence Agency- and National Science Foundation-backed researchers from IBM and Georgetown University were engaged in machine translation experimentation. They succeeded in producing English-language translations of Russian text, which in turn motivated the Soviet Union to launch a similar project.5 For its part, Google Translate launched in 2006. Built on some fifty years of continued development, the free service was trained on a corpus of linguistic data provided by open-source records at the United Nations and European Parliament.6 No doubt to the chagrin of many a foreign language instructor, personal interpreter internet translation apps for smartphones followed a few years later.7 Yet, the most recent advances in NLP and machine translation are associated with the ongoing revolution in LLM-based chatbots, and it is here where the implications of AI-enabled translation, especially for the classroom and open-source intelligence gathering, are most evident.

Army Reserve Staff Sgt. Chanson Benjamin (right) and Sgt. 1st Class Terrence Baisley, assigned to Bravo Company, Civil Affairs Battalion, U.S. Army Southern European Task Force, Africa, speak with a commander of the national assault police unit Force de Recherche et d’Assaut de la Police in the northern operational zone of Côte d’Ivoire on 29 June 2025. (Photo courtesy of the U.S. Army)

Of course, the release of ChatGPT brought with it a significant clamor aimed at understanding the implications of generative AI for higher education. While many rightly focus on AI in writing and the concordant perils of plagiarism, attention—especially in PME—is increasingly turning to the beneficial uses of AI in the classroom and workplace.8 This article contributes to the latter discourse by arguing that AI can be leveraged in PME to enable real-time translation to the benefit of student learning (and with it, American national security). Indeed, based on my experiences at the U.S. Army School of Advanced Military Studies (SAMS), I assert that using AI to facilitate real-time translation in the classroom facilitates active and self-directed learning experiences in at least two ways. First, it can be used to equip students with the capacity to more effectively follow current events abroad. Second, a similar use case involves supplementing research with heretofore inaccessible primary source material.

Current Events: The AI-Enabled Translation of Foreign Media
Students at SAMS, like students at other civilian and military institutions, must stay abreast of events unfolding abroad. While perusing media outside of the anglophone world—to remain informed of international affairs or to better understand foreign cultures—it is not uncommon for them to struggle with the inaccessibility of available information. Even multilingual students run into language barriers because classroom responsibilities require them to familiarize themselves with countries for which they lack language training. For example, students who may be quite skilled in Spanish, French, or Farsi are likely just as incapable of reading Chinese or listening to Arabic. Thus, where they may have no problem reading or listening to El País, Le Monde, or the Islamic Republic News Agency, China’s People’s Daily or parts of Al Jazeera will remain closed off to them. Of course, there are some seven thousand unique languages (and presumably an even greater number of unique dialects) in the world.9 Thus, even students with the time and motivation to learn additional languages will be incapable of learning them all.

SAMS students get around these language barriers in several ways. The first is the most straightforward: they turn to English-language content. Many foreign news sites intend their work for both domestic and international audiences, so they provide their own English translations. In democratic regimes with rigorous journalistic standards, this means they can access reliable information without incident. For authoritarian nations, where the freedom of the press is in doubt, relying on English translations is more difficult. Such sources raise questions about impartiality and objectivity. Consider the People’s Daily. Intended to shape both domestic and international attitudes, the Chinese publication is produced in as many as nineteen languages. However, People’s Daily is the official propaganda outlet for the Chinese Communist Party.10 As such, students who identify and consume English-language news stories published on People’s Daily Online must engage it cautiously while questioning whether it is a reliable narrator of Chinese current events.

Nation-states have long been cognizant of the problem of multiple audiences when promoting their strategic narratives at home and abroad.11 The same goes for authoritarian nations like China.12 Unfortunately, this means that even mindful students who land on People’s Daily’s English-language website or others like it can be blindsided in at least three ways. First, the content they read may be multivocal in nature. That is, while being intended for both an internal and external audience will lead to the full translation of some information when published, subtext may convey different latent meanings to each audience.13 I am presently unfamiliar with any extant research that may serve to educate students of military studies or international politics on the way authoritarian regimes leverage multivocality to send different signals to domestic and international audiences. Nevertheless, China has an asymmetric advantage in English-language proficiency compared to the United States’ own Chinese skills, and as research on extremism and political violence illustrates, the ability for a single message (or “polyvalent performance”) to simultaneously convey multiple meanings is how so-called “dog whistle politics” function.14

The second problem students may encounter is that many of these news sites will segregate content only intended for the nation’s internal audiences from material penned exclusively for its external audiences by altogether eschewing translation when editorial or political elites deem appropriate. Content may appear on the English version of the site that does not appear in the original language and vice versa. When this happens, locating English-language translations of noteworthy articles or broadcasts published in foreign language media outlets will be difficult (if not impossible).

The final problem is related. The same media outlets may occasionally include substantively different content for their domestic and international consumers even when the “same” stories have been translated into different languages.15 In other words, students must understand that English-language content is produced for Western audiences for a reason, while content intended for domestic readership may often be inaccessible without taking additional steps.

For intrepid SAMS students, these steps include using browser-based translation software (like that native to Mozilla’s Firefox or Google’s Chrome browsers). Accessing AI-generated English-language translations enables cross referencing and fact checking because students can read and compare stories intended only for domestic audiences with those produced for international audiences. This equips them to identify inconsistencies across versions. Likewise, it empowers them to identify content published exclusively in one language or another. Taken together, automatic browser-supported translation leads not only to more nuanced evaluations of current events unfolding abroad but also more holistic understanding of foreign media perspectives. Further, using browser-assisted translations enables students to unpack new perspectives, minimize exposure to disinformation, and break free from their own national parochialisms more effectively than relying entirely on official translations.

But what should students do when their browsers lack the ability to translate complex or uncommon languages? When material is not published in English and their browsers cannot translate it, many students at SAMS misperceive open-source material as inaccessible. For instance, Firefox does not yet support the translation of Chinese, so Firefox users at SAMS cannot read translations of Chinese-language articles published by People’s Daily. Yet, just as cautious students can minimize the risk of becoming overly reliant on the “party line” by thinking critically about official translations, so too can they avoid missing out altogether when browser-based translations are unavailable.

Commercial AI services like ChatGPT, Department of War (DoW) resources like AskSage, and resources available to both the public and military like Gemini render browser-based limitations moot. In the age of generative AI, media written in other tongues need not remain closed off from the English reader. Students need only to prompt their preferred LLM to do the heavy lifting of translation on their behalf. Even audiovisual material is increasingly accessible. During the winter of 2025, SAMS students used Kapwing and ElevenLabs, respectively, to generate English-language subtitles and voiceovers for foreign language YouTube videos, making it possible to understand audiovisual news reports originally presented in languages for which they had no training.

Historical Records: AI-Enabled Primary Source Translation
If AI can enable news media translation, it stands to reason that other primary source records represent a second use case. In fact, AI is already employed for primary source translation in some quarters of the military. As part of its “In Their Own Words” project, the China Aerospace Studies Institute at Air University employs an automated translation process as part of its methodology, including, for example, in the translation of the 2020 edition of Science of Military Strategy.16 As a result, Western readers now have access to an important primary source on Chinese military doctrine.

Furthermore, AI can be used to translate primary sources for some of the same reasons as it can be used to translate current events. For example, the 1796 Treaty of Tripoli, which famously has a provision about the United States having been founded in no sense on Christianity, includes the relevant clause only in its English text.17 The official Arabic version of the treaty is reportedly substantively different, meaning American and Arab audiences were exposed to different messages with its publication. The same goes for similar treaties that followed.18 Why this occurred can be debated, but students interested in interpreting such texts for themselves are incapable of identifying such important distinctions without access to the Arabic primary source material.

Consider national security concerns over TikTok as another example. Prior to its divestment from ByteDance, apprehension about the wildly successful social media and content-sharing internet application used by half of the American public was often dismissed as the product of hawkish or anti-China special interest groups. Yet, Chinese-language writing makes it clear that security thinkers in the People’s Republic have given significant attention to the use of short-form content platforms for propaganda purposes. But how might TikTok users illiterate in Chinese have found this information for themselves? For a forthcoming article, a colleague of mine at SAMS, Dan Cox, and I used AskSage and Google Gemini to translate several Chinese-language articles for our background research. As a result, we learned for ourselves that Chinese national security thinkers are indeed very interested in the ways TikTok and similar social media and content creation platforms can be and have been used to promote Communist Party domestic messaging, People’s Liberation Army strategic narratives, and Chinese soft power more generally.19 The figure, which shows an example paragraph in the original Chinese translated using three different methods (i.e., browser-based translation, Gemini, and AskSage), illustrates the process we employed.

Figure. Using TikTok for People’s Liberation Army Propaganda: An Example of Chinese-to-English AI Translation

(Figure by author)

Enlarge the figure

By reading the Chinese-language primary sources for ourselves, Cox and I were able to better understand how TikTok can be employed in Chinese information warfare, both against its own people and against the West. The same should be done for other primary sources like the Treaty of Tripoli because the ability to access foreign language primary sources has the same advantage as accessing primary source material published in one’s native tongue.20 That is, readers can digest and interpret content for themselves without having to rely on intermediaries to explain the information. PME students (and other interested members of the public) who make no attempt to translate information for themselves run into the same problem as students relying on official translations encounter. That is, they must trust human translators as reliable mediators of information. To be sure, credible human interpreters will be better at detecting the important subtextual features of foreign language—things like tone, sarcasm, colloquialisms, metaphor—at least for the foreseeable future. Expert translators will even be able to detect some instances of multivocality. However, translations of important primary source documents may not always be available from credible interpreters.

Take Michael Pillsbury’s The Hundred-Year Marathon as a case in point.21 The book represents Pillsbury’s subjective interpretation of China’s plans to erode American hegemony and replace the liberal international order. More popular memoir than work of serious scholarship, he derives his conclusions from his experiences working in China as a member of the national security staff and from personal translations of several Chinese-language national security documents.22 However, Pillsbury’s translation skills have long been scrutinized. Soyoung Ho argues that Pillsbury has a lax relationship with both translation and primary sources. After citing himself early in his career, subsequent fact-checks were unable to substantiate his translations when examining his previous work. Beyond this, Pillsbury has been criticized for inserting ideas into his translations, abridging statements, and ignoring important contexts, all in linguistically inappropriate ways. Indeed, says Ho, Pillsbury is responsible for introducing the concept of the assassin’s mace to describe Chinese asymmetric weapons, but the idea in context is more accurately translated as “trump card.” This also extends beyond his scholarship; Pillsbury’s mistranslations once caused a diplomatic incident between Donald Rumsfeld and Hu Jintao.23

In reviews of his 2015 book, similar critiques emerge. Peter Mattis suggests that Pillsbury’s translations are vague and sloppy, while Arthur Waldron’s otherwise laudatory review cautions that Pillsbury may be an unreliable or even untrustworthy narrator.24 Yet, it is Jude Blanchett that systematically dismantles Pillsbury’s approach to evidence and translation. In “The Devil Is in the Footnotes,” Blanchette argues that Pillsbury’s translations and citations are riddled with “errors, misdirection, and puzzling omissions,” with some of his claims even being directly contradicted by his own notes.25 Despite criticizing Western China experts for their inability to work with primary source material, Pillsbury also leans heavily on secondary sources with uncited translations. Ultimately, Blanchette concludes, “books that challenge” dovish views on China are needed, especially from people like Pillsbury who have had deep interaction with the Chinese defense community, but Pillsbury’s is not that book; it “is too replete with errors to inform.”26

Rush Doshi’s recent work restores some confidence in Pillsbury. Doshi’s The Long Game is a far more rigorous, well-designed scholarly analysis of Chinese primary sources that substantiates Pillsbury’s concerns, particularly with respect to the putative assassin’s mace program.27 Yet, not only did it take six years from the time of The Hundred-Year Marathon to publish The Long Game, meaning students interested in exploring Pillsbury’s ideas would have had no way to substantiate his claims during that time, but even now, those interested in the sources reviewed by either Pillsbury or Doshi are also left in the middle of an unresolved debate. By translating material for themselves with AI, students could be empowered to fact-check such assertions in the face of controversy without having to wait for another language expert to do so for them.

This is exactly what the SAMS students using Kapwing’s captioning service and Elevenlabs’ dubbing service did in the winter of 2025. After claims that China had automated its cruise missile production went viral online, students translated the evidence ostensibly supporting the assertion.28 A China Central Television video without an English-language analogue was said to provide evidence that China could build as many as one thousand missiles a day at a single factory, but neither the AI-generated dub nor the AI-generated subtitles for the video could substantiate the claim.29 The factory could very well be capable of such output, but this was not a fact students could verify from either translation of the viral video clip.30

Conclusion
AI-enabled translation enables better access to foreign perspectives as well as the identification of discrepancies across different versions of foreign language publications. It can thus help cultivate strategic empathy and promote better situational awareness of the operational environment. While the development of language proficiency is desirable, not everyone has the time or resources to become fluent in a second or subsequent language. Dyslexia, for example, makes foreign language acquisition difficult enough that waiving foreign language requirements is often considered a reasonable accommodation in both secondary and higher education.31 For students who are already multilingual, developing new language skills will eventually come with diminishing returns. After all, not only are there too many languages to learn in one lifetime, but language acquisition also becomes more difficult with age.32 Hence, as my experience at SAMS corroborates, even multilingual students can encounter insurmountable language barriers. Though the material in these instances may not always require immediate translation, accessing it would nonetheless benefit student learning. Translation only becomes more urgent for situations involving the operational force or other national security professionals in the field.

Regardless, anyone translating foreign languages with browser-based technology or the help of an LLM should be deliberate about addressing the limitations of AI-enabled translation. Students may, for example, fall prey to the problem of multivocality when leaning on AI, just as they might with official translations. Yet, they can guard against this by thinking critically about how translations can be intentionally misleading. Where content deliberately tailored to an international audience may be aimed at promoting a country’s strategic narratives or enhancing its soft power, content intended for a domestic audience can be intended to manipulate reader perceptions in ways that also benefit a propagandist. Students must remember this, especially when reading content published in or by an authoritarian nation.

There is less value when students interpret secondary information (i.e., someone else’s interpretation) than there is when students provide their own interpretations of primary source material. However, machine-generated translation like human translation is fundamentally an act of interpretation subject to bias and error.33 Students might compensate by leveraging multiple translations. By comparing translations from different platforms, they can develop a more nuanced understanding of the primary source material with which they are working, as well as a stronger appreciation for the intricacies of translation itself.

Students can likewise experiment with different approaches, including comparison of documents translated on a sentence-by-sentence and paragraph-by-paragraph basis with those translated at the article level. This method could compensate for technical limitations in current DoW systems. Where AskSage is built on the foundation of powerful commercial models like ChatGPT, another DoW platform called CamoGPT was trained primarily on English-language data.34 Consequently, AskSage is better equipped to translate large bodies of foreign language text, but it too is more limited than its commercial counterparts due to the amount of data it truncates during the translation process. One approach that seems to improve AskSage functionality involves paragraph-level translation, as opposed to article-level translation. Trying to translate whole articles in a single go might be useful for context, but information is undoubtedly truncated to cope with the rapid devouring of tokens required to process vast amounts of textual data.35

Mistakes and misunderstandings are still probable without comprehension of context or knowledge of other nuances in human communication, but the opportunity for miscommunication and misunderstanding is at least as large for students who do nothing. Making no attempt to translate written or even audiovisual foreign primary sources will leave students dependent on the perspectives of linguistic gatekeepers as information mediators, undermining original analysis and leading to other forms of bias. Ultimately, eschewing AI-enabled translation will further erode PME students’ and practitioners’ respective access to foreign language information. At the very best, doing nothing will leave many in the classroom, in the field, and beyond without access to important sources of open-source data capable of shedding light on the complexities of the modern operational environment. At the worst, reductions in the foreign language acquisition rate will undermine interoperability and have negative follow-on effects for America’s warfighting capabilities. Either way, eschewing AI-enabled translation would mean leaving PME—and the Nation’s security—firmly in the past.

Opinions, conclusions, and recommendations expressed or implied are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent the School of Advanced Military Studies, the Command and General Staff College, the Department of War, or any other U.S. government agency; references to specific platforms and software are not intended as either endorsements or promotion. The author is grateful to Jacob A. Mauslein, PhD, and the SAMS classes of 2024 and 2025 for making this article possible.

Publishing Disclaimer: In all of its publications and products, Military Review presents professional information. However, the views expressed therein are those of the authors and are not necessarily those of the Army University, the Department of the Army, or any other agency of the U.S. government.

Luke M. Herrington, PhD, is an assistant professor of social science at the School of Advanced Military Studies at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. A political scientist and international relations scholar by training, he earned his PhD in political science from the University of Kansas. His research is largely concerned with issues at the nexus of political psychology and national security/foreign affairs. Herrington’s experiences in teaching with AI are also chronicled in the September 2025 edition of Journal of Military Learning. His work also appears in Joint Force Quarterly, E-International Relations, and The Diplomat. Before joining SAMS, he taught at the University of Kansas and Park University.

March-April 2026

Hosted by Department of War Information Activity - WEB.mil
https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Journals/Military-Review/English-Edition-Archives/March-April-2026/Breaking-Babel/
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

"An evening of conversation with translator Sam Bett and novelist Gabriel Bump as they explore the surprising common ground between translation and fiction writing.

Sam Bett, a UMass Amherst alumnus who majored in Japanese and English, is one of the leading translators of Japanese literature working today. His recent translation of Akira Otani's The Night of Baba Yaga made history as the first Japanese mystery novel to receive the Crime Writers' Association Dagger Award (2025), and earned Bett the Commissioner for Cultural Affairs Award from the Japanese Agency for Cultural Affairs for his contributions to promoting Japanese culture abroad.

Gabriel Bump is the author of Everywhere You Don't Belong, a New York Times Notable Book of 2020, and The New Naturals, a notable book of 2023 in the Washington Post, Boston Globe, and New York Times. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Best American Short Stories, among other publications. The third novel, Don't Stop Snowing, is forthcoming from Algonquin Books.

Together, Bett and Bump will reflect on how translation and fiction, while distinct literary acts, are deeply intertwined practices. Both translators and fiction writers are often asked the same underlying question — whether the work is "faithful" to reality or to the original — but as Bett puts it, the more interesting question is not if but how: how a novel plays with biography and history, and how a translation engages with its source text.

This event is free and open to the public, co-sponsored by the English Department and the Japanese Program. A book signing and sale will follow, with books provided by Bookends of Florence.

East Asian Languages and Cultures
440 Herter Hall
161 Presidents Drive
Amherst, MA 01003
(413) 545-0886
office@asianlan.umass.edu"
https://www.umass.edu/east-asia/events/novel-languages-conversation-about-translating-and-fiction
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

"Cannupa Hanska Luger Wins PEN/Jean Stein Book Award for SURVIVA: A Future Ancestral Field Guide

PEN Open Book Award Went to Justin Haynes for Ibis, a Novel about Caribbean Migration

PEN/Weld Biography Award to Nicholas Boggs for James Baldwin Biography, Baldwin: A Love Story

Host Murray Hill quipped: “PEN America knows that making this night is about joy, love, and celebration, and that is our most powerful resistance. So on that note, let’s start handing out the cash!”

(NEW YORK)—Against the climate of government censorship of words, books, and ideas, PEN America held its celebratory 62nd annual Literary Awards last night to honor some of the best writing and thinking of the past year across fiction, nonfiction, poetry, playwriting, and essays. Nearly $350,000 in prizes were conferred at the event known as “the Oscars for books.”

Comedian, author, producer, and actor Murray Hill (Somebody Somewhere), host for the ceremony, greeted an audience of star authors, publishing insiders, and book influencers by joking that the evening is indeed like the Oscars (“I agree, it’s like the Grammys but for tonight Beyoncé is Emma Straub…it’s like the Emmys but for people who don’t have TVs”). Then Hill struck a more serious tone, saying, “Governments are doing everything they can to squash diversity in our schools, our libraries, our businesses, and our halls of power, to prevent the exchange of new perspectives and the celebration of—and even the acknowledgement of—multiculturalism. But we all know that diversity is our greatest strength.”

Musical performances by Amber Iman (Broadway: Lempicka, Tony nomination); Nina Simone in Soul Doctor;Shuffle Along…) and the Ulysses Owens Jr. Band, led by the GRAMMY Award-winning drummer and percussionist, set a high-spirited tone as the audience cheered winners onstage.

Summer Lopez, co-CEO of PEN America, said: “Tonight, we came together to uplift our shared love of books and literature’s profound role in connecting people even as we witness in real time the relentless attacks on free expression by our government. Whether Jamaica Kincaid’s incisive essay collection, Nicholas Boggs’ intimate portrait of James Baldwin, Peter Beinart’s urgent search for a new narrative, or Cannupa Hanska Luger’s imagining of a decolonized future, the winners’ works emphasize the transformative power of storytelling.”

Clarisse Rosaz Shariyf, co-CEO of PEN America, said: “Literature’s capacity to create community—one of the beautiful, vulnerable things we fight for when we defend free expression—was on full display at the ceremony. Being in the room as magnetic performers brought career achievement winners Edwidge Danticat and Julia Cho’s audacious words to life was a magical experience. It’s an honor to recognize Cho’s unique theatrical voice and the sweeping force of Danticat’s mastery across genres on the global stage. These two artists connect us to our shared humanity.”

PEN America President Dinaw Mengestu, introducing the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award for an outstanding work with the promise “of enduring influence,” raised the ongoing spectre of book censorship in his remarks: “This prize, this ceremony, this organization of writers and readers, and all of us who are gathered here this evening, are a reflection of this multitude, this intertwining, layered body of style and form and aesthetics. One that despite being relentlessly under assault, cannot be taken away or diminished by any one person or any government.”

For his genre-bending work of Indigenous futurism, SURVIVA: A Future Ancestral Field Guide, Mandan/Hidatsa/Arikara/Lakota artist and writer Cannupa Hanska Luger won the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award. The evening’s largest monetary prize, presented to the author by Mengetsu and Hill, it recognizes the originality, merit, and impact of a book-length work of any genre, and confers $75,000 to its author.

Luger described the origin story of his book: “My wife 10 years ago bought me a US Military Survival Guide as a joke. These two black and white Helvetica textbooks came in. One said ‘Booby Traps’ and the other said ‘Survival.’ And I opened to page five and there was an acrostic poem and the A in ‘Survival’ was ‘Act like the Natives.’ I realized that it is full of Indigenous knowledge—militarized, weaponized, and recontextualized, and I wanted to fix that. In a world where it’s hard to fix things, I thought maybe I could fix this. I imagined my audience was in a future far from now. You proved me wrong.”

Journalist and author Adam Higginbotham (Midnight in Chernobyl, Challenger) presented the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award to neurologist, Boston University School of Medicine professor, and writer Pria Anand for The Mind Electric: A Neurologist on the Strangeness and Wonder of Our Brains, with judges citing the book as “science writing at its best,” with “wisdom, insight, and clarity that does not sacrifice poetry or beauty.”

The PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay, also presented by Higginbothom, went to Jamaica Kincaid, a writer at the New Yorker for two decades, for Putting Myself Together: Writing 1974-, her collection of nearly five decades of writing, which the judges cited for a “combination of precision and soul, that rarest of combinations.”

Peter Beinart won the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction, presented by music journalist and author Dan Charnas (Dilla Time), for Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning. The judges praised Beinart’s work as “a brave and vital contribution to contemporary American intellectual life, challenging readers to reckon with the demands of justice, equity, and accountability in the face of one of the most consequential and divisive issues of our time.”

Accepting the award, Beinart said: “I wanted to acknowledge that there are many Palestinian writers in Gaza and beyond who have the talent to win awards like this, but didn’t have the opportunities that I have had. I wrote my book because I believe there is another Judaism than the one being offered by the Israeli government and America’s most powerful Jewish organizations. It begins where Torah begins, with the recognition that all human beings, irrespective of religion, ethnicity, and race are created equal in the image of God.”

PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography winner Nicholas Boggs’ book Baldwin: A Love Story is the first major biography of James Baldwin in three decades, centering the impact of his personal relationships on his writing and life. “Boggs distills Baldwin’s life into a heart-throbbing ‘memory of love’ that echoes through the ages,” wrote the judges, calling it “a landmark achievement.”

Receiving the award from Charnas, Boggs said: “I’m honored to have spent my whole life writing about James Baldwin,” adding that he was grateful to be honored alongside other finalists’ “incredible books” — including that of Carla Kaplan, his “undergraduate professor [who] introduced [him] to feminist theory.”

Golden Globe-nominated actor and singer Emmy Rossum (Shameless) introduced a suite of awards and grants for translation, including the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, given to Michael Martin Shea (for translating Theory of the Voice and Dream by Liliana Ponce from Spanish), and the PEN Translation Prize, given to Minna Zallman Proctor for her translation from Italian of The Leucothea Dialogues by Cesare Pavese. The judges wrote that Shea “deftly captures the essence of Ponce’s serial poems on creation and absence” and Proctor for her “consistently fresh and contemporary tone and rhythm” that “makes the book come alive for readers today.”

Justin Haynes won the PEN Open Book Award (given to an exceptional book-length work of any literary genre by an author of color) for Ibis, his debut, a cross-generational Caribbean story the judges celebrated for its “magical flair and wild, idiosyncratic audacity” as it “expose[s] the continuum between colonialism, slavery, and ongoing human trafficking” and “reminds us that the only way to confront a haunted past is to accept—with humor, humility, and invention—the simultaneity, interconnectedness, and mystery of survival.”

Accepting the award from bestselling author and civil rights litigator Qian Julie Wang (Beautiful Country: A Memoir of an Undocumented Childhood), Haynes, from Trinidad and Tobago, said: “I am standing here on the shoulders of giants” and referred to immigrant authors from Caribbean nations– Edwidge Danticat, Marlon James and Jamaica Kincaid. Describing the struggles of U.S. immigrants from the region, he said: “I am just grateful that I am able to share their story and help them become… citizens of the world.”

Aracelis Girmay won the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry Collection for Green Of All Heads, cited by the judges for “dreamlike” poems that give voice to loss and life while celebrating the Eritrean community and the African diaspora. “This book is a whisper of a book and I didn’t know if it would be met by a reader,” she said, then, reflecting on her own father’s death in 2020, she quoted from the poem Glory by fellow nominee Gbenga Adesina: ‘Glory of the eyes of my father/which, when he died, closed/inside his grave/and opened even more brightly/inside me.’” She concluded: “I’m so grateful for all the words that we can live inside.”

Jared Lemus won the $25,000 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection for Guatemalan Rhapsody, which the judges praised as a “rare” debut that “arrives fully rendered and delivers a writer whose voice and talent promise even greater things to come.”...

In celebration of Haitian-American novelist Edwidge Danticat’s (Everything Inside; Krik? Krak!; Brother, I’m Dying) PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature, Haitian-American actor Pascale Armand (Broadway: Eclipsed, Tony nomination) gave a world-premiere reading from Dèy, Danticat’s forthcoming novel (Knopf, August 2026). Set between Haiti, Brooklyn and Miami, Dèy follows a Haitian-American woman whose understanding of self is upended after a random act of violence on a sunny Florida day.

Man Booker Prize-winning author Marlon James (A Brief History of Seven Killings) introduced Danticat and her career achievement honor.

Danticat referred to the Haitian immigrant communities in the United States she writes about as now living “in fear of being abducted and disappeared.” She added: “Literature has helped me to reclaim so much of what I thought I had lost. It’s allowed me to build community and imagine beyond all I’ve been told was impossible.”

In honor of playwright Julia Cho’s (99 Histories; Office Hour; The Language Archive) PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award, actress Sue Jean Kim performed an excerpt from Cho’s play Aubergine, directed for the occasion by Obie Award-winner Eric Ting (The Far Country, The Comeuppance). Kim previously appeared in Cho’s play Office Hour (Public Theater) and performed in the New York premiere of Aubergine at Playwrights Horizons in 2016. Tony Award-winning playwright David Henry Hwang (M. Butterfly, Chinglish, Yellow Face) presented the award to Cho.

Cho said: “All my life, I’ve looked up to writers. They’ve been my heroes. You still are. So it’s really meaningful to be in a room full of writers and the people who love them. It’s been such a hard time and I have been filled with so much fear and sadness. And the reaction I had was the exact wrong one. I became quiet. I became silent. So most of all, thank you for waking me up. Thank you for reminding me who I am — that I’m a writer, that it’s the time now more than ever to write, and I will do my best to create work to be worthy of this honor.”

About PEN America

PEN America stands at the intersection of literature and human rights to protect free expression in the United States and worldwide. We champion the freedom to write, recognizing the power of the word to transform the world. Our mission is to unite writers and their allies to celebrate creative expression and defend the liberties that make it possible. Learn more at pen.org.

Press Contacts

Suzanne Trimel at PEN America: 201.247.5057, strimel@pen.org

Blake Zidell, Adriana Leshko, and Caitlyn Tella at Blake Zidell & Associates: 917.572.2493, blake@blakezidell.com, adriana@blakezidell.com, caitlyn@blakezidell.com"
https://pen.org/press-release/pen-america-62nd-annual-literary-awards/
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

"This paper draws on literary analysis and foresight or futures thinking to discuss the futures of royal (and sacred) animals in Cameroon’s Grassfields — a geo-cultural space covering mainly the Anglophone Northwest and Francophone West regions. In the indigenous kingdoms (fondoms) located within the western Grassfields of Cameroon, some nonhuman animals are reserved for royalty and/or are considered sacred. These animals—which include, among others, wild cats (cheetahs, leopards, lions, tigers); buffalos; elephants; porcupines; cowries; and birds like the Bannerman’s Turaco—are all threatened by the ongoing sixth mass extinction of biodiversity across the globe. This paper suggests that literary texts by some Anglophone Cameroonian writers foreground the extinction of wildlife in general and royal and sacred animals in particular. Such texts include Kenjo Jumbam’s Lukong and the Leopard (1978), J.K. Bannavti’s Leopard Watch (2011), Athanasius Nsahlai’s The Buffalo Rider (2008), and John Nkengasong’s Njogobi Festival (2012). The first part of this paper builds on postcolonial ecocriticism and narrative foresight to examine the literary representations of biodiversity extinction, especially royal and sacred animals, in Cameroon. And the second part presents visions, insights and recommendations from participatory foresight workshops that explored preferred futures for royal and sacred animals in Cameroon. The #CongoBasinFutures and #RoyalAnimalsFutures foresight workshops, facilitated online and onsite in Yaoundé (Cameroon), brought together a variety of stakeholders – including teachers, students, environmentalists, artists, journalists, farmers, and indigenous kings (fons) from the Northwest region. The preferred futures and recommendations from the workshops include, among others, breeding royal animals and creating special parks or reserves for them, promoting ecotourism, using artificial parts of royal animals, reinforcing environmental education and legislation, using arts and entertainment. Ultimately, the paper hopes to contribute in advancing Cameroonian and African perspectives on environmental futures in this Anthropocene and Capitalocene era of escalating global climate change and ecological crises."
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/19467567261434197
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

"Concours de traduction Saint-Jérôme

 

Participez au 17e concours de traduction Saint-Jérôme organisé par l’ONU !

Le Service de la gestion des conférences de l’Office des Nations Unies à Vienne a le plaisir d’annoncer le lancement de la dix-septième édition du concours de traduction Saint-Jérôme. 

 

Participation

Le concours est ouvert aux étudiantes et étudiants inscrits dans les universités avec lesquelles le Département de l’Assemblée générale et de la gestion des conférences de l’ONU a signé un mémorandum d’accord ou dans les universités partenaires (pour de plus amples informations, voir la liste des universités partenaires). 

 

Épreuves 

Deux textes sont choisis pour chaque édition du concours : un texte en anglais à traduire vers l’arabe, le chinois, l’espagnol, le français ou le russe, et un dans une autre langue (qui alterne habituellement entre l’espagnol et le français) à traduire vers l’anglais. Les paires de langues du Département de traduction de la FTI pertinentes pour le concours sont anglais-arabe, anglais-espagnol, anglais-français et français-anglais.

 

Pour la dix-septième édition, l’épreuve proposée aux personnes traduisant vers l’anglais est un texte en français intitulé « Les grands-parents d’animaux de compagnie ». Celle proposée aux personnes traduisant depuis l’anglais vers les autres langues susmentionnées est un texte intitulé « A dog’s life ». 

 

Envoi des traductions

Les étudiantes et étudiants devront se procurer le formulaire d’inscription auprès auprès de M. Fernando Prieto Ramos : Fernando.Prieto@unige.ch

 

Comme nous ne pouvons soumettre qu’un maximum de quatre traductions par langue A, l’éventuelle présélection interne sera gérée en collaboration avec les Unités de notre Département de traduction. Les étudiant-es des programmes de Ma en traduction auront la priorité.

 

Les personnes intéressées doivent transmettre à Fernando Prieto Ramos leurs traductions et leurs formulaires d’inscription avant le 11 mai 2026 à 10 heures.

 

 30 mar 2026"

https://www.unige.ch/fti/es/a-la-une/concours-de-traduction-saint-jerome

#metaglossia 

#metaglossia_mundus 

"Literary agency Janklow & Nesbit has launched the David Bellos Translation Prize, “celebrating outstanding translations of fiction into English and championing global literary voices”
Mar 30, 2026
by Lauren Brown
https://www.thebookseller.com/news/janklow-nesbit-launches-the-david-bellos-translation-prize
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

"Upcoming Translation Events (Virtual & In-Person): April 2026

Thursday, April 2:

Book Talk: Woodwind Harmony in the Nighttime by Michelle Quay | Winner of the inaugural Mo Habib Translation Prize in Persian Literature, Reza Ghassemi’s darkly comic and subtly provocative novel of life among the exiled and expatriated. Iranian exile Yadollah is barely scraping by in 1990s Paris. It’s an all too common situation—their apartment building houses a cast of eccentric neighbors, most of them fellow down-on-their-luck exiles from all over the world. The author, Michelle Quay is a scholar, researcher and translator who teaches Persian language, literature, and Iranian cinema and culture at Brown University. In conversation with Porochista Khakpour, an award-winning Iranian-American author of the novels Sons and Other Flammable Objects, The Last Illusion, and Tehrangeles. In-person. Hosted by Yu & Me Books. More info here. Starts at 7:00 p.m. (ET)

Monday, April 6:

Max Lawton on Antonio Moresco’s The Beginnings | The Center for the Art of Translation, City Lights, and Deep Vellum co-present a conversation between Max Lawton and Sean Thor Conroe about the life and work of Italian author Antonio Moresco and The Beginnings, the first book in his colossally disruptive Games of Eternity (Giochi dell’eternità) trilogy. Hybrid (In-person and Virtual). Hosted by City Lights Booksellers & Publishers. Zoom registration required. More info here and here. 10:00 p.m. - 11:30 p.m. (ET)

Thursday, April 9:

Sakura by Kanako Nishi and translated by Allison Markin Powell | Rizzoli Bookstore and the Japan Society are delighted to host a conversation with author Kanako Nishi and translator Allison Markin Powell to celebrate Sakura, a heartwarming tale about familial love. The discussion will be moderated by Asha Lemmie and followed by a signing. In-person. Hosted by Rizzoli Bookstore. More info here. Starts at 6:00 p.m. (ET)

Tuesday, April 14:

Poetry Exploring Poetry | Join us for a discussion about poetry translation with Carmen Gallo (poet, translator and professor of English literature at La Sapienza University in Rome) and Patrizio Ceccagnoli (translator, Italian Studies professor at University of Kansas, managing editor of Poetry Italian Review). This event is a part of the NYC Art and Craft in Translation Meetings and Dialogues on Literary Translation festival from April 13th to 15th. In-person. Hosted by Casa Italiana Zerilli Marimò. More info here and here. 3:30 p.m. - 5:00 p.m. (ET)

Interlinguistic Dialogue in Classic and Contemporary Literature | Join us for a discussion about the translation of fiction by classic and contemporary authors, with Edwin Frank (Founder, Editorial Director, New York Review of Books), Michael Frank (writer), Ann Goldstein (Translator of various Italian authors, both classical, such as Alba De Cespedes, and contemporary, such as Elena Ferrante and many more), and Brian Robert Moore (Translator of classical authors such as Lalla Romano and of the contemporary authors Walter Siti and Michele Mari). This event is a part of the NYC Art and Craft in Translation Meetings and Dialogues on Literary Translation festival from April 13th to 15th. In-person. Hosted by Casa Italiana Zerilli Marimò. More info here and here. 5:00 p.m. - 6:30 p.m. (ET)

New Translations of Cesare Pavese | Join us for the presentation of two books by Cesare Pavese: The Craft of Living (Toronto University Press) with translator Julian Sachs and the volume editor Iuri Moscardi, and The Leucothea Dialogues (Archipelago Books) with translator Minna Zallman Proctor. This event is a part of the NYC Art and Craft in Translation Meetings and Dialogues on Literary Translation festival from April 13th to 15th.In-person. Hosted by Casa Italiana Zerilli Marimò. More info here and here. 5:00 p.m. - 6:30 p.m. (ET)

Wednesday, April 15:

Tangerinn by Emanuela Anechoum, translated by Lucy Rand | A stunning debut novel about the legacy of migration in a Moroccan Italian family. Rizzoli Bookstore is delighted to partner with the Bridge Book Award to celebrate Tangerinn by Emanuela Anechoum (translated by Lucy Rand), a profound and resonant story of a woman's search for belonging and identity between cultures. She will be in conversation with Eduordo Andreoni, followed by a signing. This event is a part of the NYC Art and Craft in Translation Meetings and Dialogues on Literary Translation festival from April 13th to 15th. In-person. Hosted by Rizzoli Bookstore. More info here and here. 3:00 p.m. - 4:30 p.m. (ET)

A Fictional Inquiry by Daniele Del Giudice, translated by Anne Milano Appel | Rizzoli Bookstore is delighted to partner with the Bridge Book Award to host a conversation with Chiara Benetollo (Center for Educational Justice), Alessandro Giammei (Yale University), and Iuri Moscardi (The Graduate Center, CUNY), in celebration of the first English translation of the championed Italian novel, A Fictional Inquiry by Daniele Del Giudice, translated by Anne Milano Appel. The novel is a mysterious story of a narrator tracing the life of a long dead writer, bringing to light the sublime connection between literature and life. The conversation will be followed by a signing. This event is a part of the NYC Art and Craft in Translation Meetings and Dialogues on Literary Translation festival from April 13th to 15th. In-person. Hosted by Rizzoli Bookstore. More info here and here.. 4:30 p.m. - 5:45 p.m. (ET)

Tuesday, April 21:

Reading: Yoo Heekyung and Stine An at the Korea Society | Across Languages: New Voices in Korean Poetry brings together acclaimed South Korean poets Lee Jenny, Yoo Heekyung, Oh Eun, and Shin Hae-uk with award-winning literary translators Archana Madhavan, and Stine An, for a Korean-English bilingual reading and conversation to share the dynamism and innovations of language in Korean poetry culture. Through poetry and discussion, the speakers examine the cultural centrality of poetry in Korea and consider translation as a critical, creative practice that reshapes how literature circulates, sounds, and is felt across languages. Hybrid (In-person and Virtual). Hosted by Ugly Duckling Presse. More info here. 6:30 p.m. - 8:00 p.m. (ET)

 

Wednesday, April 22:

Book Launch: Winter Night Rabbit Worries at Poets House | Celebrate the launch of Winter Night Rabbit Worries (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2026) by Yoo Heekyung, translated from the Korean by Stine An. Structured as a series of stories, Yoo’s fifth poetry collection presents narrative and linguistic architectures that dissolve the opposition between those materials that construct the this and the that side of life—past and future, truth and falsehood, memory and fantasy. Join poet Yoo Heekyung and translator Stine An for a reading and Q&A on their collaborative translation process. This event will also feature readings from PIROWA PADOWA by Lee Jenny, translated from Korean by Archana Madhavan, and A Season by Michael Joseph Walsh. In-person. Hosted by Ugly Duckling Presse & Poets House. More info here. 7:00 p.m. - 9:00 p.m. (ET)

Friday, April 24:

Reading: Yoo Heekyung and Stine An at Accent Sisters l Come meet the poetry of four contemporary South Korean poets (and the poets) in this bilingual reading and party to celebrate four recent publications in translation. Join iconic South Korean poets Oh Eun, Yoo Heekyung, and Lee Jenny, alongside literary translator and poet Stine An, and friends for an evening of readings, experimental performances, followed by a lively conversation on Korean poetry culture and book signing. In-person. Hosted by Ugly Duckling Presse & Accent Sisters. More info here. 7:00 p.m. - 9:00 p.m. (ET)

Us&Them: A Writer/Translator Reading Series | A writer-translator reading, with original writing and new translations. For Spring 2026, Lily Meyer, Diana Arterian, Nevena Džamonja, and C.Francis Fisher  will be reading. In-person. Hosted by Molasses Books. More information here. Starts at 8:00 p.m. (ET)

Thursday, April 30:

Exophony: Writing Outside the Mother Tongue | This discussion explores the creative possibilities of writing in another language and examines the colonial legacies of languages. It convenes Patrice Nganang, whose memoir Scale Boy reflects on his relationship to the Cameroonian indigenous language Medumba, his mother tongue, and his writing in English, German, and French; and Swedish-Tunisian author Jonas Hassen Khemiri, whose recent novel The Sisters marks his first book written in English rather than his native Swedish. Moderated by translator and poet Nancy Naomi Carlson, this conversation will explore the cross-cultural and intra-language possibilities of exophonic writing and the historical legacies that shape which languages are heard. In-person. Hosted by Goethe-Institut New York. More info here. 6:30 p.m. - 7:45 p.m. (ET)"
https://arts.columbia.edu/content/upcoming-translation-events-virtual-person-april-2026
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

The academics spoke about translation, authority, disciplinary boundaries, science communication, and AI and its risks.

 

"

 

Of translation, transgression, and transcreation: A conversation on knowledge across languages

 

The academics spoke about translation, authority, disciplinary boundaries, science communication, and AI and its risks.

 

Doyeeta Majumder, Anuj Misra, Bill Mak, Subha Prasad Sanyal & Biju Paul Abraham

 

Mar 29, 2026 · 08:30 pm

 

The 2026 Making and Unmaking Facts roundtable conference.

 

What do facts, data, and objectivity mean for literature and translation in South Asia today? “Making and Unmaking Facts”, a conference on the subject, was organised by Fact or Value, DECISION, and IIM Calcutta in February 2026 to explore this and related questions.

 

 

 

 

The conference examined how facts are made, stabilised, challenged and granted authority across different social and political contexts. It feels especially relevant now, when public life is increasingly shaped by debates around post-truth, misinformation, expertise and the question of who gets to decide what counts as fact.

 

 

 

 

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The roundtable extended those concerns into a wider conversation about translation, authority, disciplinary boundaries, science communication, AI and the risks of both rigid certainty and corrosive relativism.

 

 

 

 

Anuj Misra, Professor of the History of Science and the History of Knowledge, Bill Mak, Professor of History of Science at the University of Science and Technology, John Mathew, Professor of the History of Science, Sourav Bhattacharya, Professor of Economics, Biju Paul Abraham, Professor of Public Policy, and translator Subha Prasad Sanyal were in conversation with academic Doyeeta Majumder at the conference.

 

 

 

 

Excerpts from the conversation.

 

 

 

 

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Doyeeta Majumder (DM): I would like to begin with the question of language and translation, how the making and unmaking of facts is mediated through, and constantly has to encounter, the issue of translation, transpropriation, and encounters with other systems of knowledge and other times. Facts are made at a particular point in history, at a certain historical moment; then they can be challenged and unmade, and later they can recrystallise and new certainties might emerge. This process is mediated through acts of carrying across.

 

 

 

 

Translation is not merely the question of rendering something into another language; it often involves a completely different idiom of doing science. What are these idioms of knowledge-making in different times and cultures? How do encounters with the “other” make and unmake objectivities and certainties?

 

 

 

 

Anuj Misra (AM): It is interesting to consider the cognitive space one occupies when transporting a concept from one language into another. In doing so, one lives simultaneously in two worlds, the world that belongs to you and the one that does not. One must navigate how to bring something foreign into one’s own conceptual space.

 

 

 

 

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While language does act as a mediator at this point, it has its own restrictions and strictures that delineate and shape what you are trying to understand and what you are trying to communicate. Much depends on tacit skill, your ability to introduce new words, your mastery of grammar, and your control over concepts. Many factors are already written into the translation process, including internal cognitive mediations that we do not hear about.

 

 

 

 

Equivalence, particularly in the context of translation studies, is never final. It is always in the process of being finalised, but never fully complete.

 

 

 

 

Bill Mak (BM): Translation is something I have worked on extensively, particularly in the course of my doctoral studies on Sino-Indian Buddhist translation. The translation of Indian Buddhist texts into Chinese was one of the largest human intellectual endeavours, taking nearly a millennium and becoming a collaborative project involving scholars from Central Asia, India and China.

 

 

 

 

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Although there is, of course, a linguistic dimension, translation involves more than linguistic crossing; it involves crossing cultural identities, epistemologies and value systems. There can be many ways of perceiving such acts of crossing boundaries: it can be seen positively, as in “transcreation”, where something new is added. But it can also be perceived as transgressive, provoking negative reactions to such boundary-crossing.

 

 

 

 

We can see an example of such negative reactions in the case of Hindu numerals being introduced in China, where such attempts were either completely ignored or, worse, the bringers of such new knowledge were attacked by traditional scholars, and this new scholarship was then buried for centuries before being rediscovered. As a result, although the Chinese developed their own zero sign, they did not benefit from that earlier encounter with Indian astronomers.

 

 

 

 

Sourav Bhattacharya (SB): Two words seem to be of particular significance in this context: “transgression” and “expertise”. Keeping these two words in mind, let me ask: Is there also the question of protecting one’s turf? Expertise builds authority, but it is also the source of one’s livelihood. There may be reluctance to allow dilution. A grammarian, for instance, establishes rules to maintain purity, but in doing so creates boundaries that make translation more difficult.

 

 

 

 

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During the Cold War, for instance, mathematicians in the US and the USSR worked on similar problems with little exchange, leading to duplication of effort. Might there be political efforts to protect intellectual territory that hinder translation and knowledge creation?

 

 

 

 

AM: Knowledge ownership is complex. Once a book is published, it no longer belongs solely to the author but to its readers. When knowledge systems are owned and possessed, transgression becomes possible because someone enters another’s intellectual territory.

 

 

 

 

We often speak of knowledge economies but rarely of knowledge parochialism. In certain societies, certain knowledge systems are codified in certain other kinds of practice. For example, although scholars of Sanskrit often paint a very secular picture of it, the dominant narrative is that Sanskrit is a sacred language, a language of the gods, thereby fortified and insulated from intrusion, creating a parochial view of its excellence, unnecessarily so. Yet alongside this existed secular forms such as marketplace Sanskrit and Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit, which is a mix of Sanskrit with Pali and Prakrit languages. Thus, astrology, for example, which was practised in hybridised Sanskrit, much more readily absorbed foreign Perso-Arabic material because it was not parochialised. However, when knowledge is tied to economic survival, such as royal or administrative bureaux, new systems that threaten established practices are resisted.

 

 

 

 

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At a philosophical level, once a work is created, can it truly be transgressed? Who is the victim in such a case?

 

 

 

 

John Mathew (JM): However, we must also think about societies that have been dominated and have become parochial by necessity, the Toda people, for example. In such cases, the transgression of knowledge boundaries has happened after the advent of colonialism, so there is a kind of protectionism in operation here.

 

 

 

 

AM: Of course, parochialism can also be thought of in terms of protectionism. In the short run, keeping itself closed off allows something to preserve itself until the imminent dangers have ceased, for a while. It certainly allows you to guard something until it can flourish again. Welsh is a great example, where people had to guard their language against English. They were even punished; it was extremely difficult for them even to learn their language. Very often, Welsh-speaking people miss a generation. So there is always a resurgence from the grandparents to the grandchildren, and the parents do not speak it. This happens regularly because, of course, they get narrowed and siloed into their own little communities.

 

 

 

 

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DM: I was just thinking of Ramanujan and a certain way of doing mathematics that disappeared with him; there was no revival for that. It died with Ramanujan when other systems of calculation and proof took over.

 

 

 

 

BM: When discussing knowledge parochialism, I am reminded of academia today. In many academic departments, the buzzword is interdisciplinarity, yet economic pressures encourage departments to protect their funding and survival. Interdisciplinarity can become almost an irony: when a conference is designated “interdisciplinary”, it is usually hosted by a single department, by a single discipline, which is now feeling the pressure to open up to interdisciplinary discourse.

 

 

 

 

But are we empowered to produce credible and morally valuable knowledge within the current institutional and power structures of academia?

 

 

 

 

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AM: Interdisciplinarity is an interesting term. The disciplines were themselves created by compartmentalising knowledge, assuming that expertise in the individual parts would eventually allow reconstruction of the whole. Interdisciplinarity then attempts to bridge an artificial divide with another artificial construct.

 

 

 

 

Bill and I are philologists. We look at ancient texts, we translate them, we understand their historical context, and then we bring the skills of philology and history to bear on them, and, to a certain extent, philosophy as well. We are not sociologists, but nine out of ten texts under discussion were probably texts that we had both read. So how does it really happen? I cannot claim the authority to stand up here and say I am a sociologist. I am not. But many of the texts you cite and talk about do not categorise themselves as sociological texts, or philosophical texts, or historical texts. They are texts. There is something they communicate. Once we understand communication, we can draw upon it in whatever field we wish to apply it to. So I think a better way, and this has happened in many universities, would be to abandon the idea of departments and instead create notions of themes, thematic discourse, where you build upon skills from law to sociology to medicine to talk about that theme and bring it to the fore, using them in very similar ways to how we use our skills in philology and philosophy at the same time when we look at a text.

 

 

 

 

JM: But there is also the tyranny of the invisible canon. Scholars often rely on recognised names, Spivak, Foucault, and construct their talks around them because it helps if the audience is familiar with and attuned to particular names rather than having to make the case for someone more obscure.

 

 

 

 

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BM: In some academic contexts, historical work, say, work on the history of science, is taken seriously only if framed within sociological theory. One must preface presentations with references from sociology in order to be heard.

 

 

 

 

I do agree with Anuj that a thematic approach might be more productive. To a theme, we then apply different skills. From a pedagogical point of view, this would require students to develop a much broader repertoire of skills: science students with liberal arts exposure, and arts students with scientific literacy. The Chinese, for the longest time, had this tradition. Traditional Chinese scholars were often well-versed in literature, music, natural science, and philosophy. However, current educational trends often move in the opposite direction.

 

 

 

 

DM: My final question is about what kinds of conversations historians and philosophers of science, especially those originally trained in scientific disciplines, are having with practitioners in the fields whose histories or philosophies they study.

 

 

 

 

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AM: Yes, in fact. But theoretical physics has become so obscure that the divisions between mathematics and philosophy have nearly erased themselves. Neither mathematicians nor philosophers understand what string theorists do, so they have created a universe in which, very often, they have to do both jobs themselves. When a string theorist talks about thirty-second dimensions of bosonic particles, it is almost impossible to understand what they mean. Only they understand that; for them, it is real. It is tangible. It is something they can play with. They see it, they visualise it, they understand what it really means. But they are very poor at communicating, and this is largely because they have never been called upon to communicate. They are very happy living monastic lives, doing mathematics, being left alone. And that is essentially how we have codified mathematicians in general: you do not understand a word of what they are talking about because the point of entry is so high.

 

 

 

 

This is where we break down. I teach a course on the history of mathematics, one concerned with thinking across the divide, where we have to bring people out of their irrational fear of mathematics. I have never heard anyone tell me that they are afraid of music, even though music is equally complicated. If I write music for you, or take you to a course in musicology, the point of entry is about as difficult as it is to get into string theory. But how is it that you are not afraid of music? Because there is something palpable about music, even cacophony. You can decide that you do not like this, but you can actually give it a listen. How do you give an equation a listen? And that is exactly what I teach in my course: how to listen to equations rather than look at the numbers and be afraid.

 

 

 

 

JM: Your reference to music is interesting. I once heard a TED Talk about the “music of the melting Arctic”, where climate data were rendered musically. It is interesting because you learn through music that everything is not hunky-dory, and this is more telling than anything any particular statistician could ever say.

 

 

 

 

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I teach a course called Science, History and Theatre, and students actually have to write their own play at the very end. It has always been fascinating to see how much science can be communicated through the medium of the play. Do you have to use literal elements? Do you need to resort to a metaphor? What do you do? So often, a metaphor is employed in this particular case.

 

 

 

 

BM: The question of how the dialogue takes place is a very important one. And, of course, it is not only about how the dialogue takes place among scholars, but also about the specialist communicating with non-specialists, with other colleagues, or with the public. I think there have been some good developments: you have science communicators like Carl Sagan and Brian Cox, and they are very approachable and inviting. But you do not have these people in all disciplines.

 

 

 

 

What happens when this large and messy body of evidence is encountered by non-specialists? Since the specialists are not willing to take up the task, the generalist or non-specialist still feels like taking on the job. But maybe AI will bring down all these barriers and become a game-changer. When you go to either ChatGPT or the BBC, you have equal access to everything. Of course, the irony is, as I mentioned, that AI is neither artificial nor intelligent. It is not capable of actually discerning things on the basis of truth value. But at least it opens up the opportunity, the accessibility of expertise and knowledge.

 

 

 

 

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SB: But you notice that ChatGPT, or such AI models, are much more open and permissive than regular referees, who are completely embedded within the field, which is perhaps something we were pointing out.

 

 

 

 

We have seen that facts are made, facts are unmade, facts are value-laden, and so on. But is there a risk of pushing this a bit too far, where there are multiple groups trying to produce facts, which become competing narratives? In today’s world, with social media, you end up in a scenario where people look at any fact, or anything spewed as fact, with deep scepticism, and then we end up with a situation of anarchy in the field of knowledge. I am particularly talking about laypeople here.

 

 

 

 

How do we determine what is too far?

 

 

 

 

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BM: I think that, for laypeople, there is the fear of relativism, so everything becomes flat because it is equally accessible and there are competing narratives, and so on.

 

 

 

 

But ultimately, it is the human mind that needs to make the judgment. We develop all these matrices and indices to evaluate standards – they help us to make decisions, not to decide for us.

 

 

 

 

AM: In the context of the fear about relativism, I offer the idea of the “workable epistemology”. Practising mathematicians, take a financial mathematician, for instance, who does not constantly question the ontological status of the numbers on their desk during their job. But does that mean they are not qualified enough to reflect on numbers? Not at all. They certainly are qualified, if they wish to. So I think there is a certain level of workable realism when it comes to facts. It is like the weather service: when it tells you the weather in the morning, you tend to believe it. If it rains, you do not sue them.

 

 

 

 

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The problem arises when facts are treated as sacred and immutable. As long as we understand the relativism of the fact that it can be reinterpreted again in the current moment, there is room for movement. This is the method of standpoint epistemology, in a sense: you believe in something for the moment, and that has the opportunity of changing later.

 

 

 

 

JM: But I often ask myself this question: for the lay public, how many narratives can be held simultaneously? I think it is important, because we are all inveterate classifiers and librarians, right? In some sense, we say, all right, beyond a particular point, when there is a profusion of narratives, it becomes really difficult to be able to talk about something.

 

 

 

 

So even if you say there are other ways of looking at things, is there a limit to how many of these narratives can be kept in mind at the same time?

 

 

 

 

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AM: In certain situations where a fact has a direct implication for society, like the recent rise in the measles epidemic in the US because people are vaccine-resistant, despite a long history of proving how effective vaccines have been, and despite a mongered fear of vaccines essentially having caused autism without any substantial basis, we have created a complex social situation.

 

 

 

 

This harks back to that very problem again: we have created an alienation of science in society. People have picked one narrative or another and then applied it as they want to and used their own judgement on it. But they have not been given the decision-making framework. They have never been taught how to evaluate information. So rather than simply codifying the fact that vaccines do not cause autism, it would be a better idea to train people in how to interpret the fact. So, the question is about how many narratives? There can never be an answer to that. As many as needed. Look at the idea of ritual and religion.

 

 

 

 

People come up with the same practice, the same codified mass, the same codified thing. Still, there are differences in practice everywhere. In every religion, people will practise a ritual in the way they want to ritualise it, and this allows multiplicity to survive. Yet in a common practice, if you and I constitute a temple or a mosque together, we will codify that in some kind of subjective way. How will we be doing this one?

 

 

 

 

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BM: I feel that there is a deeply human dimension to all these questions. There is a certain kind of laziness in thinking. You just do not want to apply yourself, to put yourself in your opponents’ or alternatives’ position. And I think, in our education system, there is this lack of emphasis on how to consider opinions from different points of view, and on the need for a sense of empathy in the sense of understanding things from different perspectives, whether of people with different values, different religions, different epistemologies, and so on.

 

 

 

 

DM: Perhaps the problem also lies in applying the same frameworks used to critique political or religious power to science without adjustment. Of course, training people to evaluate things for themselves would be the best-case scenario. But there are also very many times when people want to be told certain things and desire certainty. They may reject institutional expertise but accept alternative claims, such as miracle cures or confirmations of self-diagnoses, because doing so feels empowering or rebellious.

 

 

 

 

Subha Prasad Sanyal (SPS): If all claims can have truth value only in the epistemic context in which they are made, does this claim not then itself become true only in particular contexts? Is this position self-defeating?

 

 

 

 

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AM: At a meta-philosophical level, yes, such arguments can become recursive. In fact, when Longinus talked about the idea that every judgement is particular to its universe of discourse, the rebuttal was exactly the same: well, is that judgement not also saying the same thing within the discourse? So yes, at the meta-level, if you keep debating the philosophical implications of it, you will be caught in an endless loop. However, this is where the difference lies. It is not necessary to have a conversation at the meta-level to see that it is by virtue of a fact’s being based on an onto-epistemic grounding that it is called a fact.

 

 

 

 

Biju Paul Abraham (BPA): As someone who reads Bengali literature in translation, one of the things I recognise about those translations is that they are not exact translations. There is possibly some element of transgression, some element of transcreation, perhaps, which has been done in order to help me understand. So, when I read it, I understand that there could be issues with the translation. It is not exact. But as a layperson, and I consider myself a layperson in that context, I am happy to have it because I get a limited experience of it. If you worry too much about the exactness of the translation, then the problem is that you come back to the kind of issue that Nirad C Chaudhuri raised. His books have long quotations in French, so when his publisher told him, “You know, it is an English book, and there are these French quotations in it. So why don’t you provide an English translation as well?” Chaudhuri said, “If you don’t know French, you shouldn’t be reading my books.” If you adopt that kind of attitude, there is so much that is lost.

 

 

 

 

AM: This is exactly the workable epistemology I am talking about. At the level of what it functions for, it is perfectly fine. As long as we understand at what level it functions, and what we are doing, it functions. But if you build your entire belief system about Bengali literature on the basis of your reading in translation, and codify that worldview into your absolute reality, that is the problem. As long as you allow yourself to be hospitable to yourself in a recurring sense, and we understand the fact that we are only entering someone else’s space, and I am happy that I have been welcomed there, and I feel hospitable there, and I learned something, and I do understand that there are limitations, then it is perfectly fine.

 

 

 

 

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DM: This is how we work with the logic of periodisation when we teach history: dividing it up into ancient, medieval, and modern. And while you say that to first-year students, in the next class, or the next year, you say: but all of that is not really true, actually, constantly urging the questioning of those certainties.

 

 

 

 

Some things to think about, for me personally, are the questions about collective subjectivity: the kind of objectivity that is produced by that collective subjectivity; the use of personal discretion, rational discretion, both for the producers of knowledge and for the consumers of knowledge.

 

 

 

 

Doyeeta Majumder is an Assistant Professor of English at Jadavpur University.

 

 

 

 

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Anuj Misra is Professor of the History of Science and the History of Knowledge at Freie Universität Berlin and leads the Max Planck Research Group “Astral Sciences in Trans-Regional Asia” (ASTRA).

 

 

 

 

Bill Mak is Professor of History of Science at the University of Science and Technology of China and Research Associate at the Needham Research Institute, Cambridge, with research interests in the history of science in Asia, Buddhist translation, and Sino-Indian studies.

 

 

 

 

John Mathew is Dean of the Arts and the Humanities and Professor of the History of Science at the Asian University for Women, where his work focuses on natural history, disease, and environmental history in South Asia.

 

 

 

 

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Sourav Bhattacharya is Professor of Economics at IIM Calcutta, with interests spanning the economics of organisations, political economy, and development.

 

 

 

 

Biju Paul Abraham is Professor of Public Policy in the Public Policy and Management Group at IIM Calcutta.

 

 

 

 

Subha Prasad Sanyal is a Kolkata-based Bengali literary translator and winner of the 2018 Harvill Secker Young Translator’s Prize, noted for translating Hawa Hawa and Other Stories.

 

 

 

 

Fact or Value is an online forum with a focus on philosophy, intellectual history and aesthetics. They host lectures and design books on unusual subjects."

 

 

 

 

https://amp.scroll.in/article/1091632/of-translation-transgression-and-transcreation-a-conversation-on-knowledge-across-languages

 

#metaglossia

 

#metaglossia_mundus 

"Translations of historical works into regional languages are crucial to counter misinformation on its own turf. While translations speak in the language of the people, propaganda, too, spreads most effectively in the language people consume daily, making it important that well-researched history is available in those very languages to challenge it, historian Ruchika Sharma said. 

Prof. Sharma was speaking at the release of ‘Karavaliya Charitreyalli Hyder Ali Mattu Tippu Sultan’ (Hyder Ali and Tipu Sultan in the History of Coastal Karnataka) by author and journalist Naveen Soorinje. IT/BT Minister Priyank Kharge, among others, was also present.

“One of the key reasons for the growing communalisation of history is that good academic history is still in the shackles of English,” said Prof. Sharma, adding that freeing such work into languages like Kannada is essential to push back against distortions. Writing history in a language that people understand, she said, is a powerful way to counter “factless gibberish masquerading as history,” circulated through social media and messaging platforms. 

Turning to Tipu Sultan, Prof. Sharma highlighted some of the persistent claims around his rule, particularly on forced conversions. She said historical sources offer multiple, complex, and conflicting narratives on his rule.

Beyond angles & demons
She said Tipu Sultan was no exception and while, like other rulers of his time, he used force where he felt it was necessary, he also navigated a diverse society through patronage and political calculation.

“The problem with popular history today is that it looks for angels and demons,” she said, stressing that monarchs must be understood within the nature of monarchy itself, with all its grey shades.

While there were instances of forced conversion, Tipu’s engagement with Hindu institutions offers a sharply different narrative, she said. Prof. Sharma referred to the ransacking of the Sringeri Mutt by Maratha forces, and said it was Tipu who later extended financial support for the restoration of the shrine and the reinstallation of the idol. He also sought prayers for his reign at a time when Mysore faced multiple adversaries, including the British, the Marathas, and the Nizam of Hyderabad.

Prof. Sharma further argued that present-day religious identities cannot be simply applied to the past. The term “Hindu,” she said, was not used in the way it is understood today and emerged later as a broad, external categorisation. At a different time in history, communities were divided along sectarian and caste lines in conflict with one another.

Beyond social media
Speaking at the event, Mr. Kharge said there is a growing trend of reshaping history to suit political narratives. Referring to Prof. Sharma’s point on misinformation circulating in WhatsApp groups, he said this has now expanded into mainstream platforms like cinema.

“Earlier it was one forward in a resident welfare group. Now it is amplified through films and large-scale productions,” he said, citing Dhurandhar 2, The Kerala Story, and The Kashmir Files, among other recent movies based on historical themes.

He added that he had no objection to individuals watching or appreciating such content, but is only worried about the larger concern of influence. 

Mr. Kharge said initiatives are under way to promote serious writing. Over the past two years, he said, efforts have been made to support new journals and publish books by young writers, with plans to expand this into an annual exercise. The aim, he said, is to build a body of credible, research-based work that can serve as a counter to “distorted history.”

Published - March 30, 2026 12:27 am IST"
https://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/bangalore/translations-of-historical-works-into-regional-languages-are-key-to-counter-misinformation-says-historian-ruchika-sharma/article70799904.ece
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

"Elon Musk announced that Grok has started automatically translating and recommending posts from other languages on X. The new capability is already delivering content from around the world directly into users’ timelines, with many English-speaking accounts noting a surge of engaging Japanese posts. Mr Musk wrote on X: “Grok automatically translating and recommending 𝕏 posts from other languages is starting to work.” The feature builds on X’s switch to Grok as its sole translation engine last year and aims to create a truly global conversation. Early reactions have been overwhelmingly positive, with users praising the fresh perspectives now appearing in their feeds. No further technical specifications have been released, but the rollout signals continued investment in breaking down language barriers on the platform."
https://share.google/azJTvoLxp1mng3fFE
#metaglossia #metaglossia_mundus

"By Jennifer Zhan, a Vulture social editor who also covers music, TV, and online culture
Mar. 27, 2026

Grammy-winning composer Lebohang Morake, known professionally as Lebo M, is suing a comedian who he claims was lyin’ about Lion King lyrics. The pair brought this matter to the court of public opinion earlier this month by posting Instagram videos to share their sides of the story. Will this battle now end up in an actual court? Here’s what to know about the $27 million lawsuit that comedian Learnmore Jonasi is crowdfunding to fight.

How did this start?
While appearing on the February 25 episode of the One54 Africa podcast, comedian Learnmore Jonasi (born Learnmore Mwanyenyeka) said that the chant in “Circle of Life” translates to “Look, there’s a lion. Oh my God.” When asked if he was joking, he doubled down: “That’s exactly what it means.” In a federal lawsuit filed in California on March 16 and reviewed by USA Today, Morake states that the chant — “Nants’ingonyama bagithi Baba” — is a line written in isiZulu and isiXhosa that actually translates to “All hail the king, we all bow in the presence of the king.” The lawsuit notes that ingonyama can translate to “lion” in Zulu but that this specific lyric is written in a form of royal-praise poetry that gives it a different significance.

Although Jonasi is not the first person to suggest that Morake’s lyric offers a very literal description of what’s happening in the opening scene of Disney’s 1994 animated classic, clips of his translation — which One54 Africa shared alongside the caption “POV: childhood ruined” — have gone viral over the past month and given the claim new life online. Morake alleged in his complaint that Jonasi has been performing this joke for the past eight years, continued to do so at comedy clubs after the clip went viral, and tried to monetize the bit with merch. Morake’s attorneys are arguing that all of that points to “actual malice” on Jonasi’s part. The lawsuit calls his translation “a fabricated, trivializing distortion, meant as a sick joke for unlawful self-profit and destruction of the imaginative and artistic work of Lebo M.” Morake is seeking $20 million in alleged damages and around $7 million in estimated disgorgement of profits.

How has Learnmore Jonasi responded?
Jonasi slammed the complaint as “unjust” in a GoFundMe campaign calling on supporters to donate so he can afford legal representation. “I am a passionate creator who never intended harm, but I now face overwhelming legal fees just to defend my right to speak and tell jokes,” he said in the crowdfunding campaign’s description. He is also selling “Look It’s a Lawsuit” merch depicting the moment he got served with lawsuit papers while recently performing onstage at the Laugh Factory in Los Angeles. (“Get your T-shirt now, You can really help me pay these legal fees 😅,” he wrote on Facebook.) In footage he shared on Instagram, Jonasi explains to the audience that he is being sued over a “joke” and adds, “Fuck The Lion King.” He ultimately finds some humor in the situation, quipping, “Listen, I now have a gluten allergy, anxiety, I got served … I’m now American!”

As of publication, Jonasi’s GoFundMe campaign has reached more than $16,000 of its $20,000 goal. “I am truly grateful for all your support and kindness,” he wrote in a March 26 thank-you message on the crowdfunding page. “Because of you, I now have a fighting chance with this lawsuit.”

Could this not have been resolved in a private conversation?
The pair already had a tense back-and-forth online earlier this month that clearly didn’t lead to any resolution. In a March 13 video, Jonasi claimed that Morake had reached out to say that he was disrespecting his work. According to Jonasi, he told Morake that he is a fan of his and that this was “just a joke.” The comedian recalled being ready to create a video with Morake about the lyric, admitting, “Personally, I had no idea that it had a deeper meaning.” However, he said his attitude changed after Morake allegedly called him a “self-hating Negro,” an “idiot,” and a “wannabe comedian.” After that, Jonasi said he felt there was no room for constructive conversation and affirmed that he has no interest in apologizing to someone he doesn’t believe he ever insulted.

Morake responded in a March 14 video which he began by apologizing “if anyone was offended” by the language he used to describe Jonasi. However, he maintained that the comedian had disrespected his work and his culture, claiming that Jonasi is continuing to chase virality “at my expense.” Morake added that hundreds of thousands of people did not take Jonasi’s translation as a joke, noting that the comment was made on a podcast while he did not appear to be doing stand-up. “[If] it was not meant to land that way, then that’s what you should have clarified instead of continuing to insult me and [encouraging] people to divide,” Morake said. “Comedy is to unite.”"
https://www.vulture.com/article/lion-king-comedian-circle-of-life-translation-lawsuit.html
#metaglossia #metaglossia_mundus

"Each year, only one in six Canadians read a book originally written in another language. As a majority English-speaking market, it’s not surprising that most of the books available to us are written by anglophone voices. However, it is a missed opportunity for many who never venture beyond that. Translated works open doors to worlds shaped by different cultures, histories, and ways of thinking. There are many amazing stories that have been told outside of the English language. Below are several outstanding novels available at Belleville Public Library, translated into English.

We are a bilingual country, yet most English-speaking readers do not read French literature. One timeless read is Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo. Do not be turned away by its age and length, this is a thrilling adventure tale. Betrayed, imprisoned, and left for dead, Edmond Dantès overcomes hardship and loss to patiently and methodically extract revenge. The Count of Monte Cristo is available in print, eBook, and audiobook at the library.

Spanish is a rich and diverse language that is spoken in most of Central and South America, along with Mexico and Spain. One of the most celebrated and influential short story writers of the twentieth century was the Argentinian writer Jorges Luis Borges. What makes him great is his ability to write complex, philosophical ideas into very concise narratives. In just a few pages, Borges can create a world as rich and immersive as most full-length novels. Try one of his best story collections, Ficciones, available in eBook at the library.

Haruki Murakami is a Japanese author, with global popularity. One of his most acclaimed novels is The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. The novel, it is a surreal tale, follows Toru Okada, an ordinary man whose quiet life in Tokyo begins to unravel when his wife disappears. As he searches for her, Toru is drawn into a strange, dreamlike world populated by enigmatic neighbors, psychic figures, and unsettling memories that blur the line between past and present. The Wind-up Bird Chronicle is available on eBook and as a CD audiobook at the library.

The Italian novel, My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante was named in 2024 as the best book of the twenty first century by the New York Times. The novel follows the lifelong friendship between two girls growing up in a poor Naples neighborhood. Through Elena’s eyes, the brilliant and unpredictable Lila becomes both her closest companion and fiercest rival, shaping her identity as they navigate ambition and class in the 1950s. My Brilliant Friend is available in print, eBook, and CD audiobook.

Polish author Olga Tokarczuk hit mainstream popularity in 2018 when she won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Her most accessible novel Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead is a fantastic murder mystery. Janina is an eccentric, astrology-obsessed woman living in a remote Polish village. When a series of mysterious deaths begins, she becomes convinced the animals are taking revenge. Blending dark humor with philosophical mystery, the novel is a page turning read..."
Published Mar 26, 2026
https://www.intelligencer.ca/opinion/columnists/beyond-english-reading-in-translation
#metaglossia #metaglossia_mundus

That is exactly what the novel is: an ongoing exchange of reciprocal dialects, an interlingual and nonlinear demonstration of these women and their stories,” writes Johnson.

"UMass Translation Center discusses third novel in the Translated Book Club

Cecelia Johnson
By Cecelia Johnson, Collegian Staff
March 26, 2026
After walking into Herter Hall’s Translation Annex, you are greeted by a small metal book cart, sidelined in between the two double doors and filled to the brim with translated novels, short stories and poems.

One day, Ilse Meiler, a UMass graduate student with a Ph.D. in comparative literature, decided to stop and browse the shelves. On Mar. 10, she led the University of Massachusetts Translation Center’s third book club meeting based on a title she had picked up.

“Trash,” written by Sylvia Aguilar-Zéleny, has been translated into Spanish, English and French. Meiler’s favorite is the English version translated by Jadine Pluecker, but not for its lack of Spanish — rather, the very opposite.

“It shouts at you,” Meiler says. “You are constantly reminded of the fact that you’re reading a translation and that you’re not getting unmediated access to the text.”

The book club was co-founded earlier this year by Regina Galasso, Associate Director of the UMass Translation Center, and Breanna Lynch, a project manager at the center. The two aimed to shed light on the importance of translated works — which account for only three percent of the U.S. publishing market — through monthly meetings to read and discuss translated novels.

“It’s a good excuse to bring people together and help readers become more conscious of translation,” Galasso said. She described conversations she’d had in the past with people who loved to read but were unaware of the magnitude of translated works. “They’ll be reading Murakami, I’ll bring up something about translation and they’ll say, ‘Oh, I never really thought of it that way.’”

The club’s last book, “Human Acts,” touched on the topic of the 1980 Gwangju Uprising in South Korea. Lynch recalled being stunned by how direct the parallels felt to modern-day America, reading this around the time that Minnesota protests were occurring in response to ICE.

The leader of the last session, Toki Lee, provided her own personal translation of the first page, for readers to then compare to what the author had written. “The nice thing about these sessions is the people who lead them all speak the language,” Lynch added.

This month’s read, “Trash”, is set in Ciudad Juárez, a Mexican city that borders El Paso, Texas. Meiler, who has family from both regions, said this is what initially caught her eye and described her delight at finding a book that spoke to her, not just in terms of theme and language but also geography.

“So much of what’s talked about in Juárez is that it’s one of the most dangerous cities in North America to be a woman,” Meiler said, referring to the drug and gang violence that is prevalent within the region. “But the fact that [‘Trash’] makes it into something that is a secondary and not a primary plot is quite exciting to me.”

At the start of the meeting, each attendee was asked to rate the novel. Many agreed that it was interesting in terms of storyline, but what really distinguished it was the choices made in translation.

Characters are often referred to as mija (darling) and chiquitita (little one), or pendejas (stupid b*tches) and putas (whores) — often used interchangeably, as either a rebuke or term of endearment, which speaks to the complexity of these character dynamics. Natural fillers and sentence starters — mira (look), oye (hey), pues (well) — are interwoven within bouts of English exchanges. That is exactly what the novel is: an ongoing exchange of reciprocal dialects, an interlingual and nonlinear demonstration of these women and their stories.

“[‘Trash’] is an activist translation,” said Meiler. “It’s not pretending not to be. The translator is present and what they have done is make the book more accessible and rich and beautiful.” She describes it as a book that has “gained in translation.”

One member commented that she’d had to look multiple phrases up while she was reading, while another, Dona Kercher, flipped through pages and read passages she’d analyzed throughout the book, with flawless pronunciation and wore a name tag that read “I speak: Spanish/English.”

Kercher spoke about going abroad in college and falling in love with language. She has been teaching Spanish, film and women’s studies for over thirty years at Assumption University.

She was surprised that much of the discussion revolved around the book’s translation and was excited by the club’s premise. “It could really go either way. You could talk about politics and the border, femicides, class structure, the trans women, the marginality of the characters.”

Dalia Cristerna-Román, another attendee, is originally from Mexico City and recently moved to Amherst after living in Canada for eight years. She now works as a linguist with heritage Spanish speakers and families who have moved to the United States. Oftentimes, she says, families find themselves contending with the adjustment of learning English while trying to keep the Spanish alive at home.

“Their relationship with language is more emotional, but it’s also at odds with the majority,” Cristerna-Román said. “If you are in Mexico, it’s a given that English is what you should learn — it is what gets you further, gets you opportunities. But with a book like [‘Trash’], it’s almost a rebellion,” she added. “You have to put in some effort. It’s a symbolic border.”

After reading the Spanish translation first, she was interested in what people had to say about the English version. “Even people that haven’t read both come with a lot of knowledge,” she commented, which is a phenomenon that she describes as linguistic intuition. “You can learn some Spanish just from reading translated books.”

The club will host two more meetings: one in April, on the book “Neighbours,” written by Lília Momplé and translated by Richard Bartlett and Isaura de Oliveira, and one in May, “Heart Lamp: by Banu Mushtaq, translated by Deepa Bhasthi.

Cecelia Johnson can be reached at ceceliajohns@umass.edu."
https://dailycollegian.com/2026/03/why-translated-literature-matters/
#metaglossia #metaglossia_mundus

"AI didn’t kill creativity. It raised the bar
As AI use becomes ubiquitous, the real competitive edge shifts to human judgment, craft and context that make creative work truly resonate.

by Brian Carley, chief creative officer at Razorfish March 26 2026

For the past few years, the conversation around AI and creativity has been dominated by speed. Faster content. Faster iteration. Faster ways to fill feeds, banners and screens. The promise was efficiency at scale, and for a while, that was enough to get everyone’s attention. Across our work with global brands, we’ve seen this play out firsthand: AI initially arrives as a production accelerator before it fundamentally reshapes how creative teams think and operate.

But as the novelty wears off, a more interesting shift is underway. AI is no longer just accelerating creativity. It’s exposing where creativity actually comes from and why human craft, context and connection matter more than ever.

In 2026, the creative industry will stop asking how fast we can make things and start asking how well we understand the work we’re making.

From volume to value
AI has undeniably lowered the barrier to entry for creative execution and production workflows. Tools that once required specialized teams are now accessible to almost anyone. That democratization is powerful, but it also creates a paradox: When everyone can produce content quickly, speed stops being a differentiator.

Many of the brands we partner with are already confronting this shift. The conversation has moved quickly from “How do we use AI to produce more?” to “How do we ensure what we produce actually matters?”

What separates great work from forgettable work isn’t output. It’s judgment. In 2026, excellence will matter more than volume.

AI can generate options, remix patterns and surface probabilities. What it can’t do on its own is understand the nuance of a business, the unspoken tensions inside a brand or the cultural context that makes an idea resonate rather than simply exist. As production becomes easier, the value shifts to the people who know what to make, why to make it and when not to make anything at all.

The future of creativity isn’t about replacing humans with machines. It’s about using machines to raise expectations for human thinking.

Craft becomes the differentiator
As machines take on more executional tasks, creative roles expand upstream and downstream. The skill set shifts from making everything to knowing what matters.

At Razorfish, we increasingly see AI functioning as a creative partner, helping teams explore territories quickly while freeing up time for the deeper strategic work that gives ideas their meaning. It will help teams explore territories faster, test narratives earlier and pressure-test ideas before they ever reach an audience. That’s not a threat to creativity. It’s an invitation to be more intentional.

The real opportunity is craft.

Craft isn’t just how something looks. It’s how clearly an idea reflects an understanding of the brand behind it. That understanding often comes from being embedded deeply with client teams, connecting creative thinking to real business challenges. It’s the difference between work that feels interchangeable and work that feels inevitable. As AI handles more of the exploratory and repetitive tasks, creative teams will spend more time refining, editing and elevating ideas rather than racing to produce them.

This is where excellence becomes the differentiator, not as a buzzword, but as a standard. In a market saturated with AI-generated content, excellence becomes visible.

Why proximity matters more than ever
As creative ecosystems have become more distributed, teams often assemble fluidly across disciplines, partners and briefs, sometimes with little continuity or shared history. Without strong alignment and shared context, the work can struggle to compound.

AI won’t fix that problem. In fact, it makes it more visible.

As tools become more powerful, the teams that get the most value out of them will be the ones closest to the business. Proximity isn’t just about collaboration but about having access to the strategic context that allows creativity to compound over time. That context allows AI to function as a decision-support system rather than a decision-maker, strengthening judgment instead of bypassing it.

Creativity thrives on context. When teams understand not just what a brand does, but how it thinks, the work gets sharper. Ideas move faster, not because they’re rushed, but because fewer assumptions have to be made.

In an AI-enabled world, proximity isn’t inefficient. It’s leverage.

The new creative equation
At Razorfish, we believe the next phase of AI in creativity won’t be defined by novelty. It will be defined by orchestration — designing creative systems where different tools, teams and data signals work together across the entire lifecycle of an idea.

The brands that stand out won’t be defined by how much AI they use, but by how deliberately they guide it. They will be the ones designing systems where different tools work together across the creative lifecycle. One tool may help generate scripts or early concepts. Another may explore visual territories. Another may curate, adapt or refine content for different audiences. The value does not come from any single tool, but from how those tools are connected and guided by human intent.

Creativity has always been a balance between instinct and insight. AI doesn’t tip that balance. It sharpens it.

As the industry moves forward, the question won’t be whether AI can make creative work faster. It already can. The real question is whether we’re willing to slow down enough to make that work better.

Because in a world where anything can be made, what matters is why it should exist at all."
https://www.campaignlive.com/article/ai-didnt-kill-creativity-raised-bar/1952498
#metaglossia #metaglossia_mundus

"Les outils d’intelligence artificielle (IA) disponibles en Afrique fonctionnent presque tous en anglais ou en français ; ce décalage laisse des millions de locuteurs de langues locales, comme au Burkina Faso, sans accès aux technologies numériques. Le Burkina Faso engage désormais des travaux pour combler cette lacune.

Le 24 mars 2026 à Ouagadougou, un atelier organisé par le ministère en charge du numérique a réuni experts et praticiens autour de la formalisation linguistique et de la constitution de corpus en langues nationales. Quatre langues sont au centre des discussions : le mooré, le dioula, le fulfuldé et le gulmancema. La rencontre rassemble des enseignants-chercheurs, des linguistes, des journalistes et des spécialistes de l’IA. L’objectif est de produire des ressources structurées permettant d’entraîner des modèles capables de reconnaissance vocale, de traduction automatique et de synthèse vocale.

Le projet est mené en collaboration avec la Radiodiffusion Télévision du Burkina et plusieurs structures de recherche. Le ministère a précisé que l’atelier vise à bâtir « une intelligence artificielle inclusive, accessible et adaptée au contexte socioculturel » du pays. Les travaux s’inscrivent dans les douze chantiers de la transformation digitale à l’horizon 2030, notamment le chantier dédié à « une intelligence artificielle au service de tous les Burkinabè ».

Ce mouvement ne s’arrête pas aux frontières du Burkina Faso. D’autres pays africains avancent sur un terrain similaire. En septembre 2025, le Nigeria a officiellement lancé N-ATLAS v1, un modèle de langage open source construit sur l’architecture Llama-3 de Meta et entraîné sur plus de 400 millions de tokens multilingues. Ce modèle prend en charge le yoruba, le haoussa, l’igbo et l’anglais avec accent nigérian. Selon Dr Bosun Tijani, ministre nigérian des Communications, N-ATLAS « place les voix et la diversité africaines au fondement de l’IA ». Au Bénin, le projet JaimeMaLangue poursuit un travail analogue pour donner aux langues béninoises une existence dans les environnements numériques.

Les géants technologiques s’intéressent aussi à ce chantier continental. En février 2026, Google a lancé WAXAL, un programme de collecte de données vocales couvrant 21 langues africaines, dont le haoussa, le yoruba, le swahili, le luganda et le peul. Les données appartiennent aux institutions partenaires africaines, notamment l’université Makerere en Ouganda et l’université du Ghana, ce qui pose un modèle plus équitable de développement de l’IA.

Pour le Burkina Faso, la production de corpus fiables répond à une réalité démographique concrète. Le mooré est parlé par plus de la moitié de la population. Le dioula, le fulfuldé et le gulmancema couvrent l’essentiel des autres locuteurs. Sans données locales en quantité suffisante, aucun modèle d’IA ne peut produire des résultats utilisables dans ces langues. C’est précisément ce vide que les travaux engagés à Ouagadougou cherchent à combler.

Selon We Are Tech Africa, ce mouvement marque une rupture dans la posture des gouvernements africains face à l’IA. Le continent ne se contente plus de consommer des technologies conçues ailleurs. Il commence à les façonner selon ses propres réalités linguistiques et culturelles."

https://yop.l-frii.com/ia-en-afrique-apres-le-benin-le-burkina-faso-veut-lui-developper-son-propre-modele/
#metaglossia #metaglossia_mundus