Metaglossia: The Translation World

"...the Hebrew Bible has been translated hundreds of times into dozens of languages. Each translation — even the most faithful ones — inherently add connotations, remove context and subtly change the original text’s meaning.

So which of the many, many official Biblical translations have our state legislators decided is most appropriate to display for our schoolchildren?

None of them, actually.

Graven images in the Supreme Court version of the Bible
Turns out, the Louisiana legislators adopted their version of the Ten Commandments not from the original Hebrew, nor from one of the 64 official Christian Biblical translations available, but from a 2005 U.S. Supreme Court case: Van Orden v. Perry.

That case argued the constitutionality of displaying a Ten Commandments monument on the Texas State Capitol grounds. The stone monument in question was donated by the Fraternal Order of Eagles in 1961, and it’s not readily apparent which translation they used.

For example, in the King James Version, Exodus 20:4 in full reads:

Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.

Meanwhile, in Louisiana’s law, it simply reads:

Thou shalt not make to thyself any graven images.

That version of the verse excludes crucial context about not fashioning false gods from natural phenomena (a reminder that the Israelites clearly needed, given their past with the Golden Calf).

Essentially, our Louisiana legislators are canonizing an entirely new translation of the Bible that exists largely within our country’s court records. It doesn’t bother with accuracy or consistency to the Hebrew, and excises entire sentences from the holy words of the divine.

How can Louisiana students be expected to take in the Ten Commandments as intended when they’re not even getting a full and accurate translation of the text in question?

Are the Ten Commandments “foundational” to Louisiana politics?
If the state is truly committed to the idea that public schoolchildren should deeply value the Ten Commandments, let’s lean into that, too.

Why not use the Ten Commandments to teach kids how to interrogate and interpret primary sources? Let’s educate them on how different translations can reflect the priorities and values of the societies from which they originate, and how contemporary governments who claim to use the Ten Commandments as “foundational documents” actually put them into practice.

For example, if the Ten Commandments teach us not to bear false witness, then how can Louisiana’s legislators claim that there isn’t enough money in the state budget to require public school buses to provide air conditioning?
...

Lara Crigger

https://stljewishlight.org/opinion/im-a-louisiana-jew-the-ten-commandments-get-lost-in-translation-in-the-new-law/
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

"Courts Service considers implementing AI translators in bid to save money

The Courts Service is considering implementing an AI translation service to save money and speed up hearings.

The service spends approximately €4m on translation and interpretation services annually.

The AI alternative is at a “proof-of-concept” stage, and the Courts Service says further “development and evaluation is required”.

Testing is underway “to measure accuracy”.

A digital audio recording AI assistant project has already passed initial testing and will be rolled out in a controlled deployment during September and October, “subject to readiness”."
Mon, 27 Jul, 2026 - 06:00
Ann Murphy
https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/arid-41886148.html
#metaglossia #metaglossia_mundus

"...In the age of artificial intelligence, foreign language education must pivot from rote memorization and mechanical grammar exercises toward cultivating critical thinking, cultural empathy and self-directed learning.

Additionally, they said students should engage in genuine dialogue with texts, critically evaluate AI-generated content and take ownership of their own learning.

Chen Zehang, a professor at Beijing Normal University's School of Foreign Languages and Literature, said the fundamental value of reading lies in genuine dialogue with a text — questioning, challenging, imagining and empathizing.

"AI can help students understand what a text says, but it cannot help them experience the real meaning of reading," she said. "We are not spending time on reading to memorize words or translate sentences. We are reading to build minds that can question, infer and connect — and that is exactly what AI cannot do."

As AI increasingly handles grammar and other surface-level language tasks, teachers' roles must also evolve, Chen said. Rather than serving primarily as language instructors, teachers should become designers of thinking experiences and facilitators of transferable reading strategies.

For example, instead of asking students to identify grammatical mistakes in AI-generated content, teachers can encourage them to evaluate its accuracy, fairness and appropriateness, she said.

"Teachers are irreplaceable guides to meaning, judgment and curiosity," Chen added.

Yang Luxin, dean of Beijing Foreign Studies University's School of English and International Studies, said AI can also support learning when designed with clear educational objectives.

She has been piloting task-specific AI agents in writing classes, allowing students to receive personalized, text-specific feedback while drafting and continue revising over multiple rounds of interaction.

"The advantage is not that the AI has better professional judgment than the teacher," Yang said. "It is that every student can receive individualized feedback while still drafting."

"In a class of 19 to 27 students, I could not sustain that kind of immediate dialogue with everyone at once," she added.

To prevent students from simply copying AI-generated answers, Yang's team designed the agents with explicit pedagogical limits. They are instructed to diagnose problems before offering corrections, focus only on the current learning objective and ask guiding questions rather than rewrite an entire passage.

Students are required to complete their first draft independently before consulting the AI, decide for themselves what revisions to make and submit a record explaining how they used the AI during the writing process.

Student feedback has been generally positive, with many reporting reduced writing anxiety, greater confidence and stronger motivation.

"We present the AI not as a 'robot teacher' replacing the human teacher, but as a patient writing partner available during drafting and after class," Yang said. "The teacher remains the designer and final professional authority."

Cheng Liying, dean of the School of Education at City University of Macau, said learning a foreign language opens a window — or a door — to understanding different ways of seeing the world.

"The most important thing is that humans are curious and should not sit at the bottom of a well," she said, referring to the Chinese idiom describing people with a narrow outlook.

Cheng said her school's educational philosophy places nurturing at its core.

"We require our postgraduate students to respect others, take responsibility and show resilience," she said. While AI can be a helpful learning companion and mentor, she stressed that it "cannot care for you".

Addressing concerns that memorization and grammar instruction may become obsolete in the AI era, Cheng said mastering the fundamentals remains indispensable.

"If people do not understand basic concepts, they cannot recognize or process information beyond that level," she said. "Having AI does not mean we stop learning basics. The fundamentals still need to be learned; AI can just help us learn them faster."

zoushuo@chinadaily.com.cn"
https://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202607/27/WS6a66ae58a310986e2b46761a.html
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

New Testament translated into English from Greek

"500th anniversary of the first printed English New Testament. This is the story …

Quincentenary

This year marks the quincentenary, or 500th anniversary, of William Tyndale’s New Testament, which was published in 1526. Not only was it the first time that the New Testament had been translated into English from Greek, but it was also the first time that the New Testament had been printed in English.

Up to that point, there was an old fourteenth-century New Testament which had been translated from Latin by Wycliffe and his followers, but it had to be laboriously copied by hand. English had changed so much since it was made about 150 years before that comparing Wycliffe’s translation to Tyndale’s is akin to comparing the English of Chaucer with the English of Shakespeare.

Five hundred years ago, in 1526, England was very different. Henry VIII was on the throne and the Catholic Church held sway. Church services were in Latin, and the Bible in English was illegal. It is hard for us to imagine today, when you can walk into most bookstores and buy a copy of the Bible, but owning an English New Testament was dangerous, and copies had to be smuggled in.

The Reformation

William Tyndale was born in southern Gloucestershire, in the west of England, probably in 1490 or 1491, and studied at Oxford University. He graduated aged 24 and was ordained as a priest in 1515, just before the Reformation began.

Meanwhile, in Europe, Erasmus was collecting and collating Greek manuscripts, and in 1516 he published his Greek New Testament alongside a fresh translation into Latin, which highlighted some of the issues with the standard Latin Vulgate text.

The following year, in 1517, a German Augustinian monk called Martin Luther pinned his protests against the Catholic Church onto the castle church door in Wittenberg. The printing presses copied them and disseminated them across the Holy Roman Empire, and they chimed with so many people that they triggered the Reformation.

Then, using Erasmus’s Greek text, Luther was able to translate the New Testament directly from Greek into German, which was published in 1522. Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples then did the same, translating the New Testament from Greek into French, which was published in 1524.

Tyndale’s New Testament

Somewhere around this time, Tyndale got a copy of Erasmus’s Greek New Testament and Luther’s German New Testament and decided England also needed a translation into her language.

He did not like the ignorance which the common people, and even the priests, had of the Bible. They often practised a religion which was more ceremony, tradition and superstition than faith, but many did not know the difference.

According to John Foxe, Tyndale pledged to a priest, “I will cause the boy who driveth the plough to know more of the Scriptures than thou dost.” He dreamt of a time when ordinary people would engage with the Bible in their own language, and he set out to achieve it.

Tyndale in London

There was an old law in England dating from 1407, which was a reaction to the Peasants’ Revolt, stating that a person needed the permission of a bishop to translate the Bible into English.

For Tyndale, the bishop who seemed like the obvious man to ask was Cuthbert Tunstall, Bishop of London, who was a friend of Erasmus and had helped him with his printed Greek New Testament.

Tyndale left Little Sodbury in southern Gloucestershire, where he had been living and where he had likely already started to translate. With a letter of introduction, he went to London and asked the bishop.

Perhaps recalling the Peasants’ Revolt which followed Wycliffe’s translation and observing events in Germany, the bishop was reluctant to give permission. However, without his permission, which never came, no printer in London would print the translation, which would be considered illegal without it.

Tyndale Continues in Europe

So Tyndale left London aboard a merchant’s ship for Hamburg, and thence up the River Elbe to Wittenberg, where he likely studied Greek and Hebrew under Philipp Melanchthon and was inspired by Luther.

In 1525, he headed to Cologne, where friends helped him to print the completed English New Testament, which was modelled on Luther’s. His plan was discovered by less sympathetic authorities, and he escaped and travelled further up the River Rhine to Worms, where he started again.

The First English New Testament

In 1526, Tyndale published the first New Testament in English, which he called The Newe Testamente, such were the spellings then.

Copies were smuggled into England by traders of the Hanseatic League. Copies were confiscated and burnt in London, and today only three copies of this original 1526 New Testament are known to exist.

There is a copy at the British Library, which they bought for over a million pounds in 1994. The only pristine copy is in the State Library in Stuttgart, and there is a nearly complete copy in St Paul’s Cathedral.

Impact

The language in Tyndale’s translation has influenced the way we speak, and the words and phrases he coined and first put into print are now part of everyday language.

His translation of the New Testament, in a slightly edited form, ended up in the King James Version and, in modernised and updated forms, is still recognisable in the Revised Standard Version, the New King James Version, the New Revised Standard Version, and the English Standard Version, which very much preserve Tyndale’s phraseology and terminology.

Exhibitions

The British Library copy was on display recently in its Treasures room, the St Paul’s copy is currently on display at an exhibition at the Cathedral, and the Stuttgart copy is going on loan back to Worms, where it was printed, for an exhibition there starting in September.

There are currently other exhibitions at Tewkesbury Abbey and Scarborough, with others planned at Oxford and the Faith Museum in Bishop Auckland. Some conferences are also going to mark the anniversary.

The Tyndale Society has its own conference at Oxford in October.

Events

Churches, cathedrals and other groups are slowly catching the vision of the 500th anniversary, which gives an opportunity to tell the story of the English Bible, reflect on our history, and remind ourselves that there are still places where the Bible does not exist in the local language and still places where it is smuggled in.

There have been events all over the country, with more to come. Many churches are holding special services or having talks at church groups.

At the forefront of these events has been the Tyndale Society, which was founded in 1995 and kicked off the 500th anniversary event with a conference in Antwerp in 2025.

The Tyndale Society has supplied speakers, helped organise, or advertised many events, which are listed on the website.

Walks and Trails

With the growing popularity of pilgrimages - no longer to obtain time off in Purgatory, but redeemed by Protestants as walking in the footsteps of history - you can now walk in the footsteps of Tyndale on the Gloucestershire Tyndale Trail, the London Tyndale Trail, or the Stinchcombe Heritage Walk.

For those with energy, you can even walk or cycle down the River Rhine from Cologne to Worms.

Website

The Tyndale Society holds a monthly online “Tyndale Talk” about Tyndale and his impact, which can be found on Eventbrite and which are posted to the “Tyndale Talks” YouTube channel.

To find out more, for facts and information, to see if there is an event near you, or to get help holding an event, see the Tyndale Society website or join the Facebook page."
https://www.christiantoday.com/news/celebrating-500-years-of-the-english-new-testament
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

"TEHRAN – The Persian translation of the book “The Secret of the Galician Bagpipe” written by Xose Lois Foxo was unveiled on Saturday, July 25, in Tehran, in a ceremony attended by the book translator, well-known bagpipe player Liana Sharifian and her father, prominent bagpipe player Mohsen Sharifian.

 

Liana Sharifian, 28, is a music researcher, performer, and translator specializing in regional music, particularly Ney Anban, the traditional Iranian bagpipe. She spent a period in the Galicia region of Spain, studying and training on the Galician bagpipe. She has now shared her experience with Persian-speaking audiences through the translation of the book “The Secret of the Galician Bagpipe,” ISNA reported.

 

During the ceremony, Liana spoke about her motivation for publishing the book under current conditions in Iran, as the country has been at war with the US in the past months: “I have always believed that art and culture find their way, even in the darkest of days. Every book published, every piece of knowledge shared, and every bridge built between cultures is a response to violence and despair. That is why I decided not to wait for better days and to release this book in the current circumstances.”

 

Explaining her fascination with other cultures and languages, she added: “I studied for six months in Galicia, in northwestern Spain, and became familiar with the culture and music of the region. The author of this book taught me a love for culture and its promotion, and I translated this work into Persian to pay my dues to the community of Iranian musicians.”

 

Regarding the content, Sharifian noted: “This book is not merely a translation; it is a bridge between the cultures of Iran and Spain. The book covers the history, structure, playing techniques, and various types of Galician bagpipes. In the footnotes, I have added explanations and comparisons with Iranian culture and music wherever possible.”

 

Highlighting the historical background of the bagpipe in Iran, she said: “Based on historical evidence, there are carvings of instruments similar to the bagpipe at Taq-e Bostan in Kermanshah, dating back to the 6th century BC, as well as artifacts from Susa and Haft Tapeh dating to the 8th century BC. This was very interesting to the school where I studied, and they even hung a picture of Taq-e Bostan in their educational space.”

 

“This work can serve as a source and educational reference for musicians who want to learn the Galician bagpipe in the Spanish style. About three-quarters of the book is dedicated to lessons, exercises, and training; readers can follow it as a self-study guide, from music theory topics to basic exercises and the performance of local pieces,” Sharifian added.

 

Reflecting on her life in Spain, she added: “In terms of temperament, there are many similarities between the people of Iran and Spain. In the realm of music, in addition to historical commonalities, some of the rhythms and structures of the Galician bagpipe share similarities with the music of Southern Iran. Throughout my time in Spain, whenever I had the opportunity, I talked about Iran, the music of the south, and my country’s culture, and I consider this my greatest achievement.”

 

Liana Sharifian is a professional player and teacher of the Iranian bagpipe, the Ney Anban. From the age of 16, she studied with her father, the acclaimed piper Mohsen Sharifian.

 

She has distinguished herself by becoming the first documented woman player of the Ney Anban. Passionate about all the bagpipes of the world, she obtained a diploma in Galician Gaita from the school in Ourense. She has appeared on numerous recordings, both as a vocalist and a piper.

 

The Ney Anban is a captivating Persian music instrument that resonates with the soul of southern Iran’s cultural heritage. With its emotive melodies and distinctive construction, this folk music instrument has been a cornerstone of community life in provinces like Bushehr, Hormozgan, and Khuzestan for centuries.

 

From accompanying fishermen at sea to enlivening weddings and rituals, the Ney Anban embodies the spirit of Iranian cultural heritage, blending Persian, Arab, and African influences into its vibrant sound.

SS/SAB"

https://www.tehrantimes.com/news/528551/Persian-translation-of-The-Secret-of-the-Galician-Bagpipe-unveiled

#metaglossia 

#metaglossia_mundus 

"Translating the “Japanese Shakepeare”
Isabel Adair discusses Japanese literature with Natsume Soseki’s translator Nick Bradley

by Isabel Adair
Monday July 27 2026, 8:44am

You may have heard of popular Japanese novelists, Haruki Murakami or Kazuo Ishiguro – or maybe Japanese literature is completely new territory for you. It certainly was for me: my exposure to Japanese writing only went as far as flicking through some token Japanese novels on the tables in Waterstones. But that all changed when I attended Nick Bradley’s talk at Japan House in South Kensington, where he discussed Natsume Soseki’s ‘I am a Cat’. Bradley has translated several of Soseki’s works and is a novelist in his own right. Soseki is one of Japan’s most celebrated writers, often described as “the Japanese Shakespeare.”

Soseki’s works are timeless in the way they discuss the relationship between traditional Japanese values and Western culture, as Bradley emphasised during his talk. Bradley explained the challenges he has encountered in making Soseki’s work accessible to the British public- trying to make sure his book was true to Soseki’s original work while also catering to British tastes and humour. Keen to hear more from Bradley after the talk, I sat down with him last Wednesday. We talked about his work as a writer, translator, and English teacher in Japan looking for inspiration.

“Translation involves the translation of words, of course, but also the translation of culture and experiences”

Being both a published writer and translator, Bradley was able to shed light on both sides on a hotly debated topic – the translator’s role: “You don’t go into radio because you want your face to be recognised everywhere, and the same is true of the translator.” The translator’s work is behind-the-scenes and acknowledging this is necessary to find fulfilment in the role: when translating Soseki, Bradley’s task is not to stand out, but to remain faithful to the author. “How can I convey Soseki in my writing?” he asks himself, implicitly asking how he can convey more than just his words in English.

Bradley emphasised how deeply personal the translation process is: he feels a relationship with Soseki, which transcends the page. Soseki is a figure he identifies with as a fellow student of literature, and as a man also caught between two places – England and Japan. As he was drawing these connections for me, I realised that translation involves the translation of words, of course, but also the translation of culture and experiences. Translation is a means of connection.

Experiencing another culture was crucial in shaping Nick’s own writing. He has published two books, The Cat and the City (2020) and Four Seasons in Japan (2023), both of which are inspired by his time living in Tokyo. The latter is centred around a disillusioned translator struggling to make a life for herself in the city (how apt!). When I asked Bradley about why he writes novels, he replied that writing is, above all, something he does for himself. “My response to reading books that I love is writing,” he said, “and hoping my books inspire other people to write in the same way.” Where a lot of popular Japanese novels or novels set in Japan can feel like stylised guidebooks – providing Brits with a snapshot of life in a foreign place – Bradley’s writing takes a different approach: he is sharing his experiences, and if they appeal to a wider audience, even better.

“Books should convey the experiences of an individual and invite readers to get a flavour of a country as they flick through its pages”

I think this speaks for the future of foreign literature. In an age of social media and digital technology, where life abroad is often romanticised and stylised – leading to the dreaded “Paris syndrome”, or worse, complete disengagement with the authentic culture of a country – books should convey the experiences of an individual and invite readers to get a flavour of a country as they flick through its pages:

“Paris syndrome”: a severe form of culture shock and psychological distress exclusively experienced by some Japanese tourists. It strikes when the heavily idealized, romantic vision of Paris portrayed in Japanese media shatters upon arrival, leading to acute disappointment, psychiatric breakdowns, and even hallucination.

My conversation with Nick ended with him encouraging me to read as widely as possible. After telling him about my interest in dark, existential novels (I am well aware of how pretentious this sounds!), Bradley recommended me the writing of Kenzaburo Oe, who combined British and French existentialism with Japanese prose – and won a Nobel prize in the process – and Kobo Abe, who explores surrealism and alienation in the modern world. Bradley is full of recommendations: see his article ‘Top 5 Novels from Japan’ for more.

READ MORE
Review of The Mays 34

I can also pass on Bradley’s final piece of advice: go out into the world and experience things for yourself. Although I speak no Japanese, and have only begun to read Japanese literature, I believe my contribution to the task of the translator can be as simple as recording my experiences while respecting that translation should always remain true to the original culture.

Support Varsity

Varsity is the independent newspaper for the University of Cambridge, established in its current form in 1947. In order to maintain our editorial independence, our print newspaper and news website receives no funding from the University of Cambridge or its constituent Colleges."
https://www.varsity.co.uk/arts/31803
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

"...Those who have criticized the translation and the film of The Odyssey for contemporary language should understand Wilson’s commitment to avoiding the choices of some other translators who “turned a great poem into a hard one.” “I write for the body,” she tells The New Yorker’s Judith Thurman. Wilson also translated Homer’s The Illiad, the prequel to The Odyssey, in 2023.

In 2023, Wilson, who lives near the Penn campus, took Thurman for a walk along the banks of the Schuylkill and told her about her complicated background. Her mother, Katherine Duncan-Jones, was an Oxford scholar specializing in Elizabethan literature. Her father, A. N. Wilson has written famous biographies of Jesus, Darwin, Tolstoy, Milton, Shakespeare, and Queen Victoria. Her younger sister Bee Wilson is a noted British food writer. The parents divorced in 1988. Emily stayed in Oxford to support her devastated mother and to study English literature. In 1996, she took a big leap, travelling to Yale to pursue a doctorate. Wilson became a U. S. citizen in 2022, “to vote where I live.”

She believes that coming from two worlds has made her a better translator and a professor who can better understand her students. Those who attended elite private secondary schools “don’t doubt that they belong” in a classics program. She is committed to nurturing her public school students, making “the whole human experience of the poems accessible to them.”

The importance of the humanities for all students
While I’m not suggesting that Homer and Virgil led directly to my becoming an English professor and university president, an early background in the classics provided the foundation for my career and for my eternal grappling with the meaning of life.

And I’m not alone. The public is voting with movie tickets and book sales for the importance of the humanities. The New York Times reports in “The Revenge of the Philosophy Majors” that the demand for philosophy majors with A.I. training is outstripping demand.

So much for the false humanities/career dichotomy! It’s possible—and desirable– to be highly employable and to study Homer’s Odyssey.

What’s the meaning of it all?
These questions can and should be explored in university general education and elective courses, as well as in humanities majors. Pennsylvania’s public universities (PASSHE) are now considering three-year bachelors degrees. That would inevitably mean cuts in general education and elective courses.

I’m not entirely opposed to three-year bachelors degrees, especially for returning adults and for others who have self-educated in the humanities and want now to focus entirely on professional preparation. But for 18-22 year-olds, for whom college is a life-changing, growing-up experience, a four-year bachelors’ degree offers the range and scope for both career preparation and reflection on life’s meaning.

It’s particularly galling to be told that three-year bachelors degrees are good enough for low-income students who are advised to rush through higher education and join the work force. Stop. Take a breath. There must be time to read The Odyssey, or, if you’re determined to be in a hurry, at least see Christopher Nolan’s film with friends who want to talk about it.

What should we do?
Go to see Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, read and/or listen to Emily Wilson’s translation.
Encourage K-12 teachers to tell Homer’s stories.
Urge colleges and universities to support humanities programs and electives and to connect humanities majors to A. I. training
Inspire students to be life-long learners, forever improving career skills, while exploring life’s meaning.
Elaine Maimon, Ph.D., is the author of Leading Academic Change: Vision, Strategy, Transformation. Her long career in higher education has encompassed top executive positions at Governors State University (IL), University of Alaska Anchorage, and Arizona"
https://thephiladelphiacitizen.org/the-odyssey-is-for-all-of-us/
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

"Spotlight on Translation Funding: Sheikh Zayed Book Award

The Sheikh Zayed Book Award started their Translation Grant in 2018 with a goal to expand the reach of Arabic literature around the world.

By Erin L. Cox, Publisher | @erinlcox

Last week, guest contributor Chad Post wrote about the recently-launched Literary Arts Fund in the United States which was founded last October to give away $50 million over five years to the nonprofit literary arts, including many translation publishers who have been impacted by the cuts to the National Endowment of the Arts.
Around the world, there are a number of government and private institutions that support the publication of books in translation. In this series, Publishing Perspectives will highlight funding opportunities for publishers who are looking to bring books in translation to readers in their market.

The Sheikh Zayed Book Award is one of the Arab World’s most prestigious and well-funded prizes. In 2018, the award launch a translation fund initiative to support the publication of not only winning but also shortlisted titles in the Literature and Children’s categories by publishers in countries outside the Middle East.

The goal of the translation funding initiative is to promote the spread of Arabic literature around the world. The grant provides financial funding of up to $19,000 USD per title and is available to all publishing houses working to publish books in foreign languages.

This year’s titles for consideration are:

Winner of the Sheikh Zayed Book Award in Literature – Births in the Zoo by Egyptian author, judge, and legal scholar Ashraf Elashmawy. The book is a satirical allegory of contemporary Egypt which portrays the Giza zoo as a microcosm of Egyptian society. Elashmawy’s works have been published in English, French, German, Japanese and Italian translations, including a series of English translations of his novels by the American University in Cairo’s Hoopoe Press.
Fourrure by Iraqi author Nizar Abdulsattar sees its protagonist tracing the legacy of his mother from the Moulin Rouge cabaret in Baghdad to Egypt, Lebanon, and finally London, where he becomes immersed in the world of Christie’s auction house and the inner workings of the art market. Abdulsattar was previously shortlisted for the Sheikh Zayed Book Award in 2019 for his novel The Sequin Embroidery.
Secret of the Al Za‘farana by Saudi author Badriah Albeshr portrays three generations of Bedouin women to create a tapestry of women’s lives in Bedouin society. In the novel, a young girl becomes a gifted storyteller, retelling women’s stories passed down through generations. The novel offers varied depictions of women’s lives in past and present Arab societies, celebrating the importance of women’s solidarity..."

Erin L. Cox
July 24, 2026
https://publishingperspectives.com/2026/07/spotlight-on-translation-funding-sheikh-zayed-book-award/
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

"Translation and dubbing specialist Lingopal will show how AI-powered language workflows can be integrated into existing broadcast and streaming infrastructures at IBC2026.

According to the company, its latest multilingual content services are designed specifically for live and on-demand workflows. The platform currently supports more than 120 languages and offers live AI dubbing for broadcasts, events, sports, news, and streaming content. Other services include real-time translation and multilingual audio distribution, as well as AI-generated captions and subtitles.

Casey Schneider, CEO of Lingopal, said: “Language remains one of the biggest barriers to audience growth”
The company is also showcasing VOD localisation workflows for media libraries, content archives, and Lingopal Rooms, which enable viewers to access translated audio on their own devices.

Casey Schneider, CEO of Lingopal, said: “The future of media is global, but language remains one of the biggest barriers to audience growth. Our goal is to help organisations make live and on-demand content accessible to more people, in more languages, than ever before.”"
By Anne Morris
24 July 2026
https://www.ibc.org/artificial-intelligence/news/lingopal-blends-ai-language-localisation-into-streaming-workflows/22794
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

"The AI security layer and guardrails for many AI products don't evenly protect against jailbreaking and unsafe actions in every single language.

Alexander Culafi,Senior News Writer,Dark Reading
July 24, 2026

Not all languages are treated equally when it comes to AI model function and safety, and European organizations face a particular risk when it comes to this reality.

The modern large language model (LLM) ecosystem relies heavily on natural language, whether a user is speaking to a chatbot, issuing specific instructions for software development, generating emails, or performing large-scale data analysis. This reliance is further illustrated through the wide range of prompt injection attacks that rely on language-based trickery.

While leading models can process text in dozens to hundreds of languages, performance and safety capabilities vary dramatically between languages.

Many of the less-supported languages, such as Welsh and Swahili, can answer only basic prompts and may make grammatical errors. Mainstream models like OpenAI's GPT, Google's Gemini, and Anthropic's Claude demonstrate strong performance in around 30 to 40 languages such as English, Arabic, Spanish, French, German, Japanese, Simplified Chinese, and Hindi.

English is by far the language best supported by many AI models. English benefits both from disproportionate training data and from tokenization schemes that often represent English more efficiently than many other languages.

Academic research shows that many LLMs perform logic, reasoning, coding, and math tasks best when prompted in English language, and many major AI labs conduct safety tuning, behavior alignment, and reinforcement using English-speaking annotators.

There are exceptions to this rule. Chinese models like Qwen and DeepSeek outperform Western models when handling Chinese text and cultural context, and certain initiatives are in place to further support languages in Europe and the Middle East. But it would not be a stretch to call the modern AI landscape English-centric.

From a global perspective, this is not just a comprehension or AI function problem but a security issue as well. On July 22, AI security vendor DeepKeep published a blog post titled, "Your AI Speaks 100 Languages. Your AI Security Layer Doesn't."

As DeepKeep explained, the AI security layer and guardrails that exist on top of so many AI products don't necessarily protect against jailbreaking and unsafe actions equally in every single language.

"Security intent can shift during translation. A jailbreak may become less explicit. A prompt injection may lose some of its command structure," the blog post read. "A culturally specific phrase may be flattened into harmless text. A sensitive term may be translated poorly or mapped into language that no longer matches the security policy. Mixed-language inputs can preserve the malicious instruction in one language while surrounding it with benign context in another."

This becomes particularly problematic when many organizations collaborate and use AI tools across multiple languages. This is the case at any globally operating company, but particularly one based somewhere like Europe, Asia, or Africa.

Europe provides one of the clearest examples of the challenges described. Yossi Altevet, chief technology officer (CTO) and co-founder at AI security vendor DeepKeep, tells Dark Reading that dozens of languages sit inside one regulatory and economic bloc, and cross-border operations are the norm rather than the exception.

"That density means Europe is more exposed by design, simply because the odds of hitting a language gap in daily operations are so much higher," he says. "Every multilingual enterprise, anywhere, carries the same underlying risk the moment it processes a non-English prompt."

The Unique Place Europe Sits In
The European Union recognizes 24 official languages, and there are many more regional and minority languages an employee could easily use predominantly.

Paolo Palumbo, VP of strategic threat intelligence and research for WithSecure (a vendor that specializes in European cybersecurity), tells Dark Reading that Europe is not uniquely affected by the security and safety inconsistencies across lower-resourced AI languages, but Europe faces a particularly complex operational challenge "because organizations commonly deploy the same product across multiple linguistic and environments."

"A product may appear to converse competently in a particular language even though its moderation, prompt-injection detection, data-loss prevention, or incident-monitoring controls have not been validated to the same standard in that language," he says.

Palumbo says multilingual security could become an overlooked part of AI governance, and argues organizations should require evidence of multilingual safety from vendors, rather than inferring it from claims of support.

"The EU AI Act does not impose a general requirement that every AI product must achieve identical safety performance in every supported language, and an ordinary chatbot is not automatically a high-risk system," he explains. "For high-risk systems, however, the act requires continuous risk management and appropriate levels of accuracy, robustness, and cybersecurity throughout the system's life cycle. Providers must also address foreseeable misuse and test whether the measures they have implemented are effective. Where linguistic differences materially affect those controls, language-specific testing may become part of the evidence needed to demonstrate compliance."

In DeepKeep's benchmark testing, German, Spanish, French, and Italian all showed meaningful accuracy drops for translation-based personally identifiable information (PII) detection compared to native language analysis. "Europe's multilingual reality just means this gap gets exposed constantly, across nearly every one of its major markets at once," Altevet adds.

That being said, Europe has some advantages over other parts of the world in this respect. Filip Mazán, senior manager of AI research at ESET, points out that many European languages share similarities.

"English and German, for example, have overlapping vocabulary, and large language models can often leverage that common ground. The same applies to many Slavic languages, which share linguistic structures and vocabulary," he says.

The Security Question Behind Multilingual AI Support
One must distinguish between language capability, safety alignment, and downstream security controls, which may not perform equally across languages, even when the model itself appears highly capable. In other words, even if a model speaks and understands German or Spanish well, it does not mean security guardrails will necessarily perform equally as well.

Altevet explains that the risks behind AI multi-language support are not theoretical; attackers repeat malicious commands across multiple languages specifically to slip past filters tuned primarily for English.

The vendor cited Brown University research from 2023 and 2024, which found that OpenAI's GPT-4 provided harmful and actionable responses to unsafe prompts 79% of the time when translated into low-resource languages. The original English prompts generated similar harmful responses less than 1% of the time.

Pete Bryan, technical lead of Microsoft's AI red team, tells Dark Reading that the tech giant has been testing its AI systems for years across a range of different languages specifically because "model safety and behavioral profile can change depending on the language it is prompted in, as well as which it responds in."

"Language is just one dimension of the safety story, and a safe response for a user in a particular language may be unsafe in the same language if that user is in a different cultural context — for example an American in California speaking Korean versus a Korean in Seoul speaking Korean," he says.

Similarly, major AI vendors like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google also test their models against multilingual issues, though the battle continues.

Addressing Multilingual AI Issues
There are different ways organizations attempt to address the issues posed by multilingual inconsistencies across LLMs in Europe and beyond.

A standard option is translation-first security filtering, where an organization's security layer translates content into English, applies guardrails, and chooses whether to allow or block the output. There are also native language guardrails, where instead of translating everything into English, the security layer evaluates prompts and meaning in the original language.

Vendors like DeepKeep and Lakera advertise this capability as superior to the blind spots introduced by translation-based guardrails, as intent is accounted for and policy is, ideally, better preserved.

Many AI-focused red teaming firms offer multilingual evaluation. Microsoft's internal AI Red Team tests across multiple languages, different modalities including text and audio, as well as the various cultural contexts that come with different languages.

"We aren't just doing direct translation of English to another language in our scenarios. In addition, we often mix and combine languages in order to test systems, with scenarios incorporating multiple languages at once to see what effect that may have on the safety of the systems under test," he says.

Finally, runtime AI firewalls and policy enforcement tools cover the bigger risks posed by threat actors. AI firewalls block suspicious tool calls, prevent sensitive data exfiltration, attempt to block prompt-injected actions, and log suspicious incidents for investigation.

About the Author

Alexander Culafi
Senior News Writer, Dark Reading

https://www.darkreading.com/cybersecurity-operations/europes-multilingual-reality-exposes-ai-security-gaps
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

"...Is there some specific set of principles which ought to guide the translation of great books? If so, what might they be? In other words, particularly when it comes to a great work of literature or philosophy, what distinguishes a great translation from an adequate translation from a poor translation?

A lot of big names have weighed in on this topic over the years. One of the biggest in modern times is the Russian novelist, translator, and polyglot, Vladimir Nabokov, author of Lolita. In Nabokov's view, any translation except the strictly literal is a travesty. In a 1955 Paris Review piece entitled "Problems of Translation: Onegin in English", he writes: "The person who desires to turn a literary masterpiece into another language has only one duty to perform, and this is to reproduce with absolute exactitude the whole text, and nothing but the text".

Nabokov adds for good measure that anything smoother than "the clumsiest literal translation...sends me into spasms of helpless fury". Pressing the point even further, he rails against "readable" translations, declaring that "a schoolboy's boner is less of a mockery in regard to the ancient masterpiece than its commercial interpretation".

The only acceptable translation standard, he says, is "literalism, literality, literal interpretation...the absolutely literal sense,", which he equates with "absolute accuracy". If a translator's exclusive fixation on the letter "kills the spirit" of the Source Text, so be it: that only means there was something wrong with that Source Text in the first place. And "this is not really a translator's concern", he says.

In short, for Nabokov, an ideal translation sacrifices the text's "original spirit", its readability and intelligibility, its tone and register and style, even its meaning as it exists independent of the Source Language's specific idiosyncrasies, all for what amounts to word-for-wordism. To make up for the extraordinary losses required by this approach, translators should just include "copious footnotes reaching up like skyscrapers to the top of this or that page".

Even aside from his gratuitous allusion to schoolboy sexuality, this is all very odd. In addition to his native Russian, Nabokov spoke excellent English and French, along with decent German. He therefore must have known that in most cases, languages do not permit anything close to word-for-word interchange. You could get close with Portuguese and Spanish and a few other pairings, but for the most part, languages don't relate to each other that way. Yes, they often contain deep-level structural affinities with each other; but at the same time, each contains its own internal logic, grammar, and conventions; its own unique allusions, idioms, and sayings; its own cultural history and context; its own channels of perception, perception-ordering, and thinking; its own ways of instigating and connecting certain arguments, feelings, and images.

This is all obvious even at the most superficial levels of speech. Imagine, for example, you're translating a short story from French into English. In the opening scene, a police officer has pulled over a motorist and now stands at the driver's window, whereupon the driver says, "Pourquoi tu m'as arrêté?"

A truly literal translation (which Nabokov claims to want) would be, "Why you me have stopped?". A slightly less literal translation would be, "Why did you stop me?" (although in English, drivers would more likely say, "Why did you pull me over?").

But no matter which option we chose, if we stopped there, this hyper-literal approach into English would fail to convey important elements of meaning embedded in just that one simple question. One such element is that, in French, the driver addresses the officer using the informal "you" (tu), as opposed to the formal "you" (vous) (because English nowadays lacks anything but "you" as an equivalent to either word, that distinction would be lost). A related element is that drivers in France would never address a police officer using tu unless they were either ignorant of French language and culture, or expressing deliberate disrespect, even contempt, for the officer.

So if we're reading that opening scene in French, we're already experiencing a dramatic set-up—an initial conflict that will propel the rest of the story: a driver needlessly speaks disrespectfully to a police officer. We would instantly anticipate the officer taking offense at the question, or growing suspicious of wrongdoing, and acting accordingly. We can sense this exchange might well drive the events about to follow. In the Source Language, we're already on the roller coaster ride of the story, so to speak.

Not so if we're reading a strictly literal translation in English. We wouldn't know there was any disrespect at all. And if the officer immediately asks the driver to exit the vehicle, we wouldn't have any idea why. All we've heard so far is what sounds like an innocent question from the driver.

This little example suggests Nabokov's equation of hyper-literalism with "absolute accuracy" is misguided. The absolutely accurate conveyance of a passage can only mean the faithful reproduction in the Target Language of the psychological and emotional effects of the passage's properties and functions in the Source Language. (If the phrase absolutely accurate doesn't mean that, then it means nothing). So if, say, a perfectly intelligible passage becomes unintelligible, or loses important information, due to strict literalism, it has by definition not been conveyed accurately—at least not in any meaningful, human sense. And it would therefore be a poor translation, no matter how literal it might be.

So back to that French sentence. Is there a more faithful way to convey its properties, and its narrative function?

That's a tough one, but a conscientious translator would try. In this case, a footnote might be defensible. But another option would be to try to reflect the tone of disrespect without changing the wording of the question too much. Off the top of my head, and depending on the character's subsequent tone of voice and actions, one of the following might work: "You pulled me over for what?". "What'd you pull me over for?", or "Why ya stopping me, dude?" The point is that the reality of language is such, that judicious departure from strict literalism is often necessary to achieve the accuracy Nabokov wants, but which his own prescriptions would make unattainable.

So when it comes to formulating a set of rules or maxims to guide translation, I'd propose this as the first: A translation is great to the extent it reproduces the overall reader experience while adhering as closely as possible to the original text.

(That wording, I think, covers everything from information transfer to honoring the narrative function of specific words and passages to reproducing the jokes and tone and mood and key words and everything else.)

In any case, one thing my proposal means is that when a passage can be translated strictly literally without degrading transmission of the reader experience (and certainly, when literalism optimally reproduces it), then surely that's the best option. That's even the case, I would argue, when the translated passage sounds somewhat foreign in the Target Language. Nabokov wasn't wrong to reject specific features like smooth-sounding paraphrase in place of what reads roughly in the original. But he erred in pushing an extreme, dogmatic literalism which inevitably erodes, distorts, and omits the very qualities he says he wants to preserve. Great translations, by contrast, take a different path.

More 👇🏿👇🏿👇🏿
https://www.steynonline.com/16325/strictly-literal
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

"Zoom launches live voice translation, with Arabic coming in late 2026
Initial service will feature English, Chinese, French, Japanese and Spanish

Alvin R Cabral
July 24, 2026

Zoom Technologies has launched a new live voice translation service, with Arabic support coming in the fourth quarter of this year.

Five languages – English, Chinese, French, Japanese and Spanish – will initially be available, the California-based company said.

A Zoom representative confirmed to The National that Arabic will be available in the fourth quarter, alongside German, Italian and Portuguese.

Zoom launched a version of the service in April, after promoting it at its Zoomtopia conference last September.

Using the live voice translation feature requires a Pro, Business, or Enterprise account, the artificial intelligence plug-in ZoomMate, or a stand-alone add-on. Zoom has posted instructions on how to activate the service on its website.

Added features include voice cloning, which preserves the original speaker's voice characteristics, and translation projection, which allows people to speak in their own language and everyone else to hear it in theirs.

Zoom said the feature was designed to minimise distraction and add more focus when on calls.

“The core design principle here is simple: keep people in the conversation,” the company said. “Translated captions require you to split your attention between reading and listening. Voice translation lets you do what you'd do in any meeting – listen, react and respond naturally.”

Advertisement

Video conferencing exploded in popularity during the Covid pandemic of 2020, as people were confined to their homes and restricted from meeting face-to-face.

That offered companies such as Zoom a huge opportunity to tap into the market. In addition to offering a free tier, they have introduced paid tiers with more features.

Zoom has around 300 million daily active users and accounts for more than 55 per cent of the videoconferencing market, with the number of annual meeting minutes well over 3.3 trillion, according to data compiled by industry tracker DemandSage. The company reported revenue of more than $4.6 billion in 2025.

Competition has also heightened in the sector, as videoconferencing companies work to add AI features to enhance the user experience.

Zoom also stressed that live voice translation is secure, with no data from meetings stored.

“Voice translation processes audio in real time to deliver the feature. No meeting audio is stored, no voice prints are created and no persistent user profiles are built from translation data,” it said. “The feature processes what it needs for the meeting and discards it.”"

https://www.thenationalnews.com/future/technology/2026/07/24/zoom-launches-live-voice-translation-with-arabic-coming-in-late-2026/
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

"Oxford translation competition success for Wycombe High student
17th July

Education

By James Richings
News and Sports Reporter

A high school student has achieved national success after receiving recognition in one of the UK's most prestigious language competitions.

Emma Zadoroznyj, a Year 12 student, was commended in both the French and Spanish categories of the Queen's College Oxford Anthea Bell Prize for Young Translators 2026.

The annual competition, organised by the Queen's College Translation Exchange at the University of Oxford, attracted more than 35,000 entries from students across the UK.

Emma's double success places her among a select group of young linguists recognised for their translation skills, creativity and understanding of language.

Receiving a commendation in one language category is considered a significant achievement due to the scale and competitiveness of the contest.

Being recognised in two separate categories is an even rarer accomplishment and reflects a high level of proficiency in both French and Spanish.

Entries were assessed by professional literary translators alongside Modern Languages students from the University of Oxford.

Nicola Renyard who is headteacher of the school Emma attends, Wycombe High School in Buckinghamshire, praised the student's achievement.

She said: "We are absolutely delighted for Emma.

“To receive national recognition in both French and Spanish is an exceptional achievement and a testament to her talent, hard work and love of languages.

"We are incredibly proud of everything she has accomplished and hope her success inspires other students to embrace the opportunities that learning languages can offer."

Emma was presented with her certificates at the school by Mrs Renyard during a special presentation attended by members of the Modern Foreign Languages Department.

Among those celebrating her success were teachers Rafael De Souza and Annemarie Doran.

Mrs Doran said translation required far more than simply converting words from one language to another.

She added: "Emma's success is richly deserved. Translation requires not only an excellent understanding of language but also creativity, cultural awareness and attention to detail.

"To earn commendations in both French and Spanish in such a competitive national field is a fantastic accomplishment, and we are thrilled to see her efforts recognised."

The Anthea Bell Prize for Young Translators was established to celebrate literary translation and encourage young people to engage with languages in new and creative ways.

Named after the acclaimed translator Anthea Bell, the competition challenges students to translate authentic texts from a variety of world languages, testing both their linguistic skills and their ability to convey meaning, style and nuance.

With more than 35,000 entries submitted from across the country, her commendations represent a notable achievement for both her and the High Wycombe school, demonstrating the talent of local students on a national stage."
https://www.oxfordmail.co.uk/news/26289785.wycombe-high-student-wins-prize-oxford-translation-competition/
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

Study finds AI translates fluently but professional interpreters better preserve context, culture, rhetoric, and communicative intent accurately.

 

"AI Translation and Human Interpretation Differ in Handling Contextual Meaning, Study of UN Speeches Finds

External Contributor

7/25/2026 02:56:00 PM

 

By Lingnan University

 

As generative artificial intelligence (AI) becomes increasingly widely used in translation, questions have been raised over whether it could eventually replace professional interpreters. A joint study led by Lingnan University found that while AI can improve translation efficiency, it is still less capable than professional interpreters of adapting language to context and preserving rhetorical and communicative effects. The researchers conclude that human judgement and oversight remain essential, particularly in politically, diplomatically, and culturally sensitive settings. These findings have been published in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, a Nature Portfolio journal.

 

The research team from Lingnan University and the Chongqing University of Posts and Telecommunications analysed 16 Chinese-language speeches delivered at the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) between 2008 and 2023, and compared the official English interpretations by professional UN conference interpreters with AI-generated translations produced by ChatGPT-4o, examining how each handled language in different contexts.

 

Before generating the AI translations, the researchers designed detailed prompts that included the speaker's official position, institutional background, year of delivery, audience, and broader sociopolitical stance in order to approximate the contextual information available to professional interpreters. However, despite providing the AI model with extensive contextual information, they found major differences between AI-generated translations and human interpretations in both contextual understanding and translation strategies.

 

One key difference concerns the use of personal pronouns. As Chinese frequently omits subjects, professional interpreters were more likely to introduce pronouns such as “our” and “they” to reflect interpersonal meanings and relationships between speakers and audiences, reinforcing collective identity and shared responsibility. AI-generated translations, by contrast, tended to produce more literal renderings with fewer personal pronouns.

 

For example, a Chinese sentence referring to vaccines as a powerful weapon against the pandemic was rendered by a professional interpreter as:

 

“Vaccination is our powerful weapon against COVID-19.”

 

whereas ChatGPT-4o translated it as:

 

“Vaccines are a powerful weapon against the pandemic.”

 

The researchers found that the interpreter’s addition of “our” strengthened the sense of collective identity, while the AI translation adopted a more neutral tone. The study also identified distinct differences in how obligation and responsibility were expressed. Professional interpreters were more likely to adjust modal verbs according to context, using expressions such as “should” and “need to” to convey persuasive rather than mandatory obligation. AI-generated translations, however, relied more heavily on “must” and passive constructions, making responsibility less explicit.

 

For example, the professional interpretation reads:

 

“We need to enhance coordinated global COVID-19 response and minimise the risk of cross-border virus transmission.”

 

whereas the AI translation states:

 

“International joint prevention and control must be strengthened, and the cross-border spread of the virus must be minimised.”

 

The researchers found that the AI version obscures the agent responsible for action by using passive constructions.

 

The study also examined culturally embedded metaphors. More than half (52.63 per cent) of the AI translations reduced culturally specific metaphors to their literal meanings, weakening their rhetorical force. By contrast, professional interpreters adopted more flexible strategies, preserving, adapting, and explaining metaphorical expressions according to context. In about one-third of the cases (31.6 per cent), interpreters retained the metaphor and also conveyed its intended meaning.

 

One example involved the traditional Chinese metaphor of people travelling “in the same boat”. The professional interpreter translated it as:

 

“We are called upon by our times to unite as one and work together for mutual benefit and win-win progress like passengers in the same boat.”

 

While ChatGPT-4o rendered it as “Working together and achieving mutual benefits and win-win outcomes are the objective demands of our time.”

 

According to the researchers, the AI translation conveyed the general meaning, but omitted the metaphorical imagery and its rhetorical impact.

 

The team noted that ChatGPT-4o generally produces fluent and grammatically accurate translations capable of completing translation tasks effectively. However, drawing on socio-cognitive theory, the study argues that professional interpreters consider not only the source text itself but also factors such as the speaker's identity, communicative setting, audience, cultural background, stance, and rhetorical purpose when deciding how to translate. This suggests that current large language models have yet to replicate fully the human capacity to interpret context and cultural meaning.

 

Prof Wang Binhua, Professor of the Department of Translation and Head of the Centre for English and Additional Languages at Lingnan University, member of the SIG on Artificial Intelligence in Translation and Interpreting of the European Language Council (ELC), said “Large language models still face the challenge of the ‘black box’, meaning that the mechanisms through which they produce particular translations remain difficult to explain. Unlike professional interpreters, who work within established professional ethical standards and are accountable, AI systems generate translations by identifying patterns in large volumes of language data and do not possess an intrinsic ethical framework. In translation tasks that require careful attention to cultural meaning and contextual understanding, human interpreters remain indispensable in making informed judgements about interpersonal relationships, rhetorical choices, and cultural expression.”

 

He added that AI is better positioned to augment rather than replace professional translators and interpreters. When integrated with human expertise, AI has the potential to improve efficiency while leaving context-sensitive and culturally informed decision-making in human hands.

 

For the full research paper A tale of two ‘contexts’: ideological differences in the translations of UN political speeches by human interpreters and by ChatGPT4o, please visit: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-026-07877-7.

 

This article was originally published by Lingnan University and republished here with permission.

 

Reviewed by Irfan Ahmad."

https://www.digitalinformationworld.com/2026/07/ai-translation-and-human-interpretation.html?m=1

#metaglossia

#metaglossia_mundus

"This feminist translation of ‘The Odyssey’ is controversial. And it’s flying off shelves
As Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster movie is smashing box-office records this summer, ‘The Odyssey’ ebooks and audio books are seeing a spike as well.

BY Jennifer Mattson

It’s The Odyssey effect: As Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster movie The Odyssey is smashing box-office records—the July 17 opening weekend took in $124 million in the U.S. ($260 million globally)—it’s also bringing back gladiator sandals, and having an effect on book sales of Homer’s classic, especially for one translation.

The 8th or 7th century BCE work is one of two ancient Greek epic poems attributed to Homer. It recounts the legendary king of Ithaca’s arduous journey home following the Trojan War. (The other is, of course, “The Iliad.”)

For his film, Nolan used a modern-day translation from professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania Emily Wilson. It’s unique in two ways. It uses contemporary language to tell the story; and a feminist lens to interpret one of perhaps the earliest masculine origin stories and tropes in Western civilization: the hero’s quest to return home against all odds.

A look at sales for all translations of ‘The Odyssey’ shows purchases are up 76% year-to-date, per Circana BookScan; and e-book and audiobook lender Libby reports library checkouts are up 217% from this time last year, USA TODAY reported.

Meanwhile, Wilson’s translation of “The Odyssey” alone has sold more than one million copies since it was published in November.

However, people remain split over whether that’s a good thing. The debate: While modern language makes the text more accessible to a larger audience, is it, in fact, dumbing down the story, and adding intention where there is none?

Some examples of this retelling: Wilson’s translation uses “dad” and “daddy” instead of “father,” and more contemporary language like “crazy” and “tote bag,” which appear in Nolan’s movie...

More controversial, though, are Wilson’s translations of the classic’s female characters, and her comments on gender.

“Contemporary translators and commentators often present the massacre of these women [12 unnamed enslaved maidservants who worked in Odysseus’s palace] as if it were quite ordinary, and entirely justified,” Wilson writes in the New Yorker. “The murdered slaves are routinely described in contemporary American English translations as ‘disobedient maids’ and are labelled as ‘sluts’ or ‘whores’—a level of verbal abuse that finds absolutely no analogue in the Greek.”

Wilson has said she doesn’t think there’s just one way to reinvent “The Odyssey.”

“That’s part of why it’s been interesting to so many people for so long,” Wilson said. “In the end, if a new movie gets people curious about the ancient world, it’s a win.”

Jennifer Mattson is a Contributing Writer at Fast Company, where she covers news trends and writes daily about business, technology, finance and the workplace..
https://www.fastcompany.com/91576753/the-odyssey-feminist-translation-ebook-audio-book-sales-spike
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

Tech Now explores a brief history of emojis and how the tiny symbols can express what words can't.

 

"How emojis became the world's universal language

 

Emojis began as simple smiley faces, now they're a shared visual language across cultures and platforms.
 Reporting for Tech Now, Martin Sharkey puts together a brief history on emoji symbols and how they came to express what words sometimes can't.

 

 

 

 

This video is from Tech Now, the BBC's flagship technology programme."

 

https://www.bbc.com/reel/video/p0nh7hg9/watch

 

#metaglossia 

 

#metaglossia_mundus 

"The collapse of the ‘Tower of Babel’: Humans have lost thousands of languages since antiquity
According to a study in ‘Science,’ Earth reached its greatest linguistic diversity between 1,000 and 3,000 years ago, with a number of languages roughly 10 times higher than today’s 7,500

Papua New Guinea accounts for 11% of the world’s languages. In the image, men of the Huli wig community from the highlands.
Design Pics Editorial (Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
Miguel Ángel Criado
Almería (Spain) - Jul 24, 2026 - 15:50CEST

The Tower of Babel described in Genesis may have been built not in Babylon, as the biblical account states, but in New Guinea. In the western part of the island, Papua New Guinea, located north of Australia, about 840 languages are spoken despite a population of barely 12 million. By comparison, Europeans — 745 million people — speak a quarter of that number of languages. Such linguistic diversity is exceptional in today’s world, but it wasn’t in the past: a study published in Science shows how the Tower of Babel rose over the last 12,000 years, peaking a few millennia ago and then beginning to crumble.

Today, humans speak or write roughly 7,500 languages. More than half have so few speakers or face so many threats that they are heading toward extinction. Sixty percent of the world’s population communicates in one of the 10 most widely spoken languages. One final figure to complete the picture: each year the last speaker of four languages dies, and with each extinction a portion of knowledge disappears. That is why researchers are so interested in understanding how linguistic diversity evolved in the past, so it can be preserved in the future.

“In the highlands of New Guinea, it’s a kind of Garden of Eden. There is an abundance of available resources. These people have access to incredibly fertile land and the potential for an extremely wide dietary niche,” says Damián Blasi, a researcher at the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies (ICREA) and the study’s lead author. In reality there is not one Eden but many isolated edens, “with an environment so rich and generous that it reduces the need to wage war or trade with other communities,” Blasi adds; he is also a scientist in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University (United States). And that isolation fuels linguistic divergence.

What Blasi and his colleagues did was build a model of past linguistic diversity using available data. They used as a basis 171 traditional hunter-gatherer communities, like those in Papua New Guinea. Drawing also on evidence from anthropology, archaeology, paleontology, demography, and other fields, they modeled the evolution in the number of languages from the end of the Paleocene through the current geological epoch, the Holocene.

“The [scientific] literature tells us that 12,000 years ago there were between four million and 10 million people on the planet. So what we asked was: how do we divide that number by the average population size of hunter-gatherer communities?” Blasi says. The dynamics of these groups are limited by available resources and group size. Under normal conditions, beyond a certain threshold, populations split in search of new territories. “So we divide, and that gives you an approximation of the total number of languages,” the Argentine researcher adds. His calculations suggest that at the end of the last glaciation, as the Pleistocene ended, between 4,500 and 6,200 languages were spoken on Earth. However, with the Holocene everything changed.

Improved climatic conditions, aided by innovations characteristic of the Neolithic (the spread of agriculture and sedentarization in different parts of the globe at different times), triggered a huge human population expansion. At the same time, societies grew larger, which meant that more and more people could share the same language.

The graph shows the evolution of linguistic diversity. The vertical axis shows the number of languages (the thickest line indicates the most likely number). The horizontal axis shows the timeline in millennia. At the top are historical milestones.
Blasi et al. Science
To capture these opposing processes, the researchers modeled thousands of possible trajectories connecting estimates from the start of the Holocene to the present. Although the precise trajectory remains uncertain, the models produced a general pattern: linguistic diversity increased for most of the Holocene, peaking between 1,000 and 3,000 years ago, with a number of languages roughly 10 times greater than at the end of the Pleistocene.

“The most unexpected result is how recent the linguistic boom appears to have been,” Claire Bowern, a researcher at Yale University (United States) and co-author of the study, says in a statement. “The period of greatest linguistic diversity may not have occurred in the distant Paleolithic [the archaeological equivalent of the geological Pleistocene], but during the era of state expansion and the first empires,” she adds. In other words, it was in the times of the emergence of writing and the rise of great Mesopotamian, Anatolian, and Egyptian civilizations, and beyond them those of the Indus valley and eastern Asia, that the biblical Tower of Babel was tallest.

But it is also with the expansion of the first empires that the decline in linguistic diversity begins. The model also captures later impacts. Perhaps the best known is that of the Roman Empire. When Rome was still a dream, Latin was spoken only in Latium (the present-day Lazio region) on an Italian peninsula where some 400 other languages were spoken. A millennium later, it was the language of half the known world.

The authors of the study have created a map that, based on species categories, shows the number of endangered languages and their level of endangerment.
Claire Bowern
Until now, many theorists and those outside the field blamed European colonialism from the 16th century onward for the extinction of many languages. “This work demystifies the idea that language loss is due solely to western expansion,” says Antonio Benítez, a professor at the University of Seville. “The study’s authors are leading experts and used a multitude of data, from demographic to epidemic records, to carry it out.”

For Benítez, the study highlights what he considers dramatic: “The loss of linguistic diversity implies other losses, because language stores everything that is culturally relevant.” The professor points out the two main predictors of language extinction, both processes inherent to globalization. “The most relevant predictor is the number of miles of road in a given territory.” The second is “the number of years we spend in school,” he adds. Both destroy isolation. Blasi, the study’s lead author, points to a new worry to which he is now devoting his efforts: the impact of artificial intelligence on the languages that remain on Earth."
https://english.elpais.com/science-tech/2026-07-24/the-collapse-of-the-tower-of-babel-humans-have-lost-thousands-of-languages-since-antiquity.html?outputType=amp

"What John E. Woods does is translate. In the world of men and women who translate grand literary writers into English, Woods is an important name. The Manchester Guardian Weekly writes, “We have been spoiled by translators recently, what with William Weaver and John Woods and Gregory Rabassa.” Weaver is known for his translations of Umberto Eco (The Name of the Rose) and Italo Calvino (If on a Winter's Night a Traveler). Rabassa is the translator of Nobelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez (One Hundred Years of Solitude). Woods, who translates from German to English, is perhaps best known for his translations of Thomas Mann (The Magic Mountain), Arno Schmidt, Christoph Ransmayr, and the best-selling Perfume by Patrick Süskind.

John E. Woods: "I set up shop here in San Diego, found this lovely place where I live, and started translating Arno Schmidt."

Since 1985 Woods has lived in Mission Hills in a mission-revival house that overlooks a lush canyon filled with opossums, skunks, and even an occasional fox or coyote. He works at a desk near a set of French doors that open out onto a deck. The deck holds his bonsai collection and orchids. His now one-year-old standard wirehaired dachshund Zepp guards the deck, demanding in repayment only a morning walk and an occasional game of fetch.

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The Reader has started this series of its best stories from the past 52 years — 2600 cover stories and some remarkable interior features — to help make up for the loss of its physical edition, which was once large enough to hold whole oceans of print. These stories will feature all the original illustrations and photos (plus easy-to-read typography).

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Mr. Woods explains about the name “Zepp.” “In Bavaria, which is very Catholic, up in the mountains all the girls are named Maria, and all the boys are named Joseph. And in Bavaria the short form of Joseph isn’t Joe. Instead, they take the second half of the name, ‘seph,’ or ‘sepp.’ But all over Germany, if you call somebody a stupid Zepp, it’s like our ‘Clem’ — ‘the country bumpkin, the hillbilly.’ ”

A Toshiba laptop sits in its docking port on Mr. Woods’s three- by five-foot mahogany desk. “I go back as a translator before the days of the computer. I can’t imagine making a living translating without the computer now, because it increases efficiency 400 percent or 500 percent.” When he still worked only on the typewriter, says Mr. Woods, “you did the rough draft and you corrected that and retyped, find then, again, you corrected and you retyped. Retyping ended up taking up most of your time. Now, of course, that’s all gone. I let the computer do all that.”

Two windows are open on Mr. Woods’s Windows 95 computer screen, modified to pleasant, eye-saving wheat tones. “The way I control the translation is first to work on the rough in one window, and then I open up the other window and type in the German original. That way I have all the search functions available in both texts.

“When I work with Thomas Mann, who loves to use a leitmotif technique, where phrases and words or whole clauses and sentences are repeated or varied, once I have the German text in the computer, I can immediately locate all the occurrences. You no longer say, ‘I remember that somewhere in chapter seven. Or was it eight?’ Instead, you have it there at once on-screen. It’s always very useful to have the entire German at your fingertips.”

Woods does his own typing of the German texts. “I could,” he says, “scan it in. I have a scanner and I tried that. It ended up costing me about as much time. I find I actually prefer typing in the German immediately after I’ve translated. It gives me a marvelous quick control mechanism. As I type each of the German words, I remember exactly what I’ve just done with them in translation. It’s the perfect way to double-check for accuracy.”

The ergonomic keyboard sits directly in front of Woods. Propped up above the keyboard is the German text from which he’s translating.

On Woods’s desk, at his right hand, sits the one-volume German-English dictionary that he swears by. “It’s one that’s out of print, it’s called the Wildhagen-Héraucourt. It’s one compact volume and it’s very good. It’s a little British-cy, but I know it inside out and it works for me. This is copy number two; my first one fell apart.”

At Woods’s left is his one-volume American Heritage dictionary and within easy reach, a three-volume Webster's. “And then,” says Woods, “immediately to my right is my reference library, which is really my soul. It’s two Encyclopedia Britannicas, one is the 11th edition from 1910. Mine is the little British edition, half-sized and bound in blue.” Woods also has a good thesaurus, “Although with an on-screen version,” he says, “I need it less nowadays. And then I’ve got most of the Oxford companions to whatever — English Lit, German Lit, classical antiquity, Christianity — and a Columbia Encyclopedia, plus a contemporary Encyclopedia Britannica, and my compact OED [the Oxford English Dictionary].”

There’s more. Woods regularly consults a 32-volume paperback version of the Grimm Dictionary, the German dictionary that is comparable to English speakers’ OED. He has Bibles and concordances, books of English and German quotations, an encyclopedia of mammals, Eric Partridge’s Dictionary of Slang. He has references and guides to mushrooms, stars, plants, as well as French, Latin, Spanish, Italian, Russian, and various German dictionaries. And then there are books of nursery rhymes, a film encyclopedia, a good Shakespeare edition, a bilingual picture dictionary, books on German surnames and dialects, a rhyming dictionary. Close to 200 essential volumes, all within immediate grasp.

They come in handy. Only recently Woods had to trace down a reference to scalping in 2 Maccabees. Who got scalped by whom? Answer at least two of the seven sons of a widow (chapter 7), by Antiochus IV. And who was he? A Seleucid king of the Second Century B.C. Seleucid, what’s that? And on, and on.

I ask Mr. Woods if he came to feel that he almost inhabited, lived in, a text as he translated it.

“Less inhabit the text than inhabit universes” is his answer. “I get up in the morning, and it’s almost like opening a door and walking into this other world, one that I know very well by now. Whether that’s Arno Schmidt, or to a lesser extent Thomas Mann, or Christoph Ransmayr. Their worlds become my world. Or at least they are worlds that I can enter and delve all the little nooks and crannies. I know their exotic flora and fauna, the phases of their moons. Every detail is real to me. Then, at the end of the day I can close the door on all that. It’s a wonderful way to spend each professional day.”

When he takes up a new author for translation, does Mr. Woods begin by learning all that he can about that author?

“Usually not. Nor do I wade through all the secondary literature if it’s already a known author. I think that brings prejudices to what the translating task is about. I read the book. I try to read it the way any intelligent reader should read a book, and then I sit down and I start from page one to translate.

“I think, at least originally, and to a certain extent it is still the case, that what I am trying to do is to re-create for the American reader, for the English-speaking reader, something of the same experience that the educated German reader has when he or she picks up a book and reads it. I want that to happen for the American reader.

“Over time, however. I’ve come to believe that that’s probably an impossibility. That translation itself is an impossibility. Because what happens, of course, is that ultimately I end up creating a new text for new readers in a new context. The original and its translation are not the same. I cannot, to use a good old word out of my theology days [Mr. Woods, for several years, was a Lutheran pastor], I cannot repristinate the original experience.

“First of all, Americans are not Germans; sometimes I feel as if the two cultures are from different galaxies. Second of all, the languages are not congruent. When a German thinks a sentence in one way, that is not the way an American would ever think that sentence or put that thought together. So that no matter what I do and how well I do it, a new text is being shaped. Which gets us back to your question of whether I wade through all the secondary reading. No, because that new text is going to happen in any case, and what I’m trying to do is give the reader a reading experience, not a scholarly one.

“Being bilingual is only a first step toward being a good literary translator. Being a good literary translator is not anything like being an interpreter at the United Nations. I would no more know how to do that than I would know how to compete in a decathlon. It’s a whole different thing. I work with the written text. I sit and look at words and how they fit together, I wrestle with syntax, I listen to the melody and the rhythm of sentences, I try to understand what makes great prose. And I don’t touch poetry. I think only poets can translate poets. My skill, if I have one, is in creating good prose.

“One of the major differences between German and English is the syntax. Take a master of German syntax like Thomas Mann, who sometimes built sentences a page long. My task as a translator is to take each of those sentences apart piece by piece, dynamite the thing if necessary, and then reassemble it all in a vastly different order.

“One of the things that often happens in a great expansive German sentence is that it builds to its center and then dies away from it. A long sentence in English, in the classic tradition of a Gibbon period, tends to be additive and cumulative. It either starts strong and then dies away slowly or it starts and builds to that final moment of meaning. The two languages go about the task of thinking in long complex sentences so differently.

“So, once again, you’re creating a new text, and you’re looking at how that works and how to make what happened in the German happen in the English. You can’t reconstruct that, it’s not going to happen the same way. What you want to do is to make a comparable aesthetic experience out of a great sentence.

“For me, the proof of the pudding is always reading aloud. I read aloud everything I do at least a half-dozen times. One thing I discovered early on is that in reading a sentence aloud, if I stumble, there’s something wrong with the sentence.

“Reading aloud is one of my great pleasures. I happen to have a partner who loves to be read to. One of his pleasures in life is that he usually gets the daily rushes. When he comes home from work, we have our coffee and I read to him the day’s work, and that’s a way for me to proof my work, and also for us to share what I do.”

It’s not important, I ask, for a translator to know a great deal of autobiographical material about the author he’s translating?

“I won’t say it’s not important. I would say that certainly as your knowledge expands of what life experiences helped shape an author’s texts, a certain richness is added. That richness really only comes after a long, intense relationship with a particular author and his work. But if you superimpose a quirky, scholarly thing on him, however much a particular theory may appeal to you, you are probably going to wrench the text in certain directions that won’t be healthy.

“The other thing, of course — and this is a whole different matter — is ‘Had we but world enough, and time,’ as Andrew Marvell put it. Of course I would love the luxury of sitting down and reading all of Thomas Mann and all the scholarship about him, and then begin translating. Unfortunately, I’m under contract to people who want the product yesterday and aren’t paying me for five years of scholarship. They’re paying me for a translation of a text completed within a certain time frame as stipulated by the contract. Which means that translation is piecework. At the same time it is, of course, a very serious literary effort. But the utopia of endless time and endless thought is never there.”

Let’s make believe, I say, that you’re given a new text to do. What would be the first thing you would do?

“Read the book. I sit down and read it. Try to read it as an intelligent reader. I might make notes. Certainly make mental notes of how this particular language works, what characterizes this language. I’m looking always at that, at my craft. As for the larger thoughts and ideas, if I’m reasonably good at translating, those will surely get across. I’m not going to change the writer’s general outlook on the world. That’s going to come across no matter what I do. I’m looking more at surface texture, at prose style, at literary allusions. One of the things that is very difficult for me is to read any text in German, even a magazine article, without immediately asking myself, ‘How would I translate that?’

“I’m always aware of the little problems of how to do the thing I do, how to work with a word, a phrase, give it its appropriate idiom. The devil is in the details. But, generally, I read the book and form an idea of how I want to go about this. Then, I sit down at my computer and begin. I’m a very linear kind of guy. I start on page 1, and I translate doggedly onward to page 873, or whatever.

“One of the basic tools I learned as part of my training as a Lutheran pastor was ‘exegesis,’ the critical analysis of a biblical text. You sit there with the Greek or Hebrew text in front of you and take it apart piece by piece. Your questions are: How does the grammar work, what sociological context does this noun come from, was it used in the marketplace, is it from the world of farmers or warriors, and what did this verb originally mean before Paul or Luke adapted it for use in the early church? All those kinds of questions become very important when you’re preaching a sermon on a text. And they’re equally important when you’re translating a novel.

“And even after you’ve done all that, you may still not understand. Whenever I’m having trouble with a translation, with a phrase, with a metaphor, I sit there and try to visualize what it was the author saw, I try to conjure up the field of images out of which these words came. And sometimes, on my best days, I can literally see it. And suddenly I find the translation I need.”

About how many pages can you do in a day?

“Instead of pages, let’s talk words. It depends so much on the text. There are texts and there are texts. When I’m working on one of Arno Schmidt’s late novels, if I have 1000 words of rough draft after eight hours of work, I feel as if I’ve done my share for the day. There are lighter texts, of course, where I can do 3000 words without overtaxing myself. It’s entirely relative. Somewhere between, let’s say, 1000 to 3000 words a day, and most of the time something between 1500 and 2000.”

I ask if Mr. Woods does a first draft.

“I will print out what I have done that day, which is essentially a rough draft, corrected and recorrected on-screen. Then that evening, as I said, I sit over a cup of coffee with my partner and read him the daily rushes. As I do, I make a note of this or that change. At the end of the week, usually on Saturday morning, by the early morning sun on the back deck, I go over the week’s work, read it aloud, check the original for things that sound wrong, and do what I think of as the real editing. Then, about once a month, depending on how the text itself divides up, whether there are big chunks that belong together. I’ll take a day or two to do another read-through and revision. Finally, before I send it off to the publisher, I do one final grand pass. So that comes to something like four revisions.”

How long did it take Mr. Woods to translate Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain?

“Not long enough. I wish I could have had more time for it. I did The Magic Mountain in nine months. I pushed that one hard. That was a 60-hour-a-week job. I mean, I really laid in and dug in and did it.” (Mr. Woods in 1996 was awarded the first Helen and Kurt Wolff Prize for Translation for his translation of The Magic Mountain and Schmidt’s Nobodaddy's Children.)

Do you get paid well?

“I get paid quite well for what I do, and I’m incredibly lucky because I’ve made the right connections and somehow done the right things, been in the right places at the right time, whatever that’s all about. Generally speaking, translators are not paid well.”

May I ask what you made for The Magic Mountain?

“No, you can’t. I’m not a starving artist. If I were a starving artist I would find myself another profession.”

Is there much market for translators?

“Most people cannot make a living off this. I don’t think they ever have. Translation has always been poorly paid on the whole. Then there’s the state of publishing nowadays. The major houses, having been bought up by conglomerates, are looking more and more to their bottom lines and are doing fewer and fewer literary translations. The smaller houses and the university presses are not particularly picking up the slack. There isn’t a lot of money there to pay for translation, particularly now that Congress has savaged the National Endowment for the Humanities.

“Literary translating is about literature, it’s about being very, very skilled in your native language. Not only do you need to know the second language, and I mean know it well, but you have to love and work with and understand your own language. You have to know how to make it sing and dance. Being bilingual certainly is a leg up, but that doesn’t create a literary text “There are a lot of people out there who are bilingual. They think, ‘Well, I ought to be able to translate something.’ And the publishing houses know that there’s this vast pool of workers out there, and so they farm the stuff out in piecework. The results are haphazard. Some great and wonderful translations are produced, and some that are not so great and wonderful.”

Is there a community of translators?

“There are workshops and conferences, although less and less these days, because the money that funds them seems to be drying up. As I said, there aren’t many people who make a living off this. It’s a mixed bag. There are college professors who make this a hobby or see it as a way of meeting their publishing requirements or who simply have fun doing the work. There are people who do it to earn a little extra income, or as a hobby. And there are a few of us who struggle to make a living at it and a couple who actually manage to do so. Of the literary translators from the German, I suppose I know 25 or so, some of whom are dear friends, some of whom I’ve met at conferences and know to put a name with a face.”

I ask how the business of translation works.

“Well, first, let’s talk about translated literature in America. I delivered an after-dinner speech on the topic at an academic conference on postwar German literature a year or so ago. I was able to get hold of the records of PEN New York, which every year awards its PEN Translation Prize. All the publishing houses, from major conglomerates to mom-and-pop operations and university presses, submit works that have been translated from all the literatures of the world. We’re not talking here about cookbooks or tour guides or auto mechanics, but about what a group of people, after a great deal of wrangling, decide is probably ‘literature.’ I presume that most of the serious prose and poetry that gets published in a given year is on pen’s list. In any given year, at least over the past five years, that list of published translations, from all the languages of the world, has not exceeded more than 200 to 250 titles. So every year we Americans are getting no more than about 200 peeks a year over the literary fence into the world outside.

“Then, if you start looking at the individual languages, about 60 percent of the books are translated from five languages, and in this order French, Spanish, German, Russian, Italian. So that’s approximately 120 titles. All the rest of the world’s languages get the other 80. That also means that there are 20 to 25 titles a year translated from the German. There are at least 50 people who would love to have a contract for any one of those books. Which means, then, that almost no one can make a living at this.

“I feel myself extremely fortunate that, with some hard work and a great deal of amazingly good hick. I’m able to make a living. One major piece of good luck is a wonderful institution called the Arno Schmidt Foundation, which has been my bread and butter over the past ten years. Another has been a fine, long-term working relationship with my editor, Carol Janeway, at Alfred A. Knopf.” John Woods was born and raised in the Midwest. Woods’s father, a veterinarian, “was born in 1892,” says Mr. Woods, “so that he was 50 when I was born. I’ve always thought that one of the advantages I have with the English language is that both my parents spoke good Midwestern English, the way it was cultivated in little country schools almost a century ago now.” Woods’s mother and father, he adds, “both came from a small town in southern Indiana. She was the daughter of the town pharmacist. He had tuberculosis, and so in hopes of a cure the family homesteaded briefly near Clovis, New Mexico, but he died in 1912. They came back, and for many years she lived in a small town in southern Indiana.”

Woods spent his early years in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and Cincinnati and Lima, Ohio. He graduated from high school in lima in 1960. He went to a small liberal arts college, Wittenberg University in Springfield, Ohio. The university was named for Wittenberg, Germany, the city where Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the door of the town church in 1517.

Asked how he happened to choose Wittenberg, Mr. Woods says, “Quite simple. I’d applied to several places and this was the best deal.” Mr. Woods’s parents weren’t particularly religious, and he had not had a traditional religious upbringing. But at Wittenberg, he says, “the first truly intellectual and interesting people I’d ever met, people who thought deeply and who could use words to express their thoughts, were Christians, existentialist Christians. These people were formative in my life, because they gave me a world-view. I’ve since abandoned that world-view, but it certainly was a way of getting at some of the larger issues of human history and culture.”

After graduation from Wittenberg, Mr. Woods went on to graduate school at Cornell University, with a major in English literature. “I didn’t like that,” he says, “and by some of the more whimsical twists of fate, I ended up at the Lutheran Theological Seminary in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. And even served as a Lutheran pastor for two years.” The seminary was associated with the LCA, the Lutheran Church in America, the most liberal of the Lutheran denominations at the time. Mr. Woods explains, “This was the old German, Fast Coast church. They take their theology very seriously. Philosophy and scholarship mean something, and that’s what interested me ultimately, the intellectual aspect. And I was in seminary in the late ’60s, a time when the main-stream churches were very involved in social issues. We seminarians were out demonstrating and working in the ‘inner city.’ Anyway, that’s my Lutheran connection, and that’s what got me to Germany.

“I went off to Germany to study theology and ended up staying for about eight years— that’s where the whole German connection got started. When I arrived in Germany in 1971, I really had little grasp of the language. I had taken a year in college.

“I went to Germany to study with Jilrgen Moltmann and Ernst Bloch. Bloch was a Communist philosopher, a heretic who had been thrown out of East Germany for redefining Marxism, seeing it as built on an ontology of hope. Moltmann was big on hope too, with an emphasis on eschatology, the study of last things.’ It was the theological fad of the day. It sounded good to me. I planned to do my doctoral thesis on the eschatological themes in Luther’s commentary on the Book of Genesis, I’ve long since left all that behind me, but it was important to me at the time. And besides, I was a real leftist in my politics — still am — and was happy to shake the dust of Nixon’s America from my shoes. The Old World was a new world for me, and I loved it”

I stop Mr. Woods and ask how old he was when he went to Germany to study. He thinks for a moment and says, “I was just short of 30, a tall, balding, gangly fellow. My German was more or less nonexistent, so I first spent two months in an immersion course at the Goethe Institute in Passau, a small city on the Danube near the Austrian border — a reactionary backwater, by the way, as I learned after I got there. It’s where the movie The Nasty Girl is set. The Goethe Institute provides language instruction in Germany and functions outside of Germany as the nation’s cultural representative, sort of like the United States Information Agency does for us.

“I ended up,” he says, “marrying my German teacher. I enrolled at Tubingen University to study theology and because my wife was connected with the Goethe Institute, the closest Goethe Institute that we could find was in a quaint little town called Schwabisch Hall, which was a three-hour commute by train from Tubingen.” For three years, Woods commuted back and forth three to four days a week between Tubingen and Schwabisch Hall. “So,” he says, “I got the German experience. I was as close to being amalgamated into that culture as you get, I think. One of the things about all European cultures — not just German culture—is that you are always a foreigner. These are homogeneous societies. Unlike America, where you plant your two feet on the continent and say, ‘I’m an American,’ and everybody says, ‘Okay, you’re an American.’ In Europe, whether it's France or Denmark or Germany, you can plant your two feet there and say, ‘I’m a Frenchman, a Dane, a German,’ but you will always be ‘the American.’ You will never be ‘a German.’ You can’t say, ‘I’m a German.’ You just aren’t. You are always where you came from.” I ask Mr. Woods when he began to think in German. “Who ever really knows that,” he says. “After about six months in Germany, I started to work more or less fluently in the language, and I suppose shortly thereafter, I started dreaming in German and thinking in German. And even now when I go over, within hours I’m talking to myself in German. English just gets shoved to the sidelines, until I get back here, and then English takes over again right away.

“I’m a type A personality, anyway — goal-driven, obsessive-compulsive. My friends on this side of the Atlantic think of me as a mini-Nazi. When I get over there, I find the Germans so well potty-trained and uptight that the Southern California laid-back part of me starts blossoming, simply in defiance of so much German rigor, which nevertheless is part of me no matter what I do.”

Did Mr. Woods come home during those eight years?

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“Occasionally. My mother was still alive, so my wife and I would visit her. And then, there was one year in ’76, where my wife was on an exchange program with the University of Massachusetts. We were in Amherst, Massachusetts, for an academic year in ’76.”

Mr. Woods began translating when he and his then-wife were in Amherst, in 1976. “For our winter reading we had brought along Arno Schmidt’s Abend mit Goldrand, Evening Edged in Gold."

“Schmidt,” says Woods, “for lack of a better handle, is the German James Joyce. I mean, fools rush in where angels fear to tread.” Mr. Woods began trying to translate the book. “I jumped in with both feet. I had been trying to write and was not being very successful, either in terms of finding an agent who liked what I wrote, or for that matter in terms of my liking what I was writing. I hit writer’s block and looked at a wall and said, ‘I’ve got to do something.’ “Schmidt’s late works,” says Mr. Woods, are “difficult to describe if you’ve never seen them. They are about 18 inches long and about 14 inches wide. These are typescripts, photo-offset typescripts of his work. They are multicolumned, there are inserted drawings and illustrations and quotes. It’s metafiction.”

I ask Woods for a minibiography of Arno Schmidt. “He was born,” says Mr. Woods, “in 1914 and died in 1979. He is a late-born modernist. He wrote nothing of consequence, and published nothing, until after the war. He was an auto-didact and did not himself discover Joyce until well into his career, in the late ’50s, by which time he’d been writing for 16 years. But in feet, in some ways, the way Bach was the culmination of polyphony after the age of polyphony was over, I think of Schmidt as the culmination of the modernist movement.

“He created a whole new world of postwar German fiction. Arno Schmidt’s readers have known all along that he belongs in the canon with Brecht and Mann and Kafka. I’m convinced that when the 20th Century has ended and we’re well into the 21st, people will look back at the century just past and say, ‘Mann, Brecht, Kafka, Schmidt — they define German literature.’ He is that important.

“But Schmidt is difficult reading even for Germans. The early works, to be sure, less so. And some of them, like Stony Heart and Lake Scenery with Pocahontas, are great fun, with marvelous quirky love stories that build on the earlier German Romantic tradition. And he was a great humorist, the only German writer I know where I suddenly just start guffawing. But it’s often difficult reading too. And everyone said it was untranslatable. Then, just to have something to do to justify my existence as a writer, I sat down and started to translate Evening Edged in Gold. And found, much to my surprise, that I could do this.”

In 1978 Mr. Woods took the beginnings of his translation of Schmidt’s Evening Edged in Gold to the legendary Helen Wolff. Editor and publisher Helen Wolff died in 1994 at the age of 88. Mrs. Wolff and her husband Kurt (Franz Kafka’s first publisher) fled occupied France and came to the United States in 1941. In 1942 the Wolffs founded Pantheon Books. Their first success at Pantheon was a new edition of the Grimm fairy tales. They went on to publish such writers as Boris Pasternak, Gunter Grass, Umberto Eco, Georges Simenon, Max Frisch, Stanislaw Lem, and Amos Oz. In 1961, after Random House acquired Pantheon, the Wolffs, at William Jovanovich’s invitation, joined Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. There, they continued to edit and publish under the imprint “A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book.” Kurt Wolff was killed in 1963 in a traffic accident in West Germany; Mrs. Wolff continued as the imprint’s publisher until 1986, when she retired.

Mrs. Wolff, in a 1980 New York Times article, spoke about her meeting with Mr. Woods. “About two years ago, John E. Woods, a young American who had been at Cornell University, visited me in Frankfurt and said that he was totally devoted to Schmidt’s work and was translating his latest novel. I also met Ernst Krawehl, who had been Schmidt’s editor for 25 years at Fischer and was also convinced that Schmidt had turned out a masterpiece. But without the translation by Woods, I would never have dreamed of publishing it."

Mr. Woods met Mrs. Wolff, he says, “at her famous hotel room at the Hessischer Hof hotel in Frankfurt, where she always stayed during the Book Fair, never appearing on the floor of the Book Fair, but limiting her contacts to the people she invited to her room. The who’s who of European literature would knock on her door. From Calvino to Grass — they all made the pilgrimage to Helen Wolff's door, and I had the privilege of being able to knock on that door too, as an invited guest.

“She was a small woman, very soft-spoken. She was aging by then and had, I don’t know the reason, a decided and obvious limp. Her body did not move easily. But her eyes moved fast and were very penetrating. Helen Wolff could look at you and read your literary soul. She was very quick in decision making, knew what she wanted, knew what she expected of people. Her standards were incredibly high, but she was a delightfully warm person at the same time. She had a great laugh — very soft, very tinkly. She was one of those very special people who grace the planet from time to time.”

I ask what Mrs. Wolff's response was to his Arno Schmidt translation.

“She told me that Günter Grass had come to her and said it couldn’t be done. At that point she had read, I think, about 20 to 25 pages that I’d finished. I had done more by then, but that was all she had seen at that point. And she said, 'But it can be done. I see it here. Yes, let’s do it.’ And away it went.

"At the time there was a West German quasi-governmental agency called Inter Nationes that provided funds for me to continue the translation. Within about six months to a year we had a contract and it was a done deal.”

“And you were officially a translator?”

“And I was officially a translator.”

In 1979 Mr. Woods and his wife came to the United States. “The Goethe Institute, as the cultural arm of German diplomacy, is a worldwide thing. There’s a Goethe Institute in Los Angeles, one in Chicago, Boston, Atlanta, Houston. My wife was transferred to New York, which brought us to the States for three years in the early ’80s. Then, she was transferred to Boston, and I joined her there for a year.

“Schmidt’s last four novels are typescripts that were photo-offsets, no typesetter ever set them in print. What I did was create a clone. I used a typewriter like his, an old Adler office machine that his editor Ernst Krawehl supplied me. I used exactly the same paper of the same dimensions, it’s German industrial norm four, which is a page-and-a-half size of their standard typing paper. I even used the same brand of typewriter ribbon.

“One of the things about these late Schmidt texts is that wherever he made a typo, he thought of it as a kind of Freudian slip. So all of that finds its way onto the page too. I had to re-create the visual effect of strikeovers and of his crossing out of typing errors. I rebuilt visual texts. But in English. I said I was a type A personality. And, I had to deal with every conceivable kind of wordplay, double-entendre, and literary allusion.

“Evening Edged in Gold was about a two-and-a-half-year project. Luckily, at that time my wife was making the living, and I could afford to do it. So thanks to her and Inter Nationes, who backed up the project with a grant, it got done. Sad to say, shortly thereafter the marriage broke up.”

In 1981 Woods’s translation of Schmidt’s Evening Edged in Gold won the PEN Translation Prize and the American Book Award (now the National Book Award). It shared the American Book Award with Francis Steegmuller’s translation of Flaubert’s letters. “It was a grand ceremony,” says Mr. Woods. “It was held in Carnegie Hall with John Kenneth Galbraith and William F. Buckley giving out the awards and exchanging witty repartee. The winners were called up on that legendary stage to receive their awards. Along with some cash and a moment of glory, I got a beautiful small Louise Nevelson sculpture.”

A little over a year later, Mr. Woods came to San Diego. “Thanks to Helen Wolff, I found a job as an editor with Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, which happened to be moving to the West Coast, to San Diego, in 1982. I had an office on the 11th floor of that lovely old wedding-cake building. I was with HBJ here for two and a half years, then spent a year with them in Austin, Texas, on another project, and came back to San Diego in 1986. I edited 20 to 25 books with HBJ, including Mark Helprin’s Winter's Tale. But anyone who knows the editorial merry-go-round can understand why I eventually decided I didn’t really want to do that anymore. So I struck out on my own as a translator.” Before Woods left HBJ in Austin, he had the good fortune to be offered a contract to translate Patrick Süskind’s Perfume. It was a bestseller, and he decided to try the freelancer’s life. He first worked out a contract with the Arno Schmidt Foundation. “That way,” he says, “I knew that I had an income coming in and didn’t have to hustle everything I did. And I set up shop here in San Diego, found this lovely place where I live, and started translating Arno Schmidt, as well as pieces of this and that I was able to pick up along the way. And two years later I met my lover. Mona’s Law defied.” I ask about the Arno Schmidt Foundation.

“The foundation is located in a little town called Bargfeld Uber Celle. It’s in the Luneburg Heath, about two hours south of Hamburg, in a very remote and, for Europe, sparsely populated area — a flat landscape with birch trees and junipers, a few ponds and streams, it’s the landscape Schmidt loved, and where he spent the last 20 years of his life in a very modest cottage. So that’s where the archives are, and that’s where the foundation is located. Every year I get to go over and spend a couple of weeks working in the archives and revising the translations with the help of Hans Wollschlager, who is famous for his translation of Joyce’s Ulysses into German.”

In 1990, Woods’s editor at Alfred A. Knopf suggested he begin retranslating some of the major novels of Thomas Mann, the giant of German literature in the first half of the century. Awarded the Nobel Prize for The Magic Mountain in 1929, Mann fled Nazi Germany in 1933. During the war years he lived in Santa Monica, and for many Americans his voice became the voice of another, a better, Germany. He died in Switzerland in 1955.

In the ’20s, ’30s, and ’40s, Helen Lowe-Porter had already translated much of Mann’s work into English. “God bless her soul," says Mr. Woods. “She was probably not up to the task, less because her German was sometimes a bit sketchy and she managed some real howlers on occasion. But, let me assure you, that can happen to anybody. It has happened to me. No, her biggest problem was that she had a tin ear for her native language.

“One of the marvelous things about Thomas Mann is that although it is very rich, dense, and highly thought-out prose, it is still exquisitely elegant. It has a lightness and a wit in the midst of those great long periodic sentences that Germans take such delight in. Mann has the reputation in English for writing almost impenetrable prose, but that impenetrability comes chiefly from dear old Helen Lowe-Porter, who rendered it impenetrable. I think one of the reasons Knopf wanted new translations was to undo some of her knots and make Mann more available to contemporary readers. I don’t mean made simpler. As a matter of fact, Porter often broke up his sentences into smaller units. I tried to keep them as intact as possible. My goal was to make a more lucid prose. Let’s put it that way.”

I ask what other Mann there is that remains to be retranslated. “Well,” Mr. Woods says, “a lot. Some of the short stories have been retranslated, including Death in Venice, but a good many haven’t. And, then, of the major novels, there’s Lotte in Weimar—The Beloved Returns is the Lowe-Porter title. It deals with Goethe in his late years. I wouldn’t touch it, because there you really have to be a Goethe scholar, and I would simply be out of my depth. And there’s Joseph and His Brethren, a marvelous tetralogy that turns the Bible stories we learned in Sunday school into a profound human comedy. It’s probably the one major work left after the three I’ve retranslated thus far. And there are a half-dozen other smaller novels and novellas. And volumes of literary and political essays. In the mid- to late ’40s, Mann was known in this country both as a novelist and as the voice of democratic Germany. He went on lecture tours in this country and would fill 5000-, 10,000-seat stadiums. Americans waited in line to hear Thomas Mann speak—all that is so long ago now, good as forgotten.

“Those little pieces of this and that along the way have also now multiplied in a lot of directions; one is retranslation of three major Thomas Mann novels, Buddenbrooks and The Magic Mountain are behind me, and actually so is Doctor Faustus, which is now scheduled for publication in January 1998.”

Woods has translated many other, more contemporary works from German. “I did probably the one title that people who are not into serious literature in quotation marks may know, a book called Perfume, by Patrick Süskind. It was on the bestseller list in ’86 and was awarded the PEN Translation Prize. I also recently did a third novel by an Austrian writer named Christoph Ransmayr. The first Ransmayr title I translated was The Last World, which is about the Roman poet Ovid’s exile, but retold in a style that I suppose is most easily described as magical realism. That one got me the Schlegd-Tieck Prize that the Brits award each year for translation. The second Ransmayr novel I translated is called Terrors of Ice and Darkness, a rousing adventure story that deals with the Austrian polar expedition of 1874.”

Mr. Woods’s translation of the third Ransmayr novel, The Dog King, was published earlier this year. “The book is a retelling of postwar European history but assumes that when the war came to an end the Allies carried out some of the proposals that were known as the Morgenthau Plan, by which Germany was to be returned to an agrarian, pre-industrial state, Ransmayr’s premise is that such a plan was actually carried out, and he sees this strange world through the eyes of three people in a small Austrian town. It’s a marvelous, marvelous book.

“He’s also an exquisite prose stylist; the language is powerful and metaphoric but at the same time wonderfully exact and dear. We’re hoping that this may be the next big breakthrough into late-20th-century European literature for Americans to read.”

Gabriele Annan’s recent review in the New York Times of Woods’s translation of The Dog King praised both Ransmayr and Woods. “Ransmayr,” writes Annan, “is a novelist concerned with the philosophy of history rather than the psychology of character. He is taken very seriously in German-speaking countries, where history, especially recent history, is an obsession.” And, “There is something so powerful, committed, and solemn about Ransmayr’s tone that it seems like a command to interpret his message.... He must be fiendishly difficult to translate, and John E Woods has done him proud.”

Who, I ask Mr. Woods, have you not translated that you would like to translate?

“I would love to do some 19th-century material. That’s a fond hope. There’s no way that I’m going to get a contract to translate hundred-year-old novels. Wilhelm Raabe, a great late-19th-century realist, though realist is not the word, he’s almost a precursor to magical realism. There are the Romantics, Jean Paul, Ludwig Tieck—favorites of Arno Schmidt There’s Theodor Fontane, another major German realist. There’s all sorts of wonderful stuff that I’d love to put my hand to. But it ain’t gonna happen.

“As far as Schmidt goes, I’ve done most of the major things, but there’s still plenty of earlier material and his magnum opus. Bottom's Dream. The foundation wants eventually to have a more or less complete English translation available, even if we don’t find publishers here in the States who might pick up on some of the less important items. So far at least, we do have the four volumes of the Dalkey Archive Press edition —The Collected Novellas, Nobodaddy's Children, The Collected Stories, and Two Novels (the latter due out this fall).

“I’m perfectly happy to do Arno Schmidt, Thomas Mann, and any of the major contemporaries like Ransmayr. There’s also a new writer I ran across while I was in Germany last fall. And Knopf likes his work too and has decided to publish him. His name is Ingo Schulze. A brand-new voice, a man in his 30s, who’s written a book of intriguing short stories about St. Petersburg, after the fall of Communism. He was there as a journalist and has transformed his experience into 33 Moments of Happiness, with each of 33 tales written in a different style that has its roots in Russian literary history, from Gogol to Nabokov. They’re exciting and sometimes bizarre stories. I was simply bowled over by them. Maybe Ingo Schulze is the next big find. There will always be good things to translate.”

When you are translating contemporary literature, do you feel there is a difference between an educated German and an educated American reader?

“Sure there is. First, in relative numbers. There is a larger percentage of Germans who still work at being serious readers. But certainly there are still lots of good readers here in the States too. When I got back from Germany last fall, there was a lovely letter waiting for me from a young woman in graduate school She had tried reading the old Lowe-Porter Magic Mountain and could never get past the first 50 pages. Then she discovered my translation and wrote me a long letter about how it had opened up for her the whole world of Thomas Mann. Now she understood why he had won the Nobel Prize. In its own way, that kind of fan mail is worth as much as any literary award.

“Then there were a couple of older gentlemen here in California, one an ophthalmologist in Santa Monica and the other a retired naval officer in Julian. Both of them took the time to call me on the phone and write long letters. Each had read The Magic Mountain seven or eight times in his life, and suddenly they were reading it again and it was brand new, and they were so excited. That’s heady stuff for a translator. It really makes my professional life worthwhile.”

Who do you imagine as your audience?

“I don’t think I imagine an audience. My audience is in some ways myself. If this is great prose that seizes me, I figure I’ve reached my audience. I test it out on my partner, and although he likes to read he’s not a lit major or anything of the sort. So, if something comes across well and he gets excited by a great novel in my translation, then I figure I’ve succeeded, because I’ve reached not only that esoteric little community of one that I am, but someone who leans back and enjoys being told a story. And if it works, if my prose works, then I’m reaching an audience. But my first test is myself, I guess.”

Do you read in very contemporary German, perhaps newspapers and magazines?

“Occasionally, although I really don’t keep up the way I should, I must admit. I spend my day working with prose texts, and when I’m done at the end of the day, what I enjoy reading are things like history and biographies and natural history magazines. I tend to shy away from heavy literature at the end of the day, so I don’t keep up on things in Germany as much as I should.”

Has the language changed significantly since the Second World War, and if so, how do you keep up with the changes?

“It is changing. It had not changed. I think something is happening now. English, American English in particular, is a great whore of a language; it takes on new words and phrases wherever it finds them. It’s one of the things that makes English such an exciting language. German, on the other hand, has a tradition of a standard literary language, High German. There are dialects and colloquial speech galore, but when Germans want to converse seriously with one another, they turn to their formal, rather rigid High German, which tends to be much more conservative and changes only very slowly.

“Although there are writers like Arno Schmidt. One of the great things he did was to dynamite his native tongue wherever he could. But he did that more with metaphors and wordplay than with actually bringing in new language. He also played a lot with dialect. But in the last, let’s say, 10 to 20 years, actually in the time since I left Germany, a newer language is taking shape. And it’s happening fast. It’s very much influenced by English, incredibly. You get new verbs like managen. And all the computer language is English, of course, and they will pick up American synonyms where there’s a perfectly good German word already there. Gay power in Germany is Schwulenpower. ”

What is “schwulen’?

“ ‘Schwulen’ is the German word for gay. It sort of means sultry, but that’s a long story. Anyway, there are changes in the language. I keep up with it only to the extent that I’m over there once or twice a year. One of the major factors is the large new immigrant communities that have become part of Germany's major cities—Turks, Vietnamese, Greeks, Russians. And if I were asked to translate, let’s say a German novel by a Turk who has grown up in Germany speaking German, I might well find parts of his language, which will be rich in the slang and idioms of his community, very difficult to understand. I would probably need some help.”

It sounds like even an avant-garde writer would write in High German?

“They tend to write in standard old High German, although that’s starting to change. Language, of course, always changes, and my guess is that in 25 to 50 years, there will be a considerably different German than the one that Thomas Mann wrote in, although that still remains the language most well-educated Germans would be comfortable with as their formal language.”

Would the language change significantly with the end of the Wall?

“It hasn’t yet. Perhaps only in the sense that it opens up Germany to even more cosmopolitan influence. Certainly for those people in the East, it’s a whole new world, and the Central European influence will continue to grow stronger again now because of the renewed commercial and cultural exchange with Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary. Berlin is a very cosmopolitan city. I heard languages on the streets of Berlin I could not even begin to identify — Lithuanian, maybe, or Uzbek, I had no idea. So all that will of course have an influence on what happens in Germany.”

I ask who edits Woods’s translations.

“If you mean checks my translation over against the original, no one, unfortunately. This simply amazes my German counterparts. I know a few German translators. Every German publishing house has editors who go over every translation, comparing it word for word, with the original. I don’t know of any publishing house that does that anymore in this country.”

Would Helen Wolff have had somebody check the translation?

“Helen Wolff checked the translation herself. She was of the old school. Or she had staff who could, who were bilingual. It’s a rarity these days in publishing that there are people on staff who have a second language, whether it’s German or French or Serbo-Croatian or whatever.

“My editor knows German, but like everybody else in publishing today, she simply does not have the time to do that kind of editing. She reads the English text carefully, and she’s a great line editor. But nobody ever proofs my translation against the German—until the reviews come out. Then, of course, Professor Horrendo, as Breon Mitchell, a translator friend of mine likes to call him, discovers on page 23 that I’ve called an orange a tangerine. And proceeds to discuss the error at length.”

I interrupt, “And what a howler that was...”

“Yes, and what a howler that was. And the review of The Magic Mountain in the New York Times Book Review appeared in 'Books in Brief.’ I found that itself a howler. The man who reviewed it did not know that H.T. Lowe-Porter was a woman. He refers to her as ‘he.’ And he spent a good third of the review talking about what the fabric of Settembrini’s coat ought to be called and that he had a better solution than mine.”

D.J.R. Bruckner wrote in the New York Times (October 22,1995) in his 317-word review of Mr. Woods’s translation: “Of course, the pleasure of going through any translation is to catch lapses, and in a work so long and learned there are chances to mock any version. For instance, do we know more about Settembrini’s appearance when Mr. Woods has him wear an ‘ineluctable petersham coat’ than we did when Lowe-Porter clad him in an ‘inevitable pilot-coat’? This garment is meant to reveal something of the man’s politics and philosophy, it was often the garb of free thinkers in European cartoons and drawings early in this century. We would know it instantly if the translators just called it a peacoat.”

But Bruckner also wrote, “All the characters in Thomas Mann’s masterpiece The Magic Mountain come considerably closer to speaking English in John E. Woods’s version than they did in its predecessor, by H.T. Lowe-Porter, first published by Knopf in 1927. Lowe-Porter’s apology — ‘better...an English version.. .done ill than not done at all’ — was exaggerated, but his vocabulary was wholly Victorian, and he missed Mann's voice. Mr. Woods makes Mann talk much as we do, if always more intelligently, and he captures the irony and humor in all but a few passages.”

Mr. Woods says, “Professor Horrendo, of course, always knows better what to call the coat that Settembrini is wearing. And it wasn’t a peacoat, by the way. He latches on to some petty detail, and the whole sweep of the translation is forgotten.”

Do translators expect to be reviewed?

“Expect? No. The standard practice is the one-adverb review of the translation — ‘brilliantly,’ ‘adequately,’ ‘poorly translated.’ “I think if there’s a metaphor at all for what I do, it’s one I’ve taken from music. I am like a performing artist. You can’t hear a Brahms sonata until a pianist sits down and plays the notes for you. You can’t hear Thomas Mann until I sit down and play the notes for you. So, I think we translators ought to get more credit than we do.”

Did you ever make a horrible mistake?

“I’ve made lots of horrible mistakes. One in fact that Helen Wolff didn’t catch, in a small book by Günter Grass called Show Your Tongue, about a year he spent in Calcutta, India. And somewhere he uses the word ‘Schuppen, ’ which can mean the ‘scales of a fish’ or ‘dandruff.’ And in a moment of average inattention, I chose dandruff— and it should have been the scales of a fish. That sort of thing happens, it just happens. You’re working fast, you go back and check, but it never registers, and suddenly the translation is there forever in black and white.

“One of the things you learn, particularly in this job, is that there is no such thing as perfection in this existence. And you learn to live with that. It will never be perfect. Any translation can be made better both aesthetically and in terms of accuracy, and that’s why you correct four and five times yourself, and that’s why somebody else should look at it too. Because it will never be as good as it truly ought to be.”

I ask Mr. Woods if he were amazed, initially, at his ability to translate.

He says that he was but that what amazed him more was what great fun translating was. “I know that all my life I’ve been a word-smith, but one of the things I discovered in trying to write was that perhaps I didn’t have all that much of importance to say. And one of the great joys of translating the works of important authors like Schmidt, like Mann, like Ransmayr, and so many of the other things I get to do, is that you’re in the hands of masters who have wonderful things to say. And you get to say them for them, with them. It’s a great experience if that’s where your talent lies. And somehow that matchup has worked for me. And every day I get up and sit down at my computer, I still enjoy what I do. And I’ve been doing it now for 20 years.”

— Judith Moore
Author
Judith Moore (RIP)
Publish Date
July 18, 2026
Judith Moore has been a recipient of two NEA Fellowships for literature, most recently in 1996. She is coauthor with Sue Coe of X, published by Raw Books and Graphics and reissued by New Press, and author of The Left Coast of Paradise, Soho Press, which included pieces written initially for the San Diego Reader. Her essay collection, Never Eat Your Heart Out, also including pieces first printed in the Reader, was published early this year by Farrar, Straus & Giroux."
https://www.sandiegoreader.com/news/2026/jul/18/feature-thomas-mann-translator-works-out-of-mission-hills/
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

The Church’s liturgical language evolved from Greek to Latin before returning to the vernacular...
"Why Catholic Mass changed from Latin to local languages
The Church’s liturgical language evolved from Greek to Latin before returning to the vernacular, reflecting the enduring conviction that the Gospel should be proclaimed in languages people can understand

By Debra Maria Flint
Published: July 14, 2026 11:09 AM GMT
Updated: July 14, 2026 11:10 AM GMT

Jesus spent his life in the Roman province of Judaea, where four languages were in use: Latin, Koine Greek, Aramaic, and Hebrew.

Latin was the official language of Rome used by politicians, administrators and the military; Koine Greek was used in Judaea as the main language for administration and commerce among different cultures; Aramaic was the native language of Judaea, and Hebrew was the sacred language used for religious texts."
https://www.ucanews.com/news/why-catholic-mass-changed-from-latin-to-local-languages/114271
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

Automated sign language recognition and translation

Submission deadline

14 April 2027

 

This Collection supports and amplifies research related to: 

SDG 3 - Good Heath & Wellbeingand SDG 4 - Quality Education.

This Scientific Reports Collection welcomes original research on Automated sign language recognition and translation. Narrative review articles are also welcomed to our sister journal, Scientific Reviews. For further information, please view the ‘Participating Journals’ below.

The automated recognition and translation of sign language is increasingly important for improving communication access for Deaf and hard‑of‑hearing communities. Advances in deep learning and computer vision have significantly enhanced the ability to capture hand shapes, movements, facial expressions, and body posture. Modern models now support real‑time recognition, continuous signing interpretation, and natural‑language translation across diverse sign languages. Despite this progress, challenges remain due to linguistic complexity, signer variability, limited annotated datasets, and the need for culturally accurate translations.  —

To submit, see the participating journals

 

Editors

Jiaxin Cai, PhD

, 

 Abhishek Kumar, PhD

, 

 Phakkharawat Sittiprapaporn, PhD

 &

 Andrew Jeyabose Sundar, PhD

https://www.nature.com/collections/dfbcghfhbc

#metaglossia

#metaglossia_mundus

"Teaching with Ubuntu: Relational pedagogies for greater inclusion and equity
By CEID Blogger, on 15 July 2026
By Kwame Akyeampong and Sean Higgins

This blog shares reflections from our new book ‘Reconceptualising the learning crisis in Africa: Multi-dimensional pedagogies of Accelerated Learning Programmes’. For more than a decade, the conversation on education in Africa has been framed by the language of ‘crisis’, particularly the so-called ‘learning crisis’. Whilst there is a real challenge in literacy and numeracy outcomes, a crisis-dominant lens easily drifts into deficit thinking: portraying African children, teachers, and communities as lacking the capabilities to learn or teach.

An Ubuntu lens – grounded in African philosophies of care, compassion and collective responsibility – invites a different starting point. It reframes learners and teachers as knowledge-holders whose identities, languages and community ties are assets, not obstacles. As research across Ethiopia, Liberia and Ghana shows, when education systems honour these assets, learning becomes relational, joyful and transformative. Ubuntu turns attention away from imported toolkits and toward the relationships that make learning possible – between children and teachers, schools and communities and policy and practice.

Relational pedagogies in practice

Accelerated Learning Programs (ALPs) in Ethiopia, Ghana and Liberia illustrate Ubuntu in action. Each began as a response to exclusion – helping children who had dropped out or never attended school to re-enter formal education – and each achieved remarkable reach under tight constraints:

Ghana’s Complementary Basic Education (CBE) has supported over 250,000 learners, most in rural northern districts.
Ethiopia’s Speed Schools have reached more than 200,000 out-of-school children by 2017.
Liberia’s Second Chance program had about 5,000 participants by 2022.
What mattered was not imported materials but relational practice which included:

Recognising and building on the knowledge and strengths of African children and families.
Valuing local teachers’ deep knowledge of socio-cultural and economic contexts of their communities and children’s realities to organise participation, use home language strategically and build peer support.
Community language mapping to ensure teaching began in the language children actually understood.
Extended use of local languages in instruction (often two to three years longer than national policy required) which deepened comprehension and confidence.
Employing pedagogical approaches that supported holistic forms of learning, which dignify the agency and identity of the African child and their cultural and material environments.
Teacher-led, practice-centred support which replaced rigid scripted materials with shared problem-solving and mentoring.
Across settings, these moves connect curriculum goals to the material and cultural worlds of African children and enable deeper, transferable learning across subjects, not just literacy and numeracy. It also restored children’s dignity as capable learners and teachers’ agency as skilled professionals.

Language, identity and belonging

Decades of evidence show that learning in one’s home language for at least six years strengthens literacy, numeracy, motivation and self-esteem. Yet millions of African children still start school in a language that is not their own. Language of instruction is not a technical footnote – it is an equity hinge. When children cannot understand the language used in lesson delivery, they are effectively excluded from learning and from the sense of being legitimate learners.

Language of instruction can act as a gateway to communal engagement in learning, allowing children to bring what they know and experience into the classroom learning environment. As one Ghanaian linguist we interviewed points out: “…a child needs to learn from known to unknown… and from the mother tongue to be able to understand the principles, concepts and value… To use that as a basis to know.”

Instead, African children’s home languages are often trivialised as preparation for immersion in an ex-colonial language, rather than valued for their potential in facilitating meaningful and engaging learning opportunities. By excluding children’s languages, monolingual education policies and the pedagogical and curriculum approaches that result in devaluing their lives and lived experiences. In doing so, they thwart opportunities to draw on their familiar communicative practices to facilitate learning.

The myths concerning mother-tongue education – that there are too many languages, that African languages cannot express complex ideas, that English immersion guarantees fluency – have been disproven repeatedly. The deeper issue could be argued as the fear of the unknown: fear that valuing African languages may threaten national unity or global competitiveness. In truth, linguistic inclusion expands both. When learners hear and use their own languages in school, comprehension rises, participation increases and self-worth grows. Language becomes a bridge to belonging – and belonging is the soil in which learning takes root.

Four practical levers towards relational shifts in practice

Drawing on the book’s twelve guiding principles for a renewed postcolonial agenda to make meaningful progress towards Education For All, we have identified four practical levers can help ministries, teacher educators and development partners act now:

Map community languages before design: Conduct linguistic mapping so curriculum and materials match children’s real language environments.
Use local languages more consistently and for longer: Strengthen the implementation of mother-tongue instruction and ensure a more gradual, bilingual transition to the second language.
Centre classroom practice: Invest in teacher professional communities where educators adapt and co-create lesson resources rather than implement scripted plans.
Value teachers’ local knowledge: Redesign teacher education to build on teachers’ lived experience and multilingual capability.
These are not costly reforms – they are relational shifts. Each affirms Ubuntu’s ethic of mutual recognition and collective care, repositioning teachers, learners and communities as partners in the educational project.

Recommendations and ways forward

Moving from small pilots to national policy requires breaking with the ‘projectisation’ of reform. Donor-driven toolkits and narrow test-score targets cannot build the institutional capability needed for relational pedagogy to thrive. Ministries can take three steps:

Institutionalise language-inclusive policy – ensuring every child begins school in a language they understand.
Embed Ubuntu principles in teacher standards and curriculum frameworks, recognising teaching as a social, ethical practice of care.
Foster local professional learning networks that connect schools, communities and teacher colleges around shared inquiry.
Development partners can align funding and metrics to these goals – valuing participation, inclusion and teacher agency alongside test outcomes.

A way forward

Ubuntu reminds us that education is relationship before it is measurement. Inclusion and equity are not achieved by more testing but by restoring the human connections that make teaching and learning meaningful. The comparative lessons from Ghana, Ethiopia and Liberia show what is possible when policy begins with language, identity and belonging.

Filed under CEID, education and inequalities, Schools"
https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/ceid/2026/07/15/teaching-with-ubuntu-relational-pedagogies-for-greater-inclusion-and-equity/
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

ECA/OIF Fellowship Programme for Young African Translators

Call for Applications – 2026 Cohort

Application deadline: 31 July 2026

Organizational Setting and Reporting Relationships

The United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (ECA), in partnership with the

Organisation internationale de la Francophonie (OIF) and as part of the development by the

OIF of the international programme in translation and conference interpretation at the Collège

international de Villers-Cotterêts (Cité internationale de la langue française), is launching a

pilot fellowship programme aimed at strengthening the pool of qualified African language

professionals and preparing young translators for the standards and competitive examinations

of the language services of the United Nations system, including the DGACM.

This initiative contributes to the promotion of multilingualism within international

organizations and supports the professional development and employability of young African

language professionals.

The 3-month fellowship programme will be implemented between October and December

2026, within the Publications and Conference Management Section (PCMS) of ECA in Addis

Ababa, Ethiopia, and will combine practical immersion in UN language-service workflows,

mentoring by experienced professionals, and targeted professional development activities.

The programme is initially planned as a pilot cohort for 2026.

Fellowship Areas

The fellowship programme is open to young African professionals specialized in:

• Translation

• Revision/editing

• Conference documentation

• Multilingual communication

• Terminology and language technologies

The programme will primarily focus on French language professionals, with strong working

knowledge of English required. Knowledge of another UN official language is an advantage.

Responsibilities

Under the supervision of experienced language professionals within PCMS, Fellows will

contribute to selected activities related to multilingual conference and documentation services.Assignments may include:

• Translation and revision of documents;

• Research and terminology work;

• Exposure to UN editorial and documentation standards;

• Participation in mentoring and professional development activities;

• Familiarization with multilingual conference servicing workflows;

• Participation in practical exercises and simulations related to UN language

examinations;

• Support to selected multilingual communication and conference-related activities.

The Fellows will also participate in structured learning and mentoring activities and online

seminars/modules developed jointly by ECA and OIF.

Competencies

Professionalism: Ability to produce high-quality written work under supervision; ability to

work under pressure and meet deadlines; interest in multilingualism and international public

service.

Communication: Excellent drafting and language skills; ability to communicate clearly and

effectively in multicultural environments.

Teamwork: Ability to work collaboratively with colleagues from different cultural and

professional backgrounds.

Qualifications, target audience and eligibility criteria

(i) Be nationals of an African member State;

(ii) Be under 35 years of age at the time of application;

(iii) Hold a master’s degree, or equivalent, in translation, languages, linguistics or a

closely related field;

(iv) Have obtained the required degree within the last three years;

(v) Have French as their main language (“A” language);

(vi) Have English as a working language;

(vii) Demonstrate a strong interest in translation, revision and language services in an

international organization;

(viii) Be available to participate in the full duration of the programme in person in Addis

Ababa.

Special Notice

This call is open only to nationals of member States of the Economic Commission for Africa.

2Candidates must submit the following documents in PDF format:

(i) UN Administrative Profile (AP) generated through Inspira in French;

(ii) Motivation letter in French;

(iii) Curriculum vitae in French;

(iv) Certified true copies of advanced university degrees or attestation of results, and

transcripts;

(v) (vi) Copy of valid passport information page;

One professional or academic reference letter;

Shortlisted candidates will be invited to participate in a written assessment and a short online

interview.

The selection process will be conducted jointly by ECA and OIF.

Logistics

1. 2. The fellowship programme will take place in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia;

The duration of the fellowship is expected to be three months;

3. Selected Fellows will receive:

- A monthly stipend of USD 3,000;

- A one-time settling-in grant of USD 3,000;

- Return air travel between the fellow’s country of residence and Addis Ababa;

- Medical insurance coverage arrangements as applicable.

ALL SUBMISSIONS TO BE EMAILED TO:

Email Address: RecruitmentPPost@un.org

Subject Line: ECA Fellowship for Young African Professionals, 2026

Application deadline

- Applications must be received no later than 11:59 p.m. Addis Ababa time on 31

July 2026.

- Only shortlisted candidates will be contacted.

https://www.uneca.org/sites/default/files/vacancies/Language%20Talents%20EP.pdf

#metaglossia

#metaglossia_mundus

AI Translator Provides Fast Multilingual Translations

Ellen Smith — Jul 15, 2026 — Tech

References: ai-translator.cc

 

Communicating across languages is becoming increasingly important in a connected world, from international business conversations to everyday travel and learning. AI Translator offers a simple way to convert text between multiple languages using artificial intelligence-powered translation technology.

The online tool provides instant translations without requiring users to create an account, making it accessible whenever a quick language solution is needed. Whether translating messages, documents, or general text, users can receive fast results through a straightforward interface. The platform helps remove language barriers by making multilingual communication easier and more convenient for a wide range of users. With no registration process, AI Translator offers a friction-free experience for anyone looking to understand or share information in another language. It provides a practical digital resource for global communication, helping users translate content quickly while keeping the process simple and accessible.

Trend Themes

1. Frictionless Translation — No-account access lowers barriers for spontaneous multilingual communication, creating space for lightweight tools embedded across travel, commerce, education, and workplace workflows.
2. Instant Multilingual Communication — Real-time AI translation supports faster cross-border conversations, enabling digital services to become more inclusive for users who interact across languages.
3. Accessible AI Utilities — Simple browser-based AI tools are expanding everyday adoption by delivering practical value without complex onboarding, subscriptions, or specialized knowledge.

Industry Implications

1. Business Communication — Global teams and client-facing organizations benefit from rapid translation layers that reduce delays in emails, chats, proposals, and international collaboration.
2. Travel Technology — On-demand language conversion strengthens traveler confidence by making directions, messages, menus, and local information easier to understand in unfamiliar markets.
3. Education Technology — Multilingual translation tools broaden access to learning materials and peer communication, supporting more flexible participation across international classrooms and self-directed study.

"By Maung Maung Myint Thein (RIT)

In an increasingly interconnected world, translation is more than the conversion of words from one language into another. It is a bridge between cultures, civilizations, and generations. Through translation, readers gain access to the ideas, philosophies, histories, and artistic achievements of peoples beyond their own linguistic boundaries. For young people in particular, translated literature provides a gateway to global knowledge while strengthening intellectual curiosity, critical thinking, and cultural understanding.
Translation is the art of conveying the meaning, tone, and purpose of a text from its original language into another without losing its essence. It requires not only linguistic competence but also cultural sensitivity, literary judgment, and creative expression. Because no two languages are perfectly equivalent, translators must carefully balance accuracy with readability, ensuring that the translated work feels both faithful to the original and natural to its new audience.
The tradition of translation dates back thousands of years. The ancient Greek concept of metaphrasis emphasized faithful translation, while paraphrasis encouraged freer interpretation. Across Asia, particularly in India and China, translation played a vital role in the spread of religious texts, philosophical thought, and administrative knowledge. Buddhist scriptures, for example, travelled across linguistic and cultural borders through generations of dedicated translators, shaping civilizations far beyond their places of origin.
Myanmar has its own distinguished tradition of translation. Evidence of multilingual scholarship can be traced to the Bagan era, while earlier Pyu civilizations are believed to have translated texts from Sanskrit and Pali. The celebrated Myazedi Inscription, commissioned by Prince Rajkumar, stands as one of the world’s earliest examples of multilingual translation, presenting the same text in Burmese, Mon, Pyu, and Pali.
During the Konbaung Dynasty, increasing contact with Britain and France expanded the scope of translation from European languages into Burmese. Under the British education system, numerous academic works were translated for local students. Between the 1920s and the 1940s, books on anti-colonial struggles and international political movements introduced Myanmar readers to ideas that influenced the country’s own independence movement.
Following the Second World War, the translation of world classics accelerated significantly. A landmark moment came in 1947, when General Aung San called for the advancement of knowledge through translation. His vision inspired the establishment of the Burma Translation Society on 26 August 1947. The Society sought to translate important works into Burmese while introducing Myanmar literature to international readers through foreign-language translations. Its mission reflected the belief that translation is essential to national education, cultural development, and intellectual progress.
For any nation, translation is not merely a literary pursuit but an investment in human development. It enables societies to exchange knowledge, share cultural values, and participate in global intellectual life. As translation flourishes, so too does a nation’s capacity for innovation, education, and cultural dialogue.
Young readers stand to benefit enormously from translated literature. World classics introduce them to different civilizations while encouraging empathy, reflection, and intellectual maturity.
Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, beautifully translated into Burmese by the distinguished writer Tint Te, offers timeless insights into social class, personal integrity, and human relationships. Through such works, Burmese readers gain an understanding of nineteenth-century British society while recognizing universal human values that transcend time and geography.
Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, translated into Burmese under the title Myaw Ta Lin Lin by Shwe U Daung and later by Maung Htun Thu, follows the moral and emotional journey of the young protagonist Pip. Beyond its compelling narrative, the novel enriches readers’ vocabulary, deepens their appreciation of literary style, and explores themes of ambition, humility, and personal growth.
Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, translated into Burmese as Lay Htan Kone by Min Kyaw, presents one of English literature’s most powerful explorations of love, obsession, revenge, and human psychology. The novel demonstrates the enduring complexity of human emotions while exposing readers to sophisticated literary expression.
William Shakespeare’s Macbeth remains one of the greatest studies of ambition, guilt, and political power. Long included in higher education curricula, its Burmese translation has enabled generations of students to appreciate Shakespeare’s profound understanding of human nature without language becoming a barrier.
Young readers interested in history and politics should also explore Leo Tolstoy’s monumental War and Peace, masterfully translated into Burmese by the renowned scholar Mya Than Tint, who received the National Literary Award for his translation in 1972. Set against the backdrop of the Napoleonic Wars, the novel examines leadership, war, morality, and the resilience of ordinary people amid extraordinary historical events.
For readers seeking philosophical depth, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, translated by Nat Nwe, offers profound reflections on morality, faith, justice, and human responsibility. Its intellectual richness challenges readers to think critically about ethical dilemmas and the complexities of the human condition.
Translated literature is not limited to fiction. Non-fiction works also play a transformative role in shaping young minds. U Nu’s translation of Mittabala Tika remains an important contribution to Burmese intellectual life. Likewise, Dale Carnegie’s internationally acclaimed How to Win Friends and Influence People has introduced millions of readers worldwide to practical principles of communication, leadership, and interpersonal relationships. The book encourages readers to avoid unnecessary criticism, express sincere appreciation, inspire others through genuine interest, and cultivate habits that strengthen both personal and professional success.
Among translated novels, one particularly remarkable work is A J Cronin’s The Citadel, translated into Burmese by Maung Htun Thu, which won the Myanmar National Literary Award for Translation in 1983. Drawing on Cronin’s own experience as a physician, the novel explores medical ethics, professional integrity, social reform, and the conflict between idealism and materialism. More than a medical novel, it is a compelling examination of human character and moral responsibility.
The enduring value of translated literature lies in its ability to broaden perspectives while nurturing emotional intelligence and ethical awareness. Through unforgettable characters and richly imagined worlds, young readers develop empathy, resilience, and the capacity to understand lives different from their own.
Classics such as Pride and Prejudice, Great Expectations, and Jane Eyre teach lessons about personal character, responsibility, ambition, love, and integrity. They reveal how social structures, moral choices, and individual determination shape human destiny. American classics, including The Old Man and the Sea, The Grapes of Wrath, and Invisible Man, likewise encourage perseverance, courage, justice, and self-discovery while offering insights into the social and historical experiences of another nation.
For today’s generation, translated literature is far more than entertainment. It expands intellectual horizons, strengthens critical thinking, encourages cultural appreciation, and inspires lifelong learning. In an era defined by globalization, young people who engage with translated works are better equipped to understand both their own heritage and the wider world.
A nation that invests in translation invests in its future. By encouraging young people to read translated literature, Myanmar can cultivate informed citizens, thoughtful leaders, and globally minded individuals who are prepared to contribute meaningfully to both national development and international understanding.

https://www.gnlm.com.mm/beyond-borders-why-young-people-should-read-translated-literature/
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