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Charles Tiayon
November 8, 8:05 PM
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"What We Cannot See
Eh bien, éteignez donc un peu la lumière, pour voir.
By Colin MarshallNovember 7, 2026
Memoir & Essay Did you know LARB is a reader-supported nonprofit?
LARB publishes daily without a paywall as part of our mission to make rigorous, incisive, and engaging writing on every aspect of literature, culture, and the arts freely accessible to the public. Help us continue this work with your tax-deductible donation today! Donate IN THE 1960S, many readers of Japanese literature in English translation were drawn in by the “Big Three” living novelists: Yasunari Kawabata, Yukio Mishima, and Jun’ichirō Tanizaki. Tanizaki died first, in 1965, a year after being favored to win the Nobel Prize (it went to Jean-Paul Sartre instead; Kawabata would win it three years later, becoming the first Japanese writer to do so). Born in 1886, Tanizaki was the oldest of the Big Three and the most rooted in the civilization of a Japan that was, by that point, almost completely effaced by the process some would call modernization, and others Westernization. Tanizaki’s relationship to that process followed a familiar arc for that particular generation, which came of age at the turn of the 20th century. For him, an early, undiscriminating preference for all things new and Western—practically equivalent terms at the time—eventually gave way to a mournful, somewhat defensive, and even ostentatious reverence for the old ways of life being cast off by his homeland. “Most Japanese picture the author as a kimono-clad literary giant expounding on the essence of Japanese culture,” writes the celebrated architect Kengo Kuma in his foreword to Gregory Starr’s 2017 English translation of Tanizaki’s extended essay In Praise of Shadows. More so than Kawabata or Mishima, “our impression of Tanizaki is of a larger-than-life figure—a member of an older generation who lived in another universe and had an appreciation of the deepest aspects of the cultural milieu.” Indeed, by the time Kuma was born, in 1954, Tanizaki had already written virtually all the work on which his reputation rests, including the novels Naomi (1925), Some Prefer Nettles (1929), and The Makioka Sisters (1948). Those books treat seriously, if sometimes luridly, the theme of Japan’s transformation in a world dominated by the West. By comparison, In Praise of Shadows (1933), originally commissioned by a magazine and published in serial form, may at first seem insubstantial. And yet, some consider this brief meditation on domestic architecture, restaurant lighting, theater costumes, and wooden outhouses Tanizaki’s true masterpiece. Take, for instance, the Japanologist René Sieffert, who in the preface to his French translation calls it a book “que je ne suis pas le seul à tenir pour son chef-d’œuvre” (“which I am not the only one to consider his masterpiece”). Éloge de l’ombre was the first version of Shadows—or rather, In’ei Raisan, to use its Japanese title—to appear in that language in 1977, the same year an English translation was first published in book form. The latter is the work of two translators: Edward G. Seidensticker, one of the notable American Japanologists originally brought east by the war and subsequent occupation, and the Australian scholar of Japanese literature Thomas J. Harper. Seidensticker’s first translated excerpts of Tanizaki’s essay ran in the Japan Quarterly in 1954 (two decades after it was published in Japan) and were picked up the following year by The Atlantic Monthly. Harper translated the remainder for the book that appeared in 1977, which, despite its patchwork assembly, has remained the gold standard among In Praise of Shadows’ English translations, due not least to the highly crafted quality of its prose. Seidensticker and Harper’s version opens thus: What incredible pains the fancier of traditional architecture must take when he sets out to build a house in pure Japanese style, striving somehow to make electric wires, gas pipes, and water lines harmonize with the austerity of Japanese rooms—even someone who has never built a house for himself must sense this when he visits a teahouse, a restaurant, or an inn. That first line carried me along to read the rest of the slim, nondescript brown volume in its entirety, which I first discovered in the little-frequented Japanese literature stacks high up in my university’s library. At the time, I had no particular knowledge of Tanizaki’s work, nor of anything written by the Big Three. If memory serves, I was there in search of books by Kōbō Abe, the imaginative, obscenely jokey existentialist whose most widely known novel inspired the sixties art-house phenomenon Woman in the Dunes. But In Praise of Shadows has a way of capturing the non-Japanese imagination, as evidenced by its continuing reference and retranslation in the West. Since the 1977 version, two more translators have brought it into English: Starr in 2017, and now Michael P. Cronin, whose collection of translated Tanizaki pieces, In Praise of Shadows and Other Essays, came out this year. These days, anyone with an interest in architecture who wants to build a traditional Japanese house will find themselves going to great pains to come up with ingenious means to install electricity, gas, water and other modern facilities in ways that will not disturb the austere harmony of the zashiki, the formal tatami room. If they have spent any time at all in traditional structures like teahouses, restaurants or inns, even a rank amateur will sense the challenge. So begins Starr’s translation, which wastes no time in reflecting the difference in Western awareness of Japanese culture over the preceding six decades: notice that he doesn’t shy from including the word “zashiki,” in whose explanatory aside the bamboo mats known as tatami are assumed to be familiar enough to go without italics. Cronin renders the same passage as follows: When someone with an interest in architecture has a new house built these days, it’s fashionable to install the electricity, gas, water and other conveniences in such a way as to harmonize with traditional Japanese tatami-mat rooms; even those who have not built their own homes notice similar efforts when they enter a traditional room in a restaurant or inn. Like Seidensticker and Harper, and unlike Starr, Cronin preserves Tanizaki’s single opening sentence, employing a semicolon rather than an em dash. Tanizaki uses no such punctuation in the original: only commas separate clause after clause, all of which pile up to what can feel to modern readers like a great length. It may not have to his educated domestic audience of the mid-1930s, especially those who read it in monthly installments. Still, some must surely have been intimidated by In’ei Raisan’s full text, composed as it is of just 16 massive paragraphs. (They certainly look formidable to most non-native readers.) While no translator in any Western language, to my knowledge, has wholly resisted the temptation to break up its sentences, Cronin, like Eduard Klopfenstein in his 1987 German translation, leaves the paragraphs intact. However uneasy on the eyes, especially in our age of screen-scrolled text, it does lend a degree of visual logic to what at first seems an unpredictable drift from subject to subject. One block of text starts by comparing Chinese and Japanese paper with its Western equivalent, and ends with a consideration of dentists’ offices; another starts by comparing Japanese and Western ghosts, and ends with an image of women of olden times emitting darkness itself straight from their bodies, “like the Demon Spider.” As that image suggests, while In Praise of Shadows may be essayistic in form, it remains the work of a novelist. Tanizaki has an evocative way of sketching a scene, an ability especially well conveyed by Seidensticker and Harper. Despite his prejudice against electric lighting, he admits that, “seen at dusk as one gazes out upon the countryside from the window of a train, the lonely light of a bulb under an old-fashioned shade, shining dimly from behind the white paper shoji of a thatch-roofed farmhouse, can seem positively elegant.” In the largest room of a remembered Kyoto teahouse, “an elderly waitress with shaven eyebrows and blackened teeth” kneels by a candle whose light gives way to a “lofty, intense, monolithic” darkness :different in quality from darkness on the road at night. It was a repletion, a pregnancy of tiny particles like fine ashes, each particle luminous as a rainbow.” And in his favorite kind of now-unbuildable bathroom, “with its long, narrow windows at floor level,” one can “listen with such a sense of intimacy to the raindrops falling from the eaves and the trees, seeping into the earth as they wash over the base of a stone lantern and freshen the moss about the stepping stones.” These are not the elements of an argument, exactly, but if Tanizaki does make one, it goes something like this: by the early 1930s, Japan’s zeal for Western technology and aesthetics had made it difficult even to build a satisfactory traditional house, so poorly do accoutrements like glass windows and telephones comport with the ascetic nature of the structure itself. Bathrooms have become all but impossible, given the inevitable clash between bright ceramic tile and weathered wood. Like all such imported tools invented and refined to meet the needs of foreigners, the Western toilet inherently fails to suit Japanese sensibilities, or indeed the Japanese soul. Had Japan stayed its own course of development, however slowly, rather than being intimidated into rapidly assimilating the elements of a “superior” civilization, these problems could have been avoided. That would also have saved countless forms of vanishing traditional beauty, especially those predicated on the seductive partial concealment of weak illumination by candles and oil lamps: the soft shine of a lacquerware soup bowl; the whitened face (and, in Tanizaki’s childhood, blackened teeth) of a hostess; the majestic costumes of Buddhist priests and Noh theater performers; the mystery of a home’s recessed tokonoma alcove and the scroll painting and flower arrangement it frames, which direct lighting renders utterly banal. The peoples of the West passed through their own long eras without electric lights or indoor plumbing. Why, then, did they not cultivate the same appreciation for shadows and darkness as the Japanese? Tanizaki offers two explanations. First, the Japanese, unlike drivingly progressive Westerners, have always lived more by reconciling themselves to their conditions than by attempting to “improve” those conditions, choosing to conceal deficiencies rather than eliminate them. (“What we cannot see, we assume does not exist,” as Cronin translates.) Second, their penchant for muted colors and dim lighting arises, to an extent unconsciously, from a desire to set off the tone of their skin. “[N]o matter how white a Japanese person may be, their whiteness is always slightly dusky,” writes Tanizaki in Cronin’s translation (henceforth quoted unless specified otherwise). Even heavily powdered women “cannot smother the dark shade at the base of their skin. You recognize it just as you recognize the bottom of a clear, blue lake when you survey it from a great height.” (Seidensticker and Harper: “as plainly visible as dirt at the bottom of a pool of pure water.”) A sole Japanese participant amid a gathering of white foreigners “is like a spot of ink on a sheet of white paper, and even the rest of us find it uncomfortable to see, considering that person to be rather an eyesore.” This brings to mind Natsume Sōseki, the most acclaimed novelist of the generation before Tanizaki’s, who wrote about his self-perception while studying abroad in London: “I see a dwarf coming, a man with an unpleasant complexion—and he happens to be my own reflection in the shop window. I don’t know how many times I have laughed at my own ugly appearance right in front of myself.” Sōseki liked to describe his mind as “half-Western and half-Japanese,” and though he wrote that he was “impressed by the appropriateness of the term ‘yellow race,’” his time abroad may well have inspired a renewal of his own appreciation for Japanese culture. Shadows offers a paean to the ambience of the kawaya, or traditional latrine, in which Tanizaki notes how “Mr. Sōseki counted his morning bowel movement among the pleasures of life.” Later, discussing culinary matters, he cites praise for “the color of yōkan red-bean jelly” in Sōseki’s 1906 novel Kusamakura, or The Three-Cornered World. “Such depth and complexity of color is absolutely unknown in Western sweets. How naïve and one-dimensional whipped cream seems, by comparison!” Tanizaki’s remarks on the consequences of Japanese skin and its coloration would hardly have raised an eyebrow in the thirties, and that sort of commentary isn’t limited to his own countrymen. In taking his country to task for its profligate use of electricity, he also includes an anecdote about Albert Einstein touring Japan. Apparently, Einstein pointed out the wastefulness of streetlights turned on at midday, as seen from the window of a train. When telling the story later, the Japanese publisher who accompanied him “added that Einstein was very attentive to that sort of thing, being Jewish.” Some readers will be bothered by what they see as stereotyping, and others by interruption of the piece’s flow. “His descriptions of lacquerware under candlelight and women in the darkness of the house of pleasure are perfect jewels; but would they not stand out to better advantage removed from the company of that murmuring bowl of soup and Einstein’s trip to Kyoto?” asks Harper in his afterword. “Yet to do so would drain the life of In Praise of Shadows, for Tanizaki’s ‘essay’ works in ways different from the Western essay, and demands the freedom of his seemingly haphazard style.” Idiosyncratic though they may seem to Western readers, these qualities accord with a long-acknowledged literary genre in Asia: “zuihitsu or ‘following the brush,’ a Song-dynasty (960–1276) Chinese form characterized by seemingly random observations on everyday life,” as Wellesley professor of modern Japanese literature Eve Zimmerman explains in her afterword to Starr’s translation. “The zuihitsu’s startling and at times paradoxical depictions perfectly suited Tanizaki’s purposes.” Unable to rely on the solidity of the prose’s structure, the practitioner stands or falls on his control of its tone, the aspect of In Praise of Shadows with which translators have the most evident difficulty. In Japanese, it’s as if Tanizaki is thinking out loud, confidently yet tentatively. He displays a measured restraint even when accumulating detail after detail, admitting various qualifications and contradictions, or relating his frustrations, all with the lightest touch of irony, though translations usually make his voice more literary or emphatic. Seidensticker and Harper turn him into a 19th-century English essayist; Sieffert turns him into a 19th-century French one, though with enough syntactical loyalty that he often sounds Japanese nonetheless. Klopfenstein’s Tanizaki sounds like a serious, Horkheimer-style cultural philosopher; Atsuko Ricca Suga’s Italian version (in 1982’s Libro d’ombra, the title Elogio dell’ombra having already been used for a Jorge Luis Borges poetry collection) engages in more flights of lyricism, with the word “chiaroscuro” naturally at her disposal. The Japanese poet Ryoko Sekiguchi, long active in France and the French language, tried her hand more recently. In collaboration with her translation partner Patrick Honnoré, she produced the often unsettlingly idiomatic, even conversational Louange de l’ombre in 2017, the year of Starr’s almost equally free English interpretation. It’s tempting to describe Cronin’s new In Praise of Shadows as aiming, in formality, above Starr but below Seidensticker and Harper. It is, in any case, the most scholarly English translation so far, which stands to reason given the translator’s résumé. An associate professor of Japanese studies at William & Mary, he previously published a translation of Tanizaki’s final novel The Maids (1962–63), as well as a study of early midcentury Osaka as represented in film and literature. His apparent fascination with Japan’s comparatively uncosmopolitan “merchant capital” may originate in the years he lived in the wider Osaka-Kobe conurbation, known as Hanshin, before beginning his academic career. Tanizaki’s life, too, can be divided into pre- and post-Hanshin periods: a Tokyoite born and raised, he moved west in middle age after the 1923 Great Kantō Earthquake devastated the capital. There he discovered, or claimed to have discovered, the old-fashioned Japan of his childhood still carrying rustically on, far from the whirlwind of imported trend and fashion that was Tokyo. As with many of Tanizaki’s perceptions, it wouldn’t do to take this at face value. As Cronin writes in his introduction, “The region was in fact an entry-point for modern popular culture and imports from the West—cinema, jazz, coffeehouse culture and more,” citing a critic who described it as “Japan’s America” in 1929. Along with Shadows, Cronin also includes translations of earlier pieces in which Tanizaki offers his observations of Osaka and Hanshin, as well as his memories of Tokyo. These do something to place the central essay in not just geographical but also historical context, which can become somewhat hazy in the more modernizing translations. That Tanizaki was writing before the war would be obvious to any Japanese reader from his vocabulary (and, trickier for the translator, the Chinese characters, or kanji, with which he represents it) alone: “kawaya,” for example, which Cronin suitably renders as “privy” where previous English translations had simply used “toilet.” He also restores Tanizaki’s attitude of speaking for not merely his countrymen but his entire race: “we Orientals” in Seidensticker and Harper became “Easterners” in Starr, while Cronin has both “we Easterners” and “we Asians.” To be sure, the condition diagnosed by In Praise of Shadows hardly afflicted Japan alone. It was practically inevitable that I would start thinking about the essay again while living in South Korea, where I’ve spent more than 10 years now, and whose households routinely keep their fluorescent lighting on full blast well into the night. Tanizaki may have regarded his homeland as technologically disfigured by a combination of foreign coercion and genuine infatuation (of a kind he himself had experienced, despite never having traveled to the West). But here, Japan is seen as a country whose modernization proceeded comparatively on its own terms. Korea’s more harried transformation, many aspects of which were initiated under Japanese colonial rule in the first decades of the 20th century, offered not even the pretense of choice: especially after the Second World War, Korean civilization had to adapt or die, with economically revolutionary but culturally and intellectually deranging consequences. “Our thinking and way of life were borrowed,” said an anonymous Korean official quoted in The New Koreans: The Story of a Nation (2017) by longtime British expatriate Michael Breen. “Most majors we study were not created by us. Nor are the sports we play, the music we listen to, the movies we watch, or even the food we eat.” In sum, “it’s like we’re wearing shirts and pants that don’t fit.” It’s no surprise that Tanizaki eventually put on a kimono, nor that In Praise of Shadows has also been published in Korean translation. While keeping generally faithful to the shape of the original Japanese sentences, as one can do more easily in Korean than in any other language, the poet Go Un-gi performs certain localizations in his 2005 translation, as when he changes “tsukemono ishi,” a stone traditionally used to weigh down a pickling container, to a stone about as heavy as “gimjang dol,” or one that would be used in the making of kimchi. This comes in the essay’s final section, where Tanizaki (irrelevantly, so the zuihitsu-uninitiated will assume) provides a complete recipe for kakinohazushi, a simple persimmon-leaf-wrapped salmon sushi eaten by the hill folk of Nara. “I was impressed by the ingenuity of those mountain people, so poor in resources, to have come up with this way of eating salted salmon,” he writes. “But then, by inquiring into various local foodways, one discovers that country folk have much more reliable palates than city folk these days and enjoy luxuries we cannot imagine.” No other translator has come up with quite as nuanced a translation of “kyoudo ryouri” as “foodways”—but then, none of their choices evoke the bulletin board at the local co-op either. Any translation inevitably reflects something of its time, and that several new versions of In Praise of Shadows have appeared in the past nine years suggests a renewed interest in the ideas it presents compared to a generation ago. “The stunning emergence of Japan in the last few decades as a world leader in technological innovation, as well as the recent industrial awakening of Taiwan and Korea, exposes the idealism of Tanizaki’s notions,” writes the poet (and onetime Japan resident) Brad Leithauser in a New York Review of Books piece from 1985. “Those processes and products that so discomfited him would now seem to spring from economic imperatives that know no national boundaries. It was not Wester[n] but moder[n] technology—with its demands for assembly-line production and fungible goods—that left him feeling so woeful.” At that time, with the Japanese economic bubble looking unburstable, it would perhaps have seemed fatuous, if not insane, to speculate on “how different everything would be if we in the Orient had developed our own science,” as Seidensticker and Harper translate Tanizaki. “[W]ould not our myriads of everyday gadgets, our medicines, the products of our industrial art—would they not have suited our national temper better than they do?” However difficult it is to answer, the question still compels interest. Quite possibly, as the fluorescent light of ostensibly global 21st-century modernity bleaches the mystique out of more corners of the world than ever before, even a hypothetical alternative path captures the imagination. Tanizaki himself saw his cause as mostly lost, closing In Praise of Shadows with a declaration that he wants only to “extend the eaves of that sanctuary called literature, darken its walls, push back into the shadows those things that have been overexposed, and strip away useless decoration. It need not be done to every house—just one will do. To discover what it would be like, we must first try turning out the lights.” Seidensticker and Harper: “[P]erhaps we may be allowed at least one mansion where we can turn off the electric lights and see what it is like without them.” Sieffert: “Pour voir ce que cela peut donner, eh bien, je m’en vais éteindre ma lampe électrique.” Sekiguchi and Honnoré: “Eh bien, éteignez donc un peu la lumière, pour voir.” Klopfenstein: “Und um zu sehen, was dabei herauskommt, lösche ich probeweise einmal das elektrische Licht.” Ricca Suga: “Per cominciare, spegniamo le luci. Poi, si vedrà.” Each of these translators captures a certain aspect of Tanizaki’s characteristic rhetorical flourish, but many angles remain for others to illuminate. LARB Contributor Colin Marshall is a Seoul-based essayist on cities, language, and culture. He is the author of the books 한국 요약 금지 (“No Summarizing Korea,” 2024)...
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/junichiro-tanizaki-shadows-translations-cronin-starr-seidensticker-harper/
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🌍 METAGLOSSIA WEEKEND DIGEST, Issue No. 005 is out.
Beyond words and languages: Building bridges across worlds.
Twenty stories on translation, interpreting and language technology, and one question: who pays for understanding, and who decides when it is enough?
📚 Eva Baltasar wins the Medícis étranger, a first for a book written in Catalan. Korea Times announces its translation awards.
🤖 DeepL’s CEO on real-time translation, RWS on the end of per-word pricing, and why press-release claims deserve checking.
🌐 What endangered languages can teach AI, speech-recognition error rates above 60% in Yoruba, and a plurilingualism colloquium in Saint-Louis, Senegal.
🎯 Canada’s interpreter capacity, RWS completing its Acolad deal, and a survey of literary translators on AI.
💼 Jobs and events for 6 to 13 November, including an Africa-focused UN Volunteers role.
💬 How should translation be priced when AI produces the first draft?
👇🏽👇🏽👇🏽Read the issue: 👇🏽👇🏽👇🏽
https://metaglossia.com/metaglossia-weekend-digest-no-005-is-out/
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"Imagine asking an AI assistant a question in Moroccan Darija and getting an answer that actually understands what you’re saying. Not Modern Standard Arabic. Not French. Actual Darija. That possibility is becoming part of Morocco’s plans for artificial intelligence. The government has outlined new details about its approach to AI..."
https://lnt.ma/morocco-is-building-an-ai-plan-and-darija-is-part-of-it/
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Aure analyzes incoming speech continuously, using both the translated words and the source audio to decide how each translated sentence is delivered
Key points
Aure analyzes incoming speech continuously, using both the translated words and the source audio to decide how each translated sentence is delivered.
It launches in eight languages across DeepL Voice for Online Meetings, In-Person Conversations and the DeepL API for Voice, with no setup; other languages keep the older voice models.
DeepL says Aure builds no stored voice profile and deletes voice data from memory when a session ends.
DeepL on Nov. 11 launched Aure, a voice model that carries a speaker's changing tone, emotion, emphasis and speaking pace into real-time translated speech. Aure now powers DeepL Voice, the Cologne company's live voice translation product, and is applied automatically across DeepL Voice for Online Meetings, DeepL Voice for In-Person Conversations and the DeepL API for Voice.
Until now, DeepL Voice generated the translated voice from a static sample taken in the opening moments of a conversation. That captured who was speaking but not how, so it could not follow a change in emotion or pace, or convey delivery that contradicts the words, such as sarcasm, the company said. Aure instead keeps analyzing the incoming speech, using the translated text and the source audio together to shape how each sentence is spoken. "With Aure, we can capture even the subtlest shifts in expression as they happen and carry them into another language, in someone's own voice and in real time," said Jarek Kutylowski, DeepL's CEO and founder.
How it works and where it runs
DeepL said it trained Aure with techniques that separate a speaker's voice identity, prosody and spoken content so each can be carried into the new language independently, then used reinforcement learning to keep translation accuracy and speech quality while removing accents from the output. The model also has to isolate the speaker from background noise, echo and distortion, and adapt to each voice within a sentence because DeepL deletes meeting audio, transcripts and translations when a session ends and so has little cross-language data from the same speaker. Aure matches the voice live without creating a stored voice profile, and DeepL says the data is not used to train its models.
Aure initially supports English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese and Korean; DeepL Voice falls back to its earlier voice models for other languages. DeepL did not announce separate pricing. The company added voice preservation, which keeps a speaker's own recognizable voice in translation, in September, and has been building out voice since launching voice-to-voice translation in April. It named Pioneer, Aramark, Avendra International and Inetum as DeepL Voice customers. DeepL says its meeting product, which works in Microsoft Teams, Zoom and Google Meet, makes 76% fewer critical translation errors than the platforms' built-in translation tools."
Nov 11, 2026
MLQ Agent
https://mlq.ai/news/deepl-launches-aure-a-voice-model-that-carries-tone-and-speaking-speed-across-languages/
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"L'autorité allemande de la concurrence estime que les pratiques de PayPal pourraient restreindre la concurrence
L'autorité allemande de la concurrence, l'Office fédéral des cartels, a déclaré mercredi qu'une interdiction d' PYPL.O imposée par PayPal aux commerçants en ligne, leur interdisant de facturer des frais supplémentaires à leurs clients pour l'utilisation de ce moyen de paiement, pourrait entraver la concurrence et éventuellement enfreindre la loi.
PayPal, l’un des moyens de paiement en ligne les plus courants en Allemagne, a déclaré ne pas partager les conclusions préliminaires de l’Office, mais qu’il « continuerait à participer de manière constructive à la procédure ».
L’Office fédéral des cartels, qui a ouvert une enquête sur l’ en 2023, a indiqué que PayPal pratiquait des frais supérieurs à la moyenne par rapport aux autres moyens de paiement et que sa part de marché était également très élevée.
« Tant que PayPal doit être proposé sans frais supplémentaires, les consommateurs sont moins incités à utiliser un autre moyen de paiement, ce qui réduirait également la pression concurrentielle sur les frais facturés par PayPal aux commerçants », a déclaré l’Office des ententes.
L’autorité a ajouté qu’elle examinait également la possibilité que PayPal soit contraint de restituer les bénéfices qu’il a tirés de cette pratique et que PayPal avait désormais la possibilité de présenter ses observations sur ses conclusions préliminaires.
(Dans l'intérêt des personnes dont l'anglais n'est pas la langue maternelle, Reuters automatise la traduction de ses articles dans un certain nombre d'autres langues. Étant donné que la traduction automatique peut générer des erreurs ou ne pas inclure le contexte nécessaire, Reuters ne garantit pas l'exactitude du texte traduit automatiquement, mais fournit ces traductions uniquement pour la commodité de ses lecteurs. Reuters décline toute responsabilité en cas de dommages ou de pertes de quelque nature que ce soit causés par l'utilisation de la fonction de traduction entièrement automatisée."
information fournie par Reuters •11/11/2026 à 11:29
https://www.boursorama.com/bourse/actualites-amp/l-autorite-allemande-de-la-concurrence-estime-que-les-pratiques-de-paypal-pourraient-restreindre-la-concurrence-44ffdd5d3f397243e777375b07997bb7
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How thinking local can spark bigger ideas
Asper research reveals how local pride can help businesses unlock more creative ideas through crowdsourcing.
Asper School of Business Assistant Professor of Marketing and F. Ross Johnson Fellow Sijie Sun
A classic grocery store moment: you’re in the chip aisle, and a bizarre flavour catches your eye. Honey butter. Wild mushrooms and sour cream. Bacon grilled cheese.
Who comes up with this stuff? It turns out, we do.
Crowdsourcing—the practice of giving everyday people the chance to offer your company ideas for products, ad slogans or more—isn’t new. It’s a bulletproof way to get good publicity for your company and good ideas from thousands of people (or maybe more).
It’s also the underlying subject of the latest article by Sijie Sun, Assistant Professor of Marketing at I.H. Asper School of Business, “Local–Global Identity Salience and Creativity: The Mediating Role of Group-Based Pride,” published in the Financial Times 50-rated Journal of Marketing—the latest in a series of Asper articles published in prestigious journals.
As trade tensions renew conversations about what it means to buy, build and support local, Sun’s research reveals an unexpected benefit of local pride: when people are encouraged to think about their local identity, they can generate more creative ideas than when their global identity is emphasized.
Do you think locally or globally?
As a professor in Canada originally from China, Sun often researches how some consumers dominantly think about the local community, while others see the world as more of a global community.
He decided to investigate whether identifying more locally, or more globally could produce better crowdsourcing results.
Locally-minded people are very in tune with what’s close in proximity to them. For example, they keep up with local news, eat at nearby restaurants, and stay close with the friends they’ve made in their hometown or city.
Those who identify more globally tend to keep up more with world-based news and foreign films while seeing themselves as members of a global village.
Higher Group-based pride leads to higher creativity
So how does this play into your creative output?
Globally-minded people tend to feel less connected to their local communities. Says Sun, “Being a citizen of the universe—that’s too broad. It’s too big.”
The locally-minded, however, experience more group-based pride, which is the feeling of closeness and belonging within a community.
Turns out, having that pride gives you less to worry about—which gives you more cognitive capacity to connect seemingly unrelated ideas, i.e. creativity.
A logo used by Sun and his co-authors to cue research participants into thinking locally
How to set up crowdsourcing to get the most creative ideas:
1. Reach people when local or national pride is already strong
People may be more creative when they are thinking about their city, region or country. Marketers can take advantage of times when local thinking is amplified.
For example, in today’s economic climate, a Canadian company could take advantage of a heightened sense of connection to Canada by asking customers to help develop a new Canadian-made product, rethink a product using Canadian suppliers, or come up with ideas that support local businesses and workers.
Designing crowdsourcing campaigns around feelings of local pride, closeness, and connection may also naturally draw local-minded participants to a campaign.
Being a citizen of the universe—that’s too broad. It’s too big.
Sijie Sun
2. Use simple messages that encourage people to think locally
Marketers can also use small cues to put people in a local mindset before asking them for ideas.
For example, a Canadian crowdsourcing campaign could use phrases such as “support Canadian,” “made here” or “help us build a Canadian solution” before asking consumers to contribute ideas.
At a time when supporting local businesses has taken on renewed importance for Canadians, Sun’s research suggests that local pride can do more than influence what consumers buy. It can also shape how they think, collaborate and create.
For businesses looking for their next big idea, the answer might be closer to home than they think.
Read the full text of Local–Global Identity Salience and Creativity: The Mediating Role of Group-Based Pride(external link) .
The Asper School of Business aims to expand the creation of global knowledge and engage in intellectual exploration to advance management research and practice. Our researchers’ scholarly work is regularly published in world’s most renowned outlets in the field.
Be part of this flourishing research culture and learn more about research programs in management (MSc and PhD) at the Stu Clark Graduate School. (external link)
Boilerplate: Research
For nearly 150 years, UM has transformed lives through groundbreaking research and homegrown innovation. We push the boundaries of knowledge and do the hard work here in Manitoba to move our community and the world forward. With a spirit of determination and discovery, we are shaping a better future for our province and beyond."
November 9, 2026
By Brett Maclaren
https://umtoday.ca/stories/how-thinking-local-can-spark-bigger-ideas
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
Microsoft imagine une IA qui traduit une vidéo en direct et ajuste les mouvements des lèvres
Par
Mélina Loupia
Journaliste rédactrice, spécialiste tech et cybersécurité
Mis à jour le 08 novembre 20
Sur l’écran de votre téléphone, un conférencier coréen vous parlerait en français, avec des lèvres qui articulent chaque mot de la traduction. Microsoft a déposé une demande de brevet pour un système d’IA capable de réécrire en direct les paroles d’une personne filmée, puis de redessiner sa bouche.
Le groupe confie l’écoute du son d’une vidéo en direct à un agent d’IA. Ce logiciel prend seul ses décisions et choisit les mots à changer selon votre profil de spectateur, à partir de votre âge ou des langues que vous parlez - ©jackpress / Shutterstock
Microsoft a déposé cette demande de brevet en avril 2025, et l’office américain des brevets l’a publiée le 29 octobre. Le groupe confie l’écoute du son d’une vidéo en direct à un agent d’IA. Ce logiciel prend seul ses décisions et choisit les mots à changer selon votre profil de spectateur, à partir de votre âge ou des langues que vous parlez. Les mots retenus sont ensuite remplacés par un modèle génératif, dans le son et dans l’image, puis la bouche de l’orateur est redessinée pour coller aux nouveaux mots. Vous verriez le résultat avec une à dix secondes de décalage sur le direct. Mais dans la version la plus large de son brevet, Microsoft ne prévoit aucun message pour vous avertir qu’une phrase a été modifiée.
Microsoft veut traduire l’orateur jusque dans ses lèvres
Dans un brevet, chaque revendication fixe ce que l’inventeur veut protéger. Microsoft a écrit une seconde revendication principale, la numéro 16, pour la traduction. Si l’orateur parle une langue que vous n’avez pas indiquée dans votre profil, ses mots sont remplacés par leur traduction et la vidéo est retouchée, lèvres comprises. Vous entendriez alors le conférencier en français, et sa bouche formerait les sons du français.
Les deux inventeurs, David Callaghan et Dinesh Kumar, prévoient de faire tourner le système directement sur l’appareil, grâce à ses puces. Microsoft évoque des lunettes de réalité augmentée ou un smartphone, et cite les conférences et les retransmissions sportives parmi les usages possibles.
Le groupe vend une partie de ce service dans Teams. Son agent Interpreter traduit la voix des participants d’une réunion en temps réel, et il peut imiter leur timbre. Avec ce brevet, Microsoft ajoute l’image au doublage. Selon Patentlyze, Microsoft protège beaucoup moins de terrain avec la revendication 16 qu’avec la première, car il doit prouver à la fois une langue étrangère et l’ajustement des lèvres.
Microsoft veut aussi réécrire les paroles de l’orateur
Avec la revendication 1, Microsoft protège un champ beaucoup plus vaste. Microsoft veut faire disparaître les « euh » et les mots marmonnés ou mal prononcés, et il range aussi sur sa liste les propos offensants et certaines expressions familières de l’anglais américain. Les mots de remplacement pourraient venir d’une recherche sur Internet, et le groupe évoque une vérification des faits en direct. Si un intervenant se trompe de chiffre sur scène, l’IA pourrait donc corriger sa phrase avant que vous ne l’entendiez.
Patentlyze relève que Microsoft n’explique jamais, dans cette revendication, pourquoi les mots sont changés. Nettoyer un discours de ses hésitations ou remplacer un fait par un autre tombe ainsi sous le coup de la revendication 1. Microsoft ne garde l’enregistrement original qu’à titre de « vérité de référence », et seulement dans une revendication secondaire. Rien ne vous signalerait donc qu’un orateur n’a jamais prononcé la phrase que vous venez d’entendre.
« Une revendication aussi large invite à un resserrement », souligne l’équipe de Patentlyze. L’examinateur de l’office américain a rejeté les revendications telles que déposées lors d’un premier examen, une étape courante avant que le déposant ne les amende. Microsoft dépose en outre de nombreux brevets qui n’aboutissent jamais à un produit. Le groupe peut encore répondre aux objections et restreindre sa demande."
Mélina Loupia
Journaliste rédactrice, spécialiste tech et cybersécurité
Mis à jour le 08 novembre 2026
https://www.clubic.com/actualite-638245-microsoft-imagine-une-ia-qui-traduit-une-video-en-direct-et-ajuste-les-mouvements-des-levres.html
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
"The Translation Grant Scheme for Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot Literary Works is a funding initiative by the Deputy Ministry of Culture, through the Department of Modern Culture, aimed at promoting translation and circulation of literary works between the two communities in Cyprus. The scheme encourages cultural dialogue and mutual understanding through literature. The application deadline is 31 October 2027, at 14:00.
Opportunity at a Glance
Provider: Deputy Ministry of Culture, Department of Modern Culture
Opportunity Type: Translation Grant
Funding Benefits: Support for translating literary works
Eligible Applicants: Not specified in the source
Eligible Countries: Cyprus
Application Deadline: 31 October 2027, 14:00
Project Duration: Not specified in the source
About the Opportunity
The Translation Grant Scheme aims to bridge the Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot communities through literature. Established in 2010, this initiative supports the translation of significant literary works, facilitating cultural exchange and understanding. Literature serves as a powerful means of connecting different worlds, offering insights into shared experiences and distinct perspectives, thereby enriching Cyprus’s cultural heritage.
Looking beyond traditional donors? Explore corporate grants
GO
Funding and Benefits
The scheme provides financial support for the translation of literary works, allowing them to reach a broader audience and fostering new communication channels and cultural dialogue between communities.
Who Is Eligible?
Eligibility criteria are not specified in the source document. Interested applicants are encouraged to consult the official guidelines on the Department of Modern Culture’s website.
Eligible Activities or Priority Areas
The scheme supports translations of literary works that contribute to cultural dialogue and mutual understanding between Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot communities.
Find the opportunity. Check your eligibility. Plan your application
GET GRANTS
Why This Opportunity Matters
This grant is significant as it leverages literature’s power to transcend linguistic and cultural barriers, promoting greater understanding and interaction between the two communities in Cyprus. It underscores the importance of literature in showcasing the shared cultural richness of the island.
How to Apply
Review the terms and conditions of the scheme available on the Department of Modern Culture’s website.
Prepare the necessary documentation as outlined in the official guidelines.
Submit your application by 31 October 2027, at 14:00.
Next Steps
Eligible individuals or organizations interested in applying for the Translation Grant Scheme are encouraged to review the official guidelines and follow the application process as described. Visit the Department of Modern Culture’s website for more information and access to application forms.
Grant Scheme for Translation of Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot Literary Works: Literature as a Bridge for Dialogue (Cyprus)
https://www2.fundsforngos.org/individuals/translation-grant-scheme-for-greek-cypriot-and-turkish-cypriot-literary/
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
The lack of interpreters and resulting communication difficulties is an issue...
The Yomiuri Shimbun
A prison officer talks to an inmate using an AI translator at Fuchu Prison in Fuchu, Tokyo, in October.
Palm-sized AI translators have been playing an important role in prisons and detention houses across the nation that house many non-Japanese inmates.
The Justice Ministry distributed about 200 devices in summer last year to improve communication between such inmates and prison officers. It is hoped these devices will help the officers to better understand the inmates’ feelings and lead to better support for their reintegration into society.
“How are you doing? Do you want to see the factory?” said a male prison officer at Fuchu Prison in Fuchu, Tokyo, in late October.
The officer was speaking in Japanese while holding a translation device in his hand. When the officer held the translator near the small window of a one-person room housing a sentenced Chilean man, the device gave the Spanish translation in a female voice.
The Chilean man thought for a moment, and then replied to the device in Spanish. A few seconds later, the device gave the translation of the man’s reply: “Yes. I’m going to have a look around the factory.”
The man does not understand Japanese and was unable to follow prison officers’ instructions when he first arrived at the prison. It was judged that it would be difficult for him to take part in communal activities, so he was placed in a one-person room and had not participated in prison labor at the factory.
Through repeated communication with officers via the translation device, the man has adopted a more positive attitude and expressed interest in taking part in work at the factory. “Slowly but surely, we’re building a relationship of trust,” the officer said.
More than 20% of the prison’s 1760 inmates – including sentenced persons and others – were non-Japanese from overseas who do not hold permanent residency, as of the end of 2025. Before the introduction of the translators, officers could only try to give them instructions through gestures, which often resulted in frustrating the inmates.
The device has allowed non-Japanese inmates to ask more questions, such as “Why can’t we trade leftover food with each other?” and “Why aren’t we allowed to stand up while doing prison labor?”
“It’s easier to understand their feelings when we can communicate with words. For rehabilitation and recidivism prevention, it’s important to appeal to their feelings rather than force them to obey,” said a prison officer who is in charge of teaching the rules to those who enter the prison.
Those who cannot speak Japanese are sent to six institutions, including Fuchu and Osaka prisons and Tokyo Detention House, in principle. International affairs specialists are allocated to those institutions and serve as interpreters. However, their number is capped at 28, so prison officers and others are responsible for their day-to-day treatment, as well as at night and on holidays.
Those awaiting a judicial decision are generally sent to a detention house near the police station where they were arrested. The lack of interpreters and resulting communication difficulties is an issue.
In light of the situation, the ministry deployed AI translators to 129 of the 171 institutions in August last year. The device supports about 90 languages and can translate text. The supplier of the translators was selected on conditions including that translation content is not used for AI training.
As prison officers are not allowed to carry their smartphones inside the facilities, the ministry plans to allocate more translators from next fiscal year, with a focus on institutions with many foreign inmates.
According to the ministry, the number of foreigners serving a sentence, in detention prior to sentencing or detained in workhouses in lieu of payment of a fine, was 2,779 as of the end of 2025, an increase of 30% from 2015. They are from more than 20 countries, with those from Vietnam making up the largest group at 682, followed by China at 510.
Inmates who cannot speak Japanese are rarely provided with “special guidance for reform,” in which they are shown the viewpoint of victims, or vocational training, in which they can obtain certifications and licenses to support their reintegration into society.
“There need to implement support for foreign inmates’ reintegration into Japanese society and recidivism prevention has grown, as there are cases in which they remain in Japan after release by receiving special permission to stay,” said Prof. Tatsuya Ota of Keio University, an expert in criminal policy. “By lowering the language barrier with the translator, paths for special guidance and vocational training could open up.”"
By Rio Fukumoto / Yomiuri Shimbun Staff Writer
November 9, 2026
https://japannews.yomiuri.co.jp/society/general-news/20261109-357975/
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
Witch hunts may have politically influenced translators to render an original, less gendered, word for "poisoner" as "witch" in the English Bible"
"How King James’ personal obsessions influenced Bible translation
November 9
Video Duration1:54
Corbeil-Coleman explains how King James' obsession with witch hunts may have politically influenced translators to render an original, less gendered word for "poisoner" as "witch" in the English Bible."
https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/video/9.7415459
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
Apple TV Adds Sign Language Interpretation, Starting With Original Film ‘Being Heumann’
It's the latest streaming service to add American and British Sign Language options, making movies more accessible and enjoyable for a wider audience.
Being Heumann will be the first Apple TV original film that debuts with sign language interpretation.
Apple TV
Apple TV is adding sign language interpretation for a handful of supported streaming titles, beginning with the Apple original film Being Heumann, which premieres on Friday.
With iOS 27.2, you’ll find new options for American Sign Language and British Sign Language within Apple TV’s app settings. When you select one of these languages, a new button will appear on supported Apple original titles indicating sign language availability. You can also turn off or change your language selection directly within the player.
Titles that support sign language interpretation will have a sign language icon displaying an image of a hand. This icon appears on the title page of a show or movie, next to other accessibility options like closed captions and audio descriptions.
Being Heumann is an apt pick for debuting this accessibility feature. The film centers on the true story of disability rights activist Judy Heumann (Ruth Madeley) and her leadership in the historic 1977 protest that helped advance equal rights and protections for Americans with disabilities. Sign language support will also roll out to other Apple TV titles starting with F1 The Movie, followed by Greyhound and Way of the Warrior Kid (which debuts Nov. 25) later this year.
Apple TV is adding a dedicated collection called Movies & Shows with American Sign Language to make it easier to browse supported content. That collection will include movies where sign language is part of the story, such as 2021’s Oscar-winning film CODA. You can also look up “with ASL” in the app’s search bar to find relevant titles.
“We believe everyone should be able to enjoy great stories and entertainment,” Sarah Herrlinger, Apple’s senior director of Global Accessibility Policy and Initiatives, said in a statement. “Bringing sign language interpretation to Apple TV is an exciting step forward in making the viewing experience more accessible and inclusive for Deaf audiences.”
A rising tide of sign language support
Sign language interpretation can add more context and nuance than closed captions do.
Apple TV
Apple TV joins a handful of other streaming platforms with sign language options, including HBO Max and Prime Video. Netflix also features sign language interpretation for dozens of kids and family titles through a partnership with SignUp Media, which built a Chrome extension that overlays an interpreter onto supported shows and movies. SignUp is also available on select Disney Plus and Peacock content.
While closed captioning can help some deaf and hard-of-hearing people better understand what’s happening on screen, many viewers prefer watching with sign language interpretation, which can better convey emotion and expression.
“For the deaf community, our first language is ASL,” Nakia Smith, a deaf storyteller and an interpreter for the HBO Max series It: Welcome to Derry, told me in an interview earlier this year.
Unlike closed captioning, which has become nearly ubiquitous across streaming and television, sign languages like ASL are slowly making their way into more entertainment spaces, from sports broadcasts to awards ceremonies and red carpets. But there’s still a long way to go.
The challenge is that sign language interpretation requires skilled human professionals who can capture context and nuances, which takes time and resources. More companies appear to be making the effort. And while some studios are exploring AI to automate captioning, the complexity and diversity of sign languages suggest this will remain a largely human-driven endeavor for the foreseeable future.
For its part, Apple worked closely with the deaf community, partnering with Directors of Artistic Sign Language to ensure they matched the tone of the films and maintained authentic representation.
“It’s incredibly meaningful to see our beautiful language authentically represented onscreen,” Daniel Durant, who appears in Being Heumann and who directed the film’s sign language interpretation, said in a statement. “Bringing this experience to life required a lot of care to ensure every translation captured the emotion and meaning of the story. I’m proud to have been part of Being Heumann and thrilled to see Apple TV supporting greater accessibility for Deaf audiences.”
Abrar Al-Heeti
Senior Technology Reporter
November 10, 2026, 11:00 am ET
https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/apple-tv-adds-sign-language-options/
#metaglossia #metaglossia_mundus
A 4,000-Year-Old DNA Mystery Is Rewriting the Origins of the English Language
Science
A 4,000-Year-Old DNA Mystery Is Rewriting the Origins of the English Language
Rock art in the King’s Grave at Kivik (Kiviksgraven) in southern Sweden, an exceptionally large Bronze Age burial monument dating to c. 1500 BCE, coinciding with the expansion of East Scandinavian Bronze Age ancestry. From left: Hugh McColl, lead author; Eske Willerslev, senior author. Credit: Nicolas Delgado Clausen
Ancient DNA is uncovering forgotten migrations that may have shaped the origins of English, German, and Celtic languages, challenging what researchers thought they knew about Europe’s linguistic history.
How can researchers trace a language back thousands of years when no one knows exactly what its earliest speakers sounded like? Although DNA cannot reveal the words ancient people used, it can show where they traveled, offering clues to how the languages we recognize today first spread.
That approach is helping scientists reconsider the origins of English, German, Dutch, and the Scandinavian languages. Spoken by hundreds of millions of people today, these languages share Germanic roots that researchers have long believed reached Northern Europe about 5,000 years ago. New evidence suggests a major part of that history may have unfolded roughly 1,000 years later.
In two studies published in Nature, an international team led by the University of Copenhagen and Leiden University examined DNA from more than 4,500 ancient individuals, including 712 genomes sequenced for the first time. Comparing these genetic records with archaeological and linguistic evidence allowed the researchers to reconstruct population movements that had previously gone unnoticed.
Nordic Bronze Age ship and axe rock art at Järrestad in southern Sweden. Carving at the site began around c. 1500 BCE, coinciding with the expansion of East Scandinavian Bronze Age ancestry. From left: Hugh McColl, lead author; Eske Willerslev, senior author. Credit: Nicolas Delgado Clausen
“These studies show what becomes possible when genetics, archaeology, and linguistics are brought together. Questions that have remained unresolved for generations can now be addressed with a level of evidence that was previously impossible,” says Kristian Kristiansen, professor of archaeology at the University of Gothenburg.
A forgotten migration challenges Germanic history
One of the clearest discoveries was a previously unknown migration into Scandinavia around 4,000 years ago. The newcomers likely arrived from areas around the Baltic Sea and spread rapidly, leaving a lasting genetic influence on the region. Researchers believe they may have brought an early ancestor of today’s Germanic languages.
“For over a century, scholars have debated when and from where the Germanic languages arrived in Northern Europe. What is exciting is that we can now test some of these ideas directly. We discovered a previously unknown migration that occurred at exactly the time and place where we would expect the earliest form of Germanic to be spreading,” says Hugh McColl, assistant professor at the Globe Institute at the University of Copenhagen and lead author of the study.
Celtic languages may have eastern roots
The findings also shed light on a separate mystery involving Celtic languages. Although these languages now survive mainly in Ireland, Wales, Scotland, and Brittany, they were spoken across much of Europe around 2,500 years ago. Their origins have been disputed for more than a century, with competing theories pointing to the Atlantic coast or central Europe.
Ancient DNA revealed that people migrated westward from central Europe around 3,000 years ago, reaching France, Britain, Ireland, and the Iberian Peninsula. Researchers consider this the simplest explanation for the spread of Celtic languages, challenging the influential theory that they originated along the Atlantic coast.
Ales stenar (Ale’s Stones) in southern Sweden, a monumental Iron Age stone ship-setting overlooking the Baltic Sea, dating to c. 600–1000 CE and broadly coinciding with the period of back-migration into the region. From left: Eske Willerslev, senior author; Hugh McColl, lead author. Credit: Nicolas Delgado Clausen
“The question of where Celtic languages came from has been debated for more than 100 years. Ancient DNA gives us an entirely new way to evaluate competing theories and brings important new evidence into the discussion,” says Guus Kroonen, associate professor of comparative linguistics at Leiden University and the University of Copenhagen.
The Vikings’ unexpected Anglo-Saxon connection
The genetic evidence also revealed an unexpected connection between the Vikings and Anglo-Saxons. Around 1,500 years ago, several centuries before the Viking Age, people from what is now northern Germany migrated into Denmark and southern Sweden. In some areas, particularly Zealand, they became a major part of the population.
Their arrival coincided with the emergence of Old Norse, the language later spoken by the Vikings. Many Danish and Swedish Vikings appear to have inherited much of their ancestry from these newcomers, who were closely related to populations that also contributed to the Anglo-Saxons in Britain. That connection may help explain similarities between their languages and artistic traditions.
“This migration came as a real surprise. Archaeologists and linguists had not predicted it, but it helps explain several cultural and linguistic connections between Scandinavia and Britain that have puzzled researchers for a long time,” says McColl.
The researchers caution that migration alone cannot establish which language a population spoke. Their conclusions depend on how the genetic evidence fits with decades of archaeological discoveries and linguistic research.
“DNA sequences do not tell us directly which language people spoke. But by combining ancient DNA with linguistic and archaeological evidence, we can begin to trace how languages spread and changed over thousands of years,” says Eske Willerslev, senior author of the studies and professor at the Globe Institute at the University of Copenhagen."
By University of Copenhagen
November 10, 2026
https://scitechdaily.com/a-4000-year-old-dna-mystery-is-rewriting-the-origins-of-the-english-language/
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
The Language Explorer is an interactive web platform designed to let researchers, educators, and language enthusiasts discover and visualize linguistic diversity around the world. Developed as part of our 1,000 Languages Initiative, the Language Explorer brings together data across thousands of languages, building on our open-source LinguaMeta dataset.
"Our world has a fascinating wealth of languages, and for over two decades, Google has been building language technologies that cover as many languages as possible. In 2006, we started a small experiment with Google Translate, supporting just two languages (English and Arabic) at the time. Fast forward to today: nearly 250 languages are supported, with around a trillion words translated every month. Our commitment to linguistic diversity runs across products, all in service of our mission to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. Building products that reflect the world's linguistic diversity takes far more than software engineering; it requires close collaboration with the communities we aim to serve, building in a way that's deeply aligned and respectful of local communities, heritage, history, values and context. This is why we've been working on grassroots initiatives like Project Vaani in India and Project Waxal in Africa, partnering with local organizations to collect thousands of hours of open speech data across underserved languages.
But gathering this data is only one part of the journey. Preserving language vitality requires working closely with native speakers, academic institutions, and cultural organizations. Partnerships, such as our coalition with the Gates Foundation, ensure that modern digital tools reflect the nuances and authentic voices of their communities. Expanding language coverage responsibly also requires deeply understanding linguistic diversity on a global scale. This approach enables products like Gboard, our Android keyboard, to support 900+ language varieties.
To better appreciate the breadth and complexity of this speech diversity, we've been working on a tool to help visualize the world's linguistic diversity, inspired by earlier visualization initiatives like Google Earth. The Language Explorer is an interactive web platform designed to let researchers, educators, and language enthusiasts discover and visualize linguistic diversity around the world. Developed as part of our 1,000 Languages Initiative, the Language Explorer brings together data across thousands of languages, building on our open-source LinguaMeta dataset.
This week marks the opening of a new major exhibition at the Museum of Communication Berlin, Real Talk! Language. Power. World. (Real Talk! Sprache. Macht. Welt.) featuring the Language Explorer as an interactive installation. The exhibition explores how language shapes identity, society, and technology across a multi-year run in Berlin (through February 2028) and at the Museum of Communication Frankfurt (through September 2029). The Language Explorer installation reflects our broader work to build AI and language technologies that serve everyone, regardless of what language they speak, read, or sign.
If you can't make it to the exhibition in person, you can explore the museum's themes via an online companion starting November 6th, or dive directly into the world's rich linguistic diversity online with the Language Explorer."
https://research.google/blog/exploring-the-worlds-languages-with-language-explorer/
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
"For Ku Bon-seung, translating fiction began with wanting to share something remarkable with friends who could not read Korean.
After reading a novella by writer Danyao in the summer of 2025, Ku asked for permission to translate it. The author suggested translating the whole collection instead.
That exchange led to Ku’s English translation of “Giraffe Is the Name of the World,” which won this year’s Kevin O’Rourke Prize in The Korea Times Literature Translation Awards.
Working on Danyao’s fiction helped Ku understand translation as a form of testimony — taking responsibility for conveying an experience that a summary could not adequately capture.
“I experienced something remarkable while reading Danyao’s works, and I knew that this quality was holistic, irreducible to a well-delivered summary,” Ku said in a written interview with The Korea Times.
Simply sending friends the Korean text and suggesting translation tools would not have fulfilled that responsibility.
“If I wanted to make a testimony, I should indeed make it — be responsible for it,” Ku said. “I think there’s a communal beauty in that.”
Born in Korea, Ku moved to Dallas at age 10 and has lived there since, graduating this spring from the University of Texas at Dallas with a degree in cognitive science.
An early introduction to working between languages came through interpreting for Ku’s mother. Although the experience was not enjoyable, being useful brought some satisfaction.
In middle school, Ku began posting translations of gaming materials on Korean internet forums. Translating favorite song lyrics later made the activity a pleasure in its own right.
College brought a first venture into fiction through English-to-Korean translations of two visual novels by Estonian game developer etherane.
Those years in Korean online communities also led to a friendship with Danyao. “Giraffe Is the Name of the World,” translated mainly in July, became the third piece Ku translated for the collection “The Great Chain of Being.”
The story demanded close attention to a narrator whose detached, matter-of-fact voice persists while recounting family deaths and approaching death.
Ku wanted to preserve that restraint, which gradually becomes more than a way for the narrator to cope.
“To preserve the texture of the narrator’s voice would be to preserve the texture of the world,” Ku said.
One persistent challenge involved the Korean sentence ending “-dago handa,” which marks reported speech. It appears eight times in close succession as the narrator recounts the world’s creation myth.
For Ku, repeating English equivalents such as “it is said” drew attention to wording that felt unobtrusive in Korean. Varying the expressions or moving them within sentences did not resolve the problem.
The solution came in the manuscript’s final edit: retaining only the first “Or so it is told” and removing the rest..."
Lee Hae-rin
Nov 10, 2026
https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/amp/lifestyle/books/20261110/57th-modern-korean-literature-translation-awards-kevin-orourke-prize-winner-ku-bon-seung
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
A language of belonging: Advice for learning the mother tongue of your ancestors
Learning the native language of ancestors is a meaningful way for descendants of immigrants to connect with their heritage
"NEW YORK -- Losing a tangible connection to your family’s ancestral homeland can bring unexpected sorrow, whether through the death of an older relative, the sale of a property passed down for generations gets sold or the destruction a handful of surviving heirlooms.
Learning a language spoken by their parents, grandparents or great-grandparents is a way some English-speaking children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of immigrants choose to reinforce ties to the old country and nurture their cultural identity.
Knowing the mother tongue of one's ancestors could unlock a stack of letters that clarify hazy chapters of family history. Basic speaking skills may lead to meeting cousins in another country. Listening to stories and songs in the original language conveys nuances and meaning that often are lost in translation, experts say.
Imparting an ancestral language to their children also is important to some parents. Adults who grew up speaking a language other than English, perhaps because they had immigrant parents or they were born abroad themselves, may see the language as a way to foster intergenerational bonds, preserve family traditions and expand future career options.
Whether you’re a parent who wants a child to know their roots or someone eager to acquire an ancestral language yourself, here are tips for claiming a legacy through language.
Linguists and educators generally categorize foreign language students into two broad groups, each with different starting points and perhaps motivations. Most children and adults are second-language learners, who begin formal instruction with little or no prior knowledge.
Most heritage language learners, by contrast, organically acquired some familiarity with a language other than English as young children, said Tanya Ivanova-Sullivan, associate director of the National Heritage Language Resource Center at the University of California, Los Angeles. They typically heard the language spoken at home and understand or speak it themselves to varying degrees.
“Heritage language speakers are home chefs,” Ivanova-Sullivan said. “They learned the language in the family kitchen from parents and grandparents rather than in the classroom.”
Repeated early exposure tends to give heritage language students an advantage over second-language learners, but they may be reluctant to speak up in class if they aren't confident in their grammar or relatives teased them for not being fluent, experts say.
Many people are embarassed about making mistakes when conversing in a language they don't know very well, said Arturo Diaz, executive director of the UCLA Center for World Languages. He encouraged students to use what they already know, saying perfection doesn't have to be the goal.
"So just remove any apprehension you may have in learning language and then just have fun with the experience," Diaz said.
Some scholars and educators say that someone with a cultural or familial relationship to a language also could be considered a heritage language student even if they are starting pretty much from scratch, according to the Center for Applied Linguistics, a nonprofit research and teacher education organization that promotes language learning and linguistic diversity.
Listening to relatives whose first language isn't English is an effective way to learn a heritage language, Yang Xiao-Desai, a professor of Chinese at San Francisco State University, said.
“Ask your grandparents for stories,” she said. “Ask them to share a story of a dish, a story of a recipe, a piece of furniture. Whatever you can.”
Podcasts, music and subtitled movies and videos in a target language also may help learners pick up words and phrases.
Ivanova-Sullivan recommends expanding the circle of people with whom you practice. Some communities have programs that pair an English speaker learning a foreign language with a native speaker who wants to learn English.
“When you’re expanding your network, you’re expanding the opportunities to use the language in different ways, and that’s how your vocabulary (grows)," she said.
Visiting your family's country of origin can be a valuable experience for people who can afford the trip, Ivanova-Sullivan said. She takes her 12-year-old to her native Bulgaria for two months every summer.
Organized tours overseas for people who want to visit their ancestral homelands have multiplied in the last decade, in part due to at-home DNA test kits.
If you're interested in learning a language while traveling but have limited time off from work, check out intensive programs like EF Language Abroad, which has campuses in Spain, France, Korea, Italy, Germany, Japan and the United Arab Emirates.
Before or after traveling, connect with members of your extended family on social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram. Even beginner students can pick up phrases and customs from their relatives.
Parents who want their children to learn a family language and embrace their heritage can consider community language schools, which integrate language lessons with cultural traditions. Volunteers and parents from local immigrant communities often operate such schools as nonprofit organizations.
Classes typically are held after school or on weekends. Most are designed for children learning or maintaining a language spoken at home, but some serve adult learners as well, said Joy Peyton, president of the Coalition of Community-Based Heritage Language Schools.
“They use their languages with their parents, with their friends,” Peyton said. “They recognize that their language has value.”
The coalition, a nationwide initiative that connects and advocates for these schools, has documented nearly 1,000 programs teaching 62 languages in 44 states, she said. Korean is the most-taught language, according to Peyton.
Ana Lúcia Lico, a co-founder and board member of the organization, came to the U.S. from São Paulo, Brazil, at age 35. She made sure her two sons, now 20 and 23, learned Portuguese and were immersed in Brazilian culture while growing up in Northern Virginia.
Her older son, Gabriel Lico Bickham, attended a local heritage language school for two hours every Saturday for about a decade, starting at age 4. He remembers learning grammar but also being immersed in games like “Corre cotia,” similar to the American duck, duck, goose.
Lico, whose husband was born in the U.S., said she also exposed her boys to Brazilian Portuguese through music, dance and playing sports.
“Soccer is huge in Brazil,” she said. "Through soccer, my kids developed a whole amazing set of vocabulary, words that I never had to teach them."
Hiring childcare providers who are native speakers or shopping in neighborhoods where a heritage language is spoken are additional ways for children to learn the ancestral tongue, said Richard Brecht, co-director of the American Councils Research Center, a nonprofit group devoted to the improvement of language learning worldwide.
Comic books about a group of children living in a fictitious neighborhood in Brazil helped Bickham learn Portuguese, a skill he says is helping shape his future. Also fluent in Spanish, he recently graduated from the University of Virginia. In January, he leaves for Mozambique, where Portuguese is the official language, for an English teaching assistant position through the Fulbright program.
“Growing up today, I feel very close to my Brazilian identity,” Bickham said. “And the language is probably the most important aspect out of that because the language is what unlocks all these cultural aspects.”"
By ANNE D'INNOCENZIO
Associated Press
November 8, 2026
https://abcnews.com/Lifestyle/wireStory/language-belonging-advice-learning-mother-tongue-ancestors-137952220
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
English conquered the world by borrowing everyone else’s words, but artificial intelligence is changing the world by making it unnecessary to learn English
The headline is the that language is what creates the concentration of power and Britain has done a good job there, as has France in the past. The question is whether AI will destroy all of this?
From Viking invaders and French aristocrats to American technology and artificial intelligence.
There is something wonderfully ironic about the English language. It has spent more than a thousand years stealing words from everyone else, absorbing foreign expressions, borrowing grammatical ideas, adapting pronunciations and generally behaving like a linguistic pickpocket, yet somehow, it has emerged as the dominant international language of business, science, technology and much of the internet.
The French gave us sophistication, our Germanic ancestors gave us much of our linguistic foundation, the Vikings contributed everyday vocabulary, the Dutch share the ancestry of some of our finest swear words, the Romans and Greeks provided the language of scholarship, and the Americans eventually gave us Silicon Valley and the internet.
Having borrowed so much from everyone else, the English-speaking world now has the audacity to expect everyone else to speak English.
How did that happen, and why has English become so successful when other languages, particularly French, once occupied the position it enjoys today? The answer is an amazing story of immigration, invasion, trade, empire, social snobbery and technological revolution, beginning in a country that barely resembles the England we know today.
Welcome to Engla-lond
One of my favourite explorations of history is The Year 1000 by Robert Lacey and Danny Danziger. In their chapter, Welcome to Engla-lond, the authors explore the language spoken by the Anglo-Saxons around the year 1000, when England was a collection of communities connected by farming, trade, religion and the constant threat of invasion. What makes their discussion particularly interesting is that, although most modern English speakers would struggle to understand a conversation conducted in Old English, they would recognise a surprising number of its words.
Take the hundred most frequently used words in modern English and we find that almost all descend from Old English or related Germanic roots, including the everyday building blocks of communication such as the, and, I, you, he, she, we, man, wife, child, house, bread, water, eat, drink, live and die.
These are not the elaborate expressions of lawyers, academics or politicians, but the words people use to describe their families, their homes, their food and their lives. The foundations of English were established long before Shakespeare, the British Empire or Silicon Valley, and the essential vocabulary of everyday existence remains remarkably recognisable a thousand years later, even though the grammar and pronunciation have changed dramatically.
The interesting thing is that England in the year 1000 was anything but linguistically isolated. The Anglo-Saxons had originally arrived from Germanic-speaking regions of continental Europe, bringing languages that developed into Old English, while the Vikings had spent generations settling, marrying, raiding and trading across large parts of the country. There were Celtic-speaking communities, Latin-speaking churchmen and merchants crossing the North Sea from regions that would eventually become the Netherlands, Germany and Scandinavia. England was already a meeting place for people who spoke different languages, although many of those languages shared common Germanic ancestry.
Imagine an English village a thousand years ago, where a Viking arrives wanting to buy a horse, a trader from the Low Countries wants to purchase wool and a traveller from another kingdom needs somewhere to sleep. Each speaks differently, but they all want to communicate, negotiate and do business. The English villager does not have Google Translate, a language-learning application or an artificial intelligence assistant, so he has to work with whatever words he understands, whatever similarities exist between the languages and whatever expressions he has picked up through experience. Over generations, these encounters help languages influence one another, with words being borrowed, pronunciations changing and different ways of expressing ideas becoming familiar.
This does not mean that English was deliberately invented as a common language for Vikings, Germans and Frenchmen, or that everyone in medieval England could understand everyone else. The language spoken in the year 1000 was still overwhelmingly Germanic, and the great influx of French vocabulary had yet to arrive. Nevertheless, the story illustrates something that would become one of English’s defining characteristics: its extraordinary willingness to absorb vocabulary from other languages while retaining much of its existing linguistic identity.
English became a linguistic magpie, collecting useful words from wherever it found them and showing remarkably little concern about their origins. Over the centuries, this habit would create one of the richest and most varied vocabularies in the world.
Twenty words for everything
There is a popular observation that English has twenty different words for everything, which is obviously an exaggeration but captures something distinctive about the language. We can ask, question, enquire, interrogate, investigate or examine, and although these words have different shades of meaning, they allow us to express closely related ideas with extraordinary precision. We can describe something as kingly, royal or regal, using words inherited through Germanic, French and Latin routes, while freedom and liberty describe related concepts through different linguistic traditions.
The same richness appears in everyday conversation, where we can help someone or assist them, buy something or purchase it, begin a meeting or commence proceedings, and end a relationship or terminate an association. The meaning changes subtly with the choice of word, but so does the social impression we create. Someone who says they want to help sounds friendly, while someone who offers to facilitate assistance sounds as though they are preparing to send an invoice.
This is particularly noticeable in business, where the straightforward Germanic vocabulary of everyday English frequently disappears beneath an avalanche of French- and Latin-derived terminology. A normal person wants to know what something costs, whereas a management consultant wishes to undertake a comprehensive evaluation of the financial implications. A customer wants their money back, while a banker explains that the institution is initiating a structured reimbursement process in accordance with established operational procedures. Both are describing the same thing, although the consultant and the banker have managed to make the process sound considerably more expensive.
The enormous vocabulary of English developed because successive generations borrowed foreign words without consistently abandoning the ones they already possessed. Instead of replacing one expression with another, English often kept both, allowing speakers to choose between simple, direct vocabulary and more elaborate alternatives. This created a language that can be wonderfully expressive, infuriatingly inconsistent and occasionally ridiculous, but one that offers an extraordinary range of possibilities to anyone who wants to communicate.
The French arrive and make everything complicated
Then came 1066, when William the Conqueror crossed the Channel, defeated Harold at Hastings and established a new ruling elite that transformed English society and, eventually, the English language.
For centuries afterwards, varieties of French occupied powerful positions in government, law and aristocratic life, while Latin remained central to religion, scholarship and administration. English survived as the language of much of the population, but it gradually absorbed an enormous amount of French vocabulary, creating a linguistic division that still reveals the social structure of medieval England.
Many of our shortest, most direct words come from Old English, while much of our longer and more elaborate vocabulary entered through French and Latin. This is why some of the most powerful speeches in history rely upon extraordinarily simple language. Martin Luther King did not announce that he wished to communicate an aspirational vision of future societal transformation. He said, "I have a dream."
Four words, all rooted in the oldest layers of English, and considerably more powerful than anything a management consultant could have produced.
And the Dutch taught us to swear … or did they?
Lacey and Danziger also draw attention to the earthy Germanic vocabulary that English shares with languages such as Dutch and Low German, which provides another entertaining illustration of how different linguistic traditions contributed to modern English. Some of our bluntest expressions, including words associated with bodily functions, sex and insults, have close relatives across the North Sea, reflecting the common ancestry of English, Dutch and German rather than a single historical moment when Dutch sailors arrived and taught the English how to swear.
It would be wonderful to imagine that medieval English peasants spent their days politely swearing upon their honour and allegiance until a Dutch sailor arrived in port, stubbed his toe and introduced them to a whole new vocabulary of colourful abuse. Unfortunately, the historical evidence suggests that the English were perfectly capable of being offensive without foreign assistance. The Dutch did not invent our swear words, but they share a magnificent Germanic tradition of expressing displeasure in language that requires remarkably little translation.
Shakespeare, of course, took the art of insulting people to another level, and some of his finest efforts remain wonderfully effective four centuries later.
"Thou art a boil, a plague sore." King Lear
"Thou cream-faced loon." Macbeth
"I am sick when I do look on thee." A Midsummer Night’s Dream
"Away, you three-inch fool!" The Taming of the Shrew
"Thou hast not so much brain as ear-wax!" Troilus and Cressida
"More of your conversation would infect my brain." Coriolanus
"Thy face is not worth sunburning." Henry V
Admittedly, these are insults rather than conventional swear words, but they demonstrate how wonderfully inventive English had become when it came to telling someone exactly what you thought of them. Shakespeare could insult a man’s intelligence, appearance, parentage and personal hygiene without needing to resort to a single modern four-letter word, although his plays contain plenty of earthy language when the occasion demands it.
The relationship between English and Dutch is particularly notable because both belong to the West Germanic branch of the Indo-European language family, sharing vocabulary inherited from common linguistic ancestors. Centuries of maritime trade, migration and cultural contact reinforced those connections, while the Norman Conquest introduced a further distinction between the everyday language of the population and the French-influenced vocabulary of the ruling classes.
There is something wonderfully revealing about this distinction, because when an Englishman wishes to sound educated, sophisticated or professionally important, he frequently reaches for a French- or Latin-derived word, but when he hits his thumb with a hammer, discovers that his train has been cancelled or realises that his bank has charged him another inexplicable fee, he generally returns to his Germanic roots.
The French helped us sound sophisticated, while our Germanic inheritance ensures that we can still express exactly what we think when sophistication is the last thing on our minds.
When French ruled Europe
For centuries, however, the language of international prestige was not English but French. By the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, French had become the dominant language of diplomacy and elite international society across much of Europe, enjoying a position that English could not begin to match. If you wanted to participate in European diplomacy, impress an aristocrat or demonstrate that you were educated and cultivated, French was the language to know, and the ability to speak it became an important marker of sophistication.
The influence was so powerful that European aristocrats frequently used French when communicating across national boundaries, while diplomatic correspondence and international negotiations increasingly adopted it as a common language. French became associated with refinement, intellectual achievement and cultural superiority, and those who could not speak it risked being regarded as provincial, regardless of their other accomplishments.
Consider Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim, the Finnish military leader who became one of the most important figures in Finland’s history. Born in 1867, when Finland was part of the Russian Empire, he rose to become a lieutenant general in the Imperial Russian Army before returning to Finland following the Russian Revolution. He commanded the victorious White forces during the Finnish Civil War of 1918 and subsequently became the military leader who helped preserve Finnish independence against the Soviet Union.
His defining moment came during the Winter War of 1939–1940, when Finland resisted a Soviet invasion despite being vastly outnumbered. He later commanded Finnish forces during the Continuation War, when Finland fought alongside Nazi Germany against the Soviet Union, before becoming President in 1944 and negotiating an armistice with Moscow. What makes Mannerheim a very specific historical figure is that he became one of the most decorated military leaders in modern history, receiving honours from Imperial Russia, Nazi Germany, Britain, France, Sweden and numerous other nations, many of them bitter enemies. His career spanned the collapse of empires and two world wars, while his controversial role in the Finnish Civil War complicated a legacy that remains central to Finland’s national identity.
In other words, when all nations were at war, he was the leader who negotiated peace and every nation recognised him for that.
Why do I mention this?
Because the last time I was in Helsinki, I used TripAdvisor to look up things to do. There wasn't much that caught my attention, except a recommendation to visit Mannerheim's house and museum. It was something where I learned a lot, as I had never heard of him before.
He was a spy, politician, leader and soldier. During the tour, I came across an entry in Mannerheim's diary describing his meeting with Robert Baden-Powell, the distinguished British soldier and founder of the Scout movement. Mannerheim considered Baden-Powell unsophisticated and provincial because he could not speak French.
Imagine the irony of a distinguished British soldier who had travelled extensively, commanded troops, written books and established an international movement being considered insufficiently cultivated because he could not conduct a conversation in French. Military achievements, international experience and intellectual accomplishments were apparently not enough to compensate for the inability to order dinner in the language of Paris.
Yet the world has changed so dramatically that the situation is now almost completely reversed. A French business executive who cannot speak English faces considerable disadvantages in international commerce, while a British executive who cannot speak French can still conduct business across much of the world. The language that once demonstrated European sophistication has been overtaken by a language that the European aristocracy previously regarded as comparatively provincial.
And, if you want a particularly delicious illustration of how far the tables have turned, consider Jacques Chirac and the French CNN.
In the early 2000s, the French President revived an ambition to establish an international television news network that would challenge the dominance of CNN and the BBC. France had its own culture, its own political perspectives, its own international interests and, naturellement, its own language, so why should Anglo-American broadcasters dominate the way the world received its news?
Chirac wanted a French international news channel that would project French influence around the globe and provide an alternative to the English-speaking media organisations that had become so powerful. The project had been discussed for years, with research commissioned and plans debated, but there was one rather embarrassing commercial reality: if France wanted to compete internationally with CNN and the BBC, it would have to communicate with audiences who did not speak French.
In other words, France needed to defend the French view of the world by broadcasting it in English.
This was not just my interpretation. As France 24 prepared to launch in December 2006, its president, Alain de Pouzilhac, acknowledged that most of the network’s intended international audience spoke English and that delivering a French perspective therefore required broadcasting partly in English. The eventual result was a French international news network launching simultaneously in French and English.
Imagine the conversation in the Élysée Palace, where the President wants to defend French culture and international influence against Anglo-American domination, only to discover that one of the most effective ways of achieving his objective is to speak English.
For centuries, an Englishman had been considered uncultured if he could not speak French yet, by the twenty-first century, the French were broadcasting in English because they wanted the rest of the world to listen.
C’est la vie.
The British Empire spreads the language
The first great transformation in the international position of English came through the expansion of the British Empire, which carried the language across North America, the Caribbean, Africa, Asia and the Pacific. English became associated with colonial administration, international commerce, education and law, spreading through ships, soldiers, merchants, settlers, schools and institutions rather than through any inherent linguistic superiority.
Yet the British Empire alone does not explain why English dominates international communication today, because empires eventually decline and their languages do not always retain their positions of influence. Latin survived the Roman Empire as the language of scholarship and religion for centuries, while French enjoyed an extraordinary period of diplomatic and cultural prestige before losing much of its international dominance.
English enjoyed a remarkable historical advantage because, just as Britain’s imperial power began to decline, another English-speaking superpower emerged on the other side of the Atlantic.
The United States.
America’s rise to economic, military and cultural dominance transformed English from the language of a global empire into the principal language of international commerce and, eventually, the digital economy. Hollywood, Wall Street, multinational corporations, scientific research, universities and popular music carried American influence into almost every corner of the world, encouraging people to learn English not because they admired British history but because they wanted to participate in the opportunities created by American economic power.
International aviation adopted English as the standard language for communications between pilots and air traffic controllers in international operations, while scientific publishing increasingly favoured English as researchers sought to reach the widest possible audience. Multinational corporations adopted it as a common working language, and international financial markets increasingly operated through English-language contracts, documentation and communication.
The more people learned English, the more useful it became, and the more useful it became, the greater the incentive for others to learn it. Economists would recognise this as a network effect, in which the value of participating in a network increases as more people join it, and the same principle helps explain why English became so deeply embedded in international commerce.
A language does not need to be the most elegant, the most logical or the easiest to learn to become internationally dominant. It needs to be the language that enough other people already use, because once that position becomes established, the advantages reinforce themselves.
Then came the internet.
The development of modern computing and the internet, heavily influenced by American universities, government research programmes and technology companies, meant that the emerging digital world inherited much of its vocabulary, documentation and commercial culture from English-speaking institutions. Programming languages, software manuals, technical standards and early online communities were disproportionately English-speaking, reinforcing the position of English as the language of technology.
As the internet expanded, English became deeply embedded in the digital economy through search engines, online marketplaces, social networks, international business communications and the enormous influence of American technology companies. The internet did not create English dominance, but it amplified an international language that already enjoyed powerful economic and institutional advantages.
Of course, the internet is now far more multilingual than it was during its early development, and billions of people communicate online in Chinese, Spanish, Arabic, Portuguese, Hindi and countless other languages. English is not the language of every internet user, nor does it account for most of the world’s population, but it continues to occupy a particularly influential position in international online communication, technical documentation, scientific research and cross-border business.
A software developer in Bangalore, a banker in Frankfurt, a designer in Seoul and an entrepreneur in São Paulo can collaborate through English without needing to learn one another’s native languages. The common language allows people from different cultures and countries to participate in the same economic and technological networks, reducing the friction that would otherwise make international collaboration more difficult.
There is something rather wonderful about comparing this with the English village of a thousand years ago, where the Anglo-Saxon farmer, the Viking trader and the merchant from across the North Sea needed enough shared language to negotiate the price of wool, exchange goods and establish trust. Today, the village has become the world, and the conversations that once took place around a market stall now take place through video conferences, digital platforms and international financial networks.
The language that borrowed words from everyone else has become the language that everyone else is expected to understand.
And then artificial intelligence arrives
There is, however, one final irony in this story, because artificial intelligence is beginning to challenge one of the fundamental assumptions that has sustained the international dominance of English. For centuries, the ability to speak another language has been a source of education, social status, economic opportunity and political influence, with French once distinguishing the cultivated European from the provincial Englishman and English now providing access to international business, technology and education.
Artificial intelligence is changing the economics of language by making translation faster, cheaper and increasingly accessible. Real-time translation systems, multilingual language models and AI-powered communication tools are reducing the practical barriers between people who speak different languages, creating the possibility that international communication will no longer require everyone to learn the same one.
An English speaker can increasingly communicate with a Japanese speaker without either person mastering the other’s language, while a Chinese entrepreneur can conduct business with a German customer through translation technology that operates almost instantaneously. These systems are not perfect, particularly when dealing with humour, cultural references, specialist terminology or the subtleties of human emotion, but their capabilities are improving rapidly.
The consequences could be profound because the value of English as an international language depends partly upon the advantage it provides in communicating with people who do not share a native language. If technology removes much of that advantage, the incentive to learn English purely for practical international communication could weaken, even though the language will retain enormous cultural, educational and institutional importance.
This does not mean that English is about to disappear from international business, any more than the arrival of the telephone meant that people stopped meeting one another. Languages are embedded in cultures, institutions, professional relationships and educational systems, and those connections are difficult to displace. Nevertheless, artificial intelligence introduces a fascinating possibility that would have been almost unimaginable throughout most of human history.
Perhaps the future of global communication is not everyone speaking English, French, Mandarin or any other dominant language, but everyone speaking their own language and understanding everyone else.
That would represent a fundamental change in the relationship between language and power. Throughout history, the people who controlled international commerce, political institutions and cultural influence enjoyed enormous advantages in determining which languages other people needed to learn. French followed the influence of European aristocracy and diplomacy, English followed the expansion of the British Empire and American economic power, and the internet reinforced the position of English through the network effects of global technology.
Artificial intelligence could begin to separate international communication from the need for a single dominant language, allowing people to participate in global conversations without abandoning their native linguistic identities. Instead of requiring everyone to adapt to the language of the most powerful economic or political institutions, technology could increasingly adapt communication to the languages people already speak.
And that brings us back to the English village in the year 1000, where the Anglo-Saxon farmer, the Viking trader and the visitor from across the Channel were all trying to solve the same fundamental problem: how to understand one another well enough to live, trade and get along. They did it through shared vocabulary, borrowing, adaptation, gestures and the gradual development of ways to communicate across linguistic differences.
A thousand years later, we are still trying to solve exactly the same problem, except that we now have artificial intelligence to do it for us.
English conquered the world by borrowing everyone else’s words, but artificial intelligence is changing the world by making it unnecessary to learn English and somewhere, I suspect, Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim would be horrified to discover that Robert Baden-Powell could now speak perfect French simply by pressing a button."
How the British beat the French (by stealing their language)
November 9, 2026 by Chris Skinner
https://thefinanser.com/2026/11/how-the-british-beat-the-french-by-stealing-their-language
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
Latvian translation of selected Seamus Heaney poems
"Seamus Heaney's work finds a new voice in Latvian
A recent Latvian translation of selected poems by Seamus Heaney has created a new connection between one of Ireland's most celebrated poets and Latvian readers. The publication follows the translation into Latvian of Heaney's poem ‘Beacons at Bealtaine’ in 2024 and coincides with events marking 30 years since he received the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Translating Heaney into Latvian
In 2004, Heaney was commissioned by the Government of Ireland to write a poem for the ‘Day of Welcomes’, a ceremony hosted by Ireland in the Phoenix Park in Dublin on 1 May, to mark the accession of Latvia and nine other countries to the European Union.
The resulting poem, ‘Beacons at Bealtaine’ was a nod to the significance of those countries joining the EU on the same date that Ireland celebrates ‘Bealtaine’, a Gaelic holiday marking the beginning of summer and, in folklore, the arrival of the first magical inhabitants of Ireland, the Tuatha Dé Danaan.
In 2024, to mark the 20th anniversary of that ceremony, the poem was translated and published in the national languages of the ten states that joined the European Union on that day, including Latvian. One year later, after hearing about events to mark 30 years since Heaney received the Nobel Prize in Literature, Latvian journalist and award-winning translator Ieva Lešinska decided to translate some of Heaney’s other works, starting with the poetry collection ‘100 Poems’. The publication represents the first Latvian translation of a collection of Heaney's poetry.
instagram.com/@irelandinlv
'Seamus Heaney: Listen Now Again' Exhibition
To mark the 30th anniversary of Heaney’s Nobel Prize, the Embassy of Ireland in Latvia has been touring a translation of the travelling exhibition 'Seamus Heaney: Listen Now Again' across Latvia, following its launch at the National Library of Latvia.
As the exhibition has travelled to libraries around Latvia, it has provided an opportunity to highlight the newly published Latvian translation of Heaney's work. The latest stop on the tour is Liepāja, Latvia's third-largest city and the European Capital of Culture for 2027. There, the Embassy partnered with the Liepāja Central Scientific Library for an opening event that coincided with Latvia's annual Poetry Days festival. Visitors heard readings from Lešinska's translations, bringing Heaney's poetry to audiences through the Latvian language.
The work of Seamus Heaney now has a new Latvian readership, bringing new opportunities to engage with his work and extending the reach of his poetry through translation and cultural exchange."
https://www.ireland.ie/en/latvia/seamus-heaneys-work-finds-a-new-voice-in-latvian/
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
The Forum 3 of Sharjah International Book Fair (SIBF), was buzzing with energy and youthful enthusiasms on Saturday evening, as young audience filled the venue much before the programme even started. The curious audience had gathered to hear Daisy Rockwell, the Internationally acclaimed award-winning translator and receipt of the International Booker Prize.
Rockwell won the International Booker Prize in 2022 alongside Indian author Geetanjali Shree for translating her novel Tomb of Sand. The novel made history as the first book translated from Hindi to be shortlisted for the prestigious award. As expected, Rockwell captivated the Sharjah audience with her engaging insights. She took part in a panel discussion with Anamika, titled, “Across Languages: Daisy Rockwell on the Art of Literary Translation.” Rockwell discussed the challenges of translation, her sources of inspiration, and her deep connection with the Hindi and Urdu languages.
She said, I had the opportunity to attend a translation seminar by A.K. Ramanujan, which transformed my approach to the craft.” Reflecting on her journey, Rockwell said, “My interest in translation began in academia. During my PhD in South Asian languages, I wrote my thesis on Indian novelist Upendranath Ashk, who hailed from Jalandhar, Punjab, and switched from Hindi to Urdu. I was inspired to translate his work so that more people could read it.”I want more and more people to read Ashk, she urged.
Rockwell, who has translated notable works such as Bhisham Sahni’s Tamas, Khadija Mastur’s “The Women’s Courtyard” and Krishna Sobti’s “A Gujarat Here, A Gujarat There,” said, “I don’t like non-fiction. I have always found it boring. It is fiction that excites me.” A veteran in her craft, she said, “I found “Tomb of Sand” and “In the City a Mirror Wandering” little challenging.”
When asked how winning the International Booker Prize has changed her life, Rockwell said, “It has brought wider recognition to my work and given me the opportunity to visit many interesting places, including the Sharjah International Book Fair. More people are now approaching me for translation projects.”
Speaking about the growing recognition of translators, Rockwell said that they were once largely invisible but are now receiving greater attention. Readers are increasingly recognising translators by name, while the growing visibility is bringing them greater recognition and publishers are more willing to prominently credit them for their work.
Rockwell said she is not concerned about the growing influence of AI in everyday life, particularly in translation. “I don’t think AI can translate the way it should be done. AI is a robot; it can translate word for word in no time, but cultural nuances and human emotions are things it cannot fully capture.”
Encouraging aspiring writers and translators, Rockwell advised, “Keep writing every day for at least 10 minutes. You can write anything; don’t worry about the content or flow. Writing is a practice, just as translation is, so make it a daily habit. I always start with pen and paper.”"
https://www.gulftoday.ae/culture/2026/11/09/american-writer-and-translator-daisy-rockwell-captivates-audience-at-sibf
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
"‘Writing For Children is Tougher’
Amish Tripathi speaks about his first children’s book, Dhruv-Tara, and why he doesn’t want to follow chronology
08 Nov 2026, 1:30 am
You have primarily written for adult readers. How did you end up writing a children’s book, Dhruv and Tara: The Great Indian History Quiz?
This began with a discussion with my 17-year-old son, Neil. I am 51, and I saw a lot of colonial nonsense being taught to me when I was Neil’s age. But now, Neil is still being taught a lot of that nonsense. It’s not that everything is exactly the way it was. The overhyping of everything from a European lens has reduced. Some things have been decolonised, no doubt. But a lot of things are still colonial, particularly our history. I asked myself, why not be the change I want to see? So, I’ve written my own book, where a decolonised version of history is presented in the garb of a fun adventure.
When you say decolonisation, is it primarily about moving away from the British perspective of looking at history?
For example, the achievements of ancient India are downgraded. We are taught that India was basically an oral culture and that we weren’t a writing culture. That’s not true. Ancient Indians actually wrote a lot more than the rest of the world. But that’s not taught in our history books. We are taught that Vasco da Gama discovered the sea route to India, which is not true. He was actually helped by an Indian trader called Kanji Malam. But Malam’s name is wiped out. So many things like these are not taught.
Dhruv-Tara: The Great Indian History Quiz By: Amish Tripathi Publisher: Red Panda Pages: 200 Price: 350
What were the things you kept in mind while approaching writing for children?
Writing for children is tougher because they can be unforgiving. You can’t even have a few slow pages because otherwise they switch off. The book has to be a lot shorter. My usual books are 400-500 pages. I can’t release a children’s book that long. I also did some research into Gen Z language. I obviously don’t know that language, and I didn’t overuse it because that would sound fake. That’s what I was trying to do: appeal to them.
The book doesn’t follow the chronology of a typical history textbook. How did you decide what to include and how to structure the narrative?
The thing that bores children the most about history books is dates. A textbook has to be structured chronologically. But this is a storybook. I wanted the facts to come across in the garb of a story, rather than through chronology. The idea was to include as many historical facts as I can. But how they get included depends on the story. If something doesn’t flow naturally into the story, it will not work.
This is the first part of what is planned as a seven-book series. Could you tell us more about what you have in mind for next ones?
In the second book, I want to cover ancient Indian businesses. I’m talking about pre-British times, something only a few people know about. India had multinational companies in ancient times. It had formal accounting processes, influence techniques, and money transfer systems. It will be in the garb of a good adventure. We initially thought of seven books, but it could be more.
How have children been responding to the book?
Some children have told me that they’re learning these facts and then going home and shocking their parents. They know things that their parents don’t know. Many of them are also realising that history can actually be cool. Let’s see if the second book also does well. Then we’ll know it wasn’t a fluke.
One interesting aspect of the book is how it explains the origins of familiar phrases and expressions that we use in everyday life.
Exactly. There’s that famous Amitabh Bachchan dialogue, which I have included in the book: “Mere paas paanch phutti kaudi nahi hai.” We hear this expression and wonder what a phutti kaudi is. There are so many things that are part of our culture but are not taught to us. If the knowledge comes across in a fun story format, it stays in your mind.
When you discuss the Delhi Sultanate and the Mughals, there seems to be a certain dismissal of their contributions. What are your thoughts on this?
One of the things I’ll probably cover in my future books as well is something interesting that the British did. They didn’t call British colonial rule the Christian invasion, but they called Turkish colonial rule the Islamic invasion. If you ask me, it was a very mischievous formulation. Indian Muslims were as oppressed by the Turks as Indian Hindus were. Indian Muslims were never given positions such as mansabdars, for example. They were all foreigners.
This, again, is a colonial way of looking at things. The British wanted to divide India. I can understand why the British did it. But why did India continue with this formulation after 1947? It’s obviously to create Hindu-Muslim fights today. We need to take an honest look at these things.
https://www.newindianexpress.com/magazine/2026/Nov/08/writing-for-children-is-tougher
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
Los intérpretes son los grandes olvidados de los juicios de Núremberg.
Hace 80 años, los juicios de Nuremberg dieron origen a la figura del traductor simultáneo, clave en aquel proceso
Toda gran historia tiene una cara B imprescindible. Unos personajes secundarios que no parecen tan interesantes, ni tan famosos, ni tan carismáticos, pero que permiten que los protagonistas puedan desarrollar su papel. Son el motor real de la acción; las bases del progreso.
Han pasado 80 años del final de los juicios de Nuremberg, pero aún se desconoce el mecanismo interno que los puso en marcha. Alemanes, rusos, franceses y anglosajones estaban condenados a entenderse para sacar adelante una de las causas más relevantes de la historia. Y el engranaje se puso en marcha. Un grupo de pioneros hizo de la necesidad virtud e inventó prácticamente de la nada una nueva profesión para garantizar que los responsables de la barbarie nazi rindieran cuentas por sus hechos. Era la interpretación simultánea.
Cardiologue Français: «La Principale Cause De La Graisse Abdominale N’est Pas L’Excès De Calories»
Patrocinado wellnesshome.blog
Esta joven vive en un cobertizo en Región Del Litoral – echa un vistazo
Patrocinado Consejos y Trucos
Dio a luz a quintillizos en 1997, su marido la abandonó: vea cómo son después de 26 años
Patrocinado Consejos y Trucos
Göring lamentó la participación de los intérpretes en los juicios de Nuremberg: “Nos están acortando la vida”
En el número 224 de la calle Roger de Flor, en Barcelona, se han propuesto arrojar un poco de luz sobre este relato poco conocido. El Instituto Goethe se ha aliado con la Asociación Internacional de Intérpretes de Conferencia (AIIC) para organizar una exposición que homenajea y explica el rol de las personas que permitieron que este improbable e inédito juicio se acabara celebrando. Tal como sentencia Emma Soler, miembro de la AIIC y una de las dos coordinadoras de Un juicio, cuatro idiomas : “Sin los intérpretes, no habrían existido los juicios de Nuremberg”.
Los acusados querían evitarlo a toda costa. Pero una causa celebrada en alemán, y dirigida por alemanes, “no hubiera sido fiable en ningún caso”. De esta manera, la introducción de la interpretación simultánea fue una manera de garantizar los derechos de todos los que participaron en el juicio, pero también un modo de asegurar que se hacía justicia. Su promotor, el fiscal general de los Estados Unidos, Robert H. Jackson, no dudó en remover cielo y tierra para idear un nuevo sistema que resultó vital y que colaboró en el establecimiento de las bases del derecho penal internacional contemporáneo.
Pero el éxito no llegó sin sacrificios. La exposición, que abre sus puertas hasta el 15 de diciembre, explica en profundidad múltiples casos de lo que se conoce como “trauma vicario”. Es la carga emocional que sufren los profesionales que se exponen constantemente a testimonios de catástrofes y de violencia extrema. Entre las decenas de intérpretes sin experiencia que se lanzaron a la aventura por curiosidad, por ideología o por activismo, varios habían vivido en sus propias carnes o a través de sus familias el horror del Tercer Reich. Revivirlo en directo, teniendo que ponerse en la piel de sus propios verdugos, provocó que algunos lo dejaran y que muchos de ellos acabaran con síndrome de estrés postraumático.
“Cuando trasladas de una lengua a otra, tú interpretas, hablas en primera persona”, explica Soler. De ahí viene el trauma. Ser una víctima del nazismo que se ve hablando, por ejemplo, en boca de Hermann Göring, comandante en jefe de la Luftwaffe y uno de los dirigentes más cercanos a Adolf Hitler.
Esta joven vive en un cobertizo – echa un vistazo
Patrocinado Consejos y Trucos
Génia Rosoff, superviviente de Ravensbrück, fue intérprete en el juicio y dibujó a Albert Speer, el arquitecto de Hitler.Génia Rosoff (AIIC)
Waltraud Hofer, la otra coordinadora de la exposición, recuerda que el propio Göring ironizó durante el juicio: “Los intérpretes nos están acortando la vida”. Su trabajo había acelerado mucho el proceso que lo llevaría a la condena a muerte, y el líder nacionalsocialista se suicidó unas horas antes de su destino. Pero algunos de los intérpretes tampoco salieron bien parados. Como aclara Hofer, “hasta entonces nadie había visto esas imágenes, y esas atrocidades eran inimaginables”.
Soler lamenta que, para mucha gente, “somos una herramienta, una máquina que puede traducir. Muchas veces cuesta que se entienda que necesitamos unas condiciones mínimas para hacer bien las cosas”. De hecho, Hofer cuenta que algunos de los fiscales estadounidenses que participaron en el juicio ni siquiera tenían ningún recuerdo de los intérpretes más allá de “la cara bonita” de algunas de las profesionales. Muchas veces, remata Soler, “somos transparentes”.
Cardiologue Français: «La Principale Cause De La Graisse Abdominale N’est Pas L’Excès De Calories»
Patrocinado wellnesshome.blog
Solo podía pagar un viejo cobertizo de jardín – espera a ver el interior
Patrocinado Consejos y Trucos
Esto es real y ocurre todos los días en Dubai
Patrocinado Consejos y Trucos
El marido vio un detalle extraño en una foto
Patrocinado Consejos y Trucos
Por eso hace trece años que intentan reivindicar la génesis de su trabajo, tan esencial en este proceso. En el 2013, la directora del Museo Memorial de los Juicios de Nuremberg dijo a la AIIC que siempre que se hablaba del proceso se dejaba de lado su tarea. Desde entonces, la muestra ha estado en varias ciudades de 15 países alrededor del mundo.
La exposición de la AIIC sirve como ejercicio cultural e histórico, pero también es una advertencia. Sus coordinadoras, así como el director del Instituto Goethe, Joachim Bernauer, alertan del riesgo de volver a cometer los errores del pasado. Un juicio, cuatro idiomas es una reivindicación de la interpretación simultánea. Interpretar para entender. Interpretar para unir. Y para recordar."
MARTÍ ESTEBAN LLORCA
Barcelona
08/11/2026 06:00
https://www.lavanguardia.com/internacional/20261108/11678911/interpretar-genocida.html
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
When you translate, you are literally building a new novel, because you are writing in a new language that has its unique words and meanings
"Translating a novel means writing a new one, with every word and expression requiring fresh creative decisions, International Booker Prize-winning translator Daisy Rockwell told audiences at the 45th Sharjah International Book Fair (SIBF 2026).
Translating a novel means writing it anew, says author
Speaking during a session titled “Across Languages: Daisy Rockwell on the Art of Literary Translation”, the American writer, artist and Hindi-Urdu translator discussed her fascination with language and the challenges of recreating literature in English.
“When you translate, you are literally building a new novel, because you are writing in a new language that has its unique words and meanings,” she said, explaining that translators must work within the vocabulary and expressive possibilities of the new language while preserving the original meaning.
Rockwell traced her interest in translation to her early studies of Latin, ancient Greek, German and French, before taking up Hindi at university. She described her love of grammar and understanding how the individual elements of a language work together.
That fascination extends to everyday life. She recalled how her teenage daughter becomes frustrated when she analyses the meanings of song lyrics instead of simply enjoying the music.
The same curiosity shapes her choice of books to translate. “I have to be intrigued by the way that the author is using language. So that's always the first thing that grabs me. You have to really love a book because you'll end up reading it 10 or 15 times, or even 20 times.”"
Gulf Today
Magzter Gold Title
This story is from the November 07, 2026 edition of Gulf Today.
https://www.magzter.com/stories/newspaper/Gulf-Today/TRANSLATING-A-NOVEL-MEANS-WRITING-IT-ANEW-SAYS-AUTHOR
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
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US news
Trump administration accused of altering translation of request to extradite wealthy leftwing activist
Lawyers say they found multiple instances where US translation created more serious legal accusations against James ‘Fergie’ Chambers
Timothy Pratt
Sat 7 Nov 2026 13.00 GMT
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Attorneys for jailed wealthy leftwing donor James “Fergie” Chambers accused the Trump administration of making “malicious” and “bad faith” changes to legally required translations from English to Spanish in its extradition request to Spain, adding words like “violent”, “detonate” and “fires” that are not in the original text.
Chambers’ legal team also identified multiple instances where the US translation from English to Spanish created more serious legal accusations against Chambers than were indicated in the original text for his alleged involvement in paying the legal fees of activists who participated in a 2023 protest against Israeli weapons manufacturer Elbit Systems.
Chambers’ case is the first known instance of the US seeking to extradite a citizen over alleged support for Hamas, an accusation apparently tied to a money laundering charge and donations Chambers has made to support Palestinians, including the Sameer Project, in Gaza.
The attorneys have filed a last-minute request to the National Court of Spain asking for a new translation and for the court to recognize the “bad faith” actions of the US, after also learning this week that Chambers’ extradition hearing has been scheduled for 13 November.
The Guardian has seen the 21-page request, filed Tuesday. It includes multiple, detailed examples of what the legal defense team calls a “translation [that] has fictitiously added incriminating acts, in presumed bad faith”.
The goal, the attorneys assert, is “to lead Spanish authorities to commit errors in evaluating the facts [of the case] and in deciding about the extradition”.
Both Spanish law and the extradition treaty between the US and Spain require extradition requests to be translated into Spanish by the requesting country.
“This is scandalous – in 20 years of practice, I’ve never seen anything like this,” said Aitor Martínez, one of Chambers’ lawyers, adding that the “shameful” translation joined a growing list of irregularities in the Trump administration’s handling of the case – including the FBI taking Chambers’ phone, in apparent violation of Spanish law and international extradition treaty, reported on by the Guardian last month.
The translations in question come from the criminal complaint and related documents underpinning the US extradition request.
It was recently revealed that there is no indictment behind the complaint, meaning the federal government hasn’t had a grand jury evaluate evidence against Chambers and instead is seeking his extradition based on the affidavit of a single FBI agent, the basis for the sealed complaint.
Two of the three charges in the complaint – riot and conspiracy to riot – are related to allegations that he helped fund the legal fees of activists arrested in the late-2023 protests against Elbit.
The first example attorneys cite in the court filing concerns the protests. “Throughout October and November 2023, multiple direct action events occurred at Elbit facilities, causing significant damage,” reads the original in English.
But then, in Spanish, those “direct action events” become actos de violencia directo – or “acts of direct violence”.
In another example, the original refers to three activists arrested at one of the protests, saying “the three caused significant damage to the building” where Elbit Systems is located.
The three activists become tres incendios, or three fires, in the Spanish translation.
There is no mention of “fires” in the original text, because the protesters didn’t set anything on fire, Martínez told the Guardian.
In a third example, activists spoke about “risk[ing] arrest for trespassing”. In Spanish, “trespassing” becomes allanamiento de morada, which can also mean, variously, “burglary” or “breaking and entering” – a more serious offense.
Similarly, “set off smoke canisters” – the kind seen at football matches around the world – becomes detonaron botes de humo, the Spanish verb being “detonate”, as one would with explosives.
“In combination with the …bad-faith introduction of the three fires, this reinforces the idea of an attack with explosives that is not in the English original,” the attorneys write.
Nicole Navas Oxman, a US Department of Justice spokesperson, declined to comment on the translations.
Chambers has applied for political asylum in Spain. He cannot be extradited until the asylum case runs its course, and also cannot be extradited if he is granted asylum. His legal team has also notified the government office evaluating his asylum petition of the incident.
A self-described communist and anti-imperialist, Chambers is also heir of the Cox family, owners of Atlanta-based Cox Enterprises. As part of a settlement in which his family severed ties with him at the time, he sold stock back to his family worth about $250m in mid-2023. Since then, he has been funding an estimated 100 progressive and humanitarian projects in 20 countries, according to his partner, activist and actor Stella Schnabel.
Chambers’s views and donations have been extensively profiled in US media, including his public comments on Israel and Gaza. A week after the 7 October 2023 Hamas attacks on Israel, he posted on X about Israel’s response: “Stop calling it ‘collective punishment’/There’s nothing to be ‘punished’ for/No faction of the Palestinian resistance, Hamas or other, has done *anything* wrong/It’s simply genocide/Like it has been.”
After next week’s hearing, the Spanish court has three days to decide whether to extradite Chambers. If the decision is affirmative, the Spanish council of ministers can weigh in and even reverse the court’s decision.
This means Chambers’ extradition may be one of the last decisions made under Pedro Sánchez, the socialist prime minister, before national elections on 29 November.
“There’s been a lot of irregularities already,” Martínez said. “Spain has to say, ‘You can’t ridicule the Spanish justice system any longer.’”"
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/nov/07/trump-administration-altered-translation-request-extradite-fergie-chambers
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
Reform UK-led Kent County Council passes motion to end translation and interpretation services to non-English speakers
Reform UK has sparked anger after passing a motion to demand an end to the taxpayer funding of interpretation and translation services for non-English speakers.
The ruling party at Kent County Council (KCC) brought the motion forward “to protect stretched local budgets and challenge the ‘nanny state’ assumption that the local taxpayer should cover every cost”.
Reform UK Cllr Sarah Emberson
The council would “signpost” non-English speakers to other providers so they can pay for services themselves.
The motion calling for a review was passed on November 5 at full council and immediately criticised as “blatantly discriminatory” by the Green Party and it was claimed it left the authority open to legal challenge.
The move, proposed by Reform UK Cllrs Sarah Emberson and Garry Sturley, resolved to “use and pay for interpretation and translation only where necessary, including for the meeting of any and all statutory obligations, and always in the use of British Sign Language and Braille”.
Cllr Emberson said: “This is a massive win for the hard-working taxpayers of Kent.
Firefighters sent to Tesco Extra in Thanet after reports of gas leakFirefighters sent to Tesco Extra in Thanet after reports of gas leak
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“KCC is an English local authority, and our default position must reflect that. With mass migration placing an ever-growing strain on our public services, we cannot simply write a blank cheque for translation demands.
“By passing this motion, Kent is making a pragmatic, common-sense stand. We are encouraging individual responsibility, safeguarding front line services, and sending a clear message that learning and speaking English is vital to participating in our community.”
The motion conceded that no formal record of cost has been kept by the council but “it has become accepted practice within the council to simply commission (services) without questioning the reasonableness and the cost”.
But in the past 12 months KCC’s computer system found the total “identifiable” spend was £183,000, although a proportion would have been reserved for British sign language and Kent Deaf Interpretation Service support.
The papers added: “However, funds are provided from within a range of budgets to meet general interpretation and translation costs, and some are coded under ‘professional fees’. Hence, the difficulty in determining total overall spend easily and accurately.”
The £1.2m cost translation and interpreter services for unaccompanied asylum seeking children would have been paid, wholly or in part, by the Home Office.
The cost of translators used by KCC has not been easy to calculate. Picture: iStock
Cllr Garry Sturley, seconder of the motion, added: “At a time when our council budgets are squeezed to the absolute limit, every single penny of taxpayers’ money must be justified.
“It is entirely unreasonable to expect the people of Kent to pick up the bill for services that can easily be managed via modern smartphone translation apps or private means.
“We are proud to have pushed this through today, while ensuring that crucial provisions like British Sign Language and Braille remain completely unaffected.”
Liberal Democrat group opposition leader Cllr Antony Hook said the premise of the motion was “fundamentally ugly” and was an “empty political stunt”.
He said: "This sends a terrible signal about Kent to the wider world.
Liberal Democrat leader Cllr Antony Hook
“Kent is not an insular backwater.
“We are the UK's gateway to Europe, home to major international ports, world-class industries, and an economy striving to attract global investment and tourism.
“Telling the world that Kent wants to be rigidly monolingual and less welcoming to people who speak English as a second language actively damages our county.
“Global businesses looking to invest and create well-paid jobs will simply look elsewhere."
Green Party member Paul Stepto said: “The measures proposed in this blatantly discriminatory motion would make life more difficult for residents whose mother tongue is not English.
The full council meeting at KCC
“Furthermore, they could lead to administrative errors, wrong decisions and poorer outcomes in social care, SEND or home to school transport cases.
“I'm also concerned that the measures would contravene the Equality Act, leaving KCC at risk of costly legal action that would probably negate any potential savings.”
Fellow Green Party member Cllr Rob Yates said during the debate: “So why are we discussing it?
“It is because Reform don’t want to run this council, they want to create a public spectacle that looks to divide people.
“It is shameful and it is a waste of our time.”
The motion argued translators and interpreters are not a KCC statutory duty, although social services are legally required to ensure information is accessible to those with language barriers or communication needs.
The Reform UK motion was carried by 43 votes to 23 with three abstentions."
Simon Finlay, Local Democracy Reporter
Published: 17:53, 07 November 2026
https://www.kentonline.co.uk/kent/news/reform-uk-council-aims-to-end-language-services-to-non-engli-347139/
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
[Perspective] Media is going multilingual; are you still in your echo chamber?
Ong Peter
Published/7 Nov 2026 18:5
AI-translated article with transliterated names. Read original Chinese article here.
A country with a weak media pillar not only struggles to make its voice heard and is vulnerable to manipulation, but also finds it harder to weather crises. Some Singaporeans deliberately sidestep this when criticising the shortcomings of the mainstream media. Of course, it may also be a genuine blind spot.
Two days ago, Lianhe Zaobao officially launched its English edition, ZBE, joining the move towards multilingual publishing. I do not know what lies ahead; perhaps there will one day be a ZBM or ZBT too. This is not a product plug. Rather, I would like to mark this moment by sharing a few personal thoughts.
Artificial intelligence (AI) has plenty of downsides, but it also brings many benefits. One such benefit is a drastic reduction in translation costs.
For example, wherever you are in the world today, a mobile phone is generally all you need to communicate in speech and writing, in real time and largely without language barriers.
The government also recently announced that it would progressively make its agencies’ websites available in all four official languages. Be it making an application or looking up information, members of the public will be able to use the language they know best, making the process much easier and more efficient.
In the days when every word had to be translated by a person, even money could not necessarily make this possible: there simply were not enough people with the right skills to meet the enormous demand for constantly updated translations.
That resource constraint was finally overcome when the government developed its own large language model for AI translation.
In my own profession, translation technology is driving equally seismic changes.
Many mainstream Western media outlets and news agencies, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times, launched platforms in other languages, particularly Chinese, long ago. But the firewall, and especially the cost of news gathering and editing across languages, have continued to constrain their growth.
Some of China’s state media by contrast, be it newspapers, television networks or news agencies, have achieved a global reach thanks to lavish government investment aimed at telling China’s story. They even cover many less widely spoken languages beyond the UN’s official languages.
In recent years, however, AI has sharply reduced translation costs. Well-funded media organisations have gained even greater capabilities, while small and medium-sized digital outlets, traditional newspapers and television broadcasters around the world — even independent content creators as well — can now experiment with multilingual reporting.
France’s Le Monde is a case in point. For decades, it had wanted an English edition to attract traffic and extend its influence across a wider geographical area, but costs remained an insurmountable obstacle.
In 2022, however, it was among the earliest to harness AI to launch an English edition. With a mix of paid and free content, it soon turned a profit in North America, prompting several other French media outlets to follow suit.
I recently visited the site several times to read its English coverage of riots in Europe. There, I found that editors had polished and checked the articles — it was not simply a matter of clicking an AI button.
Journalists want to extend their reach beyond their usual audiences
Indian media may well have embraced AI translation with the fewest reservations. The country has 22 official languages and countless dialects: a real-life Tower of Babel, perhaps on an even larger scale. AI translation, with its near-zero marginal cost, is ideally placed to bridge those language divides.
Quite a few local television stations have even introduced AI “anchors” to translate and deliver news in real time. I do not know how professionally “they” perform, but when it comes to getting major news to the largest possible audience as quickly as possible, their key performance indicators (KPIs) should be fine.
Allow me to make a brief interjection here: two days ago, Lianhe Zaobao (LHZB) officially launched the Lianhe Zaobao English Edition (ZBE), joining the move towards multilingual publishing.
I do not know what lies ahead; perhaps there will one day be a LHZB Malay Edition (ZBM) or LHZB Tamil Edition (ZBT) too. This is not a product plug. Rather, I would like to mark this moment by sharing a few personal thoughts.
First, as a columnist, I am personally excited. The reason is simple: another language channel means more people will read my views and reflections. And if those readers were never part of my intended audience, the satisfaction is even greater.
Two years ago, for instance, a Malay friend texted to say that a commentary in the Malay-language Berita Harian had referred to a piece I wrote in this column about the Gaza war and genocide. A little surprised, I found it online. The only words I recognised were “LHZB” and “Encik Peter Ong”.
After translating it and discovering that the author had praised the piece as “thought-provoking”, I felt particularly gratified. After all, the appreciation came from someone of another ethnicity, giving it an additional sense of reaching beyond my usual circles.
A few months ago, a colleague on the political desk returned from London and told me that he had met a Singaporean Malay academic who teaches at Nanyang Technological University. The academic had mentioned me and my articles.
We had never met; I had only watched him a few times on political discussion programmes on YouTube. It occurred to me that, since neither of these Malay readers knew Chinese, they had most likely read translations on our English-language ThinkChina website. Or perhaps someone had machine-translated the articles and circulated them within their communities.
We have to acknowledge that English is the most valuable currency in the language market, whether in multiracial Singapore or internationally. I therefore believe my reporting colleagues would also welcome the chance for their hard work to gain wider recognition, and the satisfaction of reaching new audiences, through ZBE’s additional reach.
The prerequisite, of course, is that the reporting must be good enough.
My second point: multilingual publishing has both advantages and disadvantages, and media organisations must strengthen themselves.
Once language barriers are no longer difficult to cross, offering multilingual channels becomes only a matter of time. If you do not provide that convenience, a competitor is very likely to get there first.
Readers, too, will move between outlets. During the riots in France, I went straight to Le Monde. Around Israel’s general election, I read the daily updates and weekly highlights from The Times of Israel for first-hand information. On polling day in the US midterm elections, I received The New York Times’ live data visualisations immediately.
Yet I have only 24 hours in a day and cannot carve out any more time for news products. Reading more of A inevitably means spending less time on B, or dropping C altogether. In the future, there will only be more people like me, with little loyalty to media brands, not fewer.
Multilingual publishing offers opportunities to expand audiences. But imagine if every one of our products offered one or even two additional languages. In a limited market, with limited audience attention, could the combined result be a free-for-all of increasingly wasteful competition?
There is, in marketing, a concept called cannibalisation. For decades, colleagues across many of our departments have talked about it often and feared it privately. Will that scenario of our products eating into one another’s markets finally come to pass?
Three essentials for media competition: quality, character and credibility
Ultimately, though, we cannot think only about individual products and their survival. We must look at the interests of the whole group and even those of our island nation, whose people share a common fate.
Many external competitors have already committed themselves fully to the multilingual arms race, their influence surging towards us through every medium and device. Local media have little home advantage left and must compete on their own strengths.
This is no longer simply about whether people want your news or whether you can succeed commercially. It is also about advances and retreats, victories and defeats, in cognitive warfare.
A country with a weak media pillar not only struggles to make its voice heard and is vulnerable to manipulation, but also finds it harder to weather crises. Some Singaporeans deliberately sidestep this when criticising the shortcomings of the mainstream media. Of course, it may also be a genuine blind spot.
Turning back to ourselves, a media brand’s ability to grow, or at least survive, depends on at least three things: quality, character and credibility. With AI, producing enough content is usually not a problem. The key is whether the quality of its output can be improved.
Excessive reliance on AI could instead lower standards. Its translations do not yet merit an A+: they can be stilted, fail to convey the intended meaning, miss subtle cultural differences and even contain errors. Publishing every story as a machine translation without any intervention would damage the brand over time.
I believe the government, too, only felt confident enough to roll out its machine translation after establishing that it was sufficiently localised and suited Singaporeans’ reading habits.
Imagine if the translations used “coach” rather than “bus” and “social housing” rather than “public housing”, or muddled the different Chinese transliterations of “Raffles”. The public would certainly find that jarring.
Then there is character, or what we often call a newspaper’s editorial ethos, which must not be lost. This encompasses conviction, taste and human sensibility: what deserves condemnation, what warrants sympathy and what should be championed or pursued. None of this should be left to AI to decide.
In discussions about AI, colleagues often use the word “cheap”, meaning both inexpensive and tasteless. Their point is that leaving content, visuals, ideas and, in this case, translation entirely to AI and computing power is undoubtedly disrespectful to audiences.
In turn, audiences will look down on the product itself as cheap — much as, perhaps, many people now feel repelled by the deluge of AI-generated microdramas.
Of course, if a product remains popular after lowering its standards, the problem no longer lies with the product or its producers.
As for credibility, it should be the ultimate value of journalism. Accepting whatever AI translates, or pursuing only greater volume, speed and savings without caring about quality — especially by passing information to readers without verification — will inevitably erode trust over time.
I remember an interviewee once answering a reporter’s questions one by one in an email. The reporter said the replies sounded AI-generated. I advised her to use them sparingly, as they lacked authenticity.
I also wondered then: if an interviewee sent the smartest robot to answer questions on camera on their behalf, would we agree to film and broadcast it? We would not, because we would certainly be ridiculed, if not condemned.
Algorithms are your greatest enemy. Media literacy is the defence.
Requiring human intervention at every step would drive costs up enormously and is unrealistic. Slashing investment to the bare minimum and ruining the brand would be a false economy. The more balanced approach is human-AI collaboration.
Major news stories, in-depth features and distinctive commentaries, in particular, should have someone specifically responsible for the final checks and, where necessary, further editing. This approach will not satisfy everyone, but it should be broadly acceptable.
My third point concerns the audience — yes, you. It is chiefly a reminder.
With AI translation, the supply of news will rapidly reach saturation, but its quality will vary widely. Amid this flood of information, people may find that the time they spend reading the news brings little corresponding benefit, leaving them only more fatigued, entrenched in their views and confused.
Let us start with a basic understanding: no media outlet is absolutely objective. Yes, that includes me, a very small part of the industry. Everyone has financial backers, established positions and values, filters through which they see the world, priorities in choosing subjects and a whole set of default narrative frameworks.
Most will not deliberately lie or fabricate, of course, because that violates professional ethics. But cherry-picked reporting — or “half-truths” — combined with well-practised rhetorical techniques can subtly lead people astray. I have written about examples before, though naturally, the ones I chose were all foreign.
Nor does having more information to choose from mean encountering diverse views or seeing the full picture. There is a technology everyone should be wary of: the algorithm. It knows you better than anyone else. Whatever the language or channel, day or night, it keeps serving up what you like, repeatedly affirming what you already believe and gradually forming echo chambers, large and small. Sorry, but your horizons have not actually been broadened.
What can you do? You could put down your phone and consume less information, but that is a rather passive response. Bypassing algorithms and actively managing what you consume is the more constructive approach.
At its heart lies media literacy. Of course, how to develop that is another major subject, one to explore on another occasion.
For a start, maintain a sceptical mind — including towards the arguments in this article. As the old saying goes: “Better to have no books than to believe everything in them.” Today, perhaps “better to have no news than to believe all of it” could also be a first step towards breaking out of our echo chambers.
The writer is an editorial adviser to Lianhe Zaobao."
https://www.zaobao.com.sg/en/forum/views/perspective-media-going-multilingual-are-you-still-your-echo-chamber?ai-allowed=1
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Sun, Nov 08, 2026 page7
Translated fiction is a booming business in the UK
A rare bright spot in the publishing industry, literature in translation is on the rise as younger people look beyond their own borders and thirst for other cultures
By Andrew Dickson / Bloomberg
When Stefan Tobler set up a not-for-profit publishing house in the UK with friends in 2010, it was a gamble. With little in the way of seed capital, they put in grant applications and sent out a call for subscribers to help them get off the ground. Given that they wanted to produce literary fiction, much of it in translation, making money was the last thing on anyone’s mind. The name they chose, And Other Stories, was a declaration that they intended to swim outside the mainstream.
Sixteen years on, they have had the kind of trajectory that makes more conventional publishers look on in envy. The first title they published, Down the Rabbit Hole by Mexican author Juan Pablo Villalobos, became the first translation to be shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and sold out of its first run.
A few years later, the publishing house picked up another Spanish-language title, author Yuri Herrera’s Signs Preceding the End of the World, after it had been rejected as “untranslatable” and made it into a mass-market hit, selling more than 120,000 copies. This spring, And Other Stories became the first publisher to have back-to-back titles win the ultra-prestigious International Booker Prize.
“It’s another world now,” Tobler said. “It’s actually quite hard to believe.”
And Other Stories is far from alone: Translated fiction is booming in the UK. While overall fiction sales have plateaued, according to data from publishing analysts NielsenIQ, novels and short stories in translation are surging, up 36 percent in three years.
The delectable crime thriller Butter by the Japanese writer Asako Yuzuki became last year’s surprise hit in the UK, displacing celebrity memoirs and cookbooks from the bestseller lists. After South Korean novelist Han Kang won the International Booker Prize in 2016, sales of Korean fiction translations leaped 400 percent in the UK and surged even further after she won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2024.
Nielsen data say it all: In 2001, fiction in translation accounted for an estimated 1.2 million copies sold in the UK. Last year, it was 3.7 million copies, a nearly fourfold increase, and perhaps 6 percent of overall fiction sales.
Tiny independents, including the Anglo-French Fitzcarraldo Editions and Latin American specialists Charco Press, are leading the charge. In an environment where half the books in the UK are produced by the so-called Big Four — Penguin Random House, Hachette, HarperCollins and Pan Macmillan — the fact that small publishers are dominating this niche suggests that the power balance in UK publishing is shifting.
These small publishers also appear to have reached an elusive demographic: Gen Z and younger millennials.
The people who buy translated fiction skew significantly younger than the average reader and seem to be getting younger, surveys by NielsenIQ and the Booker Foundation showed. Whereas general fiction buyers are predominantly older than 60, the largest percentage of purchasers of fiction in translation last year were age 25 to 34.
While evidence suggesting that these readers are more ethnically diverse and urban than the average reader is perhaps not surprising, what stands out is that they are also now more likely to be male — conspicuous in an era when most fiction is bought by women and there are anxieties that men are abandoning books altogether.
“It’s very encouraging,” Booker Prize Foundation chief executive Gaby Wood said. “Whenever you see a younger group of people doing something, you can convince yourself it’s the future.”
Not too long ago, the expectation was that translation was a barrier, something that was “difficult” or offered a second-rate reading experience, Wood said.
“Now there are some amazing translators; they’re almost producing whole new books. It’s seen as a collaboration,” she said. “People have been watching films with subtitles for years. People have been listening to music in Spanish or Portuguese or Korean. Why wouldn’t fiction be the same?”
Nonetheless, no one can quite put their finger on what is really behind the trend. New research by publishing consultant Laura Di Giuseppe highlights the effect of social media, especially TikTok and Instagram, which have driven surprise spurts in sales for titles as varied as Butter and novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky’s White Nights, which became a #BookTok sensation in 2024.
The minimalist design and chic branding of presses such as And Other Stories (elegant cream covers, artfully text-heavy) and Fitzcarraldo (deliciously collectable Yves Klein blue) have won many fans, drawing comparison with too-cool-for-school film studios such as Mubi and A24.
“They publish with such intentionality and focus,” Bea Carvalho, head of fiction at the bookstore chain Waterstones, said of Fitzcarraldo. “And they’re brilliant at books-as-furniture.”
The spotlight shone by awards such as the International Booker, whose rules were adjusted in 2016 to reward the authors and their translators, has added luster and led to increased sales during the past decade. Tomb of Sand by writer Geetanjali Shree, first published in Hindi, sold just 473 copies when the English translation was first published by the tiny Tilted Access Press. After it won the 2022 International Booker, 35,000 copies of the original Hindi version were sold in one week alone in India. A US edition followed, and rights were sold in more than one dozen languages.
Three years later, when Taiwanese writer Yang Shuang-zi’s (楊?子) Taiwan Travelogue won the International Booker, it saw sales gains of more than 1,000 percent, And Other Stories said.
Some wonder whether there are deeper cultural forces at work, too.
As 2016 was also the year Britons voted to leave the EU, a decision where older voters tipped the balance, Wood speculates that people in their 20s and 30s are yearning for international connection.
“I think you have a generation of people wanting to look beyond their own borders,” she said. “They want to know what else there is.”
Tobler said the enthusiasm goes far beyond Europe, adding that fiction from East Asia is especially popular, perhaps linked to the fanbase for South Korean drama and Japanese manga.
“I think there is just a real thirst for cultures other than our own,” he said.
For all that, fiction in translation is very far from a majority pursuit, and it shows no signs of dominating the industry. Hiring a translator remains a substantial cost, and inflation is hitting small presses especially hard. Even larger publishers struggle to make money on translations or more niche genres.
“Publishing literary titles is a complete lottery, really,” Tobler said.
While artificial intelligence is upending the world of languages, especially in technical publishing, the effects on literary fiction remain to be seen.
“We’re quite a way away from the sensitivity that a human can give a translation,” Wood said.
Even so, some are anxious that translators will lose out. However, many feel that, now that they have taste for it, English readers will not lose their appetite for tales from elsewhere.
“Most customers coming into our bookshops aren’t really thinking about whether a book is translated or not,” Carvalho said. “They just want a good story.”
Andrew Dickson is a journalist, editor and broadcaster. He writes for the New York Times, the Financial Times, the Guardian and the New Yorker, mainly on culture and society."
https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/editorials/archives/2026/11/08/2003867346
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#metaglossia_mundus
La QNA lance une formation spécialisée en traduction journalistique
Qatar 08 nov. 2026, 14:00
Doha, le 8 novembre /QNA/ L’Agence de Presse du Qatar (QNA) a lancé ce dimanche une formation spécialisée en traduction journalistique, dans le cadre du programme de formation 2026 de son Centre de formation, à laquelle participent des rédacteurs de l’agence et des représentants de diverses entités gouvernementales.
Intitulée «Traduction journalistique», cette formation de cinq jours est dispensée par Khaled Qatamin, Expert en traduction à la QNA.
Elle a pour objectif de renforcer les compétences des participants dans ce domaine et d’améliorer leur capacité à traduire et à rédiger des contenus journalistiques avec précision et professionnalisme, conformément aux exigences du métier de journaliste et aux normes des institutions médiatiques.
Le programme aborde le rôle et l’importance de la traduction journalistique dans la diffusion d’actualités et d’informations à des publics variés.
Il examine également ses principes et ses normes professionnelles, ainsi que les techniques nécessaires pour adapter les contenus traduits aux différents formats journalistiques, sans compromettre la clarté, l’exactitude et la précision linguistique.
La formation comprend également des exercices pratiques de traduction journalistique écrite et audiovisuelle, en accordant une attention particulière aux spécificités de chaque modalité et au développement des compétences nécessaires pour répondre à leurs exigences respectives, tout en préservant l’exactitude, la clarté et l’intégrité du contexte.
La formation met particulièrement l’accent sur le maintien d’un équilibre entre la fidélité au contenu original et les exigences de la rédaction journalistique professionnelle.
Cette initiative s’inscrit dans le cadre des efforts déployés par la QNA, par l’intermédiaire de son Centre de formation, pour renforcer les capacités professionnelles et promouvoir la spécialisation dans le secteur des médias et dans d’autres domaines spécialisés.
Grâce à une offre diversifiée de programmes de formation adaptés aux besoins en constante évolution du secteur, l’agence cherche à améliorer la performance institutionnelle des médias, à consolider les normes professionnelles et à accroître l’efficacité globale."
https://qna.org.qa/fr-FR/news/news-details?id=la-qna-lance-une-formation-specialisee-en-traduction-journalistique&date=8/11/2026
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"What We Cannot See
Eh bien, éteignez donc un peu la lumière, pour voir.
By Colin MarshallNovember 7, 2026
Memoir & Essay
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IN THE 1960S, many readers of Japanese literature in English translation were drawn in by the “Big Three” living novelists: Yasunari Kawabata, Yukio Mishima, and Jun’ichirō Tanizaki. Tanizaki died first, in 1965, a year after being favored to win the Nobel Prize (it went to Jean-Paul Sartre instead; Kawabata would win it three years later, becoming the first Japanese writer to do so). Born in 1886, Tanizaki was the oldest of the Big Three and the most rooted in the civilization of a Japan that was, by that point, almost completely effaced by the process some would call modernization, and others Westernization. Tanizaki’s relationship to that process followed a familiar arc for that particular generation, which came of age at the turn of the 20th century. For him, an early, undiscriminating preference for all things new and Western—practically equivalent terms at the time—eventually gave way to a mournful, somewhat defensive, and even ostentatious reverence for the old ways of life being cast off by his homeland.
“Most Japanese picture the author as a kimono-clad literary giant expounding on the essence of Japanese culture,” writes the celebrated architect Kengo Kuma in his foreword to Gregory Starr’s 2017 English translation of Tanizaki’s extended essay In Praise of Shadows. More so than Kawabata or Mishima, “our impression of Tanizaki is of a larger-than-life figure—a member of an older generation who lived in another universe and had an appreciation of the deepest aspects of the cultural milieu.” Indeed, by the time Kuma was born, in 1954, Tanizaki had already written virtually all the work on which his reputation rests, including the novels Naomi (1925), Some Prefer Nettles (1929), and The Makioka Sisters (1948). Those books treat seriously, if sometimes luridly, the theme of Japan’s transformation in a world dominated by the West. By comparison, In Praise of Shadows (1933), originally commissioned by a magazine and published in serial form, may at first seem insubstantial. And yet, some consider this brief meditation on domestic architecture, restaurant lighting, theater costumes, and wooden outhouses Tanizaki’s true masterpiece.
Take, for instance, the Japanologist René Sieffert, who in the preface to his French translation calls it a book “que je ne suis pas le seul à tenir pour son chef-d’œuvre” (“which I am not the only one to consider his masterpiece”). Éloge de l’ombre was the first version of Shadows—or rather, In’ei Raisan, to use its Japanese title—to appear in that language in 1977, the same year an English translation was first published in book form. The latter is the work of two translators: Edward G. Seidensticker, one of the notable American Japanologists originally brought east by the war and subsequent occupation, and the Australian scholar of Japanese literature Thomas J. Harper. Seidensticker’s first translated excerpts of Tanizaki’s essay ran in the Japan Quarterly in 1954 (two decades after it was published in Japan) and were picked up the following year by The Atlantic Monthly. Harper translated the remainder for the book that appeared in 1977, which, despite its patchwork assembly, has remained the gold standard among In Praise of Shadows’ English translations, due not least to the highly crafted quality of its prose.
Seidensticker and Harper’s version opens thus:
What incredible pains the fancier of traditional architecture must take when he sets out to build a house in pure Japanese style, striving somehow to make electric wires, gas pipes, and water lines harmonize with the austerity of Japanese rooms—even someone who has never built a house for himself must sense this when he visits a teahouse, a restaurant, or an inn.
That first line carried me along to read the rest of the slim, nondescript brown volume in its entirety, which I first discovered in the little-frequented Japanese literature stacks high up in my university’s library. At the time, I had no particular knowledge of Tanizaki’s work, nor of anything written by the Big Three. If memory serves, I was there in search of books by Kōbō Abe, the imaginative, obscenely jokey existentialist whose most widely known novel inspired the sixties art-house phenomenon Woman in the Dunes. But In Praise of Shadows has a way of capturing the non-Japanese imagination, as evidenced by its continuing reference and retranslation in the West. Since the 1977 version, two more translators have brought it into English: Starr in 2017, and now Michael P. Cronin, whose collection of translated Tanizaki pieces, In Praise of Shadows and Other Essays, came out this year.
These days, anyone with an interest in architecture who wants to build a traditional Japanese house will find themselves going to great pains to come up with ingenious means to install electricity, gas, water and other modern facilities in ways that will not disturb the austere harmony of the zashiki, the formal tatami room. If they have spent any time at all in traditional structures like teahouses, restaurants or inns, even a rank amateur will sense the challenge.
So begins Starr’s translation, which wastes no time in reflecting the difference in Western awareness of Japanese culture over the preceding six decades: notice that he doesn’t shy from including the word “zashiki,” in whose explanatory aside the bamboo mats known as tatami are assumed to be familiar enough to go without italics. Cronin renders the same passage as follows:
When someone with an interest in architecture has a new house built these days, it’s fashionable to install the electricity, gas, water and other conveniences in such a way as to harmonize with traditional Japanese tatami-mat rooms; even those who have not built their own homes notice similar efforts when they enter a traditional room in a restaurant or inn.
Like Seidensticker and Harper, and unlike Starr, Cronin preserves Tanizaki’s single opening sentence, employing a semicolon rather than an em dash. Tanizaki uses no such punctuation in the original: only commas separate clause after clause, all of which pile up to what can feel to modern readers like a great length. It may not have to his educated domestic audience of the mid-1930s, especially those who read it in monthly installments. Still, some must surely have been intimidated by In’ei Raisan’s full text, composed as it is of just 16 massive paragraphs. (They certainly look formidable to most non-native readers.) While no translator in any Western language, to my knowledge, has wholly resisted the temptation to break up its sentences, Cronin, like Eduard Klopfenstein in his 1987 German translation, leaves the paragraphs intact. However uneasy on the eyes, especially in our age of screen-scrolled text, it does lend a degree of visual logic to what at first seems an unpredictable drift from subject to subject. One block of text starts by comparing Chinese and Japanese paper with its Western equivalent, and ends with a consideration of dentists’ offices; another starts by comparing Japanese and Western ghosts, and ends with an image of women of olden times emitting darkness itself straight from their bodies, “like the Demon Spider.”
As that image suggests, while In Praise of Shadows may be essayistic in form, it remains the work of a novelist. Tanizaki has an evocative way of sketching a scene, an ability especially well conveyed by Seidensticker and Harper. Despite his prejudice against electric lighting, he admits that, “seen at dusk as one gazes out upon the countryside from the window of a train, the lonely light of a bulb under an old-fashioned shade, shining dimly from behind the white paper shoji of a thatch-roofed farmhouse, can seem positively elegant.” In the largest room of a remembered Kyoto teahouse, “an elderly waitress with shaven eyebrows and blackened teeth” kneels by a candle whose light gives way to a “lofty, intense, monolithic” darkness :different in quality from darkness on the road at night. It was a repletion, a pregnancy of tiny particles like fine ashes, each particle luminous as a rainbow.” And in his favorite kind of now-unbuildable bathroom, “with its long, narrow windows at floor level,” one can “listen with such a sense of intimacy to the raindrops falling from the eaves and the trees, seeping into the earth as they wash over the base of a stone lantern and freshen the moss about the stepping stones.”
These are not the elements of an argument, exactly, but if Tanizaki does make one, it goes something like this: by the early 1930s, Japan’s zeal for Western technology and aesthetics had made it difficult even to build a satisfactory traditional house, so poorly do accoutrements like glass windows and telephones comport with the ascetic nature of the structure itself. Bathrooms have become all but impossible, given the inevitable clash between bright ceramic tile and weathered wood. Like all such imported tools invented and refined to meet the needs of foreigners, the Western toilet inherently fails to suit Japanese sensibilities, or indeed the Japanese soul. Had Japan stayed its own course of development, however slowly, rather than being intimidated into rapidly assimilating the elements of a “superior” civilization, these problems could have been avoided. That would also have saved countless forms of vanishing traditional beauty, especially those predicated on the seductive partial concealment of weak illumination by candles and oil lamps: the soft shine of a lacquerware soup bowl; the whitened face (and, in Tanizaki’s childhood, blackened teeth) of a hostess; the majestic costumes of Buddhist priests and Noh theater performers; the mystery of a home’s recessed tokonoma alcove and the scroll painting and flower arrangement it frames, which direct lighting renders utterly banal.
The peoples of the West passed through their own long eras without electric lights or indoor plumbing. Why, then, did they not cultivate the same appreciation for shadows and darkness as the Japanese? Tanizaki offers two explanations. First, the Japanese, unlike drivingly progressive Westerners, have always lived more by reconciling themselves to their conditions than by attempting to “improve” those conditions, choosing to conceal deficiencies rather than eliminate them. (“What we cannot see, we assume does not exist,” as Cronin translates.) Second, their penchant for muted colors and dim lighting arises, to an extent unconsciously, from a desire to set off the tone of their skin. “[N]o matter how white a Japanese person may be, their whiteness is always slightly dusky,” writes Tanizaki in Cronin’s translation (henceforth quoted unless specified otherwise). Even heavily powdered women “cannot smother the dark shade at the base of their skin. You recognize it just as you recognize the bottom of a clear, blue lake when you survey it from a great height.” (Seidensticker and Harper: “as plainly visible as dirt at the bottom of a pool of pure water.”) A sole Japanese participant amid a gathering of white foreigners “is like a spot of ink on a sheet of white paper, and even the rest of us find it uncomfortable to see, considering that person to be rather an eyesore.”
This brings to mind Natsume Sōseki, the most acclaimed novelist of the generation before Tanizaki’s, who wrote about his self-perception while studying abroad in London: “I see a dwarf coming, a man with an unpleasant complexion—and he happens to be my own reflection in the shop window. I don’t know how many times I have laughed at my own ugly appearance right in front of myself.” Sōseki liked to describe his mind as “half-Western and half-Japanese,” and though he wrote that he was “impressed by the appropriateness of the term ‘yellow race,’” his time abroad may well have inspired a renewal of his own appreciation for Japanese culture. Shadows offers a paean to the ambience of the kawaya, or traditional latrine, in which Tanizaki notes how “Mr. Sōseki counted his morning bowel movement among the pleasures of life.” Later, discussing culinary matters, he cites praise for “the color of yōkan red-bean jelly” in Sōseki’s 1906 novel Kusamakura, or The Three-Cornered World. “Such depth and complexity of color is absolutely unknown in Western sweets. How naïve and one-dimensional whipped cream seems, by comparison!”
Tanizaki’s remarks on the consequences of Japanese skin and its coloration would hardly have raised an eyebrow in the thirties, and that sort of commentary isn’t limited to his own countrymen. In taking his country to task for its profligate use of electricity, he also includes an anecdote about Albert Einstein touring Japan. Apparently, Einstein pointed out the wastefulness of streetlights turned on at midday, as seen from the window of a train. When telling the story later, the Japanese publisher who accompanied him “added that Einstein was very attentive to that sort of thing, being Jewish.” Some readers will be bothered by what they see as stereotyping, and others by interruption of the piece’s flow. “His descriptions of lacquerware under candlelight and women in the darkness of the house of pleasure are perfect jewels; but would they not stand out to better advantage removed from the company of that murmuring bowl of soup and Einstein’s trip to Kyoto?” asks Harper in his afterword. “Yet to do so would drain the life of In Praise of Shadows, for Tanizaki’s ‘essay’ works in ways different from the Western essay, and demands the freedom of his seemingly haphazard style.”
Idiosyncratic though they may seem to Western readers, these qualities accord with a long-acknowledged literary genre in Asia: “zuihitsu or ‘following the brush,’ a Song-dynasty (960–1276) Chinese form characterized by seemingly random observations on everyday life,” as Wellesley professor of modern Japanese literature Eve Zimmerman explains in her afterword to Starr’s translation. “The zuihitsu’s startling and at times paradoxical depictions perfectly suited Tanizaki’s purposes.” Unable to rely on the solidity of the prose’s structure, the practitioner stands or falls on his control of its tone, the aspect of In Praise of Shadows with which translators have the most evident difficulty. In Japanese, it’s as if Tanizaki is thinking out loud, confidently yet tentatively. He displays a measured restraint even when accumulating detail after detail, admitting various qualifications and contradictions, or relating his frustrations, all with the lightest touch of irony, though translations usually make his voice more literary or emphatic. Seidensticker and Harper turn him into a 19th-century English essayist; Sieffert turns him into a 19th-century French one, though with enough syntactical loyalty that he often sounds Japanese nonetheless. Klopfenstein’s Tanizaki sounds like a serious, Horkheimer-style cultural philosopher; Atsuko Ricca Suga’s Italian version (in 1982’s Libro d’ombra, the title Elogio dell’ombra having already been used for a Jorge Luis Borges poetry collection) engages in more flights of lyricism, with the word “chiaroscuro” naturally at her disposal.
The Japanese poet Ryoko Sekiguchi, long active in France and the French language, tried her hand more recently. In collaboration with her translation partner Patrick Honnoré, she produced the often unsettlingly idiomatic, even conversational Louange de l’ombre in 2017, the year of Starr’s almost equally free English interpretation. It’s tempting to describe Cronin’s new In Praise of Shadows as aiming, in formality, above Starr but below Seidensticker and Harper. It is, in any case, the most scholarly English translation so far, which stands to reason given the translator’s résumé. An associate professor of Japanese studies at William & Mary, he previously published a translation of Tanizaki’s final novel The Maids (1962–63), as well as a study of early midcentury Osaka as represented in film and literature. His apparent fascination with Japan’s comparatively uncosmopolitan “merchant capital” may originate in the years he lived in the wider Osaka-Kobe conurbation, known as Hanshin, before beginning his academic career. Tanizaki’s life, too, can be divided into pre- and post-Hanshin periods: a Tokyoite born and raised, he moved west in middle age after the 1923 Great Kantō Earthquake devastated the capital. There he discovered, or claimed to have discovered, the old-fashioned Japan of his childhood still carrying rustically on, far from the whirlwind of imported trend and fashion that was Tokyo.
As with many of Tanizaki’s perceptions, it wouldn’t do to take this at face value. As Cronin writes in his introduction, “The region was in fact an entry-point for modern popular culture and imports from the West—cinema, jazz, coffeehouse culture and more,” citing a critic who described it as “Japan’s America” in 1929. Along with Shadows, Cronin also includes translations of earlier pieces in which Tanizaki offers his observations of Osaka and Hanshin, as well as his memories of Tokyo. These do something to place the central essay in not just geographical but also historical context, which can become somewhat hazy in the more modernizing translations. That Tanizaki was writing before the war would be obvious to any Japanese reader from his vocabulary (and, trickier for the translator, the Chinese characters, or kanji, with which he represents it) alone: “kawaya,” for example, which Cronin suitably renders as “privy” where previous English translations had simply used “toilet.” He also restores Tanizaki’s attitude of speaking for not merely his countrymen but his entire race: “we Orientals” in Seidensticker and Harper became “Easterners” in Starr, while Cronin has both “we Easterners” and “we Asians.”
To be sure, the condition diagnosed by In Praise of Shadows hardly afflicted Japan alone. It was practically inevitable that I would start thinking about the essay again while living in South Korea, where I’ve spent more than 10 years now, and whose households routinely keep their fluorescent lighting on full blast well into the night. Tanizaki may have regarded his homeland as technologically disfigured by a combination of foreign coercion and genuine infatuation (of a kind he himself had experienced, despite never having traveled to the West). But here, Japan is seen as a country whose modernization proceeded comparatively on its own terms. Korea’s more harried transformation, many aspects of which were initiated under Japanese colonial rule in the first decades of the 20th century, offered not even the pretense of choice: especially after the Second World War, Korean civilization had to adapt or die, with economically revolutionary but culturally and intellectually deranging consequences. “Our thinking and way of life were borrowed,” said an anonymous Korean official quoted in The New Koreans: The Story of a Nation (2017) by longtime British expatriate Michael Breen. “Most majors we study were not created by us. Nor are the sports we play, the music we listen to, the movies we watch, or even the food we eat.” In sum, “it’s like we’re wearing shirts and pants that don’t fit.”
It’s no surprise that Tanizaki eventually put on a kimono, nor that In Praise of Shadows has also been published in Korean translation. While keeping generally faithful to the shape of the original Japanese sentences, as one can do more easily in Korean than in any other language, the poet Go Un-gi performs certain localizations in his 2005 translation, as when he changes “tsukemono ishi,” a stone traditionally used to weigh down a pickling container, to a stone about as heavy as “gimjang dol,” or one that would be used in the making of kimchi. This comes in the essay’s final section, where Tanizaki (irrelevantly, so the zuihitsu-uninitiated will assume) provides a complete recipe for kakinohazushi, a simple persimmon-leaf-wrapped salmon sushi eaten by the hill folk of Nara. “I was impressed by the ingenuity of those mountain people, so poor in resources, to have come up with this way of eating salted salmon,” he writes. “But then, by inquiring into various local foodways, one discovers that country folk have much more reliable palates than city folk these days and enjoy luxuries we cannot imagine.” No other translator has come up with quite as nuanced a translation of “kyoudo ryouri” as “foodways”—but then, none of their choices evoke the bulletin board at the local co-op either.
Any translation inevitably reflects something of its time, and that several new versions of In Praise of Shadows have appeared in the past nine years suggests a renewed interest in the ideas it presents compared to a generation ago. “The stunning emergence of Japan in the last few decades as a world leader in technological innovation, as well as the recent industrial awakening of Taiwan and Korea, exposes the idealism of Tanizaki’s notions,” writes the poet (and onetime Japan resident) Brad Leithauser in a New York Review of Books piece from 1985. “Those processes and products that so discomfited him would now seem to spring from economic imperatives that know no national boundaries. It was not Wester[n] but moder[n] technology—with its demands for assembly-line production and fungible goods—that left him feeling so woeful.” At that time, with the Japanese economic bubble looking unburstable, it would perhaps have seemed fatuous, if not insane, to speculate on “how different everything would be if we in the Orient had developed our own science,” as Seidensticker and Harper translate Tanizaki. “[W]ould not our myriads of everyday gadgets, our medicines, the products of our industrial art—would they not have suited our national temper better than they do?”
However difficult it is to answer, the question still compels interest. Quite possibly, as the fluorescent light of ostensibly global 21st-century modernity bleaches the mystique out of more corners of the world than ever before, even a hypothetical alternative path captures the imagination. Tanizaki himself saw his cause as mostly lost, closing In Praise of Shadows with a declaration that he wants only to “extend the eaves of that sanctuary called literature, darken its walls, push back into the shadows those things that have been overexposed, and strip away useless decoration. It need not be done to every house—just one will do. To discover what it would be like, we must first try turning out the lights.” Seidensticker and Harper: “[P]erhaps we may be allowed at least one mansion where we can turn off the electric lights and see what it is like without them.” Sieffert: “Pour voir ce que cela peut donner, eh bien, je m’en vais éteindre ma lampe électrique.” Sekiguchi and Honnoré: “Eh bien, éteignez donc un peu la lumière, pour voir.” Klopfenstein: “Und um zu sehen, was dabei herauskommt, lösche ich probeweise einmal das elektrische Licht.” Ricca Suga: “Per cominciare, spegniamo le luci. Poi, si vedrà.” Each of these translators captures a certain aspect of Tanizaki’s characteristic rhetorical flourish, but many angles remain for others to illuminate.
LARB Contributor
Colin Marshall is a Seoul-based essayist on cities, language, and culture. He is the author of the books 한국 요약 금지 (“No Summarizing Korea,” 2024)...
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/junichiro-tanizaki-shadows-translations-cronin-starr-seidensticker-harper/
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