Metaglossia: The Translation World

"By Eurasia Review

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

x

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

"Premium search service Kagi has launched a humorous AI translation tool that converts everyday English into the distinctive self-promotional language commonly found on LinkedIn.

Mashable reports that Kagi, a paid search service that positions itself as an ad-free, privacy-focused alternative to Google, has introduced an English-to-LinkedIn translator as part of its free AI-based language translation offerings. The tool, launched on Wednesday, has gained significant attention on social media for its ability to transform ordinary statements into the earnest, jargon-heavy posts typical of the professional networking platform.

The translator is part of a broader collection of humorous internet subculture language options Kagi has added to its service. Other available translations include Reddit speak, which incorporates phrases like “weird-ass,” “cringe,” and “banana for scale,” as well as Pirate Speak and fictional languages such as Klingon. However, the LinkedIn translator has resonated particularly strongly with users, touching a nerve about the proliferation of artificial-sounding corporate speak in digital communication.

The translation service works in both directions. Users can convert plain English into LinkedIn-style language or decode lengthy LinkedIn posts back into straightforward English. For example, spending an afternoon in bed becomes “decided to prioritize a strategic recharge to optimize cognitive performance and long-term productivity” in LinkedIn speak. The tool can even transform critical feedback into professionally palatable language, converting “I hated this and I am dumber for reading it” into “While I’m always looking for ways to challenge my current mindset, this particular content reminded me of the importance of being intentional with the information we consume. Grateful for the learning opportunity!”

The translator serves as both entertainment and practical utility. It lampoons the tendency of LinkedIn users to frame every minor career development in hyperbolic, buzzword-laden language while simultaneously offering a genuine service for those who need to navigate or create content in this particular communication style.

The LinkedIn translator’s popularity reflects broader concerns about authentic human communication in an era increasingly dominated by AI-generated content. The tool connects with similar cultural commentary, including the “Your AI Slop Bores Me” phenomenon, which criticizes generic AI-generated text that lacks genuine human perspective or value.

LinkedIn’s distinctive communication style has long been a source of commentary and parody. The platform has developed its own vocabulary filled with terms like “thought leaders,” “growth mindset,” “personal branding,” and “hustle culture.” Users frequently celebrate minor professional achievements with earnest posts that employ specific linguistic patterns and hashtags, creating a recognizable dialect that the Kagi translator successfully mimics.

The game-like quality of the translator invites experimentation. Users have tested whether any human activity, no matter how mundane or inappropriate, can be reframed in positive LinkedIn language. The results suggest that the platform’s communication style can theoretically transform any scenario into an opportunity for professional growth and learning.

Wynton Hall, author of the new book Code Red: The Left, the Right, China, and the Race to Control AI, argues that it is vital for conservatives to avoid “cognitive offloading,” by handing over all thinking to AI. The fact that people are utilizing AI to poke fun at the peculiar language of LinkedIn, which itself is filled with AI slop posts, is an encouraging sign.

Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), who was named one of TIME’s 100 Most Influential People in AI, praised CODE RED as a “must-read.” She added: “Few understand our conservative fight against Big Tech as Hall does,” making him “uniquely qualified to examine how we can best utilize AI’s enormous potential, while ensuring it does not exploit kids, creators, and conservatives.”  Award-winning investigative journalist and Public founder Michael Shellenberger calls CODE RED “illuminating,” ”alarming,” and describes the book as “an essential conversation-starter for those hoping to subvert Big Tech’s autocratic plans before it’s too late.”

Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship."
https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2026/03/22/learn-to-speak-corporate-ai-translator-converts-english-into-satirical-linkedin-jargon/
#metaglossia #metaglossia_mundus

"Theorizing “Global Criticality” and the Politics of Just Translation

07 May 2026 18:00 to 19:30

Bush House, Strand Campus, London

07

May

 

Professor Emily Apter is giving the keynote lecture at the annual conference of the Department of Interdisciplinary Humanities, King's College London. This lecture is open to the public.

 

"Translation and justice, the focus of my book What is Just Translation? Changing Languages in the Political Present, engages Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s notion of “global criticality” as a rubric for a vision of language politics that straddles the fields of law, global language policy, non-monolingual pedagogies and reparations applied to forms of linguistic injustice and cultural appropriationism. I associate “global criticality” with translational workarounds - ways of working micropolitically with language and intermedial forms of expression. These microforms stand in contradistinction to one-size-fits-all paradigms or “isms” that are anchored in colonial Euro-chronology and beholden to reductive bipolarities between major and minor, metropole and periphery, written and performative. As a micropolitics of language, “global criticality” flows into Spivak’s notion of “living translation:” a triple play on living with translation, living life in translation, and “live” translation, which vivifies life itself."

 

About the speaker

Professor Emily Apter is Julius Silver Professor of Comparative Literature and French Literature, Thought and Culture at New York University. Her books include: Unexceptional Politics: On Obstruction, Impasse and the Impolitic (Verso, 2018); Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability (2013); Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon (co-edited with Barbara Cassin, Jacques Lezra and Michael Wood) (2014); and The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature (2006). Since 2000 she has edited the book series Translation/Transnation with Princeton University Press. Essays have appeared in New Literary History, October, Public Culture, Crisis and Critique, History and Theory, Diacritics, PMLA, Comparative Literature, Critique, Les Temps qui Restent, Representations, Art Journal, Third Text, Paragraph, boundary 2, Artforum, Esprit Créateur and Critical Inquiry. In 2019 she was the Daimler Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. In 2017–18 she served as President of the American Comparative Literature Association. In fall 2014 she was a Humanities Council Fellow at Princeton University and in 2003–2004 she was a Guggenheim Fellowship recipient. In 2022 she co-edited and introduced Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s Living Translation, a collection of Spivak’s contributions to translation theory. Her book What is Just Translation? Changing Languages in the Political Present is nearing completion. Her next book project, on the conceptualization of the unborn (or “prepersons”) is provisionally titled Conception: The Laws."

https://www.kcl.ac.uk/events/theorizing-global-criticality-and-the-politics-of-just-translation

#metaglossia 

#metaglossia_mundus 

"Philly has a cozy community of translators who translate from many different languages, opening up texts from other countries and cultures for English speakers.

 

Philly literary translators are trying to increase awareness in the field. (Courtesy Paul Dry Books)

Love Philly? So do we. Let’s be friends. The Billy Penn newsletter keeps you informed about everything Philly, with a quirky vibe of healthy skepticism and persistent optimism. Join us and sign up today.

 

When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Marianna Suleymanova’s skills as a translator were put to use translating an anti-war journal called “Roar Review.” 

 

“I thought, ‘well, I think I can help people here understand a little bit of what’s going on,” she said.

 

Now, she’s one part of a group of Philly-based translators who turn literature from other languages and cultures into English. 

 

Suleymanova’s skills stem from her time growing up in Tashkent, Uzbekistan when it was still a part of the Soviet Union, where she spoke Russian and English. She moved to the United States at 16 and eventually went to work.

 

“I translated at NASA, and I translated for other industries,” she said. 

 

Suleymanova practices literary translation in addition to her full-time career. Despite this, she says this is her true passion – allowing her to uplift the voices of Russian-language writers to English speakers. 

 

“I think it’s important to have this alliance across languages,” she said. “Russian speakers are not who I do this for. It’s for Americans and English speakers that I do this for, wherever they may be, whether it’s in Australia. People can read my pieces anywhere they’re on the internet.” 

 

And Suleymanova is not alone. Philly’s literary translating community is vast.

 

 

“It will continue to be important”

Literary translation is different from literal translation – authors who are literary translators tend to try and preserve the original voice and tone of the text across languages. 

 

Many popular American books are also translated – including The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (translated from the original Swedish written by Stieg Larsson) and Pinocchio (translated from Carlo Collodi’s original Italian). 

 

And literary translation has been around for a long time, said Emily Hunsberger, a Philly translator who translates from Spanish. 

 

“Work has been translated in so many languages,” she said. “It’s kind of conduit for us to read each other’s stories and learn from each other and see what’s universal among us and what things challenge our understanding because it’s so different from the culture that we’re used to.”

 

Despite this, Hunsberger said there hasn’t been as much visibility and awareness around literary translation in the U.S. 

 

“I took a world literature course when I was in high school, many years ago, and all the books we read were translated works,” she said. “But never once did we learn the names of the translators. Never once did we talk about what translation is, or theories or challenges or dissecting what the act of translation is.” 

 

She said this is part of what inspired her to get into the field. Hunsberger owns a multilingual translation company. She helps to translate content from Spanish and Portuguese to English or from English to Spanish. 

 

She explained that this piqued her interest in literary translation. 

 

“I had always thought that I’d love to do literary translation,” she said. “In my younger years, I did a lot of creative writing, and I took a translation course when I was in undergrad, but I had left it on the back burner. I knew how to translate, but I didn’t really know about the publishing industry or how it worked.” 

 

She entered into the field after moving to Philly in 2020. She said she quickly recognized the value it brought to the city 

 

 

“Philadelphia has so many eclectic, unique spaces for art,” she said. “And I feel like I’ve talked to a lot of people in different disciplines of art who feel like Philadelphia is a place where you can practice your art, and so I feel like literary translation is just another one of those disciplines where this is a great place to be based, to be doing your art.” 

 

And beyond its artistic impact, literary translation is important to open others up to different worldviews, said Stephanie Schechner, a retired teacher from Widener University who translates from French. 

 

“Because Americans don’t study languages as much as other parts of the world, translation becomes an essential way for Americans to get access to voices that represent other points of view,” she said. “That helps open the world to people who cannot read things in the original text.” 

 

Schechner’s work focuses on a lesbian, working class French author, who goes by Mireille Best. 

 

Schechner said she felt like translating works from an author like this would be important, as it can show Americans who are feeling like their voices aren’t heard that there are models for their experiences around the world. 

 

“I think knowing that there were people ahead of us in the past who were fighting for their right to be individuals can give young people some hope,” she said. 

 

Philly’s literary translation community

Philly’s literary translation community is small, but dedicated. 

 

Hunsberger explained that Philly has an informal collective of translators called Transversal, which has helped connect Philly-area translators. 

 

“Transversal does not have any formal or nonprofit status,” she said. “We don’t have a board or anything, everything is just very organic and informal, and anyone who’s part of the collective can organize a gathering or anything they want to.”

 

Transversal was started by UPenn graduate students Liz Rose, Hilah Kohen and Kate Meng Brassel several years ago. 

 

The group now holds in-person meetups and co-working sessions, allowing for connection between members. 

 

Schechner said the group has employed creative strategies to facilitate connection between translators in different languages – including structured work sessions. 

 

“We do what’s called a Pomodoro,” she said. “You work for 25 minutes and we set a timer, then we take a five minute break in the middle, and say hello to each other. Then, we work for 25 more minutes, and then chat briefly at the end and then we leave. We’re just creating a space and an accountability where people could sit with each other and be in community.” 

 

Sean Gasper Bye has worked in literary translation for many years, including time as the interim executive director at the American Literary Translator’s Association – the only national organization in the U.S. dedicated to supporting literary translators. 

 

He said he initially got into the Philly literary translation community after moving back to the area from New York City. 

 

“I had always thought that Philly had the makings of a great translation town, because it has such strong cultural infrastructure,” he said. “I feel like people in Philly are very worldly, are very interested in culture and are readers.” 

 

He said with the creation of Transversal and conversations with other translators, a solid community was formed. He said local collaborators, like bookshops, have also been receptive to events and partnerships. 

 

Suleymanova emphasized that the morale of Philly’s translation community helps to keep her motivated.

 

“To look across the table and see people that are as hell bent as you are about bringing these stories across borders and languages, it could feel like you have a team in this, even if somebody’s working from entirely a different language,” she said. 

 

Hunsberger said she is excited to see community partnerships and interest around the topic growing, and hopes to continue with the momentum. 

 

“We want to continue, this year, with doing more of that kind of community outreach and bringing in the people interested in translation, or who are already involved in literary translation in Philadelphia who we haven’t managed to meet up with yet, and doing more things with these other organizations that are doing important work in the community,” she said. 

 

‘It’s quite solitary’

There are obstacles literary translators have to face. 

 

“What we do is very niche,” Suleymanova said. “There’s not a lot of spotlight on it. It’s quite solitary. It takes years for this work to see the light of day.” 

 

Philly’s literary translators try to get together to combat these issues and offer each other support. There are even events different translators will often host. 

 

Hunsberger said there have been bigger events the community has put together as well – including a Literary Translation Workshop she hosted late last year.

 

💌 Love Philly? Sign up for the free Billy Penn daily newsletter and stay in the know

 

“We co-sponsored the practical literary translation workshop that I led at The Head & The Hand Books last November,” she said. “It was called the ‘Translingual Remix,’ and it was meant to be small, because if you’re going to have it was a two hour time block, and if you’re going to have translators working on a piece, reading, and sharing, you you can’t have too many people in the room,” she said. 

 

“So it was intended to be a small workshop, but it was really, really cool, because the languages that people were bringing of who signed up was Hungarian, Ukrainian, Bangla, Yiddish, Italian and Spanish.” 

 

Schencher said it can also be hard to find time for literary translation, as it often doesn’t pay enough to be a primary career.

 

“Many translators are otherwise employed to pay their bills, or they’re in school, and carving out translation time for almost all of us is tricky,” she said. 

 

There can also be a lack of recognition for translators and the effort it takes to rewrite books into English, said Mahmud Rahman, a translator who translates from Bengali. 

 

“We want translators to be more recognized, and some of us feel that the name of the translator should go on the cover of the book,” he said. “Some publishers do that. Many do not, and it’s a constant tug of war, because essentially, when you’re translating a book into a language, you’re essentially recreating it, and it’s more your work.”

 

Rahman emphasized Philly’s literary community oftentimes does not get recognition compared to other big cities like New York. 

 

Bye explained there is also a lot of thought that goes into literary translating – work he says cannot be replicated by a machine. 

 

“It’s easy to think that we’re just kind of walking dictionaries who sort or swap one word in for another, and that it can be done quite mechanically,” he said. “And that’s really not the case.

 

While artificial intelligence is a concern, Hunsberger said that the machines can’t replicate much of literary translation. 

 

“The point that machines can’t really get at this point in time when it comes to literature or translation itself, is that what you would get from one translator would be different than what you get from another translator,” she said. “Because there’s also an artistic component.” 

 

“Communication and connection”

Despite these challenges, Hunsberger said Philly’s literary translation community is special. 

 

“I think it’s almost like an infinite well of conversation and connection,” she said.

 

Bye said practicing literary translation also helps to challenge our traditional ways of thinking. 

 

“Something that is really special about translation, is that you have access to these works that came up in a different cultural context, a different historical context, a different literary context, and you can see them breaking our rules or not paying attention to our rules, because those aren’t the rules over there,” he said.

 

He said that Polish writing, for example, oftentimes focuses less on the genre of story and more on the writing quality – which he says may not be the same in America. 

 

If you are interested in literary translation or joining Philly’s Transversal group, you can send them an email at transversalphl@gmail.com."

by Violet Comber-Wilen

March 3, 2026

https://billypenn.com/2026/03/03/literary-translation-services-philadelphia-language-translation/

#Metaglossia 

#metaglossia_mundus 

#métaglossie 

An international team proposes replacing Hockett’s feature checklist with a model of language as a dynamic, multimodal, and socially evolving system.

"The End of Language As We Know It? Scientists Challenge 60 Years of Linguistic Research

A new interdisciplinary study argues that one of linguistics’ most influential frameworks needs a major update. Drawing on research in sign languages, animal communication, cultural evolution, and artificial intelligence, the authors challenge the idea of language as a static set of uniquely human design features.

An international team proposes replacing Hockett’s feature checklist with a model of language as a dynamic, multimodal, and socially evolving system.

For more than sixty years, Charles Hockett’s ‘design features’ have been widely used as a framework for defining what distinguishes human language from other forms of communication. These features were long treated as a checklist of properties that set language apart.

However, a new study published in Trends in Cognitive Sciences argues that this traditional view is no longer sufficient. The researchers contend that language cannot be captured by a fixed inventory of traits, but is better understood as a flexible system shaped by social interaction, situational context, and human creativity.

Paradigm shift for language science
In a new reassessment of Hockett’s classic “design features” of language—ideas such as arbitrariness, duality of patterning, and displacement—an international team of linguists and cognitive scientists argues that current research requires a fundamental rethink of what language is and how it evolved.

Their central claim is clear: language is not merely a spoken code. Instead, it is a dynamic, multimodal, socially grounded system shaped through interaction, culture, and shared meaning.

Over the last several decades, scientific discoveries have dramatically expanded our understanding of communication. Language is no longer viewed as something confined to speech. Sign languages used by deaf communities are fully developed linguistic systems, and tactile systems such as Protactile—used by DeafBlind signers in the northwest USA—demonstrate that language can also be conveyed through touch.

Research has also reshaped views of animal communication. Dolphins use distinctive signature whistles, birds produce songs with syntax-like organization, and apes communicate intentionally through context-sensitive gestures. At the same time, the emergence of generative AI has raised new questions about whether language is limited to biological minds at all.

“This isn’t about discarding Hockett,” says Dr. Michael Pleyer, lead author and researcher at Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń. “It’s about updating him. His framework was revolutionary in 1960 – but science has moved on. Today, we see that features once thought uniquely human—like productivity (the ability to create an infinite number of sentences), displacement (the ability to talk about things not in the here and now), and even recursive structure (the ability to embed sentences within sentences)—are also found to some extent in animal communication. The real story isn’t about what separates us from other species. It’s about how language, in all its complexity, connects us.”

The interdisciplinary team Pleyer, Perlman, Lupyan, de Reus, and Raviv (2025) proposes a new direction for language science. Rather than treating language as a checklist of defining traits, they describe it as a living, adaptive system shaped by multimodality, social interaction, and cultural evolution.

Credit: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics
Beyond the List: A New Vision of Language
The researchers highlight three major developments that are reshaping linguistic theory and moving it beyond a static feature list.

1. Multimodality and semiotic diversity

Language is not restricted to spoken words. Signed languages function on equal footing with spoken languages, and gestures and facial expressions are integral to everyday communication rather than secondary additions. Furthermore, language is not purely arbitrary.

Iconicity—where form resembles meaning—plays an essential role. Examples include imitative gestures, sound-symbolic words such as ‘buzz’ and ‘crash’, a stretched pronunciation like ‘slooooow’, and even emoji in digital text. This flexibility allows humans to transform almost any behavior into a communicative signal.

2. Language as social and functional
Communication is not simply the transfer of coded information. It involves people building shared meaning within specific contexts. A phrase such as ‘Isn’t that Tom’s bike?’ might signal ‘Let’s meet here’ or ‘Let’s avoid this place,’ depending on shared history and relationships.

Language also conveys identity, sometimes unintentionally, through features such as accent or dialect. It can foster solidarity or create distance. At the same time, language influences cognition; for instance, acquiring a new color term can sharpen a person’s ability to distinguish shades.

3. Language as an adaptive, evolving system

Key properties of language, including productivity and compositional structure, do not simply exist in isolation. They emerge through repeated social interaction and cultural transmission across different timescales, from moment-to-moment exchanges to changes unfolding across generations.

Languages adapt to their social environments, and variations in community structure contribute to the remarkable diversity seen across the world’s languages.

Societal relevance
These insights arrive at a time of major change. Sign languages are increasingly recognized as fully complex languages equal to spoken ones. Animal communication research continues to reveal structured signaling systems involving context, intention, and innovation across birds, dolphins, primates, and even insects. Meanwhile, generative AI systems challenge assumptions about who or what can produce language.

Co-author Dr. Marcus Perlman from the University of Birmingham explains, “The last few decades have been an exciting time for linguistics, especially for those of us interested in the origins of human language. Language scientists today know about lots of stuff that was mostly obscure to scientists back then – for example, huge advances in our understanding of sign languages and now tactile signing systems, and recently, the advent of large language models like ChatGPT. It makes sense that linguistic theory would require a major update.”

The study also carries clear implications for society and education. In particular, it:

Questions traditional textbook accounts that reduce language to spoken words.
Recognizes sign languages and non-speech forms of communication as fully legitimate linguistic systems, supporting greater inclusion and equity.
Provides teachers and educators with an updated framework for discussing language evolution, communication, and cognition in the classroom.
“Language is not a static thing,” adds senior author Dr. Limor Raviv from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. “It’s a dynamic, embodied, and deeply social act, which is flexible in form, function, and evolution. When we accept that, we see not just what makes us human—but how we are in fact connected to the wider story of animal communication.”

About the study
The research draws together decades of work from linguistics, cognitive science, animal behavior, and neuroscience. It builds on prior analyses, including a 2022 study showing that Hockett’s design features continue to dominate introductory textbooks, even though growing empirical evidence suggests they no longer provide a complete account of language."
By Max Planck Institute for PsycholinguisticsFebruary 26, 2026
https://scitechdaily.com/the-end-of-language-as-we-know-it-scientists-challenge-60-years-of-linguistic-research/
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
#métaglossie

"Interpreters from across Canada work daily to preserve Indigenous languages.

As February marks Indigenous Languages Month, NNSL Media spoke with six interpreters at the NWT Legislative Assembly who make politics understandable in Inuinnaqtun, Inuktitut, Dene Suline, Sahtuot’ine and Dene Zhatie.

Necessity

Many found themselves interpreting out of necessity.

Tuppittia Qitsualik, a speaker of Inuinnaqtun, said that without her mother, she felt compelled to rise to the responsibility of interpreting for her unilingual father.

Dennis Drygeese, a speaker of Dene Suline Yatie, recalls that while growing up, his mother, a teacher, would travel often. As a result, he often stayed with his grandparents, who “didn’t speak a word of English.” If ever they needed help speaking to the Co-op manager, or to social services, Drygeese would be there to translate on their behalf.

Sarah Cleary, who is fluent in Sahtuot’ine Yati, began her translation in a similar way, saying, “When I was young, the Elders in my community always asked me to interpret, and I’d do my best. Sometimes I’d have to use sign language.”

Suzie Napayok-Short, an Inuktitut speaker, said, “As I was growing up, the Qallunaat — that’s the white man — had authority in pretty much everything our parents had to do, and as I grew I realized they really need to know exactly what is being said here.”

Preservation

Preservation of identity and culture are at the heart of many of the interpreters’ work.

Mary Jane Cazon, a speaker of Dene Zhatie, recalls her parents telling her that retaining her language and her culture would lead her into the future.

Drygeese shared a similar sentiment, stating: “My grandmother told me, ‘Hang on to your words, my boy, because one day it’s going to be really useful to you,’ so here I am.”

Regarding the importance of preserving one’s language, Joe Ototkiak, a speaker of Inuinnaqtun, said, “Language is a cornerstone. Without language, there’s really no identity.” He added, “I just hope and pray that Inuinnaqtun keeps thriving, it’s a language that was at the brink of disappearing.”

Information

Some translators the value that their work has in ensuring unilingual Elders fully understand the ways of western politics.

Otokiak said, “It’s about making sure our Elders have some idea of what’s going on around them, and informing them of new things on the horizon.”

Cleary recalled a time when her father, being a seasonal worker, was denied ration money. Sarah went to the local church with the goal of calling Yellowknife for assistance, but the church’s priest, on Sarah’s behalf, went and spoke with the agent that had denied her father the money for food. Sarah’s interpreting was able to help feed her family that winter.

Napayok-Short recalls that as a child, many of her community members didn’t fully understand the settler-imposed rules. She saw that as her opportunity to help her people and decided to take up the task of interpreting.

“I thought, ‘I can get really good at these languages if I keep listening and learning, so that’s what I’m gonna do — that’s going to be my way of helping my family.’”

Revitalization

Many interpreters remain hopeful and optimistic that their languages will be preserved, and even adopted more widely.

Cazon noted that she and her husband are both fluent in their mother tongue. They make an effort to speak the language in their home and around their grandchildren.

“One day, hopefully, they’ll really be able to pick it up and be able to be fluent, just like us,” she said.

Cleary envisions a future where, due to the officialization of so many Indigenous languages within the NWT, youth in Indigenous communities will be able to be educated in their mother tongue. “If they wanted to go south and enter a university, because our language is official, they would have their entrance requirement,” she said.

NWT News/North"
https://www.pentictonherald.ca/spare_news/article_30c6349e-06bb-5a33-8c56-c52e27823a6f.html
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
#métaglossie

"Pedro the Vast, the debut novel from Chilean writer Simón López Trujillo, was translated into English from Spanish by Robin Myers. The novel has been called “mind-blowing” by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara and follows a eucalyptus farm worker who survives a deadly fungal outbreak and becomes the focus of scientific obsession and religious fervor, while his abandoned children struggle to interpret his transformation as their separate reckonings collide in an unforgettable, catastrophic end.

In our latest interview series, “Writer/Translator,” we ask a writer and their translator to interview each other about their work. Below, Trujillo and Myer discuss rewriting, intertextuality, and the role of politics in translation.

Robin Myers: I always love hearing about the path from the book a person intends to write and the book they end up writing. What was the novel you imagined writing when you started work on Pedro the Vast, and what surprised you most about what happened along the way?

Simón Lopez Trujillo: In a way, this novel was a major lesson in what to make with the intentions I have when I’m writing a book. I started working on Pedro the Vast in 2018 and the first draft was completed in early 2019, but the main editing process took place between 2020 and 2021. In the meantime, not only the Covid-19 pandemic happened, but also – and more importantly – the social outburst of October 2019 in Chile. That context, marked both by intense violence and police brutality, but also by a new effervescence that opened the possibility of a new social change, pushed me to transform the novel into a sort of “protest novel” (novela de denuncia). During the hiatus between the first and second draft, I did a lot of research on big forest companies in Chile, their dependency on decree-laws and the dispossession of peasant land in the south of Chile during Pinochet’s dictatorship, and social leaders such as Rodrigo Cisterna (a forestry worker killed by the police in 2007, to whom the novel is dedicated). All this research resulted in an extra 100 pages or so, mainly of information that I wanted the reader to have in mind while reading the novel. But when my editor finally had the chance to revise this second draft, she told me: “Look, why don’t we go back to the previous draft?” I immediately said: “What? But this involved so much work and research…” And she replied: “Yes, but you’re losing your tone.” Then, I went back to the original draft and realized that she was right. I had unwittingly given up the very thing that had led me to write the novel in the first place: a strangeness in the language and story fleshed out by voices and characters that I wasn’t in absolute control of, but which I wanted to follow. And it was this curiosity that made the book feel like a novel, and not a mere device for my own personal political intentions or beliefs. This does not mean that I don’t believe in “political literature” or anything like that – of course I do. But I also believe that nowadays, in times of complex political turmoil and an excessive velocity in the circulation of discourse (where authorship seems reduced to a mere authorial image, and literary content to what “content” means in social media), we must be especially aware of what the actual pace of literature is. Because I don’t believe it moves as fast as we think. Reading, writing, and translating literature are still silent, slow, mostly solitary experiences. And maybe that’s why a good book affects us so deeply: because we feel its language is related to our own private experience. Because we can hear it as if it belonged to us, in a way, and we process it at the speed of abstraction. I’m talking about a slow, deep sense of hearing/reading, something akin to what Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht calls “the production of presence” –which is precisely what the mere meaning or content of a novel cannot convey. A strange intimacy, more connected to the mystery of human sensibility than to our intelligence, and more proximate to the realm of political imagination than of political discourse.

RM: One of the things I most admire about Pedro the Vast (and one of the parts I most enjoyed wrestling with as a translator) is the wide (wild!) range of voices: human and non-human, first person and third, with all kinds of different registers in the mix. Was there one of these voices that came to you first?

SLT: ​​I think it probably was the voice of Pedro’s sermons. For me, it’s no accident that the novel opens with that voice, that lyrical and mystical tone, italicized precisely because we don’t know (as readers but also me as writer) its true origin. He begins by confessing precisely this confusion: “If that’s what looking is—you know? I don’t know what I saw, but I saw so much.” It was important for me to work with that feeling of having seen something that you then can’t describe, because that is a way of talking about a certain form of reading, one that usually happens when I’m reading poetry. It’s a strange experience of being carried through a field of images and music, where sense is more a movement than an arrival at a specific point of meaning. In a way, all the main voices of this novel (Pedro’s, Patricio’s, Giovanna’s) are marked by this sort of poetic expansion, because my writing was very much inspired by the language of others: Juan Rulfo, scientific papers on fungi and biology, the testimonies of farmers and forest workers persecuted and killed by Pinochet’s dictatorship, Cristina Rivera Garza, Juan Emar, and “two Spinozas”: Baruch Spinoza, the God-intoxicated rationalist philosopher, and Juan de Espinosa Medrano, a Peruvian poet, priest, and preacher. Both lived and worked during the 17th century and in very different ways: Spinoza’s Ethics is written in extremely dry, heavy logical-mathematical language, while Espinosa Medrano’s La novena maravilla is profoundly baroque, brimming with metaphors and symbols. Every fragment of Pedro’s sermons was written by taking fragments of these “Spinozian” texts and rewriting them until that mystical italicized voice appeared. It’s a voice that seems both above and beneath the surface of the text. That, for me, is the fungal function in the novel: a metaphor for intertextuality. Pedro the Vast is profoundly inspired by that concept and, specifically, by that of rewriting (reescritura): the idea of writing through and with the voices of others. This notion was fundamental for me when I was mainly a writer of poetry, and it’s also a feature of the works of some of my favorite poets, who also tend to be translators: for example, Soledad Fariña, Rosmarie Waldrop, Mirta Rosenberg, and Leónidas Lamborghini, who write or wrote with a language profoundly marked by the experience of translation. As if what they saw and felt (and also had to wrestle with) in the fertile darkness of the in-between were a more intense way of approaching the poetic voice than the more traditional notion of the lyrical “I”: some kind of homogenous subjectivity that simply speaks, without worrying about whether what he says is the “right” choice because he (thinks he) is the sole “owner” of its language.

But while I was writing Pedro I was interested in the very opposite: a language whose speaker is not his owner. In fact, I wanted to advance in the direction of a “disappropriated, ownerless writing,” as explored by Rivera Garza in The Restless Dead. This, for me, is the case of Pedro after he gets infected. I truly think that his voice was also very much inspired by my own experience as a translator. Because that’s the thing with translation: you are not the owner, and you have to choose. For each word in the foreign language, there are multiple options in the language you are writing in, and you’re always responsible for making the right choice. Besides, since everybody wants to shoot the messenger, I think the task is to achieve the sense of something final, indisputable where words are free from objection. For me, this is the only way, as a translator, to become invisible, to survive, but also to mimic the most fundamental feature of writing literature: that is, to feel the language, the written word, as a sort of destiny. To enter the text not as a contingent fact but, instead, as the definitive path for what lies beyond the words. And this, for me, is linked to the metaphoric, to language employed as a vessel for seeing more than what one can see. Donald Davidson once wrote that “metaphor is the dreamwork of language,” whose grace lies not in what the metaphor means (which is actually more the task of metonymy), but in what it makes us “see.” In traversing this expanded field of countless associations where things are no longer identical to themselves. I sincerely think that this aspiration intoxicated much of the spirit of the novel: poetic language employed not as mere figurative speech, but as radical world-making. An opening, a bursting out of the experience of the self.

RM: Could you talk a bit about some of the other writers and works (or other artists and works of art) that influenced you in Pedro the Vast?

SLT: For this novel, I was very influenced by the work of Chilean and Latin American writers who explore the rural territory and rural consciousness not with a folk or naturalistic approach, but with some sense of the visionary, the poetic, and even the hallucinatory. In this sense, Juan Emar’s Ten (recently translated into English by Megan McDowell) was a sort of lighthouse. He goes to the rural land, pushes through it, reinvents it, and manages to find, as a result, a new sort of avant-garde language and vision of things. In this same vein, the writings of José María Arguedas, Marta Brunet, Carlos Droguett, and Manuel Rojas were of major importance to me, as well as more contemporary authors such as Samanta Schweblin (Fever Dream), Marina Closs (The Depopulation), and Juan Cárdenas (The Devil of the Provinces). Nevertheless, my main influence was, without a doubt, Juan Rulfo. Personally, the naming of my protagonist as Pedro is a Platonic gesture in his direction: Pedro Páramoconceived as the perfect, pure, and ideal model from which Pedro the Vast sprouts out as a contingent, humble, imperfect copy. Of course, these are two completely different characters, but Rulfo’s sense of space, time, image and language were a sort of distant murmur that enveloped and followed the contours of my own writing.

I also did a lot of research on subjects like fungi, Spinoza, the history of timber companies in Chile, and their relationship with Pinochet’s dictatorship. Here, works like Anna Tsing-Lowenhaupt’s The Mushroom at the End of the World, Marilena de Souza Chaui’s La nervadura de lo real: imaginación y razón en Spinoza, Manuel Acuña Asenjo’s La rebelión de los trabajadores forestales,and Thomas Miller Klublock’s La Frontera: Forest and Ecological Conflict in Chile’s Frontier Territory were fundamental.

Simón Lopez Trujillo: There’s a beautiful short poem in your book Having that says: “How will I know/ which voice/ was mine?”. It made me wonder: do you think translation has affected, influenced or shaped your own experience as a poet and a writer? Does it have some similarities or points of contact with the experience of living abroad, considering that you have lived in different parts of Latin America?

Robin Myers: Translation has affected me and my writing in more ways than I’m even fully conscious of, I think. I mean, some ways are pretty clear: as I explore other writers’ styles, registers, resources, and approaches, and as I do my best to inhabit them as a translator, I’m constantly reminded of what’s possible – and I feel pushed to explore, in turn, what I might otherwise assume is my “natural” voice. In this sense, translation is also a perennial reminder that every voice is learned: it’s from listening to others (reading others) that we come to speak (and write) however we speak (and write). Every voice can change. I love how your question also probes at what it means to live somewhere else. For me, this living-elsewhere – mostly in Mexico and more recently in Argentina – means an experience of continual, generative discomfort, even and perhaps especially when you start to feel comfortable where you are. To paraphrase my poet-translator friend Adalber Salas Hernández, migration means having one foot in one place and another foot in no place at all. You’re always learning to walk, and you can’t take any ground entirely for granted. There’s both melancholy and wonder in the vertigo of it all. I aspire to this wondrous discomfort, and to this neverending beginner’s-mind, as both a poet and a translator.

Going back to the first part of your question, though, I’ll also say that translation has made me a less anxious writer. I’m far less nervous about not writing than I used to be: about the fallow periods themselves, and about the sense of loneliness that can come from feeling unable to write for a while. Because when you translate, you are writing, but you’re never alone.

SLT: Perhaps this is too simple a question, but when and why did you start translating literature? And did you have or still have any role models, any literary translators that serve as inspirations for your own work?

RM: It’s not too simple a question at all! I started translating in earnest when I moved to Mexico City in 2011. I’d translated a handful of poems before, but it was then and there that I began to translate the work of young writers (mostly poets at first) I met on arrival, poets who became my friends. Beyond any more abstract interest I had in translation, though, these early experiences gave me a new way of being where I was – in a city that beguiled and challenged and stimulated me; in the company of people I admired and came to love. I translated in hopes of being more there, if that makes sense. Gradually, translation evolved into more of a practice, as well as a livelihood: for many years, I translated non-literary texts for income, and I also started translating more literary prose, which is now the bulk of my work. As for role models, there are so many translators I look up to that I couldn’t possibly name them all here! But to mention a few, Sophie Hughes and Katherine Silver have been among my lodestars for many years. More recently, I’ve gotten to know Julia Sanches and Rosalind Harvey, and I revere them both as translators and as organizers for translatorly rights and labor conditions.

SLT: In our complex times, when we’re constantly confronting horrors we thought were a thing of the past, when everything seems beholden to a nonnegotiable urgency, what do you think the political role of translation is or remains?

RM: To answer this question, I’d like to share some words from other translators I admire.

Johannes Göransson: “Translation brings in alternate canons and texts, and in so doing it also opens up alternative models of authorship. Rather than the singular great author, translation foregrounds the collaborative element of writing as well as the cultural issues and contexts at play in both the creation and transmission of the text… A poetry [or literature in general] that is profoundly engaged with foreign poetry is a poetry that is aware that nations are not homogenous, that while the institutions of literature are almost always hierarchical, writing itself is not.”

Jen/Eleana Hofer: “For years I’ve been thinking and writing through ideas around the ways translation can generate empathetic not-understanding as an alternative to simplistic and often essentializing or assimilationist ideas around the way texts in translation can provide a ‘window’ into other cultures… At its most radically politicized, translation can function to interrogate and destabilize our ideas about how language functions to make meaning, and can therefore invite us into an awareness of how our own modes of perception are configured, encouraging us to use the tools language offers — as the daily currency of thought, experience and communication — to reconstruct the very foundations on which our currently distressing world rests.”

Olivia Lott: “The reason I translate is to use my position within the United States and my native tongue subversively, to contribute to the dismantling of the imperialist vision of Latin America and to express my allyship with this struggle.”

Jeremy Tiang: “Perhaps if the dominant anglophone culture actually acknowledged itself to be part of the world, rather than treating ‘world literature’ as a spice rack to save itself from total blandness, more than three percent of books published in the United States would be in translation?”"
January 13, 2026
by Adam
https://debutiful.net/2026/01/13/writer-translator-simon-lopez-trujillo-and-robin-myer-pedro-the-vast/
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
#métaglossie

"Translator hopes to turn Cherokee speakers into readers, writers
BY CHAD HUNTER Senior Reporter

TAHLEQUAH – Cherokee is Dennis Sixkiller’s first spoken language, but it wasn’t until the early 2000s that he learned to read and write it.

Now, the 72-year-old translation specialist is determined to teach that rare and time-consuming skill to fellow first-language speakers.

“I’ve got my syllabary, and we’re working on it,” said fluent speaker Charles Levi, 77, of Coweta, Oklahoma. “It’s a long, long, you might say, event, to be a speaker and a writer. It hasn’t been that prevalent in our near past. It’s because they think maybe there’s no use for it. So, many people just swing right on over to English. We’re all guilty of that.”

Cherokee speakers began routinely gathering in 2007 to simply visit and talk in their ancestral language. But as the monthly “speakers’ bureau meetings” evolved, Sixkiller saw a need to include the written word via the Cherokee syllabary.

“Now, I try to teach them how to read and write Cherokee because the majority of them that are speakers, they don’t read and write,” he said. “I was in that category for many years, but I learned it. Actually, I think a lot of them were like I was at one time – there’s 86 characters in Cherokee, and they thought it might be too hard to learn. A lot of them do want to but sometimes it takes a little time.”

Fluent Cherokee speakers share a meal Jan. 8 at the Durbin Feeling Language Center during a monthly get-together.

Sixkiller, from Jay, grew up with Cherokee as his first spoken language and wasn’t exposed to English until grade school. He later learned to read and write the Cherokee syllabary in 2001 through classes with Cherokee linguist Durbin Feeling.

Named after Feeling, who died in 2020, the largest language investment in Cherokee history began six years ago with passage of the Durbin Feeling Language Act. Since then, nearly $70 million has been invested in language-related capital projects.

Children are taught Cherokee at the Immersion School inside the language center; a middle school for grades four through eight is being constructed nearby. And through the tribe’s 10-year-old Master Apprentice Program, a steady stream of second-language Cherokee learners has been flowing.

“There are some that really want to learn,” Sixkiller said. “I want people to learn. I really do.”

For his fellow first-language speakers, Sixkiller, a Cherokee National Treasure, is intent on teaching them to also read and write in Cherokee.

“That’s my goal. I’ve been teaching off and on throughout the years … but starting today, I’m really going to teach them how to read and write,” he said. “I’m going to take it real slow and make sure they’re learning. They’d be amazed what they can do with the language if they learn how to read and write.”

The latest Cherokee Language Speakers Bureau, held Jan. 8 at the Cherokee Nation Durbin Feeling Language Center in Tahlequah, saw speakers – mostly elders – singing and chatting in their language.

“We get together once a month and just share and talk so we won’t forget our language,” said Tribal Councilor Melvina Shotpouch, a first-language Cherokee speaker. “It’s so good to be able to converse with those that are still first speakers. There’s not many of them left.”

The Cherokee Nation Language Department estimates there are fewer than 1,500 first-language, fluent Cherokee speakers. Sixkiller, a Cherokee Nation translation specialist, has moderated the monthly meetings since 2007, noting that “there are many, many” Cherokee speakers who have passed on since then.

In August, CN Deputy Secretary of State Canaan Duncan called the Cherokee Language Speakers Bureau “a powerful bridge connecting our ancestral culture to the future of our people.”

“The work the group does is more than just preservation,” he added. “It’s also about fostering fellowship among our elders, exchanging ideas and nurturing connections when many speakers are separated by time and distance.”

Fluent speakers also meet routinely with language custodians from the other two federally-recognized Cherokee tribes to compose words for objects and concepts historically unknown to Cherokees.

“We probably have about 3,000, 4,000 words that we’ve translated to modern terms,” Sixkiller said. “Some of the words we don’t have. We didn’t have one for pizza in Cherokee, so we put it ga-du as-ti-tla-nv-i, like bread with something on it or mixed within bread, if you want to literally say it in Cherokee. That’s the way we do a lot of other words – computer, that sort of stuff.”

In addition to teaching the language, Sixkiller has promoted it over the airwaves for more than two decades on the tribe’s weekly radio show called “Cherokee Voices, Cherokee Sounds.” Primarily broadcast in the Cherokee language, the weekly program features songs, language lessons, news, traditional stories and one-on-one interviews with Cherokee elders."
https://www.cherokeephoenix.org/culture/translator-hopes-to-turn-cherokee-speakers-into-readers-writers/article_3f25395b-5ee1-40a6-9d0a-a14d4502867d.html
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
#métaglossie

Imagining ourselves in the shoes of the other affords necessary perspective for effective verbal, written, or physical communication exchange.

 

"E. Paul Zehr Ph.D.

 

Updated January 10, 2026

 

 Reviewed by Monica Vilhauer Ph.D.

 

 

 

 

Key points

 

Communication spans everything from words to physical actions.

 

Effective communication requires understanding the perspective and intention of those we interact with.

 

Translation of words, concepts, and actions requires functional interpretation, not literal representation.

 

Putting ourselves in the shoes of the other affords necessary perspective for effective communication.

 

Led Zeppelin warned us about the perils of misunderstood communications in relationships. Failing to translate what we are trying to say or do so that someone else gets it is the root of so many problems. But translation is a fantastic find when it goes right. Here are some things I've learned about translating meaning from a lifetime of speaking numerous languages, practicing a wide array of martial arts, and communicating science.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Meaning or intention?

 

"Das ist nicht mein Bier" is an expression I learned while taking German 101 in 1988 as an undergraduate. We were taught it was a Bavarian colloquialism meaning "that's not my problem." Literally, the words say, "That is not my beer." This trivial expression was something I have kept in mind ever since. It was a game-changer for how I thought about communication and translation. It's about meaning and context and understanding culture, not just about words. Keeping this in mind has served me very well when trying to communicate and navigate cultures, especially during interactions with Japanese colleagues and martial artists. It's always about what the intention is, not just what was said, asked, or stated.

 

 

 

 

Translating intention

 

I have studied a variety of martial arts in my lifetime, dabbling in about 9 traditions and diving more deeply into 6 martial arts from Japan, Okinawa, and China. I am fascinated by how similar concepts are expressed in different martial arts. It's about movement, not words, but it really is an issue of translation and communication. It's just that instead of translating a question like "what train are you trying to catch" it becomes one of "how are you going to defend against this punch coming at your face"? It is all about functional representation and how this is maintained in different forms across cultures and traditions.

 

 

 

 

Also the language used to describe physical actions needs nuance. Martial arts (Kung Fu) spread from China to strongly influence Okinawan (Toudi) and Japanese (Karate) traditions. But key core concepts seem to have been dropped along the way. For instance, total body power is a critical variable in the mastery of martial arts. In Japanese Karate, and subsequently most North American and European representations, there is a fixation on "the hips," which at first glance seems to hark back to recommendations from Chinese martial arts. Yet as I tried to reconcile teachings in Okinawan and Japanese Karate with my more recent experiences with Chinese Bagua Zhang, Xing Yi Chuan and Wing Chun Kuen, I discovered a disconnect. We blithely say "hips" which is actually meant to be "waist". And in many Chinese writings and teachings, "waist" means from just below the ribs to just above the knees. This hugely alters teaching and training and renders them much more functional. It comes down to shifting from asking "what was said" to the more useful "what was meant".

 

 

 

 

It's a matter of perspective

 

 

 

 

An interpretation of simultaneous attack and defense in Wing Chun Kung Fu.Source: Courtesy of Mike Goldsworthy

 

Over the years I have done a pretty extensive amount of science communication in blog posts, podcasts, interviews, and books. Science communication at its core is about taking concepts many find difficult to understand and rephrasing them in such a way that they are engaging and accessible. I think the key to that is making sure people are interested in a bridging metaphor, which is why so much of my writing has focused on using superheroes as vehicles for transfer and science translation. But a key thing I had to learn when I wrote a young adult book was to avoid the trap of just simplifing language instead of trying to understand a very different perspective. When I give talks about science communication, I illustrate this point by literally walking into the audience seating area, turning around and sitting there. This is the perspective you have to adopt if you want to be on the other side effectively sharing knowledge.

 

 

 

 

If we really want to be understood, we have to authentically appreciate and engage with the perspective of those we are trying to reach. This is why simple language translation like that found in "Google Translate" and the like fail so often. They provide literal translations that miss the subtlety of context and functional meaning.

 

 

 

 

The main take away here is that if we truly want people to understand us, we must try to understand them and communicate in a way that they respect, appreciate, and understand. If we do that, our meaning truly won't get lost in translation and we will gain a deeper understanding of ourselves and those we are hoping to reach."

 

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/black-belt-brain/202510/dont-get-lost-in-translation

 

#Metaglossia 

 

#metaglossia_mundus 

Idioms are an often invisible barrier to understanding and inclusion for second-language speakers because their meanings rely on shared culture as well as language.

 

"Being a linguist — and someone who has tried to learn several languages (including English) in addition to my mother tongue (Flemish Dutch) — I have an annoying habit: instead of paying attention to what people are saying, I often get distracted by how they are saying it. The other day, this happened again in a meeting with colleagues.

 

 

 

 

I started writing down some of the expressions my colleagues were using to communicate their ideas that may be puzzling for users of English as a second or additional language.

 

 

 

 

In a span of about five minutes, I heard “it’s a no-brainer,” “to second something,” “being on the same page,” “to bring people up to speed,” “how you see fit,” “to table something” and “to have it out with someone.”

 

 

 

 

These are all expressions whose meanings do not follow straightforwardly from their lexical makeup — they’re called idioms by lexicologists.

 

 

 

 

Idioms are part of daily communication. But this anecdote also suggests that we take it for granted that such expressions are readily understood by members of the same community. However, when it comes to people who are new to said community, nothing could be further from the truth.

 

 

 

 

Idioms and the limits of language proficiency

 

Research conducted at the University of Birmingham several years ago revealed that international students for whom English is an additional language often misunderstand lecture content because they misinterpret their lecturers’ metaphorical phrases, including figurative idioms.

 

 

 

 

More recent research confirms that English idioms can remain elusive to second-language learners even if the expressions are intentionally embedded in transparent contexts.

 

 

 

 

One of my own recent studies, conducted with international students at Western University in Canada, also found that students incorrectly interpreted idioms and struggled to recall the actual meanings later on after being corrected.

 

 

 

 

This shows just how persistently confusing these expressions can be.

 

 

 

 

It’s worth mentioning that we’re talking about students who obtained high enough scores on standardized English proficiency tests to be admitted to English-medium universities. Knowledge of idioms appears to lag behind other facets of language.

 

 

 

 

When literal meanings get in the way

 

The challenge posed by idioms is not unique to English. All languages have large stocks of idioms, many of which second-language learners will find puzzling if the expressions do not have obvious counterparts in their mother tongue.

 

 

 

 

There are various obstacles to comprehending idioms, and recognizing these obstacles can help us empathize with those who are new to a community. For one thing, an idiom will inevitably be hard to understand if it includes a word that the learner does not know at all.

 

 

 

 

Members of a community need to have greater empathy for newcomers who are not yet familiar with the many hundreds of potentially confusing idioms that are used so spontaneously in everyday life. (Unsplash)

 

However, even if all the constituent words of an expression look familiar, the first meaning that comes to a learner’s mind can be misleading. For example, as a younger learner of English, I was convinced that the expression “to jump the gun” referred to an act of bravery because, to me, the phrase evoked an image of someone being held at gunpoint and who makes a sudden move to disarm an adversary.

 

 

 

 

I only realized that this idiom means “to act too soon” when I was told that the gun in this phrase does not allude to a firearm but to the pistol used to signal the start of a race.

 

 

 

 

I also used to think that to “follow suit” meant taking orders from someone in a position of authority because I thought “suit” alluded to business attire. Its actual meaning — “to do the same thing as someone else” — became clear only when I learned the other meaning of suit in card games such as bridge.

 

 

 

 

The idea that idioms prompt a literal interpretation may seem counter-intuitive to readers who have not learned a second language because we normally bypass such literal interpretations when we hear idioms in our first language. However, research suggests that second-language learners do tend to use literal meanings as they try to make sense of idioms.

 

 

 

 

Unfortunately, when language learners use a literal reading of an idiom to guess its figurative meaning, they are very often misled by ambiguous words. For example, they will almost inevitably misunderstand “limb” in the idiom “to go out on a limb” — meaning “to take a serious risk” — as a body part rather than a branch of a tree.

 

 

 

 

Recognizing the origin of an idiomatic expression can also be difficult because the domains of life from which certain idioms stem are not necessarily shared across cultures. For example, learners may struggle to understand English idioms derived from horse racing (“to win hands down”), golf (“par for the course”), rowing (“pull your weight”) and baseball (“cover your bases”), if these sports are uncommon in the communities in which they grew up.

 

 

 

 

A language’s stock of idioms provides a window into a community’s culture and history.

 

 

 

 

Same language, same idioms? Not exactly

 

Idiom repertoires vary across communities — whether defined regionally, demographically or otherwise — even when those communities share the same general language.

 

 

 

 

For example, if an Aussie were to criticize an anglophone Canadian for making a fuss by saying “you’re carrying on like a pork chop,” they may be lost in translation, even if there isn’t much of one. At least, linguistically that is.

 

 

 

 

Although people may have learned a handful of idioms in an English-language course taken in their home country, those particular idioms may not be the ones they will encounter later as international students or immigrants.

 

 

 

 

The moral is simple: be aware that expressions you consider perfectly transparent because you grew up with them may be puzzling to others. We need to have more empathy for people who are not yet familiar with the many hundreds of potentially confusing phrases that we use so spontaneously." 

 

By Frank Boers, 

 

Western University

 

December 16, 2025

 

https://theconversation.com/the-trouble-with-idioms-how-they-can-leave-even-fluent-english-speakers-behind-271681

 

#Metaglossia 

 

#metaglossia_mundus 

"Redefining AI for underserved cultures and languages

THE rapid evolution of large language models has achieved grammatical correctness across major languages, yet this represents marketing inclusivity rather than true linguistic equality. While today’s AI can construct sentences in Tagalog, Swahili or Mongolian, the output remains inconsistent and inferior to English performance. Worse, the proliferation of wrapper applications without proper localization amplifies these deficiencies, potentially causing more harm than having no AI support at all.

Our experience building Egune AI in Mongolia revealed that perfect grammar is merely the starting point. The deeper challenge is not making AI speak every language; it is making AI think in every culture. When children grow up interacting with AI that fundamentally operates in English thought patterns, they gradually adopt linear, analytical reasoning, losing the circular, contextual cognition that characterizes many Asian and Indigenous languages. This represents cognitive homogenization disguised as technological progress.

The implications extend far beyond individual users. When governments process documents through foreign AI systems, health care providers rely on AI trained on different medical traditions, and educational institutions deploy AI that misunderstands local pedagogical approaches, entire nations become digitally dependent. They participate in the AI revolution as data providers rather than value creators, feeding sensitive information into systems that extract economic benefit without proportional return.

‌
Digital sovereignty has become essential for nations serious about their technological future. This transcends data localization requirements, though those are important. It is about controlling the AI systems that increasingly mediate citizen interactions with essential services. When critical infrastructure depends on foreign entities subject to external laws and priorities, true independence becomes impossible.

Building AI for languages with limited digital presence requires fundamental rethinking. Mongolian, spoken by three million people, represents less than 0.01 percent of internet content. Web scraping yields mostly translated content reflecting foreign thought patterns rather than authentic expression. We discovered that a million translated sentences teach less about genuine Mongolian thinking than a thousand authentic native conversations.

Our solution involved building dedicated data teams to create quality datasets. We digitized books, transcribed audio and video content, collected academic writing, and manually cleaned and corrected everything. While major AI systems train on trillions of tokens of varying quality, we focused on millions of carefully curated, culturally authentic examples. Every piece underwent native-speaker verification for natural expression. This approach took longer and cost more, but the results justified the investment: our AI understands not just Mongolian words but Mongolian thinking patterns.

Sovereign AI development enables capabilities impossible with foreign systems. During Mongolia’s harsh winters, we immediately update models with emergency protocols. When legislation changes, government agencies integrate updates within days rather than months. This agility becomes impossible when dependent on global release cycles prioritizing larger markets.

Local development ensures consistent alignment with national priorities. Security vulnerabilities specific to local infrastructure receive immediate attention. Critical bugs affecting local users receive priority treatment rather than languishing in global backlogs. Most importantly, economic value from AI development remains domestic, creating jobs and building expertise rather than extracting value abroad.

Our recent launch of Egune Chat on iOS and Android platforms demonstrates practical sovereign AI implementation. Users select their geographic region, accessing AI trained on specific cultural and administrative contexts. Rural Mongolians receive responses that consider traditional practices and limited infrastructure. Urban professionals get advice relevant to modern city resources. This is not translation; it is fundamentally different training for different realities...

Building national AI capabilities no longer requires competing with trillion-parameter models. Focused, culturally optimized systems serve specific populations better than generic global solutions while requiring a fraction of the resources. A $50 million investment in sovereign AI creates more local value than $500 million spent on foreign AI subscriptions.

International collaboration need not conflict with digital sovereignty. Nations can share open-source frameworks and methodologies while maintaining control over implementations. Mongolia’s experience can inform efforts in the Philippines, while Filipino innovations in multi-dialect processing might benefit Indonesia. This creates a network of diverse, interoperable AI systems rather than monolithic global platforms.

The future of inclusive AI requires recognizing that each culture offers unique problem-solving patterns worth preserving in the digital age. True inclusivity demands AI systems that understand local context, respect sovereignty, and serve actual population needs rather than assuming universal solutions exist..."
By Badral Sanlag
December 28, 2025
https://www.manilatimes.net/2025/12/28/business/sunday-business-it/inclusive-ai-from-the-ground-up-redefining-ai-for-underserved-cultures-and-languages/2249949
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

"Decolonising the Mind: The Politics Of Language In African Literature

 Mehnaz Ali Jan

 

“Every language has a right to be spoken, even if only five people speak it, because it is democratic and a human right.” (Ngugi wa Thiong’o)

 

The book “Decolonising the mind: the politics of language in African literature” is written by a Kenyan writer, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, who was born in January 5, 1938. He is one of the most influential writers, novelists, playwrights, essayists and a post-colonial theorists. He firmly upholds writing in African native language such as his own Gikuyu rather than colonial languages. His various publications include Weep Not Child, The River Between, A Grain Of Wheat, Petals Of Blood, Devil On The Cross, Homecoming and many more.

 

The book debated book contains 114-120 pages, written in English and has been translated into several languages including French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Arabic and some African and Asian languages and got published in 1986.

 

Furthermore, to fully grasp the book’s title, one must first understand the concept of colonisation.

 

Colonisation refers to the subjugation (process of bringing something under control) of one country or nation by the other militarily advanced and a powerful country or nation. The colonizer usually rule over the weak nations, form colonies and exploit their resources for its own benefits. And the colonized countries or nations undergo various changes such as political, economic, cultural and social changes in the subjugated country.

 

Decolonisation is its opposite which is the process by which colonies become independent of the colonizing country. It is about cultural, economic and psychological freedom of the native people with the achievement of national sovereignty.

 

Moreover, the book is the combination of essays regarding language and its constructive role in national development, culture, history and identity. The book is a collection of four essays namely:

 

1- The Language Of African Literature

 

2- The Language Of African Theatre

 

3- The Language Of African Fiction

 

4- The Quest For Relevance

 

1. The Language of African Literature:

 

In this essay, the writer argues that language is deeply tied to culture and identity. He explains how colonial education system pushed African writers to use European languages, which gradually distanced them from their own people and traditions. Ngugi believes that writing in colonial languages reinforces mental domination, while using African languages helps reclaim cultural pride and restore a true African perspective in literature.

 

2. The Language of African Theatre:

 

The author focuses on theatre as a communal art form that directly engages the people. He describes his experience with community theatre in Kenya, where performances were done in local languages and reflected real social issues. This essay shows how African theatre could become a powerful tool of resistance and education when it speaks the language of the people, rather than the language of the colonizers.

 

3. The Language of African Fiction:

 

Here, Ngugi examines African novels written in European languages and questions whom these works truly serve. He argues that when African stories are told in foreign languages, they often cater more to international audiences than local readers. By advocating for African languages in fiction, Ngugi emphasizes the importance of authenticity, accessibility, and preserving indigenous storytelling traditions.

 

4. The Quest for Relevance:

 

This essay discusses the responsibility of African writers and intellectuals in post-colonial societies. Ngugi stresses that literature should not exist in isolation but should address the real struggles of ordinary people, such as oppression, inequality, and cultural loss. He calls on writers to remain relevant by engaging with their communities and contributing to social change rather than seeking approval from Western institutions.

 

However, the main arguments of the book cover:

 

•Language as a tool of colonial domination

 

• Colonial Alienation

 

• Reclaiming identity through indigenous (native) languages

 

Language as a Tool of Colonial Domination:

 

Ngugi argues that colonial powers didn’t just occupy land but they also used language to shape thought and identity. He mentions that when African intellectuals write in European languages (English, French, Portuguese), they are participating in a continuation of colonial influence because these languages carry the worldviews and values of the colonizers.

 

Colonial Alienation:

 

He introduces the idea of “colonial alienation” that the psychological estrangement that occurs when a people’s native languages and cultural frames are displaced by colonial languages. This alienation, he claims, leads to a loss of cultural grounding and self understanding.

 

Reclaiming Identity Through Indigenous Languages:

 

Ngugi passionately defends the use of African languages in literature, education, and culture, arguing that they are essential for genuine cultural expression and liberation. Language, for him, is not neutral instead it’s deeply political and tied to a people’s history, memory, and resistance.

 

Apart from this, this book talks about the implementation of English as the official language by the British in the colonized countries like Africa, and its impacts as this broadens the gap between the use of mother tongue Gikuyu and English. He started writing his works in Gikuyu since 1977. Since then he was confronted with a question, particularly, in Europe about the reason for his writing in Gikuyu language. His writing in mother tongue was perceived as an abnormal act. He shares incidents of humiliating experiences undergone by the Gikuyu speaking children in school and different types of punishments were given.

 

This reflects how colonialism shaped African thinking through language and that colonial rule didn’t end with political independence as it survived in people’s minds – especially through education system that dominated European languages and cultures over African ones. For him, language is not merely a means of communication but also it carries culture, identity, memory and history. To decolonise the minds, therefore, means reclaiming African language using them to tell stories.

 

In short, Ngugi believes his writing in his native language is a part of the anti imperialistic struggles of Africans, especially Kenyan people. He does not want to see the future generation, specifically, school children growing up in the imperialistic tradition. He desires to see Kenyan national languages having a literature which reflects the rhythms of the languages as well as the native social nature, plus their struggle with nature and culture. Because it will benefit the future generations of Kenya to live in harmony; they can learn other languages and could enjoy revolutionary elements in the other languages without any complex about their mother tongue, environment and themselves.

 

Thus, “Decolonising the Mind” is a must-read for students, writers, scholars, political workers and others who are interested in understanding the lasting effects of colonialism on language and culture. We can touch it with the ongoing crises in Balochistan as well."

https://www.thebalochnews.com/2025/12/29/decolonising-the-mind-the-politics-of-language-in-african-literature/?amp=1

#Metaglossia 

#metaglossia_mundus 

Interview with Yair Frank on how the Bible Society in Israel modernized the Hebrew Bible into contemporary Hebrew while preserving meaning and literary depth.

 

"From Hebrew to Hebrew: How the Bible got a new language in Israel

Bridging the gap: Modernizing the Hebrew Bible's ancient text for today’s Israeli readers – An interview with Yair Frank, the project leader

 

Izraelinfo Staff | Published: December 20, 2025

 

What does it mean to "understand" the Bible in Israel today? The Bible Society in Israel has worked for five years to make the text of the Hebrew Bible speak in modern Hebrew – without losing its meaning, its layering, or its cultural weight.

 

We spoke with Yair Frank, the project leader, about where the line lies between translation and interpretation, why the new text did not end up as "street language," and why this edition could be crucial even for those who haven’t opened the Bible since their high school final exams.

 

Interview by Judit Kónya, Izraelinfo:

 

Could you introduce yourself in a few words? What do you do?

 

I have been working at the Bible Society in Israel for over eleven years; currently, I manage the Society's larger projects. For the past five years, our most important work has been the modernization of the Hebrew Bible – that is, transplanting the text into today's modern Hebrew language.

 

Previously, I led the revision of the Hebrew translation of the New Testament. That is a completely different field: there, we had to translate ancient Koine Greek text into Hebrew. In summary, I manage all projects at the Society that are directly related to the text of the Bible.

 

My professional background: I studied Tanakh – at is, the Hebrew Bible – and the History of the Jewish People at the Hebrew University.

 

In the name of the Bible Society, does "kitvei ha-kodesh" – "holy scriptures" – refer to the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament together?

 

Yes. The Bible Society in Israel was established in 1948, the year the state was founded. Before the establishment of the State of Israel, during the British Mandate, the British and Foreign Bible Society operated an office here, which became an independent, local society in parallel with the founding of the state.

 

Which religion or church is the organization affiliated with?

 

Just as in other countries around the world, the Bible Society in Israel is not tied to any single church or denomination. The Society's goal is to disseminate the Bible, meaning to make the biblical text accessible to everyone regardless of linguistic, cultural, or religious background.

 

At the same time, the historical background is clearly rooted in Christianity: the international movement of Bible Societies originated from that sphere. We make the Bible – both the Old and New Testaments – equally available.

 

The staff of today's Bible Society in Israel are local Jews, the majority of whom are Messianic Jews. Accordingly, we accept both the Old Testament and the New Testament as holy scripture.

 

There are Bible Societies in most countries of the world, but where is the "head" of the organization? Who coordinates the operations of the local societies?

 

There is no "head." One of the most interesting features of the system is that it is not built hierarchically, but operates like a network. For example, I know some staff members of the organization in Hungary, I know who works there, but beyond that, there is no institutional connection between us. Every local society is completely autonomous and independent, makes its own decisions, and operates with its own responsibility.

 

This year, in December 2025, the Bible Society in Israel published the text of the Bible transposed into modern Hebrew. This is a "bilingual" edition, correct?

 

Not exactly. The volume is monolingual, but it contains two texts. The Masoretic text based on the Leningrad Codex appears in one column, and on the same page, the version transposed into modern Hebrew can be read.

 

So, the text of the Hebrew Bible and its modernized version stand side by side – meaning you translated the Hebrew Bible into Hebrew.

 

Actually, this is not a classic translation, but an intra-lingual modernization.

 

Who worked on the project?

 

At least twelve people participated in the work with varying degrees of intensity.

 

Are they all Israelis and Messianic believers?

 

Not everyone. For instance, the linguistic editor of the modern Hebrew text is not a Messianic believer: he is an atheist Jew who also works with the Academy of the Hebrew Language (*HaAkademia LaLashon HaIvrit*), and he participated in this project with great joy.

 

Can the contributors be named?

 

A decision was made within the Bible Society that the names of the contributors would not appear in the publication. The book contains neither my name nor anyone else's – only the text. If this decision changes, the names may be published later. My role is known regardless of this.

 

What was your specific task?

 

Coordinating the work of the entire team. In the first phase of the work, we transposed the biblical text into modern Hebrew. This was followed by a second, research phase: we examined the finished text verse by verse and checked, using philological tools, how faithful the modernized version was to the original meaning, and to what extent the translators followed the source text.

 

I participated actively in this phase myself.

 

Did the translators have linguistic competence to interpret Greek, Latin, and other Bible translations?

 

The translators are professional translators who have been working in the profession for twenty to thirty years. They translate from other languages into Hebrew; Hebrew is their mother tongue. Furthermore, they have all read the biblical Hebrew text for many years, know it well, and use it on a daily basis.

 

So they do not have a background in biblical studies.

 

No. Biblical studies is not their field of expertise.

 

But they know biblical Hebrew deeply.

 

Yes. They grew up on it, they read it, and they use it every day.

 

Is that why the second phase was necessary?

 

Exactly. That is why it was important that in the second phase of the work, experts who are researchers in various fields of biblical studies worked on the text. They went through the translated text verse by verse, and where the translators misunderstood the text, they corrected the translation.

 

Every translation is actually an interpretation, and here it is worth discussing the Christian background of the project again. Interpreting the text of the Bible is a theologian's task. To what extent do you consider this modernized text to be theologically thought-out?

 

Indeed, every translation is interpretation. Therefore, one of the basic principles of the project was to approach the text with the greatest possible philological fidelity. We consciously had no prior theological goal or direction that would have influenced the translation.

 

We performed philological work: we tried to reproduce the meaning of the text accurately in modern Hebrew without "conveying" any theological message. We paid special attention to this during the work.

 

I looked at a few biblical passages on the Bible Society's website – for example, the psalm beginning "By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept..." [Ps. 137:1], and the Song of Songs – and I see that the changes are primarily lexical. You intervened in the text where a Hebrew word is now unintelligible or its meaning has changed over time. For example, in the modernized version of the cited psalm, they do not hang a "kinor" [Heb., in modern sense: "violin"] on the willow tree, but a lyre [Heb. lira]. Was this the goal?

 

Yes. It was a fundamental criterion for us to preserve the original meaning of the biblical text while making it accessible in modern Hebrew. To do this, we often had to swap words, but the sentence structure also differs fundamentally in biblical Hebrew, so we had to change almost every sentence. If the meaning of a word has become obscured or changed by today, we had to use a different expression so that the reader truly understands what the text originally meant.

 

Like in the case of "kinor," the meaning of which has changed in the meantime.

 

Yes.

 

I found another interesting example in the Song of Songs [Song of Songs 1:5]: the tent cloth [Heb. yeriot] of Solomon's tents appears as curtains – vilonot – in the modernized text. What justified this solution? The word yeriot is indeed difficult to understand today, but how did you arrive at the interpretation of vilonot?

 

We strove to find the most accepted interpretation of rare words – or even hapax legomena, expressions that occur only once in the Bible – one that the majority of biblical scholars also accept.

 

In this case, based on the historical context, the text refers more to the interior spaces and curtains of Solomon's palace, not to tent cloths. That is why we chose the term vilonot.

 

Here, the role of Greek, Latin, and other translations comes in as well. But then, is the source text for the modernization not only the Hebrew Bible but also these translations?

 

No, because it was a fundamental stipulation for us that the source text be exclusively the Leningrad Codex.

 

At the same time, other translations and commentaries are still needed to interpret the text, aren't they?

 

Of course, but this [the Codex] was the base, with all its faults. The Leningrad Codex does have clear textual problems.

 

Are you referring to errors stemming from text copying?

 

Yes. We translated these errors as well, but where it was clearly visible that the text was damaged or problematic, we indicated in a footnote, for example, that "the Septuagint translates it this way," or we indicated other text variants, such as the different readings of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

 

However, the translation itself is consistently based on the text of the Leningrad Codex.

 

What provided the most work: the lexical, syntactic, or stylistic changes?

 

All of them, but perhaps the lexical questions took up the most time. We worked for long months, even years, to find the right words. Additionally, however, the text had to be stylized. When the modernized Hebrew version was completed, it was an important criterion that it should not sound like street language, but rather high-level, literary Hebrew.

 

For example, you kept the word hinne [Heb. "behold"].

 

Yes. You can feel that you are reading a carefully formulated, understandable text that also has literary value.

 

What kind of reader did you imagine?

 

We didn't think of a single, well-defined reader. The goal was for the text to be understandable to as many readers as possible. To readers for whom Hebrew is their mother tongue and who have finished elementary school – so that even a teenager could understand the text.

 

Israeli society is extremely complex, with many new immigrants whose Hebrew language skills are not necessarily at a high level. We knew that for them, this text might still pose a challenge because we placed the linguistic standard above their level. We tried to set this standard so that the text reaches as many people as possible, while also being aware that it is impossible to speak to everyone at once.

 

So you are providing a text of literary value that is nonetheless accessible. Where is the modernized Bible available? Are you distributing it in book form as well?

 

The printed volumes arrived from the press about a week or a week and a half ago. The text is also available online, and the book can be purchased at the Bible Society's three local bookstores – in Tel Aviv, Haifa and Jerusalem.

 

In addition, we are already working on getting the edition to major book distributors as well.

 

So there is an intention for the text to be physically present before people.

 

Definitely. The goal is for it to become common knowledge in Israeli society: a modernized text exists.

 

Have there been reactions to the text yet?

 

Yes, there is feedback, and so far it is specifically enthusiastic. Those who have a principled problem with us touching the text of the Bible won't pick up the book in the first place.

 

It is quite certain that there will be negative reactions as well. At the same time, it is important to see that we did not invent the idea of modernizing the Hebrew Bible. The necessity of this work is self-evident, as the Bible is a collection of books that are more than two thousand years old.

 

Already in the early 2000s, a similar initiative was born: the Yediot Aharonot publishing house launched the Tanakh Ram project (תנ”ך רם), in which they transposed the Torah and the Early Prophets into modern Hebrew. However, the work was left unfinished, partly due to professional criticism. The translation was the work of a Bible teacher, but professionally it did not stand up to scrutiny.

 

They also started from the premise that there is a need to modernize the biblical Hebrew text.

 

They reached a point – the narrative books are relatively easier to transpose – but the truly difficult parts are the prophetic books, wisdom literature, and similar texts.

 

Has your relationship with the Bible changed during these five years? Am I right to think that dealing with the text took up most of your workday?

 

Absolutely. I grew up on the Bible and it is no coincidence that I studied this at university as well. I taught Bible and history for a few years, but when I embarked on this project, from then on, I literally woke up and went to bed with it. Day in and day out, I dealt only with the text. One learns an enormous amount this way; newer and newer layers of the text are revealed.

 

You now know the Bible as few do.

 

Yes, that is true.

 

Was your connection to it not as close before, or am I mistaken?

 

My connection was always very close. I read it continuously, I dealt with the text constantly. I moved to Israel at the age of sixteen, learned Hebrew, and barely a year later I already had to take my matriculation exam (*Bagrut*) in Tanakh. It was then that I decided I would no longer read the Bible in Hungarian. I already knew the Hungarian translation well, but I was increasingly interested in what was in the original text. From then on, I dealt with this continuously; I know and love the text. In this sense, my relationship hasn't changed, only deepened: for the past five years, I have dealt with this eight hours a day.

 

Is distribution also your task, meaning does it also depend on you how this text – on which twelve people worked for five years – reaches as many readers as possible? This is a work of huge volume.

 

This is not a one-person task, but the work of the entire Bible Society. Naturally, I have influence on how we do it, but the whole thing does not rest on my shoulders.

 

With what feeling would you go to your university professors with this volume? What would you say to them?

 

Just earlier this week I was at the Hebrew University, and I went in to see one of my former lecturers. I gave him the book, told him I worked on it – and he even asked for a dedication.

 

He was very curious; we leafed through the book and looked at a few specific translation decisions, precisely in the topic he was writing an article about at the time. The initial reaction was specifically positive.

 

At the same time, I am sure there will be critical feedback as well. I await with curiosity how academic circles will react and whether they will point out places where they think it could have been translated better.

 

The text can always be revised.

 

So you are waiting for the criticism?

 

Of course. I welcome it. Let them show the errors, and if we indeed made mistakes, we will change them. The main thing is that the translation is finished and is laid on the table.

 

What is the most important thing for you in this project?

 

When the thought of modernizing the Hebrew Bible first arose within the Society, I was the only one who received it with reservations. Precisely because I love the text of the Bible very much: it is extremely layered, rich, and beautiful, and not all the treasures and subtleties of the original text can be fully preserved in a modernized version.

 

For a long time, I argued that perhaps there is no need for this. Then I realized that yes, there is. Because the vast majority of people do not understand the text on first reading and cannot enjoy reading it.

 

The Hebrew Bible is not just a religious text, but in a cultural sense, it is the foundational text, the charter of the Jewish people – the text upon which we stand as a people and as a nation. Zionism, which brought us back to this land and made the founding of the state possible, is also deeply rooted in the Bible. If this text is not accessible to modern Hebrew speakers, then there is a serious deficiency there that must be corrected.

 

We cannot expect people to invest years in mastering the biblical language just so they can read without problems the book upon which this entire culture is built. I taught Bible in high school, and I saw with my own eyes how difficult it is for modern Hebrew-speaking students – young and old alike – to interpret, or even simply enjoy, the text.

 

That was when I understood that I had to put aside my own reservations, and yes, the text must be transposed into modern Hebrew. Knowing as well that the Masoretic text is not disappearing: it stays here with us, anyone can learn it, can delve into it. But regardless, there is a need for an accessible, modern text of literary quality that faithfully returns the original meaning.

 

And since the original text, the Hebrew Bible, is also included in the edition, it is conceivable that some readers will encounter it for the first time in this very way.

 

In Israel, everyone takes matriculation exams in the Bible, but after the exams, most put it aside and never look at it again because a large part of the text is unintelligible to them.

 

They still get it in the army, right?

 

Yes. They receive it for the swearing-in ceremony.

 

But not so they actually read it.

 

No. Even though it is a beautiful, extremely rich text. Independent of questions of religion and faith, it is of enormous value in a cultural sense, one of the foundational works of Jewish culture, which everyone should read at least once. The modernized Hebrew Bible provides an opportunity for exactly this.

 

The interview was first published here and is republished with permission.

 

The text of the Contemporary Hebrew Bible is available on the website..."

An interview with Yair Frank, the project leader

Izraelinfo Staff | Published: December 20, 2025

https://allisraelnews.com/from-hebrew-to-hebrew-how-the-bible-got-a-new-language-in-israel

#Metaglossia

#metaglossia_mundus

"Digital health tools hold enormous promise. For pregnant women and new mothers navigating the physical and emotional challenges of the perinatal period, websites and apps offer the potential for instant support, accessible information, and a vital connection to care. In theory, these resources should break down barriers, providing a lifeline to women anytime, anywhere.

However, for many migrant women, this digital promise is not being met. Instead of building bridges, these tools can inadvertently erect new walls, reinforcing feelings of isolation and exclusion at a time when support is most critical. These failures are not just about cultural missteps; they are symptoms of a digital health ecosystem that overlooks the complex social and structural realities—from digital literacy gaps to the profound need for privacy—that shape a migrant mother's life.

New research led by Monash University researchers including Dr. Areni Altun, Dr. Rochelle Hine, Professor Andred Deussens, Dr Levita D'Souza, Professor Helen Skouteris and Associate Professor Jacqueline A. Boyle, reveals significant systemic barriers limiting the uptake of digital mental health tools among migrant women.  The qualitative study of Chinese, Arabic, and Indian-language speaking mothers in Australia provides powerful, and often surprising, insights into why. By listening to their lived experiences, we can see exactly where well- intentioned digital design goes wrong. Here are the top five most impactful takeaways from their stories.

Takeaway 1: By the Time Help Arrives, It's Already Too Late
One of the most consistent findings was a critical mismatch in timing. Digital mental health resources are typically introduced to women postpartum, a period when new mothers are physically exhausted, emotionally overwhelmed, and consumed with caring for a newborn. Compounding this, many participants noted that after childbirth, the healthcare system’s focus shifts almost exclusively to the infant, leaving their own wellbeing unaddressed.

One mother articulated this frustrating reality perfectly:

"Because after delivery you’re not going to actually use those [websites], you really don’t have the time. I guess when you’re pregnant, I remember I had a good pregnancy, if I was given those resources at that time, I would have sat and read. I would have gone through those websites, I would have at least known.” (Indian Focus Group C).

This is a profound "missed opportunity" in the healthcare system. The ideal time to introduce these resources is during pregnancy, when women are actively seeking information and have more capacity to engage. By waiting until after birth, the system fails to provide support when it is most likely to be effective.

Takeaway 2: Language Access Is Often an Illusion
While some digital health platforms offer translated content, participants revealed that this access is frequently an illusion. The good intention is to offer multilingual support. The reality is a design that makes this support functionally invisible, rendering the intention meaningless. Language selection tools are often hidden behind unintuitive icons or buried in menus, making them nearly impossible to find for someone who cannot already read English.

A participant described the design failure on one prominent website:

“This website …my observation is about the language selection. It's not obvious to select Chinese language and you have to find this icon, that looks like a globe... But for someone who does not understand English we cannot read or speak English, it’s very difficult or inconvenient to find the language selection menu. It could feel inaccessible or too complex.” (Chinese Focus Group B).

This isn't a minor UX issue; it is a gatekeeping mechanism that locks out vulnerable users before they even begin. The consequences are significant: the study found that when faced with inaccessible local resources, women often default to health websites from their home countries, driving them toward information that may be irrelevant to the Australian healthcare context. It is a failure of digital hospitality at the most fundamental level.

Takeaway 3: "Inclusive" Imagery Can Feel Tokenistic and Erode Trust
Authentic representation is crucial for building trust, yet the well-intentioned goal of ‘inclusive’ marketing often backfires when it relies on tokenism. Participants observed a stark contrast between the "relatable, like someone next door" Caucasian women and the inauthentic depiction of women from their own backgrounds.

This powerful quote highlights the disconnect:

“The Caucasian women look relatable, like someone next door. The CALD women don’t always feel authentic. When they use faces of CALD women... they use supermodels... not relatable” (Indian Individual Interview).

But the problem runs deeper than unrelatable faces. Participants expressed a desire for imagery that demystifies an unfamiliar system, showing what help actually looks like, who provides it, and where it happens. This failure in representation sends a clear message that users are not truly seen or understood. To foster a genuine connection, digital resources must use imagery that reflects the reality of everyday mothers and visually explains how to access care.

Takeaway 4: When 'Professional' Design Feels Like a Funeral
This study uncovered a surprising and critical insight: seemingly neutral design choices can carry deeply negative cultural associations. A clean, "clinical" colour palette of grey and white, often used to convey professionalism, was perceived very differently by some participants from a Chinese background.

As one woman explained, the colours evoked a powerful and unintended negative feeling:

“...if you’re looking at black and white, sometime in Chinese culture, we use black and white in funerals. So … it’s not very culturally sensitive to us because when I was looking at that I was thinking about a negative thought.” (Chinese Focus Group A).

This finding underscores the vital importance of cultural humility in design. What is considered calming or professional in one cultural context may be stressful, inappropriate, or even frightening in another. Without deep cultural understanding, even the most well-intentioned design can inadvertently alienate the very people it is meant to support.

Takeaway 5: The Smartphone Is More Than a Convenience—It's a Safe Space
For many migrant women, the primary value of using a smartphone to access health information is not just convenience—it is privacy and emotional safety. Phones offer a discreet way to learn about sensitive topics like mental health, which is crucial in cultural contexts where stigma may be high or within shared family homes where privacy is limited.

The power of this discretion was summed up perfectly by one participant:

“Mobile is... more discreet. Just hit the button and the screen is black” (Chinese Individual Interview).

This insight reframes mobile-first design from a technical choice to a vital feature for user safety and empowerment. However, this safe space is not available to everyone. The study makes it clear that owning a device does not equate to being connected or confident. Significant barriers related to the cost of data, inconsistent internet access, and varying levels of digital literacy prevent many women from benefiting at all, potentially widening the equity gap for the most marginalized mothers.

Conclusion: Building Digital Bridges, Not Just Websites
The experiences of these women reveal a clear and consistent theme: good intentions are not enough. The evidence is clear: designing for migrant mothers cannot be an afterthought. It requires a fundamental shift from ‘translate and tolerate’ to ‘co-design and celebrate.’ Creating effective digital health tools demands deep cultural understanding, genuine community partnership, and thoughtful integration into trusted healthcare pathways.

We must demand that digital health equity becomes a non-negotiable metric of success for any tool that claims to support maternal health. As digital tools become central to healthcare, how can we ensure they are built not just to be looked at, but to be truly seen by every mother they are meant to serve?"
https://www.monash.edu/medicine/news/latest/2025-articles/beyond-translation-why-digital-health-tools-are-failing-new-migrant-mums
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

"The Tokyo bookstore where translated Korean literature sparks ‘conversation across borders’
Since 2015, publisher Kim Seung-bok has used her shop Chekccori to connect Japanese readers with top Korean authors ‘in the right way’

On a quiet street in Jimbocho, a Tokyo neighbourhood known for its second-hand bookshops and publishing houses, one shop stands out: Chekccori. The store’s shelves are lined with Korean literature translated into Japanese, as well as works in the original language. It has become a gathering place for readers eager to cross cultural borders one page at a time. The name Chekccori means “a celebration after finishing a book” in Korean. The store was founded in 2015 by Tokyo-based South Korean publisher Kim Seung-bok. In recent years, it has seen a surge in young women drawn by their love of K-pop, as well as middle-aged men who have discovered the charm of Korean novels after Han Kang won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2024.

Ayano Tachibana visited the shop in late August to find books for her coming trip to Seoul. She said she first encountered Korean literature through friends who loved K-pop and later studied Korean at university. “I loved The White Book by Han Kang,” 23-year-old Tachibana said, referring to the author’s poetic exploration of grief and fragility through reflections on white objects such as ice and paper.

“Reading it with classmates, guided by a professor who was a fan, made me realise literature could be a conversation across borders.”

Chekccori stocks around 4,000 books, including titles from Kim’s own publishing company. Kim founded Cuon in 2007 to bring more Korean literature to Japanese readers, at a time when few bookstores stocked such works. Cuon’s first release was Han’s The Vegetarian, a novel that won the 2016 Man Booker International Prize, bringing her international acclaim. The novel, which tells the story of a woman whose decision to stop eating meat provokes a violent backlash from her ignorant husband and authoritarian father, has been acclaimed for its haunting portrayal of repression, desire and the struggle for autonomy.

Kim said that while not an easy read, it is the kind of work that serious readers will recognise as extraordinary. “I wanted to establish a reputation for publishing works of real literary achievement,” said Kim, who has been in Japan since the early 1990s, when she came to study literary criticism after learning creative writing at a university in Seoul. Originally from South Jeolla province on the southern tip of South Korea, Kim witnessed how Japanese culture flowed into the country in the 1980s through magazines such as Non-no and novels by Haruki Murakami and Banana Yoshimoto.
“So I thought, literature could also flow the other way,” she said. After working in advertising, Kim launched Cuon in Tokyo but struggled to promote Korean titles because most bookstores had no dedicated section for them. “The category of ‘Korean Literature’ did not exist, making it hard to find shelf space. Rather than feeling disappointed, I instead decided to create that space myself,” she said.

That led to Kim opening Chekccori in 2015.

Over the past decade, the number of Korean books translated into Japanese has increased dramatically. Kim estimates that 300 to 400 South Korean titles are now published annually in Japan, compared to only about 20 per year around 2010. The trend was fuelled in part by the success of Cho Nam-joo’s Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982, which sold 290,000 copies in Japan after its 2018 release by publisher Chikuma Shobo. The novel, about a woman facing systemic misogyny in a patriarchal society, resonated deeply with readers.

Kim credits this popularity to the rise of social media, which has allowed ideas and movements – including feminism – to spread rapidly across borders. The feminist movement in South Korea gained momentum after a 2016 murder case in Seoul, followed by the global #MeToo movement in 2017. Kim’s publisher has released many feminist-themed books, including a collection of essays titled “#Living as a woman who speaks up” by author and lawyer Jeong So-yeon. Now celebrating its 10th anniversary, Chekccori has set a new goal to introduce more Korean poetry, a genre still relatively under-represented in translation. The bookstore held events for Korean poet Shin Mina, who was in Tokyo for two months earlier this year under a writer-in-residence programme.
Interest in Korean poetry is growing. Yukinori Ebihara visited Chekccori for the first time after hearing Mariko Saito, translator of Han’s novels and many other works, read Korean poems on the radio. “Even without understanding the words, the sound was beautiful. It made me want to hear more, to feel that resonance,” the 74-year-old said. Today, Kim’s focus has shifted from growth to sustainability. After recovering from cancer a few years ago, she hopes to ensure that Chekccori continues connecting readers and writers for years to come.
“What I’d like to do is to return to the basics – the craft of choosing excellent books, creating them with care, and placing them in the hands of readers in the right way,” she said."
Kyodo
Published: 5:15pm, 4 Nov 2025
https://amp.scmp.com/lifestyle/article/3331461/tokyo-bookstore-where-translated-korean-literature-sparks-conversation-across-borders
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

Santiago Artozqui assesses the linguistic strategies and sociohistorical stakes involved in retranslating Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 novel «Gone with the Wind» into French in 2020.

"In 2020, Éditions Gallmeister published Autant en emporte le vent, a French version of Margaret Mitchell’s lone novel Gone with the Wind, in a new translation by Josette Chicheportiche. The same day, Éditions Gallimard rereleased an earlier translation by Pierre-François Caillé from 1938, accompanied by the preface that J. M. G. Le Clézio wrote in 1989, and by excerpts from the correspondence between the author and her translator. Recent events, impossible for either publishing house to have foreseen, have triggered a global, collective reflection on the place of Blacks in societies in which they are discriminated against. Without a desire to read these two translations exclusively through the lens of the Black Lives Matter movement, it is all the same interesting to note how, seen from this angle, both say “almost the same thing.”

 

Margaret Mitchell, Autant en emporte le vent, translated from the American English by Josette Chicheportiche, Gallmeister, Vol. 1, 720 p., 13€ – Vol. 2, 720 p., 13€.

 

Margaret Mitchell, Autant en emporte le vent, translated from the American English by Pierre-François Caillé, Gallimard Folio, Vol. 1, 784 p., 13€ – Vol. 2, 832 p., 13€.

 

Ever since its original publication, Gone with the Wind has invited superlatives. In 1936, this first novel by an unknown writer was “the most read,” “the most sold,” and, three years later, the eponymous film was “the most watched,” “the highest grossing”… The two French editions published in 2020 have not broken from this tradition—the back cover blurbs mention its “immense success,” its “mythical title,” its “unparalleled historical fresco.” Le Clézio, in his 1989 preface, climbed aboard, affirming in his opening line: “Gone with the Wind is a unique and exceptional book, it is the perfect novel,” and going on to evoke the millions of copies sold and the one hundred and twenty million viewers of the film.

 

This success and the position the book has taken in Western culture is enough to justify the necessity of a new translation into French, but as Marie Vrinat-Nikolov explained in Retraduire: pourquoi ? [“Retranslation: Why Bother?”, En Attendant Nadeau, 7 August 2017], all such justification is pointless: regardless of the text in question, we must retranslate, not against earlier translations, but with them. A translation is a reading, it evolves over time, and this evolution orients the placement of certain markers which, as they provide the text with a frame of reference, anchor a translation within its era.

 

The first of these markers is surely the title. Both French publishers stuck with Autant en emporte le vent, the octosyllabic title already crowned in France by cinematic, editorial, and commercial glory that it would have been foolish to do without. It has a better ring to it than “Emporté par le vent,” a more literal translation that is rather flat, but this embellishment diverts attention from the message: something has been carried off by the wind. This unnamed thing, central to the book’s premise, is the pro-slavery idyllic society constructed by the Whites, a sort of lost paradise where Blacks were happy and stayed in their place. The novel tells the story of Scarlett O’Hara, a wealthy heiress who is going to lose it all because of the War. What follows are fifteen hundred pages of adventures, drama, and unexpected developments during which Scarlett attempts to recover what she considers to be her due: Tara, the family plantation, the literary symbol of a Golden Age to which the American Civil War put an end. But in between the love scenes, the balls, and the battles, this “unparalleled historical fresco” offhandedly defends the idea that Blacks are inferior beings.

 

Consider the following excerpt, in which Pork, one of the slaves on the plantation, presents the woman he has just married to his master (Gerald). She is quick to thank her new master.

 

From Gone with the Wind, 1936:

 

When she spoke, her voice was not so slurred as most negroes’ and she chose her words more carefully.

 

“Good evenin’, young Misses. Mist’ Gerald, I is sorry to ‘sturb you, but I wanted to come here and thank you agin fo’ buyin’ me and my chile. Lots of gentlemens might a’ bought me but they wouldn’t a’ bought my Prissy, too, jes’ to keep me frum grievin’ and I thanks you. I’m gwine do my bes’ fo’ you and show you I ain’t forgettin’.”

 

“Hum–hurrump,” said Gerald, clearing his throat in embarrassment at being caught openly in an act of kindness.

 

Translation by Pierre-François Caillé, 1938:

 

Lorsqu’elle parlait, sa voix n’était pas aussi confuse que celle de la plupart des Noirs et elle s’exprimait avec plus de recherche.

 

— Bonsoi’, mes jeunes demoiselles. Missié Gé’ald, moi je suis t’iste de vous dé’anger, mais je voulais veni’ vous ‘eme’cier de m’avoi’achetée avec l’enfant. Des tas de missiés ils voulaient m’acheter, mais ils voulaient pas acheter ma P’issy pou’ m’empêcher d’avoi’ du chag’in et je vous ‘eme’cie. Moi je fe’ai tout ce que je pou’ai pou’ vous et pou’ vous mont’er que moi j’oublie pas.

 

— Hum… hum… dit Gérald en s’éclaircissant la gorge. Il était fort gêné d’être pris en flagrant délit de bonté.

 

Translation by Josette Chicheportiche, 2020:

 

Lorsqu’elle parla, sa voix n’était pas aussi confuse que celle de la plupart des Noirs et elle choisissait ses mots avec plus de soin.

 

— Bonsoir, jeunes demoiselles. M’sieur Gerald, je suis désolée d’vous déranger, mais je voulais venir vous remercier encore que vous m’avez achetée, moi et ma p’tite. Des tas de messieurs m’auraient peut-être achetée, mais y auraient pas acheté ma Prissy aussi pour pas que je pleure et je vous remercie. J’ferai de mon mieux pour vous et pour vous montrer que j’oublie pas.

 

— Hum, hum, fit Gerald, se raclant la gorge, gêné d’être pris en flagrant délit de bonté.

 

Evidently, on a formal level, the 1938 transliteration of Dilcey’s “patois” doesn’t hold up very well today—the colonialist echoes here are a bit too blatant—and in her translation, Josette Chicheportiche offers to this character a mode of speech that is more comfortable for the contemporary reader, simply because it is less caricatured and less crude. And yet, in the above excerpt, neither of the translators can change the implications of the two sentences that frame Dilcey’s line. In the first of these, the omniscient narrator announces that the speech that is about to follow (despite its approximated syntax) is “less slurred” and “chosen more carefully” than that of “most negroes.” In a tale that endeavors to describe an era with realism and great attention to detail, this “universal truth” is a lie, as much during the period the story takes place—when men such as Frederick Douglass distinguished themselves by their eloquence—as it would have been in the era of the book’s initial publication, when writers such as Zora Neale Hurston were authoring books destined to become classics of American literature. As for the second sentence, where the narrator informs us that Gerald is embarrassed to have been “caught openly in an act of kindness,” suffice it to say that the benevolent act that upsets his natural modesty is the purchase of two slaves, one of whom is a twelve-year-old girl.

 

But the most striking feature is that by comparing these two French translations, we note that the omniscient narrator, himself, has hardly changed over the past eight decades.

 

When she spoke, her voice was not so slurred as most negroes’ and she chose her words more carefully. (1936)

 

Lorsqu’elle parlait, sa voix n’était pas aussi confuse que celle de la plupart des Noirs et elle s’exprimait avec plus de recherche. (1938)

 

Lorsqu’elle parla, sa voix n’était pas aussi confuse que celle de la plupart des Noirs et elle choisissait ses mots avec plus de soin. (2020)

 

“Hum–hurrump,” said Gerald, clearing his throat in embarrassment at being caught openly in an act of kindness. (1936)

 

— Hum… hum… dit Gérald en s’éclaircissant la gorge. Il était fort gêné d’être pris en flagrant délit de bonté. (1938)

 

— Hum, hum, fit Gerald, se raclant la gorge, gêné d’être pris en flagrant délit de bonté. (2020)

 

The text is littered with examples of this sort. Over the course of the book’s pages, it becomes clear that this omniscient narrator’s racism—another marker that the novel hinges on—is not only more insidious, but also more deep-seated than the racism we thought we could make out in the transliteration of the slaves’ patois. Accordingly, even if it is worth pointing out the remarkable job that Josette Chicheportiche has done on the language and the overall text, the problem resides elsewhere. In this book, the slaves are happy with their lot and imagine nothing more for their lives than service to their master; that is enough to make them content, and no matter how much the translator fiddles with the syntax and refines the style, the very notion is racist, today as it was yesterday.

 

 

Hattie McDaniel, Olivia de Havilland, and Vivien Leigh in Gone with the Wind (1939)

Upon the initial release of the book, and most notably among those who were campaigning for civil rights, the numerous voices that were raised against the manner it represented slavery were largely met with indifference, stifled by its sales figures. An anecdote related by John Bracey, professor of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, can serve to illustrate the position of American authorities when it came to race in 1939; this regards extras the city of Atlanta recruited to act in vignettes at the film’s premiere. As Bracey explained, the idea was to dress them up like slaves and have them chant spirituals. All the area churches refused, except for one: Ebenezer Baptist, where Martin Luther King, Sr., the father of Martin Luther King, Jr., was a preacher. At the premiere of Gone with the Wind, a ten-year-old Martin Luther King, Jr. found himself seated on a cotton bale, made up like a “colored” from the good old days: a symbolic incarnation of the old South, brought along to amuse the white elites.

 

Let us also recall that Hattie McDaniel, the black actress who played Mammy, was not permitted to attend the opening because the cinema in which it was held was reserved strictly for whites. And at the Oscar ceremonies, where she received the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, she was seated at the back of the hall, separate from the other actors. It makes sense that in a society like this, the arguments put forward by Gone with the Wind didn’t encounter much genuine pushback. 

 

That brings us back to the novel, a classic that is emblematic of an important side of American history. Not that of a Golden Age, the end of which is being lamented, but that of the fraction of America who, for the past eighty years, has lauded this novel and who sees itself in the values that it defends. As to these two new publications, the novel’s translation and its retranslation…When a novel tells us that slavery was great, there’s nothing the translator can do about that, because, as Umberto Eco put it, he or she can only say “almost the same thing” as the original. And yet, the publishers are not without resources. They have the option of adding a critical apparatus if they feel the work merits it. In this case, neither of the publishers felt it necessary. However—and this has nothing to do with current events, as it was equally true months and years ago—it wouldn’t have been meaningless to warn readers that the image this novel gives of Blacks is fallacious and that slavery, as it is depicted in the novel, is not in keeping with historical facts. Some might argue that this warning is entirely contained within the very word “novel.” They would be incorrect, as the novel and works of fiction are essential to the construction of the mental image that each of us has of the society we live in, and accordingly, to what we think.

 

Translated by Chris Clarke

 

This essay originally appeared in French in En Attendant Nadeau, No. 108, on July 1, 2020. Hopscotch Translation is grateful to the author and to the team of En Attendant Nadeau for their kind permission to publish this English translation."

 

https://hopscotchtranslation.com/2025/12/09/translations-come-and-go-racism-remains/

#Metaglossia 

#metaglossia_mundus 

"PEN America is delighted to announce the 2026 literary grant winners for works-in-progress. Juried by panels of esteemed and award-winning writers, editors, translators, and critics who are committed to recognizing their contemporaries, these winning works-in-progress show the potential for lasting literary impact. The following grant winners will be supported as they continue their important work. We look forward to seeing these bold and thought-provoking examples of literary excellence brought to the world.

Publishers, agents, and editors who wish to learn more about these projects are invited to contact the PEN America Literary Awards team at awards@pen.org.

PEN/Jean Stein Grants For Literary Oral History ($15,000)

The PEN/Jean Stein Grants for Literary Oral History recognize literary works of nonfiction that use oral history to illuminate an event, individual, place, or movement. The grants are made possible by a substantial contribution from American author and editor Jean Stein, whose groundbreaking work helped to popularize literary oral history. Since 2021, PEN America has conferred two grants with cash prizes of $15,000 each.

Judges: Katie Singer, Deborah Taffa, Raj Tawney

Dayna Bateman, Hustling Vinyl: A Hidden History of the Record Business

A personal examination of the music industry as it transitions from physical to digital formats, Dayna Bateman’s Hustling Vinyl: A Hidden History of the Record Business transcends a mere management chronicle by weaving together grief, cultural memory, and broader questions about exploitation in creative circles. From shame over her father’s career to recognition of its importance, the author’s project exposes the invisible labor that sustains artistic production while also reconciling her family legacy. With archival documentation and access to a group of historically exploited industry experts, many of whom launched rockstar careers, Bateman brings an analytical framework to what could otherwise be merely nostalgic. As the author notes, many key witnesses are aging or deceased making their voices a crucial archive. This book will fill a genuine gap in music industry literature by centering the experiences of those who made the record business function yet rarely received recognition or fair compensation for the joy they brought to millions.

Anja Aronowsky Cronberg, To Kill A Child

To Kill a Child by Anja Aronowsky Cronberg brings forward a subject that many of us might prefer to avoid. And yet, as Cronberg argues, the fact that filicide is not an uncommon occurrence should be reason enough for us to attempt an understanding, of both the crime and of those who commit it. A mother herself, Cronberg sits with a number of incarcerated women convicted of killing their own children. Contextualized alongside interviews of family and myriad professionals, we learn of lives lived before the crimes, and come to see just how seamlessly a “normal life” can ultimately turn to the deeply abnormal. While educated in Design History & Theory, Cronberg’s oral history project illustrates a practiced and empathetic interviewing style along with some incredibly literary writing. This will be a hard read for many, but in the end can speak to the humanity in all of us.

PEN/Phyllis Naylor Grant For Children’s And Young Adult Novelists ($5,000)

The PEN/Phyllis Naylor Grant for Children’s and Young Adult Novelists is offered annually to an author of children’s or young adult fiction for a novel-in-progress. The grant is made possible by a substantial contribution from PEN America Member and prolific author, Phyllis Reynolds Naylor. The award was developed to help writers whose work is of high literary caliber and assist in the novel’s completion. The author of the winning manuscript is selected blindly by judges and will receive a $5,000 grant.

Judges: Chris Grabenstein, Lesa Cline-Ransome, Padma Venkatraman

Emily Whitman, The Fire Cub

This middle grade fantasy showcases excellent writing, sensory descriptions, and world building. The author’s decision to employ multiple points of view adds interest and the readers are provided with insights into the characters’ failings and humanity.

Mima, a 12-year-old orphan, lives with her aunt and uncle, who warn her to stay away from “Dreadwood”  – a forest that borders their farm. But something about Dreadwood calls out to Mima and she sneaks in whenever she can. Surrounded by the bushes and trees, watching the woodpeckers and worms, Mima feels safe there – until one day when she hears something roaring near the riverbank in Dreadwood. Like all intrepid adventurers, Mima isn’t scared away; instead she goes closer to investigate the source of the roar – and discovers a tiny treasure chest. She opens the chest – and sparks fly out. Unknown to her, one of the sparks enters her pocket… and out of her pocket emerges a lion cub with wings! Lonely Mima bonds instantly with this magical creature, and as it grows into a full-fledged lion, so does Mima’s courage and her ability to question the tales she has been told all her life about Dreadwood and the world beyond. Will she someday be so bold as to defy not only her uncle and aunt but also her king and country by escaping into the unknown on the back of her winged lion, in pursuit of freedom?

With language that sparkles, a feisty female protagonist whose character springs to life, a three-dimensional supporting cast and ambitious storytelling structure, The Fire Cub is a fantasy novel that we hope will enchant middle grade readers for many years to come.

PEN/Bare Life Review Grants ($5,000)

The PEN/Bare Life Review Grants support literary works in progress by immigrant and refugee writers, recognizing that the literature of migration is of inherent and manifest value. As of the 2024 grant conferral, PEN America confers two PEN/Bare Life Review Grants of $5,000 each.

The grants are made possible by a substantial contribution from The Bare Life Review, which celebrates world literature and has been a champion for migrant and diasporic arts.

Judges: Maria Kuznetsova, Rania Mamoun,Novuyo Tshuma

Simha Surendranathan, Annual Rings

Annual Rings is an impressive collection of powerful, moving poems. With a refined sensitivity to language, Surendranathan juxtaposes the daily brutalities of incarceration with the unbounded landscapes of the psyche. Here, thinking, feeling and dreaming become profound acts of freedom. Language becomes a mighty tool, metaphor and symbolism bringing into stark focus the human figure caged in the American prison cell. The prose is precise and sensuous, urgent and languid. Surendranathan takes us on epic migrations, from places private where language weaves delicate dreamscapes, to the prison block where public humiliations bludgeon the tongue. These poems move; they travel across cultures and languages—from Urdu to Malayalam to America’s various lexicons—excavating the ravages of confinement on the lofty human spirit. Here, poetry becomes a lifeline for the incarcerated subject, as life-giving as water. Through capturing life behind prison walls in such an exquisite register, Surendranathan invites us into a profound witnessing—at times a profound weeping—choosing life, life, life, at every turn.

Minerva Laveaga Luna, Reasons Why I’m Late to Places

Reasons Why I’m Late to Places is a memoir-in-essays that follows a Mexican-American author through her childhood during the devastating 1985 earthquake in Mexico City to her adulthood in America, where she navigates the challenges of immigration, premature menopause, misdiagnosis, and the way that women, especially immigrants, are often ignored or not heard correctly when they are suffering physically and emotionally. Through the themes of the passage of time, living out of time, and being late to places, the author not only tells her own story in a gripping, experimental, and unflinching way, but she also shares the narrative of any person who is struggling to be heard and truly known. Through her sensitive and life-affirming narrative, Luna demonstrates that we shouldn’t be sorry about being late to places–rather, we should celebrate that we have shown up at all.

PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grants ($4,000)

Now in their 23rd year, the PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grants promote the publication and reception of translated world literature into English. Established by a gift from Priscilla and Michael Henry Heim in response to the dismayingly low number of literary translations appearing in English, the fund has supported more than 200 projects since its inception.

For the 2026 cycle, the judges reviewed applications from a wide array of languages of origin, genres, and time periods. Selected from this vast field of applicants are 10 projects, including Indonesian, Wolof, Kven, Brazilian Portuguese,  Chinese, and more. Each translator will receive a grant of $2,000-4,000 to support the translation’s completion.

Judges: Elvira Blanco, Ezra Fitz, Denise Kripper, Elizabeth Lowe, Jenny McPhee, Mario Pereira, Shuchi Saraswat, Declan Spring

Dominica Chang’s translation from the French of Among the Dunes by Louis Camara

Among the Dunes is a novel by the Senegalese author Louis Camara narrated by Nestor, a stray dog in Saint-Louis who recounts his life and that of his master, offering sharp, satirical, yet compassionate critiques of human society and behavior. From a novel as polyphonic as this—written in French, rooted in Senegalese culture, and layered with traditional Wolof oral idioms—Dominica Chang has produced a pitch-perfect translation, one that retells the story in English while hitting all the right notes. A challenging task expertly handled with a keen ear and a deft hand. Fans of canine characters from Garth Stein’s Enzo to Graciliano Ramos’ Baleia will find, in her attentive rendering, much to love and reflect on.

Milena Sanabria Contreras and Allison Stickley’s translation from the Spanish of A Brief History of Failure by Fátima Villalta

Fátima Villalta was born in Nicaragua in 1994 and currently lives in exile in Mexico. Breve Historia del Fracaso (A Brief History of Failure) is a collection of short stories that takes the reader through one hundred years of Nicaraguan history, beginning in a not-too-distant future and ending with a story set in the early 1900s. This will be Villalta’s first publication to be translated into another language. Milena Sanabria Contreras and Allison Stickley’s translation is remarkable for how it renders the voices of the everyday Nicaraguans populating these stories—foot soldiers, small bureaucrats, young people, and artists. While retaining the intimacy of the stories, Contreras and Stickley deftly put forward a history that isn’t as well known in the anglophone world. Their absorbing translation will find new resonances in our politically unstable times.

Robin Driver’s translation from the Brazilian Portuguese of Aquarium Fish by Rafaela Tavares Kawasaki

Aquarium Fish (original title: Peixes de Aquário), a debut novel by Rafaela Tavares Kawasaki is a contemplative, female-focused family saga about the lives of Japanese immigrants and their descendants in the Brazilian state of São Paulo. Published in 2021, the book was shortlisted for Brazil’s Prêmio Mix Literário, a prize focused on literary works that deal with subjects related to the LGBTQ+ community, later the same year. Translator Robin Driver deftly captures the elegiac, but never too sentimental, tone of Kawasaki’s lyrical prose. The English translation will bring an important work of Japanese-Brazilian fiction to the English-speaking world, which has little knowledge of this overlooked community.

Eirill Alvilde Falck’s translation from the Kven and Norwegian of The Heart of the Forest by M. Seppola Simonsen

The Heart of the Forest is an award-winning poetry collection written in both Norwegian and Kven— the Kven people are a Finnic ethnic minority in northern Norway whose language is spoken by fewer than 10,000 people. M. Seppola Simonsen, a nonbinary poet, is from the Norwegian island of Senja, and their exquisite, short poems explore the Kven heritage and the intersection of identity, language, and geography. Eirill Alvilde Falck’s translations have appeared widely in anthologies and literary magazines. Her translations vividly capture Simonsen’s imagery and their ability to render the power and complexity of nature and humanity’s place in it.

Marissa Grunes’ translation from the Spanish of Antarctica by Fabián Espejel

Antarctica by Mexican poet and translator Fabián Espejel, winner of the Aguascalientes Fine Arts Award in Poetry, takes us on a geographical and imaginative journey that inversely mirrors the expeditions of Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, joining the long legacy of cultural fascination with Antarctica in the global south, and taking the reader through scenes of desire, loss, and the wild delight of language. This award will support an emerging translator bringing a new voice in Spanish-language poetry into English. Marissa Grunes’s translation is as musical and lyrical as it is experimental and bold and, above all, urgent. 

Eliza Marciniak’s translation from the Polish of The Secret of the Looking-Glass by Deotyma (pen name of Jadwiga Łuszczewska)

This visionary work of speculative fiction by 19th-century Polish female writer, poet and early feminist Jadwiga Łuszczewska (writing as Deotyma) combines elements of science fiction, Gothic horror, adventure story, and philosophical dialogue to address numerous issues still current today such as the dangers of technology and the boundaries between genius and madness. Eliza Marciniak’s translations of Polish authors have won various awards and been widely published. Her translation here successfully brings across the sparkling prose, the impeccably crafted narrative, and the erudite nature of the discussions between this novel’s forward-thinking characters.

Tímea Sipos’ translation from the Hungarian of Crybaby by Krisztián Marton

Krisztián Marton’s autobiographical debut novel, Crybaby, follows Marci, a biracial gay man growing up in the extremely homogenous society of Szeged in southern Hungary during the 1990s. In this raw and moving coming-of-age story, Marci navigates racial identity, fatherlessness, queerness, and complex relationships. In her translation, Tímea Sipos, a Hungarian-American writer and translator originally from Budapest, captures the tenderness, honesty, and nuances of this urgent narrative of identity, belonging, and emotional survival. With a sensitivity to the specificities of the Hungarian social and linguistic context pervading Marton’s novel, Sipos brings readers this candid exploration of race, masculinity, vulnerability, and LGBTQ+ experiences.

Annie Tucker’s translation from the Indonesian of Suspicious Days by Dea Anugrah

Suspicious Days is a sharp, funny, and self-aware novel that follows a young, directionless writer in Yogyakarta who stumbles into a literary mystery–and a violent quest for revenge–while searching for a missing poet. In a voice that shifts effortlessly between irreverent humor, cultural critique, and genuine yearning, Dea Anugrah offers a portrait of Indonesia’s contemporary literary and political landscape, filtered through the eyes of a disaffected youth. Annie Tucker’s clear and assured translation captures the novel’s fast-paced blend of autofiction, metafiction, and cultural commentary without losing its specificity to Indonesia’s literary world. With extensive experience translating contemporary Indonesian literature, Tucker brings both deep linguistic skill and cultural understanding to this project. Her work delivers the full force of Anugrah’s voice to English-language readers, introducing a fresh and fearless talent in contemporary Indonesian fiction.

Quentin Véron’s translation from the French of Solitude of a Python in Paris by Romain Gary (writing as Émile Ajar)

Romain Gary’s Gros-Câlin, first published in 1974 under the pseudonym Émile Ajar, occupies a unique and fascinating place in French literary history. When the author’s true identity was revealed after his death, it was hailed as one of the great literary revelations of the century––unmasking the only writer ever to win the prestigious Prix Goncourt twice. Gros-Câlin (“Big Hug” in English) tells the story of Michel Cousin, a lonely and eccentric Parisian statistician who adopts an eight-foot python in his quest for affection. With sensitivity, wit, and creative daring, Quentin Véron recreates in English the puzzling “foreign” language that a bored Cousin invents for himself, through which themes of affection, alienation, and rebirth take on renewed resonance. Navigating the “deluge of amusing malapropisms, puns, literary allusions, and warmly pathetic situational comedy” (translator’s words) of Gary’s signature “Ajarism,” Véron deftly renders the novel’s humor, pathos, and linguistic playfulness without losing its peculiar absurdity and tenderness.

Yě Yě’s translation from the Chinese of All of Our Homecomings Are Feted as Yi New Year by Jike Ayou

Jike Ayou, born in Puge county of Sichuan province, is the first migrant worker poet of Yi ethnicity and one of six poets featured in The Verse of Us, a documentary film on Chinese migrant worker poets. His collection of poems All of Our Homecomings Are Feted as Yi New Year was published in Chinese by Taibai Literature and Art Publishing House in 2019. His works have appeared in publications such as Selected Poems, Liangshan Literature, Workers’ Daily, and China Youth News. Like the ancient Chinese poets, Jike Ayou writes beautifully about Shanshui (landscapes) to lament his personal and political struggles. Translator Yě Yě carefully distills his delicate lines into terse English verse that echoes the lived experience of millions of migrant workers in China.

PEN Grant For The English Translation Of Italian Literature ($5,000)

Administered under and judged alongside the PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grants, the PEN Grant for the English Translation of Italian Literature honors a translator for a book-length translation of narrative prose and seeks to promote the publication of Italian literature into English. The winner will receive a $5,000 grant to aid in the project’s completion.

Lauren Green’s translation from the Italian of Adoration by Alice Urciuolo

Adoration is a fierce and absorbing novel set in the reclaimed marshlands south of Rome, where five teenagers struggle to make sense of a friend’s murder and the suffocating models of masculinity and desire that surround them. With shifting points of view and a keen eye for the rituals and violences that shape adolescence, Alice Urciuolo explores how a place saturated with Fascist history and patriarchal norms produces its own forms of rebellion as well as complicity.

Lauren Aliza Green’s translation reflects the urgency and intimacy of Urciuolo’s prose, capturing the novel’s polyphonic voices and its precise rendering of place, class, and coming of age. A novelist and poet herself, Green is well equipped to convey both the emotional range and the structural ambition of this compelling novel. Green’s English version delivers the novel’s full force: a clear-eyed and unsettling portrait of contemporary Italian youth, and the cultural legacies they inherit and resist."
https://pen.org/announcing-the-2026-pen-america-grant-winners/
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

"When thinking of ancient Greek philosophers, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle will likely spring to mind, but only Plato and Aristotle left written works behind them that survive to this day thanks to the painstaking work of those who over the millennia copied and translated their texts. It is somewhat surprising that a philosopher as famous as Aristotle, who was also Alexander the Great’s teacher, should only be known through only a few of his treatises, but thankfully for scholars and philosophy enthusiasts, a new edition of his works is now available.

 

‘Aristotle: Complete Works’, edited by C. D. C. Reeve, the ΔΚΕ Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Pavlos Kontos, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Patras, and published by Hackett in December 2025, is a monumental achievement, the first new English-language translation of the Aristotelian corpus since 1954. This edition reconfirms that Aristotle’s philosophy is both a cornerstone of history and an integral part of contemporary Western thought and culture, bringing Aristotle to life and making his works accessible for today’s readers.

 

For the first time ever, Greek scholars, mostly from the University of Patras, played a critical role, either as editors or readers. Such significant contribution by contemporary Greek scholars to an Anglophone edition of ancient Greek philosophical texts is unprecedented.

 

‘Aristotle: Complete Works’ is presented in two volumes and makes an excellent gift. The first volume includes his logic, biology, physics, natural sciences, and psychology. The second volume contains his metaphysics, ethics, politics, rhetoric, and poetics, a translation of the ‘Fragments’, the slightly dubious work ‘Magna Moralia’, and one work not by Aristotle, but probably from his school, the Athenian Constitution. It also contains an informative long Introduction, an elaborate Index with the numerous people and places mentioned by Aristotle, and an extensive, detailed Glossary of Aristotle’s key terms in Greek and English, accompanied by translation comments and references to pertinent passages. The Glossary allows readers to navigate the entire corpus on their own.

 

A distinguished group of scholars from Europe and the United States contributed translations of the Aristotelian treatises in which they specialize.

 

Professor Pavlos Kontos spoke with The National Herald about the impressive achievement. When asked how long the editing process took on such a monumental project, Prof. Kontos told TNH: “This is a nice question, but it’s difficult to answer! The whole thing started in 2012, when C. D. C. Reeve was translating Aristotle’s ‘Nicomachean Ethics’ for Hackett and asked me to serve as a line-by-line reader. I then urged him to re-translate Aristotle’s ‘Politics’, which he did. After that, he translated Aristotle’s ‘Metaphysics’, ‘Physics’, and other shorter treatises. I served as a line-by-line reader for all of these as well. Only after this did David have the ‘crazy’ idea that we edit an English translation of the entire corpus by commissioning the translation of certain treatises to other scholars. Final approval from Hackett was not received until as late as 2021! Thus, at least in my view, the correct way to calculate the timeline is from 2012: about 13 years.”

 

Prof. Kontos added that translating an Aristotelian text “requires mastery of Ancient Greek and English, expertise in Aristotle’s philosophy (and, in particular, in specific areas of his thought), knowledge of French and German (to allow comparison with the best available translations in those languages), and long experience in translation, so that one develops a distinctive ‘style.’”

 

“Our ‘Aristotle: Complete Works’ is, as far as we know, the only consistent translation of the entire corpus in any language, for though the translators are many, they all generously agreed to follow our choices (David’s and mine) in the translation of Aristotle’s key terms,” Prof. Kontos said.

 

More information is available online"

 

https://www.thenationalherald.com/this-centurys-monumental-translation-of-aristotles-complete-works/

#Metaglossia 

#metaglossia_mundus 

Orla Case explores translated fiction, its cross-cultural benefits, and the linguistic science behind it.

"by Orla Case
December 3, 2025

My Saturday mornings consist largely of one poorly timed wakeup, two scalding coffees, three minutes late to my weekly Oxford Blue meeting, and four more books purchased in Blackwell’s on the journey home. Each time I make the fateful £45 decision to walk through that door, I find myself drawn specifically to the ‘Translated Fiction’ section on the first floor. A section so beguiling I metamorphose into a voracious magpie, in awe of the dazzling titles and shiny covers. I am by no means alone in my fascination: a recent survey conducted by Nielsen for the Booker Prize Foundation highlights that young people drive the sales of translated fiction, despite the largest group of readers being over the age of 60. Recently, I have started to wonder if the segregation of translated fiction from works originally composed in English may be problematic, despite its convenience. Does the separation of translated works simply acknowledge the painstaking and vital work of the translators involved? The notion that works of fiction not originally written in English, and thus ideas not originally pondered in English, are in some way inherently different or perhaps second-fiddle is most certainly a dangerous one.

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, more commonly known as the theory of linguistic relativity, posits that the language that we speak is related to, and influences, the way we think. Deservedly, this theory has come under great scrutiny sinceqqq its inception. Originating from the assumption that Native American people were inferior in their grammatical structure, and therefore their cognition, this hypothesis is rooted in colonialism. American linguist William Dwight Whitney went as far to state that Native American languages must be eradicated, and that those who spoke them should be taught English in order to adopt a ‘civilized’ way of life. In this case, the implication that thought differs with language fosters nothing more than bigotry. However, contemporary cognitive scientists and linguistic philosophers alike have accepted a slightly more palatable form of the theory of linguistic relativity: that language reciprocally influences thought. For instance, in his elementary works, Whorf himself discovered that in the Inuit lexicon, there are three words to distinguish varieties of snow, enabling increased perceptual discrimination between types of snow in Inuit communities. This is an example of a lexical gap, as a direct translation of such terms does not exist in English.To put it plainly, native English speakers simply do not need three words for snow. French and Czech author Milan Kundera, known for his groundbreaking novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, emphasises the issues that lexical gaps breed for translators. The Czech word ‘litost’ has no exact translation in any other language, yet Kundera cannot “see how anyone can understand the human soul without”. The term depicts a feeling “as infinite as an open accordion, a synthesis of grief, sympathy, remorse, and indefinable longing”, which begs the question – does the language in which we read a novel change the emotions it evokes? And, if this is truly the case, does translating a piece of literature from its mother tongue dampen its effect?

One of my personal favourite examples of translated literature is the work of Olga Tokarczuk, a Nobel Prize-winning Polish author whose literary activism is laced with what can only be described as magical realism. Antonia Lloyd-Jones, who has translated many of Tokarczuk’s works into English, shared her experience with translating in an interview with Notes from Poland. Lloyd-Jones admits that “it is difficult not to get seduced by the Polish text and stick too closely to what’s on the page”, and expresses the need to consider “if this person were writing in English, how would they write that?”. The role of the translator is ultimately not to reproduce, but to allow each and every individual to best reap the benefits of the abundant harvest of literature worldwide, maintaining both connotation and denotation

Translated fiction is a vehicle for literary travel across borders, facilitating visits to the best tourist attractions and recreational indulgence in some of the intimate aspects of different cultures. It is not a pair of magic glasses that enables us to see the world from another perspective. Our digestion of translated fiction is inevitably compromised by our backgrounds and past experiences, but this does not take away from its merit as a window into the life of another. We will never know what it is like to think in another first language, just as we will never know what it’s like to grow up somewhere else. In an International Booker Prize interview, Vigdis Hjorth, author of Is Mother Dead,  says that reading translated fiction is important because:

“reading fiction from abroad, but in your own language, is a meeting with experiences, environments and cultures that are different from your own, but still you met them in a way that is familiar, in your own language. It’s a win-win experience”.

The way we think is most certainly impacted by the culture in which we are embedded, which inevitably includes our native language. Thus, the creative labour of the translator in preserving the intentions of the author, whilst appealing to a dissimilar cultural demographic, is not one to be overlooked. To acknowledge that a piece is translated is to acknowledge our ignorance of it in its true context, but appreciate the invaluable insight it gives us. Whilst the emotions aroused when reading a book in English might not be the same as those experienced when reading it in its original form, it is the closest we can come to literary universality, to broadening our horizons in the comfort of our own homes, and to embracing our unrelenting curiosity. Completely incomparable, translated fiction cannot be dictated as better or worse than its originally English counterpart; it is a necessary piece of the puzzle depicting humankind. We should all engage with it, but not with the expectation that it is a perfect representation of the initial version in its true context."
https://theoxfordblue.co.uk/meta-whorf-asis-on-litost-and-translated-fiction/?amp=1
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

"Catherine Thankamma writes about her experience of translating Malayalam novels, ‘Kocharethi’ by Narayan, and ‘Pulayathara’ by Paul Chirakkarode, into English.

Catherine Thankamma

Dec 07, 2025 · 01:30 pm

 

Translating regional language texts into English has become the “in” thing in the last two decades, with translators, especially in Kerala, eagerly soliciting writers to get a chance to translate their novels. With Geetanjali Shree and Banu Mushtaq winning the International Booker Prize, the fervour has definitely hit the roof. The eagerness to translate, however, wanes when it comes to texts that occupy a space beyond the boundaries of mainstream literature, texts that are sidelined, at times even erased by the source language literary community.

 

However, when such texts do get translated into English, the translation performs the unintended task of enabling them to gain visibility and traction within the linguistic terrain from which they evolved; it’s almost like forcing the hand of the mainstream literary community to acknowledge the existence of these texts and their authors. I refer to two of my translations to prove my point, Kocharethi by Narayan, India’s first tribal novelist, and Pulayathara by Paul Chirakkarode, both novels that have withstood the test of time.

 

A strategic act of defiance

Narayan belonged to the Mala Araya tribe, which at one time inhabited the hilly terrain of the Western Ghats in central Travancore. He was born in 1940, seven years before India gained independence. A first-generation literate, he passed the tenth standard examination and joined the postal service in Kochi. He began his literary career by penning short stories. Writing Kocharethi, his first novel, was a strategic act of defiance against a certain upper caste writer’s attempt to misrepresent the tribal community and reduce it to a trope. He completed the novel in 1988 and gave the manuscript to a friend for an objective evaluation. The friend took the manuscript but forgot all about it. Narayan wasted almost five years, too diffident to ask his friend what he thought about its literary worth. Finally urged by another friend, he retrieved the manuscript; then rewrote it as the ink had dulled by then.

 

The book was published in 1998, a decade later. It won the 1999 Kerala Sahitya Academy Award and two other awards. The ordinary Malayalee reader welcomed the novel wholeheartedly but the response of the literary elite was unsettling. While some openly challenged the text’s legitimacy, the diplomatic ones opted for a willed silence. The result, even as late as 2009, postgraduates in Malayalam, research scholars in Malayalam, who spoke volubly on black identity and negritude, had not heard of Narayan and Kocharethi, despite the fact that the text had been translated into Hindi, and a Tamil translation was in the offing. A few translators did approach Narayan, expressing interest in translating the text into English, but all they did was pocket the complimentary copy and disappear.

 

The English translation finally materialised only because the late Ayyappa Paniker demanded that Mini Krishnan of Oxford University Press commission it. That I, whose only credentials as a translator at that time were limited to half a dozen short stories of NS Madhavan, which I translated for The Little Magazine, was asked to translate a text like Kocharethi speaks for itself.

 

Translating the novel was difficult, requiring frequent and extensive interactions with the author. The weight of the realisation that I was not just translating a text, but bore the moral and ethical responsibility of translating an entire tribal community’s interaction with modernity, was daunting. Narayan helped me understand the cultural nuances of usage and expressions, as well as gain insight into the customs and rituals of the tribe. And of course, I had a brilliant editor in Mini Krishnan. Then came the 2011 Crossword Award, which inevitably extended the text and the author’s visibility beyond Kerala’s literary terrain, ensuring translations into three more regional languages plus French. Juri Dutta’s translation won the Assam Sahitya Academy award. But I want to focus on the shift in perception that occurred in the source language community.

 

Academia could no longer ignore a text that had travelled so far as to be included in the culture studies program of the University of Calgary. Malayalam and English language departments across the state included the text in their postgraduate syllabi, not in any core paper, mind you, but in optional papers like Dalit Studies, Translation Studies or Culture Studies; papers whose inclusion makes the syllabus look impressive but few colleges opt for. Narayan continued to be an outsider for the most part, dignified till the end. I recall an incident: When urged to undergo cardiac surgery, Narayan stumped the doctor with the words, “I walked half a kilometre to get here. Can you guarantee that I will walk out of this hospital?”

 

When Narayan died in 2022 due to Covid-related complications, the print and visual media mentioned his passing, and a brief statement of condolence was made in the state assembly; that was all. Way back in 2011, when a certain powerful academic and Adivasi welfare activist vehemently opposed Mini Krishnan’s claim that Narayan was India’s first tribal writer, Krishnan gracefully withdrew, and the translation introduced Narayan as South India’s first tribal writer. However, in a recent publication, the same writer calls Narayan India’s first tribal writer; an acknowledgement that has come too late for the one person who would have treasured it! However, Narayan has one great asset, the backing of his Mala Araya tribe, which is determined that his legacy remains.

 

A powerful depiction of oppression

The same cannot be said of Paul Chirakkarode, who died in 2008. He wrote Pulayathara in 1962. It’s a short novel, with a simple storyline but certain features make it remarkable; one, the seamless interweaving of social history and fiction, which transforms it into a powerful depiction of the oppression and persecution of the Pulaya community who worked in the paddy fields of Kuttanad in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Second, the way Chirakkarode moulds language to depict the various levels of oppression and angst experienced not just by Dalits who convert to Christianity but also those who adhere to their native beliefs and rituals; for instance, the monosyllabic acquiescent responses of the indigenous Dalit labourer which reveal the near total erasure of autonomy, the half- formed sentences of the converted Dalits who struggle to express their thoughts, the crisp, controlled utterances of the upper caste landlords; they are all linguistic markers of inequality, held together the omniscient narratorial voice which alternates between strident criticism and evocative sentences that achieve almost lyrical cadences.

 

Most importantly, Pulayathara exposes the hypocrisy of the Church, which even as it actively engages in converting Dalits, maintains a complicit silence regarding the inequality that exists within the church, making no attempt to erase the caste hierarchy that is maintained between the Syrian Christians who claim an ancient lineage and converted Dalits, a hierarchy which is manifested spatially with the converts sitting on straw mats on the floor while the Syrian Christians lounge on benches at the back of the church.

 

The church naturally does not take well to criticism. As no one would publish the novel, Chirakkarode paid for 500 copies to be printed, but the church, which is a major vote bank in Kerala politics, made sure that the book disappeared from the public domain. When Oxford University Press commissioned the Anthology of Malayalam Dalit literature in translation and the editors decided to include a few chapters from Pulayathara, they discovered that only two copies existed in all of Kerala, one of which was a tattered copy in Thiruvananthapuram public library, on the brink of being weeded.

 

Now comes the interesting part. The news of the anthology prompted Raven Books, a local publisher, to bring out a thousand copies of the source text. When the English translation appeared in 2019, Malayala Manorama, a leading publishing house, stepped in to reprint the source text. Translation into English did something unique; it made it impossible for the source language community to feign ignorance anymore; ensured the rebirth of the source text after five and a half decades of incognito existence. What saddens me, however, is that in spite of knowing all this history of exclusion and near erasure, prejudice made a certain well-known Malayalee Dalit writer incapable of an objective assessment of the text and Chirakkarode’s contribution to Malayalam literature.

 

I recall an incident that occurred a couple of years ago. I was asked to conduct a translation workshop in a local college. The texts selected for the two-day program included a poem by a well-known Malayalam Dalit writer. The powerful imagery prompted me to check if it had been translated. It had. However, a crucial line had been carelessly translated, thereby destroying not just a powerful image but the very structural and thematic cohesion of the poem. The poet is unaware of the error that has crept into the translation. More importantly, anyone who reads just the translation will dismiss the poem as trivial. Uncompromising integrity to the source text, therefore, needs to be the cornerstone of the translation process, particularly in the case of writers from marginalised communities, who are either deceased or lack the necessary competence to identify errors that can occur during the process of translation.

 

Catherine Thankamma’s latest book is A Kind of Meat and Other Stories."

https://scroll.in/article/1088914/translators-notebook-uncompromising-integrity-is-essential-when-translating-texts-from-the-margins

#Metaglossia 

#metaglossia_mundus 

Language is rooted in culture and even shapes our thoughts. Eloquency maybe a sign of recycling other's thought. So let's embrace the awkward pause, searching for our own words.

 

"How would you describe mac-and-cheese to the Japanese?

 

Posted December 3, 2025

 

 Reviewed by Kaja Perina

 

Key points

 

Bilingualism enriches the brain, but it also brings natural hesitations and gaps in fluency.

 

Language shapes perception, identity, and even the thoughts we believe are our own.

 

Words we speak fluently may reflect inherited and borrowed ideas. Genuine thinking can result in pauses.

 

Let's embrace speech hesitation: it can be reflect authenticity, originality, and deep thinking.

 

A recent large-scale study showed that speaking more than one language can protect the brain for age-related changes. Although the study did not directly examine brain mechanisms, scientists have long theorized that managing multiple languages develop extra language centers, engages the brain’s executive system, and may even be associated with larger hippocampus volume.

 

 

 

 

I grew up in Japan, so English (what I currently use daily) is my second language. Perhaps these findings should make me a bit happy, but there are downsides to being bilingual. I have not fully mastered English, and I am now forgetting some of my Japanese. My Japanese friend tells me that my Japanese sounds a bit strange. I often now struggle to find the right words in both languages. Especially, when I try to think and speak, my speech becomes halting, full of pauses. It is a bit embarrassing, and as I became more self-conscious, I also grew more reluctant to speak my mind.

 

 

 

 

Yet after reading this study (and after pondering this issue for a long time), I’ve come to a different conclusion: it is okay not to be eloquent. It is okay not to dazzle anyone with effortless oratory.

 

 

 

 

Language and Thought

 

One of the founding figures of structuralism, linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, argued that words and language are not as neutral or objective as we assume. Language is a system of symbols, and its meaning is culturally shaped. In English, the word sheep refers to the animal, whereas in French, the word mouton includes both the live animal and its meat. (English uses a separate word, mutton, for the meat). So when a French speaker hears the word mouton, they might imagine a savory dish; but when an English speaker hears sheep, they’re more likely to picture a soft, woolly animal. The closest translational word can evoke entirely different associations. Saussure’s point was that language is arbitrary—what a word means depends not on some inherent truth but on how that society uses and interprets it.

 

 

 

 

Building on this idea, the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (linguistic relativity) proposes that the structure of a language influences how its speakers perceive and interpret the world. For example, in English, we have distinct words for “blue” and “green.” In Korean, a single word can cover both. This doesn’t mean Korean speakers can’t see the difference, but they may see blue as a shade of green. In contrast, Russian distinguishes between light blue (goluboy) and dark blue (siniy), and studies show that Russian speakers can more quickly differentiate between those two shades. Language, in other words, shapes perception.

 

 

 

 

The abilty fo discern color may differ based on language describing the colorsSource: hh5800/iStock

 

Before moving to the US, I was first exposed to American culture during my internship at the U.S. Naval Hospital in Okinawa. The American staff, far from home, welcomed me warmly and delighted in cultural exchange, especially swapping food traditions. One day, they offered me something called mac-and-cheese — they could not believe I never had it in my life, and I suddenly became the center of attention as I lifted my fork.

 

 

 

 

I was a bit skeptical of its bright orange color, but I decided to plunge in. As the creamy, cheesy soft pasta melted in my mouth, I screamed,

 

 

 

 

“This is the best food I’ve ever had in my life!”

 

 

 

 

Later, they even delighted more in showing the box, and I could not believe it came from a box, which only costed 79 cents! Needless to say, after moving to the US, I often served my daughter and her friends quick mac-and-cheese dinners (with broccoli, of course).

 

 

 

 

Later, I tried to describe mac-and-cheese to my Japanese friends but found it almost impossible. Sure, I could translate the ingredients, even describe the taste and preparation. But the idea of mac-and-cheese didn’t exist in Japanese. There was no cultural reference point for the nostalgic comfort, the bright orange color, the childhood memories that Americans attach to it. The word mac-and-cheese carries not just its technical meaning, but a shared emotional and cultural experience. Without the word, the world it represents also doesn’t fully exist.

 

 

 

 

Reaching for the "Right" Word

 

Beyond physical things like animals or food, language also shapes how we understand abstract concepts—like freedom, justice, kindness, and morality.

 

 

 

 

“We have the right to be free.” “War is bad.” “We need to respect the law and the constitution.”

 

 

 

 

When these phrases come out of our mouth smoothly with conviction, we think we’re expressing our own values. But are we?

 

 

 

 

We like to imagine that our thoughts come from a stable, inner self—that we use language as a tool to express our minds. But is that sequence, correct?

 

 

 

 

What if language doesn’t just express thought, but actually creates it?

 

 

 

 

When we speak fluently and confidently, we assume we are articulating deeply held beliefs. But often, we’re repeating words and phrases we learned from others, from TV, in books, in school and at home. We don’t invent our own language; we inherit it. And in borrowing words, we may also be borrowing the thoughts, perspectives, assumptions and values embedded in them.

 

 

 

 

Cognition Essential Reads

 

 

 

 

How to Dress for Who You Want to Become

 

 

 

 

Our New Cognitive Manifesto

 

Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote that “what we find words for is already dead in our hearts.” In other words, by the time we articulate something, it has already passed through filters—of memory, of interpretation, of culture. He believed that the spoken word was already one step removed from the living experience it tried to capture. The moment we give something a name, we freeze it in place, stripping it of its fluidity. In that sense, a spoken word is already dead.

 

 

 

 

Ironically, the moments when I struggle for words—when I pause, repeat myself, stammer and try to reach for the right words maybe the time when I am most authentic. The hesitation is not a failure of language; it maybe evidence of that I’m actually thinking.

 

 

 

 

I used to see my speech hesitation as an embarrassment. Now I accept it as who I am. Perhaps it is a sign of honesty: when the words come slowly, at least they are truly my own. And maybe, in turn, that is also helping the brain. So here is to embracing the hesitation, the stumble, and grasping to find our words."

 

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/breaking-good/202512/when-you-dont-have-the-words-yet

 

#Metaglossia 

 

#metaglossia_mundus 

'Ice' imagines an alternate early-20th-century world reshaped by the Tunguska explosion, where a mysterious substance freezes not only Siberia’s landscape but the very logic and history of Europe. Blending political intrigue, metaphysics, scientific speculation and epic journeying, Jacek Dukaj creates a universe in which language fractures, reality ossifies and thought itself becomes perilously rigid. Translating this immense, hybrid world required an act of reconstruction as much as interpretation, challenging English to carry its archaic textures, neologisms and philosophical ambition.

"Jacek Dukaj’s ‘Ice’ is one of the most ambitious novels in modern Polish literature: a 1,000-page alternate history where language freezes, logic bifurcates, and reality is reshaped by a meteor from the Siberian sky. For translator Ursula Phillips, bringing this linguistic and philosophical labyrinth into English meant seven years of deep immersion and confronting what she calls ‘the limits of possibility’.

 

Ursula Phillips has spent decades opening Polish literature to English-language readers, from the classic novels of the long 19th century to contemporary voices such as Agnieszka Taborska and Piotr Paziński. Though she is often associated with her pioneering work on women writers, her range is far broader, encompassing historical fiction, philosophical prose and, now, one of the most ambitious speculative novels of the 21st century. 

 

Bringing Jacek Dukaj’s Ice into English required nothing less than a reconstruction of language itself. The novel’s vast alternate Russia – shaped by the 1908 Tunguska event and frozen into a rigid metaphysical order – bristles with archaic Polish, Russian bureaucratic jargon, scientific invention and hundreds of neologisms. For Phillips, the challenge was not just to translate a story, but to translate an entire worldview: its logic, its mood, its philosophical architecture, and the distinctive narrative voice of Benedykt Gierosławski. The result of seven years’ work is a landmark translation of a book that has already become a modern classic in Poland and is now poised to capture new readers in English.

 

Agnes Dudek: What first struck you when you encountered ‘Ice’ – the scale of its ambition, its language, or its philosophical depth? What convinced you that it was worth the extraordinary labour of bringing it into English?

 

Ursula Phillips: I saw the language of Ice as an enormous translation challenge, everything else hinges on the language. This in itself was an attraction for someone like me who has been working with translations for many years: to attempt the seemingly impossible, like climbing the ultimate mountain. As I have mentioned elsewhere, it took me to the limits of possibility. On the other hand, translation is one of the arts of the possible – it is possible to find viable solutions to most problems, although some things have to be reinvented or reconceived, like Dukaj’s neologisms or his particular use of the Polish reflexive pronoun się in his narrative technique. Any translation is only ever an approximation of the original, only one of an unlimited number of possible versions. The immense size of the book and its many dimensions were daunting, but I happen to like reading long complicated books. 

 

AD: You are best known for translating 19th-century Polish prose and women’s writing. What kind of mental or linguistic shift did Dukaj’s novel require from you?

 

UP: Yes, I am known in Poland mostly for my translations of women novelists of the 19th and early 20th centuries. However, it’s a misrepresentation to suggest that I only translate dead women. I’ve recently published translations of Agnieszka Taborska and Piotr Paziński, and my first foray into translating Polish literature was Wiesław Myśliwski’s Palace. I’ve also translated contemporary academics, as many men as women.

 

My interest in translating the women writers emerged from my research, it had a specific purpose: why write in English about this dimension of Polish literary history, trying thereby to include these women in wider European debates, when no one outside Poland can read their texts? Of course, my work in this field convinced me that the writers I translated were important figures, and I have returned to them now: I’m currently working on a new English translation of Maria Kuncewiczowa’s The Stranger, and am planning to revive other projects which I had to put aside because of Ice, in particular Nałkowska’s The Impatient. But my long background in studying 19th-century Polish literature, as well as Russian, predating my work on Polish women, was fundamental when translating Ice, since Dukaj’s archaism dates from this period, namely the late Russian Empire, including the Russian partition of Poland. I am well used to reading this non-contemporary prose, so it didn’t feel like a seismic ‘linguistic shift’ to me.

 

Also, my own written English is not especially contemporary, in fact, so I didn’t feel it was any particular mental leap to immerse myself in the book’s setting and atmosphere. It felt familiar from my reading of the big 19th-century Russian novels. This is perhaps another reason why I chose to translate it – it felt close to my heart.

 

But I would add, as a general point, that translating women writers or translating as a feminist does not preclude translating men or translating genre fiction. I’m also a professional, so it’s my obligation to be as sensitive to all the possibilities contained in a text: the task is to translate as open-mindedly and empathetically as possible what one has before one.

 

 

Jacek Dukaj and Ursula Philips, photo: Polish Cultural Institute London fb.com/polishinstitutelondon

 

AD: How long did the translation take, and what sustained you through a project of this scale and difficulty?

 

UP: The translation itself took five years, and then there were another two years before publication, so seven in all. In the beginning, I was still working on other projects, but eventually these were finished or had to be put aside in order to complete Ice within a reasonable time. At times, it was very intense. I found myself working four, five, six hours a day on this one thing. Total immersion. What sustained me? Well, I often discussed individual issues as well as the experience as a whole with translator colleagues, experts on the historical or philosophical background, or simply other sympathetic friends and family members. This certainly sustained me. There were moments when I asked myself why I took it on at all, but it never crossed my mind to give up.

 

Working with the author also added to the time taken, resulting for example in lengthy exchanges by email or in person in Kraków or London and in several iterations of many files. But I regard such cooperation as time well spent, since it definitely improved the final product. As the work progressed, this process also gave me the opportunity to ask questions, as well as the confidence that I was more or less on the right track.

 

AD: ‘Ice’ is famous for its hybrid language – archaic Polish, Russianisms, neologisms and scientific-philosophical coinages. How did you approach this layered linguistic world at the sentence level? Did you attempt to mirror Dukaj’s linguistic eccentricities in English – his archaic spelling, syntax and wordplay – or did you seek other ways to evoke that atmosphere?

 

UP: Well, this is an enormous question, perhaps the most important, and I devote a postscript to it, a full sixteen pages, in the English version (on the invitation of the publisher). I’ll try to summarise here.

 

Starting with the ‘archaic’ Polish, it seems to me that the initial impact of the text when you first open the original, is visual, a view supported by several Polish native speakers whom I consulted. Polish orthography was reformed in 1936. Significant changes involved less usage of the letter ‘j’ 

 

 

Ursula Philips, photo: Edyta Dufaj / Instytut Książki

and the replacement of all -em and -emi adjectival case endings with -ym, -ymi. Seemingly minor changes, but given the frequency with which they occur, the impact is overwhelming. In order to reproduce such an effect in English, you would have to go back to the written/printed English of the early 18th century at least. The differences between our contemporary English and English at the turn of the 20th century are nowhere near as great. So, using the language (syntax, spelling, capitalisation conventions, obsolete vocabulary) of early 18th-century English would create not archaism but anachronism (in other words, the language would be inappropriate to the period of the book’s setting). So, I didn’t introduce any early 18th-century conventions such as capitalising nouns or using archaic past-tense verb forms (in apostrophe d, and not the modern -ed, e.g. ‘walk’d’ not ‘walked’). I took care, however, not to introduce any word not used in English before 1930 (the action starts in 1924 of the alternative reality, with history having frozen in 1908).

 

Another important aspect of Dukaj’s ‘archaism’ are the Russianisms. This is a very specific application of Russian: not only does it evoke Dostoevsky and other pre-revolutionary writers, it also conveys the language of administration, bureaucracy and power that Poles living in the Russian partition, in occupied Warsaw, would have heard on a daily basis. Polish readers, encountering this text in 2007, would have been able, however, to understand these Russian terms and phrases, even if they had never studied Russian, because of the common Slavic roots.

 

This affinity – of language, if not of culture – cannot be reflected in English, as there is no language of equivalent status which would be so closely understandable and at the same time so closely linked to external domination. I decided to keep various Russian words, which should be understandable from the context (although we have provided a glossary, where Russianisms and neologisms are listed in a single sequence, since for readers who do not know Russian, the Russianisms also function as neologisms), those connected with everyday life (clothes, food) but also those associated precisely with Russian power: tchinovnik, natchalnik, ispravnik, okhrannik. In my translation, however, these are not italicised, because they are organically integrated into Dukaj’s Polish, worked into the structure of sentences, sometimes reflecting even the syntax of Russian. The number of Russianisms increases as the protagonist Benedykt Giersławski travels closer to Irkutsk, to the epicentre of the Ice.

 

I also had to decide on an appropriate system of transcription of the Cyrillic into English that would have been used at the time. This was a mental juggling act as well. Dukaj uses a ‘Polonized’ phonetic transcription suited to the Polish ear and orthography, so I had to deduce from this what the Cyrillic would have been and then re-transcribe according to historically appropriate British methods, which tend to prefer simple transliteration rather than phonetic transcription.

 

Most difficult for me was the philosophical terminology with which I am less familiar. Clearly, in philosophical speculations and propositions, the vocabulary needs to be precise and specific, distinct from everyday usage. Here, I turned to colleagues in the UCL Department of Philosophy, who helped me to establish the correct vocabulary used in logic and mathematical logic. The translation of niekonieczy (as ‘non-necessary’, and not ‘unnecessary’) and niekonieczość (‘non-necessity’) in this context was especially important to get right.

 

As to the scientific vocabulary, this was relatively straightforward, namely the actual vocabulary used in ‘regular’ physics, cold-temperature physics, chemistry, technology, all from which Dukaj then develops his neologisms for the so-called ‘black physics’ and the technologies based upon it.

 

 

Jacek Dukaj at the Economic Forum in Karpacz, 2024, photo: Radek Pietruszka / PAP

 

AD: Were there words or concepts you found truly untranslatable, and how did you respond when fidelity and legibility clashed?

 

UP: This is probably the best place to talk about neologisms, many of which were not directly translatable by any close equivalents, and about Dukaj’s narrative using się (again I go into greater depth in my postscript which is entitled precisely: Translating the Untranslatable).

 

On my first reading of the whole book in Polish, I noted at least 400 neologisms. These relate to new natural phenomena, to the black physics, prompted by an element brought from outer space by the Tunguska meteor (1908) called tungetitum (I kept the term used in the book by Nikola Tesla), and then to the scientific research, technological developments and new industries based upon it. Some neologisms lent themselves to literal translation, such as the all-important zimnazo, which I translated as coldiron (one word), created from the regular Polish words (zimny meaning ‘cold’, and żelazo meaning ‘iron’). Dukaj, however, plays with prefixes and other devices available in Polish, often based on opposites or rather obverses or negations, which do not have equivalents in English. For example, in relation to the ‘black’ light phenomena: ćmiatło, świecień, ćmieczka. The wordplay here depends on the prefix ćmi- (implying dark) and świ- (implying light), and connotes to the actual Polish words światło (meaning ‘light’), cień (‘shadow’) and świeczka (‘candle’). I played at first with etymological solutions, but these quickly became contrived and academic: darklight, lightshadow, darkcandle… Here, the author came to my rescue suggesting that I should not be so literal and to think more in terms of how I as a non-scientist would describe these phenomena to other laypersons. I came up with: unlicht, glintz, blackwicke. I trust they work in context, but another translator would have thought of different things, as there is no right and wrong here. I discuss the neologisms in more detail in my postscript to the book.

 

I also discuss Dukaj’s invented narrative with się there, which hinges on his use of the reflexive pronoun, which doesn’t exist in English, allowing him to hide the subjectivity of his first-person narrator Benedykt Gierosławski by replacing first-person pronouns and verb forms (marked masculine) with a third-person grammatical form using się and neuter verb endings, thus creating an impersonal narrative voice. To reproduce this in English is impossible. After experimenting with various ideas, I decided in the end to make this as succinct as possible: I took the semantic element only of the infinitive (eat, sleep, run, freeze), hence without tense and without person, and placed it at the very beginning of the sentence – thereby indicating to readers that this is the narrative voice speaking. It feels a bit strange at first, just as it does in the original Polish, but I am confident that readers will get used to it, as Polish readers have done. 

 

I prefer to talk about linguistic closeness rather than ‘fidelity’ because what exactly am I meant to be ‘faithful’ to? Translating is rewriting, there is no avoiding this fact. A translation is merely an impression of the original. As to readability in English – this is ultimately the most important thing, otherwise readers will give up. If the new text does not read naturally in English, puts readers off because of clunky style, then the whole thing fails. You ask about syntax: well, the syntax needs to be adjusted to English, since preserving Polish syntax (as some translators admittedly try to do) can disrupt fluency and naturalness. Balancing on the tightrope between close adherence to Polish style and making the text comfortable to read, reminds me of the old conflict between preserving foreignness and domesticating. Ultimately, it’s a compromise. 

 

AD: What does ‘Ice’ represent in the Polish literary imagination? Why do you think it captured such attention despite its intimidating complexity?

 

UP: Well, I’m not Polish, so I can only answer as someone who has studied Polish history and literature as an outsider, albeit for over forty years. When we talk about the Polish literary imagination, what first springs to mind is the Romantic tradition of Adam Mickiewicz and Juliusz Słowacki, to which there are many references in Ice.

 

In Mickiewicz’s case, for example, to his Forefather’s Eveand especially, or so I felt, to the poems appended to part three of that drama, the ones that refer to Poles living in Russia and to the Wilno (Vilnius) students exiled to Siberia for patriotic activities in the early 1820s (Mickiewicz describes the kibitkas, mentioned by Benedykt at the end of Chapter the Third, when the express train crosses the border between European and Asian Siberia). Meanwhile a passage from Słowacki’s Anhelliis quoted at the point when Benedykt finds himself totally alone in the icy wastes. Katorga (another word I have preserved, without italics), which refers to exile into the depths of Siberia to penal settlements with hard labour in mines or logging work-gangs, an experience suffered by many Poles who participated in nineteenth-century uprisings against Russian power, is well recorded in Polish literature as well as painting. Ice features several prominent real-life exiles, who remained in Siberia and contributed to its scientific exploration, such as Karol Bohdanowicz, Jan Czerski, Benedykt Dybowski, Kazimierz Grochowski, as well as the ethnographer and novelist Wacław Sieroszewski. 

 

So, the novel definitely draws on Polish historical experience, not least because the protagonist’s father is one such Polish ex-katorzhnik or Sibyrak, and it is in search of him that Benedykt sets out on his Siberian odyssey. In this sense then, we could say the novel captures at least part of the Polish literary imagination – but that imagination is not monolithic, just as individual readers are not stereotypical in what they choose to identify with in the text.

 

It is important to point out, however, that despite this historical experience, Poles are rarely presented in Ice as victims. Not all are ex-katorzhniks. In fact, the novel reflects the fact that Poles got everywhere in the Russian Empire and many took advantage of career and economic opportunities. The fictional, all-powerful Minister of Winter is a Pole, Piotr Rappacki. In Irkutsk, the mayor Bolesław Szostakiewicz is Polish, as are the powerful industrialists who have made fortunes on the new Ice minerals, such as Wojsław Wielicki, with whom Benedykt lodges. Many were born and raised in Irkutsk, and are not themselves former convicts. Meanwhile, the role of Józef Piłsudski, who leads a secret army of Polish exiles in Siberia on the Japanese side in a new (invented) Russo-Japanese war, is by no means idealised. On the contrary, he is shown, in his own words, to be a potential dictator. I had the feeling that Dukaj acknowledges the past, but creates self-confident Polish protagonists who have moved on from that status of victimhood or oppression.

 

Ethnic groups other than Poles are also portrayed, of course, in particular the Tungusic peoples. Dukaj introduces aspects of shamanism, drawing on the research of some of the Polish exiles mentioned above but also on records kept by earlier travellers. Meanwhile, Russian political dissidents are included amongst the katorzhniks, in particular the former Marxist turned religious fanatic, the alcoholic Filimon Romanovitch Zeytsoff. Interestingly, or significantly, the most virulent criticism of the Russian ruler, Nikolay the Second Aleksandrovitch, does not come from Poles but from disaffected Russians, such as the army captain Privyezhensky whom Benedykt meets in the train. 

 

 

Castle Square with the tents of Russian troops stationed in front of the Royal Castle, after 14 October 1861, photo: Karol Beyer / National Museum in Warsaw

 

AD: The novel envisions an empire frozen in time, where even logic and history turn to ice. In translating ‘Ice’, did you sense that you were also translating a worldview – a system of logic and metaphysics rather than just a story? How do you read its political and philosophical undertones – and what do they suggest about Poland’s relationship to empire and modernity?

 

UP: I’m unwilling to give my own interpretations of the political and philosophical undertones. I want readers to decide for themselves, not hear my views. But yes, I did have the sense that I was translating a worldview, an approach to understanding the world grounded in logic and mathematics that indeed had fundamental ontological implications which transcended the specific historical context of Polish-Russian relations, but this is not divorced from the development of the ‘story’, if by ‘story’ we mean ‘plot’.

 

Without being a spoiler, I’ll try to explain where this worldview and its implications originate, if I’ve understood them correctly. Put briefly, Dukaj’s starting point is the essay by Tadeusz Kotarbiński entitled The Problem of the Existence of the Future(1913) which distinguishes between two different types of logic: two-valued and three-valued (quotations from Kotarbiński are included as mottos to the four main sections of the novel). Dukaj then tries to imagine how this dichotomy, in particular the Aristotelian two-value logic, might play out in reality, in life, in the material world. Wishing to locate his speculations in Kotarbiński’s own time, he found an ideal catalyst for transforming known reality in the Tunguska meteor explosion of June 1908. He uses that moment of impact to introduce into Siberia a new element from outer space that gradually transforms everything.

 

As for Poland and its relation to empire and modernity, Dukaj’s narrator Benedykt does not convey a message of victimhood, as I indicated above. Despite the experience of katorga, Dukaj’s Polish industrialists, scientists, manufacturers and politicians in Irkutsk are shown successfully exploiting the new natural resources, building fortunes, affording material luxuries and adopting the artistic styles of the contemporary West. In this sense, the Poles adapt to modernity. In relation to empire, he also does not omit to mention that in the early history of Siberian conquest and exploitation, cruel feats worthy of imperial overlords were committed by named Polish adventurers. 

 

Of course, reading the novel today through the lens of our contemporary politics, it is tempting to regard Vladimir Putin as a present-day emanation of the frozen logic of the Ice, of the uncompromising ‘yea-yea nay-nay’ approach to truth and falsehood, portrayed in the novel as typical of Russian religion and politics, forever torn between these two mutually exclusive extremes. In a recent interview, Dukaj described Putin as ‘a pure emanation of the Russian worldview and mentality’. Certain aspects of Russian power remain disturbingly constant: the present-day FSB is a modern variant of the tsarist Okhrana, katorga was a forerunner of Stalin’s GULAG and today’s Siberian prisons (I refer to the experiences of Aleksey Navalny and Maria Alyokhina). In more generalised terms, we could say that the dichotomy operates on every level from logic to physics to biology to ontology to mentality to politics: two-valued three-valued, yea-yea nay-nay, truth-falsehood, necessity-non-necessity, Winter-Summer, Ice-Thaw, Lyednyaks-Ottepyelniks, Russia-Poland. 

 

 

Tatra Mountains in winter, Morskie Oko, photo: Karol Majewski / Getty Images

 

AD: Were there any particular English literary models or voices that helped you capture Dukaj’s tone – perhaps from Victorian prose, speculative fiction, or philosophical writing?

 

UP: I prefer to talk about ‘inspirations’ rather than ‘models’. The word ‘model’ suggests that a translator might chose to follow or even copy another writer’s style in order to convey that of their own writer, whereas it’s important to convey the unique individual style with which the translator is tasked. As to ‘voices’ we should be clear that we are not referencing Dukaj’s ‘voice’ or ‘tone’ but that of his narrator and protagonist Benedykt Gierosławski: it is Benedykt’s voice that matters here, not that of the author – after all, novelists write different books with different narrators, and so the narrating ‘voice’ can vary. Benedykt’s tone reflects his personality and is quite distinct: he has a detached, humorous, tongue-in-cheek, self-deprecatory attitude towards himself. This provides a self-ironic counterbalance to his philosophical speculations (or ramblings?) about logic and existence.

 

Regarding ‘inspirations’ (as distinct from ‘models’), there were many. An aspect of the book that made a particular impression on me was the fantastical architecture and atmosphere of the extreme ice – I found it tantalising, beautiful and menacing at the same time. I was inspired by literary ice journeys written in English, from Wordsworth’s The Prelude, to the opening scenes of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, to the trek across the ice fields in Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness. 

 

As I was beginning the project, I read Polly Clark’s Tiger (2019), which is about researching tigers in the taiga. Her descriptions of the frozen forests, the ‘skin-paring cold’ and the birch trees exploding in a ‘deadly spray of wood and ice’ encouraged me to stretch for extreme vocabulary (though I don’t remember using ‘skin-paring’). Meanwhile, there are also the indigenous Siberian peoples, especially the Tungus, whose shamanic rituals feature in the second half of the book. After reading more recent academic articles on the topic, I opted to apply the vocabulary suggested by the Polish anthropologist Maria Antonina Czaplicka in the glossary to her book Aboriginal Siberia, published in English in 1914 when Czaplicka was a scholar at Oxford University. Her terminology was contemporary to the action of Ice and therefore seemed ideal. For example, my choices for the various shaman souls come from her.

 

The original has a strong storytelling impetus. In the first months working on the translation, I re-read several novels by Dickens, not as ‘models’ but in order to absorb something of their narrative energy and slight archaic tone: this reconfirmed me again in the conviction that the translated text has to have drive and personality, and that such a long book as Ice has to be as vigorous on page 1000 as it is on page one. Sustaining this requires attention to brevity and clarity of expression, variety in the structures of sentences, choice of colourful but appropriate vocabulary (I am constantly looking for synonyms to avoid repetition of the same words) and the reduction of too much wordiness – Dukaj uses a lot of what I call ‘padding words’ (in Polish: przecie, przecież, jednak, nawet, również, tudzierz) which may add nuance (a certain informal chattiness) to Benedykt’s narrative and therefore work in the Polish, but they clog up the English style and add little to the meaning. English is less tolerant of such padding.

 

Towards the beginning of the project, I also read all three volumes of Neal Stephenson’s The System of the World, another enormous feat of energised storytelling. Dukaj has sometimes been compared to Stephenson. From the scientific or sci-fi point of view, this makes sense: the centrality of the contrasting visions of Leibniz and Newton underlie all mathematical, scientific and philosophical speculations, but there are also significant differences. Stephenson does not attempt to recreate the ‘archaic’ English of the late 17th and early 18th centuries, and although many characters are fictional, he does not fundamentally change the historical setting, does not create an alternative historical reality to the extent that Dukaj does, wherein the First World War, the Russian Revolutions of 1917 and Polish independence have not taken place. Nevertheless, reading The System of the World did in some way help me to manage such an enormous volume of complex material.

 

Dickens was also an inspiration for the speech of Tchingis Shchekelnikoff. Here I examined the speech of Magwitch and Bill Sykes. Certain divergences from the grammar of standard received English, for example, can give a flavour of lower-class speech, although I was extremely wary of importing anything resembling dialect, such as Cockney or Scottish or West Country, because this would have created a cultural mismatch with the setting of the novel in Siberia.

 

Icealso feels like those long 19th-century Russian novels, in particular Dostoevsky’s, clearly, one of Dukaj’s inspirations. This was perhaps my overriding stylistic aim: to make the narrative sound like Dostoevsky, including digressions, long sentences and all. I tried to imagine, without consulting those contemporary translations too deeply, how such a long novel translated from a foreign language might have read at the beginning of the 20th century – much like a novel written in English, in fact.

 

Finally, I should mention Andrij Pavlyshyn’s 2018 Ukrainian translation. It’s sometimes helpful when translating to refer to the solutions of translators into other languages, although the usefulness is limited given the different structures of the languages. As I read Ukrainian, it was interesting to see how he had tackled issues where I had had difficulty, where I was not confident that I had grasped the sense of the Polish, it was a kind of insurance policy. 

 

 

'Day ut ia pobrusa, a ti poziwai' – the first sentence written in Polish in the Book of Henryków around 1270, photo: Wikimedia / CC

 

AD: How do you think English-language readers will approach ‘Ice’ – in terms of genre, themes or expectations – and what kind of readership do you imagine for the book outside Poland? Do you anticipate that Anglophone readers will interpret its dramatic ‘Thaw’ or its Siberian setting through contemporary lenses such as climate fiction or Eastern European history?

 

UP: I am unable to comment on sales in Poland, I haven’t researched that. The novel was originally published in 2007. I remember reading, early in 2008, an intriguing review by Wojciech Orliński, if I remember correctly, which prompted me to buy the book at the time. I gathered that the book was selling well; how subsequent editions have fared I’m not sure, but the fact that there have been new editions suggests that its popularity persists.

 

On whether the novel in some way represents ‘climate fiction’, Dukaj himself is quite clear: this was not his intention. However, it is possible that English-language readers may construe such a reference. Without my giving too much of the plot away, the great Thaw that takes place late in the book is massively impressive and may come, on a first reading, as a shock. This drama is not related, however, to theories of climate change, less still to present-day ecological campaigns. However, as I was translating these sensational descriptions of the melting ice, I couldn’t help but be aware that Siberia is currently warming and the permafrost is thawing, although the causes in the novel are quite different. Even so, some of the physical phenomena envisaged by Dukaj are actually coming true right now: the collapse of the soil, massive distortions to the ground resulting in bumpy airstrips and crooked buildings, not least the release into the air of long-dormant species of insect, which only add to the huge swarms of summer mosquitoes tormenting animals and people, the so-called Siberian gnus.

 

As to how it will sell in English, let’s wait and see. The publisher (Head of Zeus, part of Bloomsbury) clearly believes that there will be enthusiastic readers. It’ll be published in the United States after Christmas. I already have two online interviews booked with American critics in January/February to discuss the translation. There has been good publicity here in Britain, but I myself am waiting for longer in-depth reviews from commentators who have had time to read the whole book and reflect upon it. I imagine that the book would appeal to at least two audiences: first, science fiction aficionados and readers who enjoy immersing themselves in alternative realities, and second, readers who follow literary fiction from Eastern Europe, including historians of Russia. 

 

I’m often asked, as a translator and as a historian of Polish literature, how I expect Anglophones to be able to understand the context and sense of Polish literary texts, the implication being that they may not be able. If I achieve anything, I would dearly love to break down the misconception that only Poles can really understand their history and literature. It is possible to understand them by studying them. I see a work such as Ice, as I have many others before it, from Mickiewicz’s Pan Tadeuszto Bolesław Prus’ The Doll to Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob, as precisely the means by which non-Polish readers can learn about Polish history and culture. It’s not that one has to know the history of Poland and Russia in order to understand Ice – on the contrary, the book itself provides the insights. That said, it is probable that the scientific and philosophical, i.e. universal, supranational aspects of the book may appeal more to English-language readers. The publisher also classifies it as ‘steampunk’ which may likewise attract a specific group of readers. It remains to be seen.

 

Published: Nov 29 2025

Last updated: Nov 29 2025"

 

https://culture.pl/en/article/at-the-limits-of-possibility-ursula-phillips-on-translating-jacek-dukajs-ice

#Metaglossia 

#metaglossia_mundus 

"Maria B. Olujic Considers the Role of Neologisms and Idioms in Croatia’s Linguistic Landscape

 

Czesław Miłosz wrote, “Language is the only homeland.” I didn’t understand that sentence when I first read it. I was too busy trying to speak correctly—in English, in Croatian, in a blend that never quite landed on either shore.

 

The first time I tried to read Miłosz aloud, my tongue caught on the ł in his name. I was in class, new to the U.S., and eleven years old. My American teacher smiled, corrected me gently, but my cheeks burned hot. That same week I said “misery” instead of “mystery.” A few kids laughed. I didn’t. I stopped raising my hand for a month. I learned to taste every word before I let it out.

 

But I understand Miłosz now—not just intellectually, but bodily. Like tongue in English, the Croatian word jezik refers to both language and the tongue in our mouths—the spoken word, and the muscle that shapes it, or gets bitten when silence is safer. Or scorched, when a truth slips out too fast.

 

What he meant, I think, is that when borders collapse, when flags change, when your birthplace wakes up with a different name—sometimes six names—you realize your country hasn’t just split; your language has, too. Suddenly, one tongue wears four alphabets. Six new passports, three new anthems, and a dozen ways to say mine. What lingers is the echo of a phrase that only your people say. A joke that dies in translation. The lullaby your grandmother hummed while shelling white beans into her apron, her voice low enough not to wake the war. What stays is the syntax. The cadence. The words no one else knows how to carry.

 

The old state had collapsed. The new state was telling us how to speak. We used our tongues to carve out a space between what was imposed and what was ours.

 

In my grandmother’s kitchen, sentences simmered like soup. She never snapped. Even anger came out in full idioms: “Prije ispeci pa onda reci,” Bake it before you speak it, she’d say, tapping a wooden spoon against a pot for punctuation. Words were not thrown, they were tempered.

 

At first, I thought that saying was just village wisdom—a folksy version of Think before you speak. But under communism, it meant something else. A careless sentence, a joke dropped at the wrong table, could mark you. Or your father. Or the neighbor with too many books. Language wasn’t expression; it was a confession, or armor.

 

Even children knew this. On the walk to the village school, we knew we had to greet strangers—always. But before we spoke, we had to choose. Two greetings danced on our tongue: Good day or Blessed be Jesus and Mary. Both polite. One dangerous. We had no way of knowing which of these the stranger expected—only that one might keep you safe, and the other might mark you.

 

You chose. You spoke. You got it wrong.

 

The stranger pulled your ear until it burned raw. And the next day, the teacher called you to the front of the classroom: Didn’t we teach you how to speak properly? How to greet people? Then came the walk—the shuffle to the front of the classroom, the shame of standing there on display.

 

Speech was a test. A trap. You learned to scan a face, to read a posture, to hesitate. Because as they say, “Cim otvoriš usta, odmah znaju tko si.” The moment you speak, they know exactly who you are.

 

That’s how it worked—even the smallest words carried weight. Every sentence was a risk, every greeting a gamble. Meaning bent itself around silence. Opinion disguised itself as proverb. Grief folded tightly inside idiom, like a note slipped under a door.

 

I still carry that delay in my mouth. Even in English, I sometimes test a sentence before it leaves me—like checking the oven. The habit is not fear, exactly. It’s memory. It’s the politics of the tongue.

 

For decades, the tongue was policed. Jokes were told behind hands. Opinions were filtered through euphemism. Even laughter came out sideways. Then Yugoslavia unraveled and suddenly the gates burst open. We spoke until our jaws ached. After years of swallowing our words, we let them spill.

 

When a regime collapses, one of the first things to erupt is language. Suddenly, the unspoken can be spoken, but still in disguise. We didn’t say, The new president is absurd, but we made up a word like nabiguz (someone who stuffs their ass with greed) or samofukalo (self-fucker), and everyone understood. The absurdity was shared. Laughter was code.

 

After the war began, everyone wanted a piece of the tongue. It was as if each republic reached for a slice—Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, Montenegro, Slovenia, Macedonia, Kosovo—each claiming theirs, correcting it, renaming it. The language was so savory, so full of bite and mischief, that no one wanted to admit we’d been sharing it all along. Everyone wanted their own version. Their own dictionary. Their own alphabet.

 

We speak now of the balkanization of nations, but what about the balkanization of the tongue? Suddenly, one language had to wear four new names. People who’d grown up understanding each other perfectly were told they no longer shared a vocabulary. New alphabets, new rules, new slogans. Yet beneath it all, the rhythm stayed the same. The vowels stretched in the same spots. The jokes still landed—if you knew how to hear them. What we witnessed wasn’t just linguistic divergence. It was a rupture we tried to bandage with phonetics.

 

Overnight, dictionaries announced new norms, as if speech could be disinfected. Words were “cleansed” of their Yugoslav residue, scrubbed down to fit a newly drawn border. In Croatian, this led to

 

brzoglas—fast voice—for telephone,

zrakomlat—air beater—for helicopter,

milokliz—sweet-slider—for penis,

and for condom? Udna tuljica. A limb sheath.

 

It would’ve been funny if it hadn’t been official—if it hadn’t come with flags and checkpoints and new textbooks for children. And the more official the rules became, the more an underground language—humorous, grotesque, barbed—rose up in protest.

 

We created entire anti-dictionaries, full of words not meant for permanence but for play. For a release.

 

A chair? Cetveronožni guzni podupirac—a four-legged ass prop.

A radio? Zvucni propovjedac—a sonic preacher.

Pants? Dvocjevni nabiguz—two-barreled ass stuffers.

A belt? Okolotrbušni hlacodržac—around-the-belly pants-holder.

A pencil sharpener? Zarezivac drvene misli—carver of wooden thoughts.

 

Absurd? Absolutely. But also brilliant. The old state had collapsed. The new state was telling us how to speak. We used our tongues to carve out a space between what was imposed and what was ours.

 

These neologisms weren’t just clever. Vulgar and vivid, they were the people’s unofficial dictionary. A resistance lexicon. They were a gesture—a sticking-out of the tongue to the regime that had tried to silence it for so long. In our culture, to bare your tongue—especially in crude or exaggerated ways—isn’t just playful. It’s profane. It means: Fuck you. It means: You don’t own my mouth anymore.

 

Today, if you search for neologizam in Croatian, you’ll mostly find imported marketing terms: anti-aging, afterwork, aquapark. Borrowed words for borrowed lives. The kind of language you pack in a dutyfree suitcase. There’s even an official Dictionary of Neologisms, compiled by the University of Zagreb’s Department of Linguistics. Flip through it and you’ll find global gloss: android, after party, all-inclusive. Language of the market, not the street. Branding, not survival. But the neologisms I remember weren’t about trends or tech. They were local and lowbrow and laughed in the face of collapse.

 

The tongue I remember did more than speak. It bit. It barked. It joked. Made mischief. Broke rules. Even when we borrowed, we bent the new words until they fit our crooked rhythm. Take guglati—a perfectly conjugated Croatian verb born from Google, now fully domesticated. We twisted it. Made it ours. Now it lives in sentences with samofukalo and nabiguz, cheek by jowl. Global brand, village filth, one syntax.

 

This, too, is tongue-work: the art of blending the absurd, the slick, and the subversively local until the whole hums with mischief.

 

In my case, it’s a tongue stitched from Dalmatian hinterland dialect, postwar Zagreb officialese, and Midwestern Montessori English. A patchwork—frayed in places, but alive.

 

Even now, my aunt in California says she’s “driving a car-u.” Half-English, half-Dalmatian, fully hers. The suffix roots a foreign word in local soil—makes it ours.

 

I’ve spent decades switching tongues. In Dalmatia, I learned to stretch vowels wide, to tuck meaning into idioms, to joke before I wept. In America, I learned to speak gently, cleanly—apologizing in every sentence. Croatian stalled for me around age eleven. English rushed in: fast, glossy, eager to please. One tongue paused, the other performed.

 

When I returned to Croatia during the war, I sounded strange in Zagreb. A shopkeeper stared when I said “šta” instead of “što.” She smiled—tight-lipped, like I’d walked in barefoot. My cousin whispered, They can tell you’re from the village.

 

Sometimes, in the pause before you speak—in the silence between layers—you taste the word. It stings. It startles. And it belongs.

 

I still mix those sounds. I still mistranslate myself. But that mix—awkward, stitched, imperfect—is what keeps the whole thing alive.

 

It was that roughness that carried humor, resistance, survival. In my village, jokes weren’t told so much as inhabited. We didn’t speak about trauma—we cooked with it, laughed around it. A cousin once said, “Ako žurimo živjeti, imat cemo vremena za sprovod.” If we rush to live, we’ll have plenty of time for the funeral. A proverb disguised as a punchline. That was our syntax.

 

But not all tongues were treated equally.

 

We were in a café in Zagreb, my coffee cooling untouched. Without thinking I said, “Bog.” My friend looked up and, in English, corrected me lightly: “It’s Bok here.” I felt something shift behind my ribs—like a word was being evicted. Bog means God. Bok, on the other hand, means nothing. A stylish secularism had replaced a word much older and deeper. Such changes were never about mere sound and grammar. They were about who gets to seem modern. Whose tongue remains relevant.

 

Now a new kind of voice has entered the room. Not urban or rural. Not Zagreb or Dalmatian. A voice with no accent, no idiom, no pause. It speaks smoothly, but it remembers nothing it says.

 

Machines are fluent. GPS voices give directions in accentless English. Chatbots complete our sentences. The radio spoke English before we did. But all of that fluency is hollow. It carries no hesitation, no inheritance, no risk.

 

A machine will never know what zrakoprc means—air-fucker, a word for someone who talks and talks but says nothing. It will never understand the weight behind “Bacila se u Crveno jezero”—She threw herself into Red Lake. Not just a sentence, but a wound. It won’t get the joke when someone says, “Bacila se u Hercegovacko jezero”—She threw herself into Herzegovinian Lake—a lake that doesn’t exist, in a country that barely holds. The satire only lands if you know the absence.

 

My cousin once joked, Kids chew rubber boots now too. Only theirs are screens. He was remembering the cow he once left to graze behind a bush while he played soccer. He kept glancing over in case she wandered off. But she stayed. After the game, he found her chewing an old rubber boot. She looked content. But she wasn’t fed.

 

That’s how this new fluency feels. The voice is smooth, but it tastes nothing. It remembers nothing. It speaks, but hasn’t lived.

 

The same cousin now beams about ChatGPT.

 

She knew everything about Imotski, he said. So polite. So clear.

 

A voice with no hunger. No grief. No gossip. A voice that’s never bitten itself trying not to speak. Real language stumbles. It hesitates. It remembers.

 

I think of Tin Ujevic, Croatia’s great poet, who once entered a tavern unshaven and was refused wine. He returned the next day in a suit. They served him. He poured the wine into his pocket. Feeding the coat, he said. You weren’t serving me.

 

That, too, is language. Who’s being fed? What’s being served?

 

So which tongue do I speak? The one with its idioms and bite? The one honed in books and softened with apology? I don’t know. I’m still patching it together. Still chewing on rubber boots and village jokes. Still testing the oven. Still translating—not just between Croatian and English, but between worlds. Because in the end, the tongue remembers what the dictionary forgets. Sometimes, in the pause before you speak—in the silence between layers—you taste the word. It stings. It startles. And it belongs.

 

“The Tongue Remembers” by Maria B. Olujic appears in the latest issue of AGNI."

Maria B. Olujic

November 24, 2025

https://lithub.com/creating-new-tongues-on-language-as-adaptation-and-resistance/

#Metaglossia 

#metaglossia_mundus 

"Summary: New research using human brain organoids shows that early neural activity follows structured, time-based patterns long before sensory experience begins. These findings suggest the human brain comes preconfigured with a built-in “operating system” for organizing information, rather than relying solely on external input to form its circuits.

 

The organoids produced complex activity signatures resembling the brain’s default mode, hinting at a genetically encoded blueprint for perception and cognition. The work opens the door to deeper insights into early brain development, neurodevelopmental disorders, and how toxins may affect the fetal brain.

 

 

 

 

Key Facts:

 

Intrinsically Patterned Activity: Organoids produced organized neural firing patterns that resembled the brain’s default mode network despite no sensory input.

Genetically Encoded Blueprint: Findings suggest that the brain begins forming circuits with built-in instructions before experience shapes them.

Tool for Understanding Disorders: These early signatures may help identify developmental disruptions linked to disease or toxic exposures.

Source: UC Santa Cruz

 

Humans have long wondered when and how we begin to form thoughts. Are we born with a pre-configured brain, or do thought patterns only begin to emerge in response to our sensory experiences of the world around us?

 

 

Now, science is getting closer to answering the questions philosophers have pondered for centuries. 

 

Researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, are using tiny models of human brain tissue, called organoids, to study the earliest moments of electrical activity in the brain.

 

A new study in Nature Neuroscience finds that the earliest firings of the brain occur in structured patterns without any external experiences, suggesting that the human brain is preconfigured with instructions about how to navigate and interact with the world.

 

“These cells are clearly interacting with each other and forming circuits that self-assemble before we can experience anything from the outside world,” said Tal Sharf, assistant professor of biomolecular engineering at the Baskin School of Engineering and the study’s senior author.

 

 

“There’s an operating system that exists, that emerges in a primordial state. In my laboratory, we grow brain organoids to peer into this primordial version of the brain’s operating system and study how the brain builds itself before it’s shaped by sensory experience.”

 

In improving our fundamental understanding of human brain development, these findings can help researchers better understand neurodevelopmental disorders, and pinpoint the impact of toxins like pesticides and microplastics in the developing brain. 

 

Studying the developing brain

 

The brain, similar to a computer, runs on electrical signals—the firing of neurons. When these signals begin to fire, and how the human brain develops, are challenging topics for scientists to study, as the early developing human brain is protected within the womb.

 

 

Organoids, which are 3D models of tissue grown from human stem cells in the lab, provide a unique window into brain development. The Braingeneers group at UC Santa Cruz, in collaboration with researchers at UC San Francisco and UC Santa Barbara, are pioneering methods to grow these models and take measurements from them to gain insights into brain development and disorders. 

 

Organoids are particularly useful for understanding if the brain develops in response to sensory input—as they exist in the lab setting and not the body—and can be grown ethically in large quantities.

 

In this study, researchers prompted stem cells to form brain tissue, and then measured their electrical activity using specialized microchips, similar to those that run a computer. Sharf’s background in both applied physics, computation, and neurobiology form his expertise in modelling the circuitry of the early brain. 

 

 

 

“An organoid system that’s intrinsically decoupled from any sensory input or communication with organs gives you a window into what’s happening with this self-assembly process,” Sharf said.

 

“That self-assembly process is really hard to do with traditional 2D cell culture—you can’t get the cell diversity and the architecture. The cells need to be in intimate contact with each other. We’re trying to control the initial conditions, so we can let biology do its wonderful thing.”

 

Pattern production

 

The researchers observed the electrical activity of the brain tissue as they self-assembled from stem cells into a tissue that can translate the senses and produce language and conscious thought.

 

They found that within the first few months of development, long before the human brain is capable of receiving and processing complex external sensory information such as vision and hearing, its cells spontaneously began to emit electrical signals characteristic of the patterns that underlie translation of the senses. 

 

 

 

 

Through decades of neuroscience research, the community has discovered that neurons fire in patterns that aren’t just random. Instead, the brain has a “default mode” — a basic underlying structure for firing neurons which then becomes more specific as the brain processes unique signals like a smell or taste. This background mode outlines the possible range of sensory responses the body and brain can produce.

 

In their observations of single neuron spikes in the self-assembling organoid models, Sharf and colleagues found that these earliest observable patterns have striking similarity with the brain’s default mode.

 

Even without having received any sensory input, they are firing off a complex repertoire of time-based patterns, or sequences, which have the potential to be refined for specific senses, hinting at a genetically encoded blueprint inherent to the neural architecture of the living brain 

 

 

 

 

“These intrinsically self-organized systems could serve as a basis for constructing a representation of the world around us,” Sharf said.

 

“The fact that we can see them in these early stages suggests that evolution has figured out a way that the central nervous system can construct a map that would allow us to navigate and interact with the world.”

 

Knowing that these organoids produce the basic structure of the living brain opens up a range of possibilities for better understanding human neurodevelopment, disease, and the effects of toxins in the brain. 

 

“We’re showing that there is a basis for capturing complex dynamics that likely could be signatures of pathological onsets that we could study in human tissue,” Sharf said. “That would allow us to develop therapies, working with clinicians at the preclinical level to potentially develop compounds, drug therapies, and gene editing tools that could be cheaper, more efficient, higher throughput.”

 

This study included researchers at UC Santa Barbara, Washington University in St. Louis, Johns Hopkins University, the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, and ETH Zurich.

 

Key Questions Answered:

Q: What do brain organoids reveal about early neural activity?

A: They show structured electrical patterns that emerge before any sensory input.

 

Q: Does the brain form circuits without experience?

A: Yes — organoids self-assemble into networks that fire in coordinated patterns.

 

Q: Why does this matter for neurodevelopment?

A: These early intrinsic patterns may shape how the brain builds systems for sensing, learning, and thinking."

Neuroscience·November 24, 2025

https://neurosciencenews.com/organoid-cognition-neurodevelopment-29974/

#Metaglossia 

#metaglossia_mundus 

"Can AI translate Native languages in times of disaster?

In the wake of Typhoon Halong, an AI language company wants to hire Native translators, raising questions about data sovereignty.

Annie Rosenthal November 14, 2025

 EmailSave ArticleMore

Walter Nelson, managed retreat coordinator, points out the high water mark during flooding last month when the remnants of Typhoon Halong hit Napakiak, Alaska.

Photo by Katie Baldwin Basile/High Country News, Illustration by Luna Anna Archey/High Country News

Stay informed about the West.

Sign up for our email newsletter to receive in-depth, independent reporting that illuminates our region.

Email address(Required)

Email address

 

In 2022, after historic storms hit remote villages across Western Alaska, the Federal Emergency Management Agency hired a California-based contractor to help residents access disaster aid. Their job was to translate applications for financial assistance: The Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta is a constellation of small Alaska Native communities, and nearly half the region’s population — some 10,000 people — learn to speak Yugtun, the Central Yup’ik dialect, before they learn English. Farther north, approximately 3,000 people speak Iñupiaq.

 

 

But when the translations came through and journalists at the local public radio station, KYUK, tried to read them, they found that the material was nonsense.

 

Sign up for the newsletter

High Country News’ twice weekly email newsletter includes our latest on-the-ground reporting from across the West.

 

Email address(Required)

Email address

“They were Yup’ik words all right, but they were all jumbled together, and they didn’t make sense,” said Julia Jimmie, who is Yup’ik and works as a translator at KYUK. “It made me think that someone somewhere thought that nobody spoke or understood our language anymore.”

 

Three years later, the region is reeling from another storm: Typhoon Halong, whose remnants displaced more than 1,500 residents and killed at least one person in the village of Kwigillingok in mid-October. And despite recent changes to FEMA policy, translation is once again raising questions — this time, about the role of AI in Indigenous communities.

 

Prisma International, a Minneapolis-based company, posted an ad seeking “experienced, professional Translators and Interpreters” of Yup’ik, Iñupiaq, and other Alaska Native languages on Oct. 21, the day before the Trump administration approved a disaster declaration for the storm.

 

The company has contracted with FEMA more than 30 times over the last few years, according to government records. Its website says that Prisma’s tools “combine AI and human expertise to accelerate translation, simplify language access, and enhance communication across audiences, systems, and users.” According to the job listing, the Alaska Native language translators would be asked to “provide written translations using a Computer-Assisted Translation (CAT) tool.”

 

Learn more about advertising with High Country News.

 

A spokesperson for FEMA declined to say in late October whether the agency planned to contract with Prisma in Alaska, and the company did not respond to multiple requests for comment by phone and email. But the job posting notes a preference for applicants with experience translating or interpreting “for emergency management agencies, e.g. FEMA,” as well as knowledge of the recent storm and a connection to local Indigenous communities. Multiple Yup’ik language speakers in Alaska confirmed they had been contacted by a company representative, who described Prisma as “a language services contractor for the Federal Emergency Management Agency.”

 

Julia Jimmie was among those contacted. She said she would have been happy to translate for FEMA, but she had more questions about working with Prisma.

 

As AI expands into new areas of everyday life, including translation, it’s prompted both excitement and skepticism in Indigenous communities. Many Native tech and culture experts are intrigued by its potential, particularly when it comes to language preservation. But they warn that the technology risks distorting cultural knowledge and could threaten language sovereignty.

 

“Artificial intelligence relies on data to function,” said Morgan Gray, a member of the Chickasaw Nation and a research and policy analyst at Arizona State University’s American Indian Policy Institute. “One of the bigger risks is that if you’re not careful, your data can be used in a way that might not be consistent with your values as a tribal community.”

 

Though the U.S. government does not formally regulate AI or its use, the concept of “data sovereignty” — a tribal nation’s right to define how its data is collected and used — is increasingly part of international discussions about Indigenous intellectual property. Free, prior and informed consent for the use of Indigenous cultural knowledge is written into the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. UNESCO, the U.N. body that oversees cultural heritage, has called for AI developers to respect tribal sovereignty in dealing with Indigenous communities’ data.

 

“A tribal nation needs to have complete information about the way that AI will be used, the type of tribal data that that AI system might use,” Gray said. “They need to have time to consider those impacts, and they need to have the right to refuse and say, ‘No, we’re not comfortable with this outside entity using our information, even though you might have a really altruistic motivation behind doing it.’”

 

It’s still unclear whether Prisma has contacted tribal leadership in the Y-K Delta. The Association of Village Council Presidents, a consortium of 56 federally recognized tribes in the region, did not respond to a request for comment.

 

On its website, Prisma says that clients can opt to use only human translators, noting that its AI use is governed by an AI Responsible Usage Policy. But the details of that policy are not readily available online, and the company did not respond to requests for clarification.

 

 

Representatives from three emergency response agencies set up a place for people to apply for aid in the school in Napakiak, Alaska. Sitting at the table are Dara Rickles with the Red Cross and Kali Grunden, FEMA Region 10 tribal liasion.

Photo by Katie Baldwin Basile/High Country News, Illustration by Luna Anna Archey/High Country News

In the three years since its contractor produced the notoriously botched translations, FEMA has sought to improve its work with Alaska Native communities. KYUK’s reporting on the scandal prompted a civil rights investigation, and the California contractor, Accent on Languages, reimbursed the agency for the faulty translations. A spokesperson for FEMA said the agency now employs only “Alaska-based vendors” for Alaska Native languages, prioritizing those in disaster-impacted areas. It also requires a secondary quality-control review of all translations. “Tribal partners are continuously consulted to determine language services needs and how FEMA can meet those needs in the most effective and accessible manner,” the spokesperson wrote in an email.

 

The agency’s policies on AI are less clear. The email did not directly address questions about whether FEMA has policies in place to regulate the use of AI or protect Indigenous data sovereignty, though it said that FEMA “works closely with tribal governments and partners to make sure our services and outreach are responsive to their needs.” 

 

According to government records, FEMA has contracted with Prisma in more than a dozen states. Prisma’s website highlights a case study in which it used its “LexAI” technology to help a federal agency provide information about disaster relief in multiple languages following a wildfire. The case study says it offered translation for more than 16 languages, including “rare Pacific Island dialects.”

 

The company has also worked with several other federal agencies, the government database shows, but it does not appear to have contracted with the federal government in Alaska before.

 

In the Y-K Delta, the Yup’ik language translators Prisma contacted shared a practical concern: Would AI be able to translate their language accurately?

 

“Yup’ik is a complex language,” Jimmie wrote in a message. “I think that AI would have problems translating Yup’ik. You have to know what you’re talking about in order to put the word together.”

 

Most AI models rely on extensive data to help produce accurate translations. But that kind of data is rarely available for Indigenous languages, and AI has a poor record when it comes to translating them, often providing inaccurate sentences and even completely invented words.

 

Sally Samson, who is Yup’ik and a professor of Yup’ik language and culture at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, said she was skeptical that AI could master Yugtun syntax, which differs substantially from English. Her concern wasn’t just that the technology might provide misinformation, but that it would fail to convey the nuances of a Yup’ik worldview.

 

“Our language explains our culture, and our culture defines our language,” she said. “The way we communicate with our elders and our co-workers and our friends is completely different because of the values that we hold, and that respect is very important.”

 

“Our language explains our culture, and our culture defines our language.”

 

Learn more about advertising with High Country News.

 

Indigenous software developers are actively working to address some of AI’s shortcomings around Native languages. Many hope to mobilize the technology to preserve endangered dialects. An Anishinaabe roboticist has already designed a robot to help kids learn Anishinaabemowin, while a Choctaw computer scientist created a chatbot to converse in Choctaw.

 

But in those cases, Indigenous people have been the ones developing the AI models and making decisions about how to use them. Crystal Hill-Pennington, who teaches Native law and business at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and offers legal consultation to Alaska tribes, said she worries about the potential for exploitation if AI is trained on the work of Indigenous translators for future use by non-Native companies.

 

“If we have communities that have a historical socioeconomic disadvantage, and then companies can come in, gather a little bit of information, and then try to capitalize on that knowledge without continuing to engage the originating community that holds that heritage, that’s problematic,” she said.

 

Native communities have centuries of experience with outsiders extracting and exploiting their cultural knowledge — but there is also recent precedent for this kind of controversy. In 2022, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribal Council voted to banish a nonprofit that had promised to help preserve their language. After Lakota elders spent years sharing cultural knowledge with the non-Native group, the organization copyrighted the material and tried to sell it back to tribal members in textbooks.

 

Hill-Pennington said the introduction of AI by private companies adds another layer of complexity to contemporary conversations around intellectual property.

 

“The question is, who ends up owning the knowledge that they’re scraping?” she said.

 

Standards around AI and Indigenous cultural knowledge are evolving quickly, just like the technology. Hill-Pennington said that some companies using AI may still be unfamiliar with the expectation of informed consent and the concept of data sovereignty. But, she said, those standards are becoming increasingly relevant.

 

“Particularly if they’re going to be doing work with, let’s say, a federal agency that does fall under executive orders around authentic consultation with Indigenous peoples in the United States, then this is not something that should be overlooked,” she said."

https://www.hcn.org/articles/can-ai-translate-native-languages-in-times-of-disaster/

#Metaglossia 

#metaglossia_mundus