Metaglossia: The Translation World

In this blog I will compare and contrast the differences between active learning of a language, via language corpora and concordance lists, and passive rote learning, using my course Spanish gramma...

The Germans have a lot to answer for in Hungary. Perhaps because of historical guilt (Jewish writers such as Konrád, Nádas, Kertész and Dalos have all been especial recipients of largesse) or perhaps because Hungarians are almost the last students of the German language, Germany almost single-handedly keeps Hungarian literature in business. And the Germans, it seems to me, have encouraged the Teutonic notion that anything entertaining or exciting must be lightweight or pulp. Serious writing has to be … serious, and hard work. If you're not straining, it ain't literature. László Krasznahorkai and Peter Nádas seem to be particular exponents of this attitude.

He’s been a Robben Island prisoner and more recently one of South Africa’s most eminent educationists. He’s also a linguistic revolutionary.  KHADIJA PATEL lent Neville Alexander an ear. - Alexander is a vocal proponent of multilingualism in education. He acknowledges that his views on language are construed by some as the “idle musings of an out-of-touch eccentric”, but he believes the dominant opinions of multilingualism in education in South Africa suffer from the disposition to see everything through the prism of English. He is quick to clarify that it would be “silly” to be anti-English, but believes the role of South Africa’s African languages must be enhanced to ensure no South African is robbed of democracy.

Introductory Chapter to The Agamben Dictionary (EUP, 2010) Co-authored with Alex Murray...

As a legal concept that appeared in the 19th century and originated in international law, extraterritoriality (or exterritoriality) initially established the principle according to which a person is not necessarily subject to the laws of the territory on which he or she is located. However, as George Steiner has shown (Extraterritorial, Papers on Literature and the Language Revolution, 1971), the concept can be enlarged and transposed within the cultural field. Applied to languages, literatures and civilizations, it suggests that, under the effects of the political upheavals of the 20th century and of contemporary globalization, the political territory has lost its old unifying and defining powers in cultural matters.

The Korea Times awarded prizes to winners of its 42nd Modern Korean Literature Translation Awards at a ceremony held at Seoul Plaza Hotel, Wednesday.

Attending the awards ceremony were, among others, President-Publisher Park Moo-jong of the Korea Times, Park Je-yeong, chief operating officer of the Korea Exchange Bank, which sponsors the annual translation contest, and judges including Brother Anthony.

Notion juridique née au XIXe siècle et relevant du droit international public, l’extraterritorialité (ou l’exterritorialité) instaure d’abord le principe selon lequel une personne n’est pas forcément soumise aux lois du territoire sur lequel elle se trouve. Or, comme l’avait montré George Steiner (Extraterritorial, Papers on Literature and the Language Revolution, 1971), la notion peut être élargie et transposée dans le domaine culturel. Appliquée aux langues, littératures et civilisations, elle avance que, sous l’effet des bouleversements politiques du XXe siècle et de la mondialisation contemporaine, le territoire politique a perdu son ancienne puissance d’unification et de définition en matière culturelle.

Google Translate has added five more Indian languages to its iPhone app -- Telugu, Tamil, Bengali, Gujarati, and Kannada -- making the treasure trove of its...

As Google pushes fresh search results, a helpful Google search tool for historical searches quietly vanished earlier this month. Google has confirmed tha...

Teatro Cánovas. Fecha: 11 de noviembre. Compañía: Excéntrica Producciones. Versión y dirección: Juan José Villanueva. Reparto: Ignasi Vidal, Gregor Acuña, Lilian Caro, Pilar Crespo, Celia Vioque y Antonio Salazar. Aforo: Unas 50 personas.

Resulta paradójico el modo en que Don Juan sigue constituyendo un argumento arquetípico en el teatro contemporáneo; si en otros personajes clásicos resulta más sencillo buscar resquicios que signifiquen en la actualidad (la regla es sencilla: basta con dejar que hablen por sí solos), el burlador presenta dificultades añadidas para su traducción. El problema fundamental es que...

Con algo de ironía, empiezo a pensar que una ventaja de los libros escritos en otro idioma es que se puede leer varias veces el mismo título, pero disfrutar, con cada traducción, de una obra...

Leer poesía traducida es aceptar que uno está perdiéndose en el mejor de los casos entre la cuarta parte y la mitad de lo que hay en el original. Leer poesía traducida de una lengua que uno ignora por completo es saltar al vacío. Poesía, argumentan algunos derrotistas, es precisamente aquello que se pierde al ser traducido.

Hay poetas, poemas, que resisten bien la traducción. Antonio Machado y Federico García Lorca, que nunca faltan en las secciones de poesía de las buenas librerías americanas, se leen con una claridad magnífica en inglés. Una buena parte de la gran poesía americana, su naturalidad expansiva, viaja bien al español: incluso la solemnidad visionaria de Wallace Stevens, o el fraseo fingidamente coloquial de William Carl...

Discussion among translators, entitled: How do I permanently really disable a translation memory in Studio 2011?.

Model-turned-actress Swetha Menon’s new film Ratinirvedam is going to be released in Telugu. The movie is produced by SVR Media, which released films like Piranha, Iron Man 2, Dasavatharam, Suriya son of Krishnan and Urumi. This film is the remake of 1978 film Rathinirvedam directed by Bharathan on a the story by P. Padmarajan. The film has completed dubbing work and is likely to be released on November 18. The film has completed 100 days in Malayalam. The story of the film revolves around a young boy who falls in love with a woman elder to him. Sreejith plays Pappu, while Swetha Menon is essaying the role of Rathi. The film is directed by T.K. Rajeev Kumar.

Siavash Jamadi (Selected Translator), Mehdi Mohaqqeq (Selected Corrector), Ali-Akbar Velayati (Selected Researcher), Hojjatoleslam Mohsen Qerati (Selected Compiler) and Hojjatoleslam Mohammad-Ali Kusha (Selected Critic) are some of the figures that will be honored at the event.

Stephen Mitchell is a poet and one of the preeminent translators and interpreters of ancient and modern classics.

Since its first publication in 1928, the Oxford English Dictionary — at 20 volumes, the most comprehensive historical dictionary in the world — has only been revised once in 1933, and republished once with supplemental material in 1979.

And though Jesse Sheidlower's job as the dictionary's editor at large for North America is to spend his days updating, revising and adding new entries, there's no guarantee that there will ever be an OED 3. He addressed the issues involved with revising the OED at Elon University Nov. 10, tracing the history of lexicography to support his case.

¿Por qué el Senado tendrá dos miembros más? ¿Qué es el voto nulo? Descubre los términos clave para enfrentarte a las elecciones del 20-N.

Desde la revisión Reina-Valera de 1960 no se había elaborado ninguna edición tan exhaustiva, rigurosa y fiel a lo que cada autor quiso expresar a sus contemporáneos.

No hace demasiado tiempo, durante el período obligatorio de inseguridad e incertidumbre compartidos por muchos tras el final de carrera, decidí dejar de ignorar aquella curiosa e incesante voz que me llamaba a la traducción. Me lamenté por el hecho de que, por cuestiones de temario, sólo hubiera podido tener un breve, aunque satisfactorio, contacto con ella. En mi caso, el paso a seguir estaba claro: buscar la formación adecuada. Más tarde que temprano, lo hice: me matriculé en el máster universitario de Co

Getting the English exactly right....I have spent the last three years translating Homer's "Iliad," a project I began because none of the English translations on my bookshelf interested my ear enough to get past Book 1. Translating is a specialized kind of work, but in the most general sense, it is the art of listening. It has lessons for anyone who cares about the sound of their writing.

With Homer, the first thing that I do is my homework, looking up the Greek words I don't know and studying the commentaries. I'm left with a bramble of possibilities handwritten on the right-hand page of my notebook and a blank page on the left.

The Arabian Nights constitute, in Marina Warner's words, "a polyvocal anthology of world myths, fables and fairytales". The antecedents of these Arab-Islamic texts (also known as The Thousand and One Nights and the Arabian Nights Entertainments) are Qur'anic, Biblical, Indian, Persian, Mesopotamian, Greek, Turkish and Egyptian. In them, oral and written traditions, poetry and prose, demotic folk tales and courtly high culture mutate and interpenetrate. In their long lifetime the Nights have influenced, among many others, Flaubert, Wilde, Márquez, Mahfouz, Elias Khoury, Douglas Fairbanks and the Ballets Russes.

for the 2 million Iraqi refugees displaced, endangered and impoverished by war and sectarian violence, there is no homecoming in sight. Forced from their homes, these families must take refuge in other Middle Eastern countries that can ill afford to house them. Among the displaced are targeted religious minorities, gay men, mixed Sunni-Shia families, victims of sex trafficking and former interpreters who played a vital role in assisting the US military. Targeted in their own hometowns, war's stranded families remain in exile – even as the general level of violence in Iraq decreases.

Interview with Andrew Clifford, AIIC Conference Interpreter and Chair of the School of Translation at Glendon College, Toronto, Canada.

When ageing is the interior journey of a profound sensibility through life, it yields not answers — for there can be none to the existential enigma — but a distilled clarity about questions, the timeless questions. An aching clarity that helps to resolve those very questions in an unforgiving vision of felt truths. Perhaps that is what gives Rabindranath Tagore’s Shesh Lekha its ineffable spell for readers and inspired poet Pritish Nandy to risk its translation — or transcreation, as P. Lal would have said — into English as long back as 1973, when he was just in his incautious 20s.

Tagore’s 150th birth anniversary has given a new relevance to the English version of these 15 posthumously-published poems which the well-known artist, Paresh Maity, has lent visual body to. This jugalbandi, to be seen at CIMA till ......