Around the web – July & August 2022

Been away over the summer? Here’s your round-up of news, articles, and blog posts about language and translation for July and August.

• “Even experienced full-time literary translators can hardly make a living from literary translation” is one of the (depressing) results to emerge from a European Council of Literary Translators‘ Associations’ survey on the working conditions of literary translators in Europe
• A high price to pay: the recent attack on Salman Rushdie served as a reminder of how some of the translators who worked on ‘The Satanic Verses’ have been physically targeted – and even murdered – in the past
• A former rapper is now debunking racist myths about Creole languages, including the myth that Creoles are just simplified languages
• What is linguistic discrimination? When it comes to language, who decides what’s correct?

What is “good” or “right” when it comes to language?

• The EU border agency Frontex has been accused of exploiting staff by using a contractor who it is claimed offers interpreters an effective wage of less than €2.50 an hour
• How do our brains cope with speaking more than one language?

Mixing up the languages we speak can reveal surprising things about how our brains work.

• In this video for Wired, linguists Nicole Holliday and Ben Zimmer explain why some slang has gone out of style while other terms have persevered
• Staying on the subject of new language: “Coining words is like sex in that it’s necessary to our species” says a writer and editor in this article

Who made that word and why?
No matter how many words in a language, it seems that we always need just one more to explain ourselves.

• How do you tell which language rules are valuable and which are piffling?
• Meta launched a virtual reality game in France & Spain … but failed to translate it properly into Spanish or French

Screenshot from ‘Horizon Worlds’, Meta’s new virtual reality game

• Will naming heatwaves (i.e. the same system used for cyclones) change people’s perception and help save lives?
• Here’s an interesting chat with the team responsible for the sensational, nearly no-holds-barred “Stranger Things 4” descriptive captions

Wet writhing and eldritch gurgling

• On a fun final note, this “literature clock” instantly finds literary quotations based on the time of day (or night) you access the website

Further reading

• Around the web – May & June 2022
• Around the web – April 2022
• 20 things I learnt about 20 languages…