Here’s your round-up of news, articles, and blog posts about language and translation for September and October 2022.
- A translator’s responsibility is ‘as grave and precarious as that of a surgeon who is trained to transplant organs’, says Jhumpa Lahiri, quoted in a Spectator article written by Frank Wynne
Fresco from Pompeii of Echo and Narcissus, with whom Jhumpa Lahiri, as a translator, feels a close affinity
- “Despite their importance, translators rarely receive recognition for their work, likely due to most readers and filmgoers underestimating the challenges of translation”
- Talking about consequences, a damning New York Times report about Hasidic schools has been translated from English into Yiddish and is currently doing the rounds on WhatsApp. However the translator’s identity is a closely guarded secret as they could be at risk
Who translated The New York Times’ widely-read yeshiva report into Yiddish? It may undermine Hasidic leaders.
- In this opinion piece for the New York Times, linguist Michel DeGraff talks about how he was taught to despise his native Haitian Creole
- Another New York Times article looks at whether film titles should be left untranslated, be translated, or changed altogether
- How interpreting errors in police interviews can send innocent people to jail
- Too much trust in machine translation could have deadly consequences
Death by Machine Translation?
- On translating the musical Hamilton into German
- 200 years ago, French scholar Jean-François Champollion announced that he’d decrypted the Rosetta Stone (interesting fact: did you know that Champollion never saw the stone in person?)
- When Elizabeth II died, there was some debate about whether she was a feminist. This made language academic Debbie Cameron wonder if we’re in the process of evacuating the word ‘feminism’ of both its political meaning and its history
- According to a new guide, words and phrases commonly used in conservation, such as ‘wilderness’, ‘voluntary relocation’ & ‘protected area’, are perpetuating “racist and colonial” myths
- A novel has been translated from Uyghur into English for the first time
In order to avoid raising suspicion the novel’s translators met and worked in a Uyghur tea shop
- How Jane Austen’s early Chinese translators were stumped by the oddities of 19th-century British cuisine
On a final note, for International Translation Day I was pleased to help shine a spotlight on my profession by being featured in a local newspaper.
Further reading:
- October 9th was Hangeul Day: you might want to take a look at my blog post with a few facts about the Korean language
- Around the web – July & August 2022
- Around the web – May & June 2022
A Smart Translator's Reunion 