Around the web – September and October 2022

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