#Translation Studies

[salvadorbonaparte]

Help save the Yiddish Translation Fellowship Program

I wanted to ask my followers and fellow language enthusiasts to donate to the Yiddish Book Center so that they can continue to train translators and make Yiddish literature accessible (or at least share this post if possible) 🐐

[cerisep0urrie]

“When the violin repeats what the piano has just played, it cannot make the same sounds and it can only approximate the same chords. It can, however, make recognizably the same "music," the same air. But it can do so only when it is as faithful to the self-logic of the violin as it is to the self-logic of the piano.

Language too is an instrument, and each language has its own logic. I believe that the process of rendering from language to language is better conceived as a "transposition" than as a "Translation," for "translation" implies a series of word-for-word equivalents that do not exist across language boundaries any more than piano sounds exist in the violin.”

john ciardi’s introduction to his translation of dante’s inferno <3

[thoughts-stuck-somewhere]

I do love translation and I do love studying it and I do love how every culture has its own specific characteristics you will not find in another one, I do love the diversity, I swear, but it is damn inconvenient when you are supposed to translate it-

[chrysalistudy]

Had a phone interview and a translation test this week for an internship. I should hear back from them early next week. Keeping my fingers crossed!

[translatoronthebrink]

Emotional Intelligence in Translation

Hey everyone!

I am a student finishing my second year of Master's Degree, and I'm currently writing a thesis on the role of Emotional Intelligence in translation. It's a subject that has been brought up more and more in the field lately and I wanted to explore how beneficial it could be to add courses centered around the improvement of Emotional Intelligence in translation studies (especially since, with the rise of AI, emotional intelligence is one of the main aspects that adds value to our work).

I have created a survey for this thesis and am currently looking for translators who are still in the midst of their translation studies, or who have been in the translation market for less than 2 years. The survey takes five minutes, and I would be immensely grateful if some people here had time to take it!

Here is the link: https://forms.gle/H8tvBMD12MiMFeueA

Many, many, countless thanks to anyone who will take time to fill it out, and feel free to share it with anyone who fits the profile!

[polyglot-thought]

Language Learning Recommendation: Wikipedia

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This is something I only realized I could use more recently and I haven't seen someone mention it so I thought I should; Wikipedia can be a great resource to learn specific vocabulary and can be really helpful if you are pursuing a translation specialty like medicine or politics as Wikipedia has endless amounts of articles about those topics. (Sometimes Wikitionary will also have definitions for things you are looking for as well)

We all know that Wikipedia is full of information in English but has thousands of articles in other languages as well. On English articles all you have to do to change the language is select the language button at the top right of the screen and select another language. However, not every wikipedia article is translated from English, and some articles exist without an English translation. Also, even though there are many translated articles, many will not be an exact 1:1 translation and can be missing a lot of information but it is a very good tool when wanting to learn the meaning of words that might not be in an online dictionary.

For example: Here is the article "First Secretary of State" in English:

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In the top right corner you can see a tab that says "15 languages", this clearly means that there are 15 different languages to choose from that the article is translated into. (On another article the number will change depending on how many languages it has been translated into, of course)

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Now, if you click this button and select Chinese, the page will look like the picture below. This clear as day has shown me now that the correct word for "First Secretary of State" in Mandarin would be "首席大臣" and it also states the English version of the word in the translated article although some articles may be missing this function. ALSO, if you find an article in Chinese or another language first, the language tab is on the bottom left corner instead of the top right.

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To find how to pronounce the Mandarin words you find (that aren't already in online dictionaries) in Mandarin you can use websites like MDBG or Chinese Converter that will show you individual pronunciations for characters. Even Google Translate is quite reliable for pinyin but in Chinese Converter and Google Translate sometimes they do not pick up characters with multiple pronunciations correctly or ignore tone change rules.

For Japanese you can use websites like Nihongo Dera's Kana Converter or Jisho to figure out pronunciations.

I could make a whole post in itself for how to figure out pronunciations for words in languages you don't natively speak so I'll stop here.

I hope this post helps someone :)

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$5 translation commissions here

[nostalgicyorkshiregirl]

the whiplash between my modules i swear.. it's like

translation theory: the idea of 'translator, traitor' is a wrong and unhelpful cliché

history of translation: many translators working in cold war codebreaking were actually russian spies

translation theory: in sociology, translation is a boundary phenomenon creating links between cultures and allowing them to 'look outside of themselves'

history of translation: here's how franco used bowdlerised and domesticated translations as one of his major tools to culturally isolate spain

translation theory: christiane nord claims that loyalty to the text or commissioner is one of the main parts of translation practice

history of translation: so anyway if it wasn't for portuguese interpreters lying to merchants the transatlantic slave trade may never have happened

[movietonight]

A love letter to the internet from 'Love letters or hate mail? Translators’ technology acceptance in the light of their emotional narratives' by Koskinen and Ruokonen (2017)

[maggiecheungs]

i was reading the 6th issue of chogwa (an e-zine featuring one Korean poem & multiple English translations by different translators) and i am in love with all the different renderings of the final line of Park Seo-won’s poem “Somang/소망”

[polysprachig]

08.11.2023 | Spontaneous translation and incremental writing

Currently translating Shelley's The Triumph of Life

Sometimes I forget that spontaneous, rough draft translation is a thing and build up translation to be this huge, must-always-be-polished-to-publication-standards monolith of a task despite the fact that I firmly believe that the poetic and the translator's sense are, at best, a ripening vintage. Poetry especially warrants dalliance with the poet's influences and other works on the translator's part, those silt deposits and floral undernotes which bloom best in the cultivated palette that is the translator's discernment.

All this to say: literary translators, do not be afraid to sample the works you are translating, only to circle back and sample them again.

[salvadorbonaparte]

Posting only a snippet to protect the person's identity and because I don't want to attack them personally but comment on the many similar opinions I have seen:

[ID: a screenshot of a tumblr post reading "Don't get me wrong. But translating a poem loses it's meaning and soul."]

No one is as aware of translation loss as translators themselves. No one is as aware of translation gains as translators themselves either.

On tumblr, there are many posts about how reading something in translation "can't make you grasp the original" or how subtitles or dubs are "inaccurate". This is incredibly unkind to translators who work very hard and usually get paid very little to make books or audiovisual media accessible to you at all (not even to mention all the other areas of translation you're not even aware of).

Of course, some translators make mistakes. But writers make typos too and some make it into published books. Of course, there are cases of manipulation or censorship, I wrote my thesis on this, but more often than not these cases were caused by outside forces not the translators themselves. There are bad translations like there are bad novels or films.

I want more people to think of translation as a creative process that has nearly infinite strategies and choices. Translations differ because they are made by humans. They differ because there are as many ways to translate something as there are to write something. A translation will always necessarily differ from its source because, and it sounds really silly saying this out loud, it's in a different language. And at the same time, the translator is in a constant dialogue with the author and audience, trying to bridge a gap between them.

Translation is not meaningless and not soulless. It adds to the original the soul of the translator.

[cerisep0urrie]

my new favorite pastime is to translate songs just for fun even though they’re probably incredibly wrong i love it

[thoughts-stuck-somewhere]

How do y'all do uni work when you hate your professor? Because I'm struggling here, like I'm about to throw hands instead of handing in my assignment-

[ilovetextingandscones]

i was trying to find a the spanish dub of goncharov (1973), as one does, and i can't believe that they censored the whole apple scene at the market. they just... dubbed something different over it

[seherstudies]

I am not sure how relevant this is for many but if you are curious about Japanese-German-Japanese translation, the German Institute for Japanese Studies offers a free pdf for the book "Eine gewisse Farbe der Fremdheit - Aspekte des Übersetzens Japanisch-Deutsch-Japanisch (A Certain Shade of Otherness - Aspects of Japanese-German-Japanese Translation)".

[polyglot-thought]

How to use Reverso Context for Language Learning and Translation

(Not including their AI translation feature)

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Reverso is a website that provides dictionaries, example sentences, and machine translations for a multitude of languages.

The website has an AI translator, which in my opinion isn’t that great with Mandarin (the language I use the website for the most) so I never use it, but I don’t usually use machine/automatic translations anyways.

I use Reverso’s Context feature very often and it helps immensely with translating and learning Mandarin, as well as other languages. However, keep in mind not every language has an equal amount of quality material. It’s not ideal for beginners either, because there’s no settings to make simpler sentences show up more.

As of October 13th, 2023, Reverso supports 26 languages!

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How To

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For this example, I’m going to search the Mandarin word “平常”

* Note: A majority of the database seems to use Simplified characters, so use Simplified most of the time or it may not recognize the word.

Now you can guess from context if you didn’t already have this word in your dictionary of choice: 平常 must mean ‘usually; normally; typical; etc.’

This feature works very well with common word combinations that don’t have a direct translation in a dictionary.

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Downsides

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One downside I notice a lot is that the highlighting will be incorrect or sometimes completely absent. Other times the English translation doesn’t match the example sentence at all. So, if you are not an intermediate learner be extra careful using the context function for translations.

For example, I searched the word “洒泪” (to be shedding tears) and the first result I got highlighted the translation as “during”!

But if you are signed in to the website, you can submit corrections easily.

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Please correct me if I made a mistake

Created October 2023