Budapeste by Chico Buarque. Famous composer Chico Buarque has recently released an excellent novel whose backbone is the fascination with a foreign language. This protagonist will go any lengths to learn it.

From an excerpt:

Para ajustar o ouvido ao novo idioma, era precise renegar todos os outros. Segui a recomendação de Kriska, exceto por meia dúzia de palavras em inglês, sem as quais não teria roupa lavada nem um prato de sopa no quarto do hotel. Deliberei por via das dúvidas jamais atender ao telefone, que aliás nunca tocou, e ainda renunciei a rádio e televisão, cuja programação local, segundo Kriska, andava infestada de termos estrangeiros. Assim, depois de um mês em Budapeste, já me soava quase familiar a cadência das palavras húngaras, com a tônica sempre na primeira sílaba, mais ou menos como um francês de trás para diante. Um mês em Budapeste, na verdade, significava um mês com Kriska, porque sem ela eu evitava me aventurar na cidade; receava perder, no vozerio da cidade, o fio de um idioma que vislumbrava apenas pela sua voz.

According to Globo, Buarque never set foot on Budapest while writing the story.

According to the Mermaid, this book is gold to languagephiles. I've been taking peeks at it and can't hardly wait for the Corcovado Cowboy to finish it so I can borrow it from him.

Miniature Essays on Linguistics. A colllection of 120 mini-essays by William Z. Shetter, retired foreign languages and linguistics professor.

PowerPoint Is Evil by Edward Tufte

Purgatory, in all its nuance. "It isn’t necessarily sidestepping the question “How to chose which Dante [translation]?” if your answer (like mine) is: don’t choose. There’s no need to. Translation, especially in this case, is a form of commentary—each new one endeavoring to reveal something more (or something more nuanced) about the poem. The motivation behind these divergent translations is not simply the hubris of a translator convinced he can do it better than the last guy."

Happy International Translator's Day



And for a balanced perspective, let's pay hommage to Kumarajiva as well...

La Chichonera. Two days before her 4th birthday this little monkey was jumping on my bed. The monkey fell down and banged her head. Thank God to rubber bones she didn't break her head, as confirmed by last night's CT scan. Mood healers for my little monkey: Dora the Explorer and McDonald's delivery. Let's just see how well those fries perform after 30 minutes in transit...

La Maison du Dictionnaire. Search and browse their catalogue, order online.

A Century in Shoes. What else but a a shoe exhibit with scenes and ads from ten decades in the 20th century. Not to missed Gaza Browen's creations.

The old man who lost his horse. A story told in Chinese papercuts.



Near the Great Wall lived an old man, who had a fine horse. One day the horse ran away to the barbarian territory, and failed to return...

Now to make your jaw drop: 108 characters of a novel, each of them minutiously described ... such is the challenge accepted by the Chinese craftsmen who created this incredible set or papercuts. And for the incurably curious: papercutting from around the world.

Translate This!

A translator's log discovered by Margaret. Posts in English and German. He's having problems receiving money from an agency, we sympathize!

Conference Interpreting: Quality in the Ears of the User.

Abstract: What do the recipients of interpretation mean by “good interpretation”? What are the features they consider most important and what do they find irritating? Following a brief overview of user expectation surveys, the paper contends that the target audience is an essential variable in the interpretation equation. Quality of interpretation services is evaluated by users in terms of what they actually receive in relation to what they expected. Consequently, measurements of service quality that do not include user expectations miss the point.

I think I posted it before, but make sure you browse the wide array of articles available at Meta (1966-2001), where this paper was published.

The Importance of Terminology. The distinction between TERMINOLOGY and LEXICOLOGY, TERMINOGRAPHY and LEXICOGRAPHY, among other things.

A large majority of documents today are designed for specialist communication (including business and commercial texts). They are thus written in specialist language, 30-80% of which (depending on the particular domain and type of text in question) is composed of terminology(2). In other words, terminology (which as we have seen may also include non-linguistic items such as formulae, codes, symbols and graphics) is the main vehicle by which facts, opinions and other "higher" units of knowledge are represented and conveyed. Sound terminology work reduces ambiguity and increases clarity - in other words, the quality of specialist communication depends to a large extent on the quality of the terminology employed, and terminology can thus be a safety factor, a quality factor and a productivity factor in its own right.

The communication of specialist knowledge and information, whether monolingual or multilingual, is thus irretrievably bound up with the creation and dissemination of terminological resources and with terminology management in the widest sense of the word. This process is not restricted to science and engineering, but is also vital to law, public administration, and health care, to quote just three examples. In addition, terminology plays a key role in the production and dissemination of documents, and in workflow. Terminology as an academic discipline offers concepts and methodologies for high-quality, effective knowledge representation and transfer. These methodologies can be used both by language specialists and by domain specialists after appropriate training. In addition, they form the basis for an increasing number of tools for the identification, extraction, ordering, transfer, storage and maintenance of terminological resources and other types of knowledge.

Semantic Primitives. Isabella Massardo has an interesting post on the "61 parole fondamentali del metalinguaggio semantico universale".

In Portuguese they would be:

você, alguém, gente, algo, coisa, corpo, este, igual, outro, um, dois, um pouco, tudo, muito, bom, ruim, grande, pequeno, pensar, saber, querer, sentir, ver, ouvir, dizer, palavra, verdade, fazer, acontecer, mexer, há, ter, viver, morrer, quando/tempo, agora, antes, depois, tempão, tempinho, algum tempo, momento, onde/lugar, aqui, acima, abaixo, longe, perto, do lado, dentro, encostado, não, talvez, pode, porque, se, muitos parecido, parte, gostar.

It's interesting to note the predominance of words related to time and space. Do all languages attach the same importance to these concepts? And are they really equivalenti in tutte lingue?



By the way very=much in Portuguese (same word when translated, not same concept). So my list dropped to 60.

A mermaid with a mandolin

Zizek. The Marx Brother, a profile of Slavoj Zizek by Rebecca Mead.

Rebellious Words. " A tongue twister is defined by its propensity to provoke pronunciation problems for just about anybody who attempts to articulate it. In a sense it is like a virus: it strikes at a collective, provoking the same symptoms in each individual. And as with a virus, a minority seems to be immune!

What I call 'rebellious words' are in my view related to tongue twisters, but have characteristics all their own. I'll start by offering a simple definition of a rebellious word:

A word that blocks the flow of interpreting time and again, establishing a pattern; a word with which one 'has a thing,' as people are apt to say; a word that produces a kind of allergic reaction in the interpreter as soon as she/he hears it.


All other interpreters might find the term perfectly harmless, but when you encounter one of your personal 'rebellious words,' you must intensify your concentration to get through it, dedicating comparatively much more energy to this specific obstacle than to other parts of the discourse that are visibly more technical and difficult. "

DN on the TJ. Danilo Nogueira writes about pricing in the Translation Journal.

The embarrassment about charging for our work or being considered too much of a mercenary--and what is a free lance but a mercenary soldier?--is pure rubbish. There is no way you can "overcharge" an agency: agencies know the market and cannot be fooled.

There is no way you can overcharge a direct client either: they will ask for quotes from several other people, before making their decision. Of course, you can fool your neighbor into believing translators are paid ten dollars a word, provided the neighbor has not seen your car, but that is a different story.

(...)

Professional advance requires a two-pronged approach: you must both invest heavily in the profession and market your services as actively as you can. You may also have to make some difficult choices. For instance, there is no such a thing as a well-paid translator of philosophy books. This may be very frustrating to many of us and, at a certain point of my life, frustrated me too, because of my love for the history of music, which is not exactly a cornucopia of translatorial income. No more. I have come to the conclusion that I want to be a translator, and a well paid one, regardless of the subject to be translated.

This, perhaps, is the first step to climb in the professional ladder...

More Decor. A Brazilian interior design blog and the online version of Portuguese magazine Interiores.

Buhssit? De aorcdo com uma pqsieusa de uma uinrvesriddae ignlsea, não ipomtra em qaul odrem as lrteas de uma plravaa etãso, a úncia csioa iprotmatne é que a piremria e útmlia lrteas etejasm no lgaur crteo. O rseto pdoe ser uma ttaol bçguana que vcoê pdoe anida ler sem pobrlmea. Itso é poqrue nós não lmeos cdaa lrtea isladoa, mas a plravaa cmoo um tdoo.

Uzbek Suzani. I've fallen in love with an embroidery style. The underside of the suzani I got lining my bed on a trial basis reads Mockba 80. That a piece of cloth has traveled such a long way to reach Brazil and find in me a worshipper leaves me astounded.




"although belonging to the production of non-nomadic populations, suzanis
(silk embroideries on a cotton or silk ground) often have symbols linked
to the shamanistic iconography of nomads. long strips were woven by different
women and then sewn together. the young uzbek girls had to have at least ten
suzanis as part of their wedding dowry, and as these were neither hereditary nor
to be given away, they had to be especially embroidered for each wedding."

more suzani designs for your visual delight

Preparing Copy for Translation. This extremely interesting article gives tips for technical writers who are preparing texts that will be later be translated into one or more languages. It also includes rules for formatting, use of articles and the following key points:

Keep sentences short

Omit unnecessary words

Order the parts of the sentence logically

Do not change construction mid sentence

Avoid using more than two nouns together

Be clear when using ‘and’ and ‘or’ ie A+B or C - does this mean
[A + B] or C - or A + [B or C]

Avoid ambiguous constructions
Eg. "There are few engines fitted with spur gears instead of helical gears shown in this section"

Consider this sentence - what is shown in the section - the spur gears or helical gears?

The basis for this article is the Systran Instruction Manual. I found it at this page, which also contains links to other documents related to translation metrics and quality assurance.