Category: Links

French, Language Acquisition, Links, Recommendations, Spanish, Translation

New Words #13: How Many Continents Are There?

lnlanguage

Years ago, when I gave my high school students an assignment (in French) to learn about the origins of the Olympic Movement, they were flabbergasted by the revelation that the Olympic rings represent “les cinq continents habités.” They had always been taught that there are seven continents, of which six are inhabited—but their French-language sources, along with the United Nations, were insisting that there were merely six continents, of which five were inhabited. What on Earth (literally) was going on?

Continue reading this post on Substack. (Don’t worry—nothing is behind a paywall!)

Links, Literary Translation, Translation

New Words #10: Translating Formal Poetry

lnlanguage

I used to say I would never translate poetry—especially not formal poetry. Conveying meaning and overcoming gaps in cultural knowledge is tricky enough, so adding rhyme and meter into the mix just struck me as unreasonable.

That changed about two years ago when I read Íntimas, the 1913 novel by Adela Zamudio, a writer, educator, and activist who is remembered as the foremost figure in Bolivia’s feminist movement. I loved the novel’s morally complex protagonists and the author’s use of acerbic wit to offset the sentimentality of the plot, and since it has never been published in English, I decided to translate a sample to see if I could get a publisher interested.

Continue reading this post on Substack. (Don’t worry—nothing is behind a paywall!)

Dialogue, French, Links, Recommendations, Translation, Writing

New Words #6: Merci beaucoup, y’all

lnlanguage

For nearly thirty years, I’ve been fascinated by a man I never met. He was the uncle of my supervisor at the after-school retail job I had my senior year of high school, and the following is everything I know about him.

1. He was a middle-aged man from Texas.

2. Sometime in the mid-nineties, he took his wife to Paris for their anniversary.

3. Throughout their ten-day stay, each time they left a shop or restaurant, he’d tip his cowboy hat and address the establishment’s (presumably horrified) employees in his very best French-adjacent drawl: “MARE SEE BOW COO, Y’ALL.”

This story pops into my head at random intervals because, well, the mental image delights me. But it has some practical applications as well.

To continue reading this post, head over to my Substack. (Don’t worry—nothing is behind a paywall!)

Books, Irish, Language Acquisition, Links, Recommendations, TV series, Writing

New Words #4: Force of Habit

lnlanguage

Here’s a story about making things a little more complicated than they need to be—on purpose. Later this week, I’ll take the final set of exams in my Irish translation program, and even though I’ll need to submit my answers in a Word doc within a time limit, I’ll write about half of each exam by hand before I type a word. (Don’t worry! I did the same thing the last two semesters, and it all worked out!) The reason is simple: my written Irish is way more accurate when I write by hand.

To read the rest of this post, visit me on Substack. (Don’t worry—nothing is behind a paywall!)

Irish, Language Acquisition, Links, Literary Translation, Translation, TV series

New Words #2: Complicated as 1, 2, 3

lnlanguage

Has there been an uptick lately in clickbait about “untranslatable” terms? Maybe the algorithms are just increasingly determined to lure me in. Either way, I’m not falling for it.

I suspect this focus on untranslatability leads people to believe that the challenges of translation are concentrated in a handful of terms per language, which isn’t the case at all. In fact, the grammatical impacts of simple, everyday concepts in a given language can affect its syntax, rhythms, and sounds in ways present as much of a challenge to translators as they do to language learners.

Continue reading this post over on Substack. (Don’t worry—nothing is behind a paywall!)