Category: Writing

Fiction Writing, Films, Literary Translation, Writing

New Words #16: Literary AND Commercial?!

lnlanguage

A couple of years ago, at an online event about breaking into literary translation, the Q&A went off the rails for a reason I found wildly amusing. An attendee asked about “finding the right balance between literary and commercial translation.” The panelists then spoke about “finding the right balance between literary and commercial translation.” But the question and the answer did not match up.

Here’s what happened. . . . Read the rest of this post (for free! nothing is paywalled!) over on Substack.

Literary Translation, Recommendations, Translation, TV series, Writing

New Words #14: Good Advice

lnlanguage

If you’re engaged in some kind of creative pursuit, it’s almost certain that you’re going to get frustrated at some point and conclude that you’ve been approaching it “the wrong way.” The good news is that there’s plenty of advice out there. The bad news is that there’s so much advice out there—just, like, way, way too much—and it’s contradictory and confusing, and a lot of that advice isn’t going to apply to you, even if it’s what somebody else swears by.

I started thinking about this topic after witnessing an online tiff about whether or not rough drafts produced in a generative writing workshop must always have a title. (Yes, the internet is a treasure trove of low-stakes controversy.)

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

Books, Recommendations, Translation, TV series, Writing

New Words #8: Why the Computers Aren’t Coming for My Job

lnlanguage

This is not a newsletter about ChatGPT (if you want to read one of those, I’d recommend this one), but our topic this time around was prompted by reports of the chatbot just plain making up “facts.” That has disturbing implications—if there’s one thing we’ve already got plenty of, it’s online misinformation—but it didn’t surprise me. After all, for nearly two decades, I’ve been bombarded with confident-sounding nonsense spewed by the translation apps that supposedly threatened to render my work obsolete.

Credit where credit’s due: Google Translate and similar tools have improved somewhat since the ubiquitous “paper jam” / “mermelada de papel” screenshot was taken. But being programmed to recognize commonly used two-word phrases is not the same thing as understanding context, much less recognizing nuances or errors in a source text.

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.

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Articles, Fiction Writing, Literary Translation, Recommendations, Translation, Writing

New Words #5: A Pep Talk for Everyone Except the Late Muriel Spark

lnlanguage

I invite you to get the new year off to a hilarious start by watching Muriel Spark describing her creative process in this 35-second interview clip, which makes me howl with laughter and/or frustration every time I watch it.

I can’t be the only one who finds that video maddening. Are we really supposed to believe Muriel Spark would just sit down, write a book, and then be done writing the book?

a GIF of Frollo from Disney’s animated The Hunchback of Notre Dame shouting, “Witchcraft!”

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