Tag: translation

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.

Articles, Books, Language Acquisition, Literary Translation, Spanish, Translation

New Words #15: It’s a Dude Group!

lnlanguage

Years ago, while teaching Spanish to beginners, I overheard the following exchange between two seventh-grade boys.

A. I think I’m supposed to write “Somos altos,” but it doesn’t seem right. I have four sisters. Isn’t it better to write “Somos altas,” since there are more girls than boys in the family?

B. Dude, if there’s even one dude in the group, that’s it, it’s a dude group.

I have had the phrase dude group stuck in my head ever since. As a translator, I am regularly faced with a quandary: How can I communicate in English that a French or Spanish text is referring to a dude group?

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

New Words #13: How Many Continents Are There?

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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?

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

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

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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.

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Books, Fiction Writing, Links, Literary Translation, Podcasts, Recommendations, Translation, Writing

New Words #1: Rejection, Shmejection

lnlanguage

Welcome to New Words, a newsletter about writing, translation, and language acquisition.

I am a freelance writer and translator, an adult language learner, and a former high school world language teacher, which means that these topics are inescapably intertwined in my career and creative pursuits. This newsletter is intended to offer a peek behind the scenes as I work, and I hope it will appeal to folks who are interested in blurring the lines between these fields: writers and language teachers curious about translation, for instance, or translators wondering whether to pursue an interest in teaching or writing.

To get us started, I’ll share a bit today about how my experience as a translator prompted me to reengage with fiction writing.

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