Reading List for the rest of 2010

The 2010 Best Translated Books:

Ghosts, by César Aira (Argentina)
Translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews

The Twin, by Gerbrand Bakker (Netherlands)
Translated from the Dutch by David Colmer

Anonymous Celebrity, by Ignácio de Loyola Brandão (Brazil)
Translated from the Portuguese by Nelson Vieira

Wonder, by Hugo Claus (Belgium)
Translated from the Dutch by Michael Henry Heim

The Weather Fifteen Years Ago, by Wolf Haas (Austria)
Translated from the German by Stephanie Gilardi and Thomas S. Hansen

The Confessions of Noa Weber, by Gail Hareven (Israel)
Translated from the Hebrew by Dalya Bilu

The Discoverer, by Jan Kjærstad (Norway)
Translated from the Norwegian by Barbara Haveland

Memories of the Future, by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky (Russia)
Translated from the Russian by Joanne Turnbull

Rex, by José Manuel Prieto (Cuba)
Translated from the Spanish by Esther Allen

The Tanners, by Robert Walser (Switzerland)
Translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky

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For all your English to Arabic and vice versa translations that will help you expand your business into the Middle East visit Arabic Language Experts at http://www.arabic.com.au/

Bravo, Grossman!

The typical translator's status can be likened to a ghost writer's — an appendage obscure and underpaid. Like ghost writers, they often receive flat fees and no royalties. Reviewers often overlook them or faintly praise them — and this drives Grossman crazy — for "ably" translating the original text.

"`Ably translated,' compared to what?" asks Grossman, whose "Why Translation Matters," a brief, forceful defense of her profession, is being released by Yale University Press. "The reviewer clearly doesn't read Spanish. How would they know if it is ably translated? They quote long passages to indicate the style of the writer and never credit the translator."

BRAVO, BRAVO!

Grossman would know: she has translated such works as Miguel de Cervantes' 'Don Quixote' and Gabriel Garcia Marquez' 'Love in the Time of Cholera'.

In "Why Translation Matters," Grossman writes of taking on the opening phrase of the first chapter of "Don Quixote," among the most famous words in Spanish literature: "En un lugar de la Mancha, de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme," which in an earlier English-language edition was translated into, "In a village of La Mancha, the name of which I have no desire to call to mind."

Grossman worked on the phrase by reciting the Spanish to herself, "mantralike." She reached for the right mood and rhythm, to recapture how it struck those who read "Quixote" centuries ago. She pondered the word "lugar," which can mean either village or place. The words came to her, like lyrics to a song: "Somewhere in La Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember."

Grossman, who turns 74 in March, is curly haired and plainspoken, her voice still flavored by her childhood in a Yiddish-speaking neighborhood in Philadelphia. She had an early interest in languages — although she hardly remembers a word of Yiddish — and by high school was thinking about becoming an interpreter, "which suggested travel, exotic places, important events, world-shaking conferences at the United Nations," she writes in "Why Translation Matters."

Why Translation Matters argues for the cultural importance of translation and for a more encompassing and nuanced appreciation of the translator’s role. As the acclaimed translator Edith Grossman writes in her introduction, “My intention is to stimulate a new consideration of an area of literature that is too often ignored, misunderstood, or misrepresented.”

For Grossman, translation has a transcendent importance: “Translation not only plays its important traditional role as the means that allows us access to literature originally written in one of the countless languages we cannot read, but it also represents a concrete literary presence with the crucial capacity to ease and make more meaningful our relationships to those with whom we may not have had a connection before. Translation always helps us to know, to see from a different angle, to attribute new value to what once may have been unfamiliar. As nations and as individuals, we have a critical need for that kind of understanding and insight. The alternative is unthinkable.”

Throughout the four chapters of this bracing volume, Grossman’s belief in the crucial significance of the translator’s work, as well as her rare ability to explain the intellectual sphere that she inhabits as interpreter of the original text, inspires and provokes the reader to engage with translation in an entirely new way.

The full interview with Grossman can be read online. The book can be purchased directly from the publisher's website.

For all your English to Arabic and vice versa translations that will help you expand your business into the Middle East visit Arabic Language Experts at http://www.arabic.com.au/

Each language is a unique world of thought

Languages are not only tools of communication, they also reflect a view of the world. Languages are vehicles of value systems and cultural expressions and are an essential component of the living heritage of humanity. Yet, many of them are in danger of disappearing.

UNESCO’s Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger tries to raise awareness on language endangerment.

The editor in chief is the Australian linguist Christopher Moseley. According to him, we have to care about language preservation "because each language is a uniquely structured world of thought, with its own associations, metaphors, ways of thinking, vocabulary, sound system and grammar – all working together in a marvellous architectural structure, which is so fragile that it could easily be lost forever."

In Australia, for instance, there are active and successful campaigns to revive the use of languages that were regarded as dead for generations, but turned out to be only ‘sleeping’. In New Zealand, the Maori language has been rescued from near oblivion through the scheme of ‘language nests’ – nurseries where the language is passed on to young children.

This third edition of the Atlas is new in at least three important ways. Firstly and most obviously, it is being published in two different formats: an on-line version as well as a printed version. The on-line version is an important new development, and is based on Google Earth maps, with the location of each endangered language, no matter how small, pinpointed as exactly as possible on the maps, which can be filtered to any desired scale and level of detail.

Secondly, for the first time the Atlas is giving a comprehensive coverage of the whole world. The previous two editions gave only a sample from some continents of the state of threatened languages, but this time we have been careful to cover every language, and, as before, to show the level of endangerment, from “Unsafe” down to “Moribund” with a system of colour coding. The UNESCO Interactive Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger, freely available, aims to provide speaker communities, policy-makers and the general public with state-of-the-art knowledge, continually updated by a growing network of experts and community members. The online edition of the Atlas includes all of the information in the print edition and much more.

And thirdly, the Atlas is available in three languages: English, French and Spanish, with possibly more translations to come later.

Below is the Table of Contents:

Preface, p. 4
Irina Bokova, Director-General of UNESCO

Introduction, p. 8
Christopher Moseley

Cartographic representation of the world’s endangered languages, p. 14
Christopher Moseley

Sub-Saharan Africa, p. 20
Matthias Brenzinger and Herman Batibo

North Africa and the Middle East, p. 26
Salem Mezhoud and Yamina El Kirat El Allame

Europe and the Caucasus, p. 32
Tapani Salminen

Western and Central Asia, p. 43
Hakim Elnazarov

North-east Asia, p. 48
Juha Janhunen

India and the Himalayan chain, p. 59
Stuart Blackburn and Jean Robert Opgenort

South-East Asia, southern China and Taiwan (China), p. 64
David Bradley

Greater Pacific area, p. 74
Darrell T. Tryon

Australia, p. 79
Michael Walsh

South America, p. 86
Willem Adelaar

South America: Andean region, p. 95
Marleen Haboud

Mexico and Central America, p. 103
Yolanda Lastra

United States of America, p. 108
Chris Rogers, Naomi Palosaari and Lyle Campbell

Canada and Greenland, p. 113
Mary Jane Norris

Contributors, p. 122

Bibliography, p. 125

Index, p. 137


For all your English to Arabic and vice versa translations that will help you expand your business into the Middle East visit Arabic Language Experts at www.arabic.com.au.

Marsot's "Langue étrangère" untranslatable into French

I wrote about Vanina Marsot in April last year.


Now Marsot speaks of her experiences as a bilingual writer writing about the differences between her two languages..



"As I was writing it, I noticed there weren’t any novels that addressed my particular pet idea. There are lots of books about people moving to France, but they tend to be written by outsiders looking in: people entranced or repelled, caught up in the humor or frustration, privilege or disadvantage of being a foreigner in France. The French, they are so: puzzling, frustrating, intriguing, annoying, rude, smelly, precise, chic, and/or (insert your adjective here). But a bilingual woman is both an insider and an outsider.

Funny, then, that it turns out my novel seems to be untranslatable, at least into the other language it is about, French.

There’s a lot of French in my book. I think and hope it’s written so that even if you never studied the language, you can still understand what’s going on in the French passages, which are commented upon in English by my narrator. But here’s the crux of the matter: the French phrases and expressions in the book are dissected in English; that is, understood and parsed through English. So, though the novel is in English (the protagonist), there’s a necessary tension with French, the antagonist. If you translate everything into French, the tension is gone. You’d have to convey that the French-language voice is that of a bilingual American, who is commenting on the French language; so, you’d read a French voice puzzling over odd French phrases — in French! Perhaps a really good literary translator could do this, but I’m not sure how."






Here is an interview with the writer...



For all your English to Arabic and vice versa translations that will help you expand your business into the Middle East visit Arabic Language Experts at http://www.arabic.com.au/.

Doctors in Translation

Ofri, D. (2010) Medicine in Translation: Journeys with my patients. Beacon Press.

For two decades, Dr. Danielle Ofri has cared for patients at Bellevue, the oldest public hospital in the country and a crossroads for the world's cultures. In Medicine in Translation, she introduces us, in vivid, moving portraits, to the patients she has known. They have braved language barriers, religious and racial divides, and the emotional and practical difficulties of exile in order to access quality health care. Sharing their journeys with them over the years, Danielle has witnessed some of their best and worst moments, and come to admire their resilience and courageous spirit.

Danielle introduces us to her patients: Samuel Nwanko, who was brutally attacked by a Nigerian cult in his homeland and is attempting to create a new life in America; Jade Collier, an Aussie who refuses to let a small thing like a wheelchair keep her from being a homegrown ambassador to New York City; Julia Barquero, a Guatemalan woman who migrated to the States to save her disabled son but cannot obtain the lifesaving heart transplant she needs because she is undocumented. We meet a young Muslim woman threatened at knifepoint for wearing her veil, and the spitfire Señora Estrella, one of Danielle's many Spanish-speaking patients, whose torrent of words helps seal Danielle's resolve to improve her own Spanish, an essential skill in today's urban hospitals. And so she, her husband, and their two young children and seventy-five-pound dog relocate to Costa Rica, where they discover potholes the size of their New York City apartment, a casual absence of street signs or even street names, tangy green-skinned limon dulce dangling in the playground, and sudden rains surging over the craggy edges of roadside ditches. Ultimately, Danielle experiences being a patient in a foreign country when she gives birth to their third child, a "Costarricense" girl.

With controversy over immigrants in our society escalating, and debate surrounding health-care reform becoming increasingly urgent, Ofri's riveting stories about her patients could not be more timely. Living and dying in the foreign country we call home, they have much to teach us about the American way, in sickness and in health.

To read more about Dr. Danielle Orfi, see her blog. You can also read a review of the book in New York Times.

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Another beautiful piece by a doctor in a multicultural setting, Dr. Nell Burger Kirst from the University of Michigan, was posted on the New York Times today. I quote a part that particularly touched me:

"Words are paramount in the business of medicine. Diagnoses are illuminated by the patients’ own accounts of their illnesses. Treatment options are discussed using conditional verbs, plans described in the future tense. And in the end everything is documented. We have become so dependent on our words — so reliant on the phrases and spiels we know by rote — that it is almost impossible to imagine what we would do without them.

But there is communication without words, too — an honest-to-goodness human presence that transcends language. Sometimes it is just as essential to healing as our precise and formulaic words.

In medical school I worked with a young infectious-disease physician from India. She was consulting on the case of a middle-aged Indian man who had cancer and a hospital-acquired infection. His infection had improved, but his cancer had become quite aggressive, and I accompanied her to his room to discuss what had become a very poor prognosis.

To learn how to carry on this kind of end-of-life discussion, medical students practice on actors trained to simulate dying patients. It’s a valuable exercise, but a difficult one. I always found myself hung up on the details of what I was supposed to say — important details, like the patient’s life expectancy, remaining treatment options and the logistics of palliative care and hospice services.

When it came to real patients, I found myself similarly fixated on the particulars, doing my best to learn the drill: What lab or exam findings let the physician know it was time for this discussion? Would insurance pay for hospice care? Could she wait for her daughter to fly in from Phoenix before making the decision?

The Indian patient lay quietly in his hospital bed, his wife beside him, elegant in an embroidered dress and a sheer blue headscarf. The doctor began speaking to them in English as the husband and wife took turns translating unfamiliar words into Hindi. I listened closely as always, concentrating on the facts of the case.

I suspect the English was on my account, for when it became clear that the couple was having too much difficulty understanding, the doctor gave up and began speaking in fluent Hindi. I kept listening, but now the music of the language was all I could follow.

English words were peppered in only occasionally — a sentence punctuated by the word “suffering,” then a paragraph weaving “comfortable” and “hospice” into a string of Hindi. I was behind a veil, seeing the dialogue only in silhouettes.

Yet somehow, being outside the language finally allowed me into the heart of it. The conversation was beautiful, hypnotic, meditative. With words out of the way, I could focus on the elements I had always been too distracted to notice — the doctor’s slow and lilting tone, her attentiveness to the patient’s body language, the white-knuckled hands of the husband and wife locked together, a lifetime of love, fear, resignation and hope flickering back and forth in the glances they exchanged.

After several minutes, the patient looked my way and asked, “Should we speak in English, so she can understand?” I was humbled by his generosity, but there was no need; I understood better than I ever had before."

For all your English to Arabic and vice versa translations that will help you expand your business into the Middle East visit Arabic Language Experts at http://www.arabic.com.au/.

On Translating Arabic Literature

Kilito, A. (2008) Thou Shalt Not Speak My Language. Syracuse University Press

It has been said that the difference between a language and a dialect is that a language is a dialect with an army. Both the act of translation and bilingualism are steeped in a tension between surrender and conquest, yielding conscious and unconscious effects on language. First published in Arabic in 2002, Abdelfattah Kilito's Thou Shalt Not Speak My Language explores the tension between dynamics of literary influence and canon formation within the Arabic literary tradition. As one of the Arab world's most original and provocative literary critics, Kilito challenges the reader to reexamine contemporary notions of translation, bilingualism, postcoloniality, and the discipline of comparative literature. Waïl S. Hassan's superb translation makes Thou Shalt Not Speak My Language available to an English-speaking audience for the first time, capturing the charm and elegance of the original in a chaste and seemingly effortless style.

At the center of Kilito's work is his insistence on the ethics of translation. He explores the effects of translation on the genres of poetry, narrative prose, and philosophy. Kilito highlights the problem of cultural translation as an interpretive process and as an essential element of comparative literary studies. In close readings of al-Jahiz, Ibn Rushd, al-Saffar, and al-Shidyaq, among others, he traces the shifts in attitude toward language and translation from the centuries of Arab cultural ascendancy to the contemporary period, interrogating along the way how the dynamics of power mediate literary encounters across cultural, linguistic, and political lines.

And an excerpt from a review of the book by Kanishk Tharoor, an associate editor at openDemocracy:

[T]ranslation, particularly in the world of Arabic letters, has never been an innocent or simple process. In his slim, energetic work Thou Shalt Not Speak My Language, the Moroccan scholar Abdelfattah Kilito burrows into the age-old problem of the translation of Arabic literature. The book, itself translated from Arabic, privileges anecdote over argument, drifting playfully through the centuries to explore the relationship between the Arab and the foreign. Kilito indulges in a wide panoramic view, taking into account writings of numerous periods and styles, including ninth century theoretical musings on Persian-Arabic translation, various accounts of Arab travel writing (including Ibn Battuta’s famous journey to China), and passages from 20th century crime novels. This disparate material is shaped by the premise that there is something essentially unsound and compromised about the very act of translation, and that foreigners have yet to treat Arabic literature with appropriate sensitivity and care.

While numerous philosophical, historical and scientific works crossed into Arabic, barely any poetry made the same journey. As early as al Jahiz, the ninth century Afro-Arab writer, Arab scholars had already begun to argue that while it was possible to translate philosophy, the same could not be said of literature. Poetry in its very nature resists the estranging force of translation. “Whenever we find [the translator] speaking two languages, we know that he has mistreated both of them, for each one of the two languages pulls at the other, takes from it, and opposes it.”

Kilito himself seems to share in this distrust, but his own suspicion grows from more modern, political roots in the inversion of power relations with Europe and in the experience of colonialism. Breached and looted, Arabic has been invaded by the west. The problem now is not one of translating into Arabic, but of the implications of translation from Arabic. “The fundamental change for us in the modern age,” Kilito says, “is that the process of reading and writing is always attended with potential translation, the possibility of transfer into other literatures, something that never occurred to the ancients, who conceived of translation only within Arabic literature.” Classical Arab poets never considered the world of letters beyond their own. Their contemporary counterparts have no option but to do so.

The translation of Arab literature into western languages yokes it to western sensibilities and conventions. As Kilito muses, “Who can read an Arab poet or novelist today without establishing a relationship between him and his European peers? We Arabs have invented a special way of reading: we read an Arabic text while thinking about the possibility of transferring it into a European language (...) Woe to the writers for whom we find no European counterparts: we simply turn away from them, leaving them in a dark, abandoned isthmus, a passage without mirrors to reflect their shadow or save them from loss and deathlike abandon.”

Of course, the sins of translation are not simply those of Europeans. Though he laments the fate of these marooned Arab writers, Kilito opens the book with his own account of the pitfalls of cross-cultural translation. Invited to give a lecture in France on al Hamadhani’s maqamat (a 10th century collection of stories written in rhymed prose), Kilito describes his struggle to find a way to make the genre comprehensible to a contemporary European audience. The only European contemporary to al Hamadhani, he finds, is an obscure female German poet named Roswitha, who wrote dialogues in verse. He declines to make this connection – it strikes him as absurd, for who in his audience will have heard of Roswitha – but in his lecture he does equate the maqamat with the picaresque novels popular in Spain in the 16th and 17th centuries.

Whatever uncertainties Kilito himself holds about the possibility of translations, they are not – seeming observations of fact. Instead, they were forged in the furnace of recent Arab-European history and, more importantly perhaps, in the memory of colonisation by the French, who were far more aggressive in their use of language as a pacifying and “civilising” tool than the British. However poignant within their own context, Kilito’s doubts about multilingualism carry a whiff of the parochial about them. [He] argues that “to speak a language is to turn to a side. Language is tied to a location on the map or a given space. To speak this or that language is to be on the right or the left ... and since [the bilingual] looks in two directions, he is two-faced.” This is a real dilemma for Kilito. But it forgets that multilingualism in much of the world is (and was) a comfortable, untortured fact of life. Language is not always wedded to geographical and political loyalties. That Kilito suggests it is says much about a common Arab and European understanding of language: not the caliphate-era vision of language spread boundlessly by the sword and the book, but a vision of a fissured landscape of languages, each guarded by its own political project, its own nation. To accept this view of the world is to succumb to that false cliché produced by the era of the modern European nation-state: a language is but “a dialect with an army.”

We can forgive Kilito, perched as he is in Rabat, on the joined frontiers of Arab and European history. Just as poetry (in al Jahiz’s view) could not be lifted from its original language and dropped into another, Kilito’s misgivings about multilingualism should not be translated out of their own context. His book should be understood as a commentary on the Arab experience of translation, not on translation in general (...) He even questions his own doubts about translation, spying an unsettling chauvinism in his jealous guardianship of Arabic from the European interloper.

For all your English to Arabic and vice versa translations that will help you expand your business into the Middle East visit Arabic Language Experts at http://www.arabic.com.au/.

The Writer As Migrant

The Writer As Migrant by Ha Jin consists of three interconnected essays, this book sets Ha Jin’s own work and life alongside those of other literary exiles, creating a conversation across cultures and between eras. He employs the cases of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Chinese novelist Lin Yutang to illustrate the obligation a writer feels to the land of his birth, while Joseph Conrad and Vladimir Nabokov—who, like Ha Jin, adopted English for their writing—are enlisted to explore a migrant author’s conscious choice of a literary language. A final essay draws on V. S. Naipaul and Milan Kundera to consider the ways in which our era of perpetual change forces a migrant writer to reconceptualize the very idea of home. Throughout, Jin brings other celebrated writers into the conversation as well, including W. G. Sebald, C. P. Cavafy, and Salman Rushdie—refracting and refining the very idea of a literature of migration.

A 53-year-old professor at Boston University, Jin’s also written five novels, three books of poetry, and three collections of short stories, all in English. He’s won two PEN/Faulkner awards and a National Book Award and in 2004 was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

When he started writing, Jin says, "I viewed myself as a Chinese writer who would write in English on behalf of the downtrodden Chinese." But how could he write on behalf of a people if he couldn't also address them? Since his books often deal with the politics of modern China most of them haven't been published there. Of course, had he returned to China he could have written in Chinese. Then again, he might not be writing at all. Jin thinks he'd have become a translator or critic or maybe a professor, but wouldn't have written much. When he was starting out in the U.S., he says, writing was a matter of survival: he was on the tenure track at Emory and had to publish to keep his job. But writing in English offers another sort of survival as well. It's "a way for me to do meaningful work in a language that's not controlled by authorities. In that way it's a matter of artistic survival." So he writes in English, even though he argues in the book's second essay, "The Language of Betrayal," that "no matter how the writer attempts to rationalize and justify adopting a foreign language, it is an act of betrayal that alienates him from his mother tongue.…"

For all your English to Arabic and vice versa translations that will help you expand your business into the Middle East visit Arabic Language Experts at http://www.arabic.com.au/.

In Love With Sagan

Douglas Hofstadter's translation of Françoise Sagan's That Mad Ache is two books in one. Aside from the translation of the novel, it includes a translator's super-afterword -- at 100 pages almost half the length of the translation itself --, that stands on its own. To emphasize that, Hofstadter's piece, Translator, Trader, is printed upside-down and with its own cover.

What caught my attention - again and again - is the psychological relationship to text. La Chamade itself is not a classic, but Hofstadter had his own reasons for translating it:

"I found La Chamade beautiful and touching, and I yearned to re-experience as strongly as possible the emotions it had churned up in me. Merely re-reading the novel would not have allowed me that degree of emotional intensity and intimacy with its characters, but rewriting it in my native language did."

The reason this hit me on the nerve is that from my early twenties I have been doing that with non-fiction texts that made an impact on me. Now nearing my half-century, I came across a younger colleague who, finding me trawling pencil in hand through a book on linguistics, confessed she was doing the same during her university years, when she majored in English Literature.

I am not sure for me it was the "emotional intensity" as much as the need to own the text - what better way than to translate it? When I was in high school, part of English Language classes was a now-dead subject: precis. That too was about mastering the gist of what was said. I see translating as a similar tool. One needs very close readings to translate - you cannot just skim the text.

Further: "Not only how much liberty may a translator take, but how much liberty must a translator take, in order to do a good job." He sees himself as a "phrase-trader" - I don't like the tradesman connotation, and can't understand why he hasn't chosen "phrase-crafter" instead?? He notes that many translators aspire to invisibility, wanting to disappear behind the text; but not him. He feels translation gives him co-ownership, and he is determined to leave his imprint on it. Then he doubts his own approach:

"But do I, a mere translator, have the right to turn up the clarity and vividness knobs ? Well, the fact is that I'm naturally inclined to turn these knobs up high no matter what I'm writing, because clarity and vividness are, in some sense, my religion. I would be betraying myself if I didn't allow myself to be as clear and as vivid as possible when I translate. indeed, were I told that I had to adopt the principle of such rigid "faithfulness" to the author, then I would just give up translating, for it wouldn't allow me to use my own mind. "

Clarity and vividness. I am not a literary translator, but when I was working on non-fiction texts in philosophy or sociology, I often had to do that. These were teaching texts, and it would have benefited no one if the students could not understand what was said. But that implied to a degree that I was doing my own interpretation of how I understood the text.

For all your English to Arabic and vice versa translations that will help you expand your business into the Middle East visit Arabic Language Experts at http://www.arabic.com.au/.

Taha and Adina - Translating the Other

Taha Muhammad Ali, is a Palestinian poet born in Saffuriyya, a Galilee village that Israel bombed during the 1948 war and demolished in its wake. An autodidact (he had just four years of perfunctory village schooling), Taha has spent nearly 60 years now operating a souvenir shop near the Church of the Annunciation in Nazareth. At the same time, he has taught himself much of classical and contemporary Arabic literature, absorbed copious quantities of English and American poetry and prose, and evolved, slowly but with a stubbornly single-minded kind of determination, into a writer of formidable power.

Adina Hoffman describes herself as an American-born Jew who has lived in Jerusalem for much of her adult life with a sort of double identity. She met Taha just after the Al-Aqsa Intifada in 2000, when together with her husband and another Palestinian friend they started translating Taha's works into English. Translating Taha was itself seen by Adina as an act of political protest against the atrocities.

Now she has published a book about the poet, "My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness. The book places Muhammad Ali’s life in the context of the lives of his predecessors and peers, My Happiness offers a sweeping depiction of a charged and fateful epoch. It is a work that Arabic scholar Michael Sells describes as “among the five ‘must read’ books on the Israel-Palestine tragedy.” In an era when talk of the “Clash of Civilizations” dominates, this biography offers something else entirely: a view of the people and culture of the Middle East that is rich, nuanced, and, above all else, deeply human.

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For all your English to Arabic and vice versa translations that will help you expand your business into the Middle East visit Arabic Language Experts at http://www.arabic.com.au/

Ugly English?

That's what the cover of the Quebecan Michel Brûlé's "Essai sociologique" Anglaid: Une langue irrémédiablement vouée à l’impérialisme et à l’ethnocentrisme ("English: A language irremediably devoted to imperialism and ethnocentrism") has as a title. The title is a blend of the French words Anglais "English" and laid "ugly" — perhaps it could be approximately translated as "Uglish". His reasoning?

For a long time, the supremacy of France illuminated the entire world. At all times, the French nevertheless recognized the numerous contributions of different languages and societies to the cultural patrimony of the world.

These days, the Anglo-Saxon culture dominates the world. Whether they are British or American, the Anglo-Saxon elites are interested only in themselves. Music, literature, drama — there is nothing but English-language works created by English speakers. (translation from The Language Log at UPenn)

So what's the angst that made him write it? Mind you, he had to publish it himself, no one wanted to touch it! He then went on and plastered posters all over town. With his bulldog like semblance and the Graffiti-like book cover, he sort of gives me the shivers.

Apparently, it was the first singular pronoun in English that was the offending term:

"I made a very simple revolutionary observation, which is that the English "I" is hypertrophied by being always capitalized. This changes the way one looks at the Other. It's a case unique in linguistics. And people are so confused by the omnipresence of English that they don't even notice this evidence."

How "revolutionary" is that?? But he doesn't stop at writing - he also sings about how bad English is and wonders if Montréal will one day become Mont-real (uhm, Mt. Real?)

So France illuminated and Britain colonised? Interesting rewriting of history. What was France, pardon me, illuminating in Algeria? At least the Brits build lots of infrastructure which they couldn't take home with them.

For all your English to Arabic and vice versa translations that will help you expand your business into the Middle East visit Arabic Language Experts at http://www.arabic.com.au/

The Translator - Daoud Hari

The Translator is a suspenseful, harrowing, and deeply moving memoir of how one person has made a difference in the world–an on-the-ground account of one of the biggest stories of our time. Using his high school knowledge of languages as his weapon—while others around him were taking up arms—Daoud Hari has helped inform the world about Darfur.

Hari, a Zaghawa tribesman, grew up in a village in the Darfur region of Sudan. In 2003, this traditional life was shattered when helicopter gunships appeared over Darfur’s villages, followed by Sudanese-government-backed militia groups raping and murdering citizens and burning villages. He has worked as a language interpreter and guide for NGO's and the press on fact-finding trips into the war-torn and dangerous Darfur area. Hari was captured and detained by the government of Sudan as a spy in August 2006 along with Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Paul Salopek and their Chadian driver Abdulraham Anu (aka "Ali"). During their months-long ordeal all three men were severely beaten and deprived. Upon their successful release - after an international outcry from US diplomats, the US military, Bono and even the Pope - Hari moved to the US where be began work on his memoirs to help bring further world attention to the plight of his people and country.

The Translator tells the remarkable story of a man who came face-to-face with genocide– time and again risking his own life to fight injustice and save his people.

The book was written with Dennis Burke and Megan McKenna, based on hours of interviews with Daoud. Megan originally met Daoud in Darfur, where she had traveled as part of the Women's Commission for Refugee Women and Children, and she was one of the people who helped in the fight to bring Daoud to the United States. The author acknowledges with gratitude these contributions and also the efforts of other individuals – including several with direct experience of the events described – who reviewed portions of the book in manuscript. In Daoud's own words, “The story I am telling here is based on my memories of a time of great difficulty and confusion. I have done my best to capture the details of my experiences, and to set them down here accurately and to the utmost of my recollection, and I am grateful to those who have helped me focus and occasionally correct my account. Of course, no two people can view the same event in the same way, and I know that others will have their own tales to tell. Surely these collective tales will add up to the truth of the tragedy in Darfur.”

You can read an excerpt from the book here. There is also an interview with the writer on You Tube.

The Book To Bind Them All

Review

Gouadec, D. (2007) Translation As a Profession. Amsterdam: John Benjamins

If I had enough money to buy just a single volume of translation related material, I would gladly spend it on Gouadec’s book and never look back, despite the exorbitant price (US$149, plus postage). I would also probably rarely lift my eye off it, as the book is not only the most comprehensive but also extremely readable to both the newcomer and the veteran to our profession.

I remember sighing in exasperation when I first came across the book. Over the past seven years I have seen all kinds of “books” purporting to be fonts of advice on how to start, and which usually leave me severely disappointment. Most are written by well-meaning freelancers and cover such ultra-essential issues as the need to have a fax, and the fact that there are many types of translation software but – wink, wink – we human translators can do it better so will live happily ever after. What tempted me to pick up Gouadec’s book was the fact that it was a Benjamins’ Translation Library publication, and they mostly publish excellent stuff. Besides, the book was bulky (over 300 pages) so one could assume the writer had something substantial to say. One can’t waffle about ergonomics and carpal tunnel syndrome over 300 pages, can one?

Besides, Gouadec is not just any run-of-the-mill freelancer. He created and currently directs the translator-training institute at the University of Rennes. His thesis was on training translators. In between teaching and research, he managed to produce ten books and dozens of articles and presentations, as well as developing websites on terminography, translation quality, and the professional aspects of being a translator. His current research deals with models of quality of translation service provision. I was suitably awed.

I was also impressed by the range of information the book covers. The book covers past, present and future – it starts with an extensive grounding in what translation is and what are the main categories, followed by a very well written exposition of the whole translation process. Not much theoretical pie-in-the-sky here, but the hands on, down to earth practical advice of how to find work, deciding on requirements, preparation, planning process, and organizing the job, translating it, quality controls implementation (corrections, revisions and editing), all the way to follow-up. In short, as beneficial to the soul and nourishing to the mind as one of Anthony Pym’s lectures.

The writer next moves to defining the profession – mostly female, specializing in subject and language pairs, and rapidly adapting to the technological changes, working in such a variety of positions that Gouadec speaks of “many professions” not just the “translating profession”. He even has a category of “outlaws”: those doing it for “black money” without qualifications, without professionalism, and definitely unethically. Agencies modus operandi is described with the proviso that the market demands are changing the contours of the lines dividing the various categories. These market demands are addressed in a separate section.

After having blessed us with a taxonomy, Gouadec next poses the rhetorical question: “Does the reader, having gone so far, still want to be this species, or have they developed cold feet?” If they have persevered (or worse, belong to the species already), they can jump to the next chapter, the one written for the wannabes, the strugglers, the wanderers and – as the For Dummies series so often remind us – “the rest of us”. Except that this is not a book for dummies, and the writer takes the whole process very seriously and practically: should you specialize? In what? Where do you find clients, and how do you hold on to them? What about rates, invoicing and growing your business? I have to admit that this is the first writer in the field who advises, very early on in his book, all translators to go and do accounting, marketing and management courses if they want to succeed. He even has a section on managing during the “famine” periods, not to mention a whole chapter on buying products, dealing with partners – other translators, agencies, direct clients, your lawyer, accountant and IT specialist.. in short, everyone except, maybe, the tea lady.

I hold it against the book that professional ethics comes as Chapter 10, not 2 or 3 – but I have always preached that if one has to wait for a professional association to teach one ethical behaviour, then it is too late already anyway. It is still good to see that, as quite a few of the other “How to become a God-knows-what” publications that gather dust on my shelves address neither ethics nor cooperation, and both are in my opinion quintessential to success. Next to ethics, Gouadec tackles standards (the ISO variety), qualification, recognition and – oh, my – regulating access to the profession, not because it would solve the problem of shoddy work, but because the “regulated” translators would be obliged to pay taxes. He does say that the title “professional” given to those who have a university degree or enough experience to merit it still depends on translators feeling that such title is important enough to merit them not doing shoddy work. A bit circular, that, and highly subjective.

Chapters 13 to 16 deal extensively with all these new, wonderful – and scary – aspects of the information revolution and globalization that affect us as translators: the internet, the incessant software upgrades, globalization of the market, international competition, inflation and recession, and all the rest. It makes one seriously nostalgic for the quill and parchment era, devoid of copyrights and limited to Latin. And this of course leads, invariably, to the coming generation of translators and how, precisely, they should be trained.

And for those into futurology, there is an Epilogue about what the future (might) hold for us. And it is not good news, not for the freelancers. But I am not into spoiling the movie, so there – you go and read. Not all is lost (yet!).

The book should be compulsory reading for any translation course worth its value (not much in it for interpreters, unfortunately) . And the rest of us, of course. Gouadec has converted me and I will be using what I have learned from him not just to improve my own performance, but in my workshops as well.