Published in SAJIM, Sept 2007 Vol. 9(3)
In 2001, which seems like pre-history in Internet time, I wrote a research report about e-books in which I said, inter alia, that
E-books seem to have a chance of success if a number of issues are addressed by all involved sectors: the publishers, the hardware manufacturers, the legal sector and the writers.... To succeed, electronic books must be widely accessible by all segments of the population. Educational institutions should play a large role in improving society’s technological literacy, while ensuring that the content remains strong and valuable. Manufacturers and content owners should put the general benefit of the society above their profit making schemes, and assist in making their products available to the public domain (Berner 2001).
Only a year later, Google launched its 'book search' project and took the world by storm. The whole idea seems totally mad: to digitize millions of books currently gathering dust in the world’s largest academic libraries. The aim? To enable the millions of info-hungry Web-surfers to Google '+Ahab +whale' and find the required lines in Moby Dick. It was a dream that Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page had in 1996, 'that in a future world in which vast collections of books are digitized, people would use a "web crawler" to index the books' content and analyse the connections between them, determining any given book's relevance and usefulness by tracking the number and quality of citations from other books' (Google 2007). The project started in 2002, and in the first two years managed to hook not only the Bodleian with its one million plus manuscripts, but also a number of printing presses of world renown: Blackwell, Cambridge University Press, the University of Chicago Press, Houghton Mifflin, Hyperion, McGraw-Hill, Oxford University Press, Pearson, Penguin, Perseus, Princeton University Press, Springer, Taylor & Francis, Thomson Delmar and Warner Books. Then Harvard, the University of Michigan, the New York Public Library, Oxford and Stanford come on board with over 15 million books ready for digitalization. In 2005, Google started similar partnerships with other countries, namely, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and Switzerland.
Everyone started talking about Google Books, and the issue is still a hot topic on-line. Blogs are being dedicated to it; legal turf wars are fought over it, and it might even cause the start of the Franco-Anglaise Language War, if we are to take the French seriously (the battle has been flickering since last year). In 2006, the president of France's Bibliothque Nationale, Jean Noël Jeanneney, wrote a book in which he shared his fears of the impact of Google Books on European culture, stating that 'by the very nature of the library collections that Google proposes to put online, American and British works will dominate, leaving behind that portion of the world's hundred million books not in English' (Knoblauch 2007) So for Jeanneney, Google Books, far from being the beneficial instrument of spreading knowledge, will damage the world’s cultural heritage, presumably because it is in English and thus will 'extend the dominance of American culture abroad'. So for the French, it is either 'cultural diversity' or no culture whatsoever, not if it is in English! Possibly the greatest tragi-comic aspect of this debacle is the fact that Jeanneney’s book is on Google Books (here) in, of course, English translation.
But of course Jeanneney is totally out of date. In March of this year, the Bavarian State Library announced a partnership with Google to scan more than a million public domain and out-of-print works in German as well as English, French, Italian, Latin, and Spanish. A week later, they were followed by the Cantonal and the University Library of Lausanne, and the University of Mysore announced an agreement to digitize 800000 books and other documents, both those on paper and ancient ones on palm leaves. At the same time, the Boekentoren library of the Ghent University will participate with 19th century books in the French and Dutch language, and just last month the Keio University became Google's first library partner in Japan with the announcement that they would digitize at least 120000 public domain books. Other US universities are coming on board as well: the California System (34 million volumes), Wisconsin-Madison (7,2 million volumes), the University of Texas at Austin (one million) and Cornwell (500000 books). One just wonders where the time and energy to scan all this will come from – not to mention finances. Apparently, some of the books are already poorly scanned, if we are to reason by the feedback mechanism for reporting illegible or missing pages that Google Books provides.
Not just the information nerds, but some publishers and lawyers went up in arms about it, albeit on opposite fronts. Jason Epstein preached, 'embrace the Internet or die' to publishers. The whole notion of 'fair use' got whacked on the proverbial wall and dismantled – no one is sure yet what it will become after this deconstructionist exercise, as the courts are still discussing the matter. Farhad Manjoo, the Cornwell graduate who now writes for Salon, raised a very important question. To quote him, 'if copyright law stands in the way of Google's grand aim, isn't it time we thought about changing the law? … The company … is poised to create a tool that could truly change the way we understand, and learn about, the world around us.… Can we really afford to let content owners stand in the way of Google's revolutionary idea?' (Manjoo 2005)
In October 2005, the Association of American Publishers, which represents large publishing houses, sued Google for copyright infringement and also for costing the book industry a great deal of potential revenue. If the publishers worry that the perceived infringement of copyright by Google Books will adversely affect the sales of their already out-of-print books, then one worries about their sanity. OCLC, a non-profit library research group, set out to count and catalogue the books Google would capture in its project and determined that at the five research libraries with which Google had formed deals, about 80% of the books in the stacks were published after 1923 and were still under copyright, but only a small number of these books are currently in print (Lavoie et.al. 2005).
As for books still in print, Google made it clear in Frankfurt as early as 2004 that 'for each book found, a user would see several pages of the book with the phrase or subject of the search highlighted. The page would also offer links to several online retailers, where the book could be bought. Publishers do not pay to participate in the programme; rather, Google would make money from the service by selling advertising on the search pages, and it would share those revenues with the publishing companies' (Webb 2004).
Maybe the only way publishers think a book would sell would be to maintain as much secrecy about its content as is possible. Disclosure might drop sales, and it will have nothing to do with being able to read it on-line. This whole notion is ridiculous and yet, in 2005, when Google Books became public news, the American Authors Guild sued Google on the premise that 'it's not up to Google or anyone other than the authors, the rightful owners of these copyrights, to decide whether and how their works will be copied' (Mills 2005). Take this legal individualism to its logical end and it will be the author’s right to decide which library carries his books, where they are sold, and who reads them. This is the proverbial 'shot-in-one's-foot'. As one of the un-offended writers said,
'the large majority of current author fear regarding digitized, accessible versions of their work is based on two primary factors: Ignorance and ego. The ignorance is the lack of understanding that for the vast majority of authors, the ability to pop up in an Internet search on a subject would be a good thing: It's free publicity and also acts as a taster for people who (very likely) have no idea who you are and what your writing is like. The ego is the assumption that a whole bunch of people are just gagging to steal one's work at the slimmest opportunity' (Scalzi 2005).
Not to be left behind, in 2006 the French joined in the legal bullfight, when the French publishing group La Martiniere sued Google for 'piracy'. It seems that La Martiniere owns interests in the US.
Fred von Lohmann, an attorney at the Electronic Freedom Foundation, said that the Google Books lawsuits were a one-sided situation, and that the publishers had no argument to prove that it harmed their sales. And while a significant number of library books are protected by copyright, they are also out of print – 70% or more by some estimates. Someone owns these books, but since they are perceived to have no commercial value (because they are no longer sold in stores), publishers do not have any incentive to promote and market them, let alone to go through the expense of scanning them and making them searchable on-line (O’Reilly 2005). So why not let Google, and why not let the knowledge-hungry world have them for free? Or at least get to know about their existence? Apparently, according to the media expert Siva Vaidhyanathan of the New York University, there is no national registry of copyright holders in the United States, as there is a national registry of patents. 'It's impossible for a company like Google, or a historian, or a documentary filmmaker, or anyone to find out who owns what. Even publishers don't know what they own. It's just impossible' (Manjoo 2005). And they are suing Google demanding that it does find the unknown and asks their permission.
The Court cases are still dragging and no one is saying much about what is happening. But it looks like a bit of a paradox is happening: first politicians pontificate about the need to provide life-long education to the masses (both 'education' and 'masses' being undefined concepts) as the 'in-thing' for the 21st century. Then it is rendered impossible by those who 'own' the knowledge as they send their legal bouncers to bash any institution that takes these pontifications seriously, behaving like 18th century luddites.
No one is even considering the benefit Google books would have on the third world. This makes one feel sorry that we are faster at sending in tanks and bombers, than we are at giving the world access to some good books.
References
Berner, S. (2001) A Review of Current Issues Affecting the Future Marketability of Electronic Books, unpublished report, p.16.
Google (2007) History of Google Book Search. [Online]. Available WWW: http://books.google.com/googlebooks/newsviews/history.html.
Knoblauch, M. (2007) Book Review. [Online]. Available WWW: http://www.amazon.com/Google-Myth-Universal-Knowledge-Europe/dp/0226395782.
Lavoie, B. et al. (2005) Anatomy of Aggregate Collections. [Online]. Available: http://www.dlib.org/dlib/september05/lavoie/09lavoie.html.
Manjoo, F. (2005) Throwing Google At the Book. [Online]. Available WWW: http://dir.salon.com/story/tech/feature/2005/11/09/google/index.html?pn=4.
Mills, E. (2005) Authors Guild sues Google over library project. [Online]. Available WWW: http://news.com.com/Authors+Guild+sues+Google+over+library+project/2100-1030_3-5875384.html.
O'Reilly, T. (2005) Search and Rescue. [Online]. Available WWW: http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2005/09/ny_times_op_ed_on_authors_guil.html.
Scalzi, J. (2005) Google Books. [Online]. Available WWW: http://www.scalzi.com/whatever/003738.html.
Webb, C. (2004) Google Books It To the Finish Line. In Washington Post, 08/10/2004. [Online]. Available WWW: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A17498-2004Oct8.html.
Thursday, January 31, 2008
Words, but not translators
http://www.kalima.ae/eng.php
Not surprisingly, our team has been eyeing this from the moment of its inception. Not any longer.
We have slowly come to the conclusion that the project, as many other projects done with petro-dollars and in petro-culture, is overfunded and totally disorganized. The CEO is a sleek, young Egyptian. The money is Al Nahiyan's. One of my German friends asked me "Is this some kind of PR exercise to make us europeans feel that the ME is after all not backward and does have an intellectual side other than finding 1001 means of killing each other?".
If it is a PR stunt, then it is rather useless because making translated works available does not mean that they will be read. A far better PR stunt, and one that would have longterm positive consequences, is to have programs in place which encourage kids in the ME to read. The reading should be encouraged with appropriate incentives. This would at least create a generation of readers and thinkers.
Even if we do not mention the fact that Talal Assad and George Saliba wrote their originals in Arabic, some of the books on the Kalima list have been translated in Lebanon and Cairo many years ago (granted, before copyright law, but why not just purchase the copyright, then?) and almost ALL of them are of zilch interest to the Arab reader. Missing big time are books by women writers of Arab origins who wrote in languages other than Arabic - such as Ahdaf Suweif or Fadia Faqir, not to mention Mernissi, Yvonne Haddad, or Sabbagh. Actually, I can't see a single female writer on the list!! Missing also are vital books on Arabic culture/history etc. by such prominent writers as Ira Lapidus, Keppel, Fisk, Esposito, Tariq Ali, Zia Sardar, or even Tariq Ramadan. Missing also, very clearly, are any books on non-Arab, or non-Muslim, minorities in the ME: the Kurds, the Christians, and of course the Arab Jews.
When we look at the proposed titles, one can only marvel at the number of copies of Umberto Eco's The Sign that will sell in Arabic. It is a history of semiotics, very old by the standards of this fast-advancing world (1971) - that is Eco minus 36 years of knowledge, so why not translate his newer books on semiotics? Why not translate something more accessible to the masses? Who is this aimed at? Not me, who will read the English version. The same applies to such specialized titles as "In Search of Schrodinger's Cat" which is hellishly difficult to read unless you have a postgrad in physics, or SJ Gould's "Punctuated Equilibrium" out of the 20 very readable and delightful books he wrote, but which will not be translated because the guy is poetically Darwinian. Amazingly too, there are no books by Paul Davis - do I need to explain why :-D ? To make things even more obscure, in the same year Kalima will translate two books on Quantum Mechanics, one by Dirac and one by Heisenberg - is that because Quantum Mechanics is going to solve the problems of the Middle East, or because most of the guys that join Al-Qaeda are graduates of exact sciences, and we need to educate them more???
Then there is the first batch of "classics" - my God, I read the Aneid in Arabic in the 70s!! So why not translate, say, the history of Flavius Josephus? Why not Rabelais? Why not Augustine, or John Chrysostom? Because they are Christian Fathers? Well, then there is not need to translate Harold Bloom's "The Western Canon" either. Or is Harold going to be censored? It would be interesting, as I have the book in original English, and guess what - he makes no mention of the debt owned by Europe to the Arab/Jewish centers of learning in Spain.
And what about censorship? As a Syrian colleague of mine wrote, "If our Mufti says that such and such book is Haram, and reading it is Kufr, how many people will actually be motivated to read it? And how many teachers will even dare to ask why is it Haram, how did it insult our religion? How many teachers will inspire their students to read and find out why? None I daresay. Most of us have been conditioned into fear and obedience; we do not even dare to question authority. Like many other people, I see that the emperor has no clothes, yet when I go home I toe the party line, and shrug my shoulders. Why shock the rest of these people when they are secure in their ignorance? I have no similar security to give them in return, once you start questioning, it does not end. You cannot go back to the comfortable cushion of blind conviction."
The fact is, as a 70-year old colleague from Egypt wrote is that there was a flurry of great translations in the 1960s in Cairo and Beirut, and as time passed by they diminished and were swept aside by an incredible amount of radical, unlearned and fundamentally unenlightened writing spawned by what another Egyptian translator called "The Imam who used to be a plumber in Saudi Arabia". Precisely the guys who are giving Arab culture a bad name (and breath). This led in turn to the atrophy of vocabulary in Arabic in humanities and social sciences, as well as more advanced natural sciences such as genetics, biotechnology, etc.
But there is blame on the West as well, who has been studiously refusing to translate the real thinkers of the Arab world, such as Hussain Murwah, Salama Musa, Dr. Louis Awad, and many others. Instead, it translate post-modernist drivel in literature or books that affirm its orientalist vision of the Arab as the "Other From Behind the Camel". Understanding goes both ways, mates.
So I came up with a few titles each that we would like to see translated, dividing them by subject like the Kalima list. Writing (and translating) are highly subversive activities, and I am highly subversive.. both the list of Kalima and mine can be obtained on request. Maybe some far-seeing politician (is there such a thing?)somewhere in the US or UK will be willing to sponsor a venture? Kalima refuses to engage translators and want to work through publishing houses - obviously they will be paid peanuts and so get monkeys to do the job. Good luck, ugh, ugh, ugh, Tarzan.
Not surprisingly, our team has been eyeing this from the moment of its inception. Not any longer.
We have slowly come to the conclusion that the project, as many other projects done with petro-dollars and in petro-culture, is overfunded and totally disorganized. The CEO is a sleek, young Egyptian. The money is Al Nahiyan's. One of my German friends asked me "Is this some kind of PR exercise to make us europeans feel that the ME is after all not backward and does have an intellectual side other than finding 1001 means of killing each other?".
If it is a PR stunt, then it is rather useless because making translated works available does not mean that they will be read. A far better PR stunt, and one that would have longterm positive consequences, is to have programs in place which encourage kids in the ME to read. The reading should be encouraged with appropriate incentives. This would at least create a generation of readers and thinkers.
Even if we do not mention the fact that Talal Assad and George Saliba wrote their originals in Arabic, some of the books on the Kalima list have been translated in Lebanon and Cairo many years ago (granted, before copyright law, but why not just purchase the copyright, then?) and almost ALL of them are of zilch interest to the Arab reader. Missing big time are books by women writers of Arab origins who wrote in languages other than Arabic - such as Ahdaf Suweif or Fadia Faqir, not to mention Mernissi, Yvonne Haddad, or Sabbagh. Actually, I can't see a single female writer on the list!! Missing also are vital books on Arabic culture/history etc. by such prominent writers as Ira Lapidus, Keppel, Fisk, Esposito, Tariq Ali, Zia Sardar, or even Tariq Ramadan. Missing also, very clearly, are any books on non-Arab, or non-Muslim, minorities in the ME: the Kurds, the Christians, and of course the Arab Jews.
When we look at the proposed titles, one can only marvel at the number of copies of Umberto Eco's The Sign that will sell in Arabic. It is a history of semiotics, very old by the standards of this fast-advancing world (1971) - that is Eco minus 36 years of knowledge, so why not translate his newer books on semiotics? Why not translate something more accessible to the masses? Who is this aimed at? Not me, who will read the English version. The same applies to such specialized titles as "In Search of Schrodinger's Cat" which is hellishly difficult to read unless you have a postgrad in physics, or SJ Gould's "Punctuated Equilibrium" out of the 20 very readable and delightful books he wrote, but which will not be translated because the guy is poetically Darwinian. Amazingly too, there are no books by Paul Davis - do I need to explain why :-D ? To make things even more obscure, in the same year Kalima will translate two books on Quantum Mechanics, one by Dirac and one by Heisenberg - is that because Quantum Mechanics is going to solve the problems of the Middle East, or because most of the guys that join Al-Qaeda are graduates of exact sciences, and we need to educate them more???
Then there is the first batch of "classics" - my God, I read the Aneid in Arabic in the 70s!! So why not translate, say, the history of Flavius Josephus? Why not Rabelais? Why not Augustine, or John Chrysostom? Because they are Christian Fathers? Well, then there is not need to translate Harold Bloom's "The Western Canon" either. Or is Harold going to be censored? It would be interesting, as I have the book in original English, and guess what - he makes no mention of the debt owned by Europe to the Arab/Jewish centers of learning in Spain.
And what about censorship? As a Syrian colleague of mine wrote, "If our Mufti says that such and such book is Haram, and reading it is Kufr, how many people will actually be motivated to read it? And how many teachers will even dare to ask why is it Haram, how did it insult our religion? How many teachers will inspire their students to read and find out why? None I daresay. Most of us have been conditioned into fear and obedience; we do not even dare to question authority. Like many other people, I see that the emperor has no clothes, yet when I go home I toe the party line, and shrug my shoulders. Why shock the rest of these people when they are secure in their ignorance? I have no similar security to give them in return, once you start questioning, it does not end. You cannot go back to the comfortable cushion of blind conviction."
The fact is, as a 70-year old colleague from Egypt wrote is that there was a flurry of great translations in the 1960s in Cairo and Beirut, and as time passed by they diminished and were swept aside by an incredible amount of radical, unlearned and fundamentally unenlightened writing spawned by what another Egyptian translator called "The Imam who used to be a plumber in Saudi Arabia". Precisely the guys who are giving Arab culture a bad name (and breath). This led in turn to the atrophy of vocabulary in Arabic in humanities and social sciences, as well as more advanced natural sciences such as genetics, biotechnology, etc.
But there is blame on the West as well, who has been studiously refusing to translate the real thinkers of the Arab world, such as Hussain Murwah, Salama Musa, Dr. Louis Awad, and many others. Instead, it translate post-modernist drivel in literature or books that affirm its orientalist vision of the Arab as the "Other From Behind the Camel". Understanding goes both ways, mates.
So I came up with a few titles each that we would like to see translated, dividing them by subject like the Kalima list. Writing (and translating) are highly subversive activities, and I am highly subversive.. both the list of Kalima and mine can be obtained on request. Maybe some far-seeing politician (is there such a thing?)somewhere in the US or UK will be willing to sponsor a venture? Kalima refuses to engage translators and want to work through publishing houses - obviously they will be paid peanuts and so get monkeys to do the job. Good luck, ugh, ugh, ugh, Tarzan.
Culturally Inept Business Cards
I don't mean to be unkind, but I have just finished checking business cards for a few people working at a local government department who would not listen to common sense. So they had the phone numbers left in Arabic script (which is the script we use in the West, just to make things more confusing) instead of having them transliterated into Hindi numerals, while translating their addresses into Arabic.
I assume that the Arab clients who will want to do business with them by mail will write the address on the envelope in Arabic, and our posties - who speak Aussie, not even English - will be able to decipher the squiggles and deliver them to the nominated offices.
Where does my state government get their cultural consultants from? I'll tell you: Hon. Minister is going on a trip to petro-country, and needs to have his cards translated. He asks around what language the "petro-countrymen" use and is told by a blondie secretary who Googles it that it is "Arabian" (we had someone assure us that Yugoslavs speak Yugoslavian, so what the heck). So he tells her to find an Arabian agency whatever to do it. "Do it" not "translate it", mind you. She phones down the ladder until the buck stops at the new recruit straight out of the mind-boggling achievement of having passed Year 12 plus the Public Service Test (i.e. she/he knows who Brad Pitt is), who grabs the yellow pages, phones around with the question "Can you do our Business Cards into Arabian?" and finally lands an agency.
The agent, a bit more knowledgeable but not "Arabian" speaking, gets the cards and finds a translator. The job gets done properly, with addresses left in English. Then the cards get sent to the department's "cultural consultant" - a "new Aussie" from back home who, since he is working for the public service, must be on the lower rungs of IQ, otherwise he would be managing his own business (like me). The question posed to him is "Has everything been translated?" Of course not, and being given the BIG job of holding a red pen, he promptly rewrites the address in Arabic, not thinking why it is there in English in the first place. Not to be outdone, the Minister's secretary who needs to boost her ego gives one cursory look at the card and unable to understand ANYTHING says, "Geez, where are the phone numbers? Leave them in English so we know how to ring them over there.." or something that is meant to be as witty.
Back to the agent, back to the translator, who explains why the address needs to be in English. But to no avail. The agent who explains it back to the Blondie has an accent and she is accent-deaf with the attitude of "whatever".
And we end up with the bewildered postie stamping "Address illegible" on some important documents which are probably worth a few million petro-dollars.
Whatever!
I assume that the Arab clients who will want to do business with them by mail will write the address on the envelope in Arabic, and our posties - who speak Aussie, not even English - will be able to decipher the squiggles and deliver them to the nominated offices.
Where does my state government get their cultural consultants from? I'll tell you: Hon. Minister is going on a trip to petro-country, and needs to have his cards translated. He asks around what language the "petro-countrymen" use and is told by a blondie secretary who Googles it that it is "Arabian" (we had someone assure us that Yugoslavs speak Yugoslavian, so what the heck). So he tells her to find an Arabian agency whatever to do it. "Do it" not "translate it", mind you. She phones down the ladder until the buck stops at the new recruit straight out of the mind-boggling achievement of having passed Year 12 plus the Public Service Test (i.e. she/he knows who Brad Pitt is), who grabs the yellow pages, phones around with the question "Can you do our Business Cards into Arabian?" and finally lands an agency.
The agent, a bit more knowledgeable but not "Arabian" speaking, gets the cards and finds a translator. The job gets done properly, with addresses left in English. Then the cards get sent to the department's "cultural consultant" - a "new Aussie" from back home who, since he is working for the public service, must be on the lower rungs of IQ, otherwise he would be managing his own business (like me). The question posed to him is "Has everything been translated?" Of course not, and being given the BIG job of holding a red pen, he promptly rewrites the address in Arabic, not thinking why it is there in English in the first place. Not to be outdone, the Minister's secretary who needs to boost her ego gives one cursory look at the card and unable to understand ANYTHING says, "Geez, where are the phone numbers? Leave them in English so we know how to ring them over there.." or something that is meant to be as witty.
Back to the agent, back to the translator, who explains why the address needs to be in English. But to no avail. The agent who explains it back to the Blondie has an accent and she is accent-deaf with the attitude of "whatever".
And we end up with the bewildered postie stamping "Address illegible" on some important documents which are probably worth a few million petro-dollars.
Whatever!
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.
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.
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
Muzzle 'em, those translators
From SMH: http://blogs.smh.com.au/sit/archives/2007/08/xenophilia_hills_hoist_by_book.html
A biography of Japan's Princess Masako published last year by the Australian journalist Ben Hills (...) has had much success throughout the English-speaking world and most of Asia, but not yet in Japan. The company Kodansha had contracted to publish it but suddenly pulled out in February, apparently after pressure from the royal household. (...) last month a new publisher, Akira Kitagawa, picked up the contract, and declared that he would not be influenced by any official pressures. Kitagawa became the target of a vicious article in the weekly magazine Shukan Shincho, in which he was accused of being a former member of a terrorist organisation. The national daily Asahi Shimbun refused to publish an advertisement for the book, saying it was disrespectful to the royal family.
Last week Kitagawa sent this email to Hills: "Just now, two black cars with ultra-nationalistic slogans on them are parking besides the building where my company address is. They are shouting hysterically 'Stop the publication of Princess Masako' with huge loud speakers. Policemen are just watching them and let them do as much as they want to do." If Hills feared the resolve of his new publisher was weakening, the last sentence of the email proved reassuring: "This is how your book is getting more and more popular in Japan before being published."
******
Obviously having the best technology in the world does not equate with also having moderate reasoning faculties. A nation can produce some of the best gadgets on earth and still defer to a human being in skirts just because she is a "royal"?
I wonder if this is the opinion of the majority of the Japanese, though. Media always tends to write about "abnormal" behaviour as a result of which we tend to see a skewed up version of other countries and peoples. Still, such tactics are reminiscent of 1930s in Germany.
I hope no one shoots the messanger. Because there are, apparently, death threats against the writer already:
"Ben Hills, the Australian journalist who wrote a controversial biography of Japan’s Crown Princess Masako, has received death threats ahead of the September release of the Japanese translation of his book, according to a Kyodo News report.
Hills said he had received the anonymous death threats via email. “They were saying things like, ‘Die white pork!’ They were quite racist,” Hills said." (http://www.japannewsreview.com/society/international/20070821page_id=1656)
Oh, la, la... I didn't know pork wasn't kosher in Japan :-) But seriously, why is it that some people who are in no way related to the Princess take it upon themselves to become her knights, while - as far as I can see - the royal family itself is not in any haste lodging a defamation suit against Hills?
Or maybe Hills is doing a marketing stunt?
A biography of Japan's Princess Masako published last year by the Australian journalist Ben Hills (...) has had much success throughout the English-speaking world and most of Asia, but not yet in Japan. The company Kodansha had contracted to publish it but suddenly pulled out in February, apparently after pressure from the royal household. (...) last month a new publisher, Akira Kitagawa, picked up the contract, and declared that he would not be influenced by any official pressures. Kitagawa became the target of a vicious article in the weekly magazine Shukan Shincho, in which he was accused of being a former member of a terrorist organisation. The national daily Asahi Shimbun refused to publish an advertisement for the book, saying it was disrespectful to the royal family.
Last week Kitagawa sent this email to Hills: "Just now, two black cars with ultra-nationalistic slogans on them are parking besides the building where my company address is. They are shouting hysterically 'Stop the publication of Princess Masako' with huge loud speakers. Policemen are just watching them and let them do as much as they want to do." If Hills feared the resolve of his new publisher was weakening, the last sentence of the email proved reassuring: "This is how your book is getting more and more popular in Japan before being published."
******
Obviously having the best technology in the world does not equate with also having moderate reasoning faculties. A nation can produce some of the best gadgets on earth and still defer to a human being in skirts just because she is a "royal"?
I wonder if this is the opinion of the majority of the Japanese, though. Media always tends to write about "abnormal" behaviour as a result of which we tend to see a skewed up version of other countries and peoples. Still, such tactics are reminiscent of 1930s in Germany.
I hope no one shoots the messanger. Because there are, apparently, death threats against the writer already:
"Ben Hills, the Australian journalist who wrote a controversial biography of Japan’s Crown Princess Masako, has received death threats ahead of the September release of the Japanese translation of his book, according to a Kyodo News report.
Hills said he had received the anonymous death threats via email. “They were saying things like, ‘Die white pork!’ They were quite racist,” Hills said." (http://www.japannewsreview.com/society/international/20070821page_id=1656)
Oh, la, la... I didn't know pork wasn't kosher in Japan :-) But seriously, why is it that some people who are in no way related to the Princess take it upon themselves to become her knights, while - as far as I can see - the royal family itself is not in any haste lodging a defamation suit against Hills?
Or maybe Hills is doing a marketing stunt?
Monday, August 20, 2007
A translator at 16
From the Indian Telegraph, Sunday 19th August:
Tagore wrote Shey (He) for his granddaughter Pupe. It is a world of delightful and bizarre adventures where the poet and the protagonist, shey, weave a web of stories for the nine-year-old Pupe.
Enter a 10-year-old translator, who wants to participate in this story-telling. The result after six years is He, a translation published by Penguin in its Modern Classics series.
Translator Aparna Choudhuri, all of 16 today, is the daughter of Sukanta and Supriya Choudhuri, well-known translators of Tagore and leading academics.
It is only natural that Aparna has to defend her work from any interference, correction or revision from her parents. “My parents definitely read my translation, but they never criticised it objectively for they didn’t want to spoil my pleasure in doing the translation,” says Aparna, who began translating Shey during one of those long lazy summer afternoons during a holiday.
She plans to continue to translate Bengali texts, but admits that she has begun with a “rather difficult text”. “It is precisely because it is difficult, because it is such a riddle, that I wanted to translate it. The things that attracted me to Shey as a reader also prompted me to translate it,” says Aparna.
Her work has a longish introduction by Sankha Ghosh, who contextualises the book and the translation, preparing the reader for the text. The translation has won accolades. At the launch of the book at Oxford Bookstore on Monday, poet Nirendranath Chakrabarty said: “The translation is as good as the original. It has kept the style of Tagore’s writing absolutely intact.”
Commending the translator for having achieved this at such a tender age, he, however, cautioned her: “Don’t be a Max Beerbohm, who published his complete works when he was only 24.”
Beerbohm, English wit, parodist and illustrator, had published The Works of Max Beerbohm in 1896.
****************
I am full of admiration :-) I started my translation career at the age of 24 with a book on the history of philosophical trends by a Soviet academic, and it was a challenge in a way despite the fact that I had a degree in English by then, was working in a publishing house and philosophy was one of my specializations.
It helps to have parents who are into similar activities. Having been exposed at a very tender age to a number of very different languages, and growing up in a family where every member was poly-lingual, also helped me to translate "by ear", unlike some who have to do it "by the book".
Tagore wrote Shey (He) for his granddaughter Pupe. It is a world of delightful and bizarre adventures where the poet and the protagonist, shey, weave a web of stories for the nine-year-old Pupe.
Enter a 10-year-old translator, who wants to participate in this story-telling. The result after six years is He, a translation published by Penguin in its Modern Classics series.
Translator Aparna Choudhuri, all of 16 today, is the daughter of Sukanta and Supriya Choudhuri, well-known translators of Tagore and leading academics.
It is only natural that Aparna has to defend her work from any interference, correction or revision from her parents. “My parents definitely read my translation, but they never criticised it objectively for they didn’t want to spoil my pleasure in doing the translation,” says Aparna, who began translating Shey during one of those long lazy summer afternoons during a holiday.
She plans to continue to translate Bengali texts, but admits that she has begun with a “rather difficult text”. “It is precisely because it is difficult, because it is such a riddle, that I wanted to translate it. The things that attracted me to Shey as a reader also prompted me to translate it,” says Aparna.
Her work has a longish introduction by Sankha Ghosh, who contextualises the book and the translation, preparing the reader for the text. The translation has won accolades. At the launch of the book at Oxford Bookstore on Monday, poet Nirendranath Chakrabarty said: “The translation is as good as the original. It has kept the style of Tagore’s writing absolutely intact.”
Commending the translator for having achieved this at such a tender age, he, however, cautioned her: “Don’t be a Max Beerbohm, who published his complete works when he was only 24.”
Beerbohm, English wit, parodist and illustrator, had published The Works of Max Beerbohm in 1896.
****************
I am full of admiration :-) I started my translation career at the age of 24 with a book on the history of philosophical trends by a Soviet academic, and it was a challenge in a way despite the fact that I had a degree in English by then, was working in a publishing house and philosophy was one of my specializations.
It helps to have parents who are into similar activities. Having been exposed at a very tender age to a number of very different languages, and growing up in a family where every member was poly-lingual, also helped me to translate "by ear", unlike some who have to do it "by the book".
Thursday, August 16, 2007
Nothing Wrong With Fakes?
Persian translation of fake “Harry Potter” hits Iran’s bookstores
TEHRAN, Aug. 15 (MNA) -- A Persian translation of the internet counterfeit version of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” has appeared in Iran’s bookstores.
An internet hacker put a fake version of the latest book in the Harry Potter series on the internet a few days before the book’s worldwide release, claiming it to be the original.
Sakineh (Mehri) Kharrazi translated it into Persian off the website and it has been published by Neyestan-e Jam Publications in a 560-page book, the Persian service of ISNA reported on Wednesday.
According to the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance’s book and book reading office, the book was published with the ministry’s permission.
At the top corner of the back of the book, the label “internet version” has been printed.
Head of the office, Majid Hamidzadeh, explained that the ministry had not observed any problem in the contents of the book and therefore permission for publication had been issued, saying “The book bears the label ‘internet version’ on its cover, and we are not concerned whether or not its contents are fake.”
From http://www.mehrnews.ir/en/NewsDetail.aspx?NewsID=535306
I haven't heard of any other book being so hotly translated. And I haven't read any Potters, so no idea what is so hot. My 14 year old niece - who is a bookworm - has been telling me the storyline is excellent but that I would need to start with the first book not to get disoriented. Then, when my 20 year old sister who is not a bookish type, stood in a queue for 6 hrs in Sydney to buy a copy, I thought maybe I am missing something. So at the hoary age of nearly 50, I am off to find a copy of The Philosopher's Stone. I hope I shall not be disappointed.
TEHRAN, Aug. 15 (MNA) -- A Persian translation of the internet counterfeit version of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” has appeared in Iran’s bookstores.
An internet hacker put a fake version of the latest book in the Harry Potter series on the internet a few days before the book’s worldwide release, claiming it to be the original.
Sakineh (Mehri) Kharrazi translated it into Persian off the website and it has been published by Neyestan-e Jam Publications in a 560-page book, the Persian service of ISNA reported on Wednesday.
According to the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance’s book and book reading office, the book was published with the ministry’s permission.
At the top corner of the back of the book, the label “internet version” has been printed.
Head of the office, Majid Hamidzadeh, explained that the ministry had not observed any problem in the contents of the book and therefore permission for publication had been issued, saying “The book bears the label ‘internet version’ on its cover, and we are not concerned whether or not its contents are fake.”
From http://www.mehrnews.ir/en/NewsDetail.aspx?NewsID=535306
I haven't heard of any other book being so hotly translated. And I haven't read any Potters, so no idea what is so hot. My 14 year old niece - who is a bookworm - has been telling me the storyline is excellent but that I would need to start with the first book not to get disoriented. Then, when my 20 year old sister who is not a bookish type, stood in a queue for 6 hrs in Sydney to buy a copy, I thought maybe I am missing something. So at the hoary age of nearly 50, I am off to find a copy of The Philosopher's Stone. I hope I shall not be disappointed.
Thursday, August 09, 2007
.. and once again
From http://www.kansascity.com/news/world/story/224219.html
World briefs: French teen a wizard at translation
PARIS A determined French 16-year-old accomplished a mystifying feat in translating all 759 pages of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows within days of its July 21 release and posting it online.
The problem: It was illegal, and now the teen has spent a night in jail and faces charges of intellectual property violation.
******
He created brand new intellectual property, not violated one.
Lions, lions, more lions needed!
World briefs: French teen a wizard at translation
PARIS A determined French 16-year-old accomplished a mystifying feat in translating all 759 pages of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows within days of its July 21 release and posting it online.
The problem: It was illegal, and now the teen has spent a night in jail and faces charges of intellectual property violation.
******
He created brand new intellectual property, not violated one.
Lions, lions, more lions needed!
Saturday, August 04, 2007
Harry Potter translators strike (and get striken) again
One more chapter to the sage of two days ago, this time in Hungary:
"Hungarian HP publisher to sue over illegal translation
"Hungarian HP publisher to sue over illegal translation
Animus, the Hungarian publisher of the final part of the Harry Potter book series is considering legal action over a pirate translation that has been posted on the Internet, István Balázs," head of the publishing office, announced on Thursday.
Balázs said he finds it "a serious violation of law that the illegal version of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows has been put online, despite the fact that the official Hungarian translation will only be out next February."
Balázs warned that the perpetrators could receive a jail sentence. "
from http://www.caboodle.hu/nc/news/news_archive/single_page/article/11/hungarian_hp/?cHash=a3e01726bb
Oh, where are you, St. Jerome? Or will Potter become the new St. Henry, patron saint of daring translators? Please note, neither the Hungarian, nor the Chinese kids (see my previous posting) charged money for their translations. They did it out of sheer love for the act of translating, the act of creativity. Whereas Animus and the Chinese "people's" publishers are going to make fat profits out of the book - and you want to bet they paid their "official, legal" translators peanuts? And do you want to bet that the copyright of those translations will now reside in the publishing houses, not the translator who - if you look closely at it - actually recreated a novel? Will the translator's name be on the book? Questionable. Will he get any royalties? Even more questionable. He/she are probably just another corporate (or academic) slave of the establishment.
And have we noted duly how quick communist and post-communist countries are to claim their ownership? Would make uncle Karl and cousin Vladek turn in their graves with disgust.
Lions, please, St. Jerome. Hungry ones!
Thursday, August 02, 2007
Thwarting young enterpreneurs
The Daily Telegraph (London) has published a short piece stating that the Chinese censors have closed down a group of teenage translators working on Herry Potter - the reason, as usual, being the never ending greed of the corporate world. Apparently, an official copy is coming out soon, translated in politically correct Chinese by the politically stale and state owned The People's Literature Publishing House, which - good communism aside - is thinking like a bloody capitalist business and is unhappy about the "free for all" five chapters already published online.
Blame the PLPH for the low levels of English among young Chinese - what better way to learn a language than translate a novel? The kids, if they were mine, would have been praised, paid and given full time employment in the same stolid publishing house, plus fully paid bachelor of arts in linguistics course.
But the world is not about giving the young a chance to grow into creative humans, but into corporate slaves. How sad!
Blame the PLPH for the low levels of English among young Chinese - what better way to learn a language than translate a novel? The kids, if they were mine, would have been praised, paid and given full time employment in the same stolid publishing house, plus fully paid bachelor of arts in linguistics course.
But the world is not about giving the young a chance to grow into creative humans, but into corporate slaves. How sad!
Wednesday, August 30, 2006
Language Quirks and Microsoft Brain Dearth
I find this absolutely hilarious:
How eight pixels cost Microsoft millions
By Jo Best
Story last modified Thu Aug 19 11:36:00 PDT 2004
Microsoft's lack of multicultural savvy cost the Redmond behemoth millions of dollars, according to a company executive.
The software giant has seen its products banned in some of the biggest markets on earth--and it's all because of eight wrongly colored pixels, a dodgy choice of music and a bad English-to-Spanish dictionary.
Speaking at the International Geographical Union congress in Glasgow on Wednesday, Microsoft's top man in its geopolitical strategy team, Tom Edwards, revealed how one of the biggest companies in the world managed to offend one of the biggest countries in the world with a software slip-up.
When coloring in 800,000 pixels on a map of India, Microsoft colored eight of them a different shade of green to represent the disputed Kashmiri territory. The difference in greens meant Kashmir was shown as non-Indian, and the product was promptly banned in India. Microsoft was left to recall all 200,000 copies of the offending Windows 95 operating system software to try and heal the diplomatic wounds. "It cost millions," Edwards said.
Another social blunder from Microsoft saw chanting of the Koran used as a soundtrack for a computer game and led to great offence to the Saudi Arabia government. The company later issued a new version of the game without the chanting, while keeping the previous editions in circulation because U.S. staff thought the slip wouldn't be spotted, but the Saudi government banned the game and demanded an apology. Microsoft then withdrew the game.
The software giant managed to further offend the Saudis by creating another game in which Muslim warriors turned churches into mosques. That game was also withdrawn.
Microsoft has also managed to upset women and entire countries. A Spanish-language version of Windows XP, destined for Latin American markets, asked users to select their gender between "not specified," "male" or "bitch," because of an unfortunate error in translation.
Microsoft has also seen its unfortunate style of diplomacy have an effect in Korea, Kurdistan, Uruguay and to China--where a cartographical dispute saw Chinese employees hauled in front of the government.
Edwards said that staff members are now sent on geography courses to try to avoid such mishaps. "Some of our employees, however bright they may be, have only a hazy idea about the rest of the world," he said.
Silicon.com's Jo Best reported from London.
Copyright ©1995-2005 CNET Networks, Inc. All rights reserved.
How eight pixels cost Microsoft millions
By Jo Best
Story last modified Thu Aug 19 11:36:00 PDT 2004
Microsoft's lack of multicultural savvy cost the Redmond behemoth millions of dollars, according to a company executive.
The software giant has seen its products banned in some of the biggest markets on earth--and it's all because of eight wrongly colored pixels, a dodgy choice of music and a bad English-to-Spanish dictionary.
Speaking at the International Geographical Union congress in Glasgow on Wednesday, Microsoft's top man in its geopolitical strategy team, Tom Edwards, revealed how one of the biggest companies in the world managed to offend one of the biggest countries in the world with a software slip-up.
When coloring in 800,000 pixels on a map of India, Microsoft colored eight of them a different shade of green to represent the disputed Kashmiri territory. The difference in greens meant Kashmir was shown as non-Indian, and the product was promptly banned in India. Microsoft was left to recall all 200,000 copies of the offending Windows 95 operating system software to try and heal the diplomatic wounds. "It cost millions," Edwards said.
Another social blunder from Microsoft saw chanting of the Koran used as a soundtrack for a computer game and led to great offence to the Saudi Arabia government. The company later issued a new version of the game without the chanting, while keeping the previous editions in circulation because U.S. staff thought the slip wouldn't be spotted, but the Saudi government banned the game and demanded an apology. Microsoft then withdrew the game.
The software giant managed to further offend the Saudis by creating another game in which Muslim warriors turned churches into mosques. That game was also withdrawn.
Microsoft has also managed to upset women and entire countries. A Spanish-language version of Windows XP, destined for Latin American markets, asked users to select their gender between "not specified," "male" or "bitch," because of an unfortunate error in translation.
Microsoft has also seen its unfortunate style of diplomacy have an effect in Korea, Kurdistan, Uruguay and to China--where a cartographical dispute saw Chinese employees hauled in front of the government.
Edwards said that staff members are now sent on geography courses to try to avoid such mishaps. "Some of our employees, however bright they may be, have only a hazy idea about the rest of the world," he said.
Silicon.com's Jo Best reported from London.
Copyright ©1995-2005 CNET Networks, Inc. All rights reserved.
On converting men to software and animals
A few weeks ago I received an email via Proz from some Pakistani Fazul who wanted me to help him. The subject heading sounded like one of those poor lepers with outstretched arms sitting in front of Karachi Airport - "for God sake help me". Since it came via Proz, and I take Proz seriously, I actually read it - to my great merriment.
"I extend my hearty greetings to you and would like like to seek you assistance in the field of translation as I am a bilingula translator of Arabic/English and I am working in Pakistan with foriegen mission as arabic/English translator but could u help me to become on line translator."
I dread to think which "foriegen mission" would employ an Urdu-speaker to do Arabic/English translations? Ussie and Bros? Aymanco Propaganda Services? Now this guy is so sick of being a human that he wants an Ozzie (maybe because we have a reputation for innovation?) to convert him into a piece of software. Well, considering his standard of English, he has all the pre-requisites to become a Babelfish. But no, he wanted to become a bird. Suicidal, must be, with all this avian flu around.
I wrote him a rather offish reply telling him he could start by "learning to write proper English" and that it wasn't tandoori cooking. I thought that this would be enough. I was naive.
Four days later, a reply: "as Khalil Jabran said " Shall I coo like a pagon to please you , or shall I roar like a lion to please my self".
Never heard of Khalil saying this, but hey! the guy has dropped the robotics issue and now wants to rejoin the animal kingdom in the guise of the Birdlion.
"first of all whatever you wrote to me I really appreciate " the way you tried to make understand that the field of translation is not child works.you give psychological lessons by telling me that go and start reading english articles . Madam I will coo and obey all those will can teach me and help me in translation fild."
Of course I didn't say any of that. Maybe it was some other sucker who did?? But, coo, my dear Taliban, coo. I have no idea when English in Pakistan deteriorated to this extent - only the lowest dregs in India write such rubbish, and here you have aspiring translators butcher the language they will be translating from/into - whatever. Even Bangladesh is beginning to sound better.
"let me tell you madam that both English and Arabic are not my native languages I am Pakistani student who tried to learned Arabic and English and started his career as Arabic/English translator."
Good luck, matey. Not much to learn - for Ussie and Bros you are as good as they come. Can you shoot, per chance?
"I extend my hearty greetings to you and would like like to seek you assistance in the field of translation as I am a bilingula translator of Arabic/English and I am working in Pakistan with foriegen mission as arabic/English translator but could u help me to become on line translator."
I dread to think which "foriegen mission" would employ an Urdu-speaker to do Arabic/English translations? Ussie and Bros? Aymanco Propaganda Services? Now this guy is so sick of being a human that he wants an Ozzie (maybe because we have a reputation for innovation?) to convert him into a piece of software. Well, considering his standard of English, he has all the pre-requisites to become a Babelfish. But no, he wanted to become a bird. Suicidal, must be, with all this avian flu around.
I wrote him a rather offish reply telling him he could start by "learning to write proper English" and that it wasn't tandoori cooking. I thought that this would be enough. I was naive.
Four days later, a reply: "as Khalil Jabran said " Shall I coo like a pagon to please you , or shall I roar like a lion to please my self".
Never heard of Khalil saying this, but hey! the guy has dropped the robotics issue and now wants to rejoin the animal kingdom in the guise of the Birdlion.
"first of all whatever you wrote to me I really appreciate " the way you tried to make understand that the field of translation is not child works.you give psychological lessons by telling me that go and start reading english articles . Madam I will coo and obey all those will can teach me and help me in translation fild."
Of course I didn't say any of that. Maybe it was some other sucker who did?? But, coo, my dear Taliban, coo. I have no idea when English in Pakistan deteriorated to this extent - only the lowest dregs in India write such rubbish, and here you have aspiring translators butcher the language they will be translating from/into - whatever. Even Bangladesh is beginning to sound better.
"let me tell you madam that both English and Arabic are not my native languages I am Pakistani student who tried to learned Arabic and English and started his career as Arabic/English translator."
Good luck, matey. Not much to learn - for Ussie and Bros you are as good as they come. Can you shoot, per chance?
Thursday, July 13, 2006
Borders and Archives (Jan 2006)
Borders. I love Borders. I planned to stay at the Not-so-Glorious Gloria Jeans and peck on my laptop (hoping the hotspot in the City is functional - nope!) Instead I ended stacking up a whole load of books, and then going through the heart-wrenching decisions of which to take home and which to postpone. In the end, Foucault’s Archeology of Knowledge won, together with Spencer's The Myth of Tolerance (you know where), an introduction to Sociolinguistics and a book by a number of "Western Muslim Scholars" (some new species that is) about fundamentalism. This last one will add to my Pelgrave's anthology on Jihad , Mamdani's "Good Muslim, Bad Muslim", and the classic Islam and the West that I bought for myself before Xmas.
When I am in this book-buying mode, it takes a truck to stop me. So, after filling myself with beans (literally) I asked Dan, who was already lugging my laptop and books purchased in Borders, if she would mind walking with me to Archives. I had an ulterior motive, as the linguistics section in Archives is 2.5 meters above ground and I am not the ladder-climbing type. I was there twice in the past month, and at both times I could not even see the titles. I knew chocolate was up there, but I couldn’t get to it. Dan is an athlete and taller than me, so although she is not into language books, she is the best choice of partner if you want to get any from Archives.
When you walk into the semi-dark coolness of Archives you leave your belongings at the reception. As my Borders bag was ferried across the oak table, there was a hint of reproach in the eyes of the Irish-accent-a-hell-of-a-good-looking-lassie who runs the place. I jokingly apologized for my extra-marital affairs. Last time I was there I bought so many books that they had to order me a taxi.
Minutes after Dan parked the ladder and climbed up, I was a hair's breadth away from being a disabled linguist. While trying to hold onto the ladder, read titles 20 cm above her line of vision without ending up on the opposite shelf AND pull out books for me, Dan dropped a hardcover Eisler just millimeters from my cranium. What Eisler’s The Chalice and the Blade was doing amidst books on linguistics beats me, but regardless of their weird cataloging system Archives are much better organized than Bob Gould in Newtown, Sydney. There it is a matter of diving into the sea of paper – forget about finding a SPECIFIC BOOK. Even Bob doesn’t know what he has, or where. It is a matter of serendipity. And one can get killed by books at Gould’s without having to climb ladders, because they are stacked atop each other.
Now the Eisler is safely on my personal bookshelf, and so are ten other books whose titles would be too mundane for the general public to mention here.
There are two people that I will make rich when I win the Lotto: the Irish chick from Archives and Sean from Bent Books. Well, and maybe that grumpy but very helpful old chap from Melanie up the coast who located a rare Kazantakis for me, phoned and posted it to me so that I would not have to drive for three hours.
Bookfest is coming. Only 30 more sleeps.
When I am in this book-buying mode, it takes a truck to stop me. So, after filling myself with beans (literally) I asked Dan, who was already lugging my laptop and books purchased in Borders, if she would mind walking with me to Archives. I had an ulterior motive, as the linguistics section in Archives is 2.5 meters above ground and I am not the ladder-climbing type. I was there twice in the past month, and at both times I could not even see the titles. I knew chocolate was up there, but I couldn’t get to it. Dan is an athlete and taller than me, so although she is not into language books, she is the best choice of partner if you want to get any from Archives.
When you walk into the semi-dark coolness of Archives you leave your belongings at the reception. As my Borders bag was ferried across the oak table, there was a hint of reproach in the eyes of the Irish-accent-a-hell-of-a-good-looking-lassie who runs the place. I jokingly apologized for my extra-marital affairs. Last time I was there I bought so many books that they had to order me a taxi.
Minutes after Dan parked the ladder and climbed up, I was a hair's breadth away from being a disabled linguist. While trying to hold onto the ladder, read titles 20 cm above her line of vision without ending up on the opposite shelf AND pull out books for me, Dan dropped a hardcover Eisler just millimeters from my cranium. What Eisler’s The Chalice and the Blade was doing amidst books on linguistics beats me, but regardless of their weird cataloging system Archives are much better organized than Bob Gould in Newtown, Sydney. There it is a matter of diving into the sea of paper – forget about finding a SPECIFIC BOOK. Even Bob doesn’t know what he has, or where. It is a matter of serendipity. And one can get killed by books at Gould’s without having to climb ladders, because they are stacked atop each other.
Now the Eisler is safely on my personal bookshelf, and so are ten other books whose titles would be too mundane for the general public to mention here.
There are two people that I will make rich when I win the Lotto: the Irish chick from Archives and Sean from Bent Books. Well, and maybe that grumpy but very helpful old chap from Melanie up the coast who located a rare Kazantakis for me, phoned and posted it to me so that I would not have to drive for three hours.
Bookfest is coming. Only 30 more sleeps.
Mangled Academia
Professor Raphael Israeli (http://www.acpr.org.il/people/risraeli.html) should not be permitted to write books in English.
His English sucks. And the editors at Lexington Books who published Poison: Modern Manifestations of a Blood Libel should be placed against a wall and shot for desecrating their job.
A perfectly reasonable book, lots of research, and an almost unreadable mess as a result. The book should have been half the size, all the repetitions made by Prof. Israeli ad nauseum should have been weeded out to make his points original, the grammar and stylistics should have been checked by a NATIVE ENGLISH SPEAKER, to stop offending me with sentences such as this one:
“He nevertheless condemns the Palestinian leader for using anti-Semitic means to attain his goals instead of LEGITIMATELY defending the rights of his people by LEGITIMATE means.”
or
“As it is becoming evident…” Give me a break, mate – what is this “becoming” thing doing therein?
And did I mention the translators used by Prof. Israeli. No? The gifted linguist who translated French press articles for him used the term “intoxication” to mean poisoning, so that for a few pages one has 500 severely intoxicated Palestinian high-school girls running around Hebron flashing V-signs, instead of 500 severely poisoned ones. Such a number of drunk female students of Muslim background is unprecedented, so of course they made news in Europe.
His Arabic to English translator, although obviously fluent in Arabic is hopeless in English, a mishap that results in sentences 20 words and over with no commas, hyphens, or semicolons. “Under the eyes and ears of the Zionist occupiers” becomes “in the sight and hearing of the Zionist occupiers” giving the impression that they all have one set of ears and eyes to share in.
I’ll spare you more examples. However, I would like to add, that Poison is not the only dud. A newer publication, Islamikaze, (2003, Frank Cass) could have been in my humble opinion a best-seller alongside other books on this subject, especially as Prof. Israeli writes from within the conflict itself and has first-hand knowledge and experience of “suicide bombers”. Unfortunately, the book which runs into 472 pages, is a cut and paste hotchpotch of almost full newspaper articles (which, Prof. Israeli, I can easily find elsewhere), again translated horribly and edited even worse, mixed with Prof. Israeli’s outbursts of despair and anger. Scarcely something one would expect in an academic publication, at least not in the English-speaking world. True, editors should permit the writer’s style to shine through, but it is inadmissible to allow an academic writer to mangle language in his publication or to show emotions in a historical expose.
And which mentally challenged person chose the cover for Islamikaze, to make it look like some cheap Pakistani pamphlet?? If there is something that has always irritated me about Israeli products (forgive me if I vent my frustrations here), it the fact that they feel “cheap” and “kitchy” to me, and do not reflect the finer aspects of Jewish material culture that I grew up with. I hope Prof. Israeli wasn’t the culprit in the “book cover affair”.
Needless to say, neither of the two books is sitting permanently on my shelves. When the edited and abridged version are published, I will reconsider. And all this is so unfortunate, really, because the man has interesting things to say. He just doesn’t know how to do that in proper English.
His English sucks. And the editors at Lexington Books who published Poison: Modern Manifestations of a Blood Libel should be placed against a wall and shot for desecrating their job.
A perfectly reasonable book, lots of research, and an almost unreadable mess as a result. The book should have been half the size, all the repetitions made by Prof. Israeli ad nauseum should have been weeded out to make his points original, the grammar and stylistics should have been checked by a NATIVE ENGLISH SPEAKER, to stop offending me with sentences such as this one:
“He nevertheless condemns the Palestinian leader for using anti-Semitic means to attain his goals instead of LEGITIMATELY defending the rights of his people by LEGITIMATE means.”
or
“As it is becoming evident…” Give me a break, mate – what is this “becoming” thing doing therein?
And did I mention the translators used by Prof. Israeli. No? The gifted linguist who translated French press articles for him used the term “intoxication” to mean poisoning, so that for a few pages one has 500 severely intoxicated Palestinian high-school girls running around Hebron flashing V-signs, instead of 500 severely poisoned ones. Such a number of drunk female students of Muslim background is unprecedented, so of course they made news in Europe.
His Arabic to English translator, although obviously fluent in Arabic is hopeless in English, a mishap that results in sentences 20 words and over with no commas, hyphens, or semicolons. “Under the eyes and ears of the Zionist occupiers” becomes “in the sight and hearing of the Zionist occupiers” giving the impression that they all have one set of ears and eyes to share in.
I’ll spare you more examples. However, I would like to add, that Poison is not the only dud. A newer publication, Islamikaze, (2003, Frank Cass) could have been in my humble opinion a best-seller alongside other books on this subject, especially as Prof. Israeli writes from within the conflict itself and has first-hand knowledge and experience of “suicide bombers”. Unfortunately, the book which runs into 472 pages, is a cut and paste hotchpotch of almost full newspaper articles (which, Prof. Israeli, I can easily find elsewhere), again translated horribly and edited even worse, mixed with Prof. Israeli’s outbursts of despair and anger. Scarcely something one would expect in an academic publication, at least not in the English-speaking world. True, editors should permit the writer’s style to shine through, but it is inadmissible to allow an academic writer to mangle language in his publication or to show emotions in a historical expose.
And which mentally challenged person chose the cover for Islamikaze, to make it look like some cheap Pakistani pamphlet?? If there is something that has always irritated me about Israeli products (forgive me if I vent my frustrations here), it the fact that they feel “cheap” and “kitchy” to me, and do not reflect the finer aspects of Jewish material culture that I grew up with. I hope Prof. Israeli wasn’t the culprit in the “book cover affair”.
Needless to say, neither of the two books is sitting permanently on my shelves. When the edited and abridged version are published, I will reconsider. And all this is so unfortunate, really, because the man has interesting things to say. He just doesn’t know how to do that in proper English.
Reflections on (lack of) terminology
Why isn't this entry in the language section? Because it is going to make a few people unhappy, and unhappiness is politically almost always incorrect in our "fair-for-all and devil take the hindmost" Australia.
It has been quiet on the work front and I have about a week before madness strikes again. In the midst of converting my ailing LP records into CDs prior to donating them to LifeLine for their next Bookfest, I decided to go back to doing something more intellectually challenging than staring at my recorder's dials. From my shelves groaning with good materials I chose a book on inter-faith marriages in Australia, written by a local academic of Palestinian background and endorsed by our own Lord Vampire, Hon. Buttock.
The book is excellent, short, well written, dense with data and with sound conclusions (as sound as you are allowed to have while retaining your teaching post, that is). Translating the first chapter into English promised to be as great a task as sociolinguistic exercises go, and I didn't have to wait long before I hit the first snag.
"Inter-faith marriages", "inter-marriages" and "conversion" (from one religion to any other) were an interesting bid. After fiddling with the first two terms for 5 hours, I asked other, native Arabic language speakers for their opinion. 48 hours have passed since and although a few made attempts at solving the linguistic problem, they were all as clumsy as mine. The question that jumps to mind: is the term lacking in Arabic BECAUSE there is no such concept, or am I just unlucky in finding a really good linguist. I would go for the first, knowing that the persons who tried to assist me were all professionals with years of translating experience.
When I got to "conversion", I didn't have to go beyond my dictionary to start feeling unhappy. The word exists in Arabic, and is called "HIDAYA". Its root is the same as that of the word "yahtadi" meaning "find the right way". Am I to assume that any sane Middle Eastern Muslim would accept that a coreligionist of his, converting to say Buddhism, has finally hit the nail on the head and found the right way??? Or will a Copt in Upper Egypt accept that a brother of his converting to Islam is on the right path? Even saying something like this could cause you severe discomfort (being killed, bashed, abused - your choice) and would not do any of your "inter-faith" friendships that you may have any good. It just doesn't sound right in Arabic, with its need to be on some RIGHT path or other (can there be an "other"??) in a society where the shape of the path is more important than its content.
But things got even better: I was looking for "inter-faith dialogue" an equivalent of which in Arabic is "a dialogue between religions". Not much headache there if it wasn't for this interesting bit of information gleaned from a website called Islam Online, under their Daawa (proselytizing) section. A certain Dr. Kamal Al Masri, who has a BLLP from the University of Kuwait, and a PhD from London in Human Rights and Islamic Law, advises a young man on "addiction" and its effects on "normalization of relationship with the Jewish State" by telling him that Israelis (praised be Allah that he differentiates between those and the Jews) infiltrate Yahoo chatrooms under the guise of "Interfaith Dialogue" a term which in reality "means an attempt by Israel to be accepted in the Arab and Muslim world". WOW! I didn't know they were this crazy, those Kibbutzniks.I should really do a bit more research on what else "interfaith dialogue" means - fish n' fries? \
It has been quiet on the work front and I have about a week before madness strikes again. In the midst of converting my ailing LP records into CDs prior to donating them to LifeLine for their next Bookfest, I decided to go back to doing something more intellectually challenging than staring at my recorder's dials. From my shelves groaning with good materials I chose a book on inter-faith marriages in Australia, written by a local academic of Palestinian background and endorsed by our own Lord Vampire, Hon. Buttock.
The book is excellent, short, well written, dense with data and with sound conclusions (as sound as you are allowed to have while retaining your teaching post, that is). Translating the first chapter into English promised to be as great a task as sociolinguistic exercises go, and I didn't have to wait long before I hit the first snag.
"Inter-faith marriages", "inter-marriages" and "conversion" (from one religion to any other) were an interesting bid. After fiddling with the first two terms for 5 hours, I asked other, native Arabic language speakers for their opinion. 48 hours have passed since and although a few made attempts at solving the linguistic problem, they were all as clumsy as mine. The question that jumps to mind: is the term lacking in Arabic BECAUSE there is no such concept, or am I just unlucky in finding a really good linguist. I would go for the first, knowing that the persons who tried to assist me were all professionals with years of translating experience.
When I got to "conversion", I didn't have to go beyond my dictionary to start feeling unhappy. The word exists in Arabic, and is called "HIDAYA". Its root is the same as that of the word "yahtadi" meaning "find the right way". Am I to assume that any sane Middle Eastern Muslim would accept that a coreligionist of his, converting to say Buddhism, has finally hit the nail on the head and found the right way??? Or will a Copt in Upper Egypt accept that a brother of his converting to Islam is on the right path? Even saying something like this could cause you severe discomfort (being killed, bashed, abused - your choice) and would not do any of your "inter-faith" friendships that you may have any good. It just doesn't sound right in Arabic, with its need to be on some RIGHT path or other (can there be an "other"??) in a society where the shape of the path is more important than its content.
But things got even better: I was looking for "inter-faith dialogue" an equivalent of which in Arabic is "a dialogue between religions". Not much headache there if it wasn't for this interesting bit of information gleaned from a website called Islam Online, under their Daawa (proselytizing) section. A certain Dr. Kamal Al Masri, who has a BLLP from the University of Kuwait, and a PhD from London in Human Rights and Islamic Law, advises a young man on "addiction" and its effects on "normalization of relationship with the Jewish State" by telling him that Israelis (praised be Allah that he differentiates between those and the Jews) infiltrate Yahoo chatrooms under the guise of "Interfaith Dialogue" a term which in reality "means an attempt by Israel to be accepted in the Arab and Muslim world". WOW! I didn't know they were this crazy, those Kibbutzniks.I should really do a bit more research on what else "interfaith dialogue" means - fish n' fries? \
Bookfest (21 June 2006)
Queensland's biggest, occupying 4 exhibition halls at the prestigious Brisbane Convention Centre, and showcasing billions of books, thousands of CDs, records, DVDs, videos and audio tapes.
We hype about it weeks before it is here, preparing lists of what to fish for. It is permanently entered into our calendar, once on Australia Day long weekend, and once, six months later, at Queen’s Birthday.
We get up at 6:00AM, although the Fest doesn’t start until 9. Parked next to the lift at 7:30AM, we wander off to the Steam Café, the only thing open for breakfast that early. It is ok in January when it is steaming hot by 7, but now it’s winter and Southbank is chilly. We absorb the hot tea and toast in silence, each one of us already lost in visions of piles of books and lines of Brisbane’s most weird population – “the obsessive readers”.
When we get back to the Centre by 8.45, they are there already. Old pensioners with magnifying glasses, gaunt ladies of the society, young students, pregnant mums with prams, hippy 60 plus, bikies in black leather and silver chains, kids with accents, parents with no English, absent-minded academics and personas that look as if they spent the night on a bench. They come dragging suitcases, shopping trolleys, carton boxes the size of 90 litre fridges, backpacks, and all kinds of containers. The lounge is already open and there is a lot of impatient shuffling in front of the huge doors, while people chat in quiet voices as if in awe of this massive amount of knowledge awaiting them behind the doors.
Then the doors open and the stampede starts. Those who can run, do so. The less lucky ones shuffle, trot, push and shove. No decorum is left as the ORs focus on their destination, like lemmings falling off the cliffs. In the midst of the shuffle I try not to lose sight of Dan’s mousey locks as she heads straight for the CDs.
It is all pre-planned. Music first, because we discovered last January that we could get some really good stuff for $4 maximum per CD. A young woman with black eyes of a hungry raven shoves tens of children CDs into her shopping trolley indiscriminately. A rather dishevelled and heavy breathing gentleman next to me asks me what I am after. I respond, “anything non-Anglo” and he wipes a SALSA record into my hand with his sweaty palm. It doesn’t have a cover and is badly scratched, but he is so earnest I have no heart to tell him that he is a moron, so I take it with a smile and deposit it a few tables later.
By the time I get to the third table the CDs are spilling out of my hands and I badly need the loo. Supporting the loot with one hand and chin I desperately feel around with the other for my mobile. I have visions of having dropped it, or left it in a public toilet (been there, done that). Aisles away, Dan sees the panic and comes running. I hand her the music, mouth out “mobile” and run out into the safety of the restrooms.
(The mobile was in the car, by the way. So no panic. I am contactable still)
Now comes the turn for books. It took us from 9.30 to 11.30 to do two of the four halls and even that just broadly because Dan is allergic to book mould (plenty of this in subtropical Brisbane) and her eyes started burning. We managed to fill in 4 large backpacks, around 50 paperbacks in total plus 30 CDs. Much less than last year, when we went in there with a large suitcase each and returned three times to fill them up, in the end having to pull down the back seats of our Volvo SW and paying over 1000$ for the pleasure of erudition. Which reminds me.
A boss decides to sack his lazy cleaning lady.
“Look, Bridget, I can write my name in the dust on this desk.”
“Can you now, Sir?” she exclaims. “Isn’t erudition a wonderful thing?”
The amount of Christian books given away is just amazing. Not books about religion, but religious books. One would think that they are read, contemplated, cherished. But no; here we have endless manuals on how to get to the good old Lord, how to pray, why bad things happen to God fearing people, etc. And the buyers are all, invariably, over 60 and often non-English speaking. When Britannia Ruled the Waves, Christianity became a fad with the minorities that accepted the British protection in the face of the national liberations movements. Displaced from their own cultural milieu, these ghosts of colonial power now hope to join Churchill and Gordon in heaven. Many of the faces reminded me of my own paternal grandmother who lost it seriously in her late sixties and early seventies and joined the Pentacostals. Her bookshelves were as full of Bible commentaries and study aides as mine were full of Islamic history and Marxist theory. She was going up to Him, I assume, while I was going back in time trying to find out why I was in the shit I was in and how best to change it.
By 11.30 we are both tired, feet hurting and eyes burning and the backpacks are very heavy. We skip the middle section on account of me being a little short on cash (I am saving for the July holidays) and decide to leave. Besides, the dogs must be crossing their legs by now.
We are very good today as we decide to delay our gratification well after lunch. So off we go to the local hangout and I stuff myself with the best bangers and mash in South East Queensland while Dan nibbles on her Ceasar salad. Then we do our shopping and return home at 3.00 PM to our loot.
Coffee cups in hand, to improve intellectual functionality, we slowly tear apart the plastic bags enclosing our dusty, mitey treasures. Chaim Potok, Thomas Mann, Thurber and Heine’s poems in original German pour onto the floor. Paul Davis and JS Gould follow, as does Van der Post and Desmond Morris. There are books on the influence of Soviet Russia on Nasser’s Egyptian politics, on theory of communication post-McLuhan, on the history of South East Asia, on Australian slang, a book by Eric Berne I have never seen before, a novel by Koestner about WWII I haven’t read; Bruno Bettlehaim and Eric Fromm and Wittgenstein and the Oxford Companion to the Mind. Theory of Law lies cover to cover with some old Marxist friends and Lessons from the Koran by some Pakistani publisher. Among the music is a good Bollywood CD and Handel’s Messiah; Cha-cha and Greek bazuki, Canto Coro, Armik and sing-along Hannuka songs; some Indian yogi incantations and Andean panpipes, to mention a few. Books get sorted slowly, as Dan gets absorbed in this book or the other. CD casings must be changed as many of them are broken. Place must be made on our ceiling-to-floor bookshelves for the new comers, and I can almost hear the oldies murmuring to each other as collections get bunched together, “Hello, matey, where have you been? We felt sooo incomplete without you.”
****
Finally order reigns again. We need to vacuum the place from the dust of the many hands that lovingly (or otherwise) touched each of these books before me. They have come home to rest, and as long as I live they will be safe. I am a hoarder, and I do not part with my books easily. My recurring nightmare is the fact that I have so little time left to enjoy them. I lie awake at night calculating – with the amount of work I do I can spend two hours a day reading, which is about 60 pages. I have on an average another 25 years (if my eyesight doesn’t go). That is equivalent of about 18250 hours of reading. Or 550 thousand pages. About 1800 books. ONLY. It makes it much more difficult to choose what to read and what to drop. So many books, so little time.
I am sure I’ll forget all these qualms at the next Bookfest. I am sure…
We hype about it weeks before it is here, preparing lists of what to fish for. It is permanently entered into our calendar, once on Australia Day long weekend, and once, six months later, at Queen’s Birthday.
We get up at 6:00AM, although the Fest doesn’t start until 9. Parked next to the lift at 7:30AM, we wander off to the Steam Café, the only thing open for breakfast that early. It is ok in January when it is steaming hot by 7, but now it’s winter and Southbank is chilly. We absorb the hot tea and toast in silence, each one of us already lost in visions of piles of books and lines of Brisbane’s most weird population – “the obsessive readers”.
When we get back to the Centre by 8.45, they are there already. Old pensioners with magnifying glasses, gaunt ladies of the society, young students, pregnant mums with prams, hippy 60 plus, bikies in black leather and silver chains, kids with accents, parents with no English, absent-minded academics and personas that look as if they spent the night on a bench. They come dragging suitcases, shopping trolleys, carton boxes the size of 90 litre fridges, backpacks, and all kinds of containers. The lounge is already open and there is a lot of impatient shuffling in front of the huge doors, while people chat in quiet voices as if in awe of this massive amount of knowledge awaiting them behind the doors.
Then the doors open and the stampede starts. Those who can run, do so. The less lucky ones shuffle, trot, push and shove. No decorum is left as the ORs focus on their destination, like lemmings falling off the cliffs. In the midst of the shuffle I try not to lose sight of Dan’s mousey locks as she heads straight for the CDs.
It is all pre-planned. Music first, because we discovered last January that we could get some really good stuff for $4 maximum per CD. A young woman with black eyes of a hungry raven shoves tens of children CDs into her shopping trolley indiscriminately. A rather dishevelled and heavy breathing gentleman next to me asks me what I am after. I respond, “anything non-Anglo” and he wipes a SALSA record into my hand with his sweaty palm. It doesn’t have a cover and is badly scratched, but he is so earnest I have no heart to tell him that he is a moron, so I take it with a smile and deposit it a few tables later.
By the time I get to the third table the CDs are spilling out of my hands and I badly need the loo. Supporting the loot with one hand and chin I desperately feel around with the other for my mobile. I have visions of having dropped it, or left it in a public toilet (been there, done that). Aisles away, Dan sees the panic and comes running. I hand her the music, mouth out “mobile” and run out into the safety of the restrooms.
(The mobile was in the car, by the way. So no panic. I am contactable still)
Now comes the turn for books. It took us from 9.30 to 11.30 to do two of the four halls and even that just broadly because Dan is allergic to book mould (plenty of this in subtropical Brisbane) and her eyes started burning. We managed to fill in 4 large backpacks, around 50 paperbacks in total plus 30 CDs. Much less than last year, when we went in there with a large suitcase each and returned three times to fill them up, in the end having to pull down the back seats of our Volvo SW and paying over 1000$ for the pleasure of erudition. Which reminds me.
A boss decides to sack his lazy cleaning lady.
“Look, Bridget, I can write my name in the dust on this desk.”
“Can you now, Sir?” she exclaims. “Isn’t erudition a wonderful thing?”
The amount of Christian books given away is just amazing. Not books about religion, but religious books. One would think that they are read, contemplated, cherished. But no; here we have endless manuals on how to get to the good old Lord, how to pray, why bad things happen to God fearing people, etc. And the buyers are all, invariably, over 60 and often non-English speaking. When Britannia Ruled the Waves, Christianity became a fad with the minorities that accepted the British protection in the face of the national liberations movements. Displaced from their own cultural milieu, these ghosts of colonial power now hope to join Churchill and Gordon in heaven. Many of the faces reminded me of my own paternal grandmother who lost it seriously in her late sixties and early seventies and joined the Pentacostals. Her bookshelves were as full of Bible commentaries and study aides as mine were full of Islamic history and Marxist theory. She was going up to Him, I assume, while I was going back in time trying to find out why I was in the shit I was in and how best to change it.
By 11.30 we are both tired, feet hurting and eyes burning and the backpacks are very heavy. We skip the middle section on account of me being a little short on cash (I am saving for the July holidays) and decide to leave. Besides, the dogs must be crossing their legs by now.
We are very good today as we decide to delay our gratification well after lunch. So off we go to the local hangout and I stuff myself with the best bangers and mash in South East Queensland while Dan nibbles on her Ceasar salad. Then we do our shopping and return home at 3.00 PM to our loot.
Coffee cups in hand, to improve intellectual functionality, we slowly tear apart the plastic bags enclosing our dusty, mitey treasures. Chaim Potok, Thomas Mann, Thurber and Heine’s poems in original German pour onto the floor. Paul Davis and JS Gould follow, as does Van der Post and Desmond Morris. There are books on the influence of Soviet Russia on Nasser’s Egyptian politics, on theory of communication post-McLuhan, on the history of South East Asia, on Australian slang, a book by Eric Berne I have never seen before, a novel by Koestner about WWII I haven’t read; Bruno Bettlehaim and Eric Fromm and Wittgenstein and the Oxford Companion to the Mind. Theory of Law lies cover to cover with some old Marxist friends and Lessons from the Koran by some Pakistani publisher. Among the music is a good Bollywood CD and Handel’s Messiah; Cha-cha and Greek bazuki, Canto Coro, Armik and sing-along Hannuka songs; some Indian yogi incantations and Andean panpipes, to mention a few. Books get sorted slowly, as Dan gets absorbed in this book or the other. CD casings must be changed as many of them are broken. Place must be made on our ceiling-to-floor bookshelves for the new comers, and I can almost hear the oldies murmuring to each other as collections get bunched together, “Hello, matey, where have you been? We felt sooo incomplete without you.”
****
Finally order reigns again. We need to vacuum the place from the dust of the many hands that lovingly (or otherwise) touched each of these books before me. They have come home to rest, and as long as I live they will be safe. I am a hoarder, and I do not part with my books easily. My recurring nightmare is the fact that I have so little time left to enjoy them. I lie awake at night calculating – with the amount of work I do I can spend two hours a day reading, which is about 60 pages. I have on an average another 25 years (if my eyesight doesn’t go). That is equivalent of about 18250 hours of reading. Or 550 thousand pages. About 1800 books. ONLY. It makes it much more difficult to choose what to read and what to drop. So many books, so little time.
I am sure I’ll forget all these qualms at the next Bookfest. I am sure…
My New Sacred Text (07 May 2005)
I read it on the train, trying not to knock other commuters off their feet. I read it in the bath tub, a towel in hand, in case the book got wet. I read it on the "Thinker's Seat" early mornings, and I read it in bed, falling asleep with it open on my chest, as if I wanted my heart to absorb its lines when my mind switched off. For two weeks, I mulled over it, making notes, creating a slide presentation, sharing it with friends.
It's not a book of poetry.
It isn't a novel.
It is not even a sacred text, or a philosophical discourse. But it has become, in this past few weeks, my Bible of sorts.
The book I am writing about is Pratkanis' and Aronson's "The Age of Propaganda: the everyday use and abuse of persuasion."
I know you will think I am the most rotten person on earth, but in all my years of running business this is the best book to describe marketing strategies. The funny thing is, the writers didn't intend it to be that. Their aim was to create a "wake-up call" to the American public that would help them dig themselves out of the bad effect advertising and political propaganda has on them. Except that most of the American public couldn't care less, and those who care are already immune to bull-shit. Meanwhile, among the warnings and examples are explanations of marketing strategies and why they work - as one reviewer said, "worth pure gold. This is a riveting, mind-expanding, even freeing book" - and I have already started experimenting with a few (albeit ethical) tactics in my work. Guess what? They work. They do. I love Pratkanis!! *smooch*
All the other marketing books, of which I have a stack, are paltry nonsense in comparison. Forget about write-ups - do workshops. Forget about mugs, magnets - do favors. Make your client feel bad about themselves, then generously forgive them their misdemeanors. They will feel even worse and try to do something in return. Create frivolous groups and make belonging contingent upon them obeying your rules - apparently people are such pack animals that they need these "granfaloons" for self-esteem. And so on, and so forth. I loved it.
So, if you are in business, or you want to convince your hubby to buy that 4WD, or that nasty secretary to let you see the boss: read the book. You can buy it from Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0716722119/104-3028806-0253519?v=glance at a very cheap price. Which is unfair, because it has the potential of making you gold.
And hey, "if you think you are - then you are".
It's not a book of poetry.
It isn't a novel.
It is not even a sacred text, or a philosophical discourse. But it has become, in this past few weeks, my Bible of sorts.
The book I am writing about is Pratkanis' and Aronson's "The Age of Propaganda: the everyday use and abuse of persuasion."
I know you will think I am the most rotten person on earth, but in all my years of running business this is the best book to describe marketing strategies. The funny thing is, the writers didn't intend it to be that. Their aim was to create a "wake-up call" to the American public that would help them dig themselves out of the bad effect advertising and political propaganda has on them. Except that most of the American public couldn't care less, and those who care are already immune to bull-shit. Meanwhile, among the warnings and examples are explanations of marketing strategies and why they work - as one reviewer said, "worth pure gold. This is a riveting, mind-expanding, even freeing book" - and I have already started experimenting with a few (albeit ethical) tactics in my work. Guess what? They work. They do. I love Pratkanis!! *smooch*
All the other marketing books, of which I have a stack, are paltry nonsense in comparison. Forget about write-ups - do workshops. Forget about mugs, magnets - do favors. Make your client feel bad about themselves, then generously forgive them their misdemeanors. They will feel even worse and try to do something in return. Create frivolous groups and make belonging contingent upon them obeying your rules - apparently people are such pack animals that they need these "granfaloons" for self-esteem. And so on, and so forth. I loved it.
So, if you are in business, or you want to convince your hubby to buy that 4WD, or that nasty secretary to let you see the boss: read the book. You can buy it from Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0716722119/104-3028806-0253519?v=glance at a very cheap price. Which is unfair, because it has the potential of making you gold.
And hey, "if you think you are - then you are".
The Best of the Best (04 April 2005)
In the world of translation, one thing is vital: that you are a specialist in the language you translate from and into. Otherwise, you may as well sell potatoes.
So when I come across some really "good" freelancers, I can't stop myself from introducing them to the wider world ;-)
Here are some "About Me" quotes:
"We are specialized in two language pairs: Arabic>English and English>Arabic. Our main goal is to stick to tight deadlines and to offer the best quality, so, we decided to focus only on these two pairs."
Thank God! Their main goal is not to stick to tight deadlines, I prefer tight jeans. It's all a matter of choice. I assume the "two pairs" are him and his mirror-image?
"We employ three teams that collaborate to achive tasks assigned to them before deadlines. We stick to our slogan:”low price, best quality, almost in no time!”.
It would be a sad freelancer indeed who would achieve his tasks AFTER the deadline. Now, if I did not actually know this guy, I would have thought he was Indian :-)
"During this period, we translated a large amout of technical manulas, brochures, research papers, books, theses and a variety of documents related to a variety of language registers. As for localization, we always focus on transferring the themse of the Source Text into its counterpart in the Target Text in a way that satisfies the Target Text receiver. We participated, through contracts and subcontracts in localizing famous computer learning series, books and software manulas for reputable software and PC-learning companies."
Now who wants to start picking up the spelling mistakes in this bit? What are "manulas"? "Themse" anyone with me? "Amout" in Arabic means "I will die" - was it a Freudian slip? And how come he just said he "sticks to these two pairs" and now has a "variety of language registers"? Or is he not registering? Or maybe it is US English, UK English and Cairene English? A click away, under "Services"
"We offer a quality-oriented translation in ALL language registers."
One more click and magically the register has shrunk to "We only deal with two language pairs to ensure quality: Arabic>English and English>Arabic."
" We are always up-to-date regarding new terms and methodology of translation, localization and technical writing. We promise you to do your work with the utmost accuracy. We promise you to cling to your deadlines. And finally we promise you the best rates in the market."
And I promise to not send you any work, mate. Stop clinging, it doesn't befit a big boy like you. Sure you can have a dead-line. You can have a dead-anything if you keep it up this way :-)
So when I come across some really "good" freelancers, I can't stop myself from introducing them to the wider world ;-)
Here are some "About Me" quotes:
"We are specialized in two language pairs: Arabic>English and English>Arabic. Our main goal is to stick to tight deadlines and to offer the best quality, so, we decided to focus only on these two pairs."
Thank God! Their main goal is not to stick to tight deadlines, I prefer tight jeans. It's all a matter of choice. I assume the "two pairs" are him and his mirror-image?
"We employ three teams that collaborate to achive tasks assigned to them before deadlines. We stick to our slogan:”low price, best quality, almost in no time!”.
It would be a sad freelancer indeed who would achieve his tasks AFTER the deadline. Now, if I did not actually know this guy, I would have thought he was Indian :-)
"During this period, we translated a large amout of technical manulas, brochures, research papers, books, theses and a variety of documents related to a variety of language registers. As for localization, we always focus on transferring the themse of the Source Text into its counterpart in the Target Text in a way that satisfies the Target Text receiver. We participated, through contracts and subcontracts in localizing famous computer learning series, books and software manulas for reputable software and PC-learning companies."
Now who wants to start picking up the spelling mistakes in this bit? What are "manulas"? "Themse" anyone with me? "Amout" in Arabic means "I will die" - was it a Freudian slip? And how come he just said he "sticks to these two pairs" and now has a "variety of language registers"? Or is he not registering? Or maybe it is US English, UK English and Cairene English? A click away, under "Services"
"We offer a quality-oriented translation in ALL language registers."
One more click and magically the register has shrunk to "We only deal with two language pairs to ensure quality: Arabic>English and English>Arabic."
" We are always up-to-date regarding new terms and methodology of translation, localization and technical writing. We promise you to do your work with the utmost accuracy. We promise you to cling to your deadlines. And finally we promise you the best rates in the market."
And I promise to not send you any work, mate. Stop clinging, it doesn't befit a big boy like you. Sure you can have a dead-line. You can have a dead-anything if you keep it up this way :-)
Aleph, beth, gemail (08 March 2005)
I have just lost everything I wrote into this blog entry, and I am not happy. Writing doesn’t come easily to me these days, not with the constant pain I am in. But I won’t be beaten into submission by someone’s incompetency. Server Error my a***, 20six!
Ok, so what was I about. Yes, I have just finished reading a delectably written book on the history of alphabet. Alpha Beta: How 26 Letters Changed the World by John Man is no academically boring textbook. It takes us to the origins of writing, starting with scratches on bones and stones, to Sumer, Egypt, Phoenicia, then via the Greeks to Etruscans and ultimately Romans. The book is wittily written, with lots of fascinating stories about archaeologists battling thieves in Southern Egypt for the quickly disappearing evidence of first ever letters (not pictographs); of how the Korean language came into being as an act of a single king who had a vision of his nation reading, of Etruscans and a Scottish academic hooligan who resurrected them, of Homer and Serbian bards, and many, many more.
The fact that I have not written for a while about any books doesn’t mean that I have not been reading. It’s just that life has been hectic, with France calling at 10 PM and asking if they could get something translated by 3 PM THEIR time (which is 4 AM MY time), and similar. But I have been reading, I swear. I have finished another book on disappearing languages by Mark Abley that left me with more questions than answers. Foremost among these was “Is English a virus?”. But I will have to leave Abley to another blog entry.
William Darylmple’s From the Holy Mountain: A Journey Among the Christians of the Middle East is another fantastic book by a man who vini and vidi, not just wrote another piece of crap about the Middle East. His journey showcased the often tragic plight of Armenian, Palestinian, Lebanese and Palestinian Christians without zealotry and prejudice. Besides, it was so full of history that it forced me to go back to reading about Byzantium. The result was that I got myself John J. Norwich’s trilogy on the Byzantine Empire, of which part iii arrived miraculously before parts i and ii. Amazon works in mysterious ways J
Talking of shopping, just a few weeks ago I finally managed to obtain a copy of Oizerman’s Problems in the History of Philosophy, the first book ever that I translated into Arabic in my life for the then Soviet publishing giant Mezhdunarodnaya Kniga. I have lost the manuscript when I had to leave “home”. It is stashed somewhere safely in a friend’s container in a sub-saharan country in Africa, feeding termites. At least they will end up being intelligent, left-winged termites. Holding the book in my hands took me 20 years back and ever since I have been itching for a publisher in armor, on a white horse (with a chequebook in the saddle) who will give me a book to translate. I wouldn’t mind doing a Bernard Lewis, for the edification of the Arab world ;-) I even visualize this on my nightly tug-of-war-heel-leave that-heel walks.
After all, Dilbert’s creator Scott Adams in his hilarious The Dilbert Future: Thriving on Business Stupidity in the 21st Century tells of how he managed to visualize himself into a syndicated cartoonist while still chained to a cubicle in some corporate madhouse. He used to write affirmations, 15 lines every day, of what he wanted to achieve.
“A well-endowed publisher will pay me to translate a Lewis”. Doesn’t look bad. Looks better than panem nostrum quotidianum da nobis hodie. Can I have bacon with that, please, Allah?
Ok, so what was I about. Yes, I have just finished reading a delectably written book on the history of alphabet. Alpha Beta: How 26 Letters Changed the World by John Man is no academically boring textbook. It takes us to the origins of writing, starting with scratches on bones and stones, to Sumer, Egypt, Phoenicia, then via the Greeks to Etruscans and ultimately Romans. The book is wittily written, with lots of fascinating stories about archaeologists battling thieves in Southern Egypt for the quickly disappearing evidence of first ever letters (not pictographs); of how the Korean language came into being as an act of a single king who had a vision of his nation reading, of Etruscans and a Scottish academic hooligan who resurrected them, of Homer and Serbian bards, and many, many more.
The fact that I have not written for a while about any books doesn’t mean that I have not been reading. It’s just that life has been hectic, with France calling at 10 PM and asking if they could get something translated by 3 PM THEIR time (which is 4 AM MY time), and similar. But I have been reading, I swear. I have finished another book on disappearing languages by Mark Abley that left me with more questions than answers. Foremost among these was “Is English a virus?”. But I will have to leave Abley to another blog entry.
William Darylmple’s From the Holy Mountain: A Journey Among the Christians of the Middle East is another fantastic book by a man who vini and vidi, not just wrote another piece of crap about the Middle East. His journey showcased the often tragic plight of Armenian, Palestinian, Lebanese and Palestinian Christians without zealotry and prejudice. Besides, it was so full of history that it forced me to go back to reading about Byzantium. The result was that I got myself John J. Norwich’s trilogy on the Byzantine Empire, of which part iii arrived miraculously before parts i and ii. Amazon works in mysterious ways J
Talking of shopping, just a few weeks ago I finally managed to obtain a copy of Oizerman’s Problems in the History of Philosophy, the first book ever that I translated into Arabic in my life for the then Soviet publishing giant Mezhdunarodnaya Kniga. I have lost the manuscript when I had to leave “home”. It is stashed somewhere safely in a friend’s container in a sub-saharan country in Africa, feeding termites. At least they will end up being intelligent, left-winged termites. Holding the book in my hands took me 20 years back and ever since I have been itching for a publisher in armor, on a white horse (with a chequebook in the saddle) who will give me a book to translate. I wouldn’t mind doing a Bernard Lewis, for the edification of the Arab world ;-) I even visualize this on my nightly tug-of-war-heel-leave that-heel walks.
After all, Dilbert’s creator Scott Adams in his hilarious The Dilbert Future: Thriving on Business Stupidity in the 21st Century tells of how he managed to visualize himself into a syndicated cartoonist while still chained to a cubicle in some corporate madhouse. He used to write affirmations, 15 lines every day, of what he wanted to achieve.
“A well-endowed publisher will pay me to translate a Lewis”. Doesn’t look bad. Looks better than panem nostrum quotidianum da nobis hodie. Can I have bacon with that, please, Allah?
Mizrahi (02 November 2005)
w w w . h a a r e t z . c o m
Last update - 00:54 11/02/2005
Trapped in a group photograph
Amir believes in the distinction between private and public worlds, between an insistence on a human, personal touch with the Palestinian populace and support for perpetuation of the occupation
By Yochai Oppenheimer
"Yasmin" ("Jasmine") by Eli Amir, Am Oved Publishers, 411 pages, NIS 84Several years ago, Ella Shohat wrote about the hybrid Jewish-Arab identity of Jews from Islamic countries and about the demand made of those Jews who immigrated to Israel soon after it was established - namely, for repression of that identity and for adoption of an Israeli identity free of Arab characteristics.This "Arabness" was generally limited to "folklore" and a nostalgia for Baghdad, for its coffee shops, for Arab music and Arabic language and, at the same time, for the life the Jews had led in a traditional, hierarchical society prior to their crisis of immigration.Writers like Sami Michael, Shimon Balas and Eli Amir represented this "Arabness" as a litmus test of Israeli society's liberalism and its capacity for enabling the presence of an ethnic culture. However, the new perspective created by these writers expressed no doubt as to the validity of nationalistic positions. The "agenda" of this ethnic writing left no room for political questions pertaining to the attitude toward Arabs in Israel or Palestinians, and instead focused solely on confronting social and cultural issues.In Eli Amir's "Jasmine," Arab-Jewish identity is translated for the first time into the political context that is part of today's headlines. The novel concentrates on the first year after the Six-Day War of June 1967 and surveys the perspectives of Arabs living in East Jerusalem - including those of Abu Nabil, the Muslim nationalist, versus Abu George, the realistic and pragmatic Christian; of radicals versus moderates; and especially of Jasmine, Abu George's daughter, a young widow who has spent five years studying in Paris and has now returned for a visit with her family that becomes a prolonged stay.On the other hand, the narrative also observes the perspectives of Nuri, a Jew who has immigrated to Israel from Iraq and is an adviser on Arab affairs; of a professor of Middle Eastern studies; of a cabinet minister; of an official whose father was killed right before his eyes many years earlier; and of Nuri's parents, brother and uncle.This is a sort of group photograph that primarily presents both the ideological boundaries within which the Israeli and Palestinian national psyches are trapped and the absence of a common denominator that could enable a dialogue beyond the military-power equation between Israelis and Palestinians. To describe the political discourse on both sides, the novel includes many essay-like passages that present disagreements among the Jews themselves, and among the Arabs themselves, as well as arguments between Jews and Arabs that repeat, ad nauseum, the same worn-out rhetoric: the Palestinians' demand concerning the right of return and their perception of what they call the Nakba ("catastrophe") of the creation of Israel in 1948, in contrast to the certainty among the Jews that the Arabs want to liquidate Israel. Readers interested in a depiction of the post-1967-war political mood in Israeli and Palestinian society will find considerable material in this novel.Hybrid identityAmir's book might never have been possible were it not for the intensive writing in recent years on Jewish-Arab relations (Yitzhak Laor, Ronit Matalon, Michal Govrin, etc.), and for the tradition of love stories that has always been a part of Israeli fiction, in which "enemy lines" are crossed and a romance between a Jewish woman and an Arab man, or between an Arab woman and a Jewish man, develops. However, unlike other Israeli writers, whose radical thinking and rejection of conventional Israeli narratives serve as the basis for their political identification with the Arab case, Amir prefers yet again to connect with his Arab-Jewish identity and to be a "member of the Arab world."Recognition of this hybrid identity enables the novel's hero to note the ever-increasing discrepancy between his human sensitivity to the suffering of the occupied, and his establishment role as a representative of the occupying power. He slowly becomes aware of his inability to provide the Israeli occupation with an enlightened tone of consideration for the personal needs of the occupied Palestinians - without, of course, jeopardizing "security" needs or the continuation of control of the Palestinians.This process of self-awareness ultimately leads the protagonist to submit his resignation. His emotional position does not stem from an identification with the "other" - as is the case with the above-mentioned authors - but rather from an identification with his own self - with the refugee inside him, whose Arabness was silenced and whose suffering as a Jewish refugee who lost his homeland is not much different from the suffering of the Palestinians.Amir believes in the distinction between private and public worlds, between an insistence on a human, personal touch with the Palestinian populace and support for perpetuation of the occupation - namely, for its transformation into an invisible occupation. However, this option of an enlightened occupation is doomed to failure: The personal search of Palestinians at checkpoints, the refusal to permit a husband, a refugee, to return home for the sake of family reunification, and the confiscation of assets and property of Palestinians - all these repeatedly articulate the nature of the occupation in the novel, just as such acts do in reality. Like the slogans granting Mizrahim (Jews of Middle Eastern descent) the status of mediators in the peace process, the mottos spouted by the regime's spokespersons and agents about peaceful Jewish-Arab coexistence are intended to blur the occupation's concreteness. The hero learns to examine, in a critical manner, his self-image as a "member of the Histadrut labor federation" and as "someone who enjoys the intoxicating feeling that I represent the regime and that everyone accedes to my requests and greets me with a smile."Contact with Arabs also enables him to become someone who represents Palestinian political positions, with which he has not previously identified. Personal contact, which evolves into a romance, between Nuri and Jasmine, generates an unexpected metamorphosis in her as well: Once a young woman with a bitter animosity toward Israelis, Jasmine now becomes aware that "our occupiers walk about, like us, with wounded hearts" and she is even able to display an understanding of what she herself terms "your somod - your love for this land." Although the enemy has not become a friend, the goal is to offer both the possibilities for identification with the "other" and the limits of any nationalist position that claims to represent absolute justice.Doubtful achievementDespite these transformations, it seems that if the characters' private lives boil down only to this, the literary achievement made by this novel is doubtful. Amir also believes in the ability of his hero, whose mother tongue is Arabic, to create a closer dialogue with his Arab lover. This is also the mission his dispatchers assign him: to exploit the linguistic closeness to "explain our position." However, the novel fails to present a common language, a "discourse of love," that can break free from the political discourse around which all dialogue, even the "intimate" one being conducted here, revolves. Jasmine's decision to speak with Nuri only in English - rather than Arabic (the mother tongue of both) or Hebrew (in which they are both fluent) - points to the diplomatic nature of their relationship. A language of love is too intolerably close to the political language ("`My gentle occupier,' she whispered, her eyes brimming with tears") or it is absent, because it has no place in the dialogue that takes place between them ("I wanted to tell her, in Hebrew and Arabic and every language in the world, all the words of love I had dreamed an entire year of uttering, but the release and my dizziness made me forget everything") - a dialogue that is unable to conceal the poverty of the novel's private-linguistic space."Jasmine" is a story built in accordance with a pattern that is very common in Israeli fiction. What can we expect from yet another love story between a Jewish man and an Arab woman, who is Christian, well-educated - and, of course, beautiful - and free in her attitudes and behavior? This is, after all, the same fantasy so prevalent in Hebrew fiction since Moshe Smilansky's first short story, "The Loving Stroke" (1906): the attraction to an Arab woman that cannot be realized and which is connected to her desire to be free of her backward society. The price of this fantasy has not changed over the years: Smilansky describes the Jewish woman he marries only because she resembles the Arab woman he loves. Amir also describes his hero's inability to establish an emotional relationship with Israeli Jewish women, while his true love must remain forbidden and impossible. On the other hand, the lives of Arab women who have been unable to consummate their love for a Jewish man are fated to be horrible and suffocating. The heroes of these tales are continually compelled to admit the presence of national boundaries with which they cannot cope. These short stories are "moving," "touching," but also sterile, because their plots and endings are predictable. The only element that is open in such a structure is the setting of the private space, which is always tainted with verbal violence and nationalistic suspicions, and which displays an inability to handle the burden and to present a deep and powerful opposition to what is so familiar.Thus, Nuri, his father and uncle appear in this narrative as individuals who, in contrast with the victory-intoxicated Israeli public at the time, understand that the occupied territories must be immediately returned to their rightful owners, even without the booby-trapped formula of "land for peace." From this standpoint, the Mizrahi identity demonstrates its innocence and its distance from its stereotypical identification with chauvinism and hatred for Arabs.Mizrahi formulaIn this context of cleansing the Mizrahi identity, the author even tends to make the reader forget about the trauma of the banishment from Iraq and about the difficult experience of adjusting to a new country. The characters of Iraqi origin are assigned a formula, which they proclaim and which frees them from the feeling of personal failure that haunts them (for example, "We were refugees like them, but today, thank God, we have everything we need - hats off to the Mapai Party!"). Nonetheless, the fascinating emotional tensions characteristic of Amir's previous works, such as tensions within the family, are given no expression in this novel, which has no characters who inspire any rage or genuine pity in the reader's heart. Amir spares no effort to prove that his Mizrahi hero is another breed of Israeli man: one who is not a chauvinist, not indifferent to the suffering of the occupied, gentle in his relations with women, diffident, considerate of others to an admirable degree, and - this is most important - complex, displaying a double identity (he can quote both Haim Nahman Bialik and Umm Kulthum). This, so it seems to be, is the novel's chief goal.Connected to this goal is the role of the novel's "good Arabs." It is the purpose of Jasmin and her father to love Nuri, to give him the legitimacy that Israeli society, in its blindness, cannot grant him, for example, in the linguistic field. Unlike what we find in Amir's book, "Farewell, Baghdad," Nuri's language is meager, lacks any ethnic or cultural uniqueness and has no stylistic freshness. However, in Jasmine's eyes, his linguistic sensitivity is that of a poet. Despite this legitimization, Nuri cannot dispense with the bear hug of the state with which he identifies because of his job and, apparently, also because of his personality. Like a tour guide, he takes Jasmine to the cemetery on the shores of Lake Kinneret, where the members of the Second Aliyah (wave of immigration) are buried and where she finally understands what Zionism really is. The connection between Nuri and his Palestinian lover cannot disengage itself from the state or from the official rhetoric of its "founding fathers." Because he served them, he was chosen for his present job, and in gratitude, he brings his lover to the founding fathers' graves.Beyond the successful lesson it teaches regarding the relative justice of the "other's" case - a lesson that the book imparts with a sense of mission - where does "Jasmine" intend to throw these two lovers? Nuri knows that he cannot offer Jasmine marriage because of the anticipated opposition of his mother and family. Neither Jasmine nor Nuri can think of another option. The decision as to where to end the story (Jasmine's departure and the murder of Radid, who refuses to accede to her husband's demand that she immigrate to Jordan) reflects a certain melt-down stemming from a predictable failure, from the constantly repeated sense that reality "is not a partner" for those who love and suffer.How serious is the love affair between Nuri and Jasmine and how much does the author's flirtation with his Arab characters stem from narcissistic needs? Apparently this closely resembles the enlightened occupier's flirtation with the occupied, the sole purpose of it being to obtain the occupied's admission of both the occupying power's humanity and the good faith in which its hand is extended in peace. This commodity is supplied by the likable Abu George, who for a moment transcends his national-political standpoint: "Even your occupation has a positive element. We have brought Jasmine back. You will never know how grateful I am to you. You have rescued my daughter."In his latest novel, Amir graphically illustrates what Fredric Jameson terms the "prison-house of language." The enlightened occupier who proclaims words of "heresy" regarding the consensus is no different, in this respect, from the benighted occupier who proclaims messianic visions. The "prison-house" also relates to the selection of a shop-worn format that turns literary creations into a constant, harmless chaperon of the occupation, into a means of generating excitement that does not require any commitment and relates to the complexity of the conflict between two nations and to the human tragedy involved. Other authors who have chosen this format were aware of its limitations and thus felt compelled to find stratagems to save the story from its format. Generally, alternative formats appear, the story and the character are fragmented, or a variety of attempts are made to neutralize and distort the predictable outcome. In Amir's case, however, no alternative is offered, nor is he apparently seeking one. His clinging to the cliches of the political discourse and to the figures of the leaders of the period (Levi Eshkol, Moshe Dayan and Gamal Abdul Nasser), who mesmerize him, creates a "realistic" novel, as the back cover announces, but one that lacks a suitable independent artistic stance.Yochai Oppenheimer teaches Hebrew literature at Tel Aviv University. His book (in Hebrew), "Political Poetry in Israel," has been published by Magnes.
Last update - 00:54 11/02/2005
Trapped in a group photograph
Amir believes in the distinction between private and public worlds, between an insistence on a human, personal touch with the Palestinian populace and support for perpetuation of the occupation
By Yochai Oppenheimer
"Yasmin" ("Jasmine") by Eli Amir, Am Oved Publishers, 411 pages, NIS 84Several years ago, Ella Shohat wrote about the hybrid Jewish-Arab identity of Jews from Islamic countries and about the demand made of those Jews who immigrated to Israel soon after it was established - namely, for repression of that identity and for adoption of an Israeli identity free of Arab characteristics.This "Arabness" was generally limited to "folklore" and a nostalgia for Baghdad, for its coffee shops, for Arab music and Arabic language and, at the same time, for the life the Jews had led in a traditional, hierarchical society prior to their crisis of immigration.Writers like Sami Michael, Shimon Balas and Eli Amir represented this "Arabness" as a litmus test of Israeli society's liberalism and its capacity for enabling the presence of an ethnic culture. However, the new perspective created by these writers expressed no doubt as to the validity of nationalistic positions. The "agenda" of this ethnic writing left no room for political questions pertaining to the attitude toward Arabs in Israel or Palestinians, and instead focused solely on confronting social and cultural issues.In Eli Amir's "Jasmine," Arab-Jewish identity is translated for the first time into the political context that is part of today's headlines. The novel concentrates on the first year after the Six-Day War of June 1967 and surveys the perspectives of Arabs living in East Jerusalem - including those of Abu Nabil, the Muslim nationalist, versus Abu George, the realistic and pragmatic Christian; of radicals versus moderates; and especially of Jasmine, Abu George's daughter, a young widow who has spent five years studying in Paris and has now returned for a visit with her family that becomes a prolonged stay.On the other hand, the narrative also observes the perspectives of Nuri, a Jew who has immigrated to Israel from Iraq and is an adviser on Arab affairs; of a professor of Middle Eastern studies; of a cabinet minister; of an official whose father was killed right before his eyes many years earlier; and of Nuri's parents, brother and uncle.This is a sort of group photograph that primarily presents both the ideological boundaries within which the Israeli and Palestinian national psyches are trapped and the absence of a common denominator that could enable a dialogue beyond the military-power equation between Israelis and Palestinians. To describe the political discourse on both sides, the novel includes many essay-like passages that present disagreements among the Jews themselves, and among the Arabs themselves, as well as arguments between Jews and Arabs that repeat, ad nauseum, the same worn-out rhetoric: the Palestinians' demand concerning the right of return and their perception of what they call the Nakba ("catastrophe") of the creation of Israel in 1948, in contrast to the certainty among the Jews that the Arabs want to liquidate Israel. Readers interested in a depiction of the post-1967-war political mood in Israeli and Palestinian society will find considerable material in this novel.Hybrid identityAmir's book might never have been possible were it not for the intensive writing in recent years on Jewish-Arab relations (Yitzhak Laor, Ronit Matalon, Michal Govrin, etc.), and for the tradition of love stories that has always been a part of Israeli fiction, in which "enemy lines" are crossed and a romance between a Jewish woman and an Arab man, or between an Arab woman and a Jewish man, develops. However, unlike other Israeli writers, whose radical thinking and rejection of conventional Israeli narratives serve as the basis for their political identification with the Arab case, Amir prefers yet again to connect with his Arab-Jewish identity and to be a "member of the Arab world."Recognition of this hybrid identity enables the novel's hero to note the ever-increasing discrepancy between his human sensitivity to the suffering of the occupied, and his establishment role as a representative of the occupying power. He slowly becomes aware of his inability to provide the Israeli occupation with an enlightened tone of consideration for the personal needs of the occupied Palestinians - without, of course, jeopardizing "security" needs or the continuation of control of the Palestinians.This process of self-awareness ultimately leads the protagonist to submit his resignation. His emotional position does not stem from an identification with the "other" - as is the case with the above-mentioned authors - but rather from an identification with his own self - with the refugee inside him, whose Arabness was silenced and whose suffering as a Jewish refugee who lost his homeland is not much different from the suffering of the Palestinians.Amir believes in the distinction between private and public worlds, between an insistence on a human, personal touch with the Palestinian populace and support for perpetuation of the occupation - namely, for its transformation into an invisible occupation. However, this option of an enlightened occupation is doomed to failure: The personal search of Palestinians at checkpoints, the refusal to permit a husband, a refugee, to return home for the sake of family reunification, and the confiscation of assets and property of Palestinians - all these repeatedly articulate the nature of the occupation in the novel, just as such acts do in reality. Like the slogans granting Mizrahim (Jews of Middle Eastern descent) the status of mediators in the peace process, the mottos spouted by the regime's spokespersons and agents about peaceful Jewish-Arab coexistence are intended to blur the occupation's concreteness. The hero learns to examine, in a critical manner, his self-image as a "member of the Histadrut labor federation" and as "someone who enjoys the intoxicating feeling that I represent the regime and that everyone accedes to my requests and greets me with a smile."Contact with Arabs also enables him to become someone who represents Palestinian political positions, with which he has not previously identified. Personal contact, which evolves into a romance, between Nuri and Jasmine, generates an unexpected metamorphosis in her as well: Once a young woman with a bitter animosity toward Israelis, Jasmine now becomes aware that "our occupiers walk about, like us, with wounded hearts" and she is even able to display an understanding of what she herself terms "your somod - your love for this land." Although the enemy has not become a friend, the goal is to offer both the possibilities for identification with the "other" and the limits of any nationalist position that claims to represent absolute justice.Doubtful achievementDespite these transformations, it seems that if the characters' private lives boil down only to this, the literary achievement made by this novel is doubtful. Amir also believes in the ability of his hero, whose mother tongue is Arabic, to create a closer dialogue with his Arab lover. This is also the mission his dispatchers assign him: to exploit the linguistic closeness to "explain our position." However, the novel fails to present a common language, a "discourse of love," that can break free from the political discourse around which all dialogue, even the "intimate" one being conducted here, revolves. Jasmine's decision to speak with Nuri only in English - rather than Arabic (the mother tongue of both) or Hebrew (in which they are both fluent) - points to the diplomatic nature of their relationship. A language of love is too intolerably close to the political language ("`My gentle occupier,' she whispered, her eyes brimming with tears") or it is absent, because it has no place in the dialogue that takes place between them ("I wanted to tell her, in Hebrew and Arabic and every language in the world, all the words of love I had dreamed an entire year of uttering, but the release and my dizziness made me forget everything") - a dialogue that is unable to conceal the poverty of the novel's private-linguistic space."Jasmine" is a story built in accordance with a pattern that is very common in Israeli fiction. What can we expect from yet another love story between a Jewish man and an Arab woman, who is Christian, well-educated - and, of course, beautiful - and free in her attitudes and behavior? This is, after all, the same fantasy so prevalent in Hebrew fiction since Moshe Smilansky's first short story, "The Loving Stroke" (1906): the attraction to an Arab woman that cannot be realized and which is connected to her desire to be free of her backward society. The price of this fantasy has not changed over the years: Smilansky describes the Jewish woman he marries only because she resembles the Arab woman he loves. Amir also describes his hero's inability to establish an emotional relationship with Israeli Jewish women, while his true love must remain forbidden and impossible. On the other hand, the lives of Arab women who have been unable to consummate their love for a Jewish man are fated to be horrible and suffocating. The heroes of these tales are continually compelled to admit the presence of national boundaries with which they cannot cope. These short stories are "moving," "touching," but also sterile, because their plots and endings are predictable. The only element that is open in such a structure is the setting of the private space, which is always tainted with verbal violence and nationalistic suspicions, and which displays an inability to handle the burden and to present a deep and powerful opposition to what is so familiar.Thus, Nuri, his father and uncle appear in this narrative as individuals who, in contrast with the victory-intoxicated Israeli public at the time, understand that the occupied territories must be immediately returned to their rightful owners, even without the booby-trapped formula of "land for peace." From this standpoint, the Mizrahi identity demonstrates its innocence and its distance from its stereotypical identification with chauvinism and hatred for Arabs.Mizrahi formulaIn this context of cleansing the Mizrahi identity, the author even tends to make the reader forget about the trauma of the banishment from Iraq and about the difficult experience of adjusting to a new country. The characters of Iraqi origin are assigned a formula, which they proclaim and which frees them from the feeling of personal failure that haunts them (for example, "We were refugees like them, but today, thank God, we have everything we need - hats off to the Mapai Party!"). Nonetheless, the fascinating emotional tensions characteristic of Amir's previous works, such as tensions within the family, are given no expression in this novel, which has no characters who inspire any rage or genuine pity in the reader's heart. Amir spares no effort to prove that his Mizrahi hero is another breed of Israeli man: one who is not a chauvinist, not indifferent to the suffering of the occupied, gentle in his relations with women, diffident, considerate of others to an admirable degree, and - this is most important - complex, displaying a double identity (he can quote both Haim Nahman Bialik and Umm Kulthum). This, so it seems to be, is the novel's chief goal.Connected to this goal is the role of the novel's "good Arabs." It is the purpose of Jasmin and her father to love Nuri, to give him the legitimacy that Israeli society, in its blindness, cannot grant him, for example, in the linguistic field. Unlike what we find in Amir's book, "Farewell, Baghdad," Nuri's language is meager, lacks any ethnic or cultural uniqueness and has no stylistic freshness. However, in Jasmine's eyes, his linguistic sensitivity is that of a poet. Despite this legitimization, Nuri cannot dispense with the bear hug of the state with which he identifies because of his job and, apparently, also because of his personality. Like a tour guide, he takes Jasmine to the cemetery on the shores of Lake Kinneret, where the members of the Second Aliyah (wave of immigration) are buried and where she finally understands what Zionism really is. The connection between Nuri and his Palestinian lover cannot disengage itself from the state or from the official rhetoric of its "founding fathers." Because he served them, he was chosen for his present job, and in gratitude, he brings his lover to the founding fathers' graves.Beyond the successful lesson it teaches regarding the relative justice of the "other's" case - a lesson that the book imparts with a sense of mission - where does "Jasmine" intend to throw these two lovers? Nuri knows that he cannot offer Jasmine marriage because of the anticipated opposition of his mother and family. Neither Jasmine nor Nuri can think of another option. The decision as to where to end the story (Jasmine's departure and the murder of Radid, who refuses to accede to her husband's demand that she immigrate to Jordan) reflects a certain melt-down stemming from a predictable failure, from the constantly repeated sense that reality "is not a partner" for those who love and suffer.How serious is the love affair between Nuri and Jasmine and how much does the author's flirtation with his Arab characters stem from narcissistic needs? Apparently this closely resembles the enlightened occupier's flirtation with the occupied, the sole purpose of it being to obtain the occupied's admission of both the occupying power's humanity and the good faith in which its hand is extended in peace. This commodity is supplied by the likable Abu George, who for a moment transcends his national-political standpoint: "Even your occupation has a positive element. We have brought Jasmine back. You will never know how grateful I am to you. You have rescued my daughter."In his latest novel, Amir graphically illustrates what Fredric Jameson terms the "prison-house of language." The enlightened occupier who proclaims words of "heresy" regarding the consensus is no different, in this respect, from the benighted occupier who proclaims messianic visions. The "prison-house" also relates to the selection of a shop-worn format that turns literary creations into a constant, harmless chaperon of the occupation, into a means of generating excitement that does not require any commitment and relates to the complexity of the conflict between two nations and to the human tragedy involved. Other authors who have chosen this format were aware of its limitations and thus felt compelled to find stratagems to save the story from its format. Generally, alternative formats appear, the story and the character are fragmented, or a variety of attempts are made to neutralize and distort the predictable outcome. In Amir's case, however, no alternative is offered, nor is he apparently seeking one. His clinging to the cliches of the political discourse and to the figures of the leaders of the period (Levi Eshkol, Moshe Dayan and Gamal Abdul Nasser), who mesmerize him, creates a "realistic" novel, as the back cover announces, but one that lacks a suitable independent artistic stance.Yochai Oppenheimer teaches Hebrew literature at Tel Aviv University. His book (in Hebrew), "Political Poetry in Israel," has been published by Magnes.
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