Category Archives: Translation industry

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Google launched “Fabricius”, a web based AI tool to let users interact with ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, on July 16, 2020, to coincide with the anniversary of the Rosetta Stone. The Rosetta stone was the first Ancient Egyptian bilingual text (Egyptian/Ancient Greek) to be recovered in …

““Fabricius”, Google’s new AI tool, unravels the symbols of Ancient Egypt”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Sampooran Singh Kalra (b.1934), known as Gulzar, is an Indian lyricist, poet, author, screenwriter, and film director. His anthology of 365 poems, one for every day of the year, has just been published by Harper and Collins. He describes it as his “tribute,” in the …

““A poem a day”, 365 poems in 34 languages by 279 poets: a tribute to the many languages of India”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Chi Luu, a computational linguist and natural language processing researcher, writes about idioms and their special power to draw people together in a recent article for JSTOR Daily. The origins of idioms, she says, are most often frozen in time, lost in the mists of …

“The origins of idioms are lost in the mists of metaphor and meaning: they are “the fossilized poetry of language””

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Publishers around the world are reporting booming sales of “The Plague” (La Peste), an allegorical tale set in a town at the mercy of an epidemic, written by French Nobel prize writer Albert Camus in 1947. Penguin is rushing through a reprint of its English translation …

“New English version of Camus’ “The Plague” during Covid-19: how historical context can affect translation”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village The French film Les traducteurs (The Translators) premiered last year in November at the French Film Festival in Prague. The plot follows a group of nine talented polyglots charged with translating the third installment of a fictitious Daedalus trilogy, a series of novels that, with …

““Literary lockdown”: how the translation of a novel by a best selling author made for a thriller film plot”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village To quote scholars Barbara Byrne and Fons van de Vijver (2010), the goal of translating scales in multilingual and cross-cultural comparative survey is to produce an instrument that “measures the same construct(s) in exactly the same way” across all language versions. We know of course …

“The challenge of translating scales in multilingual surveys and the value of leveraging “legacy materials””

by Steve Dept, cApStAn CEO Beyond the AI hype and controversial reports about automatic translation achieving parity with human translation, neural machine translation (NMT) has undoubtedly made spectacular progress in the last three years. Should professional translators resist or should they use it? Machine translation software has been around for a long time. In the …

“Should professional translators shun machine translation?”

Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Never before has translation been as important as during the current coronavirus pandemic. Understanding relevant medical terms is vital at all times but all the more so during a global health crisis, where compliance to containment measures is critical in order to protect individuals and the …

“The key role of translation in ensuring that life-saving Covid-19 information reaches minority language communities within countries”

Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village People across China have been very creative in past weeks in finding ways to get around the ban on an article that was critical of how the government handled the coronavirus epidemic. The article, written by Ai Fen, director of the emergency department at a hospital …

“Skirting online censorship in China by “translating” a banned article into Morse, hexadecimal code, emoji and elvish language”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Was the removal of the Parthenon Marbles by Lord Elgin, who brought them to Britain in the early 19th century, “legal”? A leaked draft of EU paper stirs Parthenon marbles dispute, reads a recent article in the Art Newspaper. The EU paper, a negotiating mandate for …

“On how a 1801 Ottoman Empire edict and its translated English version changed the fate of the Parthenon marbles forever”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Subtitles translate a film’s dialogue into a written text superimposed on the screen, allowing viewers to read along while following the actors as they speak in their native language. Dubbing consists of translating and lip-syncing the original audiovisual text, where the original language voice track …

“Dubbing or subtitles, which is better? An age-old debate has come back to the forefront with the Oscar win for “Parasite””

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Translating the Classics was for centuries “men’s work”, writes US academic, historian and writer Erika Harlitz-Kern, in a recent article for The Week. (1) Historically, women were expected to translate the works of their contemporaries – considered less important. According to research by French academic Julie Candler …

“Does the translator’s gender influence the interpretation of a text? What happens when women translate classics?”