Category Archives: Translation industry

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Former Asymptote Journal editor-at-large Tiffany Tsao spent three years translating into English the award-winning “Sergius Seeks Bacchus”, by Indonesian poet Norman Pasaribu. By working so closely together, she says, the labels of “translator” and “author” ring false, because their roles were so “mingled” and “merged.” …

“When author and translator forge a partnership so close that their roles are “mingled” and “merged””

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village At a time when understanding different perspectives seems like our best hope for a kind and sane world, exposing the youngest members of our society to different viewpoints seems like the perfect place to start, says Emma Ramadan, author of this article. She welcomes the …

“Children’s books in translation can foster better understanding of cultural differences”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Slator has been monitoring research related to neural machine translation (NMT) for a number of years. They have recently said that research output has consistently increased since 2014 and more than doubled in 2018 compared to 2017. They base their findings on the number of papers …

“Promising research on machine translation for low-resource languages”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village The long list for the International Man Booker Prize, where, since 2016, the £100.000 award is divided equally between author and translator, has just been published. Two interesting novelties: 1) the list includes 8 women out of the 13 works selected 2) the list is …

“Why translated fiction is now selling better than English fiction”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Great panel of speakers and interesting discussions for the webinar organised by TAUS on 11 December on how to “fix” the current translation eco-system, in particular the “knowledge”, “operational” and “data” gaps. The webinar followed up on a TAUS blog entry on the same topic …

“The future of the translation eco-system: should it be “fixed” or reinvented?”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Here is an interesting take on “automation anxiety” among translators. The author’s approach was to “crawl” content from forum postings and translator blogs in order to compile “a corpus of professional discourses”. He says that, despite the wealth of studies on the issue, most research …

“Automation anxiety and translators”

by Nick Moon, linguist @cApStAn When I was seven, my family and I moved to Somerset. Three hours west of London, but light years away in terms of pace of life. And apparently language. At the end of my first day of school, I was told by my teacher to bring my daps in the …

“cApStAn linguist Nick Moon teaches us how to speak “roight proper Zummerzet””

by Danina Lupsa – Translation technologist and translation project manager @ cApStAn On September 30, my young colleagues and I woke up to discover a Facebook post from our company on a topic we had never heard about: International Translation Day. It was the perfect occasion for young translation studies graduates, senior translators and language …

“International Translation Day celebrates the key role of translators in connecting the world. Time now to give the profession a legal protection”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Translators play a key role in making world literature accessible to all but are not always given the recognition they deserve. Many publishers, for example, do not give credit to them on the covers of books. Translators say that this renders their work invisible and …

“‘At the Vanguard of Literary Change’”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Lost in translation – this recurring and derogatory judgement is an “old chestnut” that keeps bouncing back, says the author of the article. While she does confirm that some words do not have an equivalent and that translators do struggle with idioms, culture-specific words and …

“On old chestnuts and misguided ideas about translation”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Anything produced by Jost Zetzsche is premium material and his new book “Translation Matters” is no exception. The collection of articles, reviews, posts and other writings spans over 15 years, with a nice combination of historical details, real life experience, personal reflections, interviews, stories and …

“Translation matters by Jost Zetzsche”