Friday, January 30, 2004

[A]nyone who has spent any time in New Mexico knows that a huge and growing slice of the Hispanic demographic here doesn't speak Spanish and doesn't access Spanish-language media the way recent immigrants do.

Eighty-four percent of Hispanics in New Mexico are native born.

The Kerry campaign will release their first Spanish language ad, a 30 second spot airing only in Arizona and New Mexico. Although the narrator highlights Kerry's commitment to health care and education in Spanish, the candidate, whose wife speaks fluent Spanish, utters only one foreign language line: "Soy John Kerry y he aprobado este mensaje proque quiero devolver la esperanza a este pias." (Translation: "I'm John Kerry and I approved this message because I want to return hope to this [non-existent word].")

The Note suspects Kerry, who claims to be listening to Spanish language tapes in his rare spare time, means to restore hope to this country.

Thursday, January 29, 2004

Like many across the country, they want Irish to be granted "working language" status in the European Union.

At the moment it has only "treaty language" status, meaning that while it is used in EU correspondence, it cannot be used by right in the European parliament. It also means the Union's official journal is not translated into Irish. . . .

But advocates of change say enhanced status would create more jobs for Irish speakers in Brussels and argue that -- more importantly -- the issue is a matter of principle. (emphasis added)

The new regulations, announced by the Pennsylvania Department of Education last week but not yet finalized, allow those still learning English to use bilingual dictionaries and permit translators to translate test questions as well as instructions.

But some are concerned that not all students will have access to translators, and that even if they do, cultural unfamiliarity may hinder their performance. And some wondered whether the students ought to be allowed to give answers in their native languages. ...

The use of translators and bilingual dictionaries for the PSSA would be voluntary, Wong said, adding that "the state is not about to mandate that every student have a translator." Nor, at least this year, will the Education Department set proficiency standards for translators, she said.

That troubles some observers. Len Rieser, a lawyer with the Education Law Center in Philadelphia - which filed a 2002 civil-rights complaint alleging that the lack of accommodations for students with limited English is discriminatory - said the new provisions would create a whole new set of problems.

"What if four different translators translated things four different ways?" he asked. And if the state doesn't mandate translators and dictionaries for all non-English speakers, he said, "I don't know if you can have a valid test; there are obvious questions about whether you can have a uniform system that way."

The issue of accommodations for non-English speakers became a hot topic with the 2002 enactment of the federal No Child Left Behind law, which mandated that every student, regardless of his or her level of English proficiency, had to be tested during his or her first year in the United States. Previously, immigrants who did not speak English well were excused from the tests for as long as three years.

Mr Parrikar, addressing the gathering after releasing the bilingual English-Konkani version of the Constitution of India, on January 26, also suggested that GKA should try to find more translators for carrying out authentic translations into Konkani. ...

Mr Parrikar, in his piece of advice, said that anything which moves to the extreme is bad and the Konkani protagonists should try to present the language before the people in a format which is understandable to them. “If Konkani is presented in its most elite form, the people in general may not appreciate it,” he cautioned.

Speaking to journalists taking part in an EP/EU seminar on the EP and enlargement, Mr Priestley said: "Our attempts to attract interpreters have proved significantly unsuccessful. We need short term, pragmatic solutions. This, however, does not call into question the status of Maltese as an official language...

"There is no magic wand. Everyone has to realize there is this problem. We cannot from day one provide full language cover in Maltese.

"We will not have the full teams in place for any of the languages of candidate countries as of May 1."

The government, the statement said, should provide resources to the Bureau of Ghana Languages, the Department of Ghanaian Languages of the University College of Education, Winneba to implement a local language policy and to strengthen their capacities to produce adequate local language books and train more local language teachers.

When Solmarie started school, she found that her Spanish was different from that of many of her classmates who came from Mexico. Puerto Ricans have several words that aren’t spoken by Mexicans, Albelo said.

For example, the Puerto Rican word for “beans” is “habichuela,” but in Mexico, people say “frijoles.”

Wednesday, January 28, 2004

One of the ways [Gibson] tries to produce an air of authenticity in the film is to have the principals speaking Aramaic, the dialect of Hebrew that Jesus would have spoken, and the Roman soldiers and Pilate speaking Latin.

But very chillingly, in the interview after the showing, Mel Gibson said the reason that he had [his cast] speaking those original languages -- and I didn't misinterpret him, because he told a long story to illustrate it -- he said, "If I was doing a film about very fierce, horrible, nasty Vikings coming to invade a town, and had them on their ship with their awful weapons, and they came pouring off the ship ready to slaughter -- to have them speak English wouldn't be menacing enough."

How did that hit you?

I almost puked. It was so xenophobic: The good guys speak English; the bad guys speak these other languages. It wasn't a consistent view, because in the film Jesus was speaking the same language as his tormentors, but even so, I think it was meant to cause confusion and awe in the audience, to have these horrible people speaking either a Semitic or an ancient language like this.

Did you feel like that the use of these ancient languages was a veiled anti-Semitic comment?

Anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim. Some of those words in Aramaic sound a little bit like Arabic -- Arabic is a Semitic language too. [In the film, it came off like] nasty foreigners were doing this thing to our beautiful Jesus. So when Mel Gibson said in the interview that the reason for the other languages was to highlight the brutality, that kind of freaked me out. I could see how it would work on an unsophisticated audience.

It's probably the same feeling that people in Guantánamo Bay have, having had soldiers barking at them in English for two years.

Tuesday, January 20, 2004

The president already has $99 million in the bank to spend between now and the Republican convention on Labor Day Weekend. He intends to spend it all. . . . Bush is delaying the start of his reelection drive until a winner emerges in the Democratic race.

Proportional voting. The Democrats no longer use a winner-take-all-system. Thanks to party reforms, votes are allocated proportionally. So, in a nine-person field, a candidate can "win," say, South Carolina with a plurality of 30 percent of the vote -- but only get about 30 percent of that state's delegates. In the old days, the winner would have taken them all.

A persistent field. Several also-rans will doubtless drop out after a few primaries. But the first few primaries could well splinter and give five or six candidates a reason to stay in through March 2 (Super Tuesday), by which time 2,046, or nearly half, the delegates will have been chosen (and splintered). ...

Howard Dean could narrowly win the first two contests, Iowa (45 delegates) on Jan. 19 and New Hampshire (22) on Jan. 27, but not get the necessary momentum to produce an aura of inevitability. These first two events are low-delegate states. The next primary day, Feb. 3, with a a total of 269 delegates at stake, will produce very different headlines.

South Carolina's 45 delegates selected that day will likely be shared by Wesley Clark, Al Sharpton, and John Edwards. In Missouri, with 74 votes, local boy Dick Gephardt will surely come out on top. Oklahoma, with 40 delegates, will be a good state for Clark. New Mexico (26) is Dean territory, but larger Arizona next door (55) could split several ways.

Barring a dramatic change in the dynamics of the race, by Feb. 3 Dean will likely be slowed, but momentum will not shift decisively to Clark (or anyone else). Any of three candidates, Clark, Gephardt, or Dean, could be narrowly leading in the delegate count. Kerry, Edwards, Sharpton, even Kucinich will all have some delegates too.

The longer more than two candidates stay in, the less likely it is that the nominee will emerge early. ...

With proportional representation, this dynamic peels off a few delegates here and a few there. The frontrunner could well come into the convention (stagger in?) with fewer than 40 percent of the delegates. The Democrats also have 715 "super-delegates" who are elected officials and party leaders. But these delegates have no consensus favorite, either.

Howard Dean is one of the most secular candidates to run for president in modern history.

Dean himself is frank on this point, perhaps too frank. "[I] don't go to church very often," the Episcopalian-turned-Congregationalist remarked in a debate last month. "My religion doesn't inform my public policy." When Dean talks about organized religion, it is often in a negative context. "I don't want to listen to the fundamentalist preachers anymore," he shouted at the California Democratic Convention in March. . . .

As Dean has described it in recent months, the dispute over the bike path caused him to break with the Episcopal Church and become a Congregationalist. . . .

[Dean's] moment of truth has nothing to do with God or theology or personal faith; rather, it's about local politics. It's hard to imagine this story will resonate with religious voters, because very few people would untether themselves from their spiritual home over a bike path. Indeed, when Dean first explained his denominational switch on ABC's "This Week," George Stephanopoulos was incredulous: "Over the bike path?" Most people respond that way, even Dean's friends and family.

Dean provided a fine glimpse of his personal scale. "I'm still learning a lot about faith and the South and how important it is," he told reporters, cheerfully admitting to an attitude of perfect expediency about the meaning of life. (The first evidence of this spiritual casualness came in the conversion to Congregationalism for the bike path.) Then he began to expound, piously and shallowly, upon the Book of Job, which he attributed to the wrong (excuse me, to the other) Testament. Not long afterward he remembered a visit to the Galilee this way: "If you know much about the Bible--which I do ... ." But when he was asked to identify his favorite passage in the Bible, the ardent scripturalist said only, "Anything in the Gospels," which, like Bush's famous retort that his favorite philosopher is "Christ," was really a way of not answering the question, . . .

Dean should have had the refreshing integrity to agree that he is not a pious man, and to insist that piety is not a qualification for the presidency. There was no shame in Dean's secularism, until he shamed it with his pandering religiosity.

Friday, January 16, 2004

Monday, January 12, 2004

In 1999, [USA Today reporter Jack Kelley] wrote a story about a human-rights activist, whom he interviewed in the presence of two translators. One of the translators vouched for him, as I learned in the Post, but the other one, a woman living in Texas, said she didn't feel like coming forward and discussing the matter. Kelley's boss told him she'd better turn up. She didn't. So Kelley asked another translator to talk to his superior, pretending to be the translator who'd been at the interview, so he could substantiate the story.

Friday, January 09, 2004

Tuesday, January 06, 2004

What I want to emphasise is that many concepts circulating in translation studies (such as adequacy, equivalence, faithfulness) can also be considered from the point of view of negotiation. Negotiation is a process by virtue of which, in order to get something, each party renounces something else, and at the end everybody feels satisfied since one cannot have everything.

For example, there is no exact way to translate the Latin word "Mus" into English. In Latin "Mus" covers the same semantic space covered by "mouse" and "rat" in English - as well as in French, where there is "souris" and "rat", in Spanish ("ratón" and "rata") or in German ("maus" and "ratte"). But in Italian, even though the difference between a "topo" or, more unusually a "sorcio", and "ratto" is recorded in dictionaries, in everyday language one can use "topo" even for a big rat - perhaps stretching it to "topone" or "topaccio" - but "ratto" is used only in technical texts. So what happens when we find the word "topo" in an Italian translation of a French text? Does it translate back as "rat" or "souris"?

Monday, January 05, 2004

Dean said his own education about unconscious racism began at Yale, where he graduated in 1971. He was trying to get a child from the inner city of New Haven that he was tutoring to talk "proper" English. One of his African-American roommates told him, "Why don't you leave him alone?"