ak2 translation

...Gagnon, who has lived in Japan for a decade, said the country's fascination for Anne dates to 1952 when the Japanese translation was published: "The Second World War was still fresh and Japanese women were living in misery. Then when the book was published, suddenly women began to feel hopeful again and were inspired by Anne's dynamism and her model of femininity."

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August 15, 2008
Mohammad Shahidul Islam

Rabindranath Tagore, being first Bengali and Asian, won Nobel Prize for literature in 1913 principally for his prose translations of Gitanjali (song offerings).

William Rothenstein, Tagore's friend, the noted English painter and art reviewer, was deeply fascinated to the South Asian poetic works. He especially was drawn to Gitanjali, Bengali for "song offerings." The delicate beauty and charm of these poems prompted Rothenstein to urge Tagore to translate them into English so more people in the West could experience them. Unenthusiastically, with much persuasion, Tagore let him have the notebook. The painter could not believe his eyes. The poems were incredible. He called his friend, the great Irish poet, William Butler Yeats, also a Nobel Laureate (1923), and finally talked Yeats into looking at the hand scrawled notebook.

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Bridgeport Hospital video interpreter removes language barriers to ED care

Monday August 11, 2008
By Janet M. Cromer, RN, MA, LMHC

In the middle of a busy evening shift in the Bridgeport Hospital (Conn.) emergency department, a Korean woman gestured frantically that she had abdominal pain. The patient did not speak English, so the staff asked her husband where it hurt, when it started, and what her medical history was.

As he struggled to answer in his few words of English, the patient's face twisted with frustration, anxiety, and pain. Then Dawn Loehn, LPN, activated the MARTTI, a two-way live videoconferencing language service. A qualified medical interpreter appeared on the screen and began translating the staff's questions into Korean and the patient's answers into English.

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10 August 2008

Sometime during my high school years in Kobe, Japan, I heard the term seiyo- kabure used to describe Japanese people who were ardent Westernizers. I never learned the real etymology of kabure, which I thought came from the verb kaburu 'to wear (on one's head), cover one's head', so that seiyo- kabure suggested to me people who donned their Western thinking caps rather than their Eastern (to-yo) ones.

It wasn't until I decided to blog about an extremely seiyo- kabure establishment at the top of Mt. Hiei, one of Japan's leading early centers of to-yo- kabure (when it was importing Buddhism from China 1200 years ago), that I discovered a more direct source for kabure. It's from kabureru 'to break out in a rash; be (noxiously) influenced by (lacquer, poison ivy, communism, Western goods/values, etc.)'...

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August 8, 2008
David Meyer

Google has released a version of its translation service that is specifically tailored to Apple's iPhone.

The Google Translate mobile service, launched on Friday, came about as the result of the company's '20 percent' time policy, which sets aside a day of each employee's week for work on any new project or idea they may wish to pursue. Google has not yet made any announcements about future versions of the service that could work on other handsets, but a spokesperson for the company told ZDNet.co.uk on Friday that such versions were intended.

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Fri Aug 08, 2008
By ANGELA JEFFS

In the same way that few British people have read all of Shakespeare's sonnets but many can quote at least a few lines of the lyric tradition, any adult who has gone through the Japanese school system is familiar with the Ogura "Hyakunin Isshu."

This collection of 100 waka — a classic poetic form written in lines of 5, 7, 5, 7 and 7 syllables — has been translated into English before. The first who dared was a British naval officer stationed in Yokohama in the Meiji Period who studied Japanese purely "out of personal desire."

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CINEMA BABEL: Translating Global Cinema, by Abe Mark Nornes. Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2008, 304 pp.,$22.50 (paper)

August 3, 2008
By DONALD RICHIE

Though foreign film is now seen by all, we are still dependent on translation to discover what is going on up on the big screen or on the little tube. This translation of dialogue can be either graphic text (subtitling) or substituted speech (dubbing).

In either case it is because the translation that the viewer must penetrate can be so confusing that the author of this highly original and always interesting book can claim that translated foreign cinema is the new Tower of Babel.

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August 3, 2008
By Jan Gardner

...With the Beijing Olympics beginning on Friday, dozens of books about China are fighting for position in the marketplace. Two about language deserve special mention.

In the lavishly illustrated "China: Empire of Living Symbols" (Da Capo), Cecilia Lindqvist, a scholar of China since the 1950s, provides an introduction to Chinese characters and a sweeping tour of the nation's history and culture. First published in 1989, it had been out of print until this spring.

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Thursday, Jul. 31, 2008
By TIM KINDSETH

Were he alive today, the Buddha would be in jail for child-support violations. Two-and-a-half millenniums of adoration and mythology have obscured the unflattering fact that the Buddha was a deadbeat dad. So a shimmering new English translation of the Buddhacarita, the 2nd century Sanskrit poem chronicling his life, reminds us that in his search for enlightenment and release from samsara — the wheel of rebirths that condemns us to endless lives and thus suffering — he cruelly abandoned his wife and young son Rahula (whose name, making a not-so-subtle point, means "fetters").

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07/29/08

Addressing Health Care Disparities by Ensuring Language Access to All

October 10-12, 2008 in Boston, Massachusetts

Hyatt Regency at the Charles

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Sunday, July 27, 2008
By Thomas Lee

"You are never going to feel less Chinesey than when you are in China," my co-worker told me.

I had two immediate reactions to this. One: Was "Chinesey" an actual word? Two: She was probably right.

She offered the above comment after learning I'd won a fellowship to China. We are both of Chinese ancestry but were born and raised in another country.

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7/27/2008

There is yet another sign of clear reversal in the so-called “relaxed education policy” in Japan, as the government’s council on revitalizing education will soon propose to increase the volume of information and improve the quality of content in school textbooks, according to the Daily Yomiuri article linked above. It is well known that the volume of content in Japanese textbooks has been reduced since the relaxed education policy was adopted in the 1990s, and is now considerably less than that in the corresponding American and European textbooks.

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Posted by: Edward

The Japanese translation of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” was released today in Japan, just two days after the one year anniversary of when the first copies of the book were originally released. Reports online note that hundreds of fans, some dressed as wizards, gathered at bookstores early Wednesday morning to get their hands on the long-awaited translation of the seventh book.

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07-24-2008

The Korea Times will hold the 39th Modern Korean Literature Translation Awards.

This annual competition accepts translated works of Korean literature in two categories: fiction and poetry.

Applicants can choose from any works of a Korean novel of any length and the same goes for poetry.

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07-25-2008

WASHINGTON (CNS) -- The Vatican has given its approval to a new English-language translation of the main constant parts of the Mass, but Catholics in the pew are unlikely to see any of the approved changes at Masses for awhile to allow for catechesis on the reasons for the revisions.

The approved text, sent to the Vatican for "recognitio," or confirmation, after a June 2006 vote by the U.S. bishops in Los Angeles, involves translation of the penitential rite, Gloria, creed, eucharistic prayers, eucharistic acclamations, Our Father and other prayers and responses used daily.

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