Cool to be a translator? Oh yeah!

Good morning, translators and interpreters and language buffs!

My fabulous weekend ended up with a rrrrooooarrrr as Attila The Stockbroker and David Rovics rolled through our town, to perform at the local U.U. Fellowship. Which is kind of like a church, only it isn’t exactly a church. I’ve got an authorized bootleg recording on my nifty little digital recording device, so I’ll share the love – and love it was. Gosh-golly if Attila (whose real name is John, and who actually deserves a mention in this blog because he was trained as an interpreter) doesn’t have poetic license, or as he puts it, he uses language live raw and bleeding. Here’s a grand Shunra meow for the poet in Residence at Brighton and Hove Albion football club, and his lovely wife Robina – whose piano accompaniment of Attilla’s romantic song (yeah, there was a romantic one) would bring tears to your eyes. Will, actually, if you go to his website and download material. Poetry will never be – quite – the same again.

David takes more explaining. His material is all online, downloadable without cost and moving without end. His concerts are an experience in grace, which is a concept that doesn’t translate well into words. Go, check him out. Folksinging, protest, you name it, he’s doing it. Amy Goodman called him “the musical version of Democracy Now”. It’s the Good Stuff. Go, listen, you’ll hear what I mean. Song for Hugo Chavez is my current favorite, celebrating the feeling of democracy in action. But download them all, and catch him live if you can.

But what’s up on the translation front? Plenty, as usual.

There’s yet another company trying to harness speech recognition to automated translation, a crime for which the penalty should be forcing the inventors to use it for communication. What Ectaco does is sell electronic translators. Uh-huh. And a nice source of income that is for human translators, cleaning up the debris of texts given into the hands of electronic counterparts.

The profession is increasing its coolness index: a San Francisco alternative rock band calls itself Translator. It’s nice to be on the radar of popular culture, at last. When we start appearing in ads and sit-coms, that’s when we’ll know we have really arrived!

Pimping the coolness, translator Janos Sanu told students at a job fair on Kauai that he’s traveled to 61 countries around the world on clients’ dime. That’s Hiker Dude’s plan for geocaching, too: whenever he interprets, he mops up the local caches. Not enough of those, says Hiker Dude!
Our colleagues are even appearing as lead characters in novels, such as Richard Galli’s Of Rice and Men, which tells the story of Guy Lopaca, who leaves the Army Language School equipped with absolutely no ability to understand the local population, which makes it hard to act as interpreter for troops trying to build the peace in Vietnam. I haven’t read it (yet!) but hey, you’re right, translation is both cool and amusing.

Budgets for literary translations are found in odd places: Peter Green found someone who’d buy a new translation of Catullus, a very dead member of the dead poets’ society. Congrats, Peter!

Less perplexingly, first volume of 'Don Quixote' has been translated into Thai by Professor Swangwan Thaichareon-Wiwat . Yeah, that’s a good book in any language. Windmill tilting is probably my most active sport, personally. Way to go, Swangwan - here’s rootin’ for volume II!

Less cool, however, is translation for Australian translator Anna Rubin, who put down her dictionary, picked up a paint-brush, and left our profession. Gosh, Anna, those are some beautiful fish in the news release. Thanks for adding beauty to the world!

The Olympics are done, but the linguistic shambles that they made are still being reported: Bulgarian short-track speed-skater Evgenia Radanova was rendered as ineloquent as the Japanese skater I told you about last week; I somehow doubt that “Well, I'm happy I passed well. But especially I'm happy I passed" was a faithful translation of what she actually said. Issues were experienced for Czech goalie Dom- inik Hasek too. What is it with the Olympic organizers? If it’s not English, do they just not care?

It is an issue dear to the heart of Peace Palestine blogger, who has established an international cooperative venture to deal with the problem of linguistic imperialism and languages of limited diffusion. The Tlaxcala site attempts to solve for texts those very problems that the Olympic organizers ran into with athletes: little languages still hold big ideas. It’s an interesting venture, and a good place for people moving into the business to pick up worthwhile credits while providing a good service. Limited diffusion is not the same as limited value, guyz!

Here’s a Port Townsend cheer (like a Bronx cheer, but we’re spraying granola) for a group of Tuscon language bigots who heckled Mauricio Farah, national inspector for Mexico's National Human Rights Commission, at a University of Arizona event promoted only in Spanish. Hello, bigots? Take a look at the constitution. Freedom of speech is not qualified by the language spoke. It’s not Freedom As Long As You Speak English, and you’re in the wrong. Immigration issues are too important to leave to bigots!

Finally, a pet peeve: what’s this about all the people who “say things through a translator”? Isn’t there a stylebook somewhere which knows that if you’re talking at all, you’ve got an interpreter, while a translator would only be pulled in if there are written documents?

This is not an error my knitting-buddy, mom-buddy, and one of my favorite bloggers anywhere would make. A blue gal in a red state gave this blog a nod – thanks, Gal-pal! – and the counter’s HUMMING in response. Viral marketing, anyone?

I’ll be back with you tomorrow. There are deadlines on my desk today!