Lawrence Venuti is a leading translator of modern Italian and Catalan literature and internationally one of the most influential theorists in the field of literary translation. In their recent ...interview, Peter Constantine asked him about his craft and theory of translation.
The first of a two-volume memoir, Between Two Millstones, Book 1 explores Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's exile from the Soviet Union and struggles to find a home in the West.
Desegregating Language Constantine, Peter
World literature today,
07/2020, Letnik:
94, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
"1 Also unthinkable in the era of apartheid would have been a proliferation of cop duos pairing a black investigator with a white one, as is now common in South African crime novels, or a white ...officer and one of mixed race, with the white officer often the lowerranking partner. ...according to the 2001 South African Census, the largest group of Afrikaans mother-tongue speakers-3,173,972 in number-were in fact of mixed race, while there were only 2,536,906 white South Africans who spoke it as a first language. The schoolbooks we had for our Afrikaans-language classes in Greece in the 1970s had been published in South Africa under the watchful eye of the apartheid censor, and one of the tasks of the censor was to see to it that there was also an apartheid, a clear-cut segregation, between Afrikaans and its perceived archenemy, the English language. (Interestingly, Seegers has kept one Afrikaans word, ou-"guy"-and added the Spanish word nada for the Afrikaans niks.) A reader surprised by the passages of mixed Afrikaans and English in Meyer's Afrikaans novels may be outright amazed to encounter entire pages of dialogue in English, with only the reporting verbs remaining in Afrikaans: "What time?" vra Cupido.
Encountering postapartheid Afrikaans fiction for the first time, particularly the fast-paced crime novels of Deon Meyer, the author finds that the most unexpected element is the new lack of ...segregation between Afrikaans and English.
In the fall of 2016, users of Google Translate working from French to English and English to French saw a marked improvement in the quality of the translated texts. Google Translate was beginning to ...develop from a purely phrase-based statistical machine translation system into a system that uses deep learning and artificial neural networks that can adapt and learn in reaction to all they encounter. The Google Translate development team has been working on expanding and strengthening the system's capability of pragmatic analysis. This capability entails extracting useful information from a text so that its meaning can be accurately inferred in an attempt to overcome the vagueness and ambiguity inherent in language, which have remained the greatest hurdles to effective machine translation. This article explores the potential of Google Translate to provide increasingly competent translations of literary texts. Using passages from the works of Voltaire translated by Google Translate into English, this article explores both the successes and the ongoing problems faced by new generations of Google Translate, and of machine translation systems in general, as their developers seek to overcome the hurdles of identifying and rendering style, nuance, and ambiguity in language.
