Blog Archives

waiting for translation: Tokarczuk’s Bieguni

You know that feeling when you’re waiting at an airport, trying to guess where other are from and where they are going? You start writing in your notebook, observing the man across from you, who is writing in his notebook,

Tagged with: , , , , , , ,
Posted in books, international, language, literature, translation

nonsense in translation: Nina Cassian and the Jabberwocky

Romanian poet Nina Cassian died one month ago today. (Here she is reading her work, and here’s a great poem she wrote in New York exile). She also translated Brecht, Molière and Shakespeare, but was especially proud of her translation of

Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in literature, poetry, translation

april fish!

Happy April Fool’s Day! If you’re English, you’ve only got till noon to play your tricks or you’re the fool. If you’re over the channel, your day may involve April Fish, usually made of paper and attached to someone’s back

Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in April Fool's Day, international, language, words

three per cent: best translated book from German 2014

Just three percent of books published in the US are in translation, and less than one percent are literary fiction and poetry. The University of Rochester is trying to change that, with its three per cent website and Best Translated

Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Best Translated Book Award, books, gender, international, literature, translation

world book day 2014: binge-read or savour?

World Book Day today, and there’s a £1 book for everyone under 18 in the British Isles (discussion of the politics of that short-hand term another time, please). There’s an app, there are trailers for the books, you can win a

Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in books, language, literature, Word of the Year 2013, words, World Book Day

more gender pronouns: they

Facebook has finally broadened its pronoun options from 2 to 50. This should theoretically stop those odd posts with the “wrong” gender assignment, and make a lot of transgendered and queer people very happy. The only problem is that you have to

Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in gender, language, translation, words

divided by a common language

I started teaching English while living in Poznań in 1999. I only knew two other native speakers there at the time, Peter and Peter, who were both from the East Coast of the US. And sometimes, we simply didn’t understand

Tagged with: , , , , , ,
Posted in international, language, President's Day, translation

chocolate for everyone

Valentine’s Day both loses and gains something in translation. For the Japanese, today is the day when the women give chocolate (and only chocolate) to the men. This is because one chocolate company made a translation mistake, switching the genders, when

Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,
Posted in translation, Valentine's Day

year of the horse: China in 10 words

Happy Chinese New Year – Xin Nian Kuai Le! Gong Hey Fat Choy! To celebrate the dawning of the Year of the Horse, it’s time to read about China. The London Review Bookshop recommends an introduction to Chinese poetry, including

Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in international, language, literature, poetry, translation, words, Year of the Horse

the ghost child

Once upon a time there was a little ghost. It lived all alone in the forest. All the other ghosts were born in the forest because they died there. They were very old or very young, and their families were

Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Illustration, language, literature, translation
advent Alice in Wonderland American And Other Stories Antonia Lloyd-Jones Arabic Argentina Beowulf Berlin Best Translated Book Award Bible books Brazil Brazilian Portuguese British British Library Buddhism Catalan Children's Books China Chinese Christmas Christmas Carols Contemporary Czesław Miłosz Danish Dari David Hackston Deep Vellum Dublin Literary Award English Estonian Fantasy Farsi Fiction Finland Finland 100 Finlandia Prize Finnish Fitzcarraldo Editions Flemish Free Word Centre French George Szirtes German Greek Hebrew Herbert Lomas Herta Müller history Hungarian Iceland Idioms Illustration India international International Translation Day Irish Gaelic Italian J. R. R. Tolkien Japanese Jenny Erpenbeck Johanna Sinisalo Korean Language language learning Languages Latin Literature Lola Rogers Lord of the Rings Mabinogion Man Booker International Prize Maori Maria Turtschaninoff Moomins New Year Nobel Prize Nobel Prize for Literature Norwegian Old English Olga Tokarczuk Owen Witesman Oxford English Dictionary Penguin PEN Translation Prize Persian Philip Boehm Phoneme Media Poetry Poetry Translation Centre Polish Portuguese Pushkin Press Queer Romanian Rosa Liksom Russian Salla Simukka Second World War Short Stories Sofi Oksanen Spanish Stanisław Barańczak Suomi100 Susan Bernofsky Svetlana Alexievich Swedish Switzerland Thomas Teal Tibetan Tove Jansson Translation translator Translators Without Borders Wales Warsaw Welsh Wisława Szymborska Witold Szabłowski Women in Translation Month words Words without Borders writing YA

Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Follow found in translation on WordPress.com
Archives