First Carnival of Blog Translation

Welcome to the first Carnival of Blog Translation! And thank you very much for being the first bold translators to participate. Anyone I've left out, or anyone who's a day late, I'll add you if you email me as soon as possible. Now let's dive in !


Tatyana Epstein, in collaboration with Steve, has translated a short story by Leah Lubomirsky from Russian to English here on her LiveJournal. The comments from readers are in Russian and English, as well.

Bev Trayner, of Em duas línguas, and João Vasconcelos Costa, of Reformar a Educão Suuperior - Apontamentos, translated each others' posts, in Portuguese and English. Bev's "Pedagogy of Laughter" translates João's Pedagogia de Riso. João's Quem gosta de rir gosta de viver translates Bev's Lovers of laughter, lovers of life.

Regina Nabais, a blogger on intersections between writing, education, language, politics, and technology, has translated "A Difference Goes Multilingual", by Darren Kuropatwa, from English into Portuguese, here on her blog, Polikê. I like how she put each paragraph of the blog posts side by side for easy comparison. I don't know Portuguese, but could follow it, and was interested to see that "cut and paste" was translated "corta-cola".

Chris Waiglname of Diacritiques has translated a post by Ed Felten's blog, Freedom to Tinker, "Analog Hole Bill Would Impose a Secret Law": from English to French. Ed blogs on law, public policy, technology, and freedom of information, and is a professor of Computer Science and Public Policy at Princeton University.

Stuart Mudie of Blethers.com has translated a post by mobile tech and high-tech-lifestyle blogger Pedro Jorge, "NFC en el 3GSM". I still don't know how to translate 3GSM from acronymese to any other language, but Pedro's post is about mobile phones and how they can communicate with other electronic devices through a technique called NFC or "near field communication". Read Stuart or Pedro to learn more about that - it's quite intriguing.

Liz Henry (that's me) translated "Primera persona del singular del futuro imperfecto" by Hester Prynne of La letra escarlata, and the translation is over here on Composite.

This is cheating in a way, but I will count Hans Persson's translation of the call for submissions - after all, it was a post on this blog, and he translated it into Swedish. "Trendoffice", a journalist and interior designer, also translated the call for carnival entries into Bulgarian, on her ad-speckled blog; a good example of someone using a multilingual blog for business purposes.

What a fascinating variety of blog styles, subjects, and languages! We have fiction from Leah, personal memoir from Hester Prynne, pedagogy and the philosophy of laughter from Bev and Joao, speculations on mulitlingual education from Darren, legal issues by Ed Felton, and technology and translation from Pedro. Russian, French, English, Portuguese, Swedish, Bulgarian, and Spanish are represented.

I found it significant that most of the active participants came to this via Bev Trayner's blog, Em duas línguas. She's clearly a catalyst for action, which is a good thing since she has agreed to host the second Carnival of Blog Translation in March!

British recommendations of foreign books

Carol O'Sullivan recently posted a pointer on the British Council for Literary Translation listserv about a British blog effort:

"Guardian Culture Vulture blog has been running a monthly series of calls for recommendations of foreign books which is interesting to scroll through and maybe contribute to; I think they have looked at Polish and Czech literature so far. Archived posts can be found at http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/culturevulture/."

The current post, "Czech In: World literature tour," is by Sarah Crown, who describes a tidal wave of response to her previous post on Polish literature.

It will be interesting to see when she first ventures outside the EU.

What they're saying

Non-bloggity ALTA members might be interested to look over here on Technorati, a search engine that references blog posts. Take a look: right now, people are noticing the idea of the Carnival of Blog Translation, and they seem to like it a lot. I hope we get a lot of participants!

I especially noticed D. Karopatwa's post on his education/blogging/math blog "A Difference". His posts about using blogs in the classroom are so good, I'm going to have to make time to go back and read all his archives.

Well, anyway, we have a lot of interest right now in the blogosphere! How exciting! And I think that's thanks to a nice mention by languagehat.

Carnival of Blog Translation

Announcing the first Carnival of Blog Translation! Tuesday, Feb. 28th, 2006!

On the day of the Carnival, a participant translates one post by another blogger, and posts it on her own blog with a link to the original. She would need to email me, or post in the comments right here, and I'll compile one big post on the day of the Carnival with links to all the participants.

You can translate any blog entry that was posted in the month of February 2006. It can be your own blog entry, if you like.

From participants I need:

your name
name of your blog
your blog URL
post title in target language

name of blog you're translating
name of person you're translating
that URL
the post title in the source language

You should get permission from the person you're translating to post your translation of their work. I would also suggest that you might introduce your translation for the target-language audience, and provide some context if you can.

A Blog Carnival is sort of like a travelling signpost that points to a bunch of magazine articles. It is a post that contains links to other posts written especially on a particular theme. I'll host it this month, and next month will hand it off to another host. The content will not appear here; only links to that content!

If you're looking for a blog in a particular language, try searching on Technorati, a useful blog search engine.

This idea came from a discussion on Bev Traynor's blog and further discussion of bilingual blogging and tagging at BlogHer. I'm excited about the idea and its possibilities!

*** Rebecca Mckay points out that the "Translation Carnival" is a graduate student conference happening at University of Iowa in April. Here's some information on the U. of Iowa Translation Carnival; it sounds like a great event!

Carnival of Translation

(This was the wrong URL - and the correct one is http://literarytranslators.blogspot.com/2006/02/carnival-of-blog-translation.html.

Click on over to it! Sorry for the confusion.

J.M. Coetzee on translation into various languages

A fascinating article by J.M. Coetzee on being translated into various languages. Thanks to Washington DC poet and translator Yvette Neisser Moreno for this link to the Australian News:
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,17924843%5E5001986,00.html

One book but which language?

I wanted to bring out more thoughts around Liz's essay on One City, One Book. This city-wide reading idea has been used in Seattle for some time, and I don't think that the availability of Spanish was an issue, though I could be wrong. However, in our town, Spanish is not the second language. Instead, the language with the most speakers after English is Chinese. Our voting registration information is in English and Chinese. When you land at Sea-Tac airport, the languages on the subway train to the baggage claim have been English, Japanese and Chinese for decades, with later addition of Russian. Spanish is growing here, as everywhere in the United States, but unlike California, Seattle is more an Asian city than a Hispanic one. So if the One City, One Book folks here were thinking of the availability of a language, Spanish would not necessarily have been the first language in the running.
This brought my thoughts to the rise of Spanish as the de-facto second language in the United States in general, and what that means for speakers of other languages besides English and Spanish. As I receive panel proposals for the ALTA conference, it seems that at times the proposer assumes that I know Spanish, which, alas, is not the case. (Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic, German, French, some Hungarian, some Hebrew, some Yiddish and now some Chinese is frankly all I can, and most likely will muster in this lifetime, though our exchange student is pushing me to learn some Vietnamese in exchange for some Latin). My hometown of Waukegan is now about 40% Spanish-speaking, and at times when home on a visit, I have been greeted in Spanish, a development during the past decade which initially surprised me, but now is a fact of Waukegani life. My reactions to this confuse me, since I love languages and have been eagerly learning them all my life. I surmise that it is this assumption that I should/must/ought to know Spanish that is getting under my skin a bit. Well, should it? Or should I learn enough Spanish to get along with the other folks in the town in which I was born? Maybe I should...but for now I am sticking to Chinese. Does that make me racist? Does it? Would it make me racist in Waukegan or California but not in Seattle? Inquiring minds want to know.
So, one book, one city, which language -- and here in Seattle, should it be Chinese?