Tuesday, February 28, 2006

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!

7 comments:

elkit said...

Oh rats, I missed it! I wanted to participate, and then I forgot all about it again ... time flies when you're having fun. And when you're not.

Eric Kingsepp said...

yeah, ditto here, but life got in the way. I even posted it about it...just never got around to picking something to translate. Next time!

Liz said...

Oh, by all means, if you would like to translate something at the last minute, please do, and link to it here in the comments!

Or - next time.

- Liz

Anonymous said...

Oh, thank you Liz, I hope people will like Leah's story as much as I did(and Steve,too)

I find it amazing that Portugal, a magical country I love dearly, has come up so often in this small selection: I caught the Portuguese bug from Leah who lives and writes in Setubal, and visited last September.

Now I have so much to read!
Thank you.

trendoffice said...

Oh, sorry, I missed it. I was planning to translate a post, too. But I like the idea and will try next time to be more active.

bev trayner said...

Don't worry, you can join in the second blog translation carnival on March 28th.

Tatyana ... tell me more about Leah in Setúbal!

knittingwoman said...

i was planning on participating too, even picked a post but just didn't couldn't find the time. I'll aim for the second one:)