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Recently there has been an uptick in talk about semicolons. Witness:

Hooray for the ;
I say! A subterranean semicolon!
FANBOYS and the Semicolon
Colbert on punctuation
How to Use Punctuation Correctly
Punctuation lives
The Elements of Spam
Semicolonoscopy

What does this signify? I’m not sure. Could it be another sign of the trend to the literate class becoming a cultural elite, eager to [...]

When it comes to copy editing, I’m not particularly strict — let the author have some personal style. We all use words a little differently.
But one thing that has been annoying me lately is what I regard as the misuse of the word refute. Newspaper journalists and others consistently use refute when they mean rebut. [...]

Web 2.0 experiments with open content are showing the value of moderated forums. Democracy is great, but chaos isn’t necessarily so hot.
Once upon a time tech types used to track stories on Digg.com. When a post got promoted to Digg’s front page it would bring your site a huge amount of traffic. The web [...]

Language Hat has been following the arguments about Russian translation that have been taking place at the NYT Reading Room blog. Are the renderings of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky superior to those of Constance Garnett and others? Pevear and Volokhonsky have said that Garnett (for example) smooths out the originals and makes them [...]

C.M. Mayo will be reading at Alta on Saturday. Her site, Madam Mayo, is a good blog for those interested in Latin American (especially Mexican) literature and the art of translation (although I subscribe to the belief that blogs should have comments enabled). Click the screen shot to visit the site.

I don’t think I’ve mentioned here the book launch that will be held tonight at 6:30 for our new anthology of Latin American literature. The venue is Chronicle Books, 680 Second Street. You can read about it here.

A classic skit on the perils of translation.

Systran software has ruled computer translation for years. It has been the technology behind both AltaVista’s Babelfish (now owned by Yahoo), and Google’s translation service, called Google Translate. But now Google has replaced Systran technology with its own translation software.
Google says their approach was to “feed the computer billions of words of text, both monolingual [...]

I found myself next to this vehicle on the approach to the Bay Bridge the other day. It reminds me a bit of the artworks of Xu Bing and Wenda Gu. The Word dwells amongst us.

Since a big deal is being made about supposedly disappearing hyphens, let’s apply a little perspective to the discussion.
The first thing to realize is that the furor is the result of a promotional campaign for a new edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary; the sixth edition has omitted 16,000 hyphens that were included in [...]

Two Lines is calling for submissions for its 15th anniversary edition. This volume will be edited by John Biguenet (prose) and Sidney Wade (poetry). The deadline is October 22.

Fernando del Paso will receive the $100,000 FIL Literature Prize for lifetime literary achievement iat the 2007 Guadalajara International Book Fair on November 24.
An excerpt from del Paso’s Palinuro of Mexico, translated by Elizabeth Plaister, is included in New World / New Words: Recent Writing from the Americas, A Bilingual Anthology, now at the printer.
Palinuro [...]

The Save Desuetude movement starts here.
How could the sentence “We’d be no poorer if desuetude, for one, fell into a state of itself” have been written without the word desuetude? It appears in a Straight Dope article that says possible declines in vocabulary don’t matter — “The later the vocabulary test is conducted, the [...]

From a series by Tom Tomorrow.

via language log

Edward Sedensticker, who died at 86 on Sunday in Tokyo, was one of the greatest translators of Japanese literature. He had been in a coma for months following a head injury. Among his books were The Tale of Genji, Snow Country and Thousand Cranes by Yasunari Kawabata, who won the 1968 Nobel Prize for [...]

In an article entitled “Prepositional Anxiety and Voldemort’s Wand” Language Log takes J. K. Rowling to task for this sentence, spoken by her evil wizard, Mr. Riddle:
My wand of yew did everything of which I asked it, Severus, except to kill Harry Potter.
The article maintains that the “of which” construction is the result of a [...]

The University of Rochester has begun offering an undergraduate certificate in literary translation. This is a great idea.
Meanwhile the department of comparative literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (where I studied) is fighting threats to close the department.
UPDATE, 26 August 07: “Outrageous ignorance” at the University of Wisconsin.

Meanwhile, French readers are frustrated that it’s taking the official translator more than two weeks to complete a translation of the 759-page book.
LINK: French teen detained over unauthorized Harry Potter translation

Eighteen members of New York’s City Council have sponsored a resolution to ban the use of bitch and ho as “hateful language [that] creates for all women a paradigm of shame and indignity.”
Dennis Baron at the Web of Language (link may require academic affiliation authorization — borrow a friend’s, or maybe use bugmenot if you [...]