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You might have heard about the restaurant in China that, in preparation for the Olympics, decided to translate their name into English. I guess the translation program was down and, well …
Here’s a picture from tenz1225’s photostream.
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Google Blogoscoped has translated several Garfield strips into Chinese and back again using Google Translate.

Here’s the text, in case the strip is hard to read at this size.
Jon: Garfield, I retrieved a pair of slippers
Garfield: I am sorry, the cat is not worth a pair of slippers
Garfield: I will, however, capture extract
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Machine translation: there’s nothing like it.
Enjoy this short video with babelfished dialogue.

The reader, Bradley LaShawn Fowler, is suing two Bible publishers (Thomas Nelson and Zondervan), alleging that the translators erroneously rendered a passage resulting in a false suggestion that it condemns homosexuality.
At issue is I Corinithians 6:9, and whether two Greek terms allude to homosexuality or prostitution or something else. (The King James version of the [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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

I’m posting this again because, when I linked to it before, a few weeks ago, there was an error in the link (I only recently discovered that — I’ll try to get it right this time). This is the introduction to my book on literary translation from the Center for the Art of Translation (link [...]

The University of Rochester has announced a new book publishing imprint called Open Letter. The press will publish twelve books of international literature a year — I guess that means literature in translation. They will also publish an annual of international poetry. Galley Cat offers the following
“We are focusing on twentieth- and twenty-first century literature [...]

Two Lines, the journal of translation, is asking readers to send translations of the following lines from Machado. Interesting submissions will be posted on their website and in their newsletter. It’s an intriguing couplet. I made a submission, but it leaves out some parts of the original.
Send your translation to admin [at] catranslation [dot] org. [...]

Intolerance has many triggers and takes many forms, but it tends to boil down to in-group and out-group status. Most people favor “people like us.” (Whereas tolerance springs from an acceptance of equality in difference; Tzvetan Todorov’s formulation of this in The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other is a favorite of mine.)
What’s [...]

When I saw that the anchor text for a link on Ron Silliman’s blog was “a review of the most pompous translator of our time” I had a brief moment of concern. Then I remembered that my book on translation isn’t out yet.
Ron’s link is to an article called “Ted Hughes and Translation” by Clive [...]

Acouple of days ago I completed proofreading first pages of New World / New Words: Recent Writing from the Americas, A Bilingual Anthology, the first volume in a new series from the Center for the Art of Translation called the Two Lines World Library.
I’ve decided to post my introductory essay on this website, here. [...]