Left to itself, every literature will exhaust its vitality if it is not refreshed by the interest and contributions of a foreign one.
 — Goethe, 1827.

This belief that international literature plays a vital role in book culture is one that is shared by all the publishers and booksellers involved in Reading the World, a celebration of literature in translation to be held at BookPeople on Friday, June 6.

Noted Russian translator Marian Schwartz will moderate the hour-long program, which begins at 7 p.m. and will consist of three parts:

1. Liliana Valenzuela reading from her translation from English into Spanish: Cristina Garcia, A Handbook to Luck/Las Caras de la Suerte

2. Cristina Ferreira-Pinto Bailey reading from her translation from Portuguese: Teeth Under the Sun by Ignácio de Loyola Brandão (Dalkey Archive P, 2007).

3. Michele McKay Aynesworth presenting Beacons, the literary journal of the American Translators Association, with readings by the following: Liliana Valenzuela, Tony Beckwith, and Rob Cogswell and his translator, Horacio Peña.

This event is hosted by the Austin Area Translators and Interpreters Association. 

The Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at The University of Texas at Austin has acquired a rare Plantin Polyglot Bible, containing parallel texts in Hebrew, Greek, Syriac and Aramaic with translations and commentary in Latin.

"The Plantin Polyglot Bible is the Ransom Center’s single most important rare book acquisition in the past two decades," said Ransom Center Director Thomas F. Staley.

It joins a sizable collection of Bibles at the Ransom Center, including one of the 48 surviving copies of the Gutenberg Bible, a 1476 Jenson illuminated Bible on vellum, several copies of the original King James Version of the Bible, and two Coverdale Bibles, the first complete English translation of the Bible.

The New York Moon, an Internet-based publication, is a collection of experimental, reflective, and imaginative projects that unfold in any medium. The just-released April 2008 issue focuses on translation.

Translation is usually considered a practical activity. Someone who speaks one language needs to understand something in another language. But in our polyglot world and city, it can also be a challenge, a game — the intersection of a dozen cultures. In this edition of the Moon, our correspondents approached the theme from widely different vantages, but each showed that there is a hidden movement to “translation.” After all, the Latin word, translatus, means “carried over.”

In observance of World in Translation Month, the American Literary Translation Association (ALTA) has created a poster that contains a quotation from scholar, theologian, and bibliophile Miles Smith (1554-1624), known for his mastery of Biblical languages. Smith was an integral participant in the translation and publication of the King James Version of the Bible. Download the poster (pdf), print up a couple, and post them on your favorite bulletin boards.

Related:
> Wikipedia article on Miles Smith
> Who were the King James Version translators?

Evidently "translations" has become a sexy marketing term. Or does The Container Store mean that translations belong in the trash?

As seen on their website, this $25 wastebasket is "a très chic, environmentally friendly addition to your home. It’s made with authentic Japanese newspapers and magazines that have been beautifully ‘re-purposed.’ Each is a unique work of art."

The store’s marketing department may be a little confused in using the term, since the text on the trashcan is almost entirely Japanese (you can see a few English words if you look closely). Perhaps someone will provide a few translations for us.

At least they don’t call it an interpreting wastebasket.

Thanks to Marian Schwartz for spotting this.

You are invited to a bilingual reading by novelist Cristina García (author of Dreaming in Cuban, The Agüero Sisters, and other books and anthologies) and her translator, Liliana Valenzuela. They will read from García’s latest novel A Handbook to Luck (Knopf, 2007), which Valenzuela translated into Spanish as Las Caras de la Suerte (Vintage Español, 2008). García will also read from her new children’s book The Dog Who Loved the Moon. 

7 p.m. Friday, May 2, 2008 at BookPeople (6^th St. & Lamar)

The social networking site Facebook is using the wisdom of crowds to localize the site into nearly two dozen languages, but the user-translators do it for nothing more than bragging rights, according to a recent article in the Austin American-Statesman.

The four-year-old company, now estimated as worth $15 billion, has 69 million users, 60 percent of whom live outside the United States, hence the effort to serve those who don’t speak English. But Facebook’s approach has been controversial.

The concept of collaborative translation is familiar in open-source programming communities. But Facebook’s effort — as it builds sites in Japanese, Turkish, Chinese, Portuguese, Swedish and Dutch to join versions in Spanish, French and German that launched this year — is among the highest-profile attempts to harness users’ energy to do work traditionally handled by professionals.

The Spanish-language version has taken a particular beating for grammatical, spelling and usage problems throughout.

Ana Torres, a 25-year-old professional translator in Madrid, Spain, called the translation "extremely poor," citing "outrageous spelling mistakes" such as "ase" instead of "hace" (for "makes" or "does") and usage of the word "lenguaje" for "language" rather than the more appropriate "idioma."

Other critics say Facebook just wants free labor.

Valentin Macias, 29, a Californian who teaches English in Seoul, South Korea, has volunteered in the past to translate for the nonprofit Internet encyclopedia Wikipedia but said he won’t do it for Facebook.

Wikipedia is "an altruistic, charitable, information-sharing, donation-supported cause," Macias told The Associated Press in a message. "Facebook is not. Therefore, people should not be tricked into donating their time and energy to a multimillion-dollar company so that the company can make millions more — at least not without some type of compensation."

Other prominent social networking websites Friendster and MySpace also have international versions, but use professional translators for their localization efforts.

Read the complete article by Associated Press writer Tomoko A. Hosaka, and then express your own viewpoint by leaving a comment on this post.

Forvo is a site where you´ll find words pronounced in their original languages. Ask for that word or name, and another user will pronounce it for you. At this time Forvo boasts of "2.609 words 2.516 pronunciations,  177 languages."

Caveat: since dialects vary widely, and any user may submit a recording, you may not get a "standard" pronunciation.