Translator Meets Author with Mithu Sanyal and Alta L. Price
A warm invitation to the next poco.lit. Event: A conversation with Mithu Sanyal and Alta L. Price about language, cultural appropriation, cancel culture and humour.
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Ideas to postpone the end of the world
Ailton Krenak’s Ideas to postpone the end of the world (translated from Portuguese by Anthony Doyle) is a slim volume bursting with important ideas. Krenak is a philosopher and socio-environmental activist for Indigenous rights from the Krenak homelands along the Doce River.
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Undrowned
Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals by Alexis Pauline Gumbs is one of the strangest books I have read recently – and I mean that in an extremely positive way. I admit I had to get into it first, but then this unusual way of talking about dolphins, whales, seals and co. in connection with Black experiences won me over.
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Writing and translating are not neutral: an interview with Kavita Bhanot
Kavita Bhanot is a writer, editor, translator, teacher, and activist based in Birmingham, UK. We were lucky enough to chat to her about her work and her perspective on translation – translation as a political act, a form of violence, and a tool to foster dialogue when used responsibly.
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Machine Translation and Natural Language Processing
Reading through various studies on gender bias in machine translation, I stumble across the sentence: The doctor asked the nurse to help her. It’s used in a study that tests how gender is translated from English into languages which, unlike English, have grammatical gender. This attribution is particularly relevant when it comes to terms that label people. In English, for example, doctor is gender-neutral, whereas in German one would traditionally have to choose between ‘Arzt’ or ‘Ärztin’, the former a male doctor, the latter female. Intrigued, I open one of the most popular translation engines to see what happens when I translate this sentence into German.
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On the Representation of Migration in the British Press: A Conversation with Anna Islentyeva
We spoke with linguist Anna Islentyeva about her research on migration discourse in the contemporary British press. She explains how Brexit has affected the discourse around European migration and how the linguistic patterns used by conservative and left-liberal media differ, but also resemble each other.
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Translation and connection: an interview with Marion Kraft
As part of our macht.sprache. project, we organized a workshop at the Literarisches Colloquium Berlin in early September 2022. This gave us the opportunity to speak with German and American studies scholar Marion Kraft about her translation work. We discussed Audre Lorde, linguistic changes, new translations and team translations.
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Translation Workshop: macht.sprache. Sprint
We warmly invite you to join us for a workshop on possible ways of dealing with politically sensitive language in translation. Join us at the Literarisches Clloquium Berlin on September 3.
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Sensitivity Readings: taking a diverse readership into consideration
Our project macht.sprache. had us thinking about sensitive translation. But even within one language, there are many reasons to strive for sensitive expression. Sensitivity Readings support authors in taking a diverse readership into consideration.
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4 Books about Language, Race and Gender
As part of our macht.sprache. project, we dealt in depth with concepts related to race and gender. For this, it was necessary to understand how linguistic discrimination works and that it is part of discriminatory social structures. Here we present 4 books (3 written in German, 1 in English) that have shaped our thinking about concepts and terminologies around race and gender.
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