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Projects: macht.sprache.

macht.sprache. is a project to foster politically sensitive translation between English and German.

macht.sprache. offers a platform for crowdsourcing and discussing politically sensitive terms and their translations, and provides a tool to help translate with sensitivity.

macht.sprache

Author meets Translator: A conversation with Sharon Dodua Otoo and Jon Cho Polizzi

We could introduce Sharon Dodua Otoo by way of the many prestigious accolades she has received, but really her work speaks for itself. At poco.lit. we’ve been fans of her work for a long time and are delighted to present a conversation between her and her talented translator Jon Cho Polizzi as part of our event series “author meets translator”. We’ll be talking about the novel Adas Raum (Ada’s Room/Ada’s Realm), about humour, Berliner Schnauze, and doing politics in language and literature. Join us!

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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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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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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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The macht.sprache. extension is here!

Since the beginning of 2021, we here at poco.lit. have been working on the macht.sprache. project with Kolja Lange and Timur Celikel. The project aims to foster politically sensitive translation. Our new browser extension will help achieve this goal.

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Disability and/in translation: The right to self-describe

In cooperation with the Goethe-Institutes in North-Western Europe, poco.lit. hosted an online discussion about disability and/in translation. Khairani Barokka and Amy Zayed shared valuable insights. This is an overview of the discussion spanning particular terms in relation to disability, pragmatic suggestions for translators and the connection between disability justice and anti-colonialism.

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Of whale sharks and homemakers – for gender-sensitive translation

Anyone who wants to do a quick translation is probably happy to fall back on technological aids once in a while: Google Translate, Linguee or DeepL are widely known by now. But machine translation can prevent linguistic progress or the successful establishment of non-discriminatory language. Translation programmes draw from already existing texts - and these are far from being free of discrimination. That's why we're excited that our macht.sprache. project will be able to develop an integration with existing translation websites to support gender-sensitive translation with the help of the Prototype Fund.

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Where Jhumpa Lahiri finds herself linguistically

Jhumpa Lahiri wrote her latest novel in Italian. Afterwards she translated it into English herself. The deliberate shift in her own language focus invites me to question several things: the linguistic pressure to conform that migrants of Colour often experience. And the common idea that people can only express themselves well in one language - their mother tongue.

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What’s in a foreword? On translator’s notes

Translators make decisions that have an enormous impact on how texts arrive in linguistic contexts beyond the language they were written in. Especially in literary translation, many of these decisions are related to questions of aesthetics and style. But these are also, as our macht.sprache. project is making increasingly clear, decisions with political undertow and ramifications. The translator’s note is often a moment that allows translators to communicate to their readers the considerations that went into their decision-making.

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The Power of Multilingualism

The writer Olga Grjasnowa, whom many readers probably associate with her novel All Russians Love Birch Trees (Der Russe ist einer, der Birken liebt), was born in Baku, Azerbaijan, and came to Germany when she was eleven. In her recently published non-fiction book, The Power of Multilingualism – On Origins and Diversity (which has not […]

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“Everyone shares the responsibility of reducing the unconscious bias in artificial intelligence”: An interview with Kenza Ait Si Abbou

As part of our macht.sprache. / case.sensitive. project, we’re speaking to various experts who deal with language, translation or artificial intelligence. Kenza Ait Si Abbou explains some of the challenges in the field of artificial intelligence to us (e.g. in form of unconscious bias) but always stays solution-oriented.

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Discrimination, language, and translation tools

Many people who find their cultural activities increasingly moving into the realm of the virtual might find themselves working more and more with translation tools. Yet these tools, and the translations they offer, tend to suffer from biases embedded into their making.

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Participation

You are warmly invited to use our Text Checker and participate in the ongoing discussion, as well as add terms and translation options and examples. You can download our extension for Google Translate, and integrate sensitivity into your translations with no extra effort.

macht.sprache. requires a user profile for active participation, so that the administrative team can actively moderate and this platform remains as safe a space as possible. For this, the platform follows the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and asks only for the data that is necessary for a profile: An email address and a (made up) user name. The mail address is not public and is only used for account verification and possibly later for notifications, which are called “transactional” mails in the terminology of the GDPR. A newsletter subscription is offered as an opt-in.

Users are free to decide whether they want to appear under a pseudonym or under their real name, and if so, with which identity they will be recognized. Public contact options such as a Twitter handle can be specified in the user profile, if so desired.

Content Warning

As the topic of discussion is sensitive language, please be warned that you might encounter harmful language on the platform. We have incorporated a switch so that you can choose for yourself if you would prefer not be confronted with offensive language unmediatedly.

We’ve also developed some guidelines for respectful communication on this platform. We ask that you structure your participation in this collaborative process accordingly.

Read the Code of Conduct

Who we are

poco.lit. & völlig ohne

This project was conceptualised and is being developed by poco.lit. and völlig ohne. The conceptual curatorial team is made up of Anna von Rath and Lucy Gasser. Web design and technical execution are the work of Timur Celikel and Kolja Lange.

Anna von Rath

Anna von Rath lives in Berlin and works in the field of diversity and inclusion, and as a freelance translator. In 2019, she finished her PhD in postcolonial cultural studies. She is a co-founder of poco.lit.

Lucy Gasser

Lucy Gasser teaches literary, cultural and postcolonial studies at the University of Osnabrück, and is co-founder of poco.lit. She grew up in Cape Town, South Africa, and has lived in Germany since 2014.

Timur Celikel

Timur Celikel is UI / UX designer and Web-Developer and co-founded völlig ohne 2016. He studied Digital Media in Bremen and has 9 years of experience working for a startup and as freelancer in Berlin.

Kolja Lange

Kolja Lange lives in Berlin and works as a full-stack developer. He has 8 years of experience working in a software company and studied Digital Media in Bremen.

Lisa Nechutnys and Susanne Peter temporarily supported macht.sprache.

Software Development

macht.sprache. is an open source project which we are continuously improving. If you find any bugs, please contact us at info@pocolit.com and we will try to fix them. Additionally, everyone with the capabilities is invited to contribute directly and get involved in our repository: https://github.com/macht-sprache/macht-sprache-app

An Ongoing Project

macht.sprache.’s collective efforts to generate knowledge about sensitive translation flow into the Text Checker, which the project team develops technically and curates conceptually.

We fully acknowledge that such an endeavour can never be complete and such a tool will never be exhaustive. At the same time, we trust in the power of collaboration and discussion. The software is available as open source for further development, projects with a different focus, or translation between other languages.

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We’ve spoken about the project in the following articles and podcasts:

macht.sprache. was funded by the Berlin Senate and the Prototype Fund (FKZ 01lS21S36).

Logo: Senate Department for Culture and Europe Berlin