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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We are part of the Goethe-Institut’s Resonance Program
We continue to develop our project macht.sprache. for politically sensitive translation! As part of the Goethe-Institut’s Resonance Program, we will start laying the foundation for expanding macht.sprache. to include the language pair German-French.
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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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Event: Translating Violence and Resistance
Join us for a conversation with Maaza Mengiste and Patricia Klobusiczky about languages of violence and resistance.
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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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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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macht.sprache. behind the Scenes 3: Developing the Text Checker
The macht.sprache. project has been running since the beginning of 2021. Here we offer some insights into the thought processes behind the development of the Text Checker and explain why it is accompanied by a translation manifesto.
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