Support poco.lit. with Steady!

Tags:

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.

more...

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.

more...

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.

more...

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.

more...