Well heck, here’s one more horrifyingly Halloweeny language-related tale:
BBC NEWS | UK | Wales | E-mail error ends up on road sign
The English is clear enough to lorry drivers - but the Welsh reads “I am not in the office at the moment. Please send any work to be translated.”
Because, why not?
And Irish orthography is scary (it makes Welsh look like Rotokas), so it’s a good Halloween song!
See if you can follow along:
An Dragún - The Guggenheim Grotto
Tá bua ag mo dheartháir…músclaíonn sé ina bhrionglóidí
Agus is leat an uile… má dhúisíonn tú id’ bhrionglóidí
Labhairt le sioraf agus síneadh deich dtroithe
Le haon chéim amháin gearr an chruinne ‘na leath
Sea, is leat an uile má dhúisíonn tú id’ bhrionglóidí
Chas sé le dragún…d’eitil siad thuas ins an spéir
Bhí bruscar i ngach áit…bhí gach áit faoi smál ins an aeir
Só chuaigh siad chuig seomra a’bhí fairsing is bán
D’fhan siad gur oscail an doras go lán
Shiúil m’athair ’steach…’s rin’ siad dá chéile ceann croí
Happy Halloween, Kids!
For many languages, font support is a deal killer.
If you’re a user and your language has a non-Roman script, say, and if that script is relatively unusual, such as Bengali or Georgian or Tigrinya or something like that, and you waltz into a cyber cafe that doesn’t happen to be in a place where your language is on the agenda, then you’re pretty much out of luck.
It’s my contention that people who happen to use a language which is written in a broadly supported script simply have no idea of how frustrating and oppressive such a state of affairs is.
Imagine not being able to sign your name in an email!
Things are improving, but not fast enough. Interesting ideas come and go, and here’s one that’s just appeared:
With typeface.js you can embed custom fonts in your web pages so you don’t have to render text to images.
typeface.js is easy…
Instead of creating images or using flash just to show your site’s graphic text in the font you want, you can use typeface.js and write in plain HTML and CSS, just as if your visitors had the font installed locally. This is a work in progress, but functional enough at least to render the the graphic text on this site.typeface.js — Rendering text with Javascript, canvas, and VML
The idea may seem a bit nutty, but it’s not, really. After all, a font file is ultimately just some code anyway. So one could imagine finding some representative free fonts for each of the writing systems out in the world, and distributing freely so that content creators could publish away in Bengali or Georgian or Tigrinya or whatever.
Except, not really. The problem is that this thing seems to be designed more for folks who want to have nice fonts in headings and blow-up quotes than in running text. The deal killer for me: cut and paste doesn’t work. So, it may as well be an image.
The real solution is free (libre) fonts for every writing system, widely distributed across operating systems, and also available as embedded fonts. Neither of those approaches is new, but that’s what it’s going to take, I think, to really make the web egalitarian.
UPDATE: Should have checked with Richard Ishida’s site first: he’s got some links to collections of free fonts via his page on Script examples.
Anyone who reads this blog knows that I am heavily annoyed by the fact that translators don’t get credited for their work more often. But once in a while… Hey look!
Stanisław Lem’s Unpublished Works Discovered
Translated by Marcin Wawrzyńczak
*raises glass to Marcin*
The translator byline comes after the article, but hey, at least it’s there.
I’m inferring (with zero knowledge of Polish) that the same paper is the source of the Polish original, because it says Źródło: Gazeta Wyborcza, and Wikipedia tells me that Źródło means something like source. But weirdly, the Polish original doesn’t seem to be on wyborcza.pl: a search for “Stanisław” on wyborcza.pl gets some hits, but after trudging through them and comparing “by eye,” none of them seems to be the same article.
Maybe the Polish article is only in the print version; maybe they assumed that because Lem is such an international figure it would make sense to publish the story online in English… who knows?
Any Polish speakers out there who can find the original?
UPDATE: Ewa found the original: Odkryto niepublikowane utwory Stanisława Lema!. I was searching for Stanisław, but only inflected forms of the name, such as Stanisława, appear in the article. D’oh. Thanks Ewa!
Here’s a worthy project to muse over for your Friday morning:
The folks at the Internet Living Swahili Dictionary, aka The Kamusi Project, have started a project to build 100 locales for African languages:
100 African Language Locales | The Kamusi Project.
The project is being hosted at a (lovely) site called ANLoc, The African Network for Localisation.
There’s a slideshow about the project at 100 African Language Locales.
I’m happy to see that they’re planning to incorporate their work into the Common Locale Data Repository (CLDR), which really seems to be catching on. (A very good thing!)
The New York Times has an article about the translation of books into English for the United States market. The bottom line is, apparently: not much of it happens.
American Publishers and Foreign Languages at the Frankfurt Book Fair - NYTimes.com
Even in a case of a highly successful writer, there may be little to no market pressure for publishers to fund a US English translation. But the article argues that this is due to a self-fulfilling prophecy: US publishers don’t get books translated because “they don’t sell in the US,” so they don’t really market the ones that they do publish, so those don’t sell, so…
But some niche publishers are coming along to fill in the niche, bless ‘em. These upstarts are pounding the floorboards of European translation conferences, and buying the translation rights to high-quality translations for a steal.
Only a few break out in the US, but the reward to risk ratio is high if you spread it over enough titles.
I find this topic interesting; I’d like to find some more data on how many books get translated into English per year.
For me, this is the takehome:
“American publishers are depriving the American readership of the cultural diversity through translation to which they are entitled,” Ms. Noble said. “It is what I call the poverty of the rich.”
A teeny little article about how the New York Islanders’ new owner has hired announcers to call games in Chinese:
Hockey requires artful translation in Mandarin - Los Angeles Times
New York Islanders owner Charles Wang has put his announcers to the test in translating the NHL game in Mandarin.
Charles Wang, the Shanghai-born owner of the New York Islanders, has hired announcers to call games in Mandarin.
But they’re apparently having trouble translating certain words and phrases into the Chinese language.
NYIslanders.EventTicketsCenter.com
Thus, the Bruins have become the Brown Bears and the Panthers are Black Leopards.Writes ESPN the Magazine: “At least the Far East will get a clear intro to the NHL’s best, Sid the Kid,” quoting announcer Justin Chang as explaining, “Everyone knows what a Penguin is.”
I’m presuming this is a private project for Wang himself. Or maybe there’s a big enough Chinese speaking contingent of hockey fans to commercialize it. I couldn’t find any the ESPN article on their website, so who knows. I’m not a big sports guy.
I did find this one, though:
ESPN - Promise to prominence for Asian athletes - ESPN
Which I leave as an exercise to the reader, because I have work to do.
Its Native Tongue Facing Extinction, Arapaho Tribe Teaches the Young - NYTimes.com
About revitalization efforts for the Arapaho language of Wyoming and Oklahoma. Check out the narrated slide show.
PS, the Wikipedia article on Arapaho could use some love: Arapaho language
I happened upon an interesting article which suggests that a change from the Cyrillic to the Latin script may come to pass in Kazakhstan:
I really don’t know how to evaluate the claims in that article. But it does point out some interesting facts about the spread of the Latin script in several post-Soviet states:
While Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan acted quickly after the 1991 Soviet collapse to embrace Latin script, Kazakhstan took a more cautious route: it did not want to alienate its large Russian-speaking population.
Rather than research this myself, I thought I’d ask the lazyweb:
Where else is the Latin script spreading? Which scripts is it displacing? And, is it being replaced by other scripts anywhere? Which ones?
Comments will be rewarded with love and affection.
From Gujarati language on Wikipedia:
મારું માથું ન ખા
mārũ māthũ na khā
“Don’t bother me.”Literally: Do not eat my head.
I enjoy that.
