Adventures in European subtitling. "With films like these I often feel like I am some sort of firefighter trying to salvage as much as I can from an immense burning mansion. You take out the expensive furniture and artwork and all the people and you leave behind the wallpaper, the rugs, the goldfish tank and the occasional poodle. Sorry, folks, no time." via
posted on Aug 5, 2008 - View this thread

An Interpreter Speaking Up for Migrants: Erik Camayd-Freixas is a professor and a legal translator who assisted in the fast-track trial and sentencing of the over 400 illegal immigrant workers in Postville, Iowa, who were arrested on criminal charges involving identity theft rather than the usual deportation proceedings. Unusually for a court interpreter, who maintain a strict code of impartiality and neutrality, Camayd-Freixas spoke out, writing "that the immigrant defendants whose words he translated, most of them villagers from Guatemala, did not fully understand the criminal charges they were facing or the rights most of them had waived."
posted on Jul 11, 2008 - View this thread

Doug Skinner translates Paul Vibert's House of Flesh and Bone, a short story about living inside large animals. Part 2. Part 3. via
posted on Jul 10, 2008 - View this thread

Wordchamp lets you view foreign-language web pages with definitions in your language as mouseovers (registration-only).
posted on Jul 5, 2008 - View this thread

A Mid-summer Night's Story - one of hundreds of novels, poems, and tales in English translation at Suat Karantay's Contemporary Turkish Literature pages. Also: Turkish Poetry in Translation (the side-by-side translations of Dağlarca are particularly well-done), and selected stories of childhood & youth from Turkish authors in the mid 20th century.
posted on Jun 25, 2008 - View this thread

YouTube user lightning49 has 160 of videos of French singers which she has subtitled with her translations. Her biggest collection is of Jacques Brel videos but there are also songs performed by George Brassens, Charles Aznavour, Edith Piaf as well as a smattering of other stuff. To start you off with a few songs here are three of my favorite songs by Brel, Je suis un soir d'éte, Le moribond and La valse à mille temp along with Charles Aznavour's La boheme, Edith Piaf's Milord and Georges Brassens' Les passantes.
posted on Feb 13, 2008 - View this thread

Bob: "______________” Charlotte (Johansson): “Okay.” Lost in Translation's mysterious whisper finale revealed by audio processing. (via kottke)
posted on Dec 13, 2007 - View this thread

Lingro. Enter a website in the box to make all words on the page clickable. Available for English, Spanish, French, German, Italian and Polish.
posted on Nov 20, 2007 - View this thread

Claude François was one of France's most successful popstars, a complete song-and-dance act who remained at the top of the charts for almost ten years before his career was tragically cut short when he tried to change a lightbulb while in the bath (youtube ahead).
posted on Nov 11, 2007 - View this thread

Bilingual homophonic translations
posted on Nov 11, 2007 - View this thread

A Wicked Deception (youtube). A fun look at (multi) round-trip machine translation. Sadly, it is a simple fattening of Verbindungsyoutube. Of course, humans, as Jules Verne might tell you, can have problems with translations too.
posted on Sep 27, 2007 - View this thread

Sumerian is the first language for which we have written evidence and its literature the earliest known. The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature, a project of the University of Oxford, comprises a selection of nearly 400 translated literary compositions recorded on sources which come from ancient Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) and date to the late third and early second millennia BCE. Not enough for you? Why not impress your friends (and confuse your enemies) by translating some english words into Sumerian?
posted on Sep 20, 2007 - View this thread

Translating poetry is really really hard.
posted on Jul 21, 2007 - View this thread

Sean Bonney's translations of Baudelaire are unconventional. Instead of following the form of the French originals they are semi-concrete typewriter poetry. In a review of the book, everyone's cup of tea, onedit magazine says that they are "certainly the best translations of Baudelaire in English ever written." Which might explain why they published 35 of them in their latest issue. You can listen to Bonney read his translations here [mp3]
posted on Jul 18, 2007 - View this thread

dotSUB s a resource and gathering place for subtitling films from one language into many languages using our unique subtitling tools. These tools expand the power and reach of films by making it possible for people to view and enjoy films in their native languages. It is very easy to use and has many languages.
posted on May 11, 2007 - View this thread

Multilingual Keyboard Emulator.
posted on Jan 8, 2007 - View this thread

You whisper "Je t'aime", the machine says "I love you". Carnegie Mellon offer the prospect of a real-time automatic face-mounted translation device.
posted on Oct 27, 2006 - View this thread

The Tao Te Ching in dozens of languages and translations, with a lovely side-by-side comparison tool.
posted on Sep 10, 2006 - View this thread

The Nicholas Roerich Museum in New York City, houses paintings by Nicholas Roerich, a Russian artist, who spent most of his life on the Indian-Tibetan border, creating evocative images of night and day in the Himalayan Mountains. (more inside)
posted on Jun 15, 2006 - View this thread

Lost in translation. British Comedian Stewart Lee explores comedy in Germany and finds it stymied by the peculiarities of language and sentence construction. Mark Liberman at Language Log disagrees. And an extended essay by Josh Schonwald explores in greater depth how the German comedy scene is transitioning (PDF) from the more traditional kabernett to a burgeoning stand-up comedy scene, which is characterized by one observer as being in "the Bob Hope phase of comedy."
posted on May 26, 2006 - View this thread

What's the Korean for thanatophany or the Icelandic for snoek? J M Coetzee writes about the problems and delights of translation. [via languagehat]
posted on Feb 2, 2006 - View this thread

Love that can't be withstood,
Love that scatters fortunes,
Love like a green fern shading
The cheek of a sleeping girl.
Seamus Heaney's search for the soul of Antigone.
(more inside, with Christopher Logue)
posted on Nov 4, 2005 - View this thread

Transcript , published in English, German and French, is a review of European literature and books. (Their double issue on Welsh literature is particularly nice.) Archipelago is another online journal dedicated to literature in translation. And despite persistent troubles with getting World literature translated into English (The Complete Review covers this issue well.), there are many sites with translated literature on the web: Albanian, Arabic Malay and Urdu, Armenian, more Armenian, Bengali, Chinese, Czech and Slovak, Dutch, Hungarian, Korean, Japanese, Pan-African, Polish, Ukranian, Welsh, "World," Yiddish.
posted on Jul 20, 2005 - View this thread

The Aesthetics of Resistance. The first part of Peter Weiss's 3-volume novel Die Ästhetik des Widerstands (1975-81) has, after many delays, finally been published in a Joachim Neugroschel’s English translation: a major, though largely-unheralded literary event. The book ‘stands as the most significant German novel published after The Tin Drum.’ [more inside]
posted on Jun 28, 2005 - View this thread

"The main thing was that in West Berlin, we really thought it would've been great to witness the end of the world." A great interview with Einstürzende Neubauten co-founder Alexander Hacke from signandsight.com, a website that translates German arts and letters writing into English. Just part of what seems a larger trend of German outlets wading into the English market.
posted on Apr 25, 2005 - View this thread

Lauris is the spirit of the office, irrespective weather those are the numerous jokes for any occasion he has in his luggage or a basket of autumn apples, which he has picked in the morning to remind the colleges about the beauty of the autumn.

Zane has chosen to live in a beautiful world of internal and external beauty, where fragrances and aromas are of importance, however the uppermost value are harmonious relations with the closest people.

We are all fans of mangled English translations from Asia, but there is a certain added beauty in this site for a Latvian law firm, which boasts "professional, fast and qualitative translations" while "introducing a spirit of poetics in the daily routine of the office".
posted on Apr 13, 2005 - View this thread

Can't hack Catullus in Latin? How about Brazilian Portuguese, Catalan, Chinese, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, French, German, Hungarian, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Rioplatense, Romanian, Russian, Scanned, Serbian, South African, Spanish, Swedish, or Welsh? You can also compare two languages side by side.
posted on Apr 11, 2005 - View this thread

Early Modern Texts. Versions of some classics of early modern philosophy, prepared with a view to making them easier to read while leaving the main arguments, doctrines, and lines of thought intact. Recently added: John Locke's Second Treatise of Government. Via Crooked Timber.
posted on Feb 28, 2005 - View this thread

In her new book written with Catherine Johnson, Animals in Translation (NYTimes), Dr Temple Grandin, an animal behavior expert and inventor of the squeeze machine, uses her experiences with autism to explore the intricacies of animal behavior. She argues that animals do have consciousness, that language is not a prerequisite and other theories that bring insight into both animal and human behavior. (More)
posted on Jan 11, 2005 - View this thread

Knack for language? Great! Gay? No thanks. Interesting WaPo story of how DoD desparately needs linguists trained in Arabic, but dismisses linguists when it comes out that they are gay.
posted on Dec 3, 2003 - View this thread

A normal person wouldn't steal pituitaries, and other actual Hong Kong film subtitles. T-shirts, too. How can you use my intestines as a gift?
posted on Oct 28, 2003 - View this thread

Colorful phrases in 172 languages *contains offensive language* - but how else are your going to learn how to say "to pet one's monkey" in Russian or the Romanian classic "Our boss is a bloody farthead"?
posted on Apr 2, 2003 - View this thread

English-friendly Arab web portal: For those who want to better understand what Arab news agencies are printing/broadcasting or if you want to be able to read any web site published in Arabic, the Ajeeb portal has a free translation service. It translated Arabic to English more clearly than how I've seen babblefish handle other languages. However, one should approach any translation with circumspection, especially in light of current events.
posted on Mar 23, 2003 - View this thread

The Powell is sent in order to carry the water: I find Japanese "Engrish" websites unfunny and stupidly patronizing but this blog is potential poetry - Surrealist poetry. Whether it was machine-translated or drafted using Breton's, Ionesco's or Burroughs' techniques, it's splendidly memorable: Rather than "I am sad" we need "mush truth". All it needs is some artful, e.e.cummings-like arranging on the page to be transformed into art. [Via Linkfilter].
posted on Feb 6, 2003 - View this thread

The English have landed! In the spirit of international confederation, Nerve.com offers this all too brief list of common curses, epithets, and scandalous phrases, along with their French counterpart, and more interestingly, a transliteration of the French so one can better understand the Idiom.
posted on Jan 23, 2003 - View this thread

"and then beowulf, hero of the hairy peoples of upper-earth, cut the hand from the evil lord grendel... afterwards, they hung it above the mead hall door..."

okay. maybe not. but a "yellowed manuscript" containing a translation and analysis of the venerable beowulf has been found in an oxford library. the author? none other than the late j.r.r. tolkien. with all of the interest in anything even remotely hobbit-esque, this is quite a find.
posted on Jan 8, 2003 - View this thread

Poetry International Web opens today. "Hundreds of poems by acclaimed modern poets from all around the world, both in the original language and in English translation."
posted on Nov 6, 2002 - View this thread

J'ECRIS JE DESSINE, Pour les enfants écrire, dessiner, lire sur Internet. Inventer des contes, faire des dessins, les publier.
posted on Sep 20, 2002 - View this thread

This pidgin bible translation gives me the creeps. What happened to promoting literacy by example? Sure, it's important to use language that your readers are comfortable with, but come on already. Is it any wonder that education in Hawaii stinks?
posted on Sep 15, 2002 - View this thread

A handheld device that translates simple spoken phrases. "American troops in Afghanistan are using a revolutionary device that instantly translates soldiers' voices into native languages. . . . The soldier speaks into the machine, which recognizes the words and translates them into another language." Simple phrases only — and a long way from a Star Trek universal translator — but kindling for the science-fiction-addled imagination nonetheless.
posted on Jun 10, 2002 - View this thread

New scholarship on the origins of the Koran claims that the Koran has been misread and mistranslated for centuries. For example, Islamic martyrs are not rewarded in paradise with "virgins," that's a mistranslation. Oops. (NYT member: metafi, password: metafi)
posted on Mar 1, 2002 - View this thread

An interesting look at translation: Australian writer Peter Goldsworthy "on being Spanished, Deutsched, Japanesed, Greeked and Malayed", and what he thinks is gained or lost in the process. (Also: translating poetry.)
posted on Jan 4, 2002 - View this thread

WebVerbix can conjugate verbs for you sixty-four languages, ranging from French and Spanish to Dutch and a variety of creoles. The best part is that it'll do it for free (though you can buy the software and conjugate in 100 languages.) It's sites like these that remind me why I love the Internet.
posted on Dec 27, 2001 - View this thread

Looks like Samsung is having some interesting problems with translation. I especially like "This elegant phone can check women's Pink Schedule & Calorie that it helps you to be a woman of sense. It has Voice Dialing funtion.(sic)" What is a Pink schedule?
posted on Dec 17, 2001 - View this thread

Al Jazeera english language summary. Since the original al Jazeera site is in arabic, this wbur website, gives a summary of the stories covered by the network in english. Of course, one can try to translate automatically (ajeeb, registration required), but the results are usually comical.
posted on Nov 23, 2001 - View this thread

Ahye Matey! He's mean and one-eyed and known simply as "unidentified translator" .
posted on Oct 19, 2001 - View this thread

BBC translation of Bin Laden's warning much better than the spotty CNN version. One sentence struck me as very odd: "Hundreds of thousands of people, young and old, were killed [by the US] in the farthest point on earth in Japan." Why does Bin Laden mention Japan, of all places?
posted on Oct 7, 2001 - View this thread

A Little Light Relief - and Brush Up Your English While You're At It. In the spirit of poking fun at one's own flesh and blood - and respecting all those who aren't - I offer the most appalling tribute to Shakespeare's and Emerson's language since time itself began. I give you, ladies and gentlemen, the great Portuguese scholar Pedro Carolino, whose "English As She Is Spoke" Mark Twain considered to be the funniest book ever written. Start with "Familiar Dialogues 1" and, if you've still been able to keep a straight face, try "Idiotisms and Proverbs" for the full effect... (Thanks to Ganz's Humor Page)
posted on Sep 20, 2001 - View this thread

Polish slang! Having just moved to Greenpoint, Brooklyn, the heart of Polish New York City, I've been digging for Polish links. English-Polish computing dictionary. Useful Polish phrases, with audio. Simple Polish lessons and email list. Polish spelling dictionary. Warsaw Voice English-language newspaper. Warsaw Business Journal, in English. Warsaw Insider, a city guide. Portal for Wroclaw, capital of Lower Silesia. Kracow Academic Radio. Radio KRAJ from Brisbane. Polish Reader's Digest. Finally, The Official Site of His Serene Highness Dennis Fürst Blücher von Wahlstatt.
posted on Sep 8, 2001 - View this thread

Reasons not to buy a Vagina Washing Rod: 1. Badly translated Korean catalogue entry. ("Purity, an essential device for cleanliness of women daily!") 2. "No, Mom! It's for hygeine! Really!" 3. Look, just take a second, and think about what it does. Now think about where it goes. Still interested?
posted on May 16, 2001 - View this thread