Literature

Chinese Translation of “Finnegan’s Wake” Sells Out

by Alison Kroulek February 26, 2013 Literature
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“Finnegan’s Wake,” the last novel written by Irish author James Joyce, is one of the most critically acclaimed novels in the English language. It’s also one of the most perplexing and difficult to parse. Consequently, most of the general English-speaking public has not even attempted to read it. But, as IrishCentral.com reports, while Finnegan’s Wake may [...]

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Dante, Translated for 2012

by Alison Kroulek August 13, 2012 Literature
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Classical literature lovers, here’s something that might make you take all those Mayan prophecies about 2012 a bit more seriously: a new translation of Dante’s “Inferno” is out, and it’s stuffed with references to modern-day pop culture phenomena like Eric Cartman and Superman. But don’t head for the underground bunker just yet. The translation is [...]

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Happy Birthday, Shakespeare!

by Alison Kroulek April 23, 2012 Languages
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Today is Shakespeare’s birthday, as well as the anniversary of his death. Although he lived 400 years ago, the Bard still influences the English we speak today.  The Oxford English Dictionary gives him credit for coining more than 2,000 words, though of there’s some dispute over whether or not he actually invented all of them. [...]

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The Hunger Games, Translated

by Alison Kroulek April 16, 2012 Entertainment
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Move over Twilight, another series of young adult books has made its way to the silver screen. The Hunger Games movie was released last month to record box-office sales in North America. The books are set in a dystopian future, another world with its own vocabulary that has drifted away from our own in subtle, [...]

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An Irish Translation of “The Hobbit”

by Alison Kroulek March 21, 2012 Literature
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Irish-speaking Tolkien fans, rejoice! A special edition of The Hobbit is due out this month — translated entirely into Irish! The Irish version of Tolkien’s classic tale is being published by Evertype Publishers, a small publishing company owned by Michael Everson which specializes in minority language translations, specialty fonts and typesetting. Here are some details of the [...]

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Alice Learns a New Language

by Alison Kroulek February 21, 2012 Literature
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Her French skills may have been notoriously poor, but Alice, of Lewis Carroll’s “Alice in Wonderland” fame, just learned a new language: Jèrriais. Jèrriais is also known as Jersey French and is spoken only on the island of Jersey. The story of a little girl falling through a rabbit hole into a topsy-turvy world has [...]

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New Illiad Translation

by Richard Brooks October 6, 2011 Literature

When it comes to translating classic literature, one of the most pressing issues a translator faces is determining how closely to follow the original text. One the one hand, you don’t want to deviate so far from the original that you lose or change the meaning. On the other hand, sometimes a literal, word-for-word translation [...]

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Losing Language

by Tanguy June 23, 2011 Languages

“Poetry is just the evidence of life.  If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash”. This is a quotation of the artist Leonard Cohen which points out the necessity of poetry. It is the same for language. Humans need to talk and share between us but for this, reading literature is very [...]

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