Comments on: No translation

By: Chloe

Chloe — Sun, 06 Nov 2022 07:58:57 +0000

The fact that the English text was the most translated, as Table 1 points out, did not surprise me at all. Because it’s obvious, whether it’s a novel, a reference or a film. As long as the original text is in English, we can always find translations from various countries. One is the reliability of the research findings and the other is the influence of the English-speaking community itself. Get out of the book and think about people who are particularly famous in the English-speaking world, such as singers, actors and even authors. Usually they are also well known and have a following abroad. But on the contrary, because of the large population of China itself, there may not be that big a gap in terms of the number of fans. But internationally they are considerably less well known than the stars of the English-speaking countries. The second table points out that there are not so many translations into English. I think it is also justifiable. For people outside the English-speaking countries there is a high demand for English translations, regardless of the field. Because they need material from the English-speaking countries, they are curious and almost everyone wants to learn English. By contrast, people in English-speaking countries are often different. They are not that interested in learning another language, and many of them don’t feel it is necessary to do so. I think this is the reason for the discrepancy between the data given in Table 1 and Table 2.

By: Ingrid Piller

Ingrid Piller — Mon, 31 Oct 2022 20:52:13 +0000

In reply to Hana. And that, in a nutshell, is why the whole world knows about Shakespeare and no one knows about Jikji ...

By: Hana

Hana — Mon, 31 Oct 2022 12:06:19 +0000

Through this article, once again, language in politics and economy as a whole is the dominant factor in the world, and among them, global English seems to be the basic premise for everyone. In fact, most of Shakespeare’s plays, which are the first to learn when studying English literature, have been translated into modern English. It has also been translated into at least 80 languages, including Korean. However, the literacy rate is currently negative about English. However, readers who wonder what’s so great about Shakespeare can get help from a version consisting of the original on the left and a modern translation on the right. You can read it by contrasting the left and right pages. It is very easy in every country to get a translation in English like this. These days, translations are very good in each country. Usually, such translations are translated by local writers. Although there are still difficulties in this field of translation, this gap is significantly decreasing as English becomes the world’s common language.

By: Ingrid Piller

Ingrid Piller — Mon, 31 Oct 2022 05:11:55 +0000

In reply to Shiyi.ke. What's the source for these numbers? I imagine the rate of people who love to read is hard to measure (in contrast to the literacy rate) ...

By: Shiyi.ke

Shiyi.ke — Sun, 30 Oct 2022 17:48:57 +0000

WHAT A SURPRISE to know that her books are translated into French version instead of English.

The first figure shows that the literature which is translated into other languages is English literature, not surprisingly. But the second figure makes me curious, why German is at the top of the list of target languages.

In terms of supply and demand, I think it is likely that there is a high demand for books in Germany. Is there any basis for my conclusion? so I surf the internet and find out Israel is the country that people love to read most and has the largest number of Jews, followed by Germany. I think this eliminate my doubts.

By: Chocomilk

Chocomilk — Sun, 30 Oct 2022 08:32:16 +0000

This article reminds me of an episode from just a few weeks ago: my colleague was telling me that he read a foreign book and after hearing the title in Korean, I immediately and unconsciously thought it was a book written in English/originated from an Anglophone country and asked him if he read it in English. But no, it was a French book and he had read the Korean-translated version of the book. I thought about this afterward and thought, why do I assume that all books written in other countries are originally written in English? Reading this article, I felt as if I was looking for the book myself through Dr. Piller’s descriptions. How difficult it must have been to search for the particular book! The most widely used search engine is, of course, originated from the United States (there is even a verb “googled”) and it does contain countless results for LOTE too, but one must also consider for countries that have restrictive policies on the internet, the search may not be so easy.

By: “Women, life, freedom” – the slogan swimming against the global tide – Language on the Move

Tue, 04 Oct 2022 04:16:10 +0000

[…] English is widely considered worth paying attention to, as is evidenced by translation statistics: English is the source language of the overwhelming majority of translations in the world. It is the source language of 1,266,110 translated documents recorded by UNICEF. The second most […]

By: YUYANG SHE

YUYANG SHE — Thu, 09 Nov 2017 00:23:00 +0000

Translation from one language to another, in this case, from Chinese to English, or the other way around, certainly faces plenty of difficulties. That is the reason why there is a professional subject studying translation. But the fact is that most translators are just focusing on materials more related to business rather than literature. People devotes lots of time and efforts in translation but doesn’t get paid well. Translations in literature require one to be more knowledgeable and patient since the author`s intentions and the feelings provoked by the work can easily lost.

By: Reem

Reem — Thu, 05 Oct 2017 09:12:00 +0000

The significance of literacy and multilingualism opportunities are evident from the No Translation post by Prof. Ingrid Piller, which identifies a gap in translation of literary works into other languages. It is fundamental that English takes the priority in translation of literary materials followed by French which being as a second one. With regard to the Arabic world, in particular Saudi Arabia encourages advanced works of multilingualism and enables its intelligent talents to compete on the global scope.
Thank you.

By: Multilingual Macau | Language on the Move

Multilingual Macau | Language on the Move — Sun, 21 Apr 2013 15:42:40 +0000

[…] I have not been able to discover an English translation. I hope this is not another case of “no translation;” if it is, a translation would be highly desirable not only for Chinese Studies but also for […]

By: Ingrid Piller

Ingrid Piller — Tue, 31 Jul 2012 11:11:04 +0000

A reader just drew my attention to this related and fascinating blogpost at http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2012/jun/11/literary-globalization-europe-translation/

Most Favored Nations
Tim Parks
Shortly before his death in 1980, the great anthropologist Gregory Bateson suggested that social engineering was like trying to reverse a truck with five or six trailers attached to it through a complex maze; you might get somewhere, but where and with what collateral damage would never be clear. So it’s hardly a surprise that the decision in many countries around Europe to insist on English as a second language—to facilitate trade of course and to promote a global scientific community—has had some unexpected effects, not least on literature.

In Milan, where I live, the city polytechnic recently announced that some post-graduate courses are soon to be taught exclusively in English. But Italy is hardly in the forefront. About 56 percent of Europeans speak a second language, and for 38 percent of them that language is English. In Scandinavia and the Netherlands, where it’s fairly common to find university courses taught in English, the figure is more like 90 percent. Even where the percentage is smaller we are nevertheless talking about the most educated part of the community, those more likely to be reading novels, particularly literary novels.

Continue reading at http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2012/jun/11/literary-globalization-europe-translation/

By: Xiaoxiao Chen

Xiaoxiao Chen — Mon, 16 Jul 2012 12:36:30 +0000

Thanks to Ingrid for pointing out a central issue in China’s cultural globalization, namely cultural trade deficit. We’ve been very active in importing than in exporting in cultural exchanges, as Jenny also commented above. I think it is because Chinese culture or Oriental cultures in general have been long time regarded as inferior to Western culture. Chinese or Oriental are expected to learn from the Euro-Americans and to build their nation on the model of Western modernization. This Orientalist discourse has been naturalized for ages and has also been internalized by Oriental countries, at least to some extent. The good sign is, as Jenny mentioned above, the Chinese government has promulgated some policies to promote cultural export. We’re expecting to see positive effect in near future…
Ingrid’s blog also reminds me of Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang, the most prominent translator couple who had translated a lot of Chinese literary works to the English-speaking world and had also introduced many foreign literary works to China. They had made the greatest contributions to cultural exportation of China’s classic literary works. Unfortunately we’d lost them, Xianyi in 2009 and Gladys in 1999. I hope we can see some followers of the Yangs in China in near future too…
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/books-obituaries/6782148/Yang-Xianyi.html
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/yang-xianyi-translator-who-fell-foul-of-authority-during-the-cultural-revolution-1826876.html

By: Guo Jian

Guo Jian — Sat, 14 Jul 2012 11:19:12 +0000

Chi Li is one of my favourite contemporary female writers and I appreciate her novels as well as her way of raising her daughter.

It was really shocking to know there’s only a little introduction about her and no traslation for her works in English.I have to admit I’ve never pay attention to this before.Quite interesting !!More research needs to be done and it concerns many complicated reasons for such a phenomenon.

thank you for your information and Jenny’s resrarch!!!

By: Khan

Khan — Wed, 11 Jul 2012 16:55:43 +0000

Like Kimie I have also never thought about translations in terms of inequality of cultural flows. A thought provoking and eye opener post indeed. In India and Pakistan, there has been a long tradition of translating knowledges from English and other European languages into local languages. Getting all Shakespeare’s works, Goethe, Dostoevsky, Chekov, Kant etc is not very uncommon. Similarly the translations of local writers such as Ghalib, Iqbal, Manot etc are also easily available in English. The interesting point is that it is mostly the locals who are the translators of these works from one language to another. They earn their livings by it and they believe that it is the greatest service to one’s literacy and language. The institutionalization of translation as source of knowledge comes from the establishment of University of Usmania in undivided India where the motto was teach all scientific knowledge in local languages based on translation from European languages into Hindi/ Urdu.

By: Kimie Takahashi

Kimie Takahashi — Wed, 11 Jul 2012 07:31:00 +0000

In the early 1990s, a friend of mine gave me a book, “Kitchen” by Banana Yoshimoto, for a birthday present. I was both happy and *amazed* that it was translated into English. Recently a Swiss colleague of mine in Thailand asked me to read his draft journal article based on Ryu Murakami’s work. My colleague complained that he can’t read all Murakami’s books as most of them are yet to be translated. To be perfectly honest I didn’t think much of this, let alone this as the ‘inequality of cultural flows’, until I read this post – obviously I’d taken it for granted that Japanese literature was of a marginal value for the world audience;-(

By: Jenny Zhang

Jenny Zhang — Tue, 10 Jul 2012 15:17:18 +0000

When Ingrid replied that she was happy to accept our invitation to attend and address the forthcoming conference on Research and Applications of Intercultural Communication (http://www.icc2012.info/), she asked me to recommend her a good novel about Wuhan to read. I answered without a moment’s hesitation “Chi Li’s ‘Life Show’ （池莉《生活秀》）”。Chi Li is one of China’s best-known contemporary writers. Her novels are usually set in Wuhan, the city she lives in. As the novel “Life Show” was adapted into an award-winning movie in 2003 and there is a good number of professionals are engaged in literary translation in China, I took it for granted that the novel must have a translation into English. Surprisingly, it’s hard enough to find a few lines about the writer on English websites, let alone the translation of her works. The search result set me thinking. The decline of China in the 1800s awoke the late Qing government to China’s technological inferiority to the West and the necessity of Western learning. A hundred years later opening up became China’s basic state policy. During the past three decades of economic reform, the Chinese government has always stressed importing Western learning but didn’t give due attention to cultural export. As China’s economy has been developing rapidly, the government joined soft-power competition by exporting its culture. Since last year, the Chinese government has taken a series of measures to encourage cultural exports, including setting up national research funds to encourage translating great works of Chinese literature, history, culture, philosophy and others. I hope more good literary works which reflect the realities of today’s China can be translated and introduced to readers all over the world so as to promote Intercultural Literacy, Communication, and Competence in the Context of Multiculturalism