Kali Faulwetter's Blog Articles

1. Be prepared
   Let’s say you are proofreading a completed translation on a project, and you come across some unsatisfactory strings. You see this string has some clear complications, there are comments from the client, and the translator is unresponsive. Check the style guide, the glossaries, and check with the MotaWord internal team. Rely on your own expertise as well as the expertise of those around you to correct the mistake. Reach out to the translator is a question, and if they are unresponsive, let us know. Use any combination of the many tools we have to offer.
   

2. Avoid confusing language
   It is no secret that everyone has their own perspective. As a proofreader, it is your responsibility to accommodate your tone when giving feedback to ensure your points are getting across clearly. Abstract words and concepts without solid, actionable examples will not yield any result. Confusing language will lead to more confusion. Keep it simple; keep it clear; keep it high-quality.
   
   
3. Refer to the client provided style-guide and glossaries
   Our clients have a very specific vision and image in their mind of what they want from our translation services, and we trust our proofreaders to be aligned with that vision. This is where the style-guide and glossaries come in. It is up to you and the team of translators on the project to use the information in the style-guide exactly as the client asks. No embellishments, no additions. In the event that something in the style-guide or glossary is confusing to you, please reach out to us via email or the intercom widget on our site.
   
   4. Be communicative with the MotaWord internal team
   We are here to help you! Do not keep anything secret. We all work remotely, all over the world. When you need us, we will be there. Letting us know what is happening with a project, how you are working, and any comments your colleagues are making on a project will always do one thing: make our translation services better. Providing any feedback to us regarding your proofreading experience will give us more insight into how our colleagues’ performance is progressing and will allow us to make any necessary changes to solve any problems that may come. Just because a situation may initially be unhappy does not mean it needs to end that way, and a productive feedback session is one that ends on a positive note.
   
   5. Help to improve the quality of our community
   How can we improve in silence? How can a person improve their performance if they only receive positive or negative feedback? A happy relationship between positive and constructive feedback is crucial to achieving the desired change in behavior. We have automated features to help make quality assurance easier. The best tool we have found is for our translators and proofreaders to work together with our translation editor. Automatic suggestions will prompt you from a translation memory associated with that client.
   

1. “I like it, but we wanted something different”
   This kind of feedback indicates that there was a key misunderstanding at the time of ordering your translation. Somewhere along our journey together, we stopped being on the same page. We have a few options to prevent this kind of feedback and deliver you our high-quality promise.
   
   a. Make sure you make use of “Style Guides” and “Glossaries” when ordering your translation
   To prevent your project from getting started on a shaky foundation, and to make your goals as a client clear to our cloud-based, collaborative team of linguists, make sure to provide a style guide and glossary to your project. This will ensure that every individual working on your translation will be virtually sitting next to you, getting all of their stylistic, grammatical, and localization questions answered by your ready-made style guide and glossary. You may also make use of our “client comments” section of your dashboard, where you are able to make comments to any linguist working on your translation project in real time. If any glaring issues should arise, we will also be there watching, and you can reach out to us anytime via the intercom widget on your main page.
   

2. “That is the wrong translation and I want a different one.”
   An unfortunate mistake, indeed. Whether it is your fault or ours, when you order a translation with MotaWord, you agree to promptly review the delivered translations and notify us within 7 days of any errors such as outright mistranslations, typos, omissions or nonadherence to any approved glossary and/or style guide. We will correct such errors at no cost to you. You may cancel the services you have ordered at any time - in writing. You will have to pay for the amount of translation work already completed in draft condition at the time of the cancellation. In the event that you send us a document in error, and the translation has already been completed correctly and successfully, you will need to order a new translation with the correct document and pay again as if it were the original.
   

3. *Complete Silence*
   Silence is indicative of a big communication problem that needs to be addressed as soon as possible. We encourage you to communicate with us as much as possible and let us know anything and everything you think about our translations, performance, and your satisfaction as a whole. Ideally, we should be in clear communication with you before you order, during the translation process, and after your translation is complete, proofread, and delivered back to you. The worst feedback we can receive is no feedback at all. If we see you going silent, we will reach out to you.
   

1. Be Clear and Concise
   Nothing is more gratifying than understanding another human being’s words and intentions. When we are specific, there is very little room for misunderstanding - only elaboration. The goal when providing any kind of feedback, whether it be positive or constructive, is to achieve a desired changed behavior. The receiver of your feedback will not understand what is problematic about a particular behavior if you do not spell it out for them in detail - we like to use the “explain it like I am 5 years old” rule. Part of the joy of working in a multilingual, cross-cultural environment is the misunderstanding, however, when addressing changed behaviors, it is important to be painfully clear in your words and intentions.
   
   
2. Be Action-Oriented: Create a Clear Path Forward
   At MotaWord, we believe in delivering feedback proactively. Address issues immediately. Feedback should not come as a surprise to anyone, and providing feedback as close to the event as possible is the best way to ensure full understanding and illicit changed behavior.

3. Breathe and Check Perspective
   We do not believe in being mean-spirited. Before you contact someone regarding their behavior, please take a moment to breathe and understand how your feedback may be received. Especially if the feedback is constructive, it is important to create safety and comradery before providing the feedback. If the person receiving the feedback does not feel comfortable, then the positive of constructive feedback you provide them will be ultimately unproductive. Check your bias. What is your motive for giving this feedback? Remind yourself why you are contacting this person and make sure the goal is to improve the situation and the person’s performance. Being harsh, critical, and offensive will accomplish nothing.
   
   
4. Have a Discussion
   Nothing is worse when it comes to feedback then the 1,2 punch approach. “You ruined this project, and I will not work with you again”. Do not have a negative, one-sided interaction. Even if all your feedback is constructive, and you can think of nothing nice to say, take a moment to start a conversation with the person about any assumptions both of you may have about the project needing feedback. Every person on this planet has external stressors in their life, and work should not be another source of stress. Engage in a two-sided discussion that leads to a game plan for improvement. Discuss no more than two issues per feedback session. 
   
   
5. Follow Through
   This is where the MotaWord internal team comes in. Thanks to our strategy of working remotely, We are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week via our intercom widget on our website. Message us anytime with any feedback you may have regarding anything MotaWord. We are here to make high-quality translation seamless and effortless, and your cooperation with the above tactics will ensure a seamless working relationship that will benefit all involved.

• Giovanni Pontiero received several awards and nominations throughout his career as a translator. His English versions of Saramago gave him the Independent Foreign Fiction Award in 1993, the American Translators Award in 1994, and the Teixeira-Gomes Translation Award from the Portuguese government, as well as a nomination for the Aristeion Award.
• Mr. Pontiero was such a prolific, award-winning figure, that his very own award, the Giovanni Pontiero Prize for Translation, is given each year in his honor by Instituto Camões. Each year, the award is dedicated to an important translator; on years that fall on an even number, the Giovanni Pontiero Award is received by a Spanish translation originally in Portuguese, and on odd years the award goes to a Catalan translation originally written in Portuguese. 

Giovanni Pontiero in numbers:

Number of Jose Saramago novels Mr. Pontiero translated into English.

Number of novels by Brazilian author Clarice Lispector that Giovanni Pontiero translated into English.

Mr. Pontiero’s age of death on 10 February.

Giovanni Pontiero is commended in Edith Grossman’s interview here.

About MotaWord

MotaWord is the world’s fastest professional translation platform. Through the use of cloud technologies, smart algorithms that manage projects around the clock and over 15 thousand professional translators MotaWord provides high-quality translations in any language 60% cheaper and 20 times faster than traditional translation agencies. 

 

About This Article
Famous Translators is a MotaWord segment showcasing notable professional translated works and famous linguists from history to the present. We are researching, compiling and sharing stories that matter to every translator on our blog. You, too can be published right here on the MotaWord blog site - just contact kali@motaword.com.

Check out our previous "Famous Translators" articles:

• Deadly Translation: The Politics of Hitoshi Igarashi's Japanese Version of The Satanic Verses
• One Man's Soul Mountain: Translating Gao Xingjian
• The Mistranslation of the Mystical Nostradamus
  
  

Gao Xingjian
Born January 4, 1940

“The human need for language is not simply for the transmission of meaning, it is at the same time listening to and affirming a person's existence.” - Gao Xingjian

Gao Xingjian is a Chinese French national who won the Nobel Laureate in Literature in 2000, the first time the award had been given for work written almost entirely in Chinese. A novelist, playwright, critic, professional translator, screenwriter, stage director, and painter, Xingjian is a true renaissance man. Although his work is less celebrated in China, Xingjian is highly regarded in the Americas and Europe. Earning a degree in French literature in Beijing and settling in Paris in 1987, Gao Xingjian’s plays and translations have since set the trend for experimental drama in China and the West. Two of his translators, Gilbert C. F. Fong and Dr. Mabel Lee, are showcased as Xingjian’s close friends and esteemed colleagues.

• Receiving his basic education in schools of the People’s Republic of China, Xingjian grew up in the aftermath of the Japanese invasion. His mother was an aspiring actress who took great joy in stimulating Gao’s interest in theatre and writing. He wrote his whole life, creating countless manuscripts which he kept in a suitcase. During the cultural revolution (1966-76) Xingjian was sent to a re-education camp, where he is said to have burned that suitcase. He was able to travel to France and Italy in 1979, when he was finally able to publish his work.
  

• During the years of 1980-87, Xingjian published short stories, essays, and dramas in various literary magazines throughout China. He was able to publish four books in French: Premier essai sur les techniques du roman moderne/A Preliminary Discussion of the Art of Modern Fiction (1981), which incited violent written attacks on the author, A Pigeon Called Red Beak (1985), Collected Plays (1985), and In Search of a Modern Form of Dramatic Representation (1987).
  

• Xingjian wrote arguably one of his most famous novels, Soul Mountain (1990), based on a journey through the mountains and forests of southwest China. Pioneering Western interest in Chinese literature in translation, Soul Mountain gained the attention of The New York Times, who called the book “remarkable”, and is said to have been the catalyst that pushed him toward winning his Nobel Laureate 10 years later. On Xingjian, the Nobel Prize Committee said, “In the writing of Gao Xingjian, literature is born anew from the struggle of the individual to survive the history of the masses."
  

• Originally written in Chinese, Soul Mountain needed a translator into English. Born in New South Wales, Dr. Mabel Lee grew up bilingual in Cantonese and English, with a growing interest in Chinese cultural affairs. Her translation of Soul Mountain took her seven years, then an additional two years after that to find an adequate publisher. Just three months after she published her translation, Dr. Lee found herself with Gao Xingjian at the center of International literary recognition when Xingjian won the Nobel Laureate. Today, Dr. Lee works as a Professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Sydney in Australia, is the founder of Wile Peony Book Publishers, and is one of the leading authorities on Chinese literature and translation.
  

• Where Dr. Mabel Lee translated Xingjian’s novels, Gilbert C. Fong translated his plays. Also a professor at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Fong specializes in Gao Xingjian, translated drama, and Hong Kong movie and television subtitling.

Gao Xingjian moved to France to seek political asylum and was granted citizenship in 1998. "After I went to France, I finally had an environment where I could work freely," he said. "So you could say I worked extremely hard, but I was very happy."

Gao Xingjian in numbers:

The decade during which Xingjian stayed in Anhui Province doing farm labor and teaching Chinese at Gankou Middle School during the Down to the Countryside Movement. In 1975 he was allowed to move back to Beijing where he became the group leader of French translation for “China Reconstructs” magazine (《中國建設》).

The number of politically charged plays that are argued to have openly criticized the Chinese government and contributed to his absurdist drama acclaim. Titles include Signal Alarm (《絕對信號》, 1982), Bus Stop (《車站》, 1983), The Primitive (1985), and The Other Shore (《彼岸》, 1986).

Five years after being granted asylum in Paris during a visit to Europe in 1987, Xingjian was made Chevalier de l'Ordere des Arts et des Lettres de la France.

Number of pages in Xingjian’s novel Soul Mountain; a fictional autobiography exploring Xingjian’s boyhood and relationships with women. The protagonists in the novel are named with the pronouns "I," "you," "he," and "she", and explore the interconnectedness of each others’ identity.

For a New York Times interview with Xingjian, click here.
For an interview with one of Xingjian’s translators of Soul Mountain, Mabel Lee, click here.
For the Asia Society’s interview with Gao Xingjian, as interpreted from Chinese by Daniel Fertig, click here.

About MotaWord

MotaWord is the world’s fastest professional translation platform. Through the use of cloud technologies, smart algorithms that manage projects around the clock, and over 15 thousand professional translators, MotaWord provides high-quality translations in any language 60% cheaper and 20 times faster than traditional translation agencies. If you are a professional translator and would like to work with MotaWord please register using this link.

About This Article
Famous Translators is a MotaWord segment showcasing notable professional translated works and famous linguists from history to the present. We are researching, compiling and sharing stories that matter to every translator on our blog. You, too can be published right here on the MotaWord blog site - just contact kali@motaword.com.

Check out our previous "Famous Translators" articles:

• The Mistranslation of the Mystical Nostradamus

• High-Quality Translation Philosophy with Jorge Luis Borges

• Oh! The Places You'll Go...with Translation: The Professional Translator's Experience with Dr. Seuss
  
  Citations: TranslationReview, NobelPrize, UGC, IrishTimes, TIME, NYTimes, AsiaSociety, TheGuardian

For our clients, getting an accurate translation is very important. If you have ever encountered a bad translation, you’ve probably laughed, cried, scratched your head in confusion, and (if you’re a professional translator) tried to fix it. At their best, bad translations are amusing, but at their worst, a low-quality translation can seriously harm your business. So, how does MotaWord ensure that you are getting a high-quality, accurate translation?

With over 15,000 qualified, vetted, professionally-trained translators in the MotaWord roster, we collaborate to analyze, translate, edit, proofread, finalize and deliver only the most accurate business translations to our clients. In record short time, MotaWord translators can take any business document in any of the 80+ languages within our base, and translate into the target language without compromising quality.

We were born of the idea that many translators collaborating to create an accurate translation would ensure speed, take the sting out of deadlines and provide a better experience where a first-come, first- served or lowest bidder approach would no longer be necessary. 

MotaWord is unapologetically human. We are working towards creating a platform which will enable our professional translator base to not be encumbered by housekeeping or project accession tasks. We are also working on creating translation editors that this base can use to provide not 2,000 words a day output but more like 5,000 words a day - more than doubling their work capability without hindering the accuracy of their translations. 

This is something that our translator base is currently experiencing with some of our marketing translation clients like Nielsen whereby we complete translations of over 40 thousand words in multiple languages within less than 24 hours. 

As we continue to positively disrupt the translation industry with our approach to collaborative, cloud-based, high-quality translation, we are growing faster than ever. With global acclaim, we are committed to finding creative and proven ways to make our already thriving professional translator base even more accurate. We are the first to say that MotaWord is a work in progress in uncharted territories - we are better than last year but we will be better soon.

By combining the efforts of several tested translators on one project, MotaWord is able to divide and conquer any translation project with 100% accuracy, guaranteed. So how, exactly, is this achieved? By using our single-proofreader model, concordance tools, and translation memory, MotaWord is committed to maintaining consistency within a document in need of translation. Our translation editor checks segments for punctuation and glossary errors. By utilizing client glossaries and style guides, we ensure the delivery of a translation exactly in the format that the client wishes. 

This brief video shows how our concordance tool helps with accurate translations:

Don’t believe us? Clients can monitor their ordered translations in real time and be part of the quality process! Simply log on to see the status of your ordered translation, and check the language pairs for quality control. We are sure that you will be pleased with our talented translator base.

Additionally, our Translator Quality Score Algorithm (TQS) works in the background to evaluate the quality and competence of each translator working on a project. Using a translators TQS score, we are able to monitor the quality of each translators work. After every job, we provide feedback to each translator and proofreader to make sure our translator and proofreader bases are working toward our high-quality standards. Our information on our translators is not based on hearsay or unreliable and subjective evaluation. It is based on accumulative and statistically significant data.

Our TQS algorithm is not the only tech-tool we have up our sleeve. Not only are our linguists and language professionals working collaboratively to keep each other accountable when it comes to quality, but they are also backed by a proprietary AI system. Our AI minimizes repetition in the background, corrects formatting, and double-checks our human translators for linguistic consistency.

Our commitment to translation accuracy on MotaWord depends on understanding the needs of our clients with every project they send our way. By providing brand identity and company information to our translators through a “translation style guide”, MotaWord translators are able to understand the company tone and voice needed to market client’s products.

Striving to provide an accurate translation is in MotaWord's DNA. Try our translation service today, and be surprised with just how fast, accurate, and easy it is to get your documents translated with MotaWord.

About MotaWord
MotaWord is the world’s fastest professional translation platform. Through the use of cloud technologies, smart algorithms that manage projects around the clock and over 15 thousand professional translators MotaWord provides high-quality translations in any language 60% cheaper and 20 times faster than traditional translation agencies. 

Michel de Nostredame
(Latinized as Nostradamus)

14 or 21 December 1503 (depending on the source)  – 2 July 1566

“Indeed, the hereditary gift of prophecy will go to the grave with me.”
- Nostradamus

Nostradamus was a widely disputed French physician, astrologer, scholar, sorcerer, and fraud. Growing up wealthy and honored in the French court of Henry II, Nostradamus was said to be in service of queen Catherine de Medici. Best known contemporarily for his book Les Propheties, which supposedly predicts future events, Nostradamus’s credibility has been widely debated for centuries. His book is credited by a large number of supporters and the popular press with having accurately predicted many world events. However, with the many languages his predictions are read in today, what truth is to be taken seriously and what was lost in translation? 

• Documented accounts and suspicions of deliberate misinterpretations and mistranslations of Nostradamus’s work have caused sources to reject the claim that Nostradamus had any prophetic abilities at all. Academics write Nostradamus’s writings as “characteristically vague” and useless for determining the validity of any claim that Nostradamus had supernatural powers. Specifically, the English versions of his quatrains are not high quality translations. Due to a lack of knowledge of sixteenth-century French by modern authors and translators, the quatrains are often deliberately mistranslated to aid in the mystical quality and style of Nostradamus’s writings. It is rare to find an English translation of Nostradamus that is based on his original edition.
  

• Nostradamus used this Latinizing of his first name for the first time in an almanac published in 1550. The publication was so widely successful that Nostradamus decided to write a version annually. As a collection, these almanacs contain at least 6,338 prophecies and 11 annual calendars. In response to the popularity of these almanacs, nobility and far away leaders became interested in Nostradamus, and employed him for horoscopes and other “psychic” advice from the mystic.
  

• Dabbling in the healing arts as well, Nostradamus wrote two books on medical science;
  Paraphrase de C. GALIEN, sus l'Exhortation de Menodote aux estudes des bonnes Artz, mesmement Medicine, and Traité des fardemens. Included in these medical texts are descriptons for methods used to treat the plague, and the preparation of cosmetics.
  

• To address the version of French in which Nostradamus wrote, some say he used “Old French”, when in reality he wrote in “Middle French”, used in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, rather than in the ninth to fourteenth; Modern French has only been used from the 17th century onward. Whatever Nostradamus originally wrote is rarely ever used. With the very popular translation tactic of translating first Old French into Modern French, then Modern French into the target language, it is very unlikely that these translations were of the high-quality needed to retain Nostradamus’s original prophetic meaning. 

There isn’t much to confirm by way of facts with Nostradamus. With all the mistranslation, mysticism and thought-provoking prophecy, the Middle French astrologer seems to be nothing more than a poetic phenomenon who has shocked the world with the ability to predict coincidence. Nostradamus proves to be interesting when considering the importance of high-quality translation, and is, yet another, victim of the opposite.

Nostradamus in numbers:

Nostradamus is said to have predicted his own death, in the year 1567. Legend has it that Nostradamus was buried in his grave standing upright. Most extraordinarily, when his body was dug up to be moved during the French Revolution, he is said to have been wearing a medallion engraved with that day’s exact date. There is no historical evidence to support these claims.

The number of lines in a quatrain. Les Propheties was written almost entirely using this poetic device, and he used these to write in a kind of code to hide his prophecies from the Church at the time.

The age that Mario Reading, a prominent translator of Nostradamus, died on January 29th, 2017. He was a student of medieval French, and has published translations of all the surviving verses of Nostradamus from 1503-66.

The number of poetic quatrains collected in Les Propheties. First published in 1555, the book has not been out of print since Nostradamus’s death.

For the complete works of Nostradamus, click here.
For a merged French and English version of the prophecies of Nostradamus, click here.
For a list of 9 predictions by Nostradamus that some say foresaw the future, click here.
For a stark contrast to Nostradamus, read our article on Stephen Hawking, whose predictions are based on scientific observation: "Translating the Universe with Stephen Hawking"

About MotaWord
MotaWord is the world’s fastest professional translation platform. Through the use of cloud technologies, smart algorithms that manage projects around the clock and over 15 thousand professional translators MotaWord provides high-quality translations in any language 60% cheaper and 20 times faster than traditional translation agencies.  

About This Article
Famous Translators is a MotaWord segment showcasing notable professional translated works and famous linguists from history to the present. We are researching, compiling and sharing stories that matter to every translator on our blog. You, too can be published right here on the MotaWord blog site - just contact kali@motaword.com.

Check out our previous "Famous Translators" articles:

• High-Quality Translation Philosophy with Jorge Luis Borges

• Oh! The Places You'll Go...with Translation: The Professional Translator's Experience with Dr. Seuss

• Translating the Horror Fiction by Stephen King
  
  Citations: Skeptoid, CSI, LiveScience, Telegraph
  
  

MotaWord is committed to breaking language barriers, one word at a time. For businesses of all sizes and industries, MotaWord offers the world’s fastest enterprise-quality translation in 80+ languages.

So how exactly does the MotaWord translation process work? You have heard that we utilize 100% human translation. You have heard that our translations are made incredibly fast by tech. How can they work together? When it comes to speed, this article on fast translation explains how we do it and why. And all that has been made possible by thinking about the task of translation in a different way. 

“Until now you had only 2 bad options for translation services. Either fast but very low-quality machine translation or slow, expensive, cumbersome and iffy quality translation agencies. MotaWord, with its simple approach, very quick turnaround, 24/7 availability and affordability allows for the best of both worlds,” said Evren Ay, founder of MotaWord.

Start by uploading a document to our award-winning website. There, you will get an instant quote. Once the quote is accepted, the document will be sent to the MotaWord human translators matching the language pairs of the document. Once translated, proofread, checked for quality and accuracy, and finalized, you will receive the translation back in your email.

This short, real-time video explains in 40 seconds how getting an instant quote and starting a translation is made easy with our award winning site.

Our platform approach to translation also allows our clients to track projects in real time, 24/7.

MotaWord is bringing together the world's translators, opening up possibilities by providing work to anyone with the right skills and an internet connection, and building an innovative community based on collaborative translation. The MotaWord translation process is unique, made for the 21st century, and 100% human. Simply sign on and see for yourself. We hope to work with you soon.

About MotaWord
MotaWord is the world’s fastest professional translation platform. Through the use of cloud technologies, smart algorithms that manage projects around the clock and over 15 thousand professional translators MotaWord provides high-quality translations in any language 60% cheaper and 20 times faster than traditional translation agencies. 

MotaWord combines a 15,000-strong community of language professionals with an AI tech platform to provide the world’s fastest enterprise-quality translations.  We have the disruptive tech, major marquee clients, and world-class language professionals in 80+ languages. By pioneering collaborative translation in the world, we have hired the best translators the market has to offer. After rigorous evaluation, we train our language professionals extensively, and by monitoring their performance, we hone their skills to the level of high-quality and accuracy we require for our platform.
 
Our global translator base has grown from 8,500 at the start of MotaWord, and we now could not be more excited to be working with over 15,000 professional translators within our platform.

The expertise of a MotaWord translator cannot be paralleled. Our professional translators are passionately committed to providing high-quality, fast translation to anyone who needs it, so they can express themselves professionally and accurately in any language. Machine translation is in its infancy and language is an ever-changing medium that currently AIs cannot interpret. Only a vetted, trained, language professional at MotaWord can deliver the high-quality translation your company requires.

If your goal is to reach out to new clients in a different country and expand your offering in a new language by translating your website, your user’s guides or software, MotaWord’s translators are here to make it painless for you. Translation, thanks to MotaWord, is the fastest, easiest and most often overlooked portion of expanding your business. Our team of expert translators and linguists are here to make sure you do not need to think about translation ever again.

Here are some “business and language” statistics, thanks to the Harvard Business Review, to illustrate just how important it is for any business, old or new, to care about where and how they translate their content:

 - 72.1% of consumers spend most or all of their time on websites in their own language.
 - 72.4% of consumers said they would be more likely to buy a product with information in their own language.
 - 56.2% of consumers said that the ability to obtain information in their own language is more important than price.

We believe there is only one high-quality, professional solution to the problem of monolingualism in business: utilizing the expertise of our MotaWord translators! With goals that can only be attained through the efficient use of talented human translators, we use our collaborative, cloud-based, high-tech platform to deliver the best translations, in record time, 60% cheaper than the competition.

We look forward to seeing more translation projects sent our way. Just reach out to us directly via Intercom on our site, visit our pricing section, or send us an email at info@motaword.com.

About MotaWord
MotaWord is the world’s fastest professional translation platform. Through the use of cloud technologies, smart algorithms that manage projects around the clock and over 15 thousand professional translators MotaWord provides high-quality translations in any language 60% cheaper and 20 times faster than traditional translation agencies. 

Jorge Luis Borges
24 August 1899 – 14 June 1986

“The original is unfaithful to the translation.”
            - Jorge Luis Borges

Jorge Luis Borges is an Argentinian writer, poet, and translator. A key figure in Spanish language and literature. Borges wrote original works of fiction, poetry, and essays. All of these achievements seem to pale in comparison to his secretive contributions to the translation community. He never worked for a translation agency, but consistently translated independently and as a hobby throughout his life. With a translation philosophy similar to Jacques Derrida, another showcase among our famous translators, Borges argues that high-quality translation can enrich a source text, even improve it. High-quality, professional translation and localization provides a text, whether it be business, literary, or legal, with nuanced meaning, connotation and association. Borges enjoyed leafing through different translations of the same text, often as a literary exercise, maintaining that any changes in linguistic code were encouraged in his opinion, and at times necessary.

• With an English paternal grandmother, young Jorge grew up in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in a Spanish and English bilingual household. Borges was often reported saying; “the household was so bilingual that [I] was not even aware that English and Spanish were separate languages until later in [my] childhood.”  Later in his life, Borges would move out of his family home to Geneva, Switzerland, where he studied French and German.

• Borges’s translation philosophy revolves around the belief that the work itself is “ultimately more important than its creator”. Rather than gift his readers a literal translation, Borges applied his own method:
  
  

  • He would eliminate elements of the source text that was redundant, unnecessary, or inconsistent with the whole.

  • Remove “textual distractions”, adding nuance, changing the title, etc.

  • He would even rewrite an entire text in the shadow of another, i.e. when he translated Angelus Silesius through a post-Nietzsche lens.

  • Sometimes Borges would even sporadically include a translation from one text in his own work.
    
    

• As a young adult, Borges would develop a career as a translator focusing on English, French, and German into Spanish. He later expanded to include Old English and Old Norse in his language pairs, including the works of William Faulkner, André Gide, Hermann Hesse, Franz Kafka, Rudyard Kipling, Edgar Allan Poe, Henri Michaux, Jack London, H. G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, Jonathan Swift, Walt Whitman and Virginia Woolf.

Jorge Luis Borges was a champion of Latin American literature, translation philosophy, and along with his friend Gabriel Garcia Marquez, a pioneer of magical realism. He is responsible for some of the most beautiful writings known to contemporary literature. Thanks to his dynamic interest in professional translation, Borges gives us yet another example to follow.

For a comprehensive reading list of Borges best-sellers, click here.

Jorge Luis Borges in numbers:

When Jorges Luis Borges was just 9 years old, he translated The Happy Prince by Oscar Wilde from English into Spanish. Borges’ first publication in his life was a translation, and no doubt had an incredible effect on his original work as well as ignited a passion for translation that would last throughout his lifetime.

The translation theories that Borges developed above came about through a series of three essays:  “Las dos maneras de traducir” (1926), “Las versions homéricas”(1932), and “Los traductores de Las mil y una noches” (1935). The main idea offered in these essays to “challenge the idea that original texts are superior to translations and reject the concept of a ‘definitive text.” Meaning, Borges’ view is that alternate and even contradictory translations of the same source text can be equally fascinating.

The year that the University of Virginia Library built a great collection on Borges. The U.Va. Library holds manuscripts, writings by and about Borges in multiple languages, and has over 1,200 entries.

The age when Jorges Luis Borges became completely blind. He continued to write, however, and some scholars believe that his blindness helped him create some of the innovative literary symbols through his magical realist imagination.

About MotaWord

MotaWord is the world’s fastest professional translation platform. Through the use of cloud technologies, smart algorithms that manage projects around the clock and over 15 thousand professional translators MotaWord provides high-quality translations in any language 60% cheaper and 20 times faster than traditional translation agencies. 

About This Article
Famous Translators is a MotaWord segment showcasing notable professional translated works and famous linguists from history to the present. We are researching, compiling and sharing stories that matter to every translator on our blog. You, too can be published right here on the MotaWord blog site - just contact kali@motaword.com.

Check out our previous "Famous Translators" articles:

• Oh! The Places You'll Go...with Translation: The Professional Translator's Experience with Dr. Seuss

• Translating the Horror Fiction by Stephen King

• The Professional Translation of Hans Christian Andersen's Fairy Tales
  
  Citaitons: CulturesConnection, TheGuardian, UniversityOfVirginia, UniversityOfLeon, TrinityCollege, Transpanish, Britannica, TheParisReview

MotaWord is a simple, seamless, and reliable source for translation services. Using a collaboration of multiple expert translators worldwide, MotaWord settles for nothing less than delighting our clients with access to high-quality and fast translation, 100% performed by our professional translators.

You know and love the MotaWord team, the cost-effective rates, and the blazing fast tech that goes along with utilizing our cloud-based platform - but where do the MotaWord translators actually work?

Our groundbreaking translation platform allows clients to easily upload a document to the MotaWord platform, and get it translated by our global team of 15,000 translators residing in over 250 countries all over the world. And all this with no need to look for that dreaded google search term "where can I find translators near me".

Why Is Our Remote Work Model So Effective?
From Aruba to Syria, Kenya to the Netherlands, Cambodia to Alaska, and much more in-between, our global team of translators work collaboratively to deliver the high-quality, professional translations our clients deserve. A new and powerful approach to our growing cloud-based world, MotaWord offers the fastest translation delivery on the market by employing trained linguists and translators around the world, who collaborate through our shared workspace.

By employing professional, expertly trained linguists and translators all around the world, MotaWord’s collaborative translation model reduces the total time of the translation lifecycle, improves client-translator communications, and eliminates time-wasting management tasks.

Widening Our Base With Global Talent
MotaWord’s ability to simultaneously utilize multiple translators from all over the world on a single project makes the translations we deliver exceptionally fast and highly accurate. Our translators are real people, with real expert knowledge in their language pairs, working together to provide MotaWord’s translation service. By working remotely within our cloud-based system, any registered MotaWord translator can find themselves working with anyone residing in any country on Earth with their matching language pair.

Our technology makes it easier than ever to widen our talent pool and MotaWord couldn’t be happier to work remotely with our expert linguists and professional translators.

The Productivity Of A Global Workforce
MotaWord stays productive by working 24/7, around the globe, across every time zone. The seamless operational and technical foundation of our cloud-based platform allows our translators to work together on a single project, creating a powerful approach to the old single-translator model. Giving our translators the opportunity to work with colleagues remotely through a shared workspace reduces the total time of the translation lifecycle, improves cross-cultural communication, and eliminates tedious management tasks.

From its roots as a concept project - we have become a fully functional business with 15,000 translators, working in over 80 languages, residing in 250+ countries. We are fortunate to be able to share our innovative tech infrastructure with our global translator base, and together bring fast, high-quality business translation to all of the countries that we live in, and more.

Translation work with MotaWord is wherever, whenever, and without deadlines. Need a translation for your business? Get your free quote here. 
Are you a professional translator inspired by this article? Work with us!

About MotaWord
MotaWord is the world’s fastest professional translation platform. Through the use of cloud technologies, smart algorithms that manage projects around the clock and over 15 thousand professional translators, MotaWord provides high-quality translations in any language 60% cheaper and 20 times faster than traditional translation agencies. Want to read more about us? Click here to visit our blog...

At MotaWord, we work with a team of professional translators and skilled linguists to deliver high-quality translations in any file format. We use a high-tech platform that can support the translation of your documents at any time, in record time, and in any format that is most convenient for your company. You may read more about the MotaWord translation process by clicking the link.
 
Translation of different file formats become important for seamless creation of content in new languages without having to go through extensive editing or recreating of target language material. The Harvard Business Review calls for all businesses to re-evaluate their language strategy for the optimal growth of any company. Language touches everything, and we are here to help you grow your business into the 21st-century globalized market by providing high-quality, professional translations in any file format you may need.

What are the most common translation file formats? 

Every business deals with tons of different file formats, whether it be for a website, mobile app, video, marketing materials, WordPress blog, or social media content - and we're happy to help with them all.

The most common translation file formats we work on are:

• The MS Office suite: Word, Excel, and PowerPoint

• Layout and design formats like Adobe InDesign, FrameMaker, and AutoCAD

• Google Drive files (and for this we invented a Google Drive Integration tool - it allows you to order the translation of a document directly from your Drive)

• App formats (.strings for iOS and MacOS and XML for Android) and

• Scanned or digital PDF files (usually for certified translations for USCIS) 

MotaWord is able to provide instant translation quotes for all these document types and more (the full list can be obtained below). It can also run these projects, ensure that the formatting is respected into the target language and deliver your translation in the same file format that you sent in.  

So when you come to us and ask, “Can you translate my document in my format?” or,  “What format files can I use for translation?”, our answer will always be a resounding:

Yes, we can!

We currently support all of the popular translation file formats, with new ones being added constantly. If you have a specific requirement, we would be more than happy to implement it. Our brilliant IT team is constantly growing their knowledge base, and we are always happy to continue learning and growing.

After your document is translated in whichever file format you chose, after it is proofread (as all translated projects on MotaWord are), your document will be emailed back to you in the same format as the one you sent us. No conversions, no hassle. You can get to using your freshly translated document with ease.

What file formats can I use for an instant quote?
We support a variety of file formats and the list grows every day. You may upload these file formats for an instant quote MS Office Legacy (.doc, .ppt, .xls), MS Office Modern (.docx, .pptx, .xlsx), Open Office (.odt, .odp, .odg), text-based (.txt, .pdf, .srt, .sbv, .xliff), programming (.html, .htm, .xhtml, .ini, .xml, .json, .php). For special file requirements, please contact us.

Citations: HBR

About MotaWord
MotaWord is the world’s fastest professional translation platform. Through the use of cloud technologies, smart algorithms that manage projects around the clock and over 15 thousand professional translators MotaWord provides high-quality translations in any language 60% cheaper and 20 times faster than traditional translation agencies. 

Theodore “Dr. Seuss” Geisel
March 2, 1904 – September 24, 1991

"You're wrong as the deuce, 

and you shouldn't rejoice. 

If you're calling him Seuss, 

he pronounces it Soice (or Zoice)."
- Alexander Liang

Professional translators understand that a high-quality translation is not simply a word-for-word rendering of the source text. Rather, a high-quality, professional translation lies in the localization and re-creation of the source author’s intent, voice, and maintenance of meaning in the original work. With such a celebration of language as Dr. Seuss’s children’s books, one can only imagine the extreme difficulty it takes to rhyme as brilliantly in the target language as Seuss does at the source. To translate Seuss effectively, a translator must be both a linguist, a creative writer, and a poet-storyteller.

•  Arguably Seuss’s most famous work, The Cat in the Hat was first published in 1957 and is one of the best-selling children’s books of all time. The title can be found, complete with all its magic, in a number of languages:
  
  French: Le Chat Chapeauté
  Italian: Il Gatto Col Cappello
  Spanish: El Gato Ensombrerado
  Yiddish: Di Kats der Payats
  Latin: Cattus Petasatus

• Terence and Jennifer Tunberg translated most of Dr. Seuss’s works into Latin. Such titles include Green Eggs and Ham (Latin title: Virent Ova! Viret Perna!!), How the Grinch Stole Christmas (Quomodo Invidiosulus nominee Grinchus Christi natalem Abrogaverit) and The Cat in the Hat (Cattus Petasatus). The Tunbergs were able to maintain the playful feel of Seuss’s original, not by rhyming in the source Latin, but by using alliteration, “The challenge there was obviously the Seussian wording, but also he had his own kind of rhythmical rhyme. We wrote How The Grinch Stole Christmas in a very alliterative prose”, says Tunberg.
  
  

• When it comes to the famous, Green Eggs and Ham, what is a Hebrew translator to do when their source language calls for a kosher version? Leah Naor, an 83-year-old playwright, songwriter, author, and a translator is at the wheel, publishing Lo Raev, Lo Ohev: the Hebrew translation in 1982. “Lo Raev, Lo Ohev”, which roughly translates into English as, “Not Hungry, Don’t Love it”, artfully does not ever mention the name of the disliked dish. The translation is so fun and whimsical that no reader has to stop to wonder what the dish actually is.

For generations of young minds, Dr. Seuss has coined countless words and themes that carry on into adulthood. The imaginative content in his books has solidified Seuss’s effect on child development, and Seuss’s many professional translators have no lesser talent.

Dr. Seuss in numbers:

	Dr. Seuss wrote more than 60 books during his line, selling more than 600 million copies.
	Seuss’s works have been professionally translated into 20 languages.
	The classic Green Eggs and Ham, the fourth best-selling English-language children’s book of all time, total at only 50 words.
	Seuss’s books have inspired 11 television programs, four films, and a Broadway musical.

For a list of all the words made up by Dr. Seuss, click here.
For more Famous Translators of children’s literature, click here.

About MotaWord

MotaWord is the world’s fastest professional translation platform. Through the use of cloud technologies, smart algorithms that manage projects around the clock and over 15 thousand professional translators MotaWord provides high-quality translations in any language 60% cheaper and 20 times faster than traditional translation agencies. 

About This Article
Famous Translators is a MotaWord segment showcasing notable professional translated works and famous linguists from history to the present. We are researching, compiling and sharing stories that matter to every translator on our blog. You, too can be published right here on the MotaWord blog site - just contact kali@motaword.com.

Check out our previous "Famous Translators" articles:

• Translating the Horror Fiction by Stephen King

• The Professional Translation of Hans Christian Andersen's Fairy Tales

• Global Shakespeare: Translating Iambic Pentameter
  
  Citations: MentalFloss, RWS, ChinaHopeLive, Kveller, PublishingPerspectives, AtlasObscura, ChicagoTribune

Whether or not you are a translator that holds proofreader status with us on MotaWord, the information below is designed to help all our vendors achieve success. We aim to inform and encourage skill building within our vendor base, and hope that the following information will help you understand a bit more about how MotaWord works, the opportunities for growth we can offer you as a professional translator, and allow you to take on more responsibility in projects.

MotaWord is a collaborative, cloud-based business translation platform. We require our professional translator base to work together on translation projects to achieve the highest quality and fastest delivery possible to our clients.

An important part of the MotaWord translation process is our single-proofreader model. While the translation phase of a project is collaborative, the proofreading phase is not. We assign one vendor from our base to each project to look over the collaborative translation and ensure the quality, cohesion, and ultimate success of delivery.

Proofreaders are identified as MotaWord's most experienced linguists. Here is a five-step guide to proofreader success:

1. Correct errors in spelling, grammar, and spacing.

2. Make sure that your browser’s spell check tool is activated in the target language you are proofreading. This will ensure that the spell check feature will work on our platform.

As you are making your edits, you will be prompted on the platform to correspond your changes with a letter. These letters are:

T = Typo
    “T” refers to any spelling mistakes you come across. Select this letter when you find a mistype.

S = Stylistic

    “S” corresponds to any misrepresentations in the subject and style of the document being translated. 

C = Consistency
    “C” is for any error change that you as the proofreader believe to be inconsistent with the overall cohesion of the text.

G = Grammar
    “G” is selected when acknowledging a grammatical error in the target language.

M = Machine Translation
    “M” is selected to notify your colleagues that you know something has been machine translated. When this occurs, please let info@motaword.com know the user I.D. of the corresponding translator.

D = Dummy
    “D” is selected when a nonsensical type is entered in as a translation. Ex.”bmlkjbgofmglbk…” Or you encounter an error you cannot easily classify using the descriptions above.

3. Check for well-written sentence structure
    Are the sentences consistent with the style of the project? Is the grammatical voice appropriate for what the writer is trying to achieve?

4. Follow any client directions
    Most projects are equipped with a “Style Guide” provided by the client. In these guides, you will find anything and everything you need to know to deliver the project in the exact format the client wants. Each vendor, proofreader, and translator MUST read each style guide in its entirety to deliver a high-quality translation.

5. Monitor Consistency

• Terminology acronyms, capitalization, currency and measurements

• Even if you see that the project has reached 100% translation, don’t let this confuse you: even if a project has been translated 100%, this does not include the proofreading phase.

• Ideally, we are looking to set up a proactive, not reactive, approach to proofreading on MotaWord:
      Even before a project is fully translated, you can assign yourself as a proofreader on the project and can guide the direction of the translators with your comments, glossary terms, and expertise. You can actually set the style, tone, and consistency of a  project before and while the translators are working.

• Do NOT validate any phrase that you are not completely happy with. Please edit the content until it is correct. If you come across work that is deficient, please let us know with a quick message on Intercom indicating the Project # and the string that requires attention.

6. If you see someone doing a great job, let us know! We are trying to build a community of proofreaders that are committed and inclusionary. We rely on our proofreaders to provide us feedback on both the positive and negative aspects of vendor performance.

You can reach us at any time via Intercom.

When reporting on vendor performance, please include

• The project #, vendor ID#

• String #

• Translator use I.D.

• Provide exact examples and citations, as well as what needs to be changed and why.
  
  

Proofreaders warn us, the MotaWord Internal Team, we warn the translator, the proofreader fixes, and we delete the problematic translator’s work. If we don’t know of a problematic situation in one of our projects, we can’t act! We need our proofreaders to be our eyes and ears.

We try to see everything, but we simply cannot be everywhere at once. Our proofreaders do see everything that is going on in their project. We rely on our proofreaders to be the gatekeepers of MotaWord to help us deliver on our high-quality promise to our clients.

Are you a MotaWord registered translator? Have you translated most of the projects from the invitations you have received in your language pair? Ready to take the next step and become a proofreader? Write to us at info@motaword.com and let us know! 

Happy proofreading!

Stephen King

Born September 21, 1947

“When asked, 'How do you write?' I invariably answer, 'one word at a time.'”

• Stephen King

Stephen King is one of the most successful and prolific authors of the 21st century. Although King’s style looks simple because of its readability in English, with 3,354 professional translations from the English, his horrific prose are surprisingly difficult to translate. He makes great use of puns, idioms, and local slang from his home state in Maine, USA. Although this is typical of writers who don’t take into consideration their translators, King’s global popularity has made it necessary to translate his work. Among these issues, it is also very difficult to translate horror. To illustrate, the English words “scary” and “horrific” in and of themselves strongly differ in meaning, but refer to an emotional fear present in the mind. How then, can the professional translator match King’s rhythm of terrifying suspense into a target language?

• Stephen King creates his terrifying realities through dialogue and description. He says,
  “Description creates a sensory reality for the reader and dialogue brings characters to life through their speech.” Rhythm is arguably the most important aspect of writing horror fiction, and is the element that makes this genre very difficult to translate. King’s translators must keep the original organization of his narratives to arouse emotion in the same way as the source text. Keeping the original cutting of paragraphs and sentences from the source text proves to be difficult with languages that have a different literary structure.
  
  

• There is a particular shortage of English to Malay translators for Stephen King’s novels. The amount of skill and stamina it takes to contribute to and complete a novel-length project takes a special talent. Translating King’s Joyland proved to be especially difficult to translate into Malay, with its dense East-Coast American slang vocabulary. The translation took 5 months to complete.
  
  

• King has had a special influence on Italian literary fiction. Italian authors Simona Vinci and Niccolò Ammaniti’s books have been greatly inspired by King’s characterization of children and childhood.  

Translating the genre of horror fiction proves itself not to be as easy as one might think. To create fear in a reader’s mind, a translator needs to not only convert King’s words and style, but must also use complementary mechanisms to insure that the original reality and suspense that King creates within the source text is present in the target text. For the professional translator that is up to the challenge, reception of horror fiction in the target reader’s mind is the key to creating Stephen King-level fear.

Stephen King in numbers:

50+ Stephen King’s novels have been translated into over 50 languages.

56  The amount of novels Stephen King has published in his lifetime, including five non-fiction books and more than 200 short stories.

7  King has published seven novels using the pen name Richard Bachman.

10  The number of pages King is said to write per day. At this pace, King will write 180,000 words over a three-month span.

For a review of the Chinese translation of King’s Bag of Bones, click here.

To find more “Famous Translators” authors in English, click here.

About MotaWord

MotaWord is the world’s fastest professional translation platform. Through the use of cloud technologies, smart algorithms that manage projects around the clock and over 15 thousand professional translators MotaWord provides high-quality translations in any language 60% cheaper and 20 times faster than traditional translation agencies. 

About This Article
Famous Translators is a MotaWord segment showcasing notable professional translated works and famous linguists from history to the present. We are researching, compiling and sharing stories that matter to every translator on our blog. You, too can be published right here on the MotaWord blog site - just contact kali@motaword.com.

Check out our previous "Famous Translators" articles:

• The Professional Translation of Hans Christian Andersen's Fairy Tales
• Global Shakespeare: Translating Iambic Pentameter
• A Little History of Ernst H. Gombrich's Translation

Citations: WordsWithoutBorders, AsymptoteJournal, BBC, CulturesConnection, LitHub

Behind MotaWord, there are a team of people - nearly all translators - who want to ensure that you access jobs on a constant basis, without having to deal with waiting for a purchase order or confirmation; get paid without sending in an invoice; have full visibility in all aspects of a project and work with like-minded peers. 

With MotaWord, it has never been easier to make money on your own time, and on your own terms. 

The translation industry is an important part of the $22.7 trillion global trade. Generating $40 billion dollars annually is not a market anyone wants to miss out on. With MotaWord, we live in exciting times, bringing the translation industry into the 21st century with a fast, collaborative and cloud-based approach. 

For those translators passionate about their craft and intellectually curious, MotaWord offers endless earning possibilities. And on top of the monetary gains, MotaWord is also an excellent tool for the development of a professional translator; allowing them to view projects in progress for subject matters they are not used to working on, interacting with and asking questions to other translators and of course getting a feedback on their translation contributions after each project.

We eliminate the daily hassles of invoicing, and we arrange our clients for you so the only thing left to do: spend this extra time dedicating yourself to the highest quality translation you can offer, and get paid in the process.

Here are 5 key ways to make the most of your engagement with MotaWord:

1- Be Attentive to Project Invitations
Our simple platform allows for easy access to projects via your cloud-based translator dashboard. It is important to be attentive to your e-mail inbox, make sure our info@motaword.com email is designated as “priority” mail, enable browser notifications to be notified instantly while you are online, be available, provide accurate translations, and contact the internal team often via Intercom with questions or comments.

2- 100 Projects = 100 Dollars Program
$100 dollars are added to your account when you participate in 100 projects within a single calendar year! You, as a translator, are able to sign on and work as much as you want, for as long as you want. For every 100 completed projects you work on throughout one calendar year, MotaWord automatically adds a $100 bonus in your account, as a gift of gratitude for all your hard work.

3- Becoming a Proofreader Can Earn You More
Our proofreaders started off as translators on our platform. Become a proofreader by proving your prowess as a reliable and good translator and earn more money. Click here for more information on the responsibilities of becoming a proofreader.

4- The Ambassador Program
Join our MotaWord Brand Ambassador Program! We are looking for Brand Ambassadors within different WeWork locations around the world to get the word out about the World’s Fastest Business Translation Platform - that could be you! Click the link and contact the MotaWord internal team for more details.

5- Sign-on and Watch
Not all gains need to be monetary. As a MotaWord translator, you can learn from your peers and master your skills. Have you done all of the above and still want more? MotaWord is a great educational tool. When you get a notification for a project outside of your skillset, don’t fret! 

Sign-on to the project and watch your peers work. Learn from them. Make comments, ask questions, and grow your skill set, so the next time a similar project comes up, you are the one able to participate and, yes, get paid! The more projects you participate in and the more you interact with your peers and our internal team, the more projects you will be able to take. Chances are, there might even be a string for which you’d feel comfortable providing translations for and in no time, you can also get the gist of translating content that was previously not possible for you. 

We at MotaWord could not be more passionate about representing a massive opportunity for freelance translators to make money, grow their skills, and remain curious. If you are a professional, high-quality translator looking to grow personally and professionally, your time is no longer waisted with invoice hassles and negotiations. Simply sign-on, and get paid.

About MotaWord

MotaWord is the world’s fastest professional translation platform. Through the use of cloud technologies, smart algorithms that manage projects around the clock and over 15 thousand professional translators MotaWord provides high-quality translations in any language 60% cheaper and 20 times faster than traditional translation agencies.  

Hans Christian Andersen

2 April 1805 – 4 August 1875

“Most of the people who will walk after me will be children, so make the beat keep time with short steps.”

• H.C. Andersen

Hans Christian Andersen is a Danish writer, most famous for his fairy tales for children. With tales that transcend age and nationality, Andersen was also a writer of plays, travelogues, novels, and poems. Andersen offers adult themes adapted in an innocent manner, creating stories that can be enjoyed at any stage in life. He wasn’t a collector of cultural tales retold, the Brothers Grimm, rather, he was a creator. “The Princess and the Pea”, “The Emperor’s New Clothes”, and “The Ugly Duckling” were all cultural phenomenons within themselves, straight from Andersen’s brain. When is comes to the professional translation of fairy tales such as Andersen’s, his universal themes of childlike adulthood in his tales allow for an exciting, fluid literary transition into the cultural exchange. Ms. Tran Thi Minh Tam is the first and only Vietnamese professional translator to not only translate Andersen’s fairy tales into Vietnamese, but she is also the first Vietnamese to receive the Annual Hans Christian Andersen Award, giving recognition to “outstanding achievements in working with Hans Christian Andersen and contributions to promoting and spreading further knowledge of the Danish national to the world.” Tam received the highest international recognition given to people working on children's books for translating and spreading Andersen’s joyful tales to numerous children throughout Vietnam.

• Andersen’s fairy tales were first translated into English in 1846. Notable professional translators from Danish to English of Andersen include Jeffrey Frank and Diana Crone Frank, and Tina Nunnally.
  
  
• Tam has been working with Andersen’s tales for 20 years, translating over 100 fairy tales, compiled in an edition she released in 2003. New editions of her Vietnamese translations are set to come out this year.
  
  
• Tam is the sole professional translator of Andersen into Vietnamese, and Andersen’s trolls, tricksters, and monsters can be enjoyed by children and adults alike in Vietnam because of her influence.
  
  

Even when Hans Christian Andersen was writing for children, he was talking to adults. His stories are much more complex than their Disney adaptations we know today, and we honor Ms. Tran Thi Minh Tam for expanding Andersen’s influence to the Vietnamese language community.

Hans Christian Andersen in numbers:

For a complete database of H.C. Andersen’s stories in translation, click here.

For more on translating children’s fiction, click here.

About MotaWord

MotaWord is the world’s fastest professional translation platform. Through the use of cloud technologies, smart algorithms that manage projects around the clock and over 15 thousand professional translators MotaWord provides high-quality translations in any language 60% cheaper and 20 times faster than traditional translation agencies.  

About This Article
Famous Translators is a MotaWord segment showcasing notable professional translated works and famous linguists from history to the present. We are researching, compiling and sharing stories that matter to every translator on our blog. You, too can be published right here on the MotaWord blog site - just contact kali@motaword.com.

Check out our previous "Famous Translators" articles:

• Global Shakespeare: Translating Iambic Pentameter

• A Little History Of Ernst H. Gombrich's Translation

• Redeeming a Mistranslated Jules Verne
  
  
  Citations: TheGuardian, Slate, UniversityOfGdańsk, VictorianWeb, Scandasia 

William Shakespeare

Died 23 April 1616

“People tend to say he is a universal writer. It is more complex than that. What makes Shakespeare so mobile around the world is that they are hugely flexible texts. There is something in them that you can play around with. You can pull it apart and put it back together again and it still works.” Andrew Dickson, author of Journeys around Shakespeare’s Globe

Arguably the most thought-provoking English literary phenomenon, William Shakespeare has not only single-handedly redefined the English language but has been professionally translated with great difficulty and skill in many languages. Shakespeare remains unparalleled in style, and the quality of his translators must reflect that spirit in their work, as well. For example, translating Shakespeare into Zulu, Korean, Portuguese, Japanese, as well as many others require not only an expert level of English, but a creative, adaptive, and innovative attitude within the target language.

• As with many of the early literary giants, translating Shakespeare was not without political upheaval and controversy. This seems to especially be the case with early English source language texts. During his time, Shakespeare was an extremely controversial writer and cultural figure in his own right, and this tension only grew as his work expanded into the global market. Shakespeare’s plays are famously left-wing, and in the context of real-life war and censorship, translation of Shakespeare’s genres can suppress or encourage a particular political ideology, as was the case in China, Japan, and the Soviet Union.
  
  
• In the case of one of Shakespeare’s most famous plays, “Hamlet”, Japanese publishers decided to ban the play in 1932 when Japan was politically focused on challenging Western supremacy. Japan was concerned that the play as translated into Japanese would inspire protest and rebellion against the right-leaning government.
  
  
• In interpretations of Shakespeare’s plays, often the plot points were changed to suit social conditions. In Britain, for example, the ending of Romeo and Juliet is a tragic one. However, in Japan, a dual suicide committed in love might be considered honorable. As it is almost impossible to translate Shakespeare’s iambic pentameter, most translations are nonetheless faithful to the original. Thankfully, Shakespeare wrote in such a way that his subject matters are highly adaptable no matter the language or culture. Tsybouchi Shoyo, a professional Japanese translator, professor and Shakespearean scholar, being acutely aware of these socio-cultural difficulties, completed the Japanese translation of the entire works of Shakespeare for the first time in 1928 Japan.
  
  
• Virtually impossible to translate, iambic pentameter is the poetic verse Shakespeare invented to give him his unique and iconic literary style. Few languages other than English have this “mono-syllabic” word structure, and translating word-for-word makes translating take twice as long. For example, “Sir Toby Belch” in “Twelfth Night” becomes “Sir Toby Hiccup” in Bulgarian, simply because the word “belch” is too long in Bulgarian. 

Shakespeare’s work is all about wordplay. A professional translator can transfer a story, characters, meaning, and ideas of a play, but a meticulously perfect translation of Shakespeare not only proves difficult but is nearly impossible. This impossibility creates a window of opportunity for translators of Shakespeare, allowing them to twist and turn their own language in the shadow of the playwright’s inspiration. Shakespeare’s genius is so pervasive that his work, to be translated, requires the kind of creative wordplay invented by the playwright and allows the translator to become Shakespeare himself.

William Shakespeare in numbers:

Number of Indian languages, using Indian names and settings, Shakespeare’s plays has been adapted and translated into. “Hamlet” and “The Merchant of Venice” have been translated more than 50 times. Over thirty versions of “The Comedy of Errors” exist in different languages in India.

Total number of unique word forms in all of Shakespeare’s work. 12,493 of the original words only occur once.

Number of countries Romeo and Juliet has been performed in over the last ten years. Performance languages include English, German, Spanish, Korean, French, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Finnish, Russian, Dutch, Estonian, Czech, Hebrew, Ukrainian, and Romanian, among many others.

For more detail on Shakespeare as translated into Chinese, Romanian, and Māori, click here.

For a list of the New York Public Library’s collections of translated Shakespearean films and books, click here.

To listen to Folger’s “Shakespeare in Translation” podcast series, click here.

Shakespeare famously borrowed phrases from other languages. For example, 'fat paunches make lean pates', was originally a Greek and Latin proverb by St Jerome. For our article of St. Jerome’s translation, click here.

About MotaWord

MotaWord is the world’s fastest professional translation platform. Through the use of cloud technologies, smart algorithms that manage projects around the clock and over 15 thousand professional translators MotaWord provides high-quality translations in any language 60% cheaper and 20 times faster than traditional translation agencies.  

About This Article
Famous Translators is a MotaWord segment showcasing notable professional translated works and famous linguists from history to the present. We are researching, compiling and sharing stories that matter to every translator on our blog. You, too can be published right here on the MotaWord blog site - just contact kali@motaword.com.

Check out our previous "Famous Translators" articles:

• A Little History of Ernst H. Gombrich's Translation

• Redeeming a Mistranslated Jules Verne

• A Rebel Translation in a Biblical Era: St. Jerome
  
  Citations: Shakespeare, URI, TheConversation, NoSweatShakespeare, GlobalLingo, OUP, NYPL, ALS, Westmont
  

A Little History of the World

Written and translated by Ernst H. Gombrich

Originally published in 1936

“And that's how it is with 'Once upon a time'. We can’t see where it ends. Grandfather's grandfather's grandfather's grandfather... it makes your head spin. But say it again, slowly, and in the end, you'll be able to imagine it. Then add one more. That gets us quickly back into the past, and from there into the distant past. But you will never reach the beginning because behind every beginning there’s always another 'Once upon a time'.” 

- Excerpt from A Little History of the World

Written originally as a way to get children interested in history, Ernst H. Gombrich’s best-selling novel, A Little History of the World was published in German in 1936. Gombrich, only 26 at the time he wrote it, tells an accessible tale of mankind’s journey from the Stone Age to the First World War, focusing on the greater impact of human experience rather than paying meticulous attention to detail. Gombrich would not permit anyone to professionally translate his work into English, his second language. He reserved this project for himself, insisting that he was the only one who could do it properly. At the end of his life, he was rewriting his little history into English when he died in 2001, at age 92.

• A young, ambitious art history doctorate with no prospects for a job, Gombrich attempted and completed a history of the world for young readers. Eine kurze Weltgeschichte für junge Leser gained immediate success in Vienna, now circulating the world in 25 languages. Creating an accessible version of mankind’s successes and failures, Gombrich was hesitant to immediately translate his work into English after its initial German publication. He said A Little History of the World had a primarily Eurocentric worldview and thought it was “too European for the English”.
  
  
• Sadly, Gombrich was unable to complete this English translation himself. WIth collaboration from translator Caroline Mustile and his granddaughter Leonie Gombrich, the English translation was finally published by Yale University Press in 2005.
  
  
• Gombrich was fascinated by child-like intelligence and was convinced that a smart child could grasp all the complexities of adulthood. He was inspired to write A Little History of the World after talking to a young daughter of some friends, who inquired why he was working all the time. He proceeded to explain his work to the young child, using words and concepts that she could understand. Thus, he was inspired to expand this interaction into a whole 40 chapters, writing one a day, miraculously delivering the work is just six weeks.
  
  
• Nearly immediately after its original German release, “A Little History” was banned by the Nazis. Disregarded as “too pacifist”, the novel had yet to reach its full potential in the German market. Already having fled Austria for England, Gombrich then focused on his art history career. 50 years later, in 1985, “A Little History” was reissued with a fresh epilogue from Gombrich, and translated into 13 more languages. Gombrich even released bracketed versions of the work for the French, Italians, and Turks to insert additions about their own history.
  
  

Ernst H. Gombrich not only gave children a gift with A Little History of the World, but his whimsical take on humanity allowed anyone who reads his words in any language a chance to see the world from a child’s eyes. Not only did he pour his German heart into the novel, because he was bilingual he was able to put that same amount of love into the English version as his last gift to the world before his passing. Thanks to Gombrich and his collaborators for spreading “A Little History” all around the globe.

A Little History of the World in numbers:

During his six week stint writing A Little History of the World, Gombrich utilized Ms. Mustill two mornings a week. It is said that they sat “in the front room, crammed with books and musical scores and a grand piano”. Mustil had studied Chinese, and was able to help Gombrich with his thoughts on the Chinese segment of “A Little History”.

Number of chapters Gombrich was able to complete in English before his death. His wife commissioned his friend Ms. Mustill to finish his work, which took her 3 more years to complete.

Number of pages in A Little History of the World.

For more about translating science, click here.
For more about the professional translation of science fiction, click here.
For more on translating for children, click here.

About MotaWord

MotaWord is the world’s fastest professional translation platform. Through the use of cloud technologies, smart algorithms that manage projects around the clock and over 15 thousand professional translators MotaWord provides high-quality translations in any language 60% cheaper and 20 times faster than traditional translation agencies. 

About This Article
Famous Translators is a MotaWord segment showcasing notable professional translated works and famous linguists from history to the present. We are researching, compiling and sharing stories that matter to every translator on our blog. You, too can be published right here on the MotaWord blog site - just contact kali@motaword.com.

Check out our previous "Famous Translators" articles:

• Redeeming a Mistranslated Jules Verne

• A Rebel Translator in a Biblical Era: St. Jerome

• Who Translated Winnie Mandela?
  
  
  Citations: NYTimes, Britannica, FinancialTimes, TheIndependent

Jules Verne
8 February 1828 – 24 March 1905

“Man is never perfect nor contented.”

  Jules Verne

Coming in second after Agatha Christie as the most professionally translated author in the world, Jules Verne, who died on March 24th in 1905, is known as one of the “father’s of science fiction.” His works are originally written in French, and translation of Verne into English began in 1852. The professional translation and localization of these works into English is extremely poor quality, however. The Guardian especially calls for “a better translation service” for Verne, and what better service than the The World's Fastest Translation Platform? Jules Verne’s work as it is translated into English is riddled with inaccuracies, and many English readers are calling for a “full reappraisal” of his work. Since his emergence in the 19th century, Jules Verne has been popular around the globe. The English versions were translated so badly so soon after their initial publications that many who claim to have read his novels haven’t scratched the surface of what Verne has to offer as an author. 

• A Voyage in a Balloon (1851) was Verne’s first work translated into English by Anne T. Wilbur, published by the American Journal Sartrain’s Union Magazine of Literature and Art. The English translation of Five Weeks in a Balloon, done by William Lackland closely followed in 1869. Verne’s early popularity was extremely lucrative, and although English translations were steadily produced throughout Verne’s lifetime, they were done in great haste by publishers and hired translators rushing to expand Verne into the English market.
  
  
• Contrary to popular belief in the English speaking community, Jules Verne’s work was not originally intended to be exclusively for children. British and American publishers of Verne decided to market his work as “children’s literature” because they thought the work would be more popular and make more money that way. This business move had a lasting effect on Verne’s reputation, and on the quality of his work in English. These translators that were committed to translating Verne for children were not concerned with the quality; they only wanted to make money. The text was chopped up in French, chewed, and spit out in English and the gaps were filled with completely original writing.
  
  
• Original English translators would alter descriptions, simplify or remove content entirely, and even alter Verne’s carefully conducted measurements by oddly changing the units to imperial but keeping the numbers the same. Scientific research done by Verne was horribly mistranslated in the 19th century English versions. Much of the humour intended in the original French was taken out, the dialogue was compressed into a mere summary, and anything remotely offensive to the United Kingdom was completely censored. Most, if not all, of these early English translators, were committing ideological censorship. Unconcerned with quality, these poorly done translations were not due to linguistic incompetence, but many of Verne’s texts were re-written to reflect a “pro-anglo” political agenda. For example, under the guise of “localization” for the English speaking community, any criticism of British colonialism was glazed over with |glowing praise for the civilizing influence” of Britain.
  
  
• Now, with these awful 19th century translations in the public domain, they are sadly considered to be the standard translations of Jules Verne. However, beginning in the 1960s, translators and Verne fans began to catch on to this literary crime. Since then, a type of Jules Verne renaissance has undergone numerous updated versions of his beloved work. With these updated, quality translations, Jules Verne is now taken more seriously as an all-ages literary figure.

Why does quality professional translation matter? Clearly, these poorly done translations have not affected Jules Verne’s popularity or fame, so why should today’s readers and translators be concerned about the faithfulness of Verne’s translations to the original French? The injustice lies in style. A good professional translator remains meticulously faithful to their source language. Ideological censorship has no place in localization. In the case of Verne’s work, as translated before 1960, different translated editions of the same novel differed wildly in terms of characters and even plot-lines, leading one critic to say that “the English-speaking world has never had a fair chance to know the real Jules Verne”. With the “standard” translated versions now in the public domain, free and low-cost copies of these ideologically censored are circulated without regulation. The more quality professional translators interested in translating Verne from the original French, the more likely it is that his words will touch any community of readers in the way he originally intended.
   
Could MotaWord translators be up to the challenge? Definitely.

Jules Verne in numbers:

Number of movies, T.V. shows and plays that have been adapted based on the work of Jules Verne.

Number of books in Jules Verne’s series “Voyages Extraordinaires”. The series includes such titles as Journey to the Center of the Earth, Five Weeks in a Balloon, Journey to the Center of the Earth, and many more.

In 2008, two original manuscripts by Verne were included in an unmanned cargo supply craft that was sent to the International Space Station. The craft was christened as the “Jules Verne ATV”.

For a complete bibliography of Jules Verne’s English translations that need to be redone, click here.

For more on translating science and science fiction, check out MotaWord’s obituaries for Stephen Hawking and Ursula K. Le Guin.

About MotaWord

MotaWord is the world’s fastest professional translation platform. Through the use of cloud technologies, smart algorithms that manage projects around the clock and over 15 thousand professional translators MotaWord provides high-quality translations in any language 60% cheaper and 20 times faster than traditional translation agencies. 

About This Article
Famous Translators is a MotaWord segment showcasing notable professional translated works and famous linguists from history to the present. We are researching, compiling and sharing stories that matter to every translator on our blog. You, too can be published right here on the MotaWord blog site - just contact kali@motaword.com.

Check out our previous "Famous Translators" articles:

• A Rebel Translator in a Biblical Era: St. Jerome
• Who Translated Winnie Mandela?
• The Most Professionally Translated Author in the World

Citations: TheGuardian, EscapistMagaizine, HindustanTimes, Gizmodo, TheNewsMinute, St.OlafCollege

We are recognizing our professional translators this summer. All 14 thousand of them... With the start of July comes the start of #MotaWord’s First Annual Social Media Contest for Translators! 

September 30th is the International Translation Day, an annual celebration paying tribute to all the wonderful translators around the world. Held in honor of the patron saint of translation, St Jerome, who was the first to translate the Bible from Hebrew and Greek to Latin, #MotaWord would like to give our professional translator community a chance at friendly competition.

We love collaborating with #MotaWord translators on a daily basis to create a better world, providing the global community with access to information in their native language. You — our translators — are an integral part of this mission. To appreciate your dedication and let more people around the world know about the behind-the-scenes work you're doing, we decided to celebrate this year's International Translation Day with our three-month long First Annual Social Media Contest.

From 8am PST, June 30, 2018, until 8am PST, September 30, 2018, we're launching our #FromWhereIWork competition.

Open to all #MotaWord registered translators, our Social Media team is calling for picture representations #FromWhereIWork! Ending on International Translation Day, September 30th, #MotaWord registered professional translators have three months to complete the tasks listed below.

Our unique business model allows for all of our colleagues and translators to work remotely. In an effort to come together as a global translation team, if you are a translator registered with #MotaWord, take a picture of your workspace with any #MotaWord representation included and share it on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. Don’t forget to hashtag, #FromWhereIWork and #MotaWord, to be eligible for prizes.

Rules

1. Translators should take pictures of their workspace showcasing #MotaWord and reflecting their unique surroundings. Some examples include, but are not limited to: a laptop or iPad logged onto the #MotaWord website, translating by hand in a #MotaWord notebook, etc. Get creative and show us who you are!
   
   
2. “Like” MotaWord on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram via the contest widget at the end of this article.
   
   
3. Only one post per translator, per week. Each week we will select a winner based on originality and picture quality. Weekly winners will have their photo showcased on #MotaWord social media.

Our prizes include:

• A 14 inch Acer Chromebook (that is all you need to participate in projects on MotaWord),
• A #MotaWord Swag Bag complete with #MotaWord T-shirt, #MotaWord baseball cap, #MotaWord pen, #MotaWord notebooks, and #MotaWord Stickers,
• The honor to be featured on Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and Facebook (the top chosen posts at the end of each month will be featured).

We would love to see how your workspaces reflect your inner and outer world. Will we see your sunset view from your office window that brings you continued inspiration? Perhaps a shot of you trying to work while your cat sits on your keyboard begging for a break? A photo of you relaxing in an exotic location that reminds us all why we are so lucky to work remotely?

All you need is a browser, a laptop, and a creative attitude to translate with us. We love how easy it is to work for #MotaWord, and we know our translators love it too! Start participating today by simply sharing, hashtagging, and “like”-ing your way to great prizes that prove #FromWhereIWork is truly unique.

MotaWord’s First Annual Social Media Contest

About MotaWord

MotaWord is the world’s fastest professional translation platform. Through the use of cloud technologies, smart algorithms that manage projects around the clock and over 15 thousand professional translators MotaWord provides high-quality translations in any language 60% cheaper and 20 times faster than traditional translation agencies.

St. Jerome

27 March 347 – 30 September 420 A.D. 

Bethlehem

“For I myself not only admit but freely proclaim that in translating from the Greek I render sense for sense and not word for word, except in the case of the Holy Scriptures, where even the order of the words is a mystery.” 

— Jerome to Pammachius, on the Best Method of Translating. 

Eusebius Hieronymus, or St. Jerome as he would later be called,  was responsible for the most famous and successfully used version of the Latin translation of the Bible. Renowned for his intellect and translation skill he became a pioneer of biblical translation and one of the most talented biblical scholars of his time. Well educated, he rejected his Christian upbringing to behave as he wanted. At a visit to the crypts, he was confronted with his mortality and was scared into adhering to conservative Christian values. Baptized in 366 and became attracted to the Monastic life. Wanted to live as a hermit, but was renowned for his intellect and his skills at translation. He was eventually ordained with the promise that he could still do his own study. 

• St. Jerome coined the field phenomenon of ‘dynamic equivalence’. He believed that translation should be equal - not only in meaning but in quality of style. This means St. Jerome was one of the first notable translators to translate “sense for sense” rather than “word for word”. This method became known as dynamic equivalence. 
• St. Jerome was born in modern-day Croatia. His native tongue was Illyrian, but he was also fluent in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, Arabic.
  
  
• Well educated in his youth and free-spirited, St. Jerome rejected his Christian upbringing to behave as he pleased. One day on a visit to crypts and tombs of his ancestors, it is said he was scared into behaving “better”.
  
  
• In art, he is often depicted with a lion or an owl; this may be because he is said to have “pulled a thorn out of the paw of a lion”, which settled down in his monastery in Bethlehem and is shown in many paintings and biblical tales of Jerome.
  
  
• After the death of Jesus Christ, shaping and spreading Christian life via the Bible was of the highest importance to the early Church. A Greek version of the Hebrew Bible, known as Septuagint, was used as the Christian Old Testament. Christianity was traveling West, and fewer and fewer people could understand Greek. Because Latin books were written in a continuous format, without breaks or punctuation between words, St. Jerome refused to translate the Septuagint from into Latin only, but cross-referenced the translation with another translation from the original Hebrew, then compared to two Latin translations to create what was known as Vulgate.
• Vulgate to this day remains the standard Latin translation of the bible. It was also very controversial; not only was it the first translation to be done not by literal translation but by an idiomatic rendering of meaning, but also because Vulgate relied heavily on the cross-reference of the original Hebrew text- which many Christian scholars at the time ironically believed “tainted” the religion with Judaism.
  
  
• The Vulgate was even regarded by some as having greater authority than texts in the original languages. 

St. Jerome died on September 30, (year 420), hence the celebration of the International Day of Translators on 30 September. Jerome’s translation of the Bible remains the standard Latin translation of the biblical Christian scriptures, today. In celebration of the International Day of Translators but also in celebration of our professional translators, MotaWord organizes a social media contest recognizing our professional translators. You may find the details of our contest and enter through this link to win many prizes. It is open to all professional translators registered with MotaWord; https://www.motaword.com/blog/article/social-media-contest

St. Jerome in numbers:

Years at Bethlehem at the end of his life to produce his most notable accomplishment: translating the Old Testament from the Original Hebrew to Latin.

Number of times the United Nations General Assembly unanimously adopted Resolution A/RES/71/288 on the International Day of Translators, recognizing the role of professional translation in “connecting nations, and fostering peace, understanding, and development.”

The amount of categories St. Jerome’s commentaries fall under: translations/ recastings of Greek predecessors, Original commentaries on the Old Testament, and New Testament commentaries.

For more information:

Enter the United Nations St. Jerome Translation Contest.

Read The Principal Works of St. Jerome translated into English by The Hon. W. H. Fremantle, M.A., The Rev. G. Lewis, M.A., The Rev. W. G. Martley, M.A..

Read St. Jerome’s Bible in the original Latin (with side-by-side English translation) here.

About MotaWord

MotaWord is the world’s fastest professional translation platform. Through the use of cloud technologies, smart algorithms that manage projects around the clock and over 15 thousand professional translators MotaWord provides high-quality translations in any language 60% cheaper and 20 times faster than traditional translation agencies. 

About This Article
Famous Translators is a MotaWord segment showcasing notable professional translated works and famous linguists from history to the present. We are researching, compiling and sharing stories that matter to every translator on our blog. You, too can be published right here on the MotaWord blog site - just contact kali@motaword.com.

Check out our previous "Famous Translators" articles:

• Who Translated Winnie Mandela?
• The Most Professionally Translated Author in the World
• Julia Evelina Smith: The First and Only Woman to Translate The Bible

Citations: SMP, FirstEdition, Justus, FranciscanMedia, TheParisReview, GotQuestions

Winnie Madikizela-Mandela
26 September 1936 – 2 April 2018

"They think because they have put my husband on an island that he will be forgotten. They are wrong. The harder they try to silence him, the louder I will become!"

– Winnie Mandela avenging the imprisonment of her husband, Nelson Mandela, in 1962.

With the recent death of Winnie Mandela, an anti-Apartheid Freedom Fighter, author, and political figure, South Africa’s complex history is once again in the spotlight. Winnie was a force to be reckoned with for the apartheid police state, and became a prominent representative of her husband, Nelson Mandela, while he was in prison. Throughout her career in activism, she wrote two novels recounting her experiences with the Freedom Fighters. 

South Africa is characterized as the Rainbow Nation. With a rainbow of cultures comes endless languages, so one has to wonder...while Winnie was translating her husband's revolutionary voice to the public while he was in prison, who were the professional translators behind Winnie Mandela’s novels?

• In 1969, five years after her husband was imprisoned, Winnie Mandela was detained with other anti-apartheid activists and jailed for 16 months. She kept journals of her experience and wrote letters to her husband. Ultimately, she would collect these writings and produce her first novel, 491 Days, Prisoner number 1323/69. A collection was written while in solitary confinement, 491 Days discusses her detention under the 1969 Terrorism Act, designed to allow the police to hold and question anyone for as long as they wanted. She fiercely resisted abuse from South African authorities and was just as prominent a Freedom Fighter as her husband.
• Part of My Soul, written in 1984 and translated into French and German by Anne Benjamin, Mary Benson, and Dominique Malaquais, marks Winnie’s thoughts and feelings surrounding her defense of her husband before his presidency. During Nelson Mandela’s trial in 1962, Winnie showed up each day, dressed to the nines, sitting in the ‘whites-only’ section, white policemen onlooking in horror at the very idea of a black woman behaving freely.

So who translated Winnie Mandela? Because her books were written in English, and because of the lack of majority interest in South Africa’s “sublanguages” it is difficult to find translations of Mandela out of the English, French, and German. However, while her husband was in prison, Winnie served as a political translator of her husband’s ideas to the world. They imprisoned Nelson but underestimated Winnie’s command of the issues the Freedom Fighters sought to liberate South Africa from. Thanks to Winnie, South Africa’s liberation was not jailed with Nelson Mandela.

Winnie Madikizela-Mandela in numbers:

Number of Part of My Soul editions published in 1986 in French and German

Number of WorldCat member libraries worldwide providing copies of Une part de mon âme

While Nelson Mandela served 27 years in prison, Winnie Mandela was repeatedly beaten up, banned, harassed and imprisoned for her continuation of her husband’s work.

The South African Translators' Institute (SATI) is a professional association for language practice professionals in South Africa.

Tolika is an application that helps South Africans translate other South African official languages to their own.

For further reading on the Mandelas, Apartheid, and South Africa’s Freedom Fighters, visit the Cornell University Library.

For more politically charged translation, check out MotaWord’s articles about Sabahattin Ali and Persepolis.

About MotaWord

MotaWord is the world’s fastest professional translation platform. Through the use of cloud technologies, smart algorithms that manage projects around the clock and over 15 thousand professional translators MotaWord provides high-quality translations in any language 60% cheaper and 20 times faster than traditional translation agencies. 

About This Article
Famous Translators is a MotaWord segment showcasing notable professional translated works and famous linguists from history to the present. We are researching, compiling and sharing stories that matter to every translator on our blog. You, too can be published right here on the MotaWord blog site - just contact kali@motaword.com.

Check out our previous "Famous Translators" articles:

• The Most Professionally Translated Author in the World
• Julia Evelina Smith: The First and Only Woman to Translate The Bible
• Translating Feminism with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Citations: TheGuardian, NPR, OhioSwallow, BBC, SBS, NewAfricanMag, NelsonMandela, MG

Agatha Christie
15 September 1890 – 12 January 1976

"When I was a kid living in Amman [in the 90s], Arabic translations of Agatha Christie's works were available in abundance in most bookstores. In fact, the first book I bought with my own money was Appointment with Death."

- Ibtihal Mahmood, writer, and professional translator

Agatha Christie is an English literary icon. She has written 66 detective novels and 14 short story collections, mostly recounting the mysterious adventures of her two fictional detective characters, “Hercule Poirot” and “Miss Marple”. Within the professional translation community, she is said, by Index Translationum, to be the most translated author in the world. Her most popular professionally translated works are Murder on the Orient Express, and Then There Were None. Exploring her work as translated into Icelandic, Italian, Arabic and French (among many others), her stories have an unparalleled influence on the global translation community.

• Agatha Christie holds The Guinness World Record as the best-selling novelist of all time. Her works are the third most widely published, behind Shakespeare and the Bible. Christie’s best selling novel, And Then There Were None, has sold 100 million copies to date making it not only the world’s best-selling mystery ever but one of the best-selling books of all time.
  
  
• Ragnar Jónasson has translated 14 of Christie’s novels into Icelandic. Translating Christie has become part of Jónasson’s life’s work, with one project, in particular, taking ten years to complete. Jónasson explains that due to an “a particular two-word clue, which to me felt inextricably bound to the English language, scrutinizing Christie’s works so closely has been like a master-class in writing.” This has led him to a writing career of his own, as the author of the best-selling Dark Iceland series.
  
  
• The professional translation of detective stories has been met with somewhat destructive efforts in Italy, however. Detective fiction has historically been disregarded by Italian literary critics as “paraliterature without any literary value”, and is mostly ignored in Italian academia still today.No matter how popular her novels got, Christie’s work is not immune to this bizarre phenomenon. Before the 1980s Christie’s work was abridged, condensed, reshaped, and censored under Fascist Italian leadership. Not only was Fascist Italy hostile to foreign writers, but detective fiction was considered an immoral genre. Fascist censors forced professional translators to remove any references to suicides, sexual scenes, or Italian characters who were “represented ridiculously”. Long passages were also removed, rendering the literary quality of the translations extremely poor. Copies of these translations can still be found in Italy to this day.
  
  
• Success rose slowly for Christie in France, too. Taking three years to sell 3000 copies of her work in France, is wasn’t until 1927 that the French translation of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd was first successful in the “Le Masque” series launched by the Librairie des Champs Elysées.
  
  
• The lack of popularity of Christie’s novels in Europe was made up for when her work was published in Arabic in the mid-20th century. Copies of her novels circulated from Algiers to Cairo to Amman to Damascus. Many Arab writers recount “coming of age” through Christie’s mysteries. Christie herself traveled widely in Syria and Iraq throughout the 1930s, writing some of her most popular work and indulging in archeological exploits. Her popularity in Arabic was not without controversy, though. Arab readers have widely criticized Christie for her portrayal of cultural and racial stereotypes in the region. Still, fans consumed her work like a wildfire.

Agatha Christie’s novels have touched the world. With a rich translation history, Christie’s characters, writing style, and cross-cultural significance make her status as the most translated author in the world self-evident. She has also written the world’s longest-running play and six romance novels under the name Mary Westmacott. Sometimes one person’s success is too great for just one name.

Agatha Christie in numbers:

Number of translations conducted from Christie’s original English.

Number of languages into which Christie’s books have been translated.

Number of copies of Christie’s books sold.

Number of initial rejections Christie received from publishers at the start of her career. Her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, was published in 1920.

For further cross-examination into translations of Christie, click here.

For a history of Agatha Christie’s translated works into German between 1927 - 1939, click here.

For more Famous Translators, click here.

About MotaWord

MotaWord is the world’s fastest professional translation platform. Through the use of cloud technologies, smart algorithms that manage projects around the clock and over 15 thousand professional translators MotaWord provides high-quality translations in any language 60% cheaper and 20 times faster than traditional translation agencies. 

About This Article
Famous Translators is a MotaWord segment showcasing notable professional translated works and famous linguists from history to the present. We are researching, compiling and sharing stories that matter to every translator on our blog. You, too can be published right here on the MotaWord blog site - just contact kali@motaword.com.

Check out our previous "Famous Translators" articles:

• Julia Evelina Smith: The First and Only Woman to Translate The Bible
• Translating Feminism with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
• Constance Garnett: The Imperfect Pioneer of Russian Translation

Citaitons: Britannica, Aljazeera, AgathaChristie, TraduccionLiteraria, TheIndependent, Aramco, TheGuardian

Julia Evelina Smith

27 May 1792 – 6 March 1886

“It may seem presumptuous for an ordinary woman with no particular advantages of education to translate and publish alone, the most wonderful book that has ever appeared in the world, and thought to be the most difficult to translate.” - Julia Evelina Smith, on being the first woman to translate the Bible.

Of all the biblical scholars and translators to have worked on the Bible, Julia Evelina Smith is said to be the most interesting and most overlooked. A self-published professional translator and American women’s suffrage activist, Smith was the first woman to translate the Bible multiple times from its multiple original languages into English. She is also the author of Abby Smith and Her Cows, telling the story of Smith and her sister engaging in tax resistance during the American suffrage movement in Connecticut, where the pair were born. Her historical accomplishments alone deserve recognition, as she accomplished literary and political successes during a time when women were viewed as lesser beings.

•  Smith had a working knowledge of Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and English. Most of her life was spent studying language and Christian theology but officially became a professional translator at the age of 51. Inspired by William Miller, a Baptist preacher in the nineteenth century who famously predicted that the world would end on October 22, 1844. When October 23rd came and went that year, Smith decided she would translate the Bible herself from its original text to gain a more accurate understanding of the fate of the globe.
  
  
•  Born into a large family of women, Julia Evelina Smith and her sisters, mothers, and grandmothers were advocates of women’s education, abolition, and women’s suffrage. Her entire family was immortalized in the Connecticut Women's Hall of Fame in 1994.
  
  
• Ms. Smith received heavy criticism from her fellow male language students, compelling her to work harder and harder, she received further criticism for her role as a biblical translator. At that time, not only could women not attend university, women were also not allowed to be leaders in the church. How could a woman interpret God’s word? Smith obviously had a very different view, being largely self-taught, and publishing her biblical translation herself.
  
  
• Because women during Smith’s time were not considered equal to men, it was very likely that her biblical translation could have been lost to history. Ironically, it is this inequality that allowed Smith to get her translation our into the public. A tax collector had raised tax rates for property owned by women and not by men. Smith and her sister fought against this taxation without representation by publishing Ms. Smith’s translation of the Bible, drawing attention to the issue of women’s suffrage.

Julia Evelina Smith’s biblical translation is a significant piece of history, touching more than one issue for equality. She translated the Bible unaided and is still the only woman to successfully attempt the project. Her only motivation was said to be a love of the Bible, and to gain a deeper understanding of the scriptures for her growth and her family’s. Her accomplishments are certainly worthy of honor.

Julia Evelina Smith in numbers:

Number of years it took for Smith to complete her translation of the Bible. Without any help, she skillfully and impressively translated the whole of scripture from the original languages. Elizabeth Cady Stanton famously wrote, “Julia Smith translated the whole bible absolutely alone without consultation from anyone. And this not once, but five times—twice in the Hebrew, twice from the Greek and once from the Latin”.

Number of years Smith waited to self-publish her translation of the Bible. During this time, Julia and her sister, Abby, became pioneers of the women’s suffrage movement, and early leaders of the resulting umbrella feminist movement. Smith’s Bible was finally published in 1876

Smith’s translation presents one word after another, just as they present in the original text. Her translation uses English words but keeps in line with the original grammar structure of the source languages. It is not difficult to see the flaws in this method, and although her translation is often criticized to be too literal without any flow, it is considered to be a more accurate translation than the King James’ translation and the only available contemporary English translation directly out of the source languages.

To further support Women in Translation, check out the annual Warwick Prize for Women in Translation contest.

August is Women in Translation Month.

For more about women in translation, visit our Famous Translators segment of MotaWord's blog.

About MotaWord

MotaWord is the world’s fastest professional translation platform. Through the use of cloud technologies, smart algorithms that manage projects around the clock and over 15 thousand professional translators MotaWord provides high-quality translations in any language 60% cheaper and 20 times faster than traditional translation agencies. 

About This Article
Famous Translators is a MotaWord segment showcasing notable professional translated works and famous linguists from history to the present. We are researching, compiling and sharing stories that matter to every translator on our blog. You, too can be published right here on the MotaWord blog site - just contact kali@motaword.com.

Check out our previous "Famous Translators" articles:

• Translating Feminism with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
• Constance Garnett: The Imperfect Pioneer of Russian Translation
• The Graphic Translation of Persepolis

Citations: HDS, CBE, Erudit, Encyclopedia, BibleResearcher, MuseumOfTheBible

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Born 15 September 1977

“Some people ask: ‘Why the word feminist? Why not just say you are a believer in human rights, or something like that?’ Because that would be dishonest.” - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a Nigerian born essayist and novelist living in New York. She has been wildly successful in changing the literary canon in Europe and North America, while at the same time redefining African literature. She describes herself as a “translated being”, employing her specific use of the English language in partnership with her transcultural writing style to create a voice for any “global citizen”. She takes the characters in her stories on transatlantic journeys, exploring movement between languages and cultural backgrounds to produce an expansive bibliography of work. Her novels and essays have been widely translated spreading her call to action that “We Should All Be Feminists”. We explore her novel, “We Should All Be Feminists”, as it is professionally translated into Burmese and Chinese.

• Adichie’s “We Should All Be Feminists”, first published in 2014, will be translated for the first time into Burmese, by Nandar Gyawalli. The novel length essay was adapted by Adichie from her 2012 TED talk of the same name. In this essay, Adichie looks at the word “feminism” in all its rich historical complexity, and comes to the conclusion that the word “feminist” is not a negative word, but a term that should be embraced by all. Gyawalli’s translation took four months to complete, and found publishing through May Htut Pan Moe, the publications manager at Mote Oo Education. On the process of translating cross-cultural philosophy, Gyawalli writes, “It is quite frustrating when people, especially people you love and care about, don’t see these problems as problems,” she explained. “I was determined to translate it [We Should All Be Feminists] into Burmese language because I personally believe that this book will help many people to become aware of different forms of gender discrimination and think differently.”
  
  
  

• Gyawalli says, “Before I decided to use the words “feminist” [and “feminism”], I talked with different authors and poets about the word.” She was unable to find a satisfactory Burmese equivalent for the word, and instead of making a literal translation, simply spelled out the word phonetically in Burmese characters.
  
  
  

• In the Chinese translation, the word “ feminist” has to be dropped from the title. The translation was released by the People’s Cultural Publishing House, and the title has been changed to “The Rights of Women”. The words “feminism” and “feminist” are increasingly problematic terms to all of us, but this is especially the case in China. The Chinese Communist Party is known for its pride in its record for dismantling patriarchal structures that put Chinese women at a historical disadvantage, however there have been high-profile censorship crackdowns on feminist activists and on feminist websites in recent years. This makes the Chinese translation of these terms problematic.
  
  
• The issue with using the word is, said by the publisher, “not to involve the ideas that underpin feminism itself, but with the organizing potential of the cause.” Feminists in China are multi-level activists, often leveraging techniques of organization to intersect wider issues in civil society - such as classism or the labor movement. The publisher did not respond to this issue when asked for comments or an interview with the editor and translator. Adichie responds with this point in her book - “rights” are not enough. The essay is not a dull constitution retelling the do’s and don’ts of what to do or not do to a woman. The international success of the book lends itself to the universal call to change the way the word “feminism” is discussed

Arguably the most important aspect of Adichie’s work, is that she doesn’t limit feminism to women. She describes masculinity as a cage, and from an early age men are taught, perhaps forced, to limit or replace their experiences with emotions or actions deemed masculine. That is why “We Should All Be Feminists” is such an important book for the world and, specifically the professional translation community. It is the responsibility of the translator to effectively circulate revolutionary ideas that will create a better world for everyone.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in numbers:

Number of languages Adichie’s work has been translated into.

Number of languages in which Adichie’s TED talk transcript, “We Should All Be Feminists” is available.

Number of completed novels and novel length essays: Purple Hibiscus, 2003; Half of a Yellow Sun, 2006; The Thing Around Your Neck, 2009; Americanah, 2013; We Should All Be Feminists, 2014; Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions, 2017

Age when Adichie left Nigeria for the United States to study in Philadelphia. She has educational backgrounds in medicine, pharmacy, communications, and political science. Moving to the United States after growing up in Nigeria, she was not used to being defined by the color of her skin. Race, as it existed in the United States of America, became the navigation for her novel Americanah.

For Adichie’s “The Danger of a Single Story” TED talk, click here.

An excerpt from Adichie's “We Should All Be Feminists” TED talk was sampled in Beyoncé's song "Flawless" in December 2013.

• “We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller. We say to girls, "You can have ambition but not too much. You should aim to be successful, but not too successful, otherwise, you will threaten the man.” Because I am female, I am expected to aspire to marriage. I am expected to make my life choices always keeping in mind that marriage is the most important. Now, marriage can be a source of joy and love and mutual support but why do we teach girls to aspire to marriage and we don't teach boys the same? We raise girls to each other as competitors not for jobs or for accomplishments, which I think can be a good thing, but for the attention of men. We teach girls that they cannot be sexual beings in the way that boys are. Feminist: the person who believes in the social, political, and economic equality of the sexes”

About MotaWord

MotaWord is the world’s fastest professional translation platform. Through the use of cloud technologies, smart algorithms that manage projects around the clock and over 15 thousand professional translators MotaWord provides high-quality translations in any language 60% cheaper and 20 times faster than traditional translation agencies. 

About This Article
Famous Translators is a MotaWord segment showcasing notable professional translated works and famous linguists from history to the present. We are researching, compiling and sharing stories that matter to every translator on our blog. You, too can be published right here on the MotaWord blog site - just contact kali@motaword.com.

Check out our previous "Famous Translators" articles:

• Constance Garnett: The Imperfect Pioneer of Russian Translation
• The Graphic Translation of Persepolis
• Translating the Universe with Stephen Hawking

Citations: Degruyter, Coconuts, TheNewYorker, QZ, Cerep

Constance Garnett

(19 December 1861 – 17 December 1946)

“Dostoyevsky is so obscure and so careless a writer that one can scarcely help clarifying him.” - Constance Garnett

If you’ve ever picked up an English translation of any classic Russian novel, chances are it is a copy that has once passed through the hands of Constance Garnett. Born in Brighton, England, she is famous for translating the works of Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and Chekov. Introducing Russian literature on a wide basis to the English speaking public, Garnett has been both praised and widely criticized for her work and career. She is without a doubt a pioneer in the Russian translation community, and whatever may be thought about her translations themselves, her work popularized Russian literature and allowed its ideas to circulate the planet.

• She has faced harsh criticism for her translations, and her translations are by no means perfect. Where her critics fail to give her credit, she makes up for in ambition. Her work ethic was tireless. Translating scores of volumes for commercial publication, including all of Dostoyevsky’s novels, hundreds of Chekhov’s stories and two volumes of his plays, all of Turgenev’s works and most of Tolstoy’s, as well as selected texts by Herzen, Goncharov, and Ostrovsky. Without her contribution, the popularity of Russian literature would arguably pale in comparison to what it is today. Her approach to translation was the polar opposite of Ursula K. Le Guin, a novelist who translated out of love for the craft. You can read more about Ursula K. Le Guin in our article A Love for Translation...
  
  
• Garnett was the original translation hustler. It is said that she, “would finish a page, and throw it off in a pile on the floor without looking up, and start a new page. That pile would be almost up to her knees, and all magical.” Her work was not perfect, but it did the job. If she didn’t understand a word or phrase while translating, she would leave it out of the translation. Sounds criminal? Refer to her quote in the opener of this article... like any woman would, she did the work she believed was necessary to get the job done.
  
  
• Vladimir Nabokov and Joseph Brodsky were among her biggest critics. Nabokov dismissed her translations as "dry and flat, and always unbearably demure." To be fair to Garnett, Nabokov also publicly stated that his ideal translator be male. Brodsky said of her translations that "the reason English-speaking readers can barely tell the difference between Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky is that they aren't reading the prose of either one. They are reading Constance Garnett."
  
  
• In the early seventies, Meryl Streep, as a drama student at Yale Repertory Theatre, played Constance Garnett in the first production of “The Idiots Karamazov”, adapted by the two young playwrights Christopher Durang and Albert Innaurato.
  
  

Regardless of her methods, it is impossible to discuss the rise of Russian literature without mentioning Garnett’s name, and we thank her for broadening the non-Russian speaking world with her translation work.

Constance Garnett in numbers:

Number of volumes of literature she translated before retiring in 1934. Twelve volumes of Dostoevsky, five of Gogol, six of Herzen (his complete My Past and Thoughts), seventeen of Tchehov (her spelling), five of Tolstoy, eleven of Turgenev and the list goes on.

Age when Garnett was plagued by enteritis, sciatica, migraines, and a debilitating bone infection that left her unable to walk on her own until she was seven.

Number of months she left her husband and newborn child to go on her first grand tour of Russia to dine with Tolstoy himself.

For a complete list of Garnett’s translations, click here.

About MotaWord

MotaWord is the world’s fastest professional translation platform. Through the use of cloud technologies, smart algorithms that manage projects around the clock and over 15 thousand professional translators MotaWord provides high-quality translations in any language 60% cheaper and 20 times faster than traditional translation agencies. 

About This Article
Famous Translators is a MotaWord segment showcasing notable professional translated works and famous linguists from history to the present. We are researching, compiling and sharing stories that matter to every translator on our blog. You, too can be published right here on the MotaWord blog site - just contact kali@motaword.com.

Check out our previous "Famous Translators" articles:

• The Graphic Translation of Persepolis
• Translating the Universe with Stephen Hawking
• A Duel for Magical Realism: Translating Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Citations: TheNewYorker, Britannica, Timeline, AsymptoteJournal, LitHub, FinancialTimes, NYTimes

Persepolis
Published in 2000

“The moment we can laugh together is the moment we understand each other, once we understand each other, we cannot make war with one another.” - Marjane Satrapi, Author of Persepolis

Marjane Satrapi’s first book, Persepolis, is an autobiographical graphic novel about the author’s experience as a young girl growing up in Iran during the Islamic Revolution of 1979. The English translation first appeared in 2003, done by her spouse, Mattias Ripa.

Satrapi says that the most important thing for her is understanding people; that they are all similar, regardless of country or culture. She adds, “A person laughing or crying means the same thing everywhere in the end.”

•  Persepolis was not originally written in Farsi, Satrapi’s first language, but in French. She did not write her book for an Iranian audience. Satrapi’s goal was to provide an alternative outlook into Iran for “westerners” who consumed the false and negative media attention given to Iran at that time. When journalists would ask her why she wrote Persepolis, she would answer, “because you didn’t make good your job!” There is no official Persian translation of Persepolis, although Satrapi suspects that someone must have done it by now, but she is “not sure”.
  
  
• “Persepolis” is the Greek name for the capital of Persia. Selling more than 2 million copies worldwide and taught in schools and colleges, the graphic novel is the first of many small books Satrapi has written about her life growing up in Tehran, Iran.
  
  
• Satrapi recalls her childhood, “I read a lot and nothing was forbidden. I read a book about Che Guevara when I was 9 and Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights when I was 10. I read Jean Paul Sartre when I was 11 or 12; I didn’t understand all of it.” Enrolled in a Persian/French school since the age of 4, she is no stranger to the multilingual community, although she has never personally translated anything herself. She explains, “From 8 a.m. to noon we learned in Persian, so I was writing from right to left, and from 1 to 5 p.m., we had French so I would write from left to right. Two handwritings and two ways of reading.”
  
  
• Persepolis has been adapted into a film, produced by Marjane Satrapi herself and Vincent Paronnaud. The film has since received many awards, including but not limited to the Special Jury Prize in 2007 from the Cannes Film Festival and was nominated in 2008 for an Academy Award for Best Animated Feature.
  
  

Set in a modern city ripe with conflict and contradiction, Satrapi plays with notions of alienation, isolation, and displacement in Persepolis. Her goal with the novel is to not only show the flaws of the media in portraying any particular culture, but also to shed light on communication as a way to liberate a person from fundamentalism, fanaticism, and terrorism. Satrapi says, “…I believe that an entire nation should not be judged by the wrongdoings of a few extremists”.

Many argue that Persepolis is much more complex than bridging trials between East and West; it is a powerful tool showing the impact of translatability of emotions through images, in the same way, that the images from Satrapi’s childhood impacted the novel that made her a cultural and literary phenomenon.

Persepolis in numbers:

Marjane Satrapi speaks Farsi, French, German, English, Swedish, and Italian.

Rank out of 10 from Newsweek- on the list of the Top Ten Best Non-Fiction Books of the Decade.

Number of languages Persepolis has been translated into.

Read Persepolis here.

For more in-depth geographical context for Persepolis, click here.

Read The Asia Society’s interview with Satrapi here.

About MotaWord

MotaWord is the world’s fastest professional translation platform. Through the use of cloud technologies, smart algorithms that manage projects around the clock and over 15 thousand professional translators MotaWord provides high-quality translations in any language 60% cheaper and 20 times faster than traditional translation agencies. 

About This Article
Famous Translators is a MotaWord segment showcasing notable professional translated works and famous linguists from history to the present. We are researching, compiling and sharing stories that matter to every translator on our blog. You, too can be published right here on the MotaWord blog site - just contact kali@motaword.com.

Check out our previous "Famous Translators" articles:

• Translating the Universe with Stephen Hawking
• A Duel for Magical Realism: Translating Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• The Little Prince - Still Unique Through Translation

Citations: Warwick, TheGuardian, AsiaSociety, Britannica, Bustle, Toledo

Stephen William Hawking

8 January 1942- 14 March 2018

"Next time someone complains that you have made a mistake, tell him that may be a good thing. Because without imperfection, neither you nor I would exist." — From “Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking”, 2010

Stephen Hawking is a famous English physicist and celebrity personality. Diagnosed with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) at age 22, he has passed away peacefully in his sleep on 14 March 2018. Hawking is most notably famous for his unnerving discoveries about black holes in the 1970s - claiming with supporting evidence that they “could evaporate, even explode, and destroy all information about what had fallen in.” Some argue that his physical complications were somewhat of a tragic blessing, allowing his mind to roam the universe without distraction. 

Because his illness is degenerative, he had difficulty using his muscles and therefore rendered, moving, writing, and even speaking next to impossible. He relied on his famous speech software to communicate, and relied on loved ones and colleagues to “write long equations and properly code them into the right math language”.

Those who survive Hawking describe him as having the “dominating presence of a real human being, with an enormous zest for life, great humor, and tremendous determination”.

• Although Stephen Hawking only spoke English, his linguistic motor function was at the mercy of his computer-based communication system. Sponsored by Intel® Corporation since 1997, he spoke through a tablet computer mounted on the arm of his wheelchair, powered by his wheelchair batteries. A keyboard screen appears with a cursor that automatically scans the keyboard, where Hawking can select a row, column, and character by moving his cheek. His cheek movement is picked up by an infrared switch that is attached t his spectacles. Hawking’s communication device awed him to translate to us the delicate, and at times terrifying, inner workings of the universe.
  
  
• After gaining fame with his back-hole work in the 1970s, Hawking became interested in quantum gravity. In this realm of physics, Hawking continued to flirt with translation philosophy by resolving some basic issues by offering ingenious ideas. The problem of quantum gravity and the structure of space-time is regarded as the fundamental unsolved issue in the field of physics. Hawking continued his impressive career by simplifying this topic for the mere mortals among us, making him a friend to the translation community.
  
  
• Stephen Hawking had an incredible sense of humor, a passion for life, and a child-like spirit. He loved children, and is said to “sometimes entertain them by swiveling around in his motorized wheelchair”.
  
  
• Hawking, among his successes, was an amazingly tough educator. He had many students, yet being a student of his was said to be not easy. He would sometimes run his wheelchair over the feet of a student who weren’t paying attention! It is anecdotes like this from Hawking’s life that truly illustrate to us a man with great personality, determination, and a hilarious sense of humor.
  
  

Stephen Hawking maintained a healthy stubbornness. He insisted on doing everything by himself. This kept his muscles active and his spirit high, arguably allowing him to live as long as he did. He enjoyed his fame, his work, and asking his students to pursue obscure routes to reach pointed conclusions. It isn’t surprising to consider all of us a part of Hawking’s classroom; he provided us principles that cannot be questioned, but if translated correctly from his brain to our hearts provided us with a profound truth that helped us understand our world a bit better. Thank you, Professor. Rest in peace.

Stephen Hawking in numbers:

Number of languages A Brief History of Time was translated into as of 2001.

Stephen Hawking’s age at death. The average lifespan of an individual with ALS is two to five years after diagnosis. Hawking was diagnosed with the disease at age 22, defying the odds living more than 50 years after his diagnosis.

Number of editions of A Brief History of Time, release under slightly varied titles to the original, from 1988 - 2005.

Hawking’s date of death corresponds with other notable scientists, causing fans to smile and remember history fondly and value time as truly cyclical. Hawking was born 300 years after the death of Galileo Galilei, and has now died on the same day Albert Einstein was born.

To read an interview with Andrew Strominger, a contributor on Hawking’s “Soft Hair on Black Holes” paper, conducted by Seth Fletcher (from Scientific American), click here.

To access Hawking’s speech software for free, click here.
For a complete list of translated editions of A Brief History of Time, click here.

About MotaWord

MotaWord is the world’s fastest professional translation platform. Through the use of cloud technologies, smart algorithms that manage projects around the clock and over 15 thousand professional translators MotaWord provides high-quality translations in any language 60% cheaper and 20 times faster than traditional translation agencies. 

About This Article
Famous Translators is a MotaWord segment showcasing notable professional translated works and famous linguists from history to the present. We are researching, compiling and sharing stories that matter to every translator on our blog. You, too can be published right here on the MotaWord blog site - just contact kali@motaword.com.

Check out our previous "Famous Translators" articles:

• A Duel for Magical Realism: Translating Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• The Little Prince - Still Unique Through Translation
• A Love for Translation - Ursula K. LeGuin

Citations: BBC, TheIndependent, TheGuardian, ScientificAmerican, Hawking, TheIndependent2, TheWashingtonPost

Gabriel Garcia Marquez
March 6, 1927 - April 17, 2004 

“I knew this Colombian writer was eccentric when he wrote me saying that he doesn’t use adverbs ending with -mente in Spanish and would like to avoid adverbs ending in -ly in English.” She remembers thinking, what do you say in English except slowly? “Well, I came up with all types of things, like without haste.” - Edith Grossman, on translating Marquez.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, a renowned Colombian fiction writer, and pioneer of magical realism is one of the authors who favored and supported his translators. Edith Grossman and Gregory Rabassa, the two who have translated most of his works, are not only tested and trusted by Marquez but have had lucrative careers themselves. 

Marquez praised Grossman and Rambassa for “placing intuitiveness above intellectualism”; he regarded them as exemplary translators, not only translating word for word but meaning for meaning. Because he wrote so well in Spanish, he felt confident giving creative control over to Grossmand and Rambassa, allowing them to re-create his works in English, some of which would turn out to be preferred by Marquez himself.

• Edith Grossman claims that Marquez hated adverbs that ended in -mente (equivalent to adverbs ending in -ly, in English). This is a great example of translation as art: to honor her author’s style, Grossman had to get creative. For example, she would use “without haste” instead of “slowly” when translating “despacio” instead of “lentamente”.
  
  
• Grossman is responsible for translating most of Garcia Marquez’s works, including Love in the Time of Cholera (1988), The General in His Labyrinth (1991), Strange Pilgrims: Stories 1993, Of Love and Other Demons (1995), News of a Kidnapping (1997), Living to Tell the Tale (2003), and Memories of My Melancholy Whores (2005).
  
  
• Gregory Rabassa, who translated the Marquez books that Grossman did not, contributed to the 1960s Latin American writing boom that cemented Marquez as a literary giant. Rambassa translated One Hundred Years of Solitude, which is arguably Marquez’s most famous work.
  
  
• Marquez famously praised Rambassa for his work on One Hundred Years of Solitude. He loved his English translation so much, that he even regarded it as a separate work of art in its own right. Dallas Galvin, Coordinator of the Translation Center at Columbia University, made a statement that "many Spanish-speaking people who are bilingual prefer to read Rabassa's English, because it is clearer than the original Spanish."
  
  

Because realism turned magical is such an important theme in all of Garcia Marquez’s works, for his translators ‘magical realism’ takes on a whole new definition in ‘meaning for meaning’ translation. Garcia Marquez is a friend to the art of translation because he knew, for a translator to do their work properly, they must magically create a new work that exists within the realism of the original.

“I think translation is the cement that holds literary civilization together. It is the way that we learn about other literatures, other people's – I’m avoiding the word “cultures” because it’s not a favorite word of mine. The way we learn about the world is through translation. Since not everyone can read every language in the world, the only way to find out what people are writing and thinking are to read translations.” - Edith Grossman’s response to the question, ‘Why does translation matter?’

Gabriel Garcia Marquez in numbers:

Age of Edith Grossman, who resides in Manhattan, New York. Marquez and Rabassa are both deceased.

Number of copies sold of One-Hundred Years of Solitude. The novel has been translated into 36 languages.

According to Newsweek, and the American Translators Association, “Edith Grossman is one of 10 people who can make a living doing only literary translation in the U.S.”

Number of Marquez’s books Rambassa has translated from the original Spanish:

One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1970 ("Cien años de soledad")
The Autumn of the Patriarch, 1976 ("El otoño del patriarca"), for which he received the Pen Translation Prize.
Chronicle of a Death Foretold, 1982 ("Crónica de una muerte anunciada")
Leaf Storm ("La hojarasca")

Read The Washington Post's interview with Edith Grossman here.

Read Vox’s interview with Gregory Rabassa on translating One Hundred Years of Solitude here.

For Grossman’s top 5 recommendations for books on and of translation, click here.

About MotaWord

MotaWord is the world’s fastest professional translation platform. Through the use of cloud technologies, smart algorithms that manage projects around the clock and over 15 thousand professional translators MotaWord provides high-quality translations in any language 60% cheaper and 20 times faster than traditional translation agencies. 

About This Article
Famous Translators is a MotaWord segment showcasing notable professional translated works and famous linguists from history to the present. We are researching, compiling and sharing stories that matter to every translator on our blog. You, too can be published right here on the MotaWord blog site - just contact kali@motaword.com.

Check out our previous "Famous Translators" articles:

• The Little Prince - Still Unique Through Translation
• A Love for Translation - Ursula K. LeGuin
• Translating into English - Sabahattin Ali

Citations: ParisReview, OrientLink, UTDallas, TheGuardian, TheGuardian2, TranslateMedia

The Little Prince

Published in 1943, by Reynal & Hitchcock.

“But if you tame me, then we shall need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the world.” - The Little Prince

During the 75+ years since its original publication, translators have attempted to ‘tame’ the original French version of Antoine de Saint Exupery’s The Little Prince, turning the novella into a literary phenomenon. One of the most translated books in the world, The Little Prince tells the story of a pilot, charmingly reminiscent of Exupery, who had an aviation background himself. Stranded in a desert and on the edge of survival, the pilot meets a young prince who self-identifies as a traveler from his home on a distant asteroid. Being the only occupant of this asteroid, the little prince is neither boy nor man and educates the pilot in ways unimaginable.

• The original English translation of The Little Prince by Katherine Woods was the most widely read translation while in print from 1943 to 2001. Although copies of the Woods translation can still be purchased, it has since been “replaced” by what is a controversially “more modern” translation by Richard Howard. Woods’s translation is beloved as a more poetic, loyal rendering of the original French, while Howard’s version is considered a more digestible, cerebral reading experience.
   
• While illustrations require no translation, the charm of Exupery’s words is enhanced by his equally intriguing visuals. However, all of his original illustrations are often not included in every translation of the book; in this case, “a picture is worth a thousand words” takes on new meaning. In 1993, in honor of the fiftieth-anniversary celebration of The Little Prince’s publication, the handwritten pages, and illustrations (on onionskin) were showcased in a special installation at the Morgan Library in New York.
  
  
• With all its popularity, new translations of The Little Prince are in high demand. With English being the common language of business, in countries like China and Taiwan, it is more common to find translators who understand English rather than French. Because of this shortage of French translators, it is not surprising that translators have taken shortcuts. A common practice is translating from Woods’s English version into the target language of choice. The differences that occur from this practice can be glaring. There are at least five examples of these mistakes. For more detail, see “The Little Prince in numbers” section below.
  
  
• The Little Prince has even been translated into Spanglish. Ilan Stavans has acknowledged that Spanglish is not yet technically a language, considering its grammar and spelling are not yet fully developed, but he insists that “This hybrid tongue is spoken by millions across the Americas, more assiduously in the United States, which includes the second-largest concentration of Hispanics around the globe, after Mexico and before Colombia. There are dozens of varieties, not exclusively defined by national background (Chicano, Nuyorican, Cubonics, Dominicanish, etc.).” Read the full article here.
  
  
• The most recent translation of this small but mighty novella is from the original French into Hassanya, a North African dialect of Arabic. This is especially meaningful because, not only does it allow the book to win the “most translated book” title, but also because Hassanya is spoken in Cape Juby; the setting Exupery drew inspiration for his illustrations of The Little Prince.

The international impact of The Little Prince is undeniable. Sitting on the shelf at a humble 100 pages, depending on the version and translation, the story packs into its thin frame all the wonder and philosophy of the original. Because The Little Prince is such a widely distributed book, it is a great choice for translators who want a short, yet meaningful project.

The Little Prince in numbers:

Number of languages The Little Prince has been translated into, including Braille. Find a list of all the known translators and contributors here.

The number of tests that have been developed over the years to gauge the accuracy of a translation of The Little Prince from the original French. The tests are ‘The Sheep Test’, ‘The ‘True Stories Test’, ‘The Look Test’, ‘The “A Very Simple Secret” Test’, and ‘The Secret of Your Sad Little Life Test’.

Number of most popular French to English translations, listed below:

Katherine Woods, 1943 – The original translation, Harcourt Brace
T.V.F. Cuffe, 1995 – Penguin U.K.
Alan Wakeman, 1995 – Pavilion U.K.
Richard Howard, 2000 – The “new” translation, Harcourt Brace
David Wilkinson, 2011 – Omilia Languages (a dual French/English version meant for students)
Rowland Hill, 2016 – Chouette Editions (An interesting take on translating)
John Hinds, 2016 – The Annotated Little Prince (self-published)

To read The Paris Review’s interview with Richard Howard about his career, click here.

For a comprehensive history of The Little Prince, start with its production history.

Enjoy the audiobook in English, here.

About MotaWord

MotaWord is the world’s fastest professional translation platform. Through the use of cloud technologies, smart algorithms that manage projects around the clock and over 15 thousand professional translators MotaWord provides high-quality translations in any language 60% cheaper and 20 times faster than traditional translation agencies. 

About This Article
Famous Translators is a MotaWord segment showcasing notable professional translated works and famous linguists from history to the present. We are researching, compiling and sharing stories that matter to every translator on our blog. You, too can be published right here on the MotaWord blog site - just contact kali@motaword.com.

Check out our previous "Famous Translators" articles:

• A Love for Translation - Ursula K. LeGuin
• Translating into English - Sabahattin Ali
• Translating "Origin" by Dan Brown

Citaitons: WSJ, Guardian, WLT, Kinternational, CTV, Bustle

Ursula K. Le Guin

1929-2018

"I love translation because I translate for love. I'm an amateur. I translate a text because I love it, or think I do, and love craves close understanding. Translation, for me, is discovery." - Ursula K. Le Guin

Ursula K. Le Guin has recently passed away at the age of 88. Her legacy as “the grande dame of science fiction”, as she is called by the Washington Post, seems to not do her justice. 

Born Ursula Kroeber in Berkeley, California in 1929, she is an immensely popular author and translator who brought feminine sensibility to the science fiction and fantasy world. Her books and poems range from young-adult adventures to deeply philosophical fables, producing notable works such as the Earthsea series and The Left Hand of Darkness. Her recent publications include the novel Lavinia, Words Are My Matter, an essay collection, and Finding My Elegy, New and Selected Poems. Her website is UrsulaKLeGuin.com.

• Ursula K. Le Guin is best known for her early novels. In the span of six years, she wrote and published A Wizard of Earthsea (1968), The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), The Lathe of Heaven (1971) and The Dispossessed (1974). These books are said to have greatly influenced authors such as Neil Gaiman, Terry Pratchett, David Mitchell, Salman Rushdie and Zadie Smith.
  
  
• Known as an anarchist, Le Guin often carries a witty, protesting tone within her writing. She loved playing with the idea of political utopias, power dynamics, gender roles, and the supernatural.
  
  
• Given this love for the supernatural, it is no surprise that she became enchanted with Lao Tzu’s The Tao Te Ching. Not knowing any Chinese she set out to produce her own translation, or rather transliteration, utilizing Paul Carus’ translation of 1898 which has the Chinese characters followed by a transliteration and a translation in English. She developed this lyrical interpretation of the Tao with the help of J.P. Seaton, a Chinese scholar, and poet.
  
  
• Beginning the transliteration In her twenties, Le Guin completed several chapters. She then picked up the project again in her seventies, a book Le Guin describes as “a rendition, not a translation. She describes the experience as “that rare miracle when a translation stops being a translation and becomes … a second original.” She says, “...because I don’t read Chinese I can’t call it a translation. In other words, it is a sort of compendium of everybody else’s translations looked at, and then I had the Chinese text with a word-to-word [translation], which is, of course, possible only to a limited extent. And then I had Seaton to talk about it with; to tell me, “yeah, you can say that means that, but you can’t say this means this.” He could encourage me and stop me. I tried to give him more credit with that book, but he wouldn’t take it.”
  
  
• Le Guin and Seaton’s version of The Tao Te Ching is regarded as one of the most approachable, enjoyable, and satisfying versions in circulation. Here’s a sample where Le Guin beautifully highlights Lao Tzu’s humor and thoughtfulness:
  
  “Thirty spokes
  meet in the hub.
  Where the wheel isn’t
  is where it’s useful.
  
  Hollowed out,
  clay makes a pot.
  Where the pot’s not
  is where it’s useful.
  
  Cut doors and windows
  to make a room.
  Where the room isn’t,
  there’s room for you.
  
  So the profit in what is
  is in the use of what isn’t.”

Ursula K. Le Guin is the winner of the Hugo, Nebula, Gandalf, Kafka, and National Book Awards. An honored author of children’s books, poetry, and criticism, she has also received the Endeavor, Locus, Tiptree, Sturgeon, PEN-Malamud, and the Pushcart honors. She has received a lifetime achievement award from the World Fantasy Awards, Los Angeles Times, Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association, and Willamette Writers, as well as the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Grand Master Award and the Library of Congress Living Legends Award, among many others. She died on January 22, 2018, in her Portland, Oregon home at 88 years old. May she rest in peace.

Ursula K. Le Guin in numbers:

Total number of languages Le Guin’s works have been translated into.

Number of novels Le Guin wrote throughout her lifetime.

Number of volumes of translation she has personally produced.

Number of languages she spoke: English, Spanish, French, and Italian.

Read Le Guin’s English transliteration of the Tao Te Ching here, and listen to the audiobook version here.

For Le Guin’s translation of Gabriela Mistral’s Selected Poems from the Spanish, click here.

About MotaWord

MotaWord is the world’s fastest professional translation platform. Through the use of cloud technologies, smart algorithms that manage projects around the clock and over 15 thousand professional translators MotaWord provides high-quality translations in any language 60% cheaper and 20 times faster than traditional translation agencies.  

About This Article
Famous Translators is a MotaWord segment showcasing notable professional translated works and famous linguists from history to the present. We are researching, compiling and sharing stories that matter to every translator on our blog. You, too can be published right here on the MotaWord blog site - just contact kali@motaword.com.

Check out our previous "Famous Translators" articles:

• Translating into English - Sabahattin Ali
• Translating "Origin" by Dan Brown
• Thoughts on Translation - Jacques Derrida

Citations: BrainPickings, Kinternational, WashingtonPost, Britannica, NYTimes

Madonna in a Fur Coat - Written by Sabahattin Ali

Originally Published in 1943. Translated from the Turkish by Maureen Freely and Alexander Dawe

“… ...what matters most to me is the voice. And this narrator's voice is like honey. All I had to do was figure out how to get to that voice, how to recreate its flow and truthfulness.” - Maureen Freely, on the translation process in an interview with Hurriyet Daily News.

Released in May 2016, the much anticipated English translation of Turkish author Sabahattin Ali’s Madonna in a Fur Coat has finally hit the shelves. With a rich plot and a compelling, controversial author, one can’t help but wonder why it has taken so long since the novel was published in the original Turkish to attract English-language publishers. Maureen Freely, lead translator on the project, chalks it up simply to lack of interest in Turkish novels. Freely gives an all the credit to translators for much of the momentum in opening Turkish literature to the world; it is the hard work of translators who are responsible for making exposure happen.

•  Madonna in a Fur Coat is a best-selling Turkish classic challenging gender roles and playing with concepts of love and alienation. The story follows the main character Raif Efendi through 1920’s interwar Berlin where he meets a painting and it’s an artist who becomes the love of his life. Raif struggles to hold onto his new life with his strong-willed partner, Maria, as the two seem to slowly become for feminine, and masculine, respectively. Maria, a proud feminist, becomes fond of Raif’s non-threatening temperament and Raif falls for Maria’s independence.
  
  
•  Maureen Freely, president of English Pen: an organization dedicated to fighting against censorship and defending the rights of writers around the world, comments on Turkey at the time of publishing, “[The 1940s] was really a moment in Turkey that is very, very close to the moment we are experiencing now. It was a fascist, ultra-nationalist time, and the socialists were the ISIS of the day. Anybody who was a dissident was a terrorist -- that’s the same as it is now. What they do now -- and they have been doing it for the past year in Turkey -- is they have deprived almost all journalists of their livelihood, and nobody else will hire them either. And this is true of a lot of academics as well. There are about two million people, if you count the families who are affected by this, people who have been taken out of work and nobody else dares to hire them. That’s what was going on in Turkey at the time [of Sabahattin Ali], it was going through another fascist moment.”
  
  
• Sabahattin Ali (1907-48) was intensely political, suffered imprisonment and was deemed dangerous by the Turkish authorities of his time. He was a family man, a newspaper owner, and editor, writer, and activist. He may not be familiar to most western readers, but was a major voice for 20th-century secular Turks, and that moment has met a recent revival here in the 21st. Today, he is renowned as one of Turkey’s most loved writers, selling thousands of books every year. He is seen, especially by the youth of modern Turkey, as a resistance icon, a “man who dared to stand up to the heavy hand of the state.”
  
  
• Ali’s daughter, Filiz Ali, is currently based in Istanbul where she tours schools to talk about her father’s life and work to teenagers. She reports, when talking about Madonna in a Fur Coat, witnessing both boys and girls, cry. She says, “They realise there's something missing in their own lives, something they search for but cannot find in this now, now, now generation."
  
  

While politics saturates much of Ali’s work, Madonna in a Fur Coat chooses to illustrate to use that the personal is political, focusing on the politics of love rather than of government. Ali’s novel remains a set text in Bulgarian high schools to this day. As Freely points out, Madonna in a Fur Coat reminds readers that there has always been dissent, that there have always been characters who challenge with great courage.

Madonna in a Fur Coat in numbers:

Age Sabahattin Ali was murdered under suspicious circumstances. Unable to get a Turkish passport to travel as a refugee to Europe, in hopes of escaping persecution for his political views, Ali hired a smuggler to take him across the western Turkish border into Bulgaria. It is said that while Ali was reading on a bench, the smuggler who allegedly hit him over the head with a shovel and killed him. Theories circulate that the smuggler was an agent of the state, sent specifically to assassinate Ali. No one knows what really happened, nor have the whereabouts of his remains ever been located.

Amount of copies sold in Turkey

Number of years that it took after its publication to be translated into English.

Number of original books that the lead translator, Maureen Freely, has written herself. Her passion for translation stems from a deep desire to see Turkish literature exposed to a wider audience.

For more Turkish novels, reviews, and commentary follow the ‘Turkey Book Talk’ podcast on iTunes here and Facebook here.

About MotaWord

MotaWord is the world’s fastest professional translation platform. Through the use of cloud technologies, smart algorithms that manage projects around the clock and over 15 thousand professional translators MotaWord provides high-quality translations in any language 60% cheaper and 20 times faster than traditional translation agencies. 

About This Article
Famous Translators is a MotaWord segment showcasing notable professional translated works and famous linguists from history to the present. We are researching, compiling and sharing stories that matter to every translator on our blog. You, too can be published right here on the MotaWord blog site - just contact kali@motaword.com.

Check out our previous "Famous Translators" articles:

• Translating "Origin" by Dan Brown
• Thoughts on Translation - Jacques Derrida
• Deadly Translation: The Politics of Hitoshi Igarashi's Japanese Version of The Satanic Verses

“To the tireless team of translators around the world who worked so diligently to bring this novel to readers in so many languages -- my sincere thanks for your time, your skill, and your care.”

-Dan Brown, Note to translators on the back cover of Origin

With the debut of his newest novel, Origin, Dan Brown continues to support his professional translators in the above thank you note. Dan Brown is no stranger to the translation community. He has a dense history of working tirelessly with multiple translators to make sure the tone of his work gets translated accurately. He puts his translators in unconventional situations to translate his equally unconventional novels.

• Set in Bilbao, Spain, Dan Brown continues the story of the code-breaking symbologist, Robert Langdon in his new novel, Origin. We follow Langdon’s former student, Edmond Kirsch, a billionaire inventor, futurist, and atheist on another historically influenced adventure. Hoping to one day rid the world of religious conflict, Kirsch challenges Langdon in a classic cocktail of murder, mystery, and theology to bring us another page-turning thriller.
  
  
• While there is not much disclosed yet about the translation process for Origin after its October 3rd, 2017 release, Dan Brown has a history of putting his professional translators through a "hellish" experience. To translate his previous novel Inferno, he required 11 translators to be put under high surveillance and tight security in a bunker based in Milan, Italy for 2 months. Dan Brown is clearly committed to high quality translation; putting his translators under such harsh conditions in hopes of creating a linguistic “hive mind”. What better way to help a translator get in the headspace of a novel than by replicating the character’s experience?
  
  
• Author of 6 national best sellers at the age of 53, Dan Brown has over 200 million copies of his books in print.
  
  
• In 2005, Dan Brown was named one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World by Time magazine. Although his writing skill is widelydebated and his topics potentially controversial, no one can call his novels boring or unintelligent. 

Unlike The DaVinci Code, Origin does not carry the same philosophical or theological weight that risks offending religious communities. However, that doesn’t mean it is any less thought-provoking. If you’re looking for a good discussion about human existence, technology, and how the two may combine to illustrate the future, Origin is the book for you...in your language of choice.

Dan Brown’s novels, in numbers:

      Number of languages Dan Brown’s novels have been translated into.

      Number of countries where Origin was released on October 3rd, 2017.

      Number of months Dan Brown has his translators quarantined in unusual settings to translate his books.

       Number of translators used to translate Inferno and Origin under unusual circumstances in a bunker.

       Total pages translated in Origin.

More About Origin

An Illustrated guide

To see a list of the collected world editions of Origin, click here.

For more details and descriptions on the cover art, click here.

About MotaWord

MotaWord is the world’s fastest professional translation platform. Through the use of cloud technologies, smart algorithms that manage projects around the clock and over 15 thousand professional translators MotaWord provides high-quality translations in any language 60% cheaper and 20 times faster than traditional translation agencies. 

About This Article
Famous Translators is a MotaWord segment showcasing notable professional translated works and famous linguists from history to the present. We are researching, compiling and sharing stories that matter to every translator on our blog. You, too can be published right here on the MotaWord blog site - just contact kali@motaword.com.

Check out our previous "Famous Translators" articles:

• Thoughts on Translation - Jacques Derrida
• Deadly Translation: The Politics of Hitoshi Igarashi's Japanese Version of The Satanic Verses
• One Man's Soul Mountain: Translating Gao Xingjian

Citations: Hurriyet, Penguin, National, Telegraph, DanBrown, Independent, NewYorker, CPHPost

July 15, 1930, El Biar, Algeria - October 9, 2004, Paris, France

“How dare one speak of translation before you who, in your vigilant awareness of the immense stakes-- and not only of the fate of literature-- make this sublime and impossible task your desire, your anxiety, your travail, your knowledge, and your knowing skill?

How dare I proceed before you, knowing myself to be at once rude and inexperienced in this domain, as someone who, from the very first moment, from his very first attempts (which I could recount to you, as the English saying goes, off the record), shunned the translators métier, his beautiful and terrifying responsibility, his insolvent duty and debt, without ceasing to tell himself “never ever again”: no, precisely, I would never dare, I should never, could never, would never manage to pull it off.”

- Jacques Derrida, “What Is a ‘Relevant’ Translation?”, translated from French by Lawrence Venuti

Why begin our ‘Famous Translations’ segment with a literary philosopher who famously loathed the act of translating, himself? Although Jacques Derrida did not make a career as a French translator, his work centered around his faith in language as the most natural and best way to communicate. His criticism of ‘relevant’ translation can actually be read as a praise to professional translators -- those who are existentially strong enough to cope with the ‘beautiful and terrifying’ responsibility of high-quality translation -- as he, admittedly, was too “rude and inexperienced in this domain.”

• Jacques Derrida was one of the most famous, controversial, and wisest modern thinkers of the 21st century. He invented a way of doing philosophy that fundamentally altered our understanding of many academic fields, namely literary and translation studies.
• Born in 1930 to Jewish parents in French colonial Algeria, Derrida grew up in a culture centered around Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Anti-semitism was a reality he grew up with. 
• ‘Deconstruction’ is his most famous and most famously misunderstood philosophical idea. Derrida uses this term to illustrate his way of thinking. In its most basic form, deconstruction asks us to suspend our initial way of thinking and adopt the opposing viewpoint -- what is lost in the opposition...buried underneath our biases. Seem simple? Before dying in 2004 from pancreatic cancer at age 74, Derrida wrote 40 books on this topic and others-- rendering deconstruction anything but ‘simple’.
• Many Derridean scholars find it difficult not to read Derrida’s work as a response to a lifetime exposed to bigotry and exclusion. We at MotaWord find it equally as hard to read his work and not feel Derrida’s underlying respect for professional translators. He clearly praises language professionals and their abilities. With his cool demeanor and his huge heart for the art of language, it’s no surprise that Derrida is the father of deconstruction.
• For more information read Derrida’s thoughts on translation in his work, "What Is a 'Relevant' Translation?". French translation provided by Lawrence Venuti, and watch University of California Irvine’s translator roundtable for translating Derrida’s work here.

For Venuti’s thoughts on translating Derrida, read Translating Derrida on Translation: Relevance and Disciplinary Resistance.

Derrida in numbers:

      books published. Browse Derrida’s books here.

      boxes of collected publications held in the University of California, Irvine archives.

       Of his most notable works include Writing and Difference, Speech and Phenomena, and Of Grammatology.

  The voting difference when Derrida won an honorary degree from Cambridge University in 1992, 336 in favor-204 opposing. 

Opponents of the award claimed his writing to be, “denying the distinctions between fact and fiction, observation and imagination, evidence and prejudice."

With over 700 active professional French translators in our system at the time of this article, we would like to open the comments section up for an open discussion relating to French translation, Derrida, and any other ideas from this segment that may have inspired you. What is your experience in translating? Is translating an existential experience for you? If you have ideas, we would love to hear them! Comment below. Stay tuned to find out more about the Famous Translators and Famous Translations. 

About MotaWord

MotaWord is the world’s fastest professional translation platform. Through the use of cloud technologies, smart algorithms that manage projects around the clock and over 15 thousand professional translators MotaWord provides high-quality translations in any language 60% cheaper and 20 times faster than traditional translation agencies. 

About This Article
Famous Translators is a MotaWord segment showcasing notable professional translated works and famous linguists from history to the present. We are researching, compiling and sharing stories that matter to every translator on our blog. You, too can be published right here on the MotaWord blog site - just contact kali@motaword.com.

Check out our previous "Famous Translators" articles:

• Deadly Translation: The Politics of Hitoshi Igarashi's Japanese Version of The Satanic Verses
• One Man's Soul Mountain: Translating Gao Xingjian
• The Mistranslation of the Mystical Nostradamus
  
  Citations: Jstor, TranslationJournal, IEP, Britannica, Shmoop