Since there is no such thing as a truly literal translation — no two languages’ grammars match, their vocabularies diverge, even punctuation has a different weight — there can be no such thing as a translation that is not “creative.” And while most of us translators think of ourselves as “faithful,” definitions of faithfulness can differ. Because languages function differently, much of translation is about achieving a similar effect by different means; not only are difference, change, and interpretation completely normal, but they are in fact an integral part of faithfulness.
Tag: 01.11.18
Google Discovers That STEM Skills Aren’t Most Important For Its Employees
In 2013, Google decided to test its hiring hypothesis by crunching every bit and byte of hiring, firing, and promotion data accumulated since the company’s incorporation in 1998. Project Oxygen shocked everyone by concluding that, among the eight most important qualities of Google’s top employees, STEM expertise comes in dead last. The seven top characteristics of success at Google are all soft skills: being a good coach; communicating and listening well; possessing insights into others (including others different values and points of view); having empathy toward and being supportive of one’s colleagues; being a good critical thinker and problem solver; and being able to make connections across complex ideas.
The World Basically Has Two Words For ‘Tea’ – Here’s How They Spread All Across The Globe
“One is like the English term – té in Spanish and tee in Afrikaans are two examples. The other is some variation of cha, like chay in Hindi. Both versions come from China. How they spread around the world offers a clear picture of how globalization worked before ‘globalization’ was a term anybody used.”
Do Audio Books Count As “Reading”?
Over the years, people have asked if I noticed a difference between books on tape and reading print, and the answer is I don’t know. Sporadic reader that I had been, it was hard to say if the words read with my ears reached my brain differently from everything I had read with my eyes. For every study that shows comparably complex brain activity during both methods of reading, there’s a respected author or critic who discredits audio books as shortcuts or cheating.
Reconstructing An Ancient Board Game (Now There’s A Challenge For You)
“Imagine you find a Monopoly board and a handful of street cards plus one little tin hat and a little tin shoe, nothing else,” says game historian Ulrich Schädler. Reporter Natasha Frost looks at some games from the ancient world – and at the ways scholars try to figure them out.
England’s Largest Medieval Stained-Glass Window Has Been Restored
At York Minster, one of the great cathedrals of northern England, the Great East Window – completed 1405-1408 and roughly the size of a tennis court – has undergone a ten-year rehab costing nearly $15 million.
Cirque Du Soleil Banned Critic Lyn Gardner – Here’s What Happened Next
“The critic Sanjoy Roy, who has never reviewed the company before, was approved for a press ticket for the show and The Guardian bought a ticket for me for £73, which offered a side view over the stage.” Here’s a review by both writers of Cirque’s show Ovo – as Gardner writes, “I love the acts. It would be foolish to pretend that Cirque doesn’t showcase some of circus’s most skilled performers.” But …
The Great Awokening Of Pop Culture
Want a sense of how much pop culture has changed in the past year? Look at culture from even five or ten years ago that now suddenly seems inappropriate. “Such moments of not-okay-anymore recognition might throw the new era into starkest relief. And squabbles over what was and wasn’t acceptable — plus the accompanying self-righteousness of all parties, whether styling themselves unimpeachably correct or bravely defiant — were surely the most exhausting feature of the last year in pop culture. To dismiss wokeness as the handiwork of P.C. thought police, though, would be to ignore its reality: an altered pop-culture ecosystem, a Great Awokening in full bloom.”
Yo-Yo Ma: Why We’re Evolutionarily Wired To Need Culture
“As humans, we naturally need food, water and shelter to survive. But equally important is understanding. To survive, we need to understand our environment, each other and ourselves. We invented culture to meet this need: we found a short-hand to take the essential values and truths a society holds, and collapse them into coded narrative, sound, images and symbols that mean something to all of us.”
José Molina, The Dancer Who Brought Spanish Dances To U.S. Audiences, Has Died At 81
Molina came to the U.S. for an appearance on TV in 1956, and he never left. He formed José Molina Bailes Españoles, which toured the U.S. for 30 years, and taught flamenco and other dances for years afterward. A flamenco teacher who learned from him says, “He would say, ‘Better to do one thing right than 10 things badly.’ And students endured the endless repetition not only because of his expertise, but because he taught with such generosity, warmth, humor and charm.”