Steven Capsuto (translation and languages account)

What a fantastic conference it was! It always is. 😀

Hello from the American Literary Translators Association conference in Arizona!

Tonight was the annual theater-translation event: "Cold Beers and Cold Readings," including part of my translation of "Women on Radio" by Cristina Clemente. Some people are so good at unrehearsed performances! #ALTA48

100% of the members of Congress opposing funding and military aid to Israel are Democrats or (in Sanders's case) caucus with Democrats. Do you think the Republicans, whose current POTUS once promised to open a surveillance file on every Muslim in the US, will do anything but worsen the situation?

What a compelling argument.

Been meaning to delete that account for years anyway. Done!

It's more basic than that: If voters wanted the Democrats to do things, they should have voted for them. You can't give someone no power and then complain that they're not exercising power.

Yeah, it would make sense for EU English to be Irish English, for the same reasons that EU Spanish leans heavily towards the Spanish of Spain.

They approached me about working for them a few times in the 2010s, and I'm pretty sure that's why I said no.

Didn't they also do a unilateral rate cut about 10 years ago?

In the US, about half of all university graduates end up working in a field other than the one they studied as an undergrad. (When I was a student, the figure was even higher: about 80%).

But why let facts spoil a good story, right?

And were they even paying well to begin with? I seem to recall choosing not to work with them even a decade ago because of rates.

At a certain point, if publishers in the future aren't going to do actual editing or promotion, you're better off self-publishing and keeping control of the product and more of the money.

One major challenge is if your ancestors' records are in Ottoman Turkish: pre-1920s Turkish written in the Arabic alphabet. There are people who can read it, but not a whole lot of them.

A two-panel comic strip. The left one shows a sailing ship with a goose in 16th-century Portuguese clothes, with the caption "Portuguoose." The 2nd panel shows several such birds, with the caption "Portu-geese."

Today's grammar lesson...

Exactly. These are the use cases I'll be talking about in my presentations at the Mexican Translators Organization conference.

MTPE speeds me up only if I'm translating from a language I don't work with very often, and even then I don't like it because it biases you towards the computer's solution.

It's also helpful for requests like: List 15 humorous terms for "feces" in US English that are less "shocking" than "shit" and that a 37-year-old character might use in conversation while telling a funny, scatological anecdote. (I'd never heard the term "dookie" before but it was a great solution.)

It's useful in literary work if I'm translating dialogue for a character much younger than me and I know that what I put in the draft is not generation appropriate. If I ask AI tools to list options for how someone born in 1998 might say the same thing, I usually find a perfect solution.

The problem with that theory is that if the original writer does creative, nonstandard things with the source language, then the translator has to do similarly creative nonstandard things with the target language. And then people who don't know any better claim that the translator is incompetent.

Editing a machine translation slows me down and is, frankly, miserable, soul-numbing work. It's like being an Olympic runner and being told you have to compete in weighted lead sneakers.

I sometimes use AI as a fancy dictionary or for a 2nd opinion during the quality-control phase of a translation.

And the irony is they want to deploy right-wing violence against liberals and leftists, to punish us for the existence of right-wing violence against right-wingers.

Too many corporations bowing before the dictator. Boycott, boycott, boycott.

Yup... It's classic shit that right-wing dictators do. When an angry right-wing white Christian man kills someone, the solution is to go after liberals, Jews, leftists, and progressives (and people of color, and trans people, and anyone who doesn't resemble the perp). "Round up the usual suspects!"

What better place to work on translating a stage play into English than in the Drama Book Shop in New York? Soaking up the creative energy...

#TranslatorsLife #translation #theater #theatre

My ego as a #translator is having an unusually good day. A publisher just referred to me as "the great Steven Capsuto" in a LinkedIn post, and I just read an interview with an author who thanked me for helping him make his book better. 😊 For a profession that usually gets ignored, that's all lovely.

As opposed to the Latin American films and series with a character from Spain who runs around calling everyone a "gilipollas" (that's how you know they're Spaniards).

(Photo: Book cover of "When Einstein Met Kafka: Jewish Contributions to the Modern World," me, and the author: cultural historian Diego Moldes. Madrid, 2022.)

And I'm finding it's harder to figure out how to shape an engaging, entertaining talk about someone else's material, even if you studied it up close for two years while translating it! I want to be sure to do justice to the author's work. It's getting there. The first talk is this coming Tuesday. 😁

In the past, when I gave lectures based on a book, it was always one I had written and I knew the content inside out. But now, in the US, I'm the public face of a 600-page book written by someone else, which I translated into English.

#TranslatorsLife #translation #PublicSpeaking

Almost a decade ago, the guy who came up with that principle clarified publicly that it referred only to facile, irresponsible comparisons to Hitler. And he said he agreed with the Holocaust survivors and the Holocaust historians who pointed out legitimate parallels between Trump and Hitler.

In the days after Charlie Kirk's death, half the internet sounds like that awful guy at the office who keeps going up to women coworkers and saying, "What are you talking about? Bob's a great guy! *I've* never heard him harass anyone!" #CreepyAssholes