Translation

I first came across Jennifer Kronovet via her collection of poems, The Wug Test. Many of the poems are about language — how we use it, how we take it for granted, how we acquired it in the first place. (The original Wug Test was a famous language acquistion exercise developed by psycholinguist, Jean Berko Gleason.)  [[entity_id:"84678" entity_type:"node" […]

Who was Frank Zappa? Virtuoso guitarist? Modernist composer? Smutty lyricist? Anti-censorship activist? All of the above … and much more in the former East Germany. There, his banned records fetched small fortunes among rebellious young men who dreamed of freedom. This episode of The World in Words podcast spends 30 minutes in the company of one such man who now runs a Zappa-themed festival. We also hear from an American translator who explains Zappa’s obscure lyrics to German fans, line by line.

Many Russians perceive Donald Trump as an American version of Vladimir Putin. It’s partly based on Trump’s bombastic rhetoric, but also on how his speeches and tweets are translated into Russian.

What is it about Texas that sparks the global imagination? Persian and Turkish both have an expression that means, “This is not Texas.” The Norwegian adjective, ‘Texas’ means out of control.

“Africans are incredible linguists,” says Lori Thicke, founder of Translators Without Borders, which enlists Africans to translate everything from medication instructions to election materials into some of Africa’s 1,000+ languages.