New Books in Language and Translation

Latest Episodes:

Crosswords May 31, 2022

Show notes

In this episode Kim talks to Adrienne Raphel about crossword puzzles.

For lots more about crosswords, check out Adrienne’s book Thinking Inside the Box: Adventures with Crosswords and the Puzzling People Who Can’t Live Without Them (Penguin Random House, 2021)

For some of the historical puzzles she mentions in the episode, Adrienne recommends The Curious History of the Crossword: 100 Puzzles from Then and Now by Ben Tausig.

If you’re inspired to start doing crosswords and looking for some guidance, she suggests the New York Times guide: “How to Solve The New York Times Crossword.”

For more on cryptic crosswords, check out Stephen Sondheim’s article “How to Do a Real Crossword Puzzle.” New York Magazine (April 1968). Also on cryptics, Emily Cox and Henry Rathvon’s book The Random House Guide to Cryptic Crosswords (Random House, 2003) is out of print but very good. And the crossword blog in The Guardian has lots of cryptic crosswords too.

Adrienne is a poet, scholar, and lecturer in the Princeton writing program. She has a super cool web site with links to all the other amazing things she’s written!

Our cover photo shows the stage set from Puzzles of 1925, a crossword musical! The digital image is from the White Studio Theatrical Photography Collection at the New York Public Library.

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Should Scholars Trust Machine Translation of their Articles? May 30, 2022

Show notes

Should academic scholars trust machine translation for the publication of their academic articles? In this episode, Avi Staiman and Ana Guerberof Arenas discuss how the evolution of machine translation and the most recent developments in machine translation technology. Ana shares her insight on the potential pitfalls of relying on machine translation for unpublished manuscripts as opposed to when getting the 'gist' suffices for understanding the research of others. She also shares the results of her recent study on the advantages of human translation for creative and literary texts.

Ana Guerberof Arenas is a Marie Skłodowska Curie Research Fellow at University of Groningen. Her project (CREAMT) looks at the impact of MT on translation creativity and the reader's experience in the context of literary texts. Ana is also a Senior Lecturer in Translation and Multimodal Technologies at University of Surrey (UK) where she is a member of the Centre for Translation Studies. She has worked more than twenty years in the translation/localization industry in roles that ranged from translator to operations manager. She has authored refereed articles and book chapters on MT post-editing productivity, quality and experience; pre-editing and post-editing; reading comprehension of MT output; translator training and creativity and reading experience with different translation modalities.

Avi Staiman is the founder and CEO of Academic Language Experts.

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Kay Muhr and Liam Ó. hAisibéil, "The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names of Ireland" (Oxford UP, 2021) May 27, 2022

Show notes

The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names of Ireland (Oxford UP, 2021) contains explanations of over 3,800 family names, of any origin, that are established in Ireland, both in the Republic and in Northern Ireland. It provides an entry for every family name that has more than 100 bearers in the 1911 Census of Ireland. The entries bring together a variety of sources, medieval to modern, to uncover the histories, contexts, and transformations of surnames in Ireland.

Research Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities in the IRIS Center at Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville.

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Peter Scharf, "Sabdanugamah: Indian Linguistic Studies in Honor of George Cardona; Volume 1: Vyakarana and Sabdabodha" (Sanskrit Library, 2021) May 26, 2022

Show notes

Sabdanugamah (Sanskrit Library, 2021) is the first of two volumes of studies in honor of Professor George Cardona, the preeminent authority on Paninian grammar and the linguistic traditions of India as well as one of the worlds leading scholars of Indo-European linguistics. These studies cover topics in Paninian grammar, other Indian linguistic traditions, issues in Sanskrit morphology and syntax, and theories of verbal cognition.

Visit the Sanskrit Library here. The Sanskrit Library offers course here.

Raj Balkaran is a scholar, online educator, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com.

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Roslyn Petelin, "How Writing Works: A Field Guide to Effective Writing" (Routledge, 2021) May 20, 2022

Show notes

Listen to this interview of Roslyn Petelin, Honorary Associate Professor at the University of Queensland, Australia. We talk about her book How Writing Works: A Field Guide to Effective Writing (Routledge, 2021) writing well and knowing why.

Roslyn Petelin : "My book caters for all kinds of writers: student writers, creative writers, technical writers, journalistic writers, corporate writers, all of whom need to be able to write well, write successfully, for either personal or corporate credibility."

Contact Daniel at writeyourresearch@gmail.com.

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Sofia Stolk, "The Opening Statement of the Prosecution in International Criminal Trials: A Solemn Tale of Horror" (Routledge, 2021) May 13, 2022

Show notes

Dr. Sofia Stolk’s The Opening Statement of the Prosecution in International Criminal Trials: A Solemn Tale of Horror (Routledge, 2021) addresses the discursive importance of the prosecution’s opening statement before an international criminal tribunal. Opening statements are considered to be largely irrelevant to the official legal proceedings but are simultaneously deployed to frame important historical events. They are widely cited in international media as well as academic texts; yet have been ignored by legal scholars as objects of study in their own right. Dr. Stolk aims to remedy this neglect, by analysing the narrative that is articulated in the opening statements of different prosecutors at different tribunals in different times.

This book aims to magnify the story of the opening statement where it becomes ambiguous, circular, repetition, self-referential, incomplete, and inescapable. It aims to uncover the specificities of a discourse that is built on and rebuilds paradoxes, to illuminate some of the absurdities that mark the foundations of the opening statements’ celebration of reason. More generally, it aims to show how the contradticion in the opening statement reflects foundational tensions that are productive and constituative of the field of international criminal law more broadly. Above all, [this book] shows how the opening statement aims to provide certainty where there is none.

The book takes an interdisciplinary approach and looks at the meaning of the opening narrative beyond its function in the legal process in a strict sense, discussing the ways in which the trial is situated in time and space and how it portrays the main characters. Dr. Stolk shows how perpetrators and victims, places and histories, are juridified in a narrative that, whilst purporting to legitimise the trial, the tribunal and international criminal law itself, is beset with tensions and contradictions.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Mónica Guzmán, "I Never Thought of It That Way: How to Have Fearlessly Curious Conversations in Dangerously Divided Times" (BenBella Books, 2022) May 09, 2022

Show notes

Journalist Mónica Guzmán is the loving liberal daughter of Mexican immigrants who voted—twice—for Donald Trump. When the country could no longer see straight across the political divide, Mónica set out to find what was blinding us and discovered the most eye-opening tool we’re not using: our own built-in curiosity. Partisanship is up, trust is down, and our social media feeds make us sure we’re right and everyone else is ignorant (or worse). But avoiding one another is hurting our relationships and our society. In I Never Thought of It That Way: How to Have Fearlessly Curious Conversations in Dangerously Divided Times(BenBella Books, 2022), Mónica takes us to the real front lines of a crisis that threatens to grind America to a halt—broken conversations among confounded people.

Drawing from cross-partisan conversations she’s had, organized, or witnessed everywhere from the echo chambers on social media to the wheat fields in Oregon to raw, unfiltered fights with her own family on election night, Mónica shows how you can put your natural sense of wonder to work for you immediately, finding the answers you need by talking with people—rather than about them—and asking the questions you want, curiously.

This podcast episode is a recording of a live event co-hosted by Gather, an initiative of the Agora Journalism Center at the University of Oregon that focuses on community-centered journalism.

Jenna Spinelle is a journalism instructor at Penn State's Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications. She's also the communications specialist for the university's McCourtney Institute for Democracy, where she hosts and produces the Democracy Works podcast.

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The Importance of Pali, the Language of Ancient Buddhism May 04, 2022

Show notes

Core Buddhist teachings are preserved in the ancient Indian language Pali. Listen in as Aleix Ruiz-Falqués speaks about its structure, its significance, and opportunities to study it with him online.

Raj Balkaran is a scholar, online educator, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com.

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Hana Videen, "The Wordhord: Daily Life in Old English" (Princeton UP, 2022) May 02, 2022

Show notes

Old English is the language you think you know until you actually hear or see it. Unlike Shakespearean English or even Chaucer’s Middle English, Old English—the language of Beowulf—defies comprehension by untrained modern readers. Used throughout much of Britain more than a thousand years ago, it is rich with words that haven’t changed (like word), others that are unrecognizable (such as neorxnawang, or paradise), and some that are mystifying even in translation (gafol-fisc, or tax-fish). In this delightful book, Hana Videen gathers a glorious trove of these gems and uses them to illuminate the lives of the earliest English speakers. We discover a world where choking on a bit of bread might prove your guilt, where fiend-ship was as likely as friendship, and where you might grow up to be a laughter-smith.

The Wordhord: Daily Life in Old English(Princeton UP, 2022) takes readers on a journey through Old English words and customs related to practical daily activities (eating, drinking, learning, working); relationships and entertainment; health and the body, mind, and soul; the natural world (animals, plants, and weather); locations and travel (the source of some of the most evocative words in Old English); mortality, religion, and fate; and the imagination and storytelling. Each chapter ends with its own “wordhord”—a list of its Old English terms, with definitions and pronunciations.

Entertaining and enlightening, The Wordhord reveals the magical roots of the language you’re reading right now: you’ll never look at—or speak—English in the same way again.

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Zhihui Fang, "Demystifying Academic Writing: Genres, Moves, Skills, and Strategies" (Routledge, 2021) Apr 22, 2022

Show notes

Listen to this interview of Zhihui Fang, the Irving and Rose Fien Endowed Professor of Education in the School of Teaching and Learning at the University of Florida. We talk his book Demystifying Academic Writing: Genres, Moves, Skills, and Strategies (Routledge, 2021) and about how functional grammar can benefit the academic writer.

Zhihui Fang : "Learning disciplinary content is primarily a linguistic process. When you learn the language that construes particular content, then you are learning just how people understand this content, and so content and language go together inseparably. That's why language should be a key component to our pedagogical emphasis in whatever the subject being taught."

Watch Daniel edit your science here. Contact Daniel at writeyourresearch@gmail.com.

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