Art sublime

9_b_angelico_sqlarge The Blessed Angelico: The Dawn of the Renaissance – the largest exhibition entirely dedicated to Beato Angelico since 1955 – is at Rome’s Capitoline Museums until 5 July 2009. If you’re planning a visit to Rome this summer, this is a unique opportunity to see these beautiful paintings in one place. And if not, you can view them in Museo in Comune Roma’s wonderful Beato Angelico set on Flickr. For those of you who read Italian, Luisa Carrada discusses the painting shown here, the Annunciation, and its sublime detail in her Mestiere di Scrivere blog post of 16 May. A copywriter and editor with an art history background, Luisa describes the painting much more eloquently than I ever could.

By Marian Dougan

Ideas worth translating (2): a web that speaks your language

More from the New York Times on Web translation projects (this time from Leslie Berlin, writing in the Business pages). Projects featured include Lingua, the Global Voices translation project; Google in your language; Meedan.net and TED.

As a professional translator, I have mixed feelings about such projects. Not that I fear for my job:

Machine translations give workable renderings of basic texts, but complicated ideas or phrasings can trip up even the most sophisticated software […] And when it comes to nuance, “machine translation just won’t get you there”

Since 99% of my work is about complicated ideas, phrasings and nuance, I don’t see machines replacing me. Not yet, anyway.

But I take strong issue with a comment by June Cohen, executive producer of TED media:

The volunteers are deeply committed to making the best translation, and they don’t care how long it takes them,” she explains. “There is a passion there that you don’t get from hired guns.”

Deeply committed to good translation and passionate about language and ideas: that describes most of the “hired gun” translators I know. It’s what makes the job worth doing, and worth doing well.

By Marian Dougan

Art, seaside style

roof small 3439265170_8619bcd8c2-2I wrote recently about the Coastal Treasures project highlighting the architectural gems of Bexhill-on-Sea, St. Leonards-on-Sea and Hastings.

And now there’s another reason to consider the South Coast of England for the summer hols: the new Towner Gallery (web site pending) in Eastbourne, by Rick Mather Architects. The artists on show (on a rotating basis) incude Vanessa Bell, Anya Gallaccio, Henry Moore, Victor Passmore, Julian Opie, Tacita Dean, Olafur Eliasson – even Pablo Picasso. Jonathan Glancey, the Guardian’s architecture critic, describes Eastbourne as “the place to be beside the seaside”. You can read why here.

The photo, by Vicki Burton, shows the roof of Eastbourne Bandstand.

By Marian Dougan

Holey moly!

ecofont2

Dutch creative communications company Spranq has developed an ecofont that they say saves money and helps the environment by using less ink than other fonts.

You can download the font free here. A professional version is also available for large organisations (Spranq will essentially punch holes in your corporate typeface to produce an environmentally-friendlier version).

For people like me who print a lot, this could cut ink consumption considerably – by up to 20%, say Spranq.

Why do I print a lot, you may wonder? Quality control – I find reading the hard copy’s the best way to check texts (especially long or complex ones) for typos, accuracy and fluency.

Thanks to Taccuino di traduzione for the link.

By Marian Dougan

Ideas worth translating

TED: Ideas worth spreading is a web site featuring “Riveting talks by remarkable people, free to the world”. To give you a flavour of the quality of the talks, you can rank them on the home page as: jaw-dropping, persuasive, courageous, ingenious, fascinating, inspiring, beautiful, funny or informative. The “Wow!” factor indeed.

TED (which stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design) has now introduced an Open Translation Project. The aim is to

bring TEDTalks beyond the English-speaking world by offering subtitles, interactive transcripts and the ability for any talk to be translated by volunteers worldwide.

The Open Translation page provides lots of language statistics: this month the language with most translated talks is Spanish, followed by Hebrew; the most active translators (all volunteers) are Shlomo Adam (Hebrew), Michele Gianella (Italian), Diego Leal (Spanish) and Emma Gon (Spanish). Fascinating stuff for language fans.

For more about TED’s language project, see David Pogue’s Great Videos in Any Language from Wednesday’s New York Times. David is a technology columnist for the paper, publishes IT guides and makes entertaining videos on personal technology devices. He’s also an accomplished musician. I’d hate him, but he looks too nice to even mildly dislike.

By Marian Dougan

Worth two thousand words…

If the world were a village of 100 people, 9 would be English-speakers and 14 would be unable to read this post, no matter what their language.

Toby Ng Kwong To’s “If the world were a village of 100 people” project uses information graphics to re-tell a statistical story in a creative, simple and accessible way. To clever and thought-provoking effect.

World of 100 - Language World of 100 - Literacy

Check out Toby’s site for more visually inventive images.

Thanks to Luisa Carrada for the link.

By Marian Dougan

Oh, you saucy devil. Translators’ false friends

In my recent (9 May) post on “EU funding to delightful effect”, I used a word that – viewed from an Italian-to-English perspective – can trip up  unwary translators. The word is “evocative”. Pretty harmless, you might think.

One of the Italian words for “evocative” is “suggestivo”. A word that Italian-to-English translators working on auto-pilot (or who are not mother-tongue English) often translate as “suggestive”. In English, however, “suggestive” has acquired connotations of “saucy” or “rude”. Saucy post-cards (to stay on the seaside theme) play on suggestive humour.

So ladies, if that handsome Italian invites you for a “suggestive evening  stroll” to see Rome/Florence/Venice by night, don’t slap him across the chops. Far from subjecting you to a tour of his favourite lap-dancing clubs, he just wants to show you his city at its romantic best.

He may of course have some pretty suggestive plans in mind for the rest of the evening. But that’s another matter.

By Marian Dougan

EU funding to delightful effect. Yes, really.

bexhill beach shelter, pink column detailI came across a delightful site yesterday on my web meanderings. If you like architecture and/or the seaside, check it out. It’s called Coastal Treasures, and treasures are indeed what it contains.

Coastal Treasures “was set up to enable residents and visitors alike to discover the rich architectural heritage in the Anglo-French cross-border region […] and is part-funded by the European Commission through the Interreg 3a programme”. Interreg III is “designed to strengthen economic and social cohesion throughout the EU […] through cross-border, transnational and interregional cooperation”. Dry euro-language, but in this case with some lovely results.

The cooperating regions here are the south coast of England (Bexhill-on-Sea, Hastings and St Leonards-on-Sea) and the Côte Picardie and evocatively-named Côte d’Opale in northern France.

Staircase, De La Warr PavilionThe site is a tad content-heavy (I’m itching to grab my red pencil) and the small character-size doesn’t help. But it contains some fascinating architectural background and many visual gems – the Wanderlight project in Hastings, for example, with “19 spellbinding lighting installations”. The fantastical houses in the French resort towns are a delight too, with their extravagantly decorated turrets and gables. Ideas here for the summer holidays?

Don’t miss the Architectural links, which will take you to such gems as the National Piers Society or Seaside History web sites, where you can wallow in seaside nostalgia to your heart’s content.

The images here illustrate the  rich variety of our seaside architecture, with an exotically decorative beach shelter and a clean-lined modernist staircase in the De La Warr Pavilion, both in Bexhill-on-Sea. They’re courtesy of Barbara Rich, whose beautiful photos you can view in her Flickr photostream

By Marian Dougan

S.T.O.P. Gun and Knife Crime

Alexander Rose is a young Londoner who started the S.T.O.P. (Solve This Ongoing Problem) campaign after he saw friends and family members killed by gun and knife crime. He cites his campaign highlights as:

Getting the support of Archbishop Desmond Tutu and the Tutu Foundation
Winning an award from the Body Shop
Speaking at schools and youth clubs across London
Watching knives smelted down by the police to make his “key” pendants
Putting on an event at the Ministry of Sound to promote “Education is the Key”

A documentary featuring Alex’s work will be aired on Channel 4 on Mon 11 May at 11:30am (it will also be available to view online on channel 4od).

Check out Alex’s campaign page here

By Marian Dougan

New York fashion treat

A special Monday treat for me is Bill Cunningham’s On the Street fashion feature for the New York Times . Anorak-clad Bill is an unlikely-looking fashion hero but his feature is a visual and aural delight – from his Bostonian voice to the pleasure he takes in the fashion, the people, and New York itself. And he uses some great adjectives!

On the Street occasionally features other cities too, especially Paris during fashion weeks. Marvellous, as Bill would say.

By Marian Dougan