Sugar daddies

Struggling with weariness and reading bits of Ricardo Palma’s Tradiciones peruanas (1883). There was no sugar cane in Peru at the time of its conquest, he writes, and the first plantations were not established until 1570. The first Peruvian refiner suffered from the abundance and cheapness of Mexican sugar until he hit upon the smart…

Really dumb French email tax proposal

French conservative MEP Alain Lamassoure wants the budget-strapped EU to tax sms and email: For email, the rate could be as little as €0.00001. “This is peanuts, but given the billions of transactions every day, this could still raise an immense income.” Ironport’s data suggests that global email volume for 2006 will be in excess…

Cup of light and gall

Here’s an unchecked and unpolished translation of something from 1955 by Manuel Altolaguirre:

Translation diary

Ramón Buenaventura’s published a journal of his translation of Jonathan Franzen’s The corrections. He concludes that, for several reasons, including the rapidity imposed by the coordination of publication in various languages and the lifelessness of Spanish slangs, it is impossible to translate the novel well. That seems narcissistic to me, but that may be because…

Chistabín

Currently doing a bit of literary translation out of one very strange dialect into another, and here’s something not so completely different: a basic grammar of Chistabín, the well-preserved (whatever that means) dialect spoken in the Chistau valley in northern Huesca. There’s a small lexicon, sorry, lesico. I like words like agila (águila in Spanish)…

New insult: “Translator!”

That’s how Barça fans greeted Chelsea boss Mourinho at the airport. Mourinho, of course, worked as press conference reverse mumbo jumbler and general gofer for Bobby Robson during the latter’s all-too-brief spell in charge of our likely lads. Tina Vallès–a real, professional translator–has the clipping.

Werner von

My favourite enemy is hearing alarm bells going off in his head. Do his ears face inwards or what?! He also regularly has lunch with Willy J. Now, that I am prepared to believe.

Ladino lovers in a hole

Just in case you thought Sephardic morality tales were all doom and gloom and putrid canines, here’s one in which true love triumphs over promiscuity, dodgy geology and a thoroughly nasty little weasel: A girl fell into a pit while on the way to her father’s house. A young man appeared in the mouth of…

God, Allah and the Hell’s Angels

With the universe about to go up in flames as a result of a couple of innocent cartoons (check Belgium’s Le Soir’s take on the French Egyptian Le Soir’s problems), I wonder what the effect would be were Hans Teeuwen’s God and Allah sketch to be translated into a language more generally understood. In it…

God, Allah and the Hell's Angels

With the universe about to go up in flames as a result of a couple of innocent cartoons (check Belgium’s Le Soir’s take on the French Egyptian Le Soir’s problems), I wonder what the effect would be were Hans Teeuwen’s God and Allah sketch to be translated into a language more generally understood. In it…