Q: What is transcreation? A: Transcreation as a word combines two different words: translation and creation. But the word creation as such is something of a misnomer; transcreation can be more readily understood as a combination of copywriting and translation, amounting to a kind of creative adaptation of a text for a culturally specific target audience that speaks a different language from that of the original. Q: Why does transcreation exist? A: As a word,…
-
-
The idea that translation is an art rests on two fundamental premises. The first is that effective translation requires a certain amount of skill, its techniques and methods developed over time not only in the hurly-burly of solitary practice or paid translation projects but also under the guidance of a more experienced professional. This explanation would elevate translation into a craft, defined here as cultivated skill applied in a particular context. Getting from craft to…
-
There are many things to love about the Spanish language. For instance, it has a wonderful cadence undergirded by its many vowels and a speed unmatched by that of almost any other language. And while this can present a steeper learning curve for students of Spanish, who often find themselves pelted by the heavy machine-gun fire of natives in a normal, everyday conversation, it is completely worthwhile. As with many endeavors in which the steepness…
-
Humans are storytellers by nature, it has often been said, and we tell stories not only to other people but to ourselves. Without any qualms, I would assert that these stories are more common, frequent, and elaborate than the gather-around-the-campfire stories that have the appearance of innocent entertainment, revealed over the course of an hour to a group of attentive listeners observing the smoke pluming upward into a night that seems something other than eternal.…
-
This past summer, after a short hiring process with only a single interview and a grueling two-hour online assessment, I ended up working for a large data-engineering company that was contracting with an American social-media conglomerate, a major player in the industry. Although nominally employed by one company, I was largely working on projects created and dictated by this other conglomerate, which determined my daily schedule, assigned tasks, and generally established the ground rules for…
-
In an era defined both by the limitations and the expansion of artificial intelligence, human writers and translators exist at the same crossroads: that of apparently having to defend themselves against machines, define their value, and decide whether to go on. But this scarcity and fear is the opposite of my own mentality, which is not as counterintuitive as it might appear: an encroaching artificial intelligence, by serving as a standard of good-enough quality in…
-
If we stop for a moment on a day’s journey, sagging onto a bench in an orange grove on a rainy day or a perfectly leveled tree stump in the middle of a clearing, we might start thinking chin-in-hand a la Rodin and slowly, after a while, realize something: we live day after day, clothed and refined language-making featherless bipeds, borne aloft by language and wrapped up convincingly in the dramas of our lives as…
-
We all have bugaboos and afflictions as human beings. They tend to percolate into our unconscious, dashing our plans, messing with our standards, opening shutters and throttling cabinets in our tidy neuronal offices of the mind, and generally doing everything in their power to ruin a good night’s sleep. And too many times the notion mentioned in this article’s title—my long-time bugaboo—has been considered, asserted, broadly supported, and only faintly rebutted with a small minority…
-
On a Saturday night, while I sit typing away at a desk in a colorless white-walled bedroom, concealed in an apartment building next to the university where I’ve been finishing my two-year master’s degree in translation, I have reason to be excited. I am a schoolboy waiting for his favorite food at a restaurant on a Friday night, exhausted by his own anticipation and the simmer and bubble of his lingering hunger. While the thriving…
-
For all the pejorative uses of this word whenever applied to a particular individual, in a more abstracted breakdown of the concept there are two relevant kinds of stupidity. And while both have similar outcomes in any given context, they have vastly divergent causes. The first kind, actual stupidity, occurs when a person acts against their own best interests or against those of any others implicated in the action. A person’s actual stupidity is willful,…
