We have a world aflame with the chatter and mile-a-minute passions of the Internet; access to technology that spans every imaginable medium; exposure to more people and more places than ever before; the fleet and evanescent flicker of thoughts and ideas uttered by those who are both anonymous and celebrated, top of mind and ushered into oblivion. Never has the challenge of integrating the thoughts and ideas of others been more overwhelming—or more imperative. In…
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Action is of the utmost importance. How could it be otherwise? How many people have said again and again that the utility of knowledge is in its application, that knowledge is useless unless applied to the world of action or taken advantage of for some ulterior purpose? Something has to be made of knowledge, they say. And yet almost everything about my own experience, together with that of many others, has told me that knowing…
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In the second episode of the wonderful 2000 Dutch documentary series Of Beauty and Consolation, which features 26 interviews with 26 of the world’s leading turn-of-the-century scholars, authors, artists, and intellectuals, the late Roger Scruton makes an insightful diagnosis of what is likely to be one of the great human conundrums of the twenty-first century: while we have more information as a society as well as more access to more information than ever, our understanding…
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Both inside and outside the translation industry, confusion often abounds about the difference between the terms translation and localization. Some clarity is therefore in order: the two words are indeed different, though far from being so distinct in all situations that they could occupy different sectors of the industry. In fact, it’s just the opposite: they are closely related—so close, to our collective chagrin, that we find ourselves in a little translator tizzy. Let’s get…
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What are these repeated machinations of a world gone mad and doused in a thousand oils? It is the mechanical clinking of the behavioral timepiece that sooner or later falls into silence—which is always, of course, only for a while. From time to time, whenever I have the opportunity on a Sunday afternoon to watch my father playing on the well-preserved and luxuriant fairways of a golf course, tautened like a drum head from tee…
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I was recently poring over some of the excellent books by the late British educator and popularizer in the world of philosophy and critical self-reflection Bryan Magee. Throughout this lovely spree of reading and serpentine contemplation, I was enjoying myself and hop-skipping from page to page, practically dilly-dallying in all the wisdom of books that I can include among the most influential on my worldview as a human being, such as Confessions of a Philosopher…
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It is quite simple, actually: that there are phenomena that we cannot explain —such as moments or events that run the gamut of the fortuitous, accidental, absurd, miraculous, paranormal, or otherwise inexplicable—does not in itself justify our attributing a cause or explanation of any kind to these phenomena. If we concede the simple and credible assertion that human existence is filled with all kinds of inexplicable phenomena, then the only reasonable response to these phenomena…
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The registers of a language are a fascinating thing. Even the mere fact that registers exist is fascinating. And while everyone can recognize that the kind of language that we use as human beings varies with the circumstance—people don’t use the same vocabulary and phraseology in a courtroom as in a taxi or a supermarket—for the student of a foreign language, the importance of a grasp of multiple registers is often underplayed or overlooked. And…
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It is evident as a kind of motive intrinsic to the vast majority of media and entertainment that it believes it matters, and this entertainment continues to exist for a single correlative reason: as viewers in the audience, we believe that it matters. But neither of those assertions actually implies that it in itself matters enough to be worth watching, much less valorizing and investing the better part of our nighttime leisure and emotional livelihood…
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For the translator in the twenty-first century, one of the most fervently repeated collocations of the times has to be machine and translation, those two suggestive siblings that have gone on to establish their reputations as the acrobats in a traveling circus of technology. As members of the audience, both captivated and unsettled by the performance in the ring and the apparently high-flying stunts of our little siblings, translators have front-row seats that make them…
