#not to talk about beowulf for the second time in a day (lol) but beowulf being young in the first part and old in the last part

[swankpalanquin]

i do think there are some things that you just can't get until you reach a certain age

#there are def some book and movies and shows i'm glad i read/watched in my early thirties than my early twenties #also why revisiting works every few years reveals new things cos you're a different person #not to talk about beowulf for the second time in a day (lol) but beowulf being young in the first part and old in the last part #means that there's a certain level of understanding i won't get until the later stages of my life #the last time i read the lotr i realized i was older than eowyn and i was like fuckkkk #certain stories hit different with different ages and life experiences is what i'm getting at here #(i probably need to reread beowulf though... give me a chance to practice my super rusty oe)

[patukkaas]

Can you make a second part of skullgirls characters as best friend

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Multiple skullgirls characters + Reader

P.2

Warnings: sorry if I repeat stuff I said in the old one :(

At my gf's for a 2nd week but still wanted to get something out so my writing isn't complete radio silence.

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Filia

- Would study with you even before she got Samson.

- Would share her milkshakes with you.

- If you have long hair she'd ask to braid it.

- If you have short hair or no hair she'd just put accesories on your outfits and face and give you headbands.

- Would ask you to go out and eat at a new diner like every other day.

- Since Filia is your bestfriend Samsom wouldn't mind you being around.

- Samsom would protect both of you from creeps lol.

MsFortune

- She'd wanna nap with you.

- Loves to go out and do activites with you.

- You'd make sure she wasn't seen by the Medici or it's associates while you two go out.

- She'd introduce you to her other friends.

- Would rob people with you.

- Obviously would take you to Yu-wan's restraunt everytime you hang out.

Beowulf

- Would show off his merch to you.

- Would lend you so much more money than what you asked from him.

- Would carry you at random times just to make you spooked.

- If you got actually scared by it he'd apologize constantly though.

- Talks to you backstage.

Eliza

- Always invites you to her shows.

- Plays board games with you.

- You know about Sekhmet but you didn't care since you enjoyed her company so much.

- She didn't show it but she appreciated some new company.

- A lot.

- Takes you expensive places.

- Even if she's arrogant and knows how amazing she is she still enjoys your support on everything she does.

Annie

- Takes you on hikes.

- Vented to you about never getting to grow up.

- You're determined to take down the skull heart with her.

- She revealed to you that it's always just been one Annie in her show.

- Practices her choreograhpy in front of you and asks how she did.

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#x reader #fanfiction #headcanons #skullgirls #fanfic #gender neutral reader #skullgirls x reader #skullgirls platonic #friend skullgirls

[lingthusiasm]

Transcript Episode 49: How translators approach a text

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 49: How translators approach a text. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the Episode 49 show notes page.

[Music]

Lauren: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Lauren Gawne.

Gretchen: I’m Gretchen McCulloch. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about the relationship of the translator and the text. But first, we’re heading into Lingthusiasm anniversary month! This is our fourth anniversary of doing Lingthusiasm, and we’re really excited that we’re still doing this four years later.

Lauren: We love a bit of reflection and nostalgia. The month of November is always an opportunity to be grateful that we have another year of Lingthusiasm. We have a whole 12 great main episodes. We have 12 more bonus episodes. As with every year, if you want to share a link to your favourite episode, November is an especially nice time to do it.

Gretchen: There are still people in this world who don’t know that they could be listening to a fun podcast about linguistics that makes them feel like they’re at a linguistics party instead of doing the dishes. You could help people find them. Most people still find podcasts through word of mouth. Every year we’ve done this in November, we see a big spike in people listening to the show and finding the show. If you wanna share on social media, we are very happy to thank you if you tag us in things.

Lauren: If you want to share off social media, please accept our deepest gratitude non-publicly for sharing shows as well.

Gretchen: Or, if you share Lingthusiasm privately and you still wanna be thanked, feel free to tell us about it on social media. We will still give you a little heart thank you comment. Yes, thank you already for all of the support that you’ve given the show over the years.

Lauren: If you like things additional to podcasts, because we are coming up to the holiday season, it’s also a good time to think about some Lingthusiasm merch or a copy of Because Internet. It’s a pretty great book. I like it. It’s available in paperback now. These things make great gifts.

Gretchen: We now also have annual memberships on Patreon. That could make a great gift to gift somebody to listen to more Lingthusiasm episodes as well as access to the Discord for an online linguistics community.

Lauren: Our most recent bonus episode was about honorifics as a way of being polite to someone either through the title you choose or a variety of linguistic strategies.

Gretchen: You get access to the honorifics bonus as well as 43 other bonus episodes and new bonus episodes every month by going to patreon.com/lingthusiasm.

[Music]

Gretchen: So, Lauren, I’m gonna talk to you about Beowulf.

Lauren: I know this because you have been messaging me for weeks about how we have to talk about Beowulf.

Gretchen: There’s a new translation of Beowulf. I’m really excited. This made me want to build an entire episode around the translator’s relationship to the text because this new translation of Beowulf does a really cool job of it, and I wanna talk about it.

Lauren: I don’t think you’ve been this excited about a translated text since Emily Wilson translated The Odyssey. I’m pretty sure that’s what motivated our 18th episode on word translation.

Gretchen: You are not wrong about this. I think there’s a similar excitement that I have which is old texts – texts that are a thousand-plus years old that have been translated so many different times by so many different people – it feels like it’s hard for someone to do something new with a translation of them. And yet, here people are doing that, which is exciting to me. This is the new translation of Beowulf by Maria Dahvana Headley. She’s done some really cool things with translating Beowulf as a feminist text. It’s a text that uses very modern style language in this thousand-year-old epic poem of Old English literature.

Lauren: I feel like when it comes to translating, before you even translate one single word, there’s all these decisions that a translator has to make. In Episode 18, we looked at translation, but we looked at word-to-word translation. And that’s definitely one part of a translator’s job, but they have so many more decisions to make. It is such an impressive job, and it’s why it’s as much an art form as it is a technical skill to translate something well. So, what are some of the big decisions that Headley made before even starting to translate Beowulf?

Gretchen: One of the things about Beowulf is, as an oral poem, it has this intricate rhyme scheme. The Old English rhyme scheme is based on half lines. Each line has two halves and there needs to be an alliterative bit in one half that is repeated in the second half.

Lauren: So, Old English is way more interested in alliteration compared to our modern English obsession with rhyming. That’s one of the stylistic features you find in Old English.

Gretchen: It’s all about the beginning of the words rather than the ends. Trying to figure out, okay, how much am I gonna use alliteration? How much am I gonna try to represent – because we can do alliteration in modern English – how much am I gonna try to represent the existing rhyme scheme? Where am I gonna try to put it in actual rhymes like you would do in modern English – if you’re writing a poem, you might rhyme it? What am I gonna do with the metre? She’s produced this really oral text that uses a certain amount of modern slang as well in ways that are really effective. One example is there’s a dragon in Beowulf, and the dragon at one point is described as “Putting the world on blast.”

Lauren: Nice.

Gretchen: To some extent, this is modern slang, but it’s also a very literal thing that a dragon can do. It’s not using modern slang for gratuitous – like, there’s no “lols” or “omgs” in this text. It’s not like here’s this facile text-speak version of Beowulf. It’s what are the bits here that actually work with the metre and the rhyme scheme but also not shying away from using a modern idiom where a modern idiom really works.

Lauren: It’s interesting to put this in contrast to the other most famous version of Beowulf in translation that I know of which is Seamus Heaney’s from somewhere in the middle of the 20th Century where I feel like he tried to capture the mythical grandeur of Old English and chose very stoic, solid sounding Old English words. I don’t think he would’ve had the dragon “putting the world on blast.”

Gretchen: Well, I don’t think he would’ve – I think it came out in 1999, this translation. In some ways his translation is fairly vernacular, but he tries to do that in a different sense. Can I read you the first bit of the Headley translation and the Heaney translation?

Lauren: Yeah. This is super fun.

Gretchen: Okay. A big thing about Beowulf translations is the first word which in Old English is “Hwaet.” That has gotten repurposed as a meme, which we’re not gonna get into much detail about. Some people translate that as like, “Lo!” or “Hark!” or “Listen!” or something like this. Heaney translates that as “So,” which has already got a certain level of vernacularity to it. His first three lines go, “So, the Spear-Danes in days gone by and the kings who ruled them had courage and greatness. We have heard of those princes’ heroic campaigns.” This is very stately and like, “Here’s this thing you’re gonna do.” If you compare that with the first three lines of the Headley translation, the new one, she translates this “Hwaet” as “Bro.”

Lauren: Hm, that’s a very different tone.

Gretchen: It’s a very modern tone. I mean, you could pick a whole bunch of very modern things like “Yo” or “Hey all,” but specifically the reason she picks “Bro” is because she wants to highlight the bro culture-ness of this entire story. You can see that in the next couple lines which is, “Bro, tell me we still know how to speak of kings. In the old days, everyone knew what men were – brave, bold, glory bound. Only stories now, but all sound the Spear-Dane song, hoarded for hungry times.” It just leaps off the page in a way that really excites me.

Lauren: Yeah, no “princes” there.

Gretchen: Right. “Kings who ruled had courage and greatness” – “The men were bold.”

Lauren: The thing I always love about Beowulf is that it’s a millennium-old oral poem that happened to be written down, and a millennium ago people were like, “Let me tell you about the olden days.” [Laughter]

Gretchen: Right, it still takes place in this semi-mythic space, and it uses a certain stylised language that we even think was stylised at the time. You’re always picking between some kind of stylisation. There’s no neutral choice that exists. All of the choices are recreations at some level.

Lauren: I mean, it is kind of weird to think you’re translating from English into English, but it just shows how much the language has moved on because reading Beowulf if you don’t know Old English is an incredibly uncomfortable attempt to just guess some words that have retained some familiarity. I always find it interesting that you have to translate. And then because English went through enough changes by Shakespeare, we kind of put up with all of the features of Shakespeare that aren’t immediately obvious to us.

Gretchen: Right. But Beowulf is really this alien text. Like, “Hwaet. We Gardena” – and “Gardena” is “Spear-Danes,” but we don’t have “Spear-Danes,” and “Gardena” is not obviously related to those. There’s this great miniseries from The History of English Podcast that does a very in-depth line-by-line reading of Beowulf which I enjoyed a while back.

Lauren: My one semantic anecdote from that series is “Gar-Danes” as in “Spear-Danes” – garlic is the “spear-leek.”

Gretchen: Yes, it is!

Lauren: Because it’s like a little spear.

Gretchen: It’s like a little spear-leek. I love that anecdote. It’s interesting to be reading Beowulf at the same time that my book club is actually reading The Tale of Genji.

Lauren: Ah, from like a similar – Genji’s also a millennium old, yeah?

Gretchen: Yeah! In some sense it’s like Beowulf and Genji are kind of contemporaries.

Lauren: But they’re very much not contemporaries. Beowulf is about warrior bro culture in the Old English setting, whereas Genji is a Japanese court drama.

Gretchen: I don’t think they would’ve gotten along. I think they would’ve just found each other completely incomprehensible. Genji’s also one of those classic texts that’s been translated a whole bunch of different times in a whole bunch of different ways. For one thing, you’re translating from a much older version of Japanese. There are modern Japanese translations of The Tale of Genji as well. And then you’re also translating into a different cultural context. But the cultural context for Beowulf is also very weird. Like, I don’t do going and fighting monsters under lakes any more than I do writing haikus about the moon. In fact, I’m probably more likely to write a haiku about the moon than I am to go fight a monster under a lake if we wanna talk about relatability.

Lauren: Everything I know about Genji is because one of my colleagues in the Languages Department at La Trobe is a Genji studies scholar. It’s one of those pieces of work that is so big and so canonical that it has its own literary studies tradition associated with it. I also really love my colleague because the other part of her expertise is cosplay studies. I think it’s such a great combination of Japanese cultural experience there – Genji and cosplay.

Gretchen: I mean, what more do you want? The neat thing about reading Tale of Genji at the moment is because I’m reading it as part of a book club through Argo Bookshop – which is a bookstore that did the book launch party for Because Internet and I really like them – they’re having this Tale of Genji book club, and we’ve been reading it throughout the year a few chapters at a time because it’s over 1,000 pages. It’s huge. So, we’ve been reading it section by section, and different members of the book club have picked different translations into English of the same work.

Lauren: Ah, cool! Are there radical differences between the translations? Or do they all try and go for a literal approach?

Gretchen: They’re really different. One of the big things with Genji is at the time in 11th Century Japan it was considered very rude in the court to refer to people by their actual names. None of the characters in the original Tale of Genji manuscript have names, except for maybe Genji. So, you can imagine reading a thousand-page book where none of the characters have names is a bit of a feat of the imagination.

Lauren: Yes.

Gretchen: Different translations – and a lot of them have conventional names that literary scholars have used to talk about the characters. For example, Lady Fujitsubo lives in the Fujitsubo, which is the western pavilion, and so she gets called in the tradition “Fujitsubo” because that’s where she lives, and this kind of stuff. Or Murasaki gets called that after a flower, I think, the character. In some translations, they just use these conventional use names as if they’re the actual names of the characters. In some translations, they just use descriptions like the original text did, and they don’t really refer to characters by even pretend names or use names.

Lauren: So, one of them is trying to strive for cultural authenticity, and the other one is trying to just help the poor confused reader a little bit more, and that’s choices that each translator has decided to make.

Gretchen: Exactly. You also have other types of decisions like, “Are you going to try to” – because it’s a court drama, you have all these court positions. Are you going try to map those positions onto a western court so that people understand what a chancellor is? Or are you going to try to use those as a more direct translation of what the specific terms were at the time? That’s just different decisions that different translations can use.

Lauren: When you meet as a book club, is everyone following along, or is there a lot of clarifying across translations? Such an interesting little exercise.

Gretchen: Well, the nice thing is, is the division into different chapters is very constant, so we can be like, “Okay, we’re reading Chapters 6 to 10 now. We’re gonna talk about what happens in those.” But sometimes you do pull something up, and you’re like, “Okay, so this bit where this thing was said, do we think Genji is kinda misogynistic here?” And somebody will say, “Well, in my translation, it doesn’t actually seem like he’s misogynistic.” And here’s what’s going on in this particular translation versus that particular translation. And how much of it is the translator bringing their own preconceived notions of how people relate to each other? Because some of these translations are from the 1920s or something. People may have had different politics there. And how much of that is in the original text which was composed by a woman who we don’t know that much about? But it’s the first modern novel. It’s an interesting like, “How much are you going to try to westernise this book for a western audience?” Which some of the older translations do a bit more with the westernisation adaptation because people in the west hadn’t heard of Genji very much before. You do all this adaptation for your English-speaking readers. Whereas, more recent translators, people tend to have a higher degree of expectations of fidelity when it comes to a more modern translation. Sometimes they try to do that. And, you know, how many footnotes do you have? How much do you try to explain additionally? How much do you try to just make the text stand on its own as a story?

Lauren: So many choices to make as a translator. I’m eternally grateful to people who do this and make it appear so effortless while doing so much work bringing all of this context together.

Gretchen: It’s really neat. I’m not gonna read this 1,000-page book five different times in five different translations, but being able to experience portions of those translations vicariously through other people talking about, “Oh, here’s what happened in this one, here’s what happened in this one,” it does let you do this interesting comparative textual study.

Lauren: I’ve been thinking about translation in practice a lot lately because having worked with P. M. Freestone on their Shadowscent books, “The Darkets Bloom” and “Crown of Smoke,” these books have gone into translation in a whole bunch of languages, mostly European languages to date – Spanish, German, French, Russian, and Polish. I’m very excited about the upcoming Hungarian translation which will the first outside of the Indo-European language. But these translations involve a couple of things that are really interesting in that, in these books, I worked on creating the Aramteskan language, and for this language to work across different languages, sometimes it gets technically transliterated, or you need to add a different type of plural. For example, Russian has a different alphabet to English and so you need to fit this language into the Russian Cyrillic alphabet.

Gretchen: You’re not trying to pretend that Aramteskan is always written with the Latin alphabet. Even when the book itself is in Russian, you’re like, we’re gonna transliterate it into Cyrillic?

Lauren: No, translators have very much done what they think is most appropriate. I have a habit of buying these translations now and checking out what they’ve done because they’re not just translating from English into another language, they also have to translate this completely fictional language and this fictional world into that language as well. It’s one thing to maybe study in-depth Old English warrior culture or Japanese court culture and decide what to bring across, but with a fantasy world, there’s all kinds of choices you have to make as a translator as well.

Gretchen: Yeah, like what are you gonna do with the magic system? Or if you’ve invented all of these words for different scents or something, then they have to figure out some sort of equivalent of inventing those words for the other language.

Lauren: There’s a lot of scent vocabulary even in the English that P. M. Freestone has written in, so really taxing that part of the translator’s repertoire. One thing that’s been particularly interesting and that there’s been some discussion on how to manage is that in this world, both in the historical part of the world and the contemporary part of the world, the culture and the grammar allow for gender neutral third person like the English modern use of “they,” which Kirby Conrod gave a great interview about how that works in contemporary English. In fact, I did a little historical evolution of the pronoun system that fits with the story of the world where originally there was no gender distinction in the pronoun system, which fits with the old religious system of the world. And the religious system evolved younger gods that are all gendered, and the pronoun system evolved genders at the same time while still having that scope for gender neutral. Without spoiling too much, but a character that pops up in Book One and is much more a part of Book Two is gender fluid within the world. That works for current English because we have gender neutral singular they, but there are some languages like Czech or like Russian that the book’s being translated into where there isn’t that flexibility in the linguistic system. So, decisions have to be made about how that is negotiated in the translation.

Gretchen: Do you know what they did?

Lauren: I don’t know what they did for Russian yet, but I believe the solution in Czech is at various times this character is overtly identified using masculine and at other times using feminine – being much more flexible about the duality of their relationship with gender.

Gretchen: This reminds me of a thing that I heard Ada Palmer talk about at a conference panel with her book “Too Like the Lightning” and the sequels, which are set in this far future of English – well, far future and they’re written in English – in which singular they is used for everybody except when you’re writing in this faux-archaic style with “thous” and “thees” and “hes” and “shes.” It’s very marked at that point. Ada Palmer was talking about how this was translated into French where in modern English the progressive thing that people do is like, “Oh, we can use singular they. That’s very progressive.” In modern French, the progressive thing that people do is they make feminine versions of all of the professions.

Lauren: Right.

Gretchen: You have feminine versions of “professor” or “doctor” or these kinds of things to try and make the gender more visible. And so erase the gender in the French version wouldn’t have the same effect – where you’d end up using the default masculine or something in the French version – it wouldn’t have the same effect as using singular they all the time in the English version. There are modern French pronouns like “iel” that have been coined to solve this problem of using a gender neutral third person pronoun, but it wouldn’t work to use them in this particular case because the style is supposed to be faux-archaic. What the translator ended up doing was digging out this French pronoun “on,” which in the modern form “on” is used like “we” or like “one does this.” It’s related to like, “One does this.” There’s an older usage of “on” which is like a non-specific third person pronoun as well that – I speak French, but I didn’t know about this archaic form. And the translator went and looked for what other historic pronoun things could I do and ended up doing with “on” thing, which is a really interesting adaptation.

Lauren: The thing I find interesting is if you were – 50 years ago, you didn’t have the grammatical resources in English to use singular they for a specific person. It’s something that’s really only emerged in the last couple of decades. I think the translator has felt frustrated to not have – you know, you sometimes feel like you’ve got this road block because you don’t have resources in one language that you have in another and you have to innovate. I did have a colleague in Italian studies tell me that they read a whole novel once where the gender of one of the characters was deliberately written around and avoided in a way that was an incredibly artful, thoughtful translation. It is possible that you could maybe do this with this character in the Shadowscent books, but it would be such –

Gretchen: But you couldn’t do it with the whole world in the Terra Ignota books because all of the characters would have to have that.

Lauren: Yeah. And you could do that amount of heavy lifting at the cost of some other things, but when you’re doing an efficient translation for a commercial novel, you don’t have the resources to really max out your art and strategy in that way. It’s interesting that, you know, translation is a really resource-intensive activity even to just do a good translation, let alone an incredibly strategic and thoughtful translation.

Gretchen: Even translating one word, like that word at the beginning of Beowulf, involves thinking about, “Okay, what kind of relationship do I want this word to have to the rest of the text? What am I trying to set up here in relationship to the whole text? Where do I see this attention-getting word as going?” Like, what the text as a whole is doing, which is this interesting question. I should say, speaking of translation news, this is very hot off the presses, but I have received news that there are gonna be translations of Because Internet into Persian, Chinese, and Japanese. So, all – well, Persian is an Indo-European language, but it has a different writing system, and then two non-Indo-European languages. I don’t know anything else about the details yet.

Lauren: This is news that I didn’t even know. This is very exciting.

Gretchen: It’s very recent, yes. It’s not – I dunno. I will have official links when they exist. They won’t exist for, I dunno, probably a couple years. I dunno how long it’ll take them to do. I know nothing.

Gretchen: The surreal thing about translation means that you will see you work and not be able to read it. There’s something so amazing and magical about that, that words you have created are finding new audiences – you know, there’s a lot of trust in the translator in those contexts.

Gretchen: Yeah, and I don’t know if I’m gonna get to have any say in who they get to translate it and how much they know about the internet or things like that.

Lauren: Translating non-fiction is an entirely different process because you’re not translating an internal narrative world as much as you are potentially translating something that explains how this world that we live in right now exists, or how a set of historical realities existed. That also takes deftness and skill.

Gretchen: And you’re potentially trying to translate technical vocabulary between one language or another, which isn’t necessarily the same as, “Okay, we need to keep the characters’ names consistent. It’s like, “We need to use this word that has a technical meaning in its technical sense.” Speaking of non-fiction translation, I dunno if you’ve been following in translation news relatively recently, there’s been a lot of things going on with the Scots language Wikipedia.

Lauren: Yes, I did read about this. So, Scots language is a language in the same family as English. It has a lot of similarities with English but is considered its own “variety,” using that very deliberate linguist term where you don’t commit to just how much it’s a dialect or its mutual intelligibility with other varieties that its related to. And it has its own Wikipedia.

Gretchen: Scots is kind of like, as an English speaker, I’ve always been kind of jealous of people who speak Dutch or German or something because they can kind of understand each other a bit. Or Spanish and Portuguese and Italian because they can kind of approximate understanding each other to some extent even if they haven’t formally learned the languages. I’ve always been like, “Why doesn’t English have some closer neighbours?” But I hadn’t been thinking about Scots when I was thinking that. Scots is probably English’s closest neighbour but is still a distinct language and, especially, there are grammatical differences and there are a lot of political reasons as well why people consider it its own language. However, [laughs] the Scots language Wikipedia, which has all of these articles written in Scots, had apparently been being edited for the last seven years by an American teenager who didn’t know any Scots and was just looking up the English articles in a Scots-English dictionary word-by-word and just picking the first word of the translation and subbing that in for the Scots word.

Lauren: This has been such a difficult story to read because everyone throughout this process has acted in the best faith. This teenager wasn’t doing this for any reason other than a passion for sharing knowledge on Wikipedia and a passion for seeing the Scots Wikipedia grow but with a really uncritical approach to translation. You can see where translation really does require this understanding of vocabulary choice and style choice and how it can all go really, really wrong.

Gretchen: Yeah, it’s really painful because this person started when they were, like, 12, and we have all believed very foolish things about the world when we were 12. It’s just many of us didn’t write thousands of Wikipedia articles in a language that is just really not the way anybody who actually speaks this language actually writes because it’s cobbled together badly from a dictionary. It’s this very painful, “Oh, no! You thought you were helping.” And yet Wikipedia is used as the basis of a lot of machine translation, and language detection, various natural language processing tools, and so this has been potentially sabotaging the efforts to try to create other machine tools in Scots because they’ve all been in this weird dictionary-a-fied version of English.

Lauren: It’s been really heartening to see the Scots language community and the Scottish Wikipedia community come together to figure out a strategy for how to approach cleaning house – I guess it’s the biggest spring clean ever, right – how to approach this, like, thousands and thousands of articles with this very strange approach to translation.

Gretchen: It illuminates one of the issues with smaller language Wikipedias in general which is that they may only have a few active editors because to be a Wikipedia editor is to be a volunteer. It takes a long time to translate things or to write articles. If you’re a language like English, you can have tens of thousands of editors. But if you’re a language like Scots which has many fewer speakers, you may only have a dozen active editors of which maybe one of them is a well-meaning but very clueless American teenager.

Lauren: We’ve both done lots of Wikipedia editing. We have run LingWiki events to improve linguistics content on Wikipedia. It’s challenging enough to write these articles in one language that I am proficient in. I’m always in awe of people who choose to translate and support content in their second or third languages because it is a non-trivial task to translate really complicated information in a way that is really clear.

Gretchen: Translation is a technical task that is one of those things that looks at all of the different levels of language where you have some things at the individual word, or even sound, or if you’re trying to translate poetry and you wanna make it beautiful in a very aesthetic sense with the physical properties of language, all the way up to words and sentences and structure and these discourse-y particles like “Hwaet” at the beginning where you’re trying to picture a whole framing device for the structure of an entire tone of a narrative. Or if you’re trying to pick, “Okay, how are we going to treat technical vocabulary that maybe has been borrowed from English?” because its scientific vocabulary that was invented from English, how are you gonna treat that when it gets borrowed into Scots? Trying to figure out how to make these technical decisions is non-trivial. It’s this very interesting train wreck. It can go spectacularly right when you have this very clever decision for a dragon to put the world on blast, and it can also go spectacularly wrong when you just say, “Okay, I’m gonna look through a dictionary and then pick the first word I encounter.”

Lauren: One of the great things about appreciating a good translation is that language never takes a break. Culture continues to change, and we move further away from the era of Beowulf. We move into new cultural settings and new cultural expectations. It means that there is space for new translations that bring new approaches, or try something different, or aim for really capturing something about the language of the era it was created in, or set an old story in a radically new setting. Even when you find a really satisfying translation, you know there’s still possibilities for finding other interesting ways to engage with the text.

Gretchen: I think that’s a thing that’s exciting about both the translations of these thousand-year-old texts, whether Beowulf or Tale of Genji, where they go through lots of different authors who put their own spin on the translation. And also thinking of Wikipedia as a place for translation where you have multiple authors working together on the same shared text, and a bunch of different people – like Scots Wikipedia has been having these Wikipedia edit-a-thons to try to clean the place up. You have a whole bunch of contributors that are finding out about this need because of this story and coming in and working on the text together and contributing to the shared text. In many ways, even though each of these editions of the translations are published as their own book for book-length ones, it’s this very intimate relationship that you can have with a text when you’re trying to render it in a different language or in a different textual interpretation.

[Music]

Gretchen: For more Lingthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, YouTube, or wherever else you get your podcasts. You can follow @Lingthusiasm on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr. You can get IPA scarves, IPA ties, and other Lingthusiasm merch at lingthusiasm.com/merch. I can be found as @GretchenAMcC on Twitter, my blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com, and my book about internet language is called Because Internet.

Lauren: I tweet and blog as Superlinguo. Have you listened to all the Lingthusiasm episodes and you wish there were more? You can access to 44 bonus episodes right now to listen to at patreon.com/lingthusiasm or follow the links from our website. Patron also get access to our Discord chatroom to talk with other linguistics fans and other rewards as well as helping to keep the show ad-free. Recent bonus topics include pangrams, honorifics, and linguistics with kids. If you can’t afford to pledge, that’s okay, too. We really appreciate it if you can recommend Lingthusiasm to anyone who needs a little more linguistics in their life, especially as it’s the anniversary month.

Gretchen: Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our editorial producer is Sarah Dopierala, and our music is “Ancient City” by The Triangles.

Lauren: Stay lingthusiastic!

[Music]

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

#language #linguistics #lingthusiasm #episode 49 #transcripts #translation #translations #beowulf #tale of genji #maria dahvana headley #shadowscent #p m freestone #wikipedia #scots #japanese #old english #scots wikipedia

[that-was-anticlimactic]

Child’s Play

Day Twenty: Child’s Play

Oh boy. Feels time begins. Also laughs. This episode is also funny.

Aw poor Lloyd:(

This scene with Lloyd where he keeps yawning makes me think of that moment in The Office when Michael puts in his two weeks and doesn’t try and Creed is just like ‘He don’t care about nothing’ or whatever the actual line is and that’s hilarious to me

I’m still really upset that Cole’s seat isn’t the driver’s seat. I can’t get over that lol. I always headcanoned Kai as the worst driver yet here we are (actually I think a lot of people think that haha)

... holy crap. I just realized, what if the Grundal is a play on Grendel? Like from the poem / novel Beowulf? I read that last year (and honestly I loved it even though it’s flawed) and like both Grendel and the Grundal have similarities and... holy crap I’m telling my AP Lit teacher about this on Wednesday...

anywAYS SORRY

Nope I’m sorry still can’t get over this. If the Grundal is Grendel, does that make Lloyd Beowulf? HAS SOMEONE READ BEOWULF AND LIKE AH I CAN’T BE THE ONLY ONE SEEING THIS

Okay now I swear I’m done back to the episode

It really was their fault for getting turned into kids, to be honest. They did essentially  jump on the magic haha

Jay: WE SHRUNK!!!

Their. Screams. (can we just talk about the fact that Cole’s is the most high pitched? I love?)

Zane: I’ve extended my logic parameters, but nothing is coming up. This does not compute *sparks and twitches*

Lowkey I actually use that phrase like once a week or so. If I don’t understand something I say “this does not compute” haha

Cole: Okay, fine, I get it. We’re all in this together. Oh but I can’t be a kid again! I hated being a kid! You can’t drive, nobody listens to you- *gasp* oh no. BED TIMES!

Okay so many things. First of all, I love that Cole line. It’s a classic, very funny. Second, time to make it depressing because now as I rewatch it when I’m older and can really dig into it, umm Cole probably had a rough childhood with being forced to do stuff he didn’t want to do and like dead mom and rocky relationship with dad. Nobody listens to you? Cole’s dad never listening to him?? Anyone?? That probably wasn’t intended to be depressing but rather funny, but whatever I’m taking it that way (also Cole confirms he loves driving and he will always be designated driver sorry I don’t make the rules)

Their voices are so high pitched sometimes it’s hard to tell who’s who... I swear they just animated a line for Kai that sounded a little like Zane haha

The way Zane says “I’m sorry for stealing too” is so cute

It makes me think of the episode from Hunted when Iron Barren is like “is there more of you” and Zane just quickly goes “nOPE” but like Zane growth? From when he’s forced to his knees? I don’t know, still can’t get over that Beowulf thing lol

I can’t oh my rolwing! The way Kai, Cole, and Jay just go “no” and shake their heads in fear when Zane says the Grundal probably got back is so adorable

Cole’s a cutie in purple

MOTHER DOOMSDAY !! YES !! RUFUS MACALLISTER !!

Jay: ahahaha... ahem... so juvenile”

He says “Lloyd Hemorrhoid Garmadon” what the frick

I learned the word “theoretical” from this episode when I was ten and I’ve loved the word since. I use that word a lot too... I love words...

Oh gosh as Mother Doomsday talks about how to defeat the Grundal I can’t stop relating it to Grendel ahh

Look at Nya go, so responsible

MYSTAKE

“Fair? Fair is not a word where I come from!”

Kai:is this really the best time to be eating cotton candy?

Jay: it makes me feel young, deal with it!

Cole calls the Grundal “McNasty” lol then he says “stupid toy” I love him

Oh my rowling I’m so proud of Lloyd look at him go

ha Wu says “Hands of Time” like... like season seven... haha... ha

I love how Lloyd brings that “fair isn’t a word where I come from” line back like... I love that green bean

Lloyd.

*sobs* Lloyd looks confident and says, “I’m ready”

Wu: There comes a time when we all must grow up. When that times comes, it’s important not to forget the lessons of our childhood because our childhood is the greatest training one can ever have. Yes, the time until the final battle has grown shorter. But the green ninja has grown stronger.

Love that line ^^

I LOVE THIS EPISODE SO MUCH HOLY TRASH AHH !!!!

Sorry for the Beowulf rambling, I just feel clever right now haha! I have more I could say, but I’m not going to because I could write paragraphs about this haha!

Have a good day / night / evening / morning / afternoon / whenever:)

#ninjago #ninjago cole #ninjago zane #ninjago kai #ninjago jay #ninjago lloyd #ninjago nya

[elzuvinri1985-blog]

Always great to see the range I belong to on here!! 2nd biggest machine gun range in the country behind battlefield las vegas, guy has automatic everything, ARs in every caliber from 22 to 50 Beowulf, mp5s in every configuration possible, fully auto glocks, SAW, BAR, anti aircraft 50 cal, under barrel grenade launchers, 50cal sniper rifles, several different sub machine guns besides the mp5s, a couple vectors, the list goes on. About 45min south of Pittsburgh on the WV line. Cheap too, $60 let you shoot a mag out of any 3 machine guns of your choosing plus 2 "bonus guns" desert eagles, suppressed pistols, etc. So the day you get your period is Cycle Day 1 (CD1). If your cycles are "normal", you ovulate roughly around CD16 ish. So by the time you are able to find out you're pregnant, you're around CD26 ish which means your about 4 weeks pregnant.tesla023 42 광주출장안마 points submitted 3 days agoThere was a kids clothing store in a mall near us that had one of those. Totally off subject, but in my hometown last year my sisters friends mother won that HUGE jackpot of half a billion in MA. I have my sisters friend on Facebook and it turns out her mother hasn even contacted her or anything since she won knowing the daughter has a child and is down for luck money wise. I can imagine not helping your own child as a millionare.. My second one was a little terror who had colic and a milk protein allergy and was as stubborn as they come. However, now my second baby is 2 and is SO funny and ridiculously smart that it blows me away. His personality sucked in infancy but has translated amazingly well in toddler hood and I can't imagine my life without that little ball of fire.. Nope. He see's me leaving the store, it's night time and this idiot thinks it's totally okay to follow me. He blocks me by standing at the back driver side of my truck while yelling so I scream "Either move or get hit because I don't care. Theres no pain where the lash extensions are though. I suspect it might be from the fumes of the glue and my red eye visine that i been using just kind of burns my eye. Has anyone else had this problem? how long until it goes away? am i going to die lol I dont want to remove them because they were expensive and im going away in a couple days. But I can totally see a psychopath fitting in perfectly in a religious community. Just because the rules are so clearly set. They don have to rely on natural empathy; they just think what they told to think. Sometimes I have episodes during work where the above isn possible, and in that case I just run to the bathroom, splash myself with water, tell myself I have a job to do, and focus on job related things. Just distract myself 광주출장안마 enough to forget about it. But the goal is to catch it and distract before it gets to a full blown episode.. Aber deren Verhalten genauso. Geschwindigkeitsbertretungen sind die Regel und nicht die Ausnahme. Es wird gehupt. Last I saw it was still in legal limbo, but having this generation be completely raised by/with a free and open internet where they can talk to anyone, learn anything, and make whatever, at any time. Its revolutionary is what it is, but if Net Neutrality dies for real then I truly think humanity will be lost. All the potential for free education and communication latent in the unrestricted internet is too valuable to lose, as it could very well be a path to unification.

[libraryofmegharoni]

The Boneless Mercies [April Genevieve Tucholke]

started: June 30, 2021 finished: July 15, 2021 rating: 2.5/5

before reading:

I found this book on ThriftBooks by accident while searching for The Mercies by Kiran Milwood Hargrave but as soon as i saw the author was April Genevieve Tucholke i was like :eyes:. the cover paired with the author -- instant buy. I wanted to love Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea and its sequel Between the Spark and the Burn by Tucholke so so much. Like “you stop fearing the devil when you’re holding his hand” -- fucking love that tagline (or whatever it is) but when i actually read the books back in 2017, i was way underwhelmed. So this is me officially giving Tucholke another chance with lowered expectations this time.

while reading:

so I’m 125 pages in and I have a few thoughts. first of all — like all YA books I read now, I found out that the main character was 16-just-turned-17 and will pretend I didn’t read that bc like no. I will not be reading this book thinking a 17 if doing all of this. I’m fine with that there’s a girl in the Mercies that’s like 15 but one main character, who’s POV we’re in, no nope now she’s at least 19 in my head lol. why do authors do this ???

anyway — on to my actual thoughts: I can already tell I’m not going to like the ending. unless it ends like how I want it to, in which case, respect. really all I knew about this book before starting it was that it was a retelling (?) of Beowulf. and ya know I read that back in high school so I have an idea of what’s supposed to happen. but the way it’s going rn I don’t know if it’s supposed to be a retelling of Beowulf killing Grendel & co or where the Merices as an item are Beowulf that does the killing or if Beowulf does exist in the universe or really how it’s going to breakdown in the end (more thoughts on that when I finish it I guess). but I will say how I personally would enjoy this to go — is for the Boneless Mercies to be one of those groups who tries to defeat Grendel before Beowulf comes along. there’s too much talk / thoughts from Frey about ‘glory’ and being remembered. there’s even the whole ‘as long as your memory lives on in someone alive, you’re never truly dead’ idea (which when I read that I was like really? it’s that the exact cliché quote?). my point is that there’s too much of Frey that wants to defeat (what I assume to be) Grendel for it to happen. after sometime from my original thought I’d this I have 2 arcs for these characters (as a whole) — 1) would be for them to realize that maybe Grendel isn’t all the villain everyone is making him out to be and leave him alone and live out the rest of their days unremarkably. or 2) my original thought for the ending —  for them to go fight Grendel and all die. I just think it would be a fitting end for them being the bringers of death everywhere they go for them to die at the end of this story. that also goes without saying that they will have no legacy after they have died and thus never achieve any of the ‘glory’ Frey desires. now so I think either of those will actually happen? no, the first way more likely than the second — especially considering it’s in 1st person POV even if one of them die (which has to happen right?) I don’t think our narrator Frey will (unfortunately)

ohhhhhhh the monster of Blue Vee is Beowulf’s mother… yeah that makes more sense than it being Beowulf. so does that mean our Boneless Mercies fail?

ahhh ok yeah I’m okay with this monster dying. I can excuse killing men but children??? nah that’s never ok.

things I did like:

our main character already has a love interest when we meet her.

Frey is the warrior whereas her og lover (male) is the healer

after reading:

I don’t have too many opinions on this book after finishing it. I read it and that’s about it. did I enjoy it? no not really. it had potential but nothing much came of anything so it was continuously unfulfilling.

tl;dr — so many elements were there for it to be so good but everything was so surface level that it wasn’t that entertaining at any point

#megharoni book log #megharoni 2021 reads #the boneless mercies #april genevieve tucholke

[asparklingdiamond]

all of the book asks!

i love yooooou!! everything’s under the cut since it got hella long. (also you can probably tell when i started getting tired lol)

the adventures of huckleberry finn: do you think kids or their parents are responsible for their beliefs?

I think parents instill some of what we first believe. For example, I think narrow-mindedness, hate and intolerance is taught. But at some point, kids have to learn to make up their own opinions about things, and the excuse of “it’s what i was taught” is no longer valid once you reach a certain age, in my opinion.

the alchemist: what are your current plans for the future? will you be upset if they don’t work out?

I don’t have actual plans, more like hopes, for the future. I hope I’ll go back to school. I hope I one day move on from this job I have, even if I have full time now. I hope I get into a career I’ll love and enjoy. I hope I find someone to share my life with. And yes, I’ll be upset none of my hopes work out.

alice’s adventures in wonderland: how do you react to absurd situations?

It depends on the situation. I usually get sarcastic or annoyed, sometimes I laugh it off.

and then there were none: do you think murderers deserve to die?

I think murderers who just kill to kill deserve to die. I think people who have killed in self defense should have a second chance. But people who go out of their way to kill people? I have no sympathy for them. 

artemis fowl: how much do you depend on technology?

Uhhh, I mean I depend on my phone to keep in contact with my friends and family, and I use my computer for tumblr and other things, and TV for entertainment, so I guess a lot. But it’s not like I can’t unplug or anything. It’s nice to just read or write without worrying about texts and stuff.

beowulf: is it always worthwhile to hear both sides of an argument?

In some cases, sure. In others, nope. For example, there is no two sides of an argument concerning locking up immigrants in cages and separating them from their parents. There’s the right side, and the wrong side, and no argument for it would make me change my mind.

the canterbury tales: if someone is hypocritical, do you point it out?

If it’s someone in my family, sure. Otherwise, I try to keep away from confrontation. I do try to say something if I think it needs to be said.

cat’s cradle: do you think it’s better to believe a lie than to live with an unpleasant truth?

I’d rather live an unpleasant truth. 

charlotte’s web: what’s your favorite art form?

Writing and music.

coraline: if you could change your family, what would you change?

I think I’d make my siblings and parents a little more empathetic. Maybe more open to listening to others’ opinions. They can be stubborn and it’s not necessarily a bad thing but it does suck when they’re so set on their opinions that they don’t consider other’s opinions or feelings.

the crucible: how heavily do you depend on others when forming opinions?

I don’t think I depend on much. I’ll take their thoughts into consideration, but I think I’m pretty opinionated myself.

fahrenheit 451: do you think there’s any knowledge that should be kept secret?

I mean I’m good with NASA keeping aliens a secret I guess, because as interesting as they are, I don’t think I’d like an alien encounter. But no, I think knowledge should be something that everyone has access to.

the fault in our stars: if you could have one conversation before you died, who would you talk to and what would you say?

I think I’d like to talk to Marissa, actually. About what, I don’t know. Depends on whether I knew I was dying, I guess?

flowers for algernon: how much potential do you think you have?

So much. And it’s being wasted. I used to be like... really ambitious. Going places. Now I’m just embarrassed with myself.

frankenstein: is it wise for humans to attempt to create life?

Don’t humans create life all the time, when they have sex and conceive babies? Lol. But uh if we’re talking about Frankenstein type of creating life, I think it could be dangerous. 

the giver: talk about a favorite memory

Probably going to the Gun’s N’ Roses concert last summer. It was one of the best experiences of my life, and I need to see them again soon. I wanted to see them live for as long as I could remember, so it was just.... amazing. 

the great gatsby: what would you sacrifice for money?

I’d do a lot for money tbh lmao.

harry potter: if you could bring someone back from the dead, would you? if so, who would it be?

Yeah. My aunt who passed away recently. I miss her. I forget for a while that she’s gone, and then it suddenly hits me and I don’t know how to deal with it. I just wish I could have more time with her. 

the hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy: what do you think is the meaning of life?

Finding happiness.

the hobbit: do you think the average person has the potential to be a hero?

I think a lot of average people can be and have been heroes.

holes: if someone poor stole from someone rich, who would you sympathize with?

The poor, obviously. A), the rich person can just replace what was stolen, and b) if someone’s so poor they feel the need to steal, there is something very wrong with society.

howl’s moving castle: how quickly do you form opinions about other people?

It depends. I keep to myself a lot, in real life, so I don’t talk to many new people. Sometimes it’s a gradual thing, deciding what you think of someone, and then other times, it can take like a second. 

the hunger games: would you kill someone if they planned to kill you?

Probably not. I’d probably be like ‘finally’ and welcome it lmao.

identical: how clear is your perception of reality?

I think pretty clear. 

the importance of being earnest: are you flattered or annoyed by gentlemanly behavior?

Uh both??? If that makes sense.

inferno: do you think you belong in hell? why or why not?

Maybe. I don’t know if I believe in hell or heaven though.

jonathan livingston seagull: is perfection a good goal?

Nope.

the joy luck club: describe your family

They drive me fucking nuts sometimes, but I love them and would kill for them.

jurassic park: do you think it’s wrong to use animals as attractions and accessories?

YES. @ SEAWORLD.

the kite runner: if you could, what social issue would you spread awareness about?

Probably immigration and rape culture. 

les misérables: do you think people should revolt if the government is corrupt?

Yes. 

life of pi: if you were stranded, would you be able to take care of yourself?

Not at all LMAO.

the lightning thief: what would you be the god/goddess of?

Goddess of eating chips in bed. Goddess of never hanging her clothes. Goddess of surviving on Taco Bell.

the lion, the witch, and the wardrobe: if you could start a new life in a new world, would you?

Absolutely!

lord of the flies: what motivates you best?

Money.

lord of the rings: is it important to work for the greater good of the world?

I think so! 

of mice and men: would you kill your closest friend to save them from a worse fate?

Oh my gosh. I don’t know. Maybe? Depends what she did. 

the perks of being a wallflower: does listening to other people’s problems help you or weigh you down?

Depends. Sometimes it can really weigh me down. And I hate feeling like that.

the phantom of the opera: how much do you judge others on physical appearance?

I don’t, because I know I’m not anything special to look at. 

pride and prejudice: are you romantic?

Unfortunately, yes. 

the princess bride: what’s your best feature?

My dazzling personality, of course.

a raisin in the sun: what is your most important possession?

My book collection. And my phone, I guess.

romeo and juliet: have you ever done anything ridiculous for love? what?

Well, I tried to make it work when it clearly was not working, so that’s pretty ridiculous. 17 year old me had a lot to learn.

stargirl: do you value uniqueness?

Of course.

the taming of the shrew: would you be willing to be in a relationship with someone who is very dominant?

UHHH dominant in the bedroom, sure, outside of it? Nah. I mean, I grew up with a dad who’s a huge machista. I’m not interested at all in having my life controlled. I have enough of that now and when I was growing up.

the tell-tale heart: is there anything you feel guilty about right now? what?

Nope? My conscience is fine at the moment.

to kill a mockingbird: do you believe something has value simply because it’s beautiful?

No, definitely not.

twilight: how consistent are your feelings about people close to you?

I guess pretty consistent? It depends on my mood though, lol.

watership down: do you think your right to life is any greater than an animal’s?

I’d give my life for any animal’s, tbh.

the westing game: if you died now, what would you want to happen to your possessions?

Burn my laptop, burn my phone. Give the rest of my belongings to my family and friends. I don’t have anything valuable, so it’d be junk. 

#q&a. #q&a:ask meme. #youcancallmepookiebear