Thoughts about translation

[garonne]

(This was written with voice dictation software, so please excuse any weird capitalisation or punctuation.)

Make_believe_world recently posted a Russian translation of one of my fics, which has also been translated into Polish. (which I think is really cool, and here are the links: Russian, Polish though I don't know if there is anyone on my f-

Comments

[mrua7]

Are you friends with open_channel_d. She's Russian and can look at the translation for you. There's also inji, though she hasn't been around on LJ very much as of late.

Yes translating your work into another language can be a daunting task, and you're right, what wonks in one language might not work well in another. I speak Irish, though my fluency has had issues since I had my stroke a few years ago. I used to teach it and it was always a trial, trying to get across to English speaking students how some things could not be exactly translated, especially when it comes to idioms and colloquialisms.

[garonne]

Thanks for the tip about open_channel_d :) In fact I can read Russian myself, after a fashion, but what I can't read is Polish!

Oh, I didn't know there were many people studying Irish in the US. That's cool! Is it a popoluar language to study?

[mrua7]

Thousands of people studying Irish in the NY/NJ area alone. There's Irish speaking communities and impromptu schools all across the US and in Canada as well.

The Irish language movement was started here in the US many years ago by a native speaker from Co. Armagh. Her name was Ethel Brogan. She would get people together to speak Irish so they wouldn't lose it and eventually they invited people to come learn at these weekend retreats. Lovely woman, but sadly she's since passed away. She was honored but the Taoiseach, the Irish government and the US government for her work with preserving and promoting the language.

Her work is carried on by the faithful. Irish language teachers now visit here to help instruct teachers to continue teaching the language. It's amazing that all this happened because of Ethel Brogan,

[garonne]

That's really interesting. I had no idea. I knew Irish-speaking people who emigrated in the 19th century often quickly switched to English when making their new life in the US, but not what happened after that. That's cool that that lady had such a huge and positive influence.

[mrua7]

The language nearly died out in the early 20th c. After the Easter uprising and the establishment of an independent Irish government, the Irish language was standardized (as there were a few dialects....they took bits from each of them to make one language) it was made mandatory in school, but it wasn't until the late 20th c that the young Irish began to take pride in their Irish identity.

All legal documents/ government proclamations are issued in both Irish and English. All business conducted with the EU is in Irish only. So there's been an amazing resurgence of the language, and it's come back from the brink of nearly becoming a dead language.