Bedtime reading in translation
: This has turned into a gangly post about language and connections in weblogs. It started with the first link, below, but then I kept adding other things I found. The result is rather disjointed post about international connections. It’s an important topic — internatinalization is one of the great contributions of weblogs — and so I’m sorry I’m doing it a disservice with this disjointed post but I’m rushed this morning, so click away below and I’ll come back to the topic later…
: Just found a site packed with good reading: World Without Borders, the online magazine for international literature. I got to read one of my favorite German-language authors, Wladimir Kaminer, in a story called Paris Lost, translated into English.
The site’s raison d’etre:
English-speaking culture in general and American culture in particular has long benefited from cross-pollination with other worlds and languages. Thus it is an especially dangerous imbalance when, today, 50% of all the books in translation now published worldwide are translated *from English,* but only 6% are translated *into* English.
I just wish the creators — from Bard College — didn’t turn into apologetic Americans:
Globalization, we hope to say (not didactically, and not, we hope, naively, but in the richness of cultural information we present) need not be equivalent to Americanization.
Nevermind that. There’s still much to read here and it’s good that so much is being translated into English. [via Die Zeit]
: Also see David Kaspar’s new bilingual blog with English posts and German posts translated into English. [Thanks to Tanker Schreiber for the link.]
: Meanwhile, Martin R
