Ersatz TLS discussion
note: This topic has been closed to new comments.
Weekly TLS
>
What are we reading? 17/02/2024
Mod
Good story.
AB76 wrote: "4got to add, small article by Tim Parks on translation, he fed various italian novels into an AI translator and found the versions were almost perfect, inc some dialect works of Pasolini. Sobering to see AI can do this...."For the past two years in my 'spare' time I've been translating a family history from French to English. I just volunteered for a friend when I had more free time than now. My MO was to read out a simultaneous translation into the pc, which then put what it thought I'd said into a document. I then had to go over it once to correct mis-hearings and look up French words I didn't know, then once more for grammar, readability etc. It's not going to be published but I've tried to do it well.
The first 17 chapters were really interesting and I have enjoyed doing my best at it, but I was left with Ch 18 and 19, 44 very boring pages the thought of which drove me to distraction.
I'd dictated Ch 18 and was halfway through yesterday, losing the will to live correcting mis-hearings etc, when I decided to put the rest of it into an AI translator. The difference was amazing. No mishearings, no missed accents, virtually nothing I wanted to change. I then put the 26 pages of Ch 19 through the translator and today's task is to go over that.
I didn't think I'd have finished before the end of April, but I can visualise it all done by the end of Feb now.
I wouldn't have done the lot this way as it would have felt like cheating, and I've gained a lot from doing Chapters 1-17, but this has been a game-changer for me. But I'm not a professional translator, relying on my skills to feed the family. I prefer reading books, which have had to take a back seat for a while now.
FrancesBurgundy wrote: "AB76 wrote: "4got to add, small article by Tim Parks on translation, he fed various italian novels into an AI translator and found the versions were almost perfect, inc some dialect works of Pasoli..."That is an amazing story Frances. But it make one wonder what jobs will no longer be available in a few years time.
FrancesBurgundy wrote: "AB76 wrote: "4got to add, small article by Tim Parks on translation, he fed various italian novels into an AI translator and found the versions were almost perfect, inc some dialect works of Pasoli..."was that before my post or after? if so glad it helped!
AB76 wrote: "FrancesBurgundy wrote: "AB76 wrote: "4got to add, small article by Tim Parks on translation, he fed various italian novels into an AI translator and found the versions were almost perfect, inc some..."It may have been before but I was too busy 'translating' to check in yesterday! So psychic or serendipity. Gotta dash to my next volunteer post now but will tell more later!
FrancesBurgundy wrote: "AB76 wrote: "FrancesBurgundy wrote: "AB76 wrote: "4got to add, small article by Tim Parks on translation, he fed various italian novels into an AI translator and found the versions were almost perf..."ok!
Mod
RussellinVT wrote: "I’m moving along with Reprobates by John Stubbs, a lengthy survey of poets and wits of the Civil War era. He has a nice way of describing John Aubrey’s talent for compressed and telling stories: no..."its a fascinating era for some things, the 1640-1660 period, i'm a bit annoyed the new Yale book on the 1658-1660 period is not in paperback yet but there are at least 4 new studies of various aspects of those 20 years in print right now which is great. Bizarrely i have mislaid John Lays book on the period, after having it ready for 12 months...
If anyone's interested I'll just say a bit more about my translation using AI.The app I've been using all along, but always just for a word or two that I didn't know (in French), is Reverso. I like it because it gives several different translations for a word and you can even click on 'more' and get sentences using the various meanings. I did try once or twice to translate something - from Dutch I think - and knew you could put in a good chunk of prose and get it translated, but there was a limit unless you paid for it.
I discovered yesterday that the limit is 2000 words - not bad. Just about half a page of A4. So to do 26 pages was something like 50 times 'copy the French, paste into Reverso, copy the translation, paste into my document'. But the translation was instantaneous!
What faults have I found? American spellings, 'pussies' instead of 'cats' (!), and various faults due to French/English problems. So 'de' translated as 'of' when it should be 'in'. 'his' instead of 'her' (but how would it know?). Families like 'les Leblanc' are missing the s in English 'the Leblanc'.
Il savait à peu près lire - He could read.
Depuis quelques mois, il faisait du judo - For a few months, he was playing judo
Then a word like définitivement - three translations - definitely, definitively, permanently. In the middle of a paragraph it can only choose one meaning (though it will give all three if you put just that word in)- and who can blame it if it chooses the wrong one? That's where a human brain has to come in.
Having said all this, there are acres of translation where I haven't had to change a word. And sometimes the changes I'm making are just because I prefer a different way - not because it's wrong.
Still immersed in Forbidden Notebook by Alba De Cespedes(1952)In this introspective but typically italian realist novel we have maybe the newest female addition to the 1950s Italian literature canon. De Cespedes has been "re-discovered" and i love her style, which is reminiscent of Moravia in some ways, though possibly even more stringent.
Valeria, the 40 something narrator is slowly watching her lower middle class life and family, flounder. She is a loving mother and wife, with a job on the side(unlike her friends who do not work). She slowly starts to question all her expectations, through her "forbidden notebook" and the novel gets darker and one feels for this woman and her life.
One marvels that Italian literature of this period actually comes from southern climes, from latin culture. There is a hard and persistent tension in the prose of all the great Italian writers of this period and De Cespedes is the feminine equivulent. Life is all hard surfaces, sacrifices and analytical processes, the bubbling emotions and passion of stereotypical Italy is another world from this one
On Goodreads-(994 people are currently reading it/20,100 people want to read it)
Mod
The app I've been using all along, but always just for a word or two that I didn't know (in French), is Reverso. I li..."
I prefer DeepL — I think it's better than Reverso. I don't know what the free limit is, I've never tried for really long texts.
Gpfr wrote: "I prefer DeepL "I haven't tried anything else - just found Reverso and it fulfilled my needs at the time, and I don't intend to do anything like this again!
Mod
I haven't tried anything else - just found Reverso and it fulfilled my needs at the time, and I don't intend to do anything like this again!"
It does sound a big job :)
Gpfr wrote: "AB76 wrote: "Macdonalds The Drowning Pool..."I read this last year. I said at the time:
I've read Macdonald's The Drowning Pool, following the Ross Macdonald praise here :)..."
Praise from me, presumably - between 2022-24 I read all Macdonald's 'Lew Archer' tales that I could lay hands on. I expect there are reviews of most or all of them in the group's archives!
AB76 wrote: "Its almost a year since i started subscribing to The Times Literary Supplement and its been a revelation..."I don't read these magazines for the simple reason that I already read far too much (books, news, sports reports, cultural reviews of many arts), so if I did that as well I'd have little or no time left for other stuff such as talking to people, paying the bills, shopping for food and walking the dog!
But I wonder how that one compares with the London Review of Books? The other day, diving down another rabbit hole I came across a review of Stefan Zweig's works. Now, I only ever read one - referred to as 'Chess' or 'Chess Story' - and was amazed at how bad it was, from a well rated author. So you can imagine that I was intrigued to find that a professional critic - Michael Hoffman - felt much the same - but expressed his contempt at much greater length*, and with astonishing fluency - strongly recommended if you like a good hatchet job. Some quotes
... this popular-again populariser (Zweig) who, like the Kitschmeister Gustav Klimt, is glitteringly and preposterously back in fashion, and neither of them any better than they were the first time round.
...this anxious success and oh-so-modest failure; bestselling and most-translated German-language author before World War Two, and now again book of the week here, rediscovery of the century there, and indulgently reviewed more or less everywhere; this uniquely dreary and clothy sprog of the electric 1880s; ...
who logged his phone calls and logged his letters and logged his books, and, who knows, probably logged his logs;
...who, in the words of the writer Robert Neumann, ‘spent his life on the run. From the Great War to Switzerland. From the symbolic firing-squad across the Channel. From Blitzed London to the safety of provincial Bath. From Hitler’s threatened invasion of England to the USA. From Roosevelt’s impending entry into the war to Brazil. He even fled Rio for a Brazilian mountain resort. From there there was no more running’; who left a suicide note which, like most of what he wrote, is so smooth and mannerly and somehow machined – actually more like an Oscar acceptance speech than a suicide note – that one feels the irritable rise of boredom halfway through it, and the sense that he doesn’t mean it, his heart isn’t in it (not even in his suicide);...
Stefan Zweig just tastes fake. He’s the Pepsi of Austrian writing...The story went the rounds that Zweig had his manuscripts checked for grammatical errors by a German professor, which gets most things about Zweig: the ineptitude, the anxiety to please, the respect for authority, and the use of others.
It’s not easy to think of a writer so poorly thought of by his maybe peers... When Hofmannsthal and Max Reinhardt started the Salzburg Festival in 1919, it was one of their conditions that Zweig – who had recently moved to Salzburg – be rigorously excluded. (Zweig took to absenting himself from Salzburg every summer while the festival was on.) Hofmannsthal’s friend Leopold von Andrian (wrote about one book)... ‘each sentence incredibly pretentious, false and empty – the whole thing a complete void’.
In his memoir, The Play of the Eyes, Elias Canetti recalls a meeting with Zweig, who had come back to Vienna for two reasons: to get his teeth seen to, and to set up a new house that would publish his books. The next sentence is: ‘I believe nearly all his teeth were extracted.’ The malicious and inescapable and (in a master like Canetti) perfectly deliberate undercurrent is that of course Zweig’s books are not worth talking about.
*I very much enjoyed Hoffman's comments, though in truth his destruction of Zweig was too long, and would have been better cut in half. If you want to read the whole thing:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v32/n...
FrancesBurgundy wrote: "Gpfr wrote: "I prefer DeepL "I haven't tried anything else - just found Reverso and it fulfilled my needs at the time, and I don't intend to do anything like this again!"
Interesting comments - I most often use Reverso when I'm reading a 'difficult' (in terms of vocabulary) book in French, though I usually have several alternatives open in tabs on my laptop. On the rare occasions when I've translated snatches of books here or elsewhere, I find that it's tricky at times to get the exact feeling across, because the languages are structured differently. It's not just 'choosing the best word', although that matters as well. (I'm probably too fussy!)
has anyone here read either a novel, or good non-fiction account, about what it was like living in Berlin, for the natives, whilst 'The Berlin Airlift' was in operation?
scarletnoir wrote: "AB76 wrote: "Its almost a year since i started subscribing to The Times Literary Supplement and its been a revelation..."I don't read these magazines for the simple reason that I already read far..."
I tried reading Zweig's 'The World of Yesterday' a few years back, I didn't get on with him, and abandoned it when he moved to Berlin, less than a third of the way through, to the best of my memory. I didn't like his attitude to people, as he patronised those who he thought were not on his level. Though personally I felt quite glad that I was unlikely to have ever been recognised as someone on his level... even if our time frames had ever over-lapped!...
scarletnoir wrote: "It's not just 'choosing the best word', although that matters as well. (I'm probably too fussy!..."
You're not too fussy. There's no point in translating if it feels like a translation.
Tam wrote: "scarletnoir wrote: "AB76 wrote: "Its almost a year since i started subscribing to The Times Literary Supplement and its been a revelation..."I don't read these magazines for the simple reason tha..."
i didnt finish it either, it kept sitting at the back of my mind as this great non-fiction work of his but about 120 pages in, i dumped it, last year
i dont remember him being patronising there was just a way of telling his story which i felt just didnt engage me, i have Canetti's memories of the 1920s to read some time this year and hopefully that will be more engaging
AB76 wrote: "Tam wrote: "scarletnoir wrote: "AB76 wrote: "Its almost a year since i started subscribing to The Times Literary Supplement and its been a revelation..."I don't read these magazines for the simpl..."
I didn't like the way that he portrayed some of the women that he met, especially in Berlin, but being a male you have different filters, I guess. It's just a way of me reading in to it a kind of sensitivity to a certain kind of stereotyping of women, perhaps?... And it is very much a period piece, so his attitude was very much dominant, of his own time. But I have read books by male authors from far earlier periods, and had no problem with them at all, so its an individual thing to me... so I am not generalising at all... I hope...
Mod
I’m glad someone has spoken out by Stefan Zweig. I thought it was just me. I read all his short stories and some of the novellas and longer fiction, and while some pieces were decent, e.g. Letter from an Unknown Woman, there was nothing I found overwhelming. I did enjoy The World of Yesterday, at least the first half, because it sent me off to explore all the writers and other figures with whom he was acquainted, but after the atmospheric pages on the outbreak of war in 1914 (everyone apprehensive and then suddenly scrambling to get home from a seaside resort in Belgium) I don’t have much recollection. What was really good was something quite different called The Tide of Fortune, a collection of short essays on historical moments, e.g. the fall of Constantinople, the night when The Marseillaise was composed, and the Sealed Train.
Tam wrote: "has anyone here read either a novel, or good non-fiction account, about what it was like living in Berlin, for the natives, whilst 'The Berlin Airlift' was in operation?"H'm. Well, Air Bridge by Hammond Innes definitely covers the airlift within the thriller genre, but I'm not sure how much he had to say about ordinary Berliners - in fairness to myself, I must have read this some 60 years ago! At that time, I found Innes to be an effective genre writer, though it's difficult to know how I'd feel now if I re-read his books. He was anyway very good IIRC in writing 'man v nature' scenes, where people struggle through snow, or extreme heat, or a storm at sea.
More recently, I read Masaryk Station by David Downing - the sixth book in his 'John Russell' series - set in Berlin from 1948 onwards. Downing is excellent at describing the lives of the ordinary folk, and the conditions in the city - but I don't remember how much he had to say about the airlift even though I'm pretty sure it is covered to some extent. I reviewed it here:
https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...
Mod
H'm. Well, [b..."
This set me looking for a book by a writer called Sarah Gainham and I'm totally puzzled because I can't find her books. I've got 3 physical books by her + e-books, she wrote books set in Vienna and one I've got set in Berlin after the war, but I don't remember the details. I've moved a lot of books around having given away quite a few, but I certainly haven't got rid of those. I'm baffled!
On an oxfam browse, i came accross a 1950s Penguin paperback called The Mint by TE Lawrence.I was amaxed to find out that Laurence of Arabia ducked out of his fame and legend after WW1 and struggled with finding a decent meal and sleeping in friends spare bedrooms for 18 months , before, even more amazingly, joining the RAF in 1922 under an assumed name as a ranker.
I started reading it last night and its just incredible to think that this shaper of new worlds, decided to do something so different and then write beautifully about it. The first few chapters i read describe his induction at an RAF base in London, among a whole bunch of other ex-servicemen, unemployed persons and people down on their luck. I know from the blurb he does get found out and then is allowed back into the RAF but i am mostly enjoying it for this incredible account of six months living a different life.
The Mint
AB76 wrote: "On an oxfam browse, i came accross a 1950s Penguin paperback called The Mint by TE Lawrence.I was amaxed to find out that Laurence of Arabia ducked out of his fame and legend after WW1 and strugg..."
I believe he left the services because of the way the British reneged on their promises to the Arabs. Promises he had given on behalf of the government.
I see that Suetonius' The Twelve Caesars is a bestseller in a new translation. I can recommend the Robert Graves translation of this book in Penguin Classics.
Mod
I was amaxed to find out that Laurence of Arabia ducked out of his fame and legend after W..."
If I remember correctly, we see this in the film.
Gpfr wrote: "giveusaclue wrote: "AB76 wrote: "On an oxfam browse, i came accross a 1950s Penguin paperback called The Mint by TE Lawrence.I was amaxed to find out that Laurence of Arabia ducked out of his fam..."
Yes you remember correctly
Robert wrote: "I see that Suetonius' The Twelve Caesars is a bestseller in a new translation. I can recommend the Robert Graves translation of this book in Penguin Classics."Thanks for that tip. I've read and admired I, Claudius, Claudius the God and His Wife Messalina and Count Belisarius by Graves... and although I'm trying to wean myself off Amazon as far as possible, when I looked this up and found a Kindle edition at £0.78 (78 pence) I thought that would not greatly swell the coffers of that organisation, and took the plunge.
AB76 wrote: "On an oxfam browse, i came accross a 1950s Penguin paperback called The Mint by TE Lawrence..."Quite a while ago, I tried - and failed - to read The Seven Pillars of Wisdom: a triumph by Lawrence. I remember very little about it (nothing, really).
Has anyone here read and enjoyed it? Or not enjoyed it and can remember why?
Mod
scarletnoir wrote: "AB76 wrote: "On an oxfam browse, i came accross a 1950s Penguin paperback called The Mint by TE Lawrence..."Quite a while ago, I tried - and failed - to read [book:The Seven Pillars of Wisdom: a ..."
i expected a lot more from it when i read it in my late 20s, its such an interesting life he led during that period but i found it slow going and in the end i gave up, i do mean to read it again sometimes
Now then. It has been said - wholly erroneously - that the Americans lack a sense of irony. However, I think it is fair to say that some Americans lack that sense.Could it be that president Trump is among them?
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2...
scarletnoir wrote: "AB76 wrote: "On an oxfam browse, i came accross a 1950s Penguin paperback called The Mint by TE Lawrence..."Quite a while ago, I tried - and failed - to read [book:The Seven Pillars of Wisdom: a ..."
I read it about 10 years ago. It was interesting, but I had the sense that it could have lost a hundred and fifty pages and only improved.
Mod
I see no theoretical reason why it shouldn't work — if the necessary work of putting in Middle English texts or whatever had been done. But I don't know if anything actually exists.
Was going to post a long review of the De Cespedes novel i just finished but its got no traction on the G and minimal in here, so i will leave itIts a superb novel and essential reading for men, methinks, the inner life and workings of the maternal figure, told in a stark, realist manner, set in Rome in 1950.
Forbidden Notebook
RussellinVT wrote: "GP/FrancesB – Interesting exchange on AI, thank you. ..Do either of you happen to know if AI models require an actual foreign language? Would it work just as well if, say, you asked for a modern version of The Wife of Bath’s Tale?"
Hi Russell, thank you for asking this as it gives me a break from the translation.
I've checked and Reverso lists 26 languages which you can translate from/to. I see that if I wanted to I could translate from Japanese into Romanian, for instance, and vice versa, but no Olde Englishe on the list I'm afraid.
It's taken me almost two days to go through the AI translation of 26 A4 pages - quite a long time. Mostly I've been racking my brains for a better word or changing it to a more 'English' word order, but I had a funny thing near the end.
I'd been quite happy with the translation of one paragraph but on my final read through I thought it was slightly odd.
It concerned a young man who was working in Italy and who would cycle off in his suit and tie each morning, then go out for a coffee as soon as he got to the office. He would put his towel on the handlebars. I assumed he was going to shower at work or go swimming afterwards, like they may do in Italy, but thought I'd just check. Then it hit me. It wasn't his towel, it was his briefcase! Same word in French! And I could easily have left the wrong word in.
As I said before, how would it know what was correct? It would have to be clever AI to realise in the context that briefcase was the most likely (though not necessarily the right word). So I don't think you could trust an AI translation completely and the work involved in checking over and perfecting the whole thing wouldn't be far short of doing it yourself.
Paul wrote: "scarletnoir wrote: "AB76 wrote: "On an oxfam browse, i came accross a 1950s Penguin paperback called The Mint by TE Lawrence..."Quite a while ago, I tried - and failed - to read [book:The Seven P..."
i am beginning to feel the same after 80 pages, its a wonderful account of england in the 1920s i feel, the language, the references, fond nostalgia for things my grandparents mentioned occurs regularily. I had to laugh at the point where he is sat in the canteen and observes portraits of the King, Field Marshal Haig, Rear Admiral Beatty and himself.....a crowded RAF canteen in west london and there was Lawrence of Arabia, sitting under his own portrait, a lowly aircraftman having a break...amazing
scarletnoir wrote: ""Serviette", je suppose? :-)"oui, but Reverso only gives towel and napkin for it. But it was the word I learnt many years ago at school, though I don't think I'd use it today. I'd have said cartable which Mr Reverso says is binder/ schoolbag/ satchel, so what do I know?
Mod
oui, but Reverso only gives towel and napkin for it...."
I would have been as non-plussed as Reverso! I've never heard a briefcase called a serviette. Not a cartable either, I don't think, as that I understood to be something with shoulder straps. Always it was a porte-documents. At least, that's what I carried around.
Wife of Bath - Maybe one reason is that as between modern languages there are vast reservoirs for deep language models to learn from, whereas for Chaucerian English the pool by comparison is pretty small.
Mod
oui, but Reverso only gives towel and napkin for it...."
I would have been as non-plussed as Reverso! I've never heard a ..."
I tried on DeepL. For serviette, it gives towel, napkin, briefcase.
Then I wrote:
le monsieur mettait des documents dans sa serviette
and got 3 suggestions:
the gentleman was putting documents in his briefcase
the gentleman put documents in his briefcase
the man put documents in his briefcase
Then I wrote:
le jeune homme prenait son vélo pour aller au bureau. Il mettait sa serviette sur le guidon.
and got:
the young man was taking his bike to the office. He put his briefcase on the handlebars.
Mod
You didn't get comments but you got 3 upticks, including from me. I didn't really have anything to say, but I'm interested in this book and would like to read your review!
Mod
For briefcase it says:
porte-document m
porte-documents m
attaché-case m
mallette f
serviette f
Mod
I didn't know that his pseudonym is a Japanese word meaning evil person, villain. Also, if you write B. Akunin, it recalls the anarchist Bakunin. And I didn't know that he translated Japanese books into Russian.
On the subject of translation, he says that when writing he often writes books in different styles, adopting the style of different Russian authors, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Dostoyevsky, Gogol ... Which must be difficult if not impossible to convey in translation.
Talking about the titles given his books in translation, he said that once that of a German translation actually gave away the name of the murderer.
Gpfr wrote: "AB76 wrote: "Was going to post a long review of the De Cespedes novel i just finished but its got no traction on the G and minimal in here, so i will leave it ..."You didn't get comments but you ..."
i will try and get a review done then
just started Ice Station Zebra by Alistair Maclean(1963), felt like a good old cold war thriller
RussellinVT wrote: "I would have been as non-plussed as Reverso! I've never heard a briefcase called a serviette. Not a cartable either, I don't think..."Not sure I've heard 'serviette', but have seen it written... I've heard 'cartable' often though.
But I also need Reverso or similar for American... I used to be baffled by 'pocket book', for example, which isn't a book and is usually much too big to fit in a pocket!
This topic has been frozen by the moderator. No new comments can be posted.
Ersatz TLS
Books mentioned in this topic
The Fatherland Files (other topics)The March Fallen (other topics)
The History Man (other topics)
The Lamb (other topics)
The Vegetarian (other topics)
More...
i was suprised to see this too as Parks is a good authority on things and this could lead to a lot of job losses, i agree