Biblit.it: useful resources for translators

[Loki]

I've recently found out this website, called Biblit, which was founded to help translators who are moving their first steps into this job, or for whoever would like to become a translator (here I am!). Unfortunately for those of you who would like to have a look at it the website is in Italian, but still there are some interesting things. For instance, in the section Dizionari & Glossari (on the left) you can see a curious Yiddish-Hebrew-English-German-Russian Picture Dictionary: I've got no idea of what's it like because it only works with Internet Exporer; you can also find Lexicons of Early Modern English, United Nations Multilingual Terminology Database and other (perhaps) interesting things (for English and other languages, even Chinese).
The website also features:

1. a list of books and films that talk about translators and interpreters
2. examples of letters of protest that you can send to magazines/newspapers when they do not mention the translator (who should be mentioned according to the law)
3. a section in which translators describe the room where they work
4. a section about how much translators are paid (according to the language, for instance)
5. some advice to write properly

I hope you will find something interesting for you. I think I'll delve into it for the next few days.

[Eric]

I've put the Biblit among my Favourites on my computer. It certainly has lists which could prove useful. So I'll browse it when I have the time.

You have to try to separate the wheat from the chaff on such websites. In other words, some lists are constructed by people who have experience of professional translation, while others are put together by language freaks who tend to like to have lists of things, but never actually learn any language. So your Yiddish-Hebrew-English-whatever list may have its uses, but it looks like somebody, who I imagine is Jewish, who likes to construct parallel lists of words in the five languages he may know.

Some of the lists look suspiciously amateurish. There is one under Altre Lingue about Afrikaans (the correct name, even in English). But when you find the list itself, it talks about "African" (which is the English for the whole continent, not the actual language of the descendents of the Dutch in South Africa). So you immediately smell a rat. Another language freak seems to have got hold of a dictionary and created another list of words. Though it is, at least, interactive.

And to return to the Yiddish-Hebrew business, you have to ask yourself:

1) Which of the two languages do I want to learn (or do I just like looking at amusing lists of words), and for what precise reason?
2) Yiddish is a Germanic language, while Hebrew is a Semitic one like Arabic. What knowledge am I aiming for? About Old Europe or contemporary Israel?
3) Should I not look at a Yiddish or Hebrew primer, before looking at unconnected lists of words?

I like dabbling in languages, but the ones I've learnt properly were learnt by buying or borrowing a primer (language textbook for beginners) and going through it from beginning to end. If you are really enthusiastic, you go to language classes. Only then can you really begin to think about (literary) translation, unless you've studied the source language in depth at university level.

[Loki]

I know, among all those things there must be a lot of rubbish. But, nonetheless, one should be smart enough to know what's useful for him.
Anyway, I didn't say that that dictionary was useful, but that it was curious: I only know English (and something, very little, of Russian) so I can't even judge how good it's been made.

Anyway, I think that such a list could be useful when you have to translate a novel in which you find some words in a distant language you don't know, and even though you shouldn't translate them, it could be useful to know what they mean. You can search your word in a search engine with different languages in it, so you may even ignore the language of the words you're looking up.


You've used an interesting expression: separate the wheat from the chaff, which has made me think about the Accademia della Crusca (lit. Academy of the Bran), whose original purpose was (and actually still is) to separate "the flour (the good language) from the bran (the bad language)". It's an Italian society for scholars, Italian linguists and philologists. Unfortunately it's different from the Spanish Real Academia Española and the French Académie française.

[Eric]

We use "wheat" and "chaff" in English. The expression is based on something Jesus is reported to have said, in Luke 22:31, echoing things said in, for instance, the Old Testament book of Jeremiah.

You will find that there are a great number of expressions that are common to European languages, on account of the Bible (Hebrew Old Testament and Greek New Testament) which have been part of our common European culture for at least 1,000 years. Whether the grains of corn have already been ground or not is not clear in the Bible I've got, where the verb "to sift" is used, which implies flour rather than seeds. But the metaphorical meaning is clear enough.