Gender Neutrality In Everyday Life Set in 1961, Hidden Figures is a film about the true story of a team of African-American mathematicians in which gender and racial distinction are broken down in favour of neutrality. The main protagonist, Katherine Johnson, is a talented woman who is hired to work for NASA. However, she works in a white, male-dominated environment, where the toilets for coloured women are in a completely different building from the one where she works. For this reason, every day she has to go back and forth between the two, meaning she’s often absent from her desk. When her boss demands an explanation for her constant absenteeism, Katherine, filled with indignation, makes a moving speech about how the racially divided, male-dominated society in which they live is impeding her from doing a good job. In agreement, her boss destroys the “colored ladies room” sign outside the toilets to stop the segregation. Hidden Figures might be set in the early sixties but gender and racial discrimination are still present in our lives. The difference is that today is not just about the distinction between male and female. This happens because we live in a gender-fluid society where things are far more complex. In this blog post, we will explore what is gender neutrality and how it affects languages. The Way Gendered Languages Shape Our World Historically, the masculine gender has always been the default gender for describing situations where both men and women are present. Indeed, with respect to gender, we can distinguish three types of languages: Gendered languages like Spanish, French and Italian, where nouns and...
The Relationship Between Beauty and Culture Carnival is upon us, and we can’t help but think about all the beautiful clothes and makeup used on this occasion. Carnival is held in various parts of the world and is packed with cultural traditions. What is the relationship between beauty and culture? How does the concept of beauty change across different cultures? And in what ways does it affect the world of translation? Cultural influences guide our perception of beauty, which takes on a different meaning not only across different countries but also across different ages and eras. Indeed, Americans in the fifties conceived beauty differently from today. In most European countries, a slim figure with flawless skin is the ideal of beauty, whereas in Africa, a larger figure is considered beautiful. To achieve this ideal of beauty, women (and, most recently, also men) have been experimenting with cosmetics and beauty aids for a long time. Some people go to great lengths to alter their appearance and conform with what society considers beautiful. Religion, as part of a culture, also has its influence on beauty. In Hinduism for example, they portray Goddesses as beautiful, making beauty a godly quality. In the Muslim religion, instead, they abhor things like nudity and women must wear a veil to hide their face from everyone except their husbands. Today’s Ideals of Beauty and Culture Pride However, today’s ideals of beauty are far more inclusive than they were in the past. Thanks to social media, in particular Instagram, a lot of celebrities, whose beauty is not the “standard” one, encourage women and teenagers to be proud...
It is undeniable that every language brings with it not only a grammar code but also an entire culture. We do not translate culture only by directly using a language. We also apply various forms of intercultural communication. This is why it is important to have an intercultural approach when translating culture from one language to another. Intercultural Translation – Translate Culture through Words Of course, there are languages and industry fields where direct translation prevails, such as information technology or science. But in other fields, we cannot ignore the relevance of intercultural aspects. There are some intercultural words, or rather, words that influence and shape realities unknown in other language groups, or words shared with other languages but used for a different concept. For example, a lot of English words are used in Italian with different meanings. It’s the case of mister, which means football coach, or scotch, used to designate adhesive tape. The Use of Realia To translate culture means to convert a text through words called realia (personal names, places, names of food, etc.). We use these words in translation to indicate culturally specific objects that are very difficult to translate. The vocabulary connected to a determined culture or that belongs to a specific linguistic community contains words and expressions that describe events or objects representative of this culture. Simply put, some words have a local or historical “colour” and often, we do not have the perfect equivalent in another language. We can translate these realia by using different strategies. We can invent a new word (neologism) or we can replace the realia with a description....
How is food related to translation? The New Year has just begun and one of the first points of a New Year’s resolution is often to eat healthily and to keep fit. For this reason, in this blog post, we talk about food and how its cultural nature can sometimes be challenging in translation. Food has always been a vital part of life. We all need food, it is fuel for our body, it gives us energy and powers our runs. But food is also part of our language, our culture, and our identity. Food represents what we are if it is true that we are what we eat. Hence the relation between food and translation. As we all know, language and culture are intrinsically related. Since food is part of our culture, it is unavoidable that translating food will represent a hurdle for translators. Food in our lives and translation in idioms If we think of fairy tales, which are timeless, we can see how deeply rooted food is in every tradition. For example, take Snow White and The Seven Dwarves, from which the concept of the poisoned apple has spread around the world, and has also been used in famous films. In Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, there is a scene in which Princess Elizabeth, who has been kidnapped by Captain Barbossa, is eating with him. He offers her an apple and, looking at his gaze, she exclaims: “It’s poisoned!”. The cross-reference to the fairy tale is obvious. Food is also present in some idiomatic expressions, which sometimes are difficult to translate...
What is artificial intelligence and how is it dominating the world? In an increasingly digitalized world, we can’t deny that Artificial Intelligence (AI) is taking over. In this blog post, we look into the connection between artificial intelligence and translation. The leader in AI is the United States, inventor of the Internet, but China is quickly taking its place. In this race between the US and China, Russia is also trying its best to keep up. Indeed, at the AI Journey 2019 conference held in Moscow, Putin said: “Artificial intelligence is a resource of colossal power. Those who will own it will take the lead and will acquire a huge competitive edge.” But what is AI exactly? And what is its impact on our daily life? Artificial intelligence is the ability for computers to simulate human thought and behaviour in real-world environments. It works with deep learning, that imitates our brain’s functionality and allows computers to analyze situations based on data. A pioneering force in AI was the Logic Theorist, a program designed to mimic the problem-solving skills of a human being. Allen Newell, Herbert A. Simon and Cliff Shaw invented it in 1956, while John McCarthy coined the term AI. The Logic Theorist function was to prove mathematical theorems like the ones in Russell and Whitehead’s book Principia Mathematica. It proved 38 out of 52 problems in the book, showing better results than the authors. Artificial intelligence and translation – What is machine learning? The term artificial intelligence is often used interchangeably with the term machine learning, but they actually refer to different realities. While AI is the...
The connection between language and reality When we think about the relationship between language and reality, the following question arises: does language shape reality or is it the other way round? There’s a philosophy, called “direction of fit”, according to which both statements are true. This philosophy distinguishes two directions of fit. The first one is that language reflects reality. According to this direction, called the “word-to-world” direction of fit, the words match reality. For example, in the sentence “there is a pen on the table”, these words immediately match the world around us. In this case, language creates statements that can be true or false according to the reality they match. The second direction, the one we are going to explore in this blog post, is when we use language to change reality. This is the “world-to-word” direction of fit because the world is shaped to match the words. In other words, we can say that language is extremely powerful and individuals often use it to manipulate and control. In this blog post, we’ll see how this happened during periods of war and how it is happening today during the COVID-19 pandemic. The language in political speeches during the war and times of crisis: World War I When World War I broke out, politicians gave speeches to persuade citizens to fight for victory. These speeches were not just words. Rather, they were a smart way to brainwash citizens and lead them to think that fighting was the best choice. An example is the speech of Woodrow Wilson, the then United States President. In 1917, the United States declared...
