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Weiye Loh

Asymptote: Literary Encounters Between Languages and Cultures  | the kent rid... - 0 views

kentridgecommon.com/?p=10045

Language Translation

shared by Weiye Loh on 20 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • Asymptote is a new, international literary journal dedicated to the translation of literary works, both from various languages to English as well as from English to other languages. It was founded by our very own Singaporean writer, Lee Yew Leong, whose editorial team spans various continents and cultures – South Asia, the Middle East, Europe, America and East Asia – and is a veritable international, multi-cultural and multilingual task force.
  • A ‘classic’ metaphor comes from the Italian – “traduttore, traditore”, which means “translator, traitor”. My teacher had written this phrase on the board in my first translation class, demonstrating her (rather cynical) philosophical stance on the whole project of translation – something is always ‘lost in translation’, and the translator necessarily interferes in this gap of meaning guided her own bias, conscious or unconscious, political or philosophical.
  • In philosophy classes my charismatic and wildly esoteric professor once railed on about the possibility (or impossibility) of commensuration between various little narratives ( petits récits ), given the rejection of ‘modernist’ grand or meta-narratives. But translation, he declared dramatically, the possibility of translation hints at the possibility of commensurability between the little narratives. In his view, little narratives were understood as discrete cultures (Japanese, Iranian, Russian) and inter-cultural communication (and consequent kindness and friendliness amongst humankind) is only possible if translation is possible.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • The Asymptote raison d’être is much more optimistic than my translation teacher’s stance, and much less abstruse than that of my philosophy professor’s. The editors write, “We are interested in encounters between languages and the consequences of these encounters. Though a translation may never fully replicate the original in effect (thus our name, “asymptote”: the dotted line on a graph that a mathematical function may tend towards but never reach), it is in itself an act of creation. … The value of translation is that it unleashes from latency ideas and emotions to a vast sea of others who do not have access to the language in which these ideas and emotions reside.”
  • With the asymptote, the y-axis and the x-axis will never get lonely, pairing off into the infinite distance and the distant infinity; the original text and its companion translations proliferate in the blinker-free world wide net, reaching a broader readership and our earthly community grows closer with a shared cache of stories, tales, imaginations.
  • In addition, “[n]ot only will [Asymptote] display work in its original language after the English translation, [but they] also encourage translators (especially of poems) to provide audio recordings of the original work so that the reader has access as well to the sounds of that language, via a “Press PLAY” audio option whenever such an MP3 recording is available.” This project straddles cultures, languages as well as media – writing, audio and even visual
  • Weiye Loh on 20 Feb 11
     
    Koh Choon Hwee
Weiye Loh

Balderdash: Stephen Fry on English, and Pedantry - 0 views

gssq.blogspot.com/...y-on-english-and-pedantry.html

Language Pedantry

shared by Weiye Loh on 27 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • Those once fashionable Frenchies designated them are Langue, language as an idea, and parole, language as utterance...
  • The structuralists: one of their number, perhaps the best known, Roland Barthes, liked to use two words jouissance and plaisir. Le plaisir du texte. The pleasure of the text. Those who think structuralism spelt or spelled death to conscious art and such bourgeois comforts as style, accomplishment and enjoyment might be surprised that the pleasure of the text, the jouissance, the juicy joy of language, was important to Roland and his followers. Only to a dullard is language a means of communication and nothing more. It would be like saying sex is a means of reproduction and no more and food a means of fuelling and no more.
  • What is considered "correct" language works very much like how Scientific theories get in vogue. When there's a Kuhnian paradigm shift - voilà, what was once wrong becomes right, and vice versa. That said, outside of the usual hunting grounds of pedants (who Fry is decrying), grammar has functions outside of being correct for the sake of being correct.
  • Weiye Loh on 27 Oct 10
     
    Stephen Fry on English, and Pedantry
Weiye Loh

YouTube - Stephen Fry Kinetic Typography - Language - 0 views

www.youtube.com/watch

Language Pedantry

shared by Weiye Loh on 21 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • Weiye Loh on 21 Oct 10
     
    Stephen Fry Kinetic Typography - Language
Sarah Eeee

Dissent Magazine - Arguing The World - Are English Departments Killing the Humanities? - - 0 views

www.dissentmagazine.org/atw.php

shared by Sarah Eeee on 10 Jan 11 - No Cached
  • The focus of this post is not the thousand-and-one times told tale of how the corporatization of the university and state divestment from higher education has had a particularly disastrous impact upon humanities departments
  • We can treat these realities as facts to be taken for granted.
  • We might wonder if there are conditions of intellectual deprivation for which the institutional structures governing the humanities are partly to blame.
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  • For Arnoldians, literature would play the cultural role once occupied by religion, with beauty civilizing the modern individual.
  • The avatar of that attitude was Harvard’s Douglas Bush, who speaking in 1944 identified the cultural tradition running from the ancient Greeks through Milton as “that heritage for which the war has been fought.”
  • To put it another way, the English department currently labors under a deep paradox: it devotes much of its intellectual energy to declaring the limits of Anglo-American culture while being structurally wedded to that culture in a way that necessarily privileges it.
  • At the risk of being impolite, I will be pointed about their implications: this is not a progressive program of higher education, but is in fact a perniciously anti-progressive one. It confirms the casual undergraduate presupposition that nothing occurring before 1980 is of real significance, that the free market is the culmination of the human desire for liberty, and that digital fora for blather are now fundamental to meditations on our role in the universe.
  • In its youth it promised an education in literature without the hard work of learning languages, much to the dismay of classicists. In its middle age it offered a stripped-down version of philosophy under the banner of critical theory, an intrusion that philosophers bore with Stoic calm. Now in its senescence, the English department is being beaten by communications at its own game of watering down curriculum and reducing humanist traditions to what today’s adolescent will find—to use the favorite malapropism of the text-messaging generation—“relatable.”
  • In an age more forthright in its bigotries, Irving Babbitt advocated a New Humanism that readily embraced a meritocracy of learning. The humanitarian, in Babbitt’s phrase, “has sympathy for mankind in the lump,” where a humanist “is interested in the perfecting of the individual.” The return to the classics, or to great texts traditionally conceived, never seems in my mind fully to dispense with such patrician sensibilities.
  • The humanities programs of the next century might rather be structured around “world humanisms.” In such programs the phrase “great texts” would evoke the Bhagavad Gita every bit as much as it does The Iliad. The learning of at least one world language would be required, be it Arabic, French, or Mandarin. At its center would be neither the vernacular nor an artificially constructed “Western tradition.”
  • Instead it would explore on their own terms, and in their rich cross-fertilization, millenia of world traditions offering insight on the relationships between individual and society; on our ethical obligations to our fellow beings, human and non-human; and on flourishing and justice.
  • An example of a “world humanisms” approach is suggested by a conference that I recently attended in Istanbul, which brought together philosophers and theologians from North America and Turkey. One of the many rich portraits that emerged was of first-century Alexandria, where the Neoplatonism of the Jewish philosopher Philo directly influenced the early Christians Clement and Origen, as well as laying the foundations of Islamic philosophy through al-Kindi and al-Farabi. We are blinded to the study of this kind of influence by a focus on “Western Civilization” that favors Athens and Rome to Alexandria and treats Origen only as a precursor to Saint Augustine, that supposed inventor of an exclusively Christian syncretism between philosophy and theology.
  • Our task as humanists of the twenty-first century is to make those long and deep traditions visible, and to do so in the teeth of those forces that would strip them away, be those forces technological, commercial, political, or intellectual.
  • Sarah Eeee on 10 Jan 11
     
    An alternate take on the "future of the humanities" argument. This author proposes a revamped sort of literature study incorporating modern languages and a fervently international approach to literature, thought, and culture.
  • Sarah Eeee on 10 Jan 11
     
    This one skirts the edges of the digital humanities, by proposing a vision of future literature study. Explicitly digital projects could be useful for finding the international connections this author calls for.
Weiye Loh

Why I Am Teaching a Course Called "Wasting Time on the Internet" - The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...wasting-time-on-the-internet

Reading Writing Internet Academia Plagiarism

shared by Weiye Loh on 22 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • The vast amount of the Web’s language is perfect raw material for literature. Disjunctive, compressed, decontextualized, and, most important, cut-and-pastable, it’s easily reassembled into works of art.
  • What they’ve been surreptitiously doing throughout their academic career—patchwriting, cutting-and-pasting, lifting—must now be done in the open, where they are accountable for their decisions. Suddenly, new questions arise: What is it that I’m lifting? And why? What do my choices about what to appropriate tell me about myself? My emotions? My history? My biases and passions? The critiques turn toward formal improvement: Could I have swiped better material? Could my methods in constructing these texts have been better? Not surprisingly, they thrive. What I’ve learned from these years in the classroom is that no matter what we do, we can’t help but express ourselves.
  • Weiye Loh on 22 Nov 14
     
    "Web surfing as a form of self-expression. Every click is indicative of who we are: indicative of our likes, our dislikes, our emotions, our politics, our world view. Of course, marketers have long recognized this, but literature hasn't yet learned to treasure-and exploit-this situation. The idea for this class arose from my frustration with reading endless indictments of the Web for making us dumber. I've been feeling just the opposite. We're reading and writing more than we have in a generation, but we are reading and writing differently-skimming, parsing, grazing, bookmarking, forwarding, retweeting, reblogging, and spamming language-in ways that aren't yet recognized as literary."
Weiye Loh

A `Bad Writer' Bites Back - 0 views

pantherfile.uwm.edu/...butler.htm

Academic Writing Postmodernism

shared by Weiye Loh on 24 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • The journal, Philosophy and Literature, has offered itself as the arbiter of good prose and accused some of us of bad writing by awarding us "prizes."
  • The targets, however, have been restricted to scholars on the left whose work focuses on topics like sexuality, race, nationalism and the workings of capitalism -- a point the news media ignored. Still, the whole exercise hints at a serious question about the relation of language and politics: why are some of the most trenchant social criticisms often expressed through difficult and demanding language?
  • scholars in the humanities should be able to clarify how their work informs and illuminates everyday life. Equally, however, such scholars are obliged to question common sense, interrogate its tacit presumptions and provoke new ways of looking at a familiar world.
  • Weiye Loh on 24 Oct 10
     
    A `Bad Writer' Bites Back By JUDITH BUTLER
Sam McGrath

This Week In Ed Tech - Home - A Case for the iPad: Teaching English as a Seco... - 0 views

www.thisweekinedtech.com/...h-as-a-second-language-es.html

edtech ipad2

shared by Sam McGrath on 13 May 11 - No Cached
  • Sam McGrath on 13 May 11
     
    Good argument for the iPad in classrooms.
Weiye Loh

Why Concrete Language Communicates Truth - PsyBlog - 0 views

www.spring.org.uk/...anguage-communicates-truth.php

Langauge Abstraction

shared by Weiye Loh on 01 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • Verbs as well as nouns can be more or less abstract. Verbs like 'count' and 'write' are solid, concrete and unambiguous, while verbs like 'help' and 'insult' are open to some interpretation.
  • Even a verb's tense can affect its perceived concreteness. The passive tense is usually thought more abstract, because it doesn't refer to the actor by name. Perhaps that's partly why fledgling writers are often told to write in the active tense: to the reader it will seem more true.
  • three reasons why concreteness suggests truth: Our minds process concrete statements more quickly, and we automatically associate quick and easy with true (check out these studies on the power of simplicity). We can create mental pictures of concrete statements more easily. When something is easier to picture, it's easier to recall, so seems more true. Also, when something is more easily pictured it seems more plausible, so it's more readily believed.
Weiye Loh

Kamila Shamsie on the perils and delights of translation | Books | The Guardian - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...ila-shamsie-author-translation

Translation Reading Language Culture

shared by Weiye Loh on 30 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • When it comes to books of high merit, the translated sentence that fails to relay some nuance or music of the original, is tinged with loss; the translated sentence that doesn't understand the nuance or music to begin with is negligent; the untranslated sentence is a terrible deprivation.
  • "translated" and "foreign" are two separate things – sometimes a translated world can feel far more familiar than the foreign worlds I might find in a novel of the English language; and as a reader I am at home with both familiarity and foreignness.
Audrey B

JSTOR: Modern Language Notes, Vol. 75, No. 4 (Apr., 1960), pp. 297-304 - 0 views

www.jstor.org/...3040415

Thoreau Action Walden Civil Disobedience

shared by Audrey B on 31 May 10 - No Cached
  • Audrey B on 31 May 10
     
    Comparing Thoreau's gestures and actions around the times of Walden and "Civil Disobedience"
Neal C

JSTOR: The Bulletin of the Midwest Modern Language Association, Vol. 4, No. 1 (Spring, ... - 0 views

www.jstor.org.erl.lib.byu.edu/...1314967

shared by Neal C on 01 Jun 10 - No Cached
    • Neal C
      Neal C on 01 Jun 10
       
      2nd poaragraph
Weiye Loh

Deep Grammar will correct your text using AI technology - 0 views

thenextweb.com/...-your-text-using-ai-technology

Grammar Machine Learning Deep Learning Algorithm Language Artificial Intelligence

shared by Weiye Loh on 10 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • Weiye Loh on 10 Jan 16
     
    Deep Grammar works by giving each word a value known as a vector. It then uses that value to determine what context you have used the term in and whether or not it needs changing when it analyzes your text. Mugan gives the example of how Deep Grammar might learn that "I feel worried" is closer to the same meaning as "I feel anxious" than it is to "I feel sleepy." It takes three steps to analyze what has been written - firstly, it computes the likelihood that what's written is what you mean to say and then if needs be, it will replicate the sentence or phrase with something more likely to be what you meant and makes a suggestion to edit.
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