Martin Boyd

In an article published in the last issue of the ATA Chronicle, Nataly Kelly raises some interesting questions about the professional impartiality of translators and interpreters. In particular, she points out that many of us cling to dubious beliefs on linguistic matters, such as the belief that one regional variant of a language is “better” than another, or that every language should be kept “pure”, free from foreign influences. Among people with little knowledge about the nature and functions of language, the existence of such beliefs is perhaps understandable; but among linguists such ideas would suggest a lack of professionalism and an ignorance of our own discipline that should worry us.

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Martin Boyd

The four big authors of the Latin American “Boom”: Julio Cortázar, Mario Vargas Llosa, Gabriel García Márquez and Carlos Fuentes.

In the English-speaking world, the Latin American literary “Boom” that began in the 1960s was understood as a sudden upsurge in literary creativity in Latin America, as if suddenly, Latin Americans were finding a literary voice. But if there was really ever a sudden “boom” in Latin American literature, it probably occurred in the early twentieth century, with the emergence of literary giants like Rubén Darío (1867-1916), Horacio Quiroga (1878-1937), Alfonso Reyes (1889-1959) and Cesar Vallejo (1892-1938). Sadly, most of the English-speaking world missed out on these authors because at the time they were writing, very little Latin American literature was being translated into English. What really changed in the 1960s was not that Latin Americans suddenly began to write, but that the English-speaking world suddenly began wanting to read what they were writing.

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Martin Boyd

Another product of Machine Translation?

Sarita me out of the fire, because before you know it the future of humanity I did not care. She showed me the way of the spirit, he informed me that all men are equal, that the only worthy ideal is the class struggle and the victory of the proletariat, I did read Marx, Engels and Carlos Fuentes, and do everything to what? To destroy after his indiscretion.

Readers of the above paragraph could probably be excused for believing it to be the incoherent raving of a lunatic with a somewhat tenuous grasp of the English language.  Actually, it is the direct result of applying Google Translate to the opening paragraph of “La ley de Herodes”, a short story by Jorge Ibargüengoitía, one of Mexico’s greatest comic writers.

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