The main reason behind Amazon’s success lies in the long tail paradigm that is now being exploited to its extremes thanks to the dematerialization of books.
In the physical world, there isn’t enough shelf space “to carry everything for everyone.” As a result, the industrial business era has been mostly about a small number of mass-produced-and-sold products, the “head of the long tail” (red part of the graph).
The digital era turns the tables on traditional thinking about supply and demand. We are moving into the (yellow) long tail of the curve. That is the world of infinite niches.
Back in the old days people had to hunt for books at local bookstores or order them through the internet and wait till they were delivered to their door.
But now they can:
Click on a search engine on their Kindle, find the book they’re looking for, buy it with one click and read it immediately on their device. Wherever they are. At home. Abroad. With no hidden connection expenses nor subscription fees.
Buy books in English at a fraction of the price normally levied at local european bookstores. Most Kindle books cost less than 9.95 dollars. Can you imagine that? That’s about 7 euro.
Travel wherever with a small 8.5 ounce device that can carry up to 3.500 books.
Here are some interesting articles on interpreting and translation studies that I collected in these past years.
I cannot post them directly due to copyright issues but if you’re interested in any one of them I’ll be more than pleased to send them to you by email.
He who sees everything as nothing but the Self, and the Self in everything he sees, such a seer withdraws from nothing. (Isha Upanishad, translation by Alistair Shearer)
I have just returned from a one month trip to India. I was truly impressed by those wonderful people. So calm despite the extreme misery they live in, yet incredibly rich in terms of their souls, of their commitment to religion, to God.
Beautiful women, especially in the more remote towns of central India where you can often see them carrying the most heavy loads of wood on their heads with the elegance of top models on a catwalk.
In the larger cities people dying of hunger and diseases have such wonderful eyes full of hope and dignity that make me think how small we westeners are who live in such opulence and yet are so poor in spirit.
The following is a list of translation procedures developed by Vinay, Darbelnet, Newmark and Catford. Although they were developed for written translations they can also apply to interpreting.
Simultaneous interpreting is generally considered to be a very difficult task that involves a number of complex efforts. According to Daniel Gile’s suggestive tightrope model, simultaneous interpreting is made up of three different concurrent efforts:
a listening and analysis effort
a production effort and
a short-term memory effort.
Although models such as this one are very precious to describe what happens “behind the scenes” in the so-called black box (the interpreter’s mind), it is perhaps best to approach the interpreting process as though it did not involve any special effort at all.
The frame of mind required to produce a good working interpretation is such that it actually has to come by as a simple and spontaneous event. In the end simultaneous interpreting is only as hard as one makes it. L1 and L2 should not be viewed as ferocious opponents, but as precious allies that peacefully and placidly work together.
P.S. A word of advice to those interpreters who are moving their first steps in this very competitive business: be wary of those seemingly “nice” new colleagues who offer to share their 20-page glossary of abstruse lingo just a few minutes into the start of the conference.
Note down only those few words that are truly essential, relax, allow your mind to be as blank as possible, focus only on the message and on the speaker…. and “voila’” the magic is done.
Il carissmo Paolo Noseda traduce Annie Lennox da ‘Che Tempo che Fa’. Come al solito piu’ che perfetto, mai noioso e sempre ‘a cavallo’ della persone che traduce. Ma senza pedanteria e sopratutto senza finzione.
It goes without saying that academic referencing is paramount in helping a reader identify important resources that would otherwise remain unexplored. Yet it may sometimes be employed deceitfully to substantiate weak or irrelevant points and perhaps show deference to some specific milieus, often the ones to which the author belongs.
The interesting article linked below focuses on the interpreting field, although it probably could be extended to others.
Mnemonic systems such as the one developed by Cicero centuries ago would come in very handy to consecutive interpreters when traditional note-taking is not feasible. In interpreting for the media, for example, spontaneity is appreciated and scribbling is generally considered inappropriate.
One of the oldest mnemonic systems is the method of loci [LOW-sye]. A “locus” is a location, “loci” is the plural. The Method of Loci uses locations of a familiar place (imagined in memory) as a framework for memory retrieval.
To use the method of loci, you associate items you wish to remember later with locations of a familiar room, building, or street. Then, to retrieve the information, you mentally “stroll down memory lane” and visualize the same locations. If the method works, the information you stored in various locations will come back with the memory of the location. To be effective, one must usually visualize an object “doing something” or interacting in some way with the objects at a particular location.
The method of loci is ancient. Cicero, the Roman orator, recommended it. Lecturers in his day were not allowed to use lecture notes, so memorization techniques were valued.
Cicero told a traditional story about how the method of loci was discovered. A Greek poet named Simonides was entertaining a group of wealthy noblemen at a banquet. Suddenly a pair of mysterious figures called him outside. They turned out to be messengers from the Olympian gods Castor and Pollux, praised by Simonides in his poem. As soon as Simonides stepped outside, the roof of the banquet hall collapsed, squashing everybody inside. The mangled corpses could not be identified until Simonides stepped forward, pointed to the place where each victim had been sitting, and said each name in turn.
How did Simonides accomplish this feat? He mentally recreated the scene of the banquet, visualizing each reveler in his place. When he saw the places, it helped him remember the person who had been sitting there.
A more modern approach would involve the use of a digital voice recorder, as already discussed in this same Blog and previously in some SCIC Newsletters (see Simultaneous/Consecutive Mode).
An optimal segmentation of the source message is by far a simultaneous interpreter’s most important resource to avert the risk of falling behind a fast speaker, of missing some important information or overloading short term memory.
While this may not come as a novelty, few interpreters will be aware that they can learn to master this technique through an apparently unrelated discipline: subtitling.
Here is a brief excerpt from a very informative article that I recently came across in the Translation Journal.
Segmentation at the highest nodes: Subtitled text should appear segmented at the highest syntactic nodes possible. This means that each subtitle flash should ideally contain one complete sentence. In cases where the sentence cannot fit in a single-line subtitle and has to continue over a second line or even over a new subtitle flash, the segmentation on each of the lines should be arranged to coincide with the highest syntactic node possible. For example, before we segment the phrase:
“The destruction of the city was inevitable.” (44 characters),
we first have to think of its syntactic tree as follows:
A segmentation on the fifth node (N5) would create the two-line subtitle
“The destruction of the
city was inevitable.”
A segmentation on the second node (N2) would create the two-line subtitle
“The destruction of the city
was inevitable.”
Out of the two segmentations, it is the second that flows as more readable. This occurs because the higher the node, the greater the grouping of the semantic load and the more complete the piece of information presented to the brain. When we segment a sentence, we force the brain to pause its linguistic processing for a while, until the eyes trace the next piece of linguistic information. In cases where segmentation is inevitable, therefore, we should try to force this pause on the brain at a point where the semantic load has already managed to convey a satisfactorily complete piece of information.
A very interesting post that opens with a (dissenting) opinion of two U.S. Court of Appeal’s Judges, attempts to go beyond the dictionary definition of what a Dead Language is by asking its participants: is Latin a Dead Language?
Here is an amusing article by the BBC that reports on the publication of the latest edition of the Vatican’s Latin dictionary called Lexicon Recentis Latinitas (Recent Latin Lexicon), an abridged Italian-Latin version being available online. You will find it interesting to learn that the FBI is the “officium foederatum vestigatorium” and that the video-phone is called “telephonium albo televisifico coniunctum”.
And finally here is a quote from Wikipedia that makes a distinction between Extinct Languages and Dead Languages:
Synopsis: In the mountains of Vizcaya, a band of gypsies are gathered round a large fire. Azucena broods over the fire. She sings a ballad of a pitiful woman being dragged by a howling mob toward the flames. As the others depart, Manrico, who has been lying at her side, asks her to tell her the story that inspired such a sad song.
She tells him how her mother was accused by a haughty Count of having bewitched his young son; how she was brought in chains to meet her doom at this very spot; how she herself followed, her own baby in her arms, weeping; how her mother tried to stop and bless her, but was viciously thrust upon the stake. Her mother’s last words, in her death agony, were “Avenge me!” Those words have ever since echoed in her heart.
Manrico asks if she was avenged. Azucena replies that she abducted the Count’s son and brought him here, where the fire still burned. The baby cried piteously; her maternal feelings broke her heart; suddenly a horrible vision appeared: the killers; the torture; her mother crying out “Avenge me!” Blindly she siezed the victim in her trembling hand and thrust it on the fire. In an instant the vision was gone. Only the raging flames remained, consuming their prey; and there beside her was the son of the wicked Count. It was her own son she had cast into the fire! (from opera.stanford.edu)
