Bilingual

'Odyssey' translator Emily Wilson: Nolan shouldn't have written movie himself
12 hours ago
- Emily Wilson criticizes Christopher Nolan's script for lacking emotional depth and character development, particularly in Odysseus's motivation.
- Wilson notes the film omits sex scenes and depicts food poorly, while stripping Odysseus of desires like hunger and lust.
- She suggests hiring a scriptwriter could have resolved the film's issues.
- Wilson praises the cast's performance and finds the film worth watching despite its flaws.
- She is working on a new translation of Homer's epic, free from line-for-line constraints, and enjoying the process.
- Wilson's upcoming essay collection 'Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea' explores ancient literature and translation challenges.
- She critiques the film's handling of gods and sirens, finding them unclear or lacking divine presence.
- Wilson reflects on her personal journey with 'The Odyssey' from childhood performance to scholarly translation.
- She notes being the first woman to translate the epic into English was a surprise, not a motivation for her work.
- Wilson rejects labeling her translation as feminist, emphasizing the depth of character portrayal in Homer.
- She addresses online harassment but highlights positive engagement with new readers discovering Homer through the film.
Offline command line translation with TranslateGemma + Ollama
3 days ago
- A script translates text from the command line completely offline using TranslateGemma, Ollama, and Efficient Language Detector.
- It reads input from stdin, detects the source language, uses the system language as the target, and returns the translation.
- Built in Deno for personal use, but can be adapted for other needs.
- Provides offline, private, and automatic translation, though imperfect.
<antirez>
3 days ago
- The author's blog writing process involves two steps: thinking about topics for weeks or months, then writing and publishing in 30 minutes without much concern for form.
- Blogging is prioritized to be quick (under 30-60 minutes) to avoid abandoning it, leading to poorly written English posts due to limited vocabulary, grammar errors, and Italian-influenced sentence construction.
- For a post on LLMs and programming, the author tried writing in Italian and translating to English with GPT-4, resulting in a better post with a personal voice, comparable time, and detection as human-written.
- The author is uncertain about future blogging methods, fearing loss of English writing confidence, but notes their true voice may emerge in translated posts using their full native lexical ability.
- The choice available in 2024 evokes both hope for human possibilities with talking machines and fear that AI may discourage hard tasks like learning new languages.
Show HN: What 180k words look like as a temporal knowledge graph (Oz series)
5 days ago
- Readers should read in their preferred language; authors should just write.
- SynapTale reads a story chapter by chapter, remembering every character, promise, and secret.
- It powers translations that remain faithful across hundreds of chapters.
- It provides a living encyclopedia of the story's world, including connections the author never wrote.
- Explore the interactive demo at synaptale.com/graph.
Emily Wilson: Scholia
15 days ago
- Ordinary words and phrases can be the hardest to translate, not just the complex ones.
- Homeric characters often have standard epithets that fit metrically with their names.
- Odysseus's olive wood bed symbolizes his control over his household and his craftsmanship.
- Translation comparison aims to analyze how English versions echo and differ from the Greek, not to rank or criticize.
- Emily Wilson used Twitter to share insights on translation challenges and compare passages from different translations.
- Her Twitter presence was described as revolutionary for exposing the process of knowledge formation.
- Selected Twitter threads cover topics like Hector and Andromache, translation dilemmas, and specific scenes from Homer and Ovid.
- Wilson discusses the impossibility of perfectly translating Homer due to linguistic and stylistic differences.
- Key translation issues include metaphor, stylistic equivalence, and handling wordplay or cultural nuances.
- Notable moments analyzed include Argos the dog, the hanging of slave women, and the Sirens' cognitive seduction.

translation

'Odyssey' translator Emily Wilson: Nolan shouldn't have written movie himself

Offline command line translation with TranslateGemma + Ollama

<antirez>

Show HN: What 180k words look like as a temporal knowledge graph (Oz series)

Emily Wilson: Scholia