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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   31962 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 24, 2025

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Incredible.

I was very sure translation was fucking dead four years back when DeepL started doing English<->Czech passably well, not the mangled mess google translate was making.

Technical text sure. But literature translation is more closer to writing the book anew. I really appreciate the exemplary work the early 90s translatiors did with Wodehouse in my native language. You could feel in your bones the interwar period.

And when I read it in original - to my surprise some of the puns were less funnier in the original.

Is there that much demand for purely literary translation? I'd expect that like most romantic/artisanal fields, the bulk of the work is dry and boring. Here, make that washing machine's manual Spanish.

Currently, the bulk of my work is website content.

Literary translation has some demand and I know people who do it, the main problem is that the pay is crap compared to technical translation and much of it is dependent on getting grants.

Somehow that's even more surprising. Who even reads websites at this point? Most of the content I run into is commercial slop, and if it's not written by AI itself, it might as well have been.

Website content includes interface stuff, I should clarify.

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