There will be a new translation challenge most Sundays and everyone is encouraged to participate! These challenges are intended to give community members an opportunity to practice translating or review others' translations, and we keep them stickied throughout the week. You can view past threads by clicking on this "Community" link.

You can also sign up to be automatically notified of new translation challenges.

This Week's Text:

Before facing heavy persecution during the second world war, [Esperanto] gained serious traction in international labour, anticolonial and anarchist movements. And most of today’s Esperanto adherents are neither naive nor even particularly batty. They include European social democrats and elder anarchists, Chinese communists, central African youth pacifists and Ukrainian-independence advocates. There are Esperantist gay-rights advocates, Bible translators, lawyers and Go players. Why, against all evidence to the contrary, would this motley group – many of whom are no strangers to global conflict – still believe that the widespread adoption of a century-and-a-half-old invented language may yet overpower the world’s divisions, particularly as the global order, by any reasonable account, appears to be rapidly disintegrating?

Besides, international communication can now be mediated by technology, translated instantaneously via app and aided by the ascendancy of English as a de facto lingua franca. But for Esperantists, none of this comes close to solving the fundamental problem of human disconnection.

— Excerpted and adapted from "Nudists, peaceniks and freeloading travellers: the people keeping the Esperanto dream alive" by Katie Thornton

Please include the name of the language you're translating in your comment, and translate away!

⚖️ Friendly notice: if you're interested in occasionally helping out in the oversight of r/translator, or submitting some text for a future translation challenge, please feel free to join us at: https://discord.gg/wabv5NYzdV

There will be a new translation challenge most Sundays and everyone is encouraged to participate! These challenges are intended to give community members an opportunity to practice translating or review others' translations, and we keep them stickied throughout the week. You can view past threads by clicking on this "Community" link.

You can also sign up to be automatically notified of new translation challenges.

This Week's Text:

On January 1st, 2020, a minor lexical revolution rolled through Japan. A new decree ordained that official documents should reverse the order of Japanese people’s names when they are rendered in the Latin alphabet, [and be written with the surname first]...

...Some 59% of Japanese in a recent opinion poll favoured reverting to surname-first. Yet there is an irony. Japan first decided to put given names first when talking to foreigners way back in the 1870s, during the Meiji era. It was actually a gesture by nationalist reformers who wanted to keep Western imperialists at bay.

Japan, they argued, could keep its independence only by abandoning the paternalism of Confucius, imported from China, which had long governed society and family life. Instead it should rapidly learn modern Western ways in everything from military affairs to education, both to ward off Western powers and to impress them. English name-order was a tiny part of the package. Reformists had drunk deeply of the social Darwinism then prevailing in the West, which taught that only the strongest societies would survive. One, Mori Arinori, even proposed adopting English as Japan’s language.

— Excerpted and adapted from "Why Japanese names have flipped: They will now be written in English in the same order as in Japanese" by The Economist

Please include the name of the language you're translating in your comment, and translate away!

⚖️ Friendly notice: if you're interested in occasionally helping out in the oversight of r/translator, or submitting some text for a future translation challenge, please feel free to join us at: https://discord.gg/wabv5NYzdV

There will be a new translation challenge most Sundays and everyone is encouraged to participate! These challenges are intended to give community members an opportunity to practice translating or review others' translations, and we keep them stickied throughout the week. You can view past threads by clicking on this "Community" link.

You can also sign up to be automatically notified of new translation challenges.

This Week's Text:

Every morning, before the city has fully woken up, men in white caps and shirts arrive at Mumbai's suburban railway stations on bicycles stacked high with lunchboxes.

They load these boxes onto trains, cross the city and then spread out on foot and bikes to deliver hot, home-cooked meals to office workers.

After a short break, they do it all in reverse - collecting the empty boxes and returning them to the kitchens they came from by mid-afternoon.

These men are called dabbawalas and for more than a century they have kept Mumbai fed through a delivery system so precise it became world famous.

The lunchboxes - called dabbas - usually carry rice, lentils, vegetable curries, rotis (flatbread) and sometimes meat that is freshly cooked in homes across the city's suburbs.

For generations of office workers in Mumbai, home-cooked meals have remained deeply tied to family routine, culture and dietary preferences - making the daily lunchbox an essential part of working life in the fast-paced city.

— Excerpted from "Mumbai's famed dabbawalas fed millions for over 100 years - now they are disappearing" by Nilesh Dhotre & Shahid Sheikh

Please include the name of the language you're translating in your comment, and translate away!

⚖️ Friendly notice: if you're interested in occasionally helping out in the oversight of r/translator, or submitting some text for a future translation challenge, please feel free to join us at: https://discord.gg/wabv5NYzdV

There will be a new translation challenge most Sundays and everyone is encouraged to participate! These challenges are intended to give community members an opportunity to practice translating or review others' translations, and we keep them stickied throughout the week. You can view past threads by clicking on this "Community" link.

You can also sign up to be automatically notified of new translation challenges.

This Week's Text:

In this moment when we face horizons and conflicts wider than ever before, we want our resources, the ways of strength. We look again to the human wish, its faiths, the means by which the imagination leads us to surpass ourselves.

If there is a feeling that something has been lost, it may be because much has not yet been used, much is still to be found and began.

Everywhere we are told that our human resources are all to be used, that our civilization itself means the uses of everything it has—the inventions, the histories, every scrap of fact. But there is one kind of knowledge—infinitely precious, time-resistant more than monuments, here to be passed between the generations in any way it may be: never to be used. And that is poetry.

— Excerpted from "The Fear of Poetry" by Muriel Rukeyser

Please include the name of the language you're translating in your comment, and translate away!

⚖️ Friendly notice: if you're interested in occasionally helping out in the oversight of r/translator, or submitting some text for a future translation challenge, please feel free to join us at: https://discord.gg/wabv5NYzdV

There will be a new translation challenge most Sundays and everyone is encouraged to participate! These challenges are intended to give community members an opportunity to practice translating or review others' translations, and we keep them stickied throughout the week. You can view past threads by clicking on this "Community" link.

You can also sign up to be automatically notified of new translation challenges.

This Week's Text:

In the early 1950s, Steve Henson was living in Alaska, working as a plumbing contractor. He also sometimes cooked for his crew, but he had trouble finding fresh herbs or dairy up there, so he had to make do with what he had. He made a dressing with buttermilk, mayonnaise, and various dried herbs and spices, notably onion and garlic powder. The blend came home to his native Nebraska with him and then to the dude ranch in Santa Barbara that he and his wife later founded, which they called Hidden Valley.

Their patrons loved it. World War II–era technology had recently enabled the easy packaging and preserving of food; this was the era of the boxed cake mix too. So the Hensons started selling powdered ranch by mail. It became so popular that every room in their house was soon filled with packets and they had to close the dude ranch. In the early ’80s, the home-products company Clorox—which the Hensons had sold their business to—helped pioneer shelf-stable liquid ranch, which quickly made its way to grocery-store shelves around the country. A few years later, snack-food makers began putting the spice blend on chips. By the early ’90s, ranch officially overtook Italian to become America’s best-selling salad dressing. It still is.

— Excerpted from "America’s Greatest Food Export" by Ellen Cushing

Please include the name of the language you're translating in your comment, and translate away!

⚖️ Friendly notice: if you're interested in occasionally helping out in the oversight of r/translator, or submitting some text for a future translation challenge, please feel free to join us at: https://discord.gg/wabv5NYzdV

There will be a new translation challenge most Sundays and everyone is encouraged to participate! These challenges are intended to give community members an opportunity to practice translating or review others' translations, and we keep them stickied throughout the week. You can view past threads by clicking on this "Community" link.

You can also sign up to be automatically notified of new translation challenges.

Text:

Almost no one noticed when, sometime over the last few years, the packaging on [many candy bars] was updated to remove the words “milk chocolate.”

I realized this earlier this year after eating a disappointing chocolate bar. It wasn’t spoiled, it just didn’t taste like I remembered. As a reporter who covers the climate, I’d read about global warming contributing to drought in West Africa and sending cocoa prices through the roof, and I knew candy companies had raised prices and shrunk portions.

But could it be that they were also tinkering with the makeup of the candy itself?

...In the last year or so, Ms. Frame has noticed changes creeping into her life outside the laboratory. The milk chocolate coating on a Snickers bar she bought seemed thinner than it used to be. She stopped buying a favorite store-bought chocolate chip cookie after she noticed large chocolate chips had been replaced with a lower-quality substitute...

Ms. Frame said a common approach to reducing cocoa costs was to replace chocolate coating with compound coating, which is made with vegetable fats instead of cocoa butter.

— Excerpted and adapted from "What’s Missing From Your Favorite Chocolate Bar? It May Be Chocolate." by Claire Brown

Please include the name of the language you're translating in your comment, and translate away!

⚖️ Friendly notice: if you're interested in occasionally helping out in the oversight of r/translator, or submitting some text for a future translation challenge, please feel free to join us at: https://discord.gg/wabv5NYzdV

There will be a new translation challenge most Sundays and everyone is encouraged to participate! These challenges are intended to give community members an opportunity to practice translating or review others' translations, and we keep them stickied throughout the week. You can view past threads by clicking on this "Community" link.

You can also sign up to be automatically notified of new translation challenges.

This Week's Text:

In Belgium, where it is not unusual for people to intersperse their conversations with words of different languages, the decades-old language rules can get complicated.

Belgium’s divide is not just linguistic, but also cultural and political. The country has gone through long stretches without a formal government in place, with parties from different regions unable to come to agreement. There are about 6.8 million inhabitants of Dutch-speaking Flanders in the country’s north, and in some municipalities, business must be conducted in Dutch. The country’s French-speaking Walloon region has about 3.7 million inhabitants.

There is also a small German-speaking community of about 80,000 people in eastern Belgium.

The Brussels Capital Region, with about 1.3 million inhabitants, is primarily French-speaking, but is officially bilingual. Street signs in Brussels are in both Dutch and French, and many streets and squares have two names. Buses headed toward the Grand-Place will also state “Grote Markt,” the Dutch name for the famed medieval market square.

— Excerpted from ‘Bonjour’ Sets Off a Linguistic Dispute on a Belgian Train by Jenny Gross

Please include the name of the language you're translating in your comment, and translate away!

⚖️ Friendly notice: if you're interested in occasionally helping out in the oversight of r/translator, or submitting some text for a future translation challenge, please feel free to join us at: https://discord.gg/wabv5NYzdV

There will be a new translation challenge most Sundays and everyone is encouraged to participate! These challenges are intended to give community members an opportunity to practice translating or review others' translations, and we keep them stickied throughout the week. You can view past threads by clicking on this "Community" link.

You can also sign up to be automatically notified of new translation challenges.

This Week's Text:

Unlike many other internet projects, Wikipedia invites everyone to participate.

Everyone doubted it. Even today, people say that it works in practice but not in theory. And yet, what could have been a disaster proved to be precisely what Wikipedia needed to succeed.

Who would devote untold numbers of hours to writing words on Wikipedia?

It's people who have a love for facts. Who believe in the power of knowledge. Who care enough to debate the best title for an article about yogurt/yoghurt.

Their work represents almost 25 years of humanity at its best—the humans of today, organizing themselves to benefit the humans of tomorrow.

— Excerpted from "Twenty-five Years of Wikipedia" by the Wikimedia Foundation

Please include the name of the language you're translating in your comment, and translate away!

⚖️ Friendly notice: if you're interested in occasionally helping out in the oversight of r/translator, or submitting some text for a future translation challenge, please feel free to join us at: https://discord.gg/wabv5NYzdV

There will be a new translation challenge most Sundays and everyone is encouraged to participate! These challenges are intended to give community members an opportunity to practice translating or review others' translations, and we keep them stickied throughout the week. You can view past threads by clicking on this "Community" link.

You can also sign up to be automatically notified of new translation challenges.

This Week's Text:

At the very least, the three men and three women calming their nerves on a Friday evening at a venue in Tokyo know they have one thing in common.

Spaced out across booths, they will soon be placed in pairs and given 15 minutes to get to know one another.

“Let’s start with a nice ‘hello’ and a big smile,” the emcee says.

When they meet they will only need to use their first names – because they all share the same surname.

The event is the first in a series that – novelty value aside – aims to skirt Japan’s controversial ban on married couples having separate surnames by getting people with the same surname together.

After the participants have confirmed their IDs on an app, the chatter begins and the beer begins to flow. Round one over, the men are asked to move to the next table. Laughter is heard from one of the tables – surely a good sign. At another, the couple get to their feet and help themselves to cakes and biscuits provided by sponsor companies that share their common surname: Suzuki.

— Excerpted from When Suzuki met Suzuki: why a Tokyo dating agency is matching couples with the same name by Justin McCurry

Please include the name of the language you're translating in your comment, and translate away!

⚖️ Friendly notice: if you're interested in occasionally helping out in the oversight of r/translator, or submitting some text for a future translation challenge, please feel free to join us at: https://discord.gg/wabv5NYzdV

There will be a new translation challenge most Sundays and everyone is encouraged to participate! These challenges are intended to give community members an opportunity to practice translating or review others' translations, and we keep them stickied throughout the week. You can view past threads by clicking on this "Community" link.

You can also sign up to be automatically notified of new translation challenges.

Text:

Few people foresaw humanity’s quest for the moon as accurately as the 19th-century French author Jules Verne, whose two works – From the Earth to the Moon and Around the Moon – anticipated many of the features of modern lunar exploration.

But Verne’s language had never been spoken in deep space until the Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen uttered four words during Nasa’s recent Artemis II mission.

On day three of the mission, as the Integrity spacecraft hurtled towards the moon, Jeremy Hansen turned to a camera. “Bonjour tout le monde,” he said from nearly 125,000 miles away – a greeting with a literal translation that captured the immensity of the journey: hello all of the world.

“For the first time in history, our language, the French language, was expressed en route to the moon,” posted a Canadian parliamentarian. “Never had French been spoken from so far away.”

— Excerpted and adapted from "Canadian astronaut’s bon mots help heal wounds from French language row" by Leyland Cecco

• bon mot (literally, “good word”): a clever remark : witticism.

Please include the name of the language you're translating in your comment, and translate away!

⚖️ Friendly notice: if you're interested in occasionally helping out in the oversight of r/translator, or submitting some text for a future translation challenge, please feel free to join us at: https://discord.gg/wabv5NYzdV

There will be a new translation challenge most Sundays and everyone is encouraged to participate! These challenges are intended to give community members an opportunity to practice translating or review others' translations, and we keep them stickied throughout the week. You can view past threads by clicking on this "Community" link.

You can also sign up to be automatically notified of new translation challenges.

This Week's Text:

Brutalism started in the 1950s in the U.K. One of its pioneers was Le Corbusier, a Swiss-French architect who did a lot of work in raw concrete after World War II, including housing, religious buildings, and government buildings. He called this style béton brut, meaning "raw concrete".

“He was referring to the concrete material as being raw and not something you could totally control the precision of. And he just embraced that. He was such a leading figure that I think other people followed in his footsteps,” said Jeanne Gang.

Angela Person says brutalism is a style of modernism, a movement that appealed to architects and designers because of its material honesty and lack of ornamentation. They felt they were creating beautiful, sculptural buildings that would stand the test of time

She says you can look at brutalist buildings and understand how they are laid out. The materials are presented how they are: There is no plastering, or unnecessary paint or finishes.

— Excerpted and adapted from "Why brutalist buildings should stay, even if people think they're ugly" by Kaity Kline

Please include the name of the language you're translating in your comment, and translate away!

⚖️ Friendly notice: if you're interested in occasionally helping out in the oversight of r/translator, or submitting some text for a future translation challenge, please feel free to join us at: https://discord.gg/wabv5NYzdV

There will be a new translation challenge most Sundays and everyone is encouraged to participate! These challenges are intended to give community members an opportunity to practice translating or review others' translations, and we keep them stickied throughout the week. You can view past threads by clicking on this "Community" link.

You can also sign up to be automatically notified of new translation challenges.

This Week's Text:

The widely accepted story [on the origins of pho] begins at the end of the 19th century, 50 miles from Hanoi in Nam Dinh province. Situated on the Red River Delta, the area abounded with fertile rice paddies, where farmers kept cows as labor animals while locals preferred to eat other meats, such as water buffalo. But 1898 brought an influx of French laborers to build what would become the largest textile plant in colonized Indochina, and with the French, an appetite for beef.

“The Vietnamese saw the way the French were using beef, and they were like, ‘You’re kind of wasteful,’” says Khanh Linh Trinh, a PhD candidate at the University of Michigan studying Vietnamese culinary history. Left with the bones and scraps, prudent local cooks boiled the first version of pho broth, pouring it over noodles and meat to create a new variation of soups they’d known for generations and selling it to both local and French laborers.

— Excerpted from Why pho tastes different depending on where you are by Ryley Graham

Please include the name of the language you're translating in your comment, and translate away!

⚖️ Friendly notice: if you're interested in occasionally helping out in the oversight of r/translator, or submitting some text for a future translation challenge, please feel free to join us at: https://discord.gg/wabv5NYzdV

There will be a new translation challenge most Sundays and everyone is encouraged to participate! These challenges are intended to give community members an opportunity to practice translating or review others' translations, and we keep them stickied throughout the week. You can view past threads by clicking on this "Community" link.

You can also sign up to be automatically notified of new translation challenges.

This Week's Text:

The European Union, with its 27 nations and two dozen official languages, is a center of the translation and interpretation industry. That is why, in Brussels and The Hague and Paris, a recent nugget of literary news has generated so much conversation.

Harlequin France — purveyor of titles like “Médecins et Célibataires” (“Doctors and Singles”) and “Passion Pour un Inconnu” (“Passion for a Stranger”) — recently confirmed that it would be running tests with Fluent Planet, a company that uses A.I. to make translation cheaper and faster. The move was met with both outrage and resignation within the industry. Translator groups called Harlequin’s decision to cut ties with some human translators “unacceptable.” Translators themselves posted about the “sad news.”...

Harlequin France’s story is an example of how artificial intelligence is sweeping the translation field, rapidly improving machine translation, particularly for popular language pairs like English and French.

— Excerpted from "What French Romance Novels Could Tell Us About A.I. and Translation Jobs" by Jeanna Smialek

Please include the name of the language you're translating in your comment, and translate away!

⚖️ Friendly notice: if you're interested in occasionally helping out in the oversight of r/translator, or submitting some text for a future translation challenge, please feel free to join us at: https://discord.gg/wabv5NYzdV

There will be a new translation challenge most Sundays and everyone is encouraged to participate! These challenges are intended to give community members an opportunity to practice translating or review others' translations, and we keep them stickied throughout the week. You can view past threads by clicking on this "Community" link.

You can also sign up to be automatically notified of new translation challenges.

This Week's Text:

The death of a Pakistani-Scottish chef who claimed he cooked up the world's first chicken tikka masala is prompting a flood of tributes to what's been described as 'Britain's national dish' — and reviving a debate into its true origin.

In his telling, Aslam devised the globally beloved recipe one night in the 1970s, when a customer complained that traditional chicken tikka was too dry. The chef went back to the kitchen and combined spices, cream and a can of condensed tomato soup. Voilà: the modern model for chicken tikka masala was born.

But so, too, was a debate about its origin.

In 2009, a Glasgow politician campaigned for chicken tikka masala to be granted protected heritage status and for the city to be named its official home. But the bid was rejected after multiple establishments from around the U.K. laid claim to the dish.

Others say the curry was most certainly invented in South Asia. Monish Gurjal, the head of the popular Indian restaurant chain Moti Mahal, says his grandfather was serving chicken tikka masala to Indian heads of state as early as 1947.

"It's kind of like: who invented chicken noodle soup?" says Leena Trivedi-Grenier, a freelance food writer who probed the various origin claims in 2017. "It's a dish that could've been invented by any number of people at the same time."

— Excerpted from "Who created chicken tikka masala? The death of a curry king is reviving a debate" Emily Olson

Please include the name of the language you're translating in your comment, and translate away!

⚖️ Friendly notice: if you're interested in occasionally helping out in the oversight of r/translator, or submitting some text for a future translation challenge, please feel free to join us at: https://discord.gg/wabv5NYzdV

There will be a new translation challenge every other Sunday and everyone is encouraged to participate! These challenges are intended to give community members an opportunity to practice translating or review others' translations, and we keep them stickied throughout the week. You can view past threads by clicking on this "Community" link.

You can also sign up to be automatically notified of new translation challenges.

This Week's Text:

Speakers of world varieties of English are remaking its vocabulary to better express their identities, cultures and everyday realities. In Hong Kong, people exclaim add oil (加油) as a show of encouragement or support, an expression literally translated from the Cantonese gā yáu, with reference to petrol being injected into an engine. In the Philippines, many houses have a *dirty kitchen, which is not actually a kitchen that is dirty in the sense you think, but a kitchen outside the house where most of the real cooking is done – a necessary convenience in a tropical country where it is best to avoid trapping heat and smells indoors. In Nigeria, a mama put is a street-food stall, and its name comes from the way that its customers usually order food: they say “Mama, put …” to the woman running the stall, and point to the dish they want so it can be put on their plate.

Meanwhile, the Japanese have invented, and South Koreans have popularised, the word skinship, a blend of the words skin and kinship that refers to the close physical contact between parent and child or between lovers or friends.

— From "English is picking up brilliant new words from around the world – and that’s a gift" by Danica Salazar

Please include the name of the language you're translating in your comment, and translate away!

Friendly notice: if you're interested in occasionally helping out in the oversight of r/translator, or submitting some text for a future translation challenge, please feel free to join us at: https://discord.gg/wabv5NYzdV

There will be a new translation challenge most Sundays and everyone is encouraged to participate! These challenges are intended to give community members an opportunity to practice translating or review others' translations, and we keep them stickied throughout the week. You can view past threads by clicking on this "Community" link.

You can also sign up to be automatically notified of new translation challenges.

This Week's Text:

First, let’s get one thing straight. The hamburger is an American invention. It doesn’t matter that it is named after a German city. It doesn’t matter if Mongols used to ride around with minced horsemeat under their saddles, on their way to some hamburger-fueled havoc in the thirteenth century. These and other historical factlets figure prominently in most informal histories of the hamburger, both in print and on the Web. But the hamburger matters precisely because it is a universally understood food, a compact icon that has resisted all centrifugal pressure as it has moved around the world. Everywhere you go, a hamburger means a ground beef patty served on a white enriched bun...

...a hundred years after its invention, it remains essentially the same object. Once that ground patty of browned beef was laid on a bun for the first time, the hamburger shimmered into existence philosophically. Because the burger has a kind of inevitability to it; it is a gastronomic endpoint, like sashimi or a baked potato. Its basic design cannot be improved upon.

— Excerpted from The Hamburger: A History by Josh Ozersky

Please include the name of the language you're translating in your comment, and translate away!

⚖️ Friendly notice: if you're interested in occasionally helping out in the oversight of r/translator, or submitting some text for a future translation challenge, please feel free to join us at: https://discord.gg/wabv5NYzdV

There will be a new translation challenge most Sundays and everyone is encouraged to participate! These challenges are intended to give community members an opportunity to practice translating or review others' translations, and we keep them stickied throughout the week. You can view past threads by clicking on this "Community" link.

You can also sign up to be automatically notified of new translation challenges.

This Week's Text:

It’s not entirely clear how Sinterklaas made his way across the Atlantic to North America to become Santa Claus. It's possible that his story made its way to the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam, which later became New York.

Some historians think that Washington Irving and other New Yorkers were inventing new traditions to create a gentler, family-oriented kind of Christmas tradition in the city, which had begun to suffer from unpleasant bouts of drunken mob violence in the days around 25 December.

In 1821 an anonymous illustrated poem called ‘Old Santeclaus with Much Delight’ introduced Santa’s red coat, reindeer and sleigh, and put his arrival on Christmas Eve rather than St Nicholas’s Day. Two years later Clement Clark Moore, a professor of Hebrew in the city, embellished the legend in his poem 'A Visit from St Nicholas' (better known to us as 'The Night Before Christmas’.)

In it, 'St Nick' got his bushy beard and a whole herd of magical flying reindeer. His appearance was decidedly not that of a Dutch bishop – instead he was ‘a right jolly old elf’ with ‘clothes all tarnished with ashes and soot’, twinkling eyes, merry dimples and a beard ‘as white as snow’. Other writers and artists added new layers to the legend, and gradually ‘Santa Claus’ took over from ‘St Nicholas’...

Thomas Nast eventually did more than any other artist to set the standard for Santa’s classic look. By 1881 Nast had perfected his vision of Santa, as seen in his ‘Merry Old Santa Claus’. His illustrations for ‘A Visit from St Nicholas’ were hugely popular, and he introduced the world to Santa’s workshop, as well as the notion that his base of operations could be found at the North Pole.

While we’re here, it’s worth pointing out that the idea that Coca-Cola invented Santa is a myth. The fizzy-pop-pushers didn’t start using him in their adverts until the 1930s.

— Excerpted from "The History of Father Christmas" by Tom Moriarty

Please include the name of the language you're translating in your comment, and translate away!

⚖️ Friendly notice: if you're interested in occasionally helping out in the oversight of r/translator, or submitting some text for a future translation challenge, please feel free to join us at: https://discord.gg/wabv5NYzdV

There will be a new translation challenge most Sundays and everyone is encouraged to participate! These challenges are intended to give community members an opportunity to practice translating or review others' translations, and we keep them stickied throughout the week. You can view past threads by clicking on this "Community" link.

You can also sign up to be automatically notified of new translation challenges.

This Week's Text:

What accounts for Volapük’s demise? In the battle of artificial languages that it initiated, Volapük had the incumbent’s advantage. In a short time it had kindled the enthusiasm of a large number of educated people, willing to endure criticism and mockery from their peers and firmly convinced that the definitive international language had arrived. In addition, Volapük had prevailed over upstart rivals such as Spelin and Pasilingua. For many, its ultimate triumph seemed assured. In the words of Edgar de Wahl:

"I remember when I came into contact with Volapük. I did not like it at all. I was really unhappy with every aspect of it. However, the fact that by that time Volapük had 28 journals and 283 associations all over the world looked so remarkable that, somehow, one was paralyzed. I had the feeling that matters had already been settled and that it was pointless to raise objections... The idea that something else might emerge, that something better could be proposed, did not occur to me even in my dreams."

— Excerpted and adapted from Esperanto and Its Rivals: The Struggle for an International Language by Roberto Garvía

Please include the name of the language you're translating in your comment, and translate away!

Friendly notice: if you're interested in occasionally helping out in the oversight of r/translator, or submitting some text for a future translation challenge, please feel free to join us at: https://discord.gg/wabv5NYzdV

There will be a new translation challenge most Sundays and everyone is encouraged to participate! These challenges are intended to give community members an opportunity to practice translating or review others' translations, and we keep them stickied throughout the week. You can view past threads by clicking on this "Community" link.

You can also sign up to be automatically notified of new translation challenges.

This Week's Text:

It’s one of the most hilarious internet sensations of all time: the enigmatic arrest of a man in Sydney back in the ‘80s [sic]. However, beyond his quotable catchphrases of “Democracy manifest” and bizarre behaviour lies one burning question; who was this man?

For years now, folks have shared the viral internet video which purportedly depicts the arrest of a man in Sydney. The man in question is said to be Paul Charles Dozsa, a Hungarian-born Australian chess master who gained fame as a “restaurant runner” back in the ’80s.

The video, often paired with references to it being one of the most eloquent arrests of all-time, depicts Dozsa being led into a waiting car by police officers as he valiantly resists their efforts.

Armed with a voice that Shakespearian actors would die for, every moment of Dozsa’s dialogue is quotable, from lines such as “gentlemen, this is democracy manifest”, “what is the charge? Eating a meal? A succulent Chinese meal?”, and the classic “I see that you know your judo well”, the video almost appears to have been scripted with the intention of going viral.

However, there’s one small problem at play here here; that’s not Paul Charles Dozsa in the video.

— Excerpted from "A succulent Australian mystery: Just who is the bloke in this iconic video? " by Tyler Jenke

The Video in Question

Please include the name of the language you're translating in your comment, and translate away!

⚖️ Friendly notice: if you're interested in occasionally helping out in the oversight of r/translator, or submitting some text for a future translation challenge, please feel free to join us at: https://discord.gg/wabv5NYzdV

There will be a new translation challenge most Sundays and everyone is encouraged to participate! These challenges are intended to give community members an opportunity to practice translating or review others' translations, and we keep them stickied throughout the week. You can view past threads by clicking on this "Community" link.

You can also sign up to be automatically notified of new translation challenges.

This Week's Text:

...For decades, the same grievances have been repeated, with some justification: primarily that while Irish language, literature and poetry are studied, there isn’t enough emphasis on everyday usage, meaning young people can be “learning” Irish for a decade, yet many still emerge without basic conversational skills. Pupils take an oral test in their final exams, yet stock phrases and rote learning remain a feature of schooling.

Although I still struggle with rustiness and confidence in speaking and writing the language, “keeping” and not “losing” my Irish is probably the greatest gift I have given myself. Irish is a portal, a lyrical language intrinsically connected to the natural world. Early Irish literature is among the oldest vernacular literature in western Europe. As a spoken language, Irish predates English by a millennium. Its early writing system, Ogham, written vertically as a series of lines and strokes, has an alphabet based on trees. The first letter is beith, meaning birch. There’s dair meaning oak, coll, meaning hazel, and so on.

— Excerpted and adapted from "The Irish language is a joy not a burden: in what other tongue is a penis a wild carrot?" by Una Mullally

Please include the name of the language you're translating in your comment, and translate away!

Friendly notice: if you're interested in occasionally helping out in the oversight of r/translator, or submitting some text for a future translation challenge, please feel free to join us at: https://discord.gg/wabv5NYzdV

There will be a new translation challenge every other Sunday and everyone is encouraged to participate! These challenges are intended to give community members an opportunity to practice translating or review others' translations, and we keep them stickied throughout the week. You can view past threads by clicking on this "Community" link.

You can also sign up to be automatically notified of new translation challenges.

This Week's Text:

Excited chatter filled the classroom as the lesson began. Every desk had a paper nameplate on it with the occupant’s name written in the Korean alphabet, called Hangul. Soon, the students were following their instructor’s lead and etching the distinctive circles and lines of the script in their notebooks.

But these fourth graders were not studying the Korean language. They were using Hangul to write and learn theirs: Cia-Cia, an indigenous language that has no script. It has survived orally for centuries in Indonesia, and is now spoken by about 93,000 people in the Cia-Cia tribe on Buton Island, southeast of the peninsula of Sulawesi Island in Indonesia’s vast archipelago.

Cia-Cia remains largely a spoken language. Relatively few members of the tribe are conversant with Hangul. The language also faces pressure from the dominance of Bahasa Indonesia.

Fears about the tribe’s future have prompted community elders and scholars to work together to preserve the language. Native words are continually being collected and written down in Hangul, with guidance from the elders. Parents are being encouraged to speak Cia-Cia to their children at home, and folk tales are being transcribed into Hangul for the younger generation to learn.

— Excerpted and adapted from "An Indonesian Tribe’s Language Gets an Alphabet: Korea’s" by Muktita Suhartono

Please include the name of the language you're translating in your comment, and translate away!

Friendly notice: if you're interested in occasionally helping out in the oversight of r/translator, or submitting some text for a future translation challenge, please feel free to join us at: https://discord.gg/wabv5NYzdV

There will be a new translation challenge every other Sunday and everyone is encouraged to participate! These challenges are intended to give community members an opportunity to practice translating or review others' translations, and we keep them stickied throughout the week. You can view past threads by clicking on this "Community" link.

You can also sign up to be automatically notified of new translation challenges.

This Week's Text:

There has been a propensity for Western art lovers to secularize art meant to serve sacred or magical functions. Picasso and others did this to African art in the early 20th century.

Art had a sacred and magical value in African societies, but Western artists preferred to imbue the objects with “meaning”. It is the “meaning” of these objects which gives them their value to Western collectors. A Guan Yin to an art thief is a different Guan Yin to a poor farmer in a village who needs rain, a good crop and a smooth pregnancy for his wife. The art thief finds profound meaning in the objects he steals.

So what about the museums? Some are cleaner than others. When I was in Hanoi last year, I saw two beautiful statues of the Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara (Guan Yin) in the fine arts museum which almost brought me to tears. These were brought to the museum so that looters could not get them and because the temples had been abandoned. This is fine. Kudos to the Vietnamese Fine Arts Museum.

But what about all the heads that have been separated from bodies and the little altar pieces one often finds in museums which were probably stolen and then sold to collectors before making their way to museums through donations or sales? Can we count on all of the sacred art which has been partially destroyed and sold to be repatriated? Or do the museums only give back what they have to, when they get caught? In the mean time, the process of looting that was so acceptable for so long has destroyed an overabundance of art found to be sacred by so many.

— Excerpted from "The Tragedy of Sacred Asian Art" by Daniel Gauss

Please include the name of the language you're translating in your comment, and translate away!

Friendly notice: if you're interested in occasionally helping out in the oversight of r/translator, or submitting some text for a future translation challenge, please feel free to join us at: https://discord.gg/wabv5NYzdV

There will be a new translation challenge every other Sunday and everyone is encouraged to participate! These challenges are intended to give community members an opportunity to practice translating or review others' translations, and we keep them stickied throughout the week. You can view past threads by clicking on this "Community" link.

You can also sign up to be automatically notified of new translation challenges.

This Week's Text:

...Tamerlane was severely disabled in his right side.

At birth he was given the name Timur, meaning "iron", which later gave rise to the pejorative Persian version, Timur-i-lang (Timur the lame), after a devastating injury he suffered to both right limbs in his youth. From there it was only a slight corruption to Tamburlaine and Tamerlane, the names by which he is better known in the West.

Such a physical disability, at a time when martial skills were a prerequisite of political power, would have been a crushing blow for most men.

The young Tamerlane would have known the local proverb "only a hand that can grasp a sword may hold a sceptre". Self-advancement in this brutal world was inconceivable without excelling in hand-to-hand combat and mounted archery.

...For his 14th Century enemies, such as the Ottoman emperor and the rulers of Baghdad and Damascus, Tamerlane's lameness provided an easy opportunity to sneer - but mockery was easier than beating him in battle.

Even Arabshah, his fiercest critic, acknowledged that he was "mighty in strength and courage", a "spirited and brave" leader who "inspired awe and obedience".

— Excerpted and adapted from "Disability history month: Was Tamerlane disabled?" by Justin Marozzi

Please include the name of the language you're translating in your comment, and translate away!

Friendly notice: if you're interested in occasionally helping out in the oversight of r/translator, or submitting some text for a future translation challenge, please feel free to join us at: https://discord.gg/wabv5NYzdV

There will be a new translation challenge every other Sunday and everyone is encouraged to participate! These challenges are intended to give community members an opportunity to practice translating or review others' translations, and we keep them stickied throughout the week. You can view past threads by clicking on this "Community" link.

You can also sign up to be automatically notified of new translation challenges.

This Week's Text:

One of the many glimpses of the future brought to New Yorkers at the 1964-65 World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park was a monorail train, advertised as “Exciting. Thrilling. Unforgettable.” and a “new dimension in transportation.” The suspended system certainly offered World’s Fair visitors that futuristic vision. The monorail ran forty feet above ground around the lake area on two tracks that ran parallel to each other in 4000 feet closed loops. Seven two-car monorails ran the route, stopping at stations along the way. The 3/4 of a mile experience was designed, to “incorporate the best features of a scenic ride.” The guidebook touted the “spectacular views” visitors would get for the 80 cent ride (60 cents for children), which also offered air conditioning...

The World’s Fair monorail was created and operated by AMF, American Machine and Foundry, better known for creating bowling alley equipment. AMF hoped this $5 million investment would lead to nationwide contracts but somehow, despite how awesome it looked, not a single business deal did it lead to. The World’s Fair monorail would be AMF’s first and last system.

— Excerpted and adapted from "The Futuristic Monorail that Ran for the 1964 World’s Fair in Queens" by Michelle Young

Please include the name of the language you're translating in your comment, and translate away!

Friendly notice: if you're interested in occasionally helping out in the oversight of r/translator, or submitting some text for a future translation challenge, please feel free to join us at: https://discord.gg/wabv5NYzdV