The UNESCO Courier - Current Issue

It is omnipresent and everywhere discreet. We all have an idea of what it is, but never the same one. It represents a universal human faculty (to understand is to translate, wrote the Franco-American writer, linguist and critic George Steiner), and it mobilizes very specific skills – translation seems to be nothing but paradoxes. It is not surprising, then, that over the centuries, people have preferred to use metaphors, often disparaging ones, to try to define it: translation as ‘an unfaithful beauty’, ‘a servant’, ‘the reverse side of embroidery’, etc. Translators as ‘go-betweens’, ‘craftsmen’, ‘copyists’, and occasionally as ‘traitors’ or ‘investigators’, and so on.

As the conjunction of at least two languages and two cultures, translation and diversity are inseparable. Translation remains a profound experience of otherness, even when the person translated is culturally similar to us. Many translators, after having fallen in love with a book written by someone ‘racially’ and culturally very different from themselves, have looked for a publisher willing to take on that author’s text in the new language. This is one reason why many of them were upset by the 2021 controversy over the translation of a poem by Amanda Gorman.

In January 2022, employees of a hotel in Tulum, a tourist resort on the Yucatan Peninsula, demonstrated in the streets of the town. Their demands? To obtain the recognition of their social rights and to protest the rule forbidding them to speak their language, Maya.

In its four centuries of existence, Spanish writer Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote has become one of the most read, translated and analyzed books in the world. With its experimental form and literary playfulness, it has been hailed as foundational in modern literature. It invites readers to follow Spanish gentleman Don Quixote who, fed by his own delusional fantasies, turns knight errant. In the company of his faithful squire, Sancho Panza, he embarks on picaresque adventures in seventeenth-century Spain, leaving behind them a legacy of humor, romance and sadness.

What makes you laugh? What you perceive as funny can vary depending on unique characteristics such as age and personality traits, but culture and language are also key determining factors. Humour is an integral part of the culture in which it was created and as such, it can be one of the hardest things to translate.

For South African science journalist Sibusiso Biyela, writing about a new dinosaur discovery in his home language Zulu should have been an easy task. But when he sat down to write the piece, as he told the British journal Nature’s podcast, he found that he “didn’t have the words for relatively simple scientific terms like ‘fossil’ or even ’dinosaur’.” Biyela remembers being extremely discouraged.

“Once you overcome the one-inch-tall barrier of subtitles, you will be introduced to so many more amazing films”, stated South Korean director Bong Joon-Ho at the Golden Globe awards in 2020. His film Parasite became the first non-English language film to win an Oscar for Best Picture, shining a spotlight on the critical role subtitles play in exposing global audiences to the vast world of film.

The first public machine translation experiment took place in 1954. Led by researchers from IBM and Georgetown University in Washington, DC, it was destined to make possible high-quality automatic translation from Russian into English in a few years. Since this first attempt, claims that machines could soon be replacing translators became usual. In 2018, Microsoft announced that their Chinese to English news translations were of comparable quality to human translation. The paradox however, is that although translation systems are accessible to most people, the number of people working in the translation industry is higher than ever before – an approximate 600,000 people in the world. In this context, do professionals really have a reason to worry?

It’s one of the biggest coral reefs in the world, unfolding its flowers and lace over a nearly three-kilometre long stretch, and one of the deepest too. This underwater treasure has for long been known to local fishermen, but its extent was unsuspected. Following a diving expedition conducted with support from UNESCO in 2021, the French explorer and photographer Alexis Rosenfeld provides us with exceptional images of this landscape.

The act of eating is governed by a principle of absorption. The food we ingest has concrete biochemical effects in the body. This is why we literally are what we eat. But this aphorism also works the other way round – we eat what we are. Because, when we eat, we absorb not only nutrients, but also symbols and meanings. All cultures assign specific meanings to their foods – there are everyday dishes and festive dishes, main meals and snacks, things that are eaten and things that are not. Food not only weaves a web of meanings, it is also a central feature of collective and individual identities.

Growing use along with the increased pressure on surface water resources is making global water crises unavoidable – unless we tap into the full potential of Earth’s groundwater resources, which offer an enormous supply of freshwater.