Friday News: ATT & DirecTV merger, RockNRoll bride photo shoot, Golden Heart/RITA lifestream, and translating books
Consumer groups say FCC conditions on AT&T-DirecTV merger fall short – Amazingly enough (aka not surprisingly), the Department of Justice has signaled that they don’t find the merger of AT&T and DirectTV “did not appear to be anti-competitive.” AT&T, which is purchasing DirecTV for $49 billion, has met with some conditions from the FCC, although consumer groups do not believe they go far enough. Among the conditions are that AT&T will not privilege its own video services and that the company will expand its broadband networks to expand access to high-speed Internet.
FCC negotiators in recent weeks had sought a commitment from AT&T to more aggressively expand its broadband fiber network so that more homes have access to high-speed Internet.
A recent FCC study found that 55 million Americans — 17% of the population — still lack access to Internet service with sufficient speed to watch video or accomplish other data-intensive tasks. A third of the nation’s schools also lack adequate Internet service. –Los Angeles Times
FLOWER BEARD BRIDALS WITH HARNAAM KAUR – If you’re not familiar with Harnaam Kaur, a 24-year-old woman who sports a full beard due to polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), you need to check out this amazing bridal photo shoot for RockNRoll Bride. Not only does Kaur blast past traditional standards of female beauty, but her comments on body acceptance are just so cool.
“At the age of 16 I hit my biggest low. I had been suicidal all year due to immense bullying from school and people in society. I hid away and did not want to venture out into the public. My bedroom was my only safe haven. I was hugely depressed. I remember sitting on my bed and thinking about taking my own life. But instead, as I sat there, I started to counsel myself. I told myself ‘The energy you are putting into ending your life, put all that energy into turning your life around and doing something better’.”
“At that point I decided I wanted to be me. I decided to keep my beard and step forward against society’s expectations of what a woman should look like. Today I am not suicidal and I do not self harm. Today I am happy living as a young beautiful bearded woman. I have realised that this body is mine, I own it, I do not have any other body to live in so I may as well love it unconditionally.”
“I stopped self harming and I have now fallen in love with the elements on my body that people may call ‘flaws’. I love my beard, my stretch marks and my scars. These elements make me who I am, they make me whole, they make me complete. My beard has 100% become a part of my body. It is the source of my strength and confidence. People just see the beard as hair, but my beard for me is much more than that. I keep my hair to show the world a different, confident, diverse and strong image of a woman. I love my beard, it has become a part of my body. I look at it and is it a sign to me that we are all different and none of us are born the same. I love my lady beard and I will forever cherish it.” –RockNRoll Bride
Lisa Kleypas Announces 2015 RITA & Golden Heart Awards Live-Streaming – The 35th annual Golden Heart and Rita Awards will be streamed live from New York on Saturday, July 25th at 8:00 pm EST, on www.RWA.org –YouTube
The Mad Challenge of Translating “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” – Book translations can be big business, but they can also be a huge challenge, especially when the book in question depends on linguistic eccentricities that are not easily reproduced in other linguistic and cultural contexts. Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland is a great example of just such a book, and the fact that it has been translated into more than 170 languages is pretty impressive. A new three-volume work, Alice in a World of Wonderlands, explores some of the issues with these translations, and it might be of interest to writers who are interested in how their own linguistic expressions may and may not translate easily into other languages.
How do you write about the Mouse’s tale without losing the all-important pun on “tail”? Some languages, like the Aboriginal tongue Pitjantjatjara, don’t even use puns. What about when a character takes an idiom literally? The Caterpillar, for instance, tells Alice to explain herself. “I can’t explain myself, I’m afraid, sir, because I’m not myself, you see,” Alice replies. The cultural references in this Victorian novel pose other problems. British contemporaries would have guessed that the Hatter was mad from mercury exposure, but hat makers in other parts of the world didn’t use mercury. And why translate a parody of a popular British poem for readers of Arabic who have never seen the original? . . .
Language and typography scholar Michael Everson says the novel’s inherent difficulty is part of its appeal. “The Alice challenge seems to be one that people like because it’s really fun,” he says. “Wracking your brains to resurrect a pun that works in your language even though it shouldn’t, that sort of thing.” For instance, an early Gujarati translator managed to capture the tail/tale pun for readers of that western Indian tongue. When someone talks incessantly, it is often conveyed through the Gujarati phrase poonchadoo nathee dekhatun, which means “no end in sight”—allowing the translator to play on poonchadee, the word for “tail”, with poonchadoo. –Smithsonian Magazine
I very much enjoyed reading the linked article about Alice in Wonderland. My interest stems in part from the fact that my daughter and I entered into a correspondence some years ago with the daughter of Clive Harcourt Carruthers, the man who’d translated Alice in Wonderland into Latin, when we were trying to find a copy. His Latin translation is once again in print.
The FCC officially approved the DirecTV and AT&T merger today.