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[edit] Welcome to the Translation Nexus!
During February of 2011, The Fiction Circus held an experimental contest designed to solve a "world problem" that has caused our greatest American authors to be ignored and maligned all over the globe.
In order to correct our deep American ignorance, we have created a system — hopefully a standard — that will allow "important literature" to flow back and forth between countries with the same grace as wacky YouTube videos of cats or torture. We want to show that it is possible to apply the same dynamics that make Wikipedia and Bittorrent effective toward the process of translation. We want to show that poets, linguists, and other language artists are just as willing to donate their talents to the internet as encyclopedophiles and pornographers.
We asked writers to submit short stories for this contest that were 1500 words or shorter. After judging the entries, we have selected "East Meets West" by Isla McKetta as the winner. We have created a "translation nexus" around this short story, a wiki where readers all over the world can help to translate the winning story into every possible language. We feel that conflict and argument will create the best version of each translation, just like conflict and argument create the best Wikipedia articles about bees or "Ghostrider."
We predict that the winning story will quickly be translated into the big seven languages (English, Mandarin, Spanish, Hindi, Russian, Arabic, and Portuguese), and then will slowly filter down into the more obscure languages, like Klingon and Latin. Our goal is to get this story translated into every human language on the planet.
Probably some kind of important linguistic thesis could be written about what happens here.
Welcome to the Translation Nexus.
[edit] The story: "East Meets West" by Isla McKetta
Olek took me to the edge of town—to a new kind of store. The whole front of the building was made up of windows. It looked small at first—the size of Pani Hanio’s dark shack with its dusty shelves of dry goods—but it grew bigger and bigger as we walked across the asphalt of the empty parking lot. It wasn’t the targ with its tangled forest of tarps over poles. There must have been stalls for over a thousand cars. How could so many cars ever be in one place? At the door I couldn’t see the end of the building anymore. The doors slid open without our even touching them. I wondered if they would sweep closed again. How would they know I stood between them? Olek motioned me inside—into the light of thousands of fluorescent fixtures. Twelve slender girls in aprons and tight ponytails stood beside twelve cash registers and twelve lighted numbers.
“They look like aliens.” They were from another universe than the corpulent stary babas at the targ who hawked Nickes and Addiddas and Comverse.
“Wait until we check out. The only thing different about each of them is the name over their left boobs, but it’s easier if you call them all Asia.”
“They just stand there?”
“You never have to wait in line.” The lines of our childhood—waiting with Babcia while the women gossiped.
“What is that smell?”
“Nothing. There is no smell. All the food is fake. You’ll see.” He picked up a plastic basket from a nested stack by the door.
“Why are we here?”
“This place is like Christmas.”
At the end of each aisle stood a pyramid of cans. The blue pyramid was marked “Lima beans” with a photograph of white beans in a bowl. The red pyramid showed tomatoes. In the aisle packets hung from metal sticks. The packets had familiar names like barszcz and onion soup and mushroom sauce and a picture of the food supposedly on the inside, but they were flat and filled with powder. How could there be soup with no Babcia to stir it? They were spaced so far apart they could have been paintings. Even in the bleakest times, the shelves at Pani Hanio’s were so densely packed and stacked only her trained hands could decipher the order. When she didn’t have what we wanted, we made do with whatever she offered.
A sign for vegetables hung over our heads. On the other side of the aisle three yellow cans of corn sat at eye level on white metal shelves. There was a large gap then two green cans of green beans. Another gap then more cans and gaps all the way down the aisle. The clusters of cans were like the dots of Morse code—the goods and the dashes of space between them spelled out SOS. All the aisles were the same—like the food waited for its friends.
At the back of the store the shelves blew cold air. On the shelves were plastic-wrapped packages of meats already cut up—the flat pink of pork kotletki, vibrant red strings of ground beef. Each had its own spot with plenty of space around it—as though the animals didn’t get along. I had never seen so much meat in one place and with no one to eat it. Olek lifted the front of his hoodie and slipped a hunk of bacon into the waistband of his pants. Next in were steaks.
“You can’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“Olek, that’s stealing.”
“Stealing is from someone. Look around you. There’s no one to steal from.” Inside the white walls and light of the box it was hard to imagine there were people involved at all.
“Someone owns this place.”
“If a person owns this place, they aren’t Polish. It’s probably jakiś German mega-corp.”
“It’s still wrong.” Someone would know—wouldn’t they? Someone would see. Someone would catch him and punish him and I couldn’t watch him get caught. I couldn’t watch them take him away.
“Spoko, Madzia. I’ll put it back if you want, but the boys are waiting.” We were the only customers. He couldn’t put that meat back on the shelf. Not after where it had been. Even if it was wrapped in plastic.
“Chodź. I’ll buy you a Milka.”
At the cash register, Asia number seven smiled and asked if we had found everything we needed. Then she wished us a good day. The doors opened for us on the way out. No one chased us across the long parking lot.
“Do you do this often?”
“This place just opened.”
[edit] START TRANSLATING NOW
Our goal is to translate this story into as many languages as possible, starting with Polish (due to the subject matter of the story). We predict that "translation" will soon become a hip new hobby, like sewing, building bicycles, or sport sex.
If you speak one of these languages, please help us with the project by clicking one of the links below to correct mistakes or add your own interpretation.
If there's another language into which you would like to translate this story, please feel free to add this language below by adding a new link:
- Polish (Polski) (40 million speakers)
- English (1,400 - 1,800 million speakers)
- Mandarin Chinese (漢語) (845 million speakers)
- Spanish (Español) (328.5 million speakers)
- Portuguese (Português) (224 million speakers)
- Arabic (العربية) (221 million speakers)
- Hindi/Urdu (हिन्दी/उर्दू) (181 million speakers)
- Bengali (বাংলা) (181 million speakers)
- French (Français) (178 million-265 million speakers)
- Russian (Россию) (143 million speakers)
- Japanese (日本語) (122 million speakers)
- German (Deutsch) (90 million speakers)
- Tamil (தமிழ்) (66 million speakers)
- Afrikaans (15-23 million speakers)
- Albanian (Shqip) (7.6 millions speakers)
- Yiddish (ייִדיש) (1,762,320 speakers)
- Welsh (Cymraeg) (750,000 speakers)
- Irish (Gaeilge) (1.66 million speakers)
- Armenian (Հայերէն) (6.7 million speakers)
- Azerbaijani (آذربایجان دیل) (20-30 million speakers)
- Vietnamese (Tiếng Việt) (80 million speakers)
- Ukrainian (українська мова) (42-47 million speakers)
- Basque (Euskara) (665,800 speakers)
- Belarusian (беларуская мова) (4-9 million speakers)
- Turkish (Türkçe) (91 million speakers)
- Thai (ภาษาไทย) (60 million speakers)
- Bulgarian (Български език) (12 million speakers)
- Catalan (Català) (11.5 million speakers)
- Croatian (Hrvatski) (5.5 million speakers)
- Swedish (Svenska) (10 million speakers)
- Swahili (Kiswahili) (50 million speakers)
- Czech (Čeština) (12 million speakers)
- Danish (Dansk) (6 million speakers)
- Slovenian (Slovenščina) (2.5 million speakers)
- Slovak (Slovenčina) (7 million speakers)
- Serbian (српски) (9-10 million speakers)
- Dutch (Nederlands) (28 million speakers)
- Filipino (Wikang Tagalog) (90 million speakers)
- Estonian (Eesti keel) (1,048,660 speakers)
- Finnish (Suomi) (6 million speakers)
- Romanian (Română) (28 million speakers)
- Persian (تاجیکی) (60-70 million speakers)
- Galician (Galego) (3-4 million speakers)
- Georgian (ქართული) (6-7 million speakers)
- Maltese (Malti) (371,900 speakers)
- Malay (Bahasa Melayu) (180 million speakers)
- Greek (Ελληνικά) (13 million speakers)
- Haitian Creole (Kreyòl ayisyen) (12 million speakers)
- Macedonian (Македонски) (1.6-3 million speakers)
- Lithuanian (Lietuvių kalba) (4 million speakers)
- Hebrew (עִבְרִית) (9 million speakers)
- Hungarian (Magyar) (16 million speakers)
- Latvian (Latviešu valoda) (1.5 million speakers)
- Latin (Latina) (0 speakers)
- Korean (한국어) (78 million speakers)
- Icelandic (Islenska) (320,000 speakers)
- Indonesian (Bahasa Indonesia) (165 million speakers)
- Italian (Italiano) (65 million speakers)
- Norwegian (Norsk) (5 million speakers)
- Esperanto (Esperanto) (2-10 million speakers, around 2000 native speakers)
- Binary (010000100110100101101110011000010111001001111001) (0 human speakers, billions of native speakers)
[edit] Additional Information
As the Translation Nexus community continues to grow, our hope is that it will develop into a page dedicated to translating other pieces of literature as well. If there is a piece of literature you would like to submit for translation on the Translation Nexus, please visit the Texts page.
Please note that we have been experiencing spam attacks over the last few weeks and are working at combatting this. If you see changes made to a page in the meantime that look strange, please help us clean things up by reverting to the last edit.
Wikipedia also has a list of currently spoken world languages available here. If you need help editing pages, please refer to the Wikipedia page on editing here. This site was created by The Fiction Circus. If you have any problems with the wiki or need additional help, please contact the administrator.
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