Translators can vote on existing translations, or submit their own inline while browsing the site.
Rather than construct complicated and precise mappings between dictionaries, augmented by language-specific rules for syntax to go from one language to another, Google Translate makes use of a vast trove of instances of individual existing translations to craft a best guess at a new translation -- using what we translate as the foundation of how we translate.
It analyzes the corpus of existing translations, and finds statistical matches.
Nabokov had complained bitterly about the existing translations; she innocently suggested that he try a hand at it himself.
Mitchell builds his version on existing translations (the original poem survives today in fragments on thousands of small tablets of hardened clay).
And although David Lan's new version is very direct, I can't help wondering what's wrong with the dozen other existing translations.
Though his career was shaped by Arsenyev's work, he was able to read only a fraction of the explorer's writings in English, since most existing translations are based on versions heavily censored by Soviet authorities.
"The basic challenges of titling 'War and Peace' are the ones the titlist faces with every opera," said the experienced practitioner Sonya Haddad, who is doing the job for the Met, working from existing translations in consultation with Zinaida Epstein, her adviser on Russian projects.
While fragmentation, misspellings, and poor grammar and punctuation muddle the existing translations, the new ones — twenty-seven, with a special appendix for fakes — will reflect bin Laden's prose as Lawrence reads it: stark, lean, free of colloquialism, resonant in multiple registers.
The consensus development resulted in a 12-step process that outlines universal and country-specific new translation approaches, as well as country-specific adaptations of existing translations.
In other words, for Schlegel, a translation theory as such is uninteresting unless it involves the exposition of the actual work undertaken with the texts, i.e. with the original text as well as with all the existing translations.
