Translation Impossible: : The Ethics, Politics and Pragmatics of Radical Translation in South Asian Literatures

Since the growth of translation studies, translators and literary scholars have increasingly come to acknowledge the intense ethical and political, as well as practical, issues involved in preparing, producing and circulating translations of literature

Strategies for Translating Obscenity: : Medical Language and Sanitization in Malay Rāychoudhurī’s Poetry

The Bengali ‘obscene’ (aślīl) poetry of the Hungry Generation is heavily pregnant with ‘dirty’ sexual imagery. In particular, the poem “Prachanda Baidyutik Chutar” and its English translation “Stark Electric Jesus” (1964) by the Hungryalist Malay Raychoudhuri concern the description of the female ‘sexual body’, male masturbation and bodily fluids. The use of a Bengali ‘medical’ vocabulary for portraying the ‘sexual body’ achieves a double operation of ‘sanitization’ of the semantic sphere of sex, unsuitable subject of poetry, and of ‘ironic inversion’ where the low dirty content embodied by masturbation and sexual activity attains the higher status of poetry, while downplaying the overtly mechanical Bengali lexicon of medical sciences. My attempt at re-translating some controversial passages of this poem helps laying out some methodological principles for developing a ‘contextual’ practice of translation in resistance to traditional notions such as accuracy and faithfulness

BasahaCorpus: An Expanded Linguistic Resource for Readability Assessment in Central Philippine Languages

Current research on automatic readability assessment (ARA) has focused on improving the performance of models in high-resource languages such as English. In this work, we introduce and release BasahaCorpus as part of an initiative aimed at expanding available corpora and baseline models for readability assessment in lower resource languages in the Philippines. We compiled a corpus of short fictional narratives written in Hiligaynon, Minasbate, Karay-a, and Rinconada -- languages belonging to the Central Philippine family tree subgroup -- to train ARA models using surface-level, syllable-pattern, and n-gram overlap features. We also propose a new hierarchical cross-lingual modeling approach that takes advantage of a language's placement in the family tree to increase the amount of available training data. Our study yields encouraging results that support previous work showcasing the efficacy of cross-lingual models in low-resource settings, as well as similarities in highly informative linguistic features for mutually intelligible languages.Comment: Final camera-ready paper for EMNLP 2023 (Main

Authorship Classification in a Resource Constraint Language Using Convolutional Neural Networks

Authorship classification is a method of automatically determining the appropriate author of an unknown linguistic text. Although research on authorship classification has significantly progressed in high-resource languages, it is at a primitive stage in the realm of resource-constraint languages like Bengali. This paper presents an authorship classification approach made of Convolution Neural Networks (CNN) comprising four modules: embedding model generation, feature representation, classifier training and classifier testing. For this purpose, this work develops a new embedding corpus (named WEC) and a Bengali authorship classification corpus (called BACC-18), which are more robust in terms of authors’ classes and unique words. Using three text embedding techniques (Word2Vec, GloVe and FastText) and combinations of different hyperparameters, 90 embedding models are created in this study. All the embedding models are assessed by intrinsic evaluators and those selected are the 9 best performing models out of 90 for the authorship classification. In total 36 classification models, including four classification models (CNN, LSTM, SVM, SGD) and three embedding techniques with 100, 200 and 250 embedding dimensions, are trained with optimized hyperparameters and tested on three benchmark datasets (BACC-18, BAAD16 and LD). Among the models, the optimized CNN with GloVe model achieved the highest classification accuracies of 93.45%, 95.02%, and 98.67% for the datasets BACC-18, BAAD16, and LD, respectively

Ghosts, Drunkards and Bad Language:: Translating the Margins of Nabarun Bhattacharya's Kāṅāl Mālsāṭ (‘The War Cry of the Beggars’)

This article unfolds some problematic aspects encountered during the translation of Nabarun Bhattacharya's radical novel Kāṅāl Mālsāṭ (2003), published in Italian with the title Gli ammutinati di Calcutta (2016). I focus on the translation of the language of the margins, intended as social, ontological as well as linguistic spaces. The difficulty of translating into Italian the richness of Bengali slang in the semantic field of boozing offers an interesting case to reveal the strategies of a radical translation practice, which resists domestication (Venuti; Spivak) and endorses the unsettling use of sub-standard language(s) in order to translate the bizarre mutiny of Kāṅāl Mālsāṭ and the counter-language of its author

Afterword:Towards a Theory of Reparative Translation

The 'work' of world literature, as this volume underscores in its title, and as Derek Attridge lays out in his case for translation as 'creative labour', points to theories of translational praxis that challenge the status of a nationally fortressed standard language

ReadMe++: Benchmarking Multilingual Language Models for Multi-Domain Readability Assessment

We present a systematic study and comprehensive evaluation of large language models for automatic multilingual readability assessment. In particular, we construct ReadMe++, a multilingual multi-domain dataset with human annotations of 9757 sentences in Arabic, English, French, Hindi, and Russian collected from 112 different data sources. ReadMe++ offers more domain and language diversity than existing readability datasets, making it ideal for benchmarking multilingual and non-English language models (including mBERT, XLM-R, mT5, Llama-2, GPT-4, etc.) in the supervised, unsupervised, and few-shot prompting settings. Our experiments reveal that models fine-tuned on ReadMe++ outperform those trained on single-domain datasets, showcasing superior performance on multi-domain readability assessment and cross-lingual transfer capabilities. We also compare to traditional readability metrics (such as Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level and Open Source Metric for Measuring Arabic Narratives), as well as the state-of-the-art unsupervised metric RSRS (Martinc et al., 2021). We will make our data and code publicly available at: https://github.com/tareknaous/readme.Comment: We have added French and Russian as two new languages to the corpu

Religion and Aesthetic Experience

Religious aesthetics have gained increasing importance over the past few years in the fields of Religious studies and Islamic studies. This volume highlights the transcultural dimensions of the theoretical foundations of religious aesthetics. It explores aesthetic experience in the religious field through a series of case studies. These include Islamic sermons from the Middle East and South Asia, Islamic religious chanting, a chapter of the Qurʾān, a German performance artist, Indian rasa theory, and Arabic and Bengali literature. Together, the authors demonstrate that the analysis of the aesthetic forms of religious mediation across regions and genres is a fruitful approach to transcultural studies.Die Religionsästhetik hat in den vergangenen Jahren an Bedeutung innerhalb der Religions- und Islamwissenschaft gewonnen. Dieser Band betont die transkulturellen Dimensionen der theoretischen Grundlagen der Religionsästhetik und bietet Fallstudien über die Rolle ästhetischer Erfahrung in religiösen Kontexten. Diese umfassen islamische Predigten im Nahen Osten und Südasien, islamische religiöse Gesänge, ein Korankapitel, einen deutschen Performance-Künstler, indische rasa-Theorie und arabische wie bengalische Literatur. Zusammen zeigen die Autoren die Fruchtbarkeit der Analyse ästhetischer Formen von religiöser Vermittlung über verschiedene Regionen und Gattungen hinweg auf