Jennifer Howard

As I write in my latest feature for the Chronicle (UPDATE: the link is now free), translation is “having a moment, or a series of moments.” It was the presidential theme of the Modern Language Association’s most recent convention. Two university-affiliated publishing ventures, Dalkey Archive at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Open Letter Books at the University of Rochester, have been working overtime to get more translated literature into the hands of American readers. One of Dalkey’s recent titles, Best European Fiction 2010, edited by Aleksandar Hemon, has gotten some nice mainstream attention. The WSJ wrote about the… Read more...

UNESCO has unveiled an interactive online version of the new edition of the Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger: Manx, Aasax, Ubykh, Eyak: Once spoken in, respectively, the Isle of Man, Tanzania, Turkey, and Alaska, all four languages have died out in the last 35 years. Of the 6,000 or so languages still heard in the world, about 2,500 are at risk, and 199 have fewer than 10 speakers left, according to Unesco. You can get a world of very cool detail about these languages-at-risk via the Atlas. You can search by name, country or area, or level of… Read more...

The Economist reviews Henry Hitchings’s The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English: …a book which is really about the way the English language has roamed the world helping itself liberally to words, absorbing them, forgetting where they came from, and moving on with an ever-growing load of exotics, crossbreeds and subtly shaded near-synonyms. It is also about migrations within the language’s own borders, about upward and downward mobility, about words losing their roots, turning up in new surroundings, or lying in wait, like “duvet” which was mentioned by Samuel Johnson, for their moment. I want this book…. Read more...