Upcoming Events

Meetings and Workshops

Time for New Leadership - Call for Volunteers

It is time for a new leadership to replace me. In addition to the great work that Mark Levinson is doing, we have a new volunteer, Eitan Greenberg, who will manage the Event and Course Calendars. There is definitely a demand for meetings (any volunteers to start organizing them?) We also need a volunteer to take over the Job Opps section and post jobs (with preference for listings with salary information and jobs from the actual employer/customer and not intermediaries).

Translation, proofreading and writing organizations/mailing lists that would like write permissions to use elephant.org.il as a resource to promote their events should contact me directly.

95 seconds of comic relief.

Foreign relations in a nutshell - from the Animated Cookbook at the Big Cartoon Festival.

Cover credits for translators?

Should a translated book name the translator on the cover? If you something to say about it, join the discussion here.

Building a megalist of translators/editors

The folks over at CIWI are attempting to build a comprehensive list of translators of all stripes, as well as editors and copywriters working in Israel. It’s being maintained on a Google Sheet and anyone is free to write/edit/comment. Link here. It will be a great resource for anyone looking to hire someone quickly. Share widely.

Translatable but Debatable
Is a Translator’s Name That Scary?
Is a Translator’s Name That Scary?

Jennifer Croft, who translated Nobel Prize laureate Olga Tokarczuk from Ukrainian, has announced that next time if her name won’t be on the cover, she won’t be translating. And together with novelist Mark Haddon, she started a petition. Columnist Pamela Paul believes that better visibility for translators can also lead to better pay.

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Translatable but Debatable – נמאס nim'as
Translatable but Debatable – נמאס nim'as

A slangy way of translating nim’as li uses“over,” as in “I’m so over this place” and “I’m over your patronizing tone, okay?”  I think that’s a recent usage; I don’t remember it from when I was young. And speaking of getting old, “getting old” is another way of saying nim’as about something.

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Translatable but Debatable – בסימן b'siman
Translatable but Debatable – בסימן b'siman

“Netanyahu hasn’t learned the lesson of five months ago, that drinking up too many of his so-called natural partners’ votes can hurt him,” said a Jerusalem Post article. But there’s a better expression in English, and it’s been in use since well before this election year. “Ralph Nader was siphoning votes from Gore,” a 2004 book by William Saletan notes.

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Translatable but debatable – הקל hekel
Translatable but debatable – הקל hekel

The dictionaries have more to say about translating hekel as applied to a problem — alleviate, mitigate, palliate, etc. — than as applied to the person who has the problem. If you find a software program complicated to use, and the company supplies shortcuts to reduce that difficulty, then actually none of the dictionary definitions of hekel can describe what the shortcuts do for you.

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Translatable but Debatable — מחדל mekhdal
Translatable but Debatable — מחדל mekhdal

Yeshayahu Ben-Porat’s book about the Yom Kippur War, called HaMekhdal in Hebrew, was published in English translation under the title Kippur. English-language journalists and scholars never did come up with a thorough consensus on what to call the Mekhdal, and sometimes we see it transliterated from Hebrew and glossed in English.

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Translatable but Debatable – התלבט hitlabet
Translatable but Debatable – התלבט hitlabet

Morfix defines hitlabet as “to have doubts, to be uncertain, to weigh possibilities; to think over, to deliberate, to ponder, to mull, to debate.” Still I think of the meaning as commonly more specific than that. When I leave the house, it’s not so much that I mitlabet about whether I fed the goldfish. I mitlabet about whether or not to go back.

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Young animators bring Israeli animation to a new level!

The Fenesta Family is a high quality animation series created by group of young Israeli animators with the support and help of the Kan Digital incubator. With only the first two episodes out, the series has already gone viral.

Animation is a time consuming art, especially when done at the level of this series. In my opinion, they have brought Israeli animation to world class level. Hopefully this is only the beginning. In Israel the Kan Digital link is recommended. Outside of Israel you may need to find the episode on facebook.

For Hebrew speakers read

"משפחת פנסטה": הסדרה שהיא בול כמו המשפחה שלכם, רק מצוירת