"I'm an alien (but my parents are Indian.)" (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

Tina Malhotra’s journey through a high school existential crisis was difficult. Bringing her world to life was just as wrenching.

Author Keshni Kashyap and illustrator Mari Araki spent four years working on the graphic novel Tina’s Mouth: An Existential Diary, which was published in January. Kashyap was trained as a filmmaker and Araki is a surrealist painter. The pair had to teach themselves the comic form while melding the book’s substantial text with some 1,000 drawings.

“I’d rather kill myself than do another graphic novel,” Kashyap says flatly. “It was so hard to do.” Besides, “The world is such a rough place right now. I don’t really want to write about privileged teenagers anymore.”

Read more at the LA Weekly

“Most people don’t object to prayer,” he says. “They just object to control.”

Hakim, 41, says that as his faith deepens, so too does his desire to “be disruptive.” Muslims are present in Los Angeles’ civic life, he explains, they’re just not organized.

Read on at the LA Weekly.

Shaikh blogs for AidWatch, End the Neglect, UN Dispatch, and her fascinating and candid personal blog, Blood and Milk. She speaks French and Uzbek and, to a lesser extent, Russian, Arabic and Urdu.

But even Shaikh sometimes struggles with translations and translators. In an October post on her blog, she explained some of the pitfalls of translation. Jokes often cause confusion, for example. “They’re just too cultural and based on language and tone nuance,” she wrote. Colloquialisms, such as “hard” and “soft” for estimations, or “drop” or “fall” for decreases, also don’t translate well.

Sharing personal history – like photos of your kids -– is a great  to connect with people regardless of the language they speak. “I’ve seen other people successfully transcend language and culture barriers by talking about a dislike of mushrooms, fear of snakes and bugs, mocking people who are drunk, alluding to sex, and comparing government officials to babies,” Shaikh explained.

Shaikh expanded on her experiences translating health concepts. She answered questions by email and over Skype from Tajikistan and our exchange has been edited for clarity.

Angilee Shah: Do you have any specific advice about talking about health issues through a translator? Are there any pitfalls with the vocabulary we use to describe health conditions?

Alanna Shaikh (left): I’ve had health in translation hit two major hurdles (which, by the way, is another sports metaphor translators don’t get):

1. Many languages don’t actually have “nice” words for genitals. So there is no neutral, clinical way to talk about reproductive health. Imagine trying to teach a woman about condoms or an IUD if you couldn’t say penis, vagina, or intercourse but had to say (cruder words).

2. We use a lot of war metaphor in our health language. We battle cancer, fight disease — even our immune systems attack invaders. When translated literally, that can be violent and confusing.

Are there any particular languages that have tripped you up in your communications? For example, in Spanish, the literal translation of “sugar” means only the granular stuff, not necessarily the sugars found in fruits, etc. [See Megha Satyanarayana's post about her difficulties translating the word.] How do you work around these issues?

In Uzbekistan, levels of health knowledge are very low in rural areas. I once had to use an anatomy book and actually teach my translator what all her internal organs were before we could work out translation for the workshop I was planning.

In general, I think the key to avoiding problems is to get to know your translator. Sit down with them before the work starts, and go over the general topics you’ll be covering. That gives you the chance to get a sense of their level of skill on the topic, and for them to ask questions or share any concerns.

Also in Uzbekistan, I was at a roundtable with a foreign expert who was collecting information on women’s lives in Uzbekistan. He asked about FGM [female genital mutilation]. The translator didn’t know what it was, and once he explained, she actually went pale and said “People do that?” She was so shaken up she had trouble working for the next few hours.

When you read reports on global public health, what do you think journalists get wrong most often? Do you see translational problems in the media?

Either they misread the science and draw big unwarranted conclusions, or they think things are new and novel which aren’t. Or they don’t understand local context, which at times can be a translation issue.

On a more practical level, does a good translator have to be expensive? What do you look for when you are hiring someone? 

Good translators are generally expensive. You could luck out with a student or someone with a knack for translation, but you’re safer with a professional. I look for health knowledge as well as language skills, and with an interpreter, speed.

Shaikh also runs an international development careers list  (there’s a small fee), if you’re looking for the inside scoop on jobs in her field.

(Photo of translator booth by dweekly on Flickr Creative Commons)

This post originally appeared at ReportingonHealth.org.

But America’s use of images has not always been so high-minded. W. J. T. Mitchell’s Cloning Terror takes on the issue of how images have been used in the so-called “war on terror,” which he describes as a “metaphor run amuck.”  Footage of the Twin Towers falling on 9/11, the televised “shock and awe” bombing of Baghdad, a statue of Saddam Hussein being destroyed, and the much-criticized 2003 photo of Bush on an aircraft carrier in front of a banner that read “Mission Accomplished”– these images resonated during the Iraq War and, for many Americans, solidified the misguided notion that terror could be an actual enemy in a war.  Launching a conventional war against a concept was a fool’s errand, Mitchell writes, “a misbegotten fantasy from the first.”

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/C/bo10004921.html

In 2004, the war on terror acquired a competing set of iconic images. Photographic evidence of torture and mistreatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib fueled anti-war protests increased doubts about other U.S. prisons, including Guantánamo Bay, and undermined Bush’s moral argument for war. Cloning Terror focuses on the now-famous photograph of a prisoner in a black robe standing on a box with his arms outstretched. The prisoner was told that if he lowered his arms he would be electrocuted. “The Hooded Man,” as the image came to be known, was reproduced time and time again by street artists and cartoonists, scholars and protesters, to represent the shame of America’s conduct abroad. It became a powerful recruitment tool for terrorist groups.

When Obama took office, he changed America’s rhetorical course. Mitchell writes that Obama, “without fanfare, stopped using the term ‘war on terror’.” In 2009, Obama committed to keeping much of the Abu Ghraib photographic archive classified and adopted a “look forward and not backwards” stance on investigations into Bush era abuses.  On its face, Obama’s decision not to release photos of bin Laden is another blow to the Bush administration’s rhetorical regime, even if Obama carries on many of the other policies that Mitchell critiques in Cloning Terror. But for Mitchell, “the appropriate strategy for international terrorism is not war, but the development of rational, open public institutions of international justice,” that should include holding America responsible for its own wrongdoings. If America has offered any kind of mea culpa, Mitchell has not found it sufficient; the animating images of the Bush years may have less play, but the wars rage on.  In the meantime, Mitchell offers Cloning Terror as a necessary if “fairly simple exercise in memory and the prevention of historical amnesia.”

Mitchell wrote much of Cloning Terror during the Bush administration, and he explains that for that administration, bin Laden was “less than satisfactory as an iconic figure of the enemy.” “No statues, monuments, palaces, or regimes could be leveled as ways of performing the destruction of bin Laden,” Mitchell writes. His book resonates now as we grapple with what bin Laden means — and what his image could mean — now that he is dead.

Korematsu, a Japanese-American who resisted placement in a World War II-era internment camp, and later fought in courts to have a Supreme Court conviction of “defiance” overturned, was remembered on January 30 in the state of California. In September, California declared this day, Korematsu’s birthday, to be the Fred Korematsu Day of Civil Liberties and the Constitution.

I wrote about the day and what it means for Asian American civil rights advocates for Mother Jones online and about bloggers’ initial reactions for GlobalVoices.

Not a reader? Here’s the trailer for 2007 documentary Of Civil Wrongs and Rights: The Fred Korematsu Story.

Of Civil Wrongs and Rights – trailer from Asian Law Caucus on Vimeo.

Larson has done a lot of reporting on China’s environmental movement, where she has found great stories about a dynamic country. Environmentalists in China, she said, have created a legal space for their advocacy. Registered environmental nongovernmental organizations now make up the largest sector of civil society in China.

“None of these people think of themselves as dissidents,” Larson said. They are working to enforce existing laws, not make the current regime crumble.

But the China news narrative in the United States is often dominated by stories about dissidents and victims, corruption and communism, painting a narrow picture of what activism and political engagement can mean there.

The discussion concluded with this provocative question: “Can you think of any hero stories about China?” Larson asked. If not, you’ll find plenty of heroes in Larson’s own reporting. In particular, read her reports for Yale Environment 360.

This conversation made me think about another place — however unlikely — where the China narrative, and narratives about Asia writ large, has evolved considerably: the White House. President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address on Tuesday included praise for China, India and South Korea, countries recast as places to stir American ideas and energy rather than fear and derision. Here are a three Asia-related snippets:

Meanwhile, nations like China and India realized that with some changes of their own, they could compete in this new world. And so they started educating their children earlier and longer, with greater emphasis on math and science. They’re investing in research and new technologies. Just recently, China became the home to the world’s largest private solar research facility, and the world’s fastest computer.

Let’s also remember that after parents, the biggest impact on a child’s success comes from the man or woman at the front of the classroom. In South Korea, teachers are known as “nation builders.” Here in America, it’s time we treated the people who educate our children with the same level of respect.

Our infrastructure used to be the best, but our lead has slipped. South Korean homes now have greater Internet access than we do. Countries in Europe and Russia invest more in their roads and railways than we do. China is building faster trains and newer airports. Meanwhile, when our own engineers graded our nation’s infrastructure, they gave us a “D.”