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Conny Weigert

Emilia Roig
Das Ende der Ehe

Roig begins her book with her personal story, tells of her wedding, marriage and divorce, and also explains right at the start the origins of a collective-social longing for marriage, before she then focuses on the individual aspects of marriage and heteronormative relationships.

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Claire Kohda
Woman, Eating

Woman, Eating by Claire Kohda highlights just how monstrous the human world that the vampire inhabits can truly be. It’s also a food lover’s delight that gives us a peek into the complicated identities that can inhabit individual bodies and how time and history can affect them, but it’s not intimidating.

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Yoga, Environment and Language

“Yoga is not just about exercise; it is a way to discover the sense of oneness with yourself, the world and the nature.”

With this statement, the Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi, proposed establishing an International Day of Yoga.

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Eat Gingerly

Ginger tea to Germans is starting to feel like what Windex brand glass cleaner was to the father in My Big Fat Greek Wedding.

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Indigo Waves and Other Stories

It’s a Saturday morning and it’s still very quiet in the Gropius Bau. I am looking forward to the exhibition “Indigo Waves and Other Stories: Re-Navigating the Afrasian Sea and Notions of Diaspora” – a group exhibition of writers, artists, filmmakers and musicians in the Gropius Bau.

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We All Have Garlic Breath

There isn’t a garlic tool in the world that has met with my approval so far. I’ve probably tried all of the ones that are small enough to justify filling space in your kitchen. (As opposed to some overpriced whack-chopper machine advertised on TV.)

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Gitanjali Shree
Tomb of Sand

Tomb of Sand by Geetanjali Shree was unexpected. It’s a tale that hits like a lost, slow-moving freight train. A rambling, chugging adventure in prose that diverts again and again before pulling you back to its core. It is a tale of Partition sprinkled throughout with magical realism.

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Machine Translation and Natural Language Processing

Reading through various studies on gender bias in machine translation, I stumble across the sentence: The doctor asked the nurse to help her. It’s used in a study that tests how gender is translated from English into languages which, unlike English, have grammatical gender. This attribution is particularly relevant when it comes to terms that label people. In English, for example, doctor is gender-neutral, whereas in German one would traditionally have to choose between ‘Arzt’ or ‘Ärztin’, the former a male doctor, the latter female. Intrigued, I open one of the most popular translation engines to see what happens when I translate this sentence into German.

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