ES-EN poetry translation workshop, London, 22 September

Just a quick last-minute post to our readers in London to flag up a Spanish to English poetry translation workshop taking place tomorrow, organised by the Poetry Translation Centre at SOAS in London. The workshop will be led by David Shook and will work on poems by Marcelo Ensema Nsang, from Equatorial Guinea, the only Spanish-speaking country in Africa.

Who knew?

These workshops sound wonderful - some day I hope to make it up to the metropolis for one.

Conference call for papers: Invisible Presences, April 2011

So many lovely conferences, so little time...  D:

Invisible Presences: Translation, Dramaturgy, and Performance
Queen's University Belfast/ Out of the Wings
Contact: k.taroff at qub.ac.uk

‘Invisible Presences’ is presented under the aegis of Out of the Wings, an AHRC-funded project exploring Spanish theatre in English translation, in association with the Melbourne Dramaturgies Project, the Translation, Adaptation, and Dramaturgy Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research, and the Dramaturgs’ Network

Drama and Film Centre
Queen’s University Belfast
18-20 April 2011.

This international conference will explore the dramaturgical processes of translation in performance practice, whether across language and culture or the translation of ideas into material production. Rather than seeing the processes of writing (whether collaborative or single-authored), translation, rehearsal, production, and audience reception as separate and discrete, the conference will engage approaches that view the process as more of a continuum, one that is perpetually at work. In this way the conference offers the opportunity for dialogue between contemporary practitioners, both translators and theatre makers, and for new insights into dramaturgy and translation that seek to map the growing convergence between theatre practice and translation.

Areas for discussion include, but are not limited to:

● Translation and its metaphorical apprehension of text
● Translation and its audiences
● Translation and the contingency of performance
● Collaborative translation processes
● The limits of translation
● Dramaturgy as translation/ translational process
● Visual theatre: dramaturgies and translations of light, sound, space
● Technology: new relationships with audiences in online productions
● The dramaturgical process in different contexts: Case studies from practitioners and scholars exploring the issues and particularities of each context, such as community arts, theatre for young people, cross-art collaboration processes and facilitation, ‘postdramatic’ dramaturgies, queer dramaturgies, disability arts, collaborative writing processes, etc.

The conference will feature:

● A range of eminent keynote speakers, including Mary Luckhurst, Lawrence Venuti, Peter Eckersall and Paul Monaghan.
● Practical workshops exploring issues of dramaturgy and translation
● Performances
● Panel sessions
● Round table discussions

Proposals addressing the themes of the conference are invited in the forms of:

20 minute paper presentation
2-hour workshop

Please submit proposals of 300-500 words, with 150-word biography, by 30 September 2010, to the organisers:
Alyson Campbell: a.e.campbell at qub.ac.uk
David Johnston: d.johnston at qub.ac.uk
Kurt Taroff: k.taroff at qub.ac.uk

Translation event in Rome, 8 October

A very interesting-looking event for anyone near Rome:

It's a question that applies to other languages too: how are our languages changing through translation? Possibly less relevant to the English language, whose attitude to translation has long been that it is better to give than to receive...
More information about the 'progetto casa delle traduzioni' here.

Tralogy conference, Paris, March 2011

Thanks to Sam B. for pointing out this interesting-looking conference which may interest our readers living in France. The deadline for paper proposals is 10 November 2010.

Translation Careers and Technologies: Convergence Points for the Future
Paris - March 3th & 4th 2011

Call for Papers

We no longer translate as we did 50, 20 or even 10 years ago. What form will the translation process take 10, 20 or 50 years from now? What will be the demand for translation and what kind of tools, what kind of approach, will we need to meet that demand? Who will be the translators – assuming they will still be called translators – of tomorrow? What skills and disciplines will they need, on what concepts will their work be based and what form will their training take? What can technology do today and what will it be able to do tomorrow? How far has research in the field of machine translation and computer-assisted translation come? If there is to be a partnership between human beings and machines, what approach to human translation will it be based on, and how will it progress?

One thing is for sure: the process of shaping the future is under way, and will move forward along the fault line that divides human translation, a translation activity that is, by nature, unsystematic, and the power of computer processing, which is, by definition, systematic. It would be impossible even to attempt to answer these questions satisfactorily without seeking, at international level, the opinions of the key protagonists, namely: translators, trainers and manufacturers of translation technologies, and researchers in these areas. We feel that such an interdisciplinary approach is the only way to overcome fears, stereotypes and narrow-minded opinion; we must address the emergence of a shared working culture by examining economic, technical, ethical and organisational issues.

We are therefore calling for papers on the way forward in translation careers and technologies, with the overall objective of taking stock of this rapidly changing world and examining how it is likely to develop. Our intention is to establish a regular forum for reflection and for professional, intellectual and scientific debate. This will take the form of a biennial international symposium intended to provide perspective on current European and world discourse, with the emphasis on a particular guest country, which in 2011 will be Canada. The aim is to provide a space in which:

* developers and researchers can gain an understanding of translators’ needs,
* translators can find out about the development of machine technologies, see where they fit in and express the profession’s expectations in relation to the changes taking place, and
* trainers can meet translators and researchers face to face and mark out the knowledge paths to which the training of future translators will be geared.

another site for internships

Another site worth looking at for internships is this German website.

translation internship in Germany

Hi all, 

This just came round, and may be of interest to those of you working from German. More possible places to look for internships and work placements here.

Looking for work experience? 

We run a translation service in Freiburg (Southern Germany) and are currently offering an internship to a language graduate (preferably with an MA in translation) with the possibility of subsequent employment after the internship.

During the internship you’ll get a feel for the day-to-day work of a translator, including translating into your native language (English) as well into a foreign language, terminology work, research, project management, organizing interpreting assignments, tendering offers etc.

You must be a native speaker of English with excellent knowledge of German; we welcome French, Italian or Spanish as second languages. You should have some experience in translating technical (legal, economic,…) texts. Finally, we expect applicants to be competent at word-processing and using the web as a research tool.

If you are committed, passionate about languages, and would like to live in Freiburg for a longer period, we look forward to receiving your application along with a CV by e-mail.

To find out more about us, please go to our website at www.peschel-communications.de.

Übersetzungsbüro Peschel

c/o Anja Peschel

Wallstraße 9

D-79098 Freiburg

Tel. +49 (0) 761/380969-0

E-mail: peschel at peschel-communications.de

PLEASE NOTE: Updated November 2014 with new contact details. For current listing, please click here.

Congratulations and keep in touch!

There was quite a bit for the noticeboard today but as it should be, the most important thing comes last: 

Well done to all our MA students who submitted their dissertations today!

I hope you all have an opportunity to celebrate and then time to put your feet up, because you deserve it. :) 

Translator residencies and 2011 Amazon.com Translator Fellowships

I just saw this very exciting-looking residency opportunity for translators at Ledig House in New York State. Residencies from two weeks to two months are available. Postal applications must be received by 20 October. The criteria seem very open. In addition, so the site says:

Ledig House International Writers Residency is proud to offer the 2011 Amazon Translator Fellowships through the generous support of Amazon.com. Supporting the work of translators is a major part of the Ledig House mandate and with this support from Amazon.com our organization is able to dramatically increase the scope of this mandate.
Three fellowships will be awarded; each will be one month in duration. Translators of all languages are welcome to apply. If you would like to be considered for an Amazon.com Translator Fellowship, please follow the general application guidelines. In the required description of your work to be completed at Ledig House, please be sure to state that you would like to be considered for an Amazon Translator Fellowship. 

Two other recently sighted possible residency opportunities here, for translators from French, and here.

Corpus of Historical American English

This came round on a distribution list and I thought it might be handy for those of you who use corpora. (I see they have Spanish and Portuguese corpora too on the site).

We are pleased to announce the release of the 400 million word Corpus of Historical American English (1810-2009). The corpus has been funded by a generous grant from the US National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), and it is freely available at http://corpus.byu.edu/coha/. COHA is the largest structured corpus of historical English, and it contains more than 100,000 texts from fiction, popular magazines, newspapers, and non-fiction books, with the same genre balance decade by decade from the 1810s-2000s.

COHA is also related to other large corpora that we have created or modified, including the 410 million word Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), the 100 million word TIME Magazine Corpus (1920s-2000s), the 100 million word British National Corpus (our architecture and interface), the 100 million word NEH-funded Corpus del Español (1200s-1900s), and the 45 million word NEH-funded Corpus do Português (1300s-1900s). For information on these corpora, see http://corpus.byu.edu.

COHA allows you to quickly and easily search the 400 million words of text from the 1810s-2000s to see how words, phrases and grammatical constructions have increased or decreased in frequency, how words have changed meaning over time, and how stylistic changes have taken place in the language. Users can see the overall (normalized) frequency by decade and year, as well as the frequency of each matching string, by decade.

The following are just a small sample of an unlimited number of queries, but they should give some idea of what the corpus can do.

* Lexical change: the rise and fall of words and phrases like the following:
 - (decrease since the 1800s): bosom, folly, grieved, bestow*, quaint, beauteous, fellow, sublime, lad, many a time, of no little, for (conj)
  - (an increase and then decrease): mustn't, naughty, boyish, agog, toddle, far-out, famed, wangle, swell (adj), lousy
  - (an increase to the present time): a lot of, unleash, sexual, calm down, screw up, freak out, mommy, skills, frustrating
  - (words reflecting historical and cultural shifts): emancipation, steamship, telegraph, flapper*, fascis*, teenage*, communis*, global warming

* Stylistic change (which gives the flavor of a different time period). Examples from the 1800s, which have decreased since then, are: [so ADJ as to V] (so good as to show me), [PRON be but] (they are but the last examples), [have quite V-ed] (until she had quite finished), [NOUN be that of] (her dress was that of a beggar), or [a most ADJ NOUN] (a most helpful child).

* Morphological change: which show how word roots, prefixes, and suffixes have been used over time, including comparisons between different periods, such as -heart- (1800s noble-hearted, 1900s heart-stopping), home- (1800s homebred, 1900s homeowner), or -able adjectives (1800s placable, 1900s predictable).

* Syntactic change (since the corpus is tagged and lemmatized), like [end up V-ing], [going to V], [V PRON into V-ing] (talked them into going), phrasal verbs with [up] (make up, show up), post-verbal negation with [need] (needn't mention), the 'get' passive (get hired), sentence-initial 'hopefully', and semi-modals like [need to] and [have to].

* Semantic change: how the meaning or usage of words have changed over time, by looking at changes in collocates (co-occurring words), like [sexual, gay, chip, engine, or web]. This can also signal cultural changes over time, such as nouns used with [woman] in the 1930s-50s compared to the 1960s-80s (fabrics, hips // liberation, abortion), or nouns used with [problem] in the 1810s-1920s compared to the 1920s-2000s (railway, trust // drugs, pollution).

 * Lexical change (again): users can also have the corpus generate a list of words that were used more in one period than another, even when they don't know what the specified words might be. For example, the corpus can generate lists of verbs in the 1970s-2000s compared to the 1930s-1960s (download, recycle // effectuate, redound), adjectives in the 1970s-2000s and the 1930s-1960s (online, affordable // leftist, communistic), or -ly adverbs in the 1900s and the 1800s (basically, reportedly // despondingly, sportively).

As can be seen, the corpus allows research on a wide range of phenomena in 400 million words of text from the last two centuries of American English. The corpus is freely available at http://corpus.byu.edu/coha/, and we invite you to use it for your research and teaching.

job DE-EN for Deutsche Bank, Frankfurt

Deutsche Bank are advertising an in-house position in Frankfurt for a German-English translator. It looks like a very good opportunity for a more experienced translator with some background in the industry.

Le Fabrique des traducteurs (in French)

This looks like a great opportunity for young French translators with some experience of literary translation:

 

Le Collège international des traducteurs littéraires (CITL), à Arles, accueille depuis le 1^er septembre « La Fabrique des traducteurs ». Ce programme a pour objectif de donner à de jeunes traducteurs en début de carrière l’occasion de travailler avec d’autres traducteurs expérimentés et de mieux connaître le paysage de la traduction et de l’édition dans les deux pays.

Les enjeux

Face au recul de l’enseignement du français dans le monde, face au vieillissement du vivier des traducteurs et aux difficultés qu’ils ont à exercer leur métier, l’émergence d’une nouvelle génération qualifiée, familiarisée avec les réalités des métiers du livre et apte à jouer un rôle de passeur entre le français et la langue d’origine est une nécessité.

La Fabrique des traducteurs vise à renouveler les générations de traducteurs étrangers (traduisant du français vers leur langue), en s’appuyant sur un travail en tandem. Les jeunes traducteurs traduisant vers le français y trouveront un précieux dispositif de perfectionnement : une situation de bilinguisme idéal où chacun bénéficie de l’apport d’un locuteur naturel.

L’objectif est aussi de développer le réseau des traducteurs professionnels, en  constituant un noyau de traducteurs d’une même génération, qui formeront à moyen terme un réseau international d’entraide et de compétences. Pour chaque session linguistique, trois jeunes traducteurs traduisant du français vers leur langue travailleront avec trois jeunes traducteurs traduisant dans l’autre sens.

A plus long terme, la visée est enfin de favoriser le repérage ou l’émergence de structures qui apportent un soutien au travail des traducteurs dans leur pays, et de nouer de nouveaux partenariats.

 
Principes de fonctionnement

La Fabrique des traducteurs repose sur un triple tutorat :

-       Un axe « vertical », grâce à la présence conjointe de deux traducteurs expérimentés traduisant respectivement du français et vers le français. Ces tuteurs guideront le travail.

-       Un axe « horizontal », les jeunes traducteurs se choisissant mutuellement pour traduire en tandem. Chaque traducteur bénéficie ainsi pour son travail en cours de la compétence d’un locuteur naturel, ce qui apporte un enrichissement mutuel décisif.

-       L’inscription dans un réseau :

-          Dix semaines du travail sur projets, où le travail en tandem alterne avec  des séances plénières.

-          Des rencontres avec des professionnels du livre (éditeurs, directeurs de collection, responsables de droits étrangers, association de traducteurs, responsables) de revues ou opérateurs institutionnels ...

Public concerné

Les langues concernées pour 2010 sont successivement le russe, le chinois, en 2011, l’italien (du 10 janvier au 19 mars 2011) puis l’arabe, l’espagnol et le portugais.

Le programme s’adresse à de jeunes traducteurs en début de carrière. Les candidats à ce programme seront porteurs d’un projet personnel de traduction. C’est sur ce projet et sur des critères d’excellence qu’ils seront choisis.

Conditions d’éligibilité :

·             être âgé de 35 ans maximum 

·             être entièrement disponible du 10 janvier au 19 mars 2011 pour la session "italienne"

·             justifier d’un projet de traduction autour du domaine linguistique défini 

·             justifier d’une traduction publiée de la même langue : 1 ouvrage ou 2 textes en revue ;

·             ne pas avoir bénéficié d’une aide du Cnl depuis au moins 2 ans.

Date limite de dépôt des dossiers :

8 octobre (langue : ITALIEN)

Déroulement du séjour

-      Chaque session prévoit la venue de deux traducteurs expérimentés différents dans chaque sens, chacun venant 3 à 4 semaines. Le temps restant est mis à profit pour le programme de rencontres professionnelles et la préparation de la présentation publique.

-      L’atelier se déroule au Collège international des traducteurs littéraires (Arles). Le lieu offre à ses résidents la possibilité d’utiliser une bibliothèque spécialisée de 17 000 ouvrages. L’hébergement se fait en appartement au centre ville d’Arles (3 appartements avec espaces communs et chambres individuelles.)

-      Les textes traduits au cours des sessions feront l’objet d’une présentation publique de clôture. Cette présentation sera précédée d’un travail de mise en voix, encadré par un professionnel de la scène qui sera bilingue.

-      La publication d’une brochure diffusée à 300 exemplaires auprès des professionnels du livre et présentant les travaux réalisés donnera une visibilité au programme et à ses participants.

-      Les participants pourront assister aux événements littéraires organisés par le CITL (cycle de découverte la littérature française contemporaine, ...)

Renseignements et inscription

-      Les dossiers de candidature sont à retirer auprès du

Centre National du Livre

Hôtel d’Avejan                                                   

53, rue de Verneuil

75343 Paris cedex 07

Tél. : 01 49 54 68 68 / Fax : 01 45 49 10 21

Les candidats retenus seront boursiers du CNL. Ils percevront la somme  de 5000 € pour un séjour de deux mois et demi dont 1400 € seront dus au CITL en tant que participation aux frais du programme.

-      Les dossiers sont à retourner par fax ou par mail au Centre national du livre, à l’attention de :

Valérie ICHOU

Bureau des Auteurs

53 rue de Verneuil

75343 PARIS CEDEX 07

Tél. 01 49 54 68 12

Mél. valerie.ichou@culture.fr

Financement

coproduction

ATLAS-CITL

Culturesfrance

Centre National du Livre (CNL)

Délégation générale à la langue française et aux langues de France (DGLFLF).

Région Provence Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur  (PACA)

Le Collège international des traducteurs littéraires (CITL) est géré par l’association ATLAS, qui organise les Assises de la Traduction Littéraire en ArleS.

CITL - Espace Van Gogh, 13200 Arles - Tél. 04 90 52 05 50 Fax 04 90 93 43 21 www.atlas-citl.org

Doctoral scholarships at London Metropolitan University

London Metropolitan University is offering fifteen PhD studentships across a range of subjects including translation and interpreting. Maintenance grants as well as tuition fees are available (tuition fees only for overseas students). The closing date for applications is Friday 1 October 2010 (12 midnight).

International Translation Day, London, 30 September

On 30 September, which savvy readers will know is the day of St. Jerome, patron saint of translators (see above), the FLOW festival in association with English PEN and the Literary Translation Centre of the London Book Fair is holding an International Translation Day Event:

How does a book make its way from an international author to an English-language reader? What are the joys of publishing literature in translation - and what are the obstacles? What can we do to increase the proportion of translated literature in the UK? Join us for a full day of events focused on literary translation. We will be hearing from some of the people who have done most to raise the profile of translation; discussing the future of funding for translation; and looking at the role of schools and universities in training the translators of the future. The symposium will provide a space for all those interested in the business of literary translation to network, share ideas and take these important debates forward.

I hope to go along and would as always love to meet up with any of our MA students who decide to attend.

Kurodahan Press Translation Prize (JP-EN) 2010

Many thanks to Stephen C. for pointing out this prize for translating a Japanese short story. Full details and a copy of the story to be translated can be found here. Note that the deadline is 30 September 2010.

The website also gives the text of previous entries to the competition which may be of interest.

Good luck to any of our readers who decide to give it a go! :)