PhD studentships at South, West and Wales consortium, including University of Bristol

PhD Studentships at the University of Bristol

The University of Bristol is delighted to invite applications for studentships in the arts and humanities, including translation studies, for September 2014. Approximately 50 studentships will be funded by the AHRC through the South, West and Wales Doctoral Training Partnership at the eight universities in the consortium and their cultural partners across the range of arts and humanities subjects. 

The School of Modern Languages at the University of Bristol has a long-standing interest in Translation Studies from the medieval to the modern periods. Languages include Catalan, Chinese, Czech, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish. Research specialisms include literary translation; translation history; publishing; drama; audiovisual translation. Specialist supervision is available for performance-related translation in the School of Arts.

Information is available at the consortium website and an application form will be available shortly. Informal enquiries can be addressed to Dr Carol O’Sullivan at carol.osullivan[at]bristol.ac.uk. Enquiries relating to translation and performance should be sent to Dr Katja Krebs at k.krebs[at]bristol.ac.uk. Applications will be accepted from mid-December but you are encouraged to make informal enquiries at an early date. Decisions will be made before Easter 2014.

Remake? Adaptation? Remix? Homage?

I had the pleasure of attending a fiftieth anniversary screening of Fellini's film 81/2 earlier this month. It was a little odd, because I had already seen the musical Nine, which in retrospect was the wrong, wrong way round. Also, Nine is not very good.

The thing that really struck me was how the sequence with La Saraghina from 81/2 gets reworked in Nine. The Fellini sequence goes something like this (for the full contrast of Fellini after Rob Marshall, you might like to try watching the second clip first):

The sequence in Nine, starring Fergie in the role of la Saraghina, goes like this:

The director of Nine is Rob Marshall, who previously made Chicago, so the big lush musical numbers are a gimme. But is it just me, or does this sequence also borrow shamelessly from the staging of 'Mein Herr' from Cabaret and the production values from the 'Tango de Roxanne' in Moulin Rouge?

So what is this? Remake, homage, remix, adaptation, pastiche? I'm stumped. Answers in the comments please!

Translatable! Workshop, translation slam, and prizegiving, Bristol, 17 December 2013

 For our German and non-German-speaking readers within reach of Bristol:

 

Translatable!

Translation Workshop with Thomas Friese, Translation Slam, and Prizegiving Ceremony

 

School of Modern Languages, University of Bristol

Lecture Theatre 1, 43 Woodland Road, Clifton, Bristol

17 December 2013

All are welcome to an afternoon of translation events on 17 December 2013 at the University of Bristol on the occasion of the prizegiving for the 2013 Ernst Jünger Translation Competition, organised by the School of Modern Languages with support from the EU.

Schedule: 

2pm: workshop with distinguished Canadian translator Thomas Friese

4pm: translation slam showcasing two winners of the Ernst Jünger Translation Competition

5pm: prizegiving ceremony

Registration is free, and all are welcome. All events will take place in 43 Woodland Road, LT1.

If you would like to attend the workshop and/or the translation slam, please e-mail Dr Christophe Fricker (christophe.fricker [at] bristol.ac.uk) in advance. Knowledge of German is not required to enjoy either event.

Six translators will receive awards or commendations for their entries to the Competition: 

Joint 1st prize of £300 each will be awarded to Nigel Cooper and Jack Davis for their translations from Jünger’s Am Sarazenenturm (By the Saracen Tower). 

Third prize of £100 will be awarded to Iwona Luszowicz and Steve Laird for their collaborative translation from Jünger’s Atlantische Fahrt (Atlantic Voyage). 

The entries of Julian Reidy and Simon Pare will also be commended at the event. 

The competition’s undergraduate prize of £100 will be awarded to Joseph Prestwich; Constance Cramp will receive a special commendation. 

The three commended entrants will receive a copy of Heimo Schwilk’s Ernst Jüngers Leben und Werk in Bildern und Texten, and thanks to the generosity of Klett-Cotta Verlag, all participants will receive a copy of Heinz Ludwig Arnold’s Jünger reader, Ein abenteuerliches Herz.

The competition was judged by writer and translator Julian Evans, Dr Christophe Fricker (Bristol), Jünger’s translator Thomas Friese, Dr Petra Rau (UEA), and Professor Robert Vilain (Bristol). Sixty-four entries were received from 11 different countries and four continents. Participants were asked to translate an 8-page excerpt of their choice from one of three books of Jünger’s travel writings: Atlantische Fahrt, Am Sarazenenturm, or Zweimal Halley (Halley Revisited). 

Funding for the competition was provided as part of an EU-funded Marie Curie project on Ernst Jünger’s intercultural encounters, currently being carried out by Christophe Fricker at the University of Bristol.

Call for entries: China International Translation Contest 2013

Just came round on Edwin Gentzler's translation list, and may interest some of our readers.

Call for submissions: China International Translation Contest 2013
Sponsored by 
The Chinese Writers Association; China International Publishing Group (CIPG); Translators Association of China China International Translation Contest 2013 (CITC 2013) was launched in Beijing on September 2, 2013. It is co-hosted by the State Council Information Office, the Chinese Writers Association and the China International Publishing Group (CIPG), with the Translators Association of China being one of its organizers. It is the first translation contest in China that targets translators both home and abroad.

The CITC 2013 organizing committee has provided 30 pieces of contemporary Chinese short stories as source texts, and the participants can choose one or more of the stories to translate into one of the five (English, French, Russian, Spanish, or Arabic) languages. The submission deadline is February 28, 2014. The awarded pieces will be chosen from the submitted entries by the judging committee, and the top ones will be published by partner publishers of the target languages, namely: China International Publishing Group, Penguin Books, Hachette Livre (France), Editorial Popular (Spain), Oriental Literature Publisher (Russia), and Egypt-China Cultural Exchange Association.

Translators of the five languages who love Chinese culture and are dedicated to the translation of China's excellent contemporary works are all welcome to participate in this contest. As one of the organizers, the Translators Association of China will be in charge of the appraisal procedure. Translators from China and abroad, editors from well-established publishing companies and relevant experts will be invited as members of the judging committee. For each language, there will be a judging committee including at least five members.

For more details on submitting an entry, please see http://www.china.org.cn/arts/citc/index.htm.
For more information, please contact Hu Yuqing,Secretariat for the Translation Association of China, at hyq[at] tac-online.org.cn.

Translationstudiesforfree part 6: Journal special issues on translation

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In a previous post in the translationstudiesforfree occasional series I linked to free content from a number of translation journals. Of course there are lots of non-translation-studies journals which do special issues on translation too. A few are even open access. For instance:

reconstruction: studies in contemporary culture has a 2011 issue on 'Multilingual realities in Translation'.

Volume 5, issue 1 of the Journal of Writing Research has a special section on writing and translation process research.

The French sociolinguistics journal Glottopol has an interest in translation; see e.g. this 2010 issue on orality and writing in translation (and there's a call out for a 2015 special issue on self-translation which looks interesting (useful bibliography provided, too); deadline April 2014).

Helsinki English Studies has two special issues on translation, issue 1, edited by Ritva Leppihalme,  and issue 4, 'The Road to Translation', a Festschrift in Leppihalme's honour edited by Outi Paloposki (Finnish and English content) (which includes by-the-by an interesting article on dissertation supervision from the student's point of view by Mika Loponen). 

New Comparison, the old journal of the British Comparative Literature Association, ran several special issues on translation which are available for download here.

There's a special issue of the Portuguese journal Anglo-Saxonica (Series III, No.3) on 'New Directions in Translation Studies' edited by Anthony Pym and Alexandra Assis Rosa on translation here (click on the cover image to download the whole issue). 

The Revue française de linguistique appliquée has a couple of special issues on translation, one from 2003 on 'La traduction aujourd'hui: théories et pratiques' which includes an interesting-looking article on the translation of philosophy, and one on 'linguistique et traduction' from 2009 which includes a useful article by Kirsten Malmkjaer revisiting definitions of translation competence. There's a 1994 Langages special issue on 'Le traducteur et l'ordinateur'.

UPDATE 5 March 2014: Gisèle Sapiro has edited a special issue of the journal Bibliodiversity on translation and globalisation. The issue is dedicated to the publisher and champion of translated literature André Schiffrin. Articles in French, English, Spanish. Downloadable or readable online.

UPDATE 6 March 2014: The journal Book History has an issue free to access (no.16) at time of writing which includes a number of interesting articles relating to translation and publishing.

A keyword search for translation in the 'journal' field in the Directory of Open Access Journals turns up some 45 journals, and a keyword search under articles brings up nearly 7,000 hits, in many languages. There turn out to be many open access journals which have an interest in translation, without being translation-focused (e.g. journals not on the European Society for Translation Studies list of translation journals). Next time you're looking for secondary literature, a direct search on the DOAJ might be worthwhile.

Another great site is revues.org. It lists 13 special issues on translation, including:

A 2011 issue of Trivium on medieval translation and information exchange in the Mediterranean region; 
A 2002 issue of ILCEA on cultural factors in translating pragmatic texts (in Delisle's sense) and a special issue of the same journal from 2011 on the ergonomics of translation (a nice, catchy way of talking about translators and their tools).
A 2002 special issue of IDEO on translation and reception of the literatures of Asia in French
There's a special issue of Études irlandaises on translation in an Irish context, including a very good interview with Michael Cronin or, as he is sometimes known in Ireland, Micheál Ó Cróinín. His observations on Ireland's 'sociolinguistic deficit' have a wider application too.
There's a very interesting-looking 2011 special issue on the translation of Flaubert, including Sharon Deane on the retranslation of Flaubert into English, here.

France seems very well provided with open access journal repositories, what with www.cairn.info and www.persee.fr (where a keyword search on translation is also worth doing). The latter has a nice 1999 special issue on literary translation in the nineteenth century from Romantisme. This portal also has a very substantial 2002 special issue of Actes de recherche en sciences sociales on translation and international literary exchanges edited by Johan Heilbron and Gisèle Sapiro.

I note with interest the charges obtaining on www.cairn.info: between 3 and 5 euro per article, e.g. the 2011 special issue of the Revue de la BNF on translation or the 2011 special issue of Études de linguistique appliquée on 'Traduire des français: des mots et des mondes'. This is refreshing, in an era when articles on the big publishing platforms can be priced at £30 or more for individual download. Could this be a trend? Is anyone else exploring the potential of mini- or micropayments for academic publishing?

Speaking of matters financial, it's worth noting that there is a potential ethical issue around open repositories like the DOAJ, which may include journals which impose publication charges on authors. There's a search on the DOAJ to filter this, if you feel that open access content should be free for both authors and readers.

On the same theme, for readers who know Italian I recommend an excellent, thought-provoking article, 'Autori nella rete', by the dubbing scriptwriters Eleonora di Fortunato and Mario Paolinelli, authors of Tradurre per il doppiaggio (Hoepli 2005), on the impact of the move to open access and free content on writers who are not also salaried academics.

Photo credit: Flickr Commons

William Weaver, translator

Very sad, and moved, to read Susan Bernofsky's in memoriam post for William Weaver, one of the great translators from Italian.

Weaver is the English translator of one of my best-loved Italian books, Italo Calvino's Il castello dei destini incrociati/The Castle of Crossed Destinies. Bernofsky links to an interview with Weaver in the Paris Review which has some fascinating insights into the working relationships Weaver had with his authors. His marvellous reflection on the process of translating a paragraph of Gadda is also available online here.

Translationstudiesforfree part 5: Conference proceedings online

Today is the thirteenth annual Portsmouth translation conference, and I wish I could be there. It is the first conference I haven't been at in ten years. 

But here's hoping they are having a great day, and I thought I'd give them a shoutout, in the form of a link to some online translation conference proceedings as part of our ongoing occasional series on Translation Studies for free.

The Portsmouth conference has put several years' worth of proceedings online: click here for 2007, here for 2008, here for 2009. Some of the contributions to the 2011 conference on multimodality and translation were published as part of issue 20 of the Journal of Specialised Translation, which will also publish a special issue in 2014 based on this year's topic of translation and crime.

There are a few other conferences which put their proceedings online. There tends to be a mixture of full texts, powerpoints, handouts etc. Click here for the proceedings to a 2013 conference held in Liège entitled "Impliciter, expliciter: le traducteur comme équilibriste interculturel".

SEPTET, a translation research group based at the University of Strasbourg, has put online the proceedings of a conference on "Les relations internationales à travers les traductions françaises au siècle de Louis XIV" which look very interesting. Both mostly/all in French.

Lastly, we can't forget the proceedings of three Marie Curie-funded conferences on Multidimensional Translation (the MuTra conferences) held in 2005, 2006 and 2007 and containing useful papers on lots of topics including my favourite, subtitling.

I don't know quite where one draws the line between online conference proceedings and online downloadable books based on conferences. A good example of the latter is the 2010 book Translators' Agency, edited by Tuija Kinnunen and Kaisa Koskinen, based on a symposium held in Tampere in 2008 [the link is to a direct download of the book]. I'd love to see more books circulating via this route.

As always, feel free to link to any other online translation conference proceedings in the comments.

Viva voce congratulations to Alice Colombo!

Warmest congratulations to Alice Colombo for her successful PhD viva today, with a thesis looking at textual reworkings of Jonathan Swift from a translation point of view.

Brava! 

\o/\o/\o/\o/

Poems about translation 17: epitaph for Henry G. Bohn

Henry George Bohn has popped up in this blog before, as publisher of Ichabod Wright's translation of Dante. He was a Victorian publisher who, in the late 1840s, established the series known as the 'Libraries' (the Standard Library, the Classical Library, and many others) which became a widely known brand. They featured literal translations which were popular with students, and the Libraries continued to be published by George Bell & Sons until well into the twentieth century, eventually supplanted by Everyman and Loeb.

Bohn's output of translations was so substantial that, according to Kenneth Haynes in the Oxford History of Literary Translation into English, “it was Henry Bohn, more than any other publisher, whose series actively influenced the formation of a canon of world literature in translation” (2006: 8). The Libraries' attractive and inexpensive volumes were eagerly awaited by Victorian readers with three-and-sixpence or five shillings to spare:

When Bohn died in 1884, Punch published an affectionate obituary (6 September 1884, p.110), which gives some sense of the institution that was Bohn, and the reputation the translations enjoyed:

Eh? Dead at Eighty-nine? A ripe old age.

Dear renderer of many a learned page

Into the—rather dryasdust—vernacular;

True source of many an utterance oracular

From many a pseudo-pundit, who scarce owns

To wandering in that valley of dry Bohns.

Thousands should thank thee who will hardly do so—

In public! From Catullus down to Crusoe,

From Plato, Xenophon, and Aristotle deep,

To Goethe, Schlegel, Schiller we drink pottle-deep –

Of Learning’s fount from thy translated tap!

And what though o’er it one may nod and nap?

‘Tis wholesome, if not sparkling, with sound body,

If not the glint of true Pierian toddy.

Gone from thy roses underneath the daisies,

We echo Emersonian thanks and praises,

And say (Pundits make puns, and sometimes own ‘em),

            “Vale! De mortuis nil nisi Bo(h)num!”

(Ralph Waldo Emerson, a man who compared reading foreign languages in the original to swimming across the Charles River when he wanted to go to Boston, had said, in a judgment much-quoted in Bohn's advertisements, that Bohn's translations "have done for literature what railroads have done for internal intercourse".)

I have the good fortune to be talking about Bohn the translation publisher on Thursday 14 November 2013 as part of the UCL 'Translation in History' series.

Translationstudiesforfree part 4: Repositories of researchers' publications

This is the next instalment in the translationstudiesforfree series, which tries to highlight good open access resources for translation researchers.

I mentioned in a previous post that some translation scholars have their own websites where selections of their work can be downloaded. Theo Hermans was the scholar in question, but of course there are many others. Anthony Pym's website has a huge quantity of resources. Many of Andrew Chesterman's publications can be found on the open web. His homepage has a number of links. His short article from 1996: 'Psst! Theory can be useful!' cheers me up with its practical good sense. He offers a useful overview of Skopos theory here. On conference interpreting, see the rich resources gathered by Daniel Gile. On public service interpreting, see Holly Mikkelson's page.

Several scholars have extensive publications lists on academia.edu, including Mona Baker (lots of her work here on translation and narration). Another senior scholar represented is Douglas Robinson, who has several articles on the site including his '22 theses about translation' which remain as rich as ever.

In fact, academia.edu has unending riches for translation scholars, from Catherine Baker on military interpreting in the Balkans to Chris Rundle on translation and censorship in Fascist Italy; from Rachele Antonini on child language brokering to Federico Zanettin on comics translation; from Chris Larkosh on sexualities and translation in Latin America to Kyle Conway on news translation.

Of course this is a tiny and reductive selection of topics; there's much more to be found with a bit of patient rummaging. Note that on academia.edu it would be usual to find preprint versions of articles, but one may also find extended or alternate versions of work (e.g. Nicholas Watson's 'Director's Cut' of his entry on theories of translation in the medieval volume of the Oxford History of Literary Translation into English - nice!) It's also a place where people upload drafts of conference papers. So in textual terms, one needs, in the words of Alastor Moody, 'constant vigilance!'

PhD theses can increasingly be found on the open web, either on their authors' webpages, in institutional repositories or via services such as the British Library's Ethos in the UK (try looking up 'subtitling' or 'literary translation' to see the range of theses available). Abstracts of PhD theses are published regularly in New Voices in Translation Studies.

More suggestions for academics' pages with good resources are welcome in the comments.

Seminar on du Bouchet as poet and translator, Oxford, 7 November 2013

Looks fascinating; may be of interest to readers in hailing distance of Oxford: 

Oxford Modern French Research Seminar

  

Emma Wagstaff (University of Birmingham) will speak about 

 

'Poetry and Translation: the work of André du Bouchet'

   

André du Bouchet (1924-2001) was a poet, translator, and, along with other major poets of the post-war generation in France, a founding editor of the literary review L'Ephémère. This paper will discuss his understanding of translation, his work as a translator, and the ways in which translation is bound up with his poetic practice as a whole.

  

Thursday 7 November, 5.15, Maison française (Oxford)

Tea and coffee will be available from 5p.m. All welcome.