PhD funding in arts and humanities, University of Bristol. Deadline 12 January 2015

The University of Bristol is offering 8 3-year PhD scholarships for the arts and humanities for projects starting in the academic year 2015-16. Translation studies projects are also eligible. The deadline is 12 January 2015.

6 Graduate School of Arts and Humanities scholarships of £12,500 per year, and 2 Alumni scholarships of £10,000 per year are available. Scholarships are open to applicants from the UK and EU.

The Faculty of Arts at the University of Bristol has broad expertise in translation studies; areas of particular expertise include literary translation, audiovisual translation, translation history (Dr Carol O'Sullivan), interpreting (Dr Xiaohui Yuan), theatre translation and performance (Dr Katja Krebs); and adaptation (Dr Bradley Stephens). Enquiries are welcome.

Please note that these scholarships are separate from the AHRC-funded scholarships offered by the South, West and Wales Doctoral Training Partnership. The deadline for those scholarships is also 12 January 2015. See the SWW DTP website for details of translation studies supervision available across the  consortium.

'Tis the Season for Thinking About Summer (Schools)

Recent forays onto the European Society for Translation Studies Facebook page (a good place to lurk, as witness the 7,287 likes at time of writing) suggest that, once again, it is the season for thinking about summer schools.

Three summer schools have announced their lineup for next year (note that all information is taken from the respective websites and no guarantee is made of its accuracy). 

The long-running CETRA Summer School is now in its twenty-seventh year and will be held at the Antwerp campus of the University of Leuven from 24 August to 4 September 2015. This year's visiting professor is Judy Wakabayashi. Two partial scholarships are available. Applications close 2 April 2015.

The fourth annual EMUNI Agricola Translation Studies Doctoral and Teacher Training Summer School will take place from 1 to 12 June 2015 in Turku, Finland. The guest professors will be Yves Gambier and Andrew Chesterman. The summer school is named for the sixteenth-century Finnish translator Mikael Agricola. Applications close 28 February 2015.

The ninth Nida School of Translation Studies, an initiative of the Nida Institute for Biblical Scholarship, takes place from 18 to 29 May 2015. The guest professors are Susan Bassnett and Sandra Bermann. It takes place in Misano Adriatico (Rimini), Italy. The website says a limited number of partial bursaries are available on the basis of need and merit. Applications close 31 January 2015.

Edinburgh Interpreting Research Summer School has not yet announced dates but looks as though it is expected to run again in 2015.

The European Society for Translation Studies has an annual Summer School Scholarship with a deadline on 1 May 2015 which contributes 1,000 euro towards the cost of any recognised translation or interpreting summer school. You have to be an EST member at the time of application.


Some readers will have noticed an omission from this list. The Translation Studies Summer School which used to run between Edinburgh, Manchester, UCL and latterly Hong Kong has been discontinued. Many of the staff involved have set up a new initiative, ARTIS (Advancing Research in Translation and Interpreting Studies) which provides academic support for translation and interpreting research training events. These events can be held anywhere in the world; see the website for upcoming events or follow @ARTISinitiative on Twitter for information about the next call for events.

Readers looking for more practically-oriented events, rather than research training, may wish to keep an eye on Translate in the City, the BCLT Summer School, Traduttori in Movimento, the Assises de la Traduction Littéraire or the Giornate della Traduzione Letteraria.

UPDATE 17 December: The long-running translation programme at the University of Ottawa offers two summer schools in 2015: a summer school in Chinese-English translation and interpreting, and a summer school in translation pedagogy for translator trainers. More information here. Application deadline 15 January.

Summer is coming...


Image by Tai on Flickr with warm thanks.

Translating cult TV and fiction into French

On the Arte site, this evening, this entertaining piece (in French) on the translation, dubbing and subtitling of cult media in France. Featuring, among others, Sylvestre Meininger and Anaïs Duchet of the Association des Traducteurs et Adaptateurs de l'Audiovisuel (ATAA):

For French speakers, the ATAA website is a fantastic source of information on the French audiovisual translation industry.

Translation, Research and the Production of Knowledge

This looks like a really interesting event:

One-Day Conference: Translation, Research and the Production of Knowledge

Date: Friday 28 November 2014
Venue: Institut Français, 17 Queensberry Place, London

Organised by the Society for French Studies and the French Studies Library Group,
with the collaboration of the Institut français

This event will bring together translators, academics and librarians to discuss the ways in which translation constitutes a form of research and knowledge production in its own right. It will include discussion of translation as a form of practice as research, and provide reflections by researchers and translators on recent projects that exemplify such an approach. Colleagues from the British Library will explore the potential of translators’ papers as a research resource, and there will be a round table with colleagues from the wider fields of translation studies and Modern Languages. The event will conclude with a presentation by prize-winning translator and curator Sarah Ardizzone. This is the third in a series of translation-related events co-organized by SFS and FSLG, and follows previous symposia on ‘Constructing “21st-century Literature in French”‘ in December 2011 and ‘Translation and Reception: 21st-century French fiction in the UK’ in April 2013.

Advance booking is essential by 14 November 2014 as spaces will be limited.

Programme
10.00 – tea/coffee and registration
10.30 –panel 1:
Nick Harrison (KCL), Translation as research
Kate Briggs (American University in Paris), Translation as experiment
11.30 – panel 2:
Nina Parish (Bath) and Emma Wagstaff (Birmingham), Translating contemporary French poetry
Michael Syrotinski (Glasgow), Translating the Dictionary of Untranslatables
Tim Mathews (UCL), Translation and reading
1.00 – lunch
2.00 – Rachel Foss and Deborah Dawkin (British Library), Collecting Translators’ Archives at the British Library
3.00 – tea/coffee
3.30 – round table (with Kate Briggs (American University in Paris), Nick Harrison (KCL), Duncan Large (British Centre for Literary Translation, UEA) and Karen Leeder (University of Oxford))
4.30 – Sarah Ardizzone, The Spectacular Translation Machine & Other Adventures in Translation 
5.30 – event ends

Registration
Please register as soon as possible, and before Friday 14 November 2014, by completing the brief form below, and returning it with a cheque for the required to the following address:

Professor Charles Forsdick,
CLAS: French,
Cypress Building,
University of Liverpool,
Liverpool L69 7ZR

Please mark the envelope ‘Translation Event’.

Fee (including lunch and refreshments): £40 for the day (reduced rate of £20 for postgraduates and unwaged).

Cheques payable to The Society for French Studies. Please provide an email address as confirmation of registration will be provided by this means. Receipts will be available on the day.
*****************************************************************************
Translation, Research and the Production of Knowledge
Friday 28 November 2014 at the Institut Français, 17 Queensberry Place, London
I wish to attend this event.
Name and title:
________________________________________________________________________________
Institutional Affiliation (if any):
___________________________________________________________________
Address for Correspondence:
_____________________________________________________________________
Any special requirements (dietary and other):
________________________________________________________________
e-mail: ________________________________________________________________

Please address any enquiries to Charles Forsdick (craf[at]liv.ac.uk)

---

Internship for German-English translator, Freiburg, Germany

This may be of interest to readers working from German.

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

Open talk: 'Making a living as a professional translator', Bristol, 12 November 2014

Here's an event coming up that may interest some readers who are within reach of Bristol. The event is free and open to everyone.

MAKING A LIVING

as a Professional

Translator

 

Silke Lührmann

(Wolfestone Translation, Swansea)

on working in-house & as a freelance translator

Wednesday 12 November 2014

15:00-16:30

ARTS CMPLX Lecture Theatre 2
entrance via 3-5 Woodland Road, Bristol BS8
All welcome. 

The Forum for Modern Language Studies Prize 2015: Translating Cultures

Seen in passing on the FRANCOFIL mailling list: 

The Forum Prize 2015 – Call for Articles

The Forum for Modern Language Studies Prize competition 2015 invites submissions on the subject of translating cultures.

In an increasingly transnational, multi-cultural and multi-lingual world, translation has a crucial role to play in inter-cultural understanding, to which research in Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures makes a vital contribution. Translation has long been at the heart of LLC teaching and research activity and is a thriving area of interdisciplinary scholarship across a broad range of historical and geographical contexts.

‘Translating Cultures’ is the subject of an important current AHRC research theme in the UK, and is a key area of many research centres, collaborative projects and networks across the world, involving a wide range of disciplinary fields, in both the academic and professional spheres. As well as a textual practice familiar to all learners of language, translation understood as a range of dynamic processes has extended into countless inter-related research domains including such broad fields as adaptation, comparative literature, multilingualism, post-colonialism and cultural identity. Authors may wish to address one or more of the following topics:

• Comparative analyses of different translations of the same text, their reception and the ways they allow the flow of ideas – and their evolution – across national boundaries.

• How translation contributes to the development of particular literary forms (and vice versa).

• Canonisation – the relationship between translation and notions of world literature, or the role translation plays in comparative literature.

• Questions of genre – what differences or similarities might be observed in the translation of narrative, poetry, prose, drama, opera, subtitles, bande dessinée, fiction and non-fiction, or political, legal, economic and religious texts?

• The multilingual text, translanguaging, and the relationship between multilingualism and creativity.

• Intermediality – the ways in which adaptation may be conceived as a form of translation, ekphrastic translations of the visual arts, but also including non-linguistic translation, between music, painting, sculpture, dance, as well as digital culture.

• The ethics of translation – how notions of domestication or foreignisation raise questions of appropriation and resistance in intercultural dialogues.

• Migration and diaspora – the migration of texts across boundaries,
translation as a form of cultural interpretation, or as catalyst for mobile, dynamic global identities.

• Linguistics and the linguistic landscape – the politics and practice of bilingual signage, the complex relationship between language and regional, national or transnational identities.

• Translating between regional and national languages, the question of internal colonialism, and the creation of hybridised global discourses.

• Representations of the translator in literature or film. How do fictional texts represent, support or subvert the politics and practice of translation?

• Radical translation practices: intralingual translation and rewriting, feminist translation strategies, translation and phenomenology.

• The role of translation in producing original cultural artefacts.

• Mistranslations, deliberate or accidental.

• The untranslatable, including omitted or untranslated elements, or
resistance to translation.

• Translation and the acoustic properties of a text.

Submissions may address literature of any period, from a literary or
linguistic perspective, and in any of the languages covered by the journal (usually Arabic, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and Russian, but we will consider others too). The competition is open to all researchers, whether established or early-career: it is worth noting that previous competitions have been won by scholars in both categories.

The winner’s prize will consist of:

1. Publication of the winning essay in the next appropriate volume of Forum for Modern Language Studies

2. A cheque for £500

A panel of judges will read all entries, which will be assessed anonymously. At the judges’ discretion, a runner-up prize of £200 may be awarded. The Editors may commission for publication any entries that are highly commended by the judges.


Entry requirements and Submission details for the Forum Prize 2015.

The closing date for entries is Friday 3 April 2015.

Entries must be written in English, between 6,000 and 10,000 words in length including notes, should conform to MHRA style, and must be accompanied by an abstract (approx. 150 words) summarizing the principal arguments and making clear the relevance of the article to the competition topic.

Articles should be submitted online at www.fmls.oxfordjournals.org, flagged as Forum Prize entries and following the guidelines for authors. We will also accept submissions by email or hard copy and disc, if there is a compelling reason: in this case, please contact:

formod.editorialoffice at oup.com

Full details of the Essay Prize rules can be found at
http://www.oxfordjournals.org/our_journals/formod/forum_prize.html

Plus ça change: on being a translator in the UK a century ago

I'm reading the urbane Frederic Whyte's memoirs, titled A Bachelor's London: Memories of the Day before Yesterday 1889-1914, and he has this to say about the state of the translation profession and rates:

One of the curses of the town translator, by the way (and most of us are townsmen, of course), is his country competitor. A man earning his livelihood by his pen in London can scarcely translate a German book (unless he knows German as perfectly as English) for much less than £1 per 1,000 words. A man living in cheap quarters in the country may welcome such work at less than half the price. I heard of one very competent worker some years ago who translated a long and important French book at 5s. per 1,000! He was living in a Welsh village quite happily. (Whyte 1931: 141)

So far, so plus ça change (except for the mysteriously and exclusively male workforce of British translators...?). Whyte goes on to say:

Still worse competitors are the people who can afford to translate for the pleasure of it, or the kudos. The whole matter of payment for translators calls for rationalisation. Arnold Bennett used to advocate the founding of a Translators' Guild. It might be a great boon. 

Applications open for European Society for Translation Studies Event Grant

EST Translation Studies Event Grant

The EST Translation Studies Event Grant is awarded annually to help finance Translation Studies events (conferences, symposia, guest lectures, courses, exhibitions). It may be used to cover a wide range of documented expenses such as bursaries, travel, accommodation, or preparation of conference materials.

Deadline: January 31, 2015

Amount: Up to 1000 euros

Rules and procedures

1. At least one member of the organizing or scientific committee must be a paid-up member of the European Society for Translation Studies.
2. The funds have to support a Translation Studies event. This may include symposia, courses, visits of keynote speakers, etc.
3. Applications should explain the circumstances under which the request is made and include details about the specific use of the sum requested.
4. The Event Grant Committee will conduct an evaluation of each application on the basis of: a) the needs demonstrated in the application, b) the importance of the event for the Translation Studies community, and c) compliance of the event with the EST’s general philosophy of making Translation Studies accessible to all.
5. The sum granted will be transferred to the applicant’s account after invoices and/or receipts have been received.
6. Applications should be sent by email to the Chair of the Event Grant Committee, Magdalena Bartłomiejczyk: magdalenabartlomiejczyk[at]hotmail.com. Reception will be acknowledged.
7. The deadline for submitting applications for 2015 is January 31, 2015. The decision of the Committee will be announced at the beginning of March. The grant may thus be requested for events that are planned for between March 1, 2015 and March 31, 2016.

Oldies but goodies

It's fifty-five years old, but I still really like this description of what good translation feels like:

If [the translator] does see and hear clearly and fully, he (sic) will hold the original poem in a sort of colloidal suspension in his mind – I mean a fluid state in which the syntax, all the rigid features of the original dissolve, and yet its movements and inner structures persist and operate. It is out of this that he must make another poem that will speak, or sing, with his own voice’

Jackson Mathews, 'Third Thoughts on Translating Poetry', in Reuben Brower (ed. ) On Translation, Harvard University Press, 1959, pp.66-77

How to prepare a good PhD application

The next round of Doctoral Training Partnership funding is coming up, and it's made me think about what makes a good PhD application. Over the years I have seen a lot of PhD enquiries and applications, and it might be helpful to outline what my expectations of a competitive application in my field are. These are just my personal opinions, and are not representative of any institution or organisation, but I hope they may be helpful for readers out there considering applying for PhD funding in Translation Studies.

The thing I can't emphasise enough is groundwork. The PhD application is not the place to submit your initial idea; once you have an idea, you should get appropriate academic feedback on it and begin approaching your chosen institution(s) to scope out supervision possibilities. This should be done well in advance of any application, particularly where funding deadlines are at issue. A good literature review takes time to develop; for archival projects, you might find yourself visiting archives to establish the availability of appropriate primary material - and so on. A competitive funding application is about showing that the project is worth doing and that you are the right person to do it.

Turning your topic into a proposal
What's going to be new about your project? The literature review is an important step in pinning this down. What's been written about the topic? Where is the gap in knowledge that this work can address? What theoretical framework/methodology will you use/draw on/develop? Why is this an appropriate framework/methodology? Your prospective supervisor will look with interest at the bibliography following your research proposal - do you mention the key scholars in this field? Are you familiar with the relevant debates? Where's the evidence of critical thinking in your proposal?

Where are you going to get your data from? Sometimes, a PhD project comes not from the research question, but the other way around, from the discovery of a source of data which invites analysis - the research question might then be a function of what you can usefully ask about that data. If you're looking at a body of texts, what texts are you going to look at, and why?

Your own preparation for doctoral work
Your application will include details about your academic and professional background. A good PhD application explains how this project proposal builds on your existing strengths. It should show that you have enough familiarity with the general field to be reasonably confident about the claims or hypotheses outlined in your proposal. Is there appropriate evidence of the language competence, if any, needed to do the research?

You don't have to have all the research training in advance; good PhD programmes will make training available to you, but you need to have an appropriate background in the subject. And you don't have to answer your research question(s) before you've even begun the PhD, but you do need to be able to show in the proposal that the questions are worth asking, and can be answered within the scheme of work that you propose.

Managing your application(s)
One of the things which helps to make a good narrative for a PhD application is choice of institution. Have you selected an appropriate institution? Do they have the right research strengths? Are they able to supervise in your language pair(s)? Can you tell a good story, not just about how you are the right person to do this project, but about how this is the right place for you to do it?
Have you checked the requirements for the application at your chosen institution(s)? Don't be afraid to ask questions.

Attention to detail
Have you formatted and proofread your application carefully, using clear headers and consistent referencing conventions? Check that you've done all this, then proofread it again.

Timing
Be aware that a lot of funding for PhDs in the UK has deadlines in December or January for the following autumn; for the 2015 round I'd start approaching institutions as soon as possible.

Useful Links
There are lots of more or less helpful webpages out there with advice about applying for PhDs. I thought this one and this one had pretty useful guidance.

UPDATED 23 September 2016 with some style edits and a new title.

Translators' notes

I've long thought that there's not enough writing out there by translators about specific knotty problems in texts. You can track them down sometimes in the prefaces of books, and there's always one's own experience to draw on, but one can never have too many examples to hand of real problems which have come up in authentic translation contexts, especially in a translation class with seven language pairs represented.

So I was delighted when the Translators Association's excellent journal In Other Words added an 'in brief' section where translators discuss fascinating questions such as how to translate 'del rancho de la chingada' in Mexican writer Juan Pablo Villalobos' Down the Rabbit Hole (Rosalind Harvey in issue 39) or the kind of relationship known as a 'Bratkartoffelverhältnis' (Anthea Bell in issue 40, on translating Eugen Ruge's In Times of Fading Light).

And now I am very very pleased to see that there's a new wordpress community, Brouillon, dedicated to the same thing - short pieces by translators about very specific words and phrases that proved a problem in translation, and how they got solved. So far, all the posts are, predictably enough, about fiction translation but it seems to be open to all sorts of translation (screen translation, anyone?).

Doctoral funding available from the South West and Wales Doctoral Training Partnership

The University of Bristol is a member of the Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded SouthWest and Wales Doctoral Training Partnership (SW&W DTP).

The DTP consortium, which consists of eight universities, will award more than 50 scholarships for students commencing doctoral research in 2015-16. 

Applications can be made to the DTP after 26 November 2014. The closing date for applications is 12 January 2015. 

If you wish to undertake doctoral studies at the University of Bristol, and wish to be considered for a DTP scholarship, please make contact with your potential supervisor at Bristol as soon as possible. Candidates are welcome to submit proposals in any field of the arts and humanities with supervision expertise in the University of Bristol. 

The University of Bristol offers supervision in a range of translation studies fields including translation history, literary translation, screen translation, adaptation, interpreting and theatre translation/performance. Languages include Chinese, Czech, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish. Candidates should contact Dr Carol O'Sullivan in the first instance. For projects in drama translation and performance, please contact Dr Katja Krebs.

The University of Bristol also expects to be in a position to offer a number of its own postgraduate research scholarships to outstanding applicants. Students who apply for a DTP scholarship based at Bristol will also be automatically considered for a University of Bristol scholarship. An application for a place on the PGR programme at the University of Bristol can be made at any time, but only those applications received before 12 January 2015 will be considered for a UoB scholarship.  For more details of PGR funding opportunities at the University of Bristol see http://www.bristol.ac.uk/arts/gradschool/funding.

Happy St. Jerome's Day: untranslatable words

You get those little 'untranslatable words' meme going round at intervals. I'm always a bit suspicious - though I did like the word 'poronkusema' which is apparently, according to the interwebs, a distance of about 7.5km in Finland, equal to how far a reindeer can travel without stopping to urinate. 

But what about words which are untranslatable not because they mean something so specific, but because they mean so many things? My favourite (if, OK, fictional) example is Flann O'Brien's panegyric on the meanings of the Irish verb 'cur' [to put]:

There is scarcely a single word in the Irish (barring, possibly, Sasanach) that is simple and explicit. Apart from words with endless shades of cognate meaning, there are many with so complete a spectrum of graduated ambiguity that each of them can be made to express two directly contrary meanings, as well as a plethora of intermediate concepts that have no bearing on either. And all this strictly within the linguistic field. Superimpose on all that the miasma of ironic usage, poetic licence, oxymoron, plamás, Celtic evasion, Irish bullery and Paddy Whackery, and it a safe bet that you will find yourself very far from home. Here is an example copied from Dinneen and from more authentic sources known only to my little self:

Cur, g. curtha and cuirthe, m.—act of putting, sending, sowing, raining, discussing, burying, vomiting, hammering into the ground, throwing through the air, rejecting, shooting, the setting or clamp in a rick of turf, selling, addressing, the crown of cast-iron buttons which have been made bright by contact with cliff-faces, the stench of congealing badger's suet, the luminance of glue-lice, a noise made in an empty house by an unauthorised person, a heron's boil, a leprachaun's denture, a sheep-biscuit, the act of inflating hare's offal with a bicycle pump, a leak in a spirit level, the whine of a sewage farm windmill, a corncrake's clapper, the scum on the eye of a senile ram, a dustman's dumpling, a beetle's faggot, the act of loading every rift with ore, a dumb man's curse, a blasket, a 'kur', a fiddler's occupational disease, a fairy godmother's father, a hawk's vertigo, the art of predicting past events, a wooden coat, a custard-mincer, a blue-bottle's 'farm', a gravy flask, a timber-mine, a toy craw, a porridge-mill, a fair-day donnybrook with nothing barred, a stoat's stomach-pump, a broken—

But what is the use? One could go on and on without reaching anywhere in particular.

                                                 (from Flann O'Brien, The Best of Myles, pp.278-279)

Myles na Gopaleen is joking (I think) but in a very nice 2012 article called "Honor Thine Author" (paywalled) the translator Fiona Elliot puts in a plea to her authors not to use the German word aufheben because 

What English verb could match “aufheben,” meaning to pick something up from the floor, to save something up for later, to close a meeting, to terminate a siege, to remove restrictions, to cancel or annul, to repeal or revoke, to compensate, neutralize, offset, or elevate? (Actually, at the latest count there are forty-seven separate translations for it online at dict.cc.).

         (Fiona Elliott, "Honor Thine Author". Art in Translation 4:1 (2012), pp.89-98)

Happy St. Jerome's Day!

Save the date: Translate in the City 2015, London, 6-10 July 2015

Doesn't everyone love a good summer school? I hear very good things about this one, so you might want to make a note in your diary.

Part-bursaries available.

Poetry in Metamorphosis: A celebration of Italian poetry and translation

For italianisti, poetry lovers and anyone who enjoyed this post on Dante in Essex:

Poetry in Metamorphosis

A celebration of Italian poetry and translation

as part of the British Academy Guardian Language Festival and the Settimana della Lingua Italiana nel Mondo 2014

Tuesday 21 October 2014

at The British Academy, 10–11 Carlton House Terrace, London, SW1Y 5AH

9.30 a.m.–5.45 p.m.

Speakers include: Jacob Blakesley (Leeds), Nadia Cannata and colleagues (Sapienza Università di Roma), Daniela Caselli (Manchester), F.M. Federici (UCL), Paul Howard (Cambridge), Daniela La Penna (Reading), Matthew Reynolds (Oxford), Claudia Rossignoli (St Andrews) and Nigel Vincent (Manchester)

at the Italian Cultural Institute, 39 Belgrave Square, London, SW1X 8NX

6.30 p.m.

Matthew Reynolds will introduce readings by Philip Terry (Essex) from Dante’s Inferno

Marina Warner will introduce Jamie McKendrick’s new translation of the poetry of Antonella Anedda

For further information and the programme, see:

http://www.bsr.ac.uk/poetry-in-metamorphosis

Job opening: in-house translator from French and German to English

In-house Translator from French and German to English

Additional languages would be an advantage and a background in science and/or technology would be an asset
 
We are a small translation agency based in Colchester, Essex, specialising in intellectual property. We pride ourselves on our customer service and in particular on the high quality of translations we produce, and we are now seeking a new colleague who will enjoy working to these values.

Responsibilities will include:
• translation and checking of texts (patents, trademark documentation, oppositions, appeals, judgments, scientific articles) from French and German into English.
• coordination of incoming work and assignment of texts to translators.
• dealing with clients in French and German.
• administration related to translation tasks.

The ideal candidate will:
• be qualified to postgraduate level in translation (essential)
• speak English to native-speaker level (essential)
• be able to translate from French and German into English (applicants with only one of these two language combinations may still be considered)
• have experience in a scientific and/or technological field (desirable)
• have excellent attention to detail
• work well both independently and as part of a team
• be able to work to deadlines without compromising quality of work.

Permanent position on successful completion of three-month probationary period.
Training provided in a friendly, team-orientated company, with opportunity to develop areas of interest and expertise.
Salary commensurate with experience.
Part-time options may be available – please state your availability when applying.

Closing Date: 17th October 2014.

To apply, please send a CV and covering letter to Priory Translations
By e-mail: careers[at]priorytranslations.co.uk (please include the reference "In-house Translator" in the subject line)
By post: Careers
Priory Translations Limited
Graphic House
11 Magdalen Street
Colchester
Essex
CO1 2JT

Original post is on the company website here. 

STEM visuals in translation: project seeks co-researchers

Maybe of interest to some readers of this blog:

I saw on the European Society for Translation Studies Facebook page that a Lisbon- and New Mexico Tech-based research project, VISTAC (Visualising Science and Technology Across Cultures), is seeking co-researchers to look at STEM visuals in translation. They want to disseminate a survey in the main internet languages and are particularly interested in hearing from researchers who speak Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Russian or Spanish.

The last thing I read on this topic was a fascinating article by Liangyu Fu entitled 'Indigenizing visualized knowledge: translating Western science illustrations in China, 1870-1910' which is currently free to read on the Translation Studies website. But it would be great to read something more up to date too!

CFP: Recent European (Re)translations of Shakespeare

This just came round on the Translatio mailing list and looks like an interesting seminar:

Call for Papers: Recent European (Re)translations of Shakespeare

(a seminar at the ESRA conference, 2015, Worcester)

Conveners: Lily Kahn (UCL),  l.kahn@ucl.ac.uk

                     Márta Minier (University of South Wales), marta.minier@southwales.ac.uk

                     Martin Regal (University of Iceland), martinregal@gmail.com

The longevity of Shakespearean translations is generally somewhat limited. Although some canonical translations have a relatively long life as literary works and/or in the theatre, it is common for Shakespeare to be retranslated periodically. Within Europe there is a widespread phenomenon of systematic series of (re)translations of Shakespeare’s complete works; in recent years this trend has given rise to the WSOY Finnish Complete Works, completed in 2013, the new Polish Complete Works, the New Romanian Shakespeare series, and others. In addition, specially commissioned individual retranslations designed for specific productions are a common feature of the European theatrical scene. Examination of the rich variety of issues surrounding this phenomenon of retranslation in the European context can provide valuable insights into the theory and practice of Shakespearean interpretation.

This proposed seminar will bring together scholars, editors and practising translators engaged in the production and analysis of Shakespearean translations. It will also be open to dramaturges or directors who would like to comment on working with new or revised (that is, dramaturgically adjusted) translations. Proposals will be welcomed on topics including but not limited to the following:

·         factors galvanising the decision to produce new translations, including philological and interpretive shifts, changing conventions of theatre, and the emergence of new performance and directorial styles;

·         the collaborative framework behind commissioned translations and the relationship between the translator and other stakeholders;

·         societal perceptions of the modern Shakespeare translator; trends in the selection of different translation strategies (e.g. foreignising vs. domesticating);

·         comparisons between alternative translations of the ‘same’ play (both synchronically and diachronically);

·         different translations of a single play by the same translator; the use of updated and otherwise modified versions of existing translations in new productions instead of commissioning completely original work;

·         the critical reception of new translations both in textual format and in theatrical contexts.

We will consider papers focusing on academic translation series not necessarily intended for performance in addition to those specifically commissioned or designed for theatrical use that may not be as suitable for employment in educational contexts.

Please submit an abstract (200-300 words) and a brief biography (150 words) by 1 December  2014 to all seminar conveners. 

All participants will be notified about the acceptance of their proposals by 1 March 2015. 

The deadline for submitting the completed seminar papers (3,000 words) is 1 May 2015.