Alex Zucker visits the University of Bristol

We are delighted to welcome the distinguished translator Alex Zucker to Bristol. The event is free and all are welcome.

Hand Over Fist or Hand to Mouth? Translating Fiction in the U.S. 

Thursday December 7th

5:15pm, 

G108, 21 Woodland Road. Entrance at 3-5 Woodland Road.

More literature is being translated into English than ever before. International fiction seems to be enjoying if not a golden age, then at least a moment. Is this a boon for the translating profession? The School of Modern Languages is delighted to welcome the leading American translator of Czech fiction, Alex Zucker, from New York City to share his experience and offer a sneak peek at results from the first-ever survey of working conditions for literary translators in the U.S.A. 

Alex's latest work is Three Plastic Rooms, the remarkable and linguistically bewildering monologue of an ageing Prague prostitute, by the leading contemporary Czech novelist, Petra Hůlová, to be published by Jantar in November 2017. You can find out more about Alex and his work at http://www.alexjzucker.com/

Enquiries to Rajendra Chitnis (contact details are here). 

Michael Henry Heim Collegial Translation Prize: deadline 1 September 2016

This looks like a very interesting initiative. The Michael Henry Heim Prize is offered for the best translation of a journal article by a scholar from a relevant discipline, from an Eastern European language into English. The prize is worth $500 and publication of the translation in the journal East European Politics and Societies. The deadline is 1 September 2016.

The prize came into being because in the Guidelines for the Translation of Social Science Texts, which he compiled with Andrzej Tymowski, Heim

encouraged scholars to translate their colleagues' work to make it more widely available. Although Heim was a renowned literary translator, he was convinced that the best translator of a scholarly text is a colleague in a relevant discipline who has acquired facility in translation, rather than a professional translator who is linguistically skilled but unfamiliar with the discipline's concepts, contexts, and controversies.

The Heim Prize flyer can be downloaded here.

The Guidelines for the Translation of Social Science Texts, as well as translations of it into Arabic, Chinese, French, Japanese, Russian, Spanish and Vietnamese, can be found at www.acls.org/programs/sstp.

For more writing on translation by Michael Henry Heim see this 2012 interview,  this article in the Yearbook of General and Comparative Literature (paywalled) and the MLA's very useful peer review guidelines on 'Evaluating Translations as Scholarship'.

For more on the problematic status of translation in the academy see this article in the US Chronicle of Higher Education (another version downloadable as a pdf here).

jobs in games localisation

For any enthusiastic gamers reading this blog, Testronic Laboratories in the UK are advertising for localisation game testers with a wide range of languages (must be native speakers): German, French, Spanish, Italian, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish, Portuguese, Brazilian Mexican (a new one on me - possibly Brazilian Portuguese and Mexican Spanish? or has gaming in the Americas developed interesting new transnational articulations??), Czech, Polish and Japanese. They are also looking for a Japanese translation lead technician.