Talks by Nick Rosenthal, MITI, Bristol, Tuesday 24 February 2015

We are delighted to announced that Nick Rosenthal, MITI will be visiting us on Tuesday 24 February 2015. Nick will give two talks:

 
Session 1: Building a career as a translator (3-4pm)
Session 2: Translating the Tour de France (4-5pm)

24 February 2015

Arts Complex Lecture Theatre 2, 3-5pm (entrance via 3-5 Woodland Road for external visitors)

Nick Rosenthal, MITI, has worked as a technical translator from French and German since 1986. He studied languages at Salford University, and then worked as a management accountant for a large multinational company before founding SalfTrans (www.salftrans.co.uk), a specialist translation and localisation company, in 1988. He is an experienced translator in his own right, and an experienced project manager used to managing teams of high-end translators. Nick has a broad vision of the translation industry, with a particular interest in training and professional development. Nick chaired the Board of the Institute of Translation and Interpreting (ITI) from 2011 to 2013, and is one of the team of authors who wrote "101 Things a Translator Needs To Know" (http://101things4translators.com/advance-praise/).  Nick is also an experienced racing cyclist, and one of his greatest pleasures each year is combining his passions for translation and for bike racing by translating press articles about the Tour de France.

Talks are free and open to all.

Translators on translating: Michael Hofmann warns for peanuts

I just read a really lovely piece by Michael Hofmann on being a poet and translator. The images he uses are glorious. Why should translators leave no trace of themselves in a text (there's a question for our translation studies reading group, which has been reading Theo Hermans on that very topic)?

If 'chocolates carry warnings that they may have been manufactured using equipment that has hosted peanuts; why not translations too?'

If 'a translator is a passenger, riding in relative safety (and deserved penury) in a 
vehicle that has already been built', Hofmann would still rather be 'a passenger of the bobsleigh kind — a converted sprinter, someone who at least puts his own bones and balance and reactions into his work'. Of course, this takes for granted that you are translating for someone with no access to the source text. The presence (or threat) of a parallel text can 'protract negotiations'.

Invoking what Gideon Toury called the 'law of growing standardisation' in translation, and what David Bellos refers to as a tendency 'toward the 
accepted and the established and the center, the unexceptional and the unexceptionable', Hofmann counters: 'I don’t mind much where my extremes come from — whether they are mine, or my authors’, but I want them to be there. Extra pixels. The high resolution of a fourth or fifth decimal place'.

And a salutory reminder to all translators and translators-in-training: the people who don’t look [words] up are usually the ones who don’t know them. Good translators look the words up anyway.

For more links to translators talking about their work, see here.

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. 

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?).

Spanish translation slam with Nick Caistor and Rosalind Harvey, 26 March 2014, Bristol

My colleague Rosie Doyle at Bristol has organised this great event next week; free and open to all. Tell your friends! 

Spanish Literary Translation Slam

Wednesday 26 March 6:30-8:00pm

Department of Hispanic, Portuguese and Latin American Studies,

University of Bristol

Lecture Theatre 3, 15 Woodland Rd

(Please access the building through 3-5 Woodland Rd)

Literary translators Nick Caistor and Rosalind Harvey will go head to head to produce a live translation of a literary text from Spanish to English. Come and watch the professionals at work, live! You will have the opportunity to discuss the translators’ decisions and gain insight into the work of a literary translator.

Nick Caistor is a translator, journalist and author of non-fiction books. He has translated over 40 books from Spanish and Portuguese. These include works by Paulo Coelho, Eduardo Mendoza, Juan Marsé, Manuel Vázquez Montalban and Andrés Neuman. He has twice been awarded the Valle-Inclán prize for translation, while his short biography of Che Guevara (Macmillan) was praised as 'a biography of Che Guevara for grown-ups'. He has also published a biography of Fidel Castro and a 'Critical Life' of the Mexican poet Octavio Paz (both for Reaktion Books) and a cultural history of Mexico City (Signal Books) As a journalist, he has presented and produced many programmes on Radio 4 and the BBC World Service, and contributes regularly to the TLS and Guardian. [You can read some of Nick's thoughts on literary translation here and here]

Rosalind Harvey is the translator of a number of Latin American novels and co-founder of the Emerging Translators Network. She has held a prestigious fellowship at the Free Word Centre in London and writes regularly for Words without Borders. Her translation of Juan Pablo Villalobos's debut novel Down the Rabbit Hole was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and the Oxford-Weidenfeld prize. Her co-translation of Dublinesque was shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction prize and has been long listed for the Dublin IMPAC award. Her latest translation is Villalobos’s Quesadillas, with And Other Stories and FSG. [You can listen to Rosalind talking about getting started as a literary translator here, and answering readers' questions here.]

The project is very kindly sponsored by the School of Modern Languages.
For further enquiries please contact Rosie Doyle on rd13066 at bristol.ac.uk. 

Translators on translation

I'd love to see more pieces by translators about getting into the nitty-gritty of texts. Sometimes we ask our students to analyse translations against the translators' own discourse (from prefaces, interviews, notes etc.). It can be tricky to find these at short notice, except perhaps in the case of older translation prefaces which can sometimes be tracked down via repositories like Project Gutenberg.

So here are some suggestions for finding translators talking about their work.

The Centre for Translation Studies at the University of Texas at Dallas has collected interviews with a number of eminent translators, many from Spanish.

Words Without Borders has a series of posts 'From the Translator'. 

There is a growing collection of pieces by translators on the authors they have translated at http://authors-translators.blogspot.co.uk/p/translators.html. 

The Necessary Fiction blog has collected a number of Translators' Notes.

Peter Bush's 2003 essay on translating Juan Goytisolo remains a great point of reference and shows how enlightening it can be to look at successive drafts of the same passage.

Lydia Davis has been widely interviewed about her translations of Proust and of Flaubert. For instance, peeping out from behind the Paris Review paywall are the intriguing opening paragraphs of this essay.

We have previously mentioned William Weaver's wonderful piece on translating Gadda.

And Daniel Hahn is nearing the end of a diary about his translation of a novel by Saavedra (it might be worth saving these pages as you go, because I don't know how long they will be available; a previous blog on translating Agualusa was later collected and published and is no longer on the web).

UPDATE 14 November 2014: There's a new blog on the block called brouillon, which collects translators' reflections on specific knotty words and phrases. There are just a few posts at time of writing but it looks very promising! 

Maureen Freely on Pamuk, Harvill Secker book draw

Reading a very interesting blog post by Maureen Freely, translator of the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, who talks about the political and economic repercussions of her work. (And reveals that astonishingly, UK university research departments still don't seem to have solved the problem of how to acknowledge translation among other scholarly work. Sigh.)

On a more festive note, in the same blog post, Harvill Secker, one of the UK's most assiduous and best-respected translation publishers, is holding a book draw to celebrate its 100th birthday this year. HS is giving away a library of 50 books to a lucky reader. To enter the prize draw, 'email your favourite piece of translated writing – fiction or non‑fiction – to review at observer.co.uk by Wednesday 1 December, putting "translation" in the subject field'.

translation controversy

A lively translation controversy has been unscrolling over the pages of the London Review of Books this spring. It began with Toril Moi's critical review of the new translation of Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex and continued with ripostes from the translators, the publisher and other interested parties. A great illustration of the pressures that are exerted on ideas travelling between languages. Economic factors aside (if one can ever say that) I'm a big fan myself of heavily annotated translations - like good DVD extra features they puncture the illusion of transparency and lift us out of our absorption in the text to show us some of the scaffolding behind it. It will be interesting to see whether the rise in e-books will generate e-book extra texts, for those readers who want a sense of how the text turned out the way it did; could be very enriching for translation.

'Getting into Print' talk, Portsmouth, 29 April 2010

This is just to remind you that Ros Schwartz of the Translators Association will be giving a paper on Thursday in our 'Translators on Translation' seminar series. The talk will begin at 5pm in Room 3.06, Park Building, University of Portsmouth (see www.port.ac.uk/maps). All welcome. Refreshments provided. For further information contact carol.osullivan at port.ac.uk or see www.port.ac.uk/translation. This talk is highly recommended for anyone considering literary translation as a specialisation or for the Translation Project.

Ros Schwartz is an award-winning literary translator and a prominent member of the TA, the Translators’ Association of the Society of Authors. A freelancer since 1980, Ros has translated some 50 works of fiction and non-fiction, particularly novels by contemporary Francophone writers. She runs a small translation company with a team of translators working into and out of the major European languages and specializing in the arts, development and corporate literature. She works for a select number of clients with the emphasis on quality and style, developing long-term relationships based on good communications. She runs numerous workshops, is a frequent speaker on the international circuit and writes on translation-related issues; see e.g. here and here.

translators on translation: two interviews

Two short but good interviews by translators on translating fiction: Marian Schwartz in the Boston Globe on translating Russian fiction, and the ubiquitous Chris Andrews on Bolaño in the New Yorker, with some nice examples of tricky problems in the text. Russianists may be interested in Schwartz's hints and tips about Russian translation and Russian resources here and here.

My only thin, reedy, querulous complaint: how, in the New Yorker of all publications, can an interviewer not know the difference between the present tense and the past tense of the verb 'to lead'? Am I the only person who remembers that the past tense is 'led'? Next you're seeing 'loose' for 'lose' and then Aughrim is really lost. 'Ware spellchecks.

translators on translating 3

I have come across some more good translator interviews recently. A subtitler and web translator for Maori television has some useful things to say about the web translator's skill set. Chris Andrews, the translator of Roberto Bolaño and others, is interviewed for The Quarterly Conversation here and is well worth reading. In fact do browse through The Quarterly Conversation because it has lots of wonderful posts, reviews and interviews on translation.

The recent intense media interest in Google Translate has generated some interesting responses by translators. David Bellos, translator of Perec and other vertiginously difficult French writers, suggests in the New York Times that literary translators may be the only translators to remain indispensable in the age of GT. Lynne Bowker of the University of Ottawa thinks that MT and TM tools have the potential to interact with the creativity of literary translators. Basically, the range of skills required of professional translators and the need for flexibility are only going to increase. Plan to store your eggs in more than one basket!

Translation Slam and other literary tidbits

I like the idea of a translation slam - see here for head-to-head, specially commissioned competing translations of Chinese, Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, Persian and English poems. Lots more goodies at the PEN translation site including an interesting email correspondence between the translators Anthea Bell and Doris Orgel.
For those of you with unpublished translations in the drawer, a new literary translation journal from Australia, the AALITRA Review, with a distinguished international editorial board, is accepting submissions. Unusually and pleasingly, submissions are published in both languages.

Translators on Translation seminars at Portsmouth

Dear all,

After positive feedback last year, we are running some more seminars by translators on their translation work at Portsmouth. The current lineup is:

18 February Lucy Brooks (Chartered Institute of Linguists)
The freelance translator

11 March Robert Rietti (Translator, actor and director)
Dubbing Films

15 April Martin Sorrell (University of Exeter)
Translating Baudelaire and the prose poem

29 April Ros Schwartz (Translators Association)
Getting into Print

The talks begin at 5pm in Room 3.06, Park Building, University of Portsmouth (see www.port.ac.uk/maps). All welcome. Refreshments provided. For further information contact carol.osullivan at port.ac.uk or see www.port.ac.uk/translation.

A National Network for Translation event, supported by the Routes into Languages programme. For more information see www.routesintolanguages.ac.uk.

Translators on translation 2

Hi all,

The last post about translators on translation seems to have been useful, so I thought I would post a few more links.

I liked very much the recent issue of TranscUlturAl on 'The Translator as Theorist'. (In passing, yay for open-access peer-reviewed translation journals. Some of them really hide their light under a bushel.) One of the best open access translation journals and probably already familiar to you is the crunchy and delicious Journal of Specialised Translation. The January 2010 issue focuses on Chinese, including an interesting-looking article on what goes wrong with those badly translated signs which infest Flickr which I'm looking forward to reading. I have a feeling that I recklessly promised more links to non-literary translators on translation, and lots of them can be found on the JoSTrans website. The current issue features a useful interview with Yinghong Huang & Linda Liu on becoming a freelance translator in London and other riches.

There are hours of viewing pleasure to be had here, on the National Network for Translation website with practical presentations and interviews with translators on the profession.

In the literary translation field, Sarah Adams has pointed me to an excellent collection of videos on the London Review of Books website from the World Literature Weekend 2009. These include a lovely round table with well-known translators (oxymoron? Never say it!) including Anthea Bell, Anne McLean, Daniel Hahn and Frank Wynne talking about their work. I very much liked the talk with Faïza Guène and her translator Sarah Ardizzone too. You can find more clips of authors talking to their translators here.

The Center for the Art of Translation has a series of audio discussions on their website including discussions with some well-known American translators. Lots of goodies here. I really enjoyed José Manuel Prieto's chat with his translator Esther Allen where they discuss the complicated relationships between translation and writing. Still in the US, Three Percent, based in Rochester, had a fizzy and charming round table on translation which has been immortalised on film here. Lastly, the online journal Cipher contains marvels, both translations and essays by translators.

Translators on translation

Translation students read a lot of secondary literature in Translation Studies but may not read much that is written by translators themselves. Translators' own discourse on translation sometimes gets short shrift from scholars, rather unfairly it has always seemed to me. So here are a few links to interviews, reflections and blogs by translators which I have found helpful and/or interesting:

Author-translators get lots of critical attention because their translations tend to be all assertive and sexy and to enter into a dialogue of equals with the source text. Try Kenneth Rexroth on poet-translators. I am very fond of Eliot Weinberger's article 'Anonymous Sources'. Kent Johnson opens a dialogue with Weinberger in the Notes on Notes on Translation. Lydia Davis talks about translating Proust in an audio interview here.

Professional translators can have interesting things to say about their work which are well worth close scrutiny by students of translation as well as by readers of translations. There's a very nice interview with Howard Goldblatt on translating Chinese literature. Or try Natasha Wimmer on translating Roberto Bolaño or Anne McLean, another highly prized translator of Latin-American and Spanish fiction. Anthea Bell, recently awarded an OBE for services to literature and literary translation, has been interviewed lots, including here. The best of these essays say a lot not just about what translators do, but why they do it.

Translation is a process, and an experience which can be difficult to track. The translator's mind is a bit like a black box. We tend (like Jeremy Munday in his talk at Imperial this week) to turn to texts for evidence of how translators approach a translation. But we can also Ask A Translator. Four inside glimpses of the process of translation that I find very compelling are:

Daniel Hahn's blog on translating Agualusa's Estação das Chuvas (Rainy Season); Jo Clifford on translating Calderón's La vida es sueño and other plays; Peter Bush on translating Juan Goytisolo; and my favourite, David Macey's 'Beginning the Translation', published in an issue of the journal SubStance and available online here. I have probably mentioned this essay before and will again - it's a brilliant reflection on translation from the inside. Enjoy.

It used just to be literary translators who had their voices heard (not very loud). The web has provided a space for other translators to talk too - I came across some nice interviews with translators from Chinese recently which I recommend to anyone worrying that their background is too 'unusual' to build a career as a translator...:)

That's more than enough for one day. I hope to come back with more links on this later, but meanwhile if anyone else has good links to translator interviews, blogs or essays, why not drop a line and post them in a comment?

Translation events Foyles, London, November

Many thanks to Jon Evans, who has just drawn my attention to these translation events happening next month as part of Foyles Bookshop's Festival of Ibero-American Literature. The whole festival looks great, but for translation students events of most interest include:

Saturday 14 November

13.45 – 15.00 The Art of Translation
Translation is an essential part of the literary market in a globalised world, opening the gates to foreign narratives in the luxury of our own language. But what are the challenges behind translation, and what ethical questions does it pose? Join us for an exciting session with the UK’s leading figures in literary translation, Dr Stefan Tobler, Professor Amanda Hopkinson and Professor Peter Bush, as they discuss their crucial role in bringing Latin American and Hispanic literature to the UK.
Tickets: Free, email events@foyles.co.uk to reserve a place

15.15 – 16.30 The Art of Translation: A Closer Look
Get up close to the particulars of translation as Colombian author Juan Gabriel Vásquez and translator Anne McLean discuss their work on The Informers, 9780747596516 shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and one of the most successful Latin American novels to be published in the UK in recent years.
Tickets: Free, email events@foyles.co.uk to reserve a place

translation seminars at Surrey

The Centre for Translation Studies at the University of Surrey is
pleased to announce the programme for its Professional Aspects of
Translation seminar series for this autumn. The lectures are open to all.

For up-to-date information on these seminars, please also visit:
http://www.surrey. ac.uk/translatio n/events/ pats.htm

22 October 2008
Sue Dimitrijevic (Xerox Global Services)
The Challenges of Translation Memory Management in a Global Environment

29 October 2008
Fiona Harris (DGT London Field Office for Multilingualism)
The Directorate General for Translation (DGT) - working methods and tools

5 November 2008
Susie Kershaw (Language Dimension)
Interpreting for Business

12 November 2008
Dr Enrnst August Gutt (SIL International)
`Communicative clues' and their significance for translation

19 November 2008
Andew Holland (VocalEyes)
Audiodescription for the Theatre

3 December 2008
Tony Reynolds (Freelance Translator)
Translating Annual Reports part I

10 December 2008
Tony Reynolds (Freelance Translator)
Translating Annual Reports part II

translators on translating

For those of you interested in literary translation/translation for publication (especially French-English), a couple of useful articles (the first one is particularly interesting):

David Macey, 'Beginning the Translation' in parallax, 2000, vol. 6, no. 1, 2–12. This article is available online via the University Library if you have an Athens password.

Arthur Goldhammer, 'Translating Subtexts: What the Translator Must Know' online at

http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~agoldham/articles/WhatMust.htm