Tuesday, 4 September 2012

Call for Proposals: Yale UP translation project

Seen on Twitter:

Dear colleagues,

I would like to take this opportunity to introduce a new project I am coordinating through Yale University Press and to invite proposals for translations.

Our series “World Thought in Translation,” supported by a major grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, will make important works of political, legal, social and ethical thought available in English translation. Its focus will be on previously untranslated texts from outside European traditions, particularly the Middle East and the broader Islamic world, South Asia, China, East Asia, and Africa, but the series will also be open to important but under-studied works originally written in European languages, particularly from Russia, Eastern Europe and Latin America.
The series will embrace both pre-modern and modern classics. Our primary criteria are the enduring influence of the texts for political and social debate and their unavailability to a wide English-speaking audience. We thus intend to fill the most urgent gaps faced by faculty seeking to teach courses on the political thought of non-Western societies. Given that the works in question will be unfamiliar to students, the translations will be accompanied by interpretive and analytic essays to give readers a basic introduction to the texts’ backgrounds, the circumstances in which they were written, and their subsequent influence within and outside their cultures.

These books are intended to be useful to faculty and students not only in political science departments but also in such fields as anthropology, history, religious studies, area studies and law. Some of the works are expected to reach a sizeable popular audience beyond the university.

We already have a number of projects in the pipeline, including translations of Shihab al-Din al-Qarafi’s (d. 1285) Al-Ihkam fi Tamyiz al-Fatawa ʿan al-Ahkam wa Tasarrufat al-Qadi wa-l-Imam (translator: Mohammed Fadel, Toronto) and Muhammad Rashid Rida’s Al-Khilafah aw al-Imamah al-‘Uzma (translator: Simon Wood). We are also considering proposals to translate Rashid al-Ghannushi’s al-Hurriyat al-’amma fi’l-dawla al-islamiyya, al-Raghib al-Isfahani’s K. al-dhari’a ila makarim al-shari’a and Abu Hamid al-Ghazali’s Mizan al-’amal.

I would like to invite members of this scholarly community to submit proposals for collaboration. We take a wide view of what would make a valuable contribution, and are interested in proposals from all languages of the Muslim world. We are open to all kinds of proposals from any time period, any country, any language and any intellectual persuasion from the broader Islamic world.

Please address all queries to me at andrew.march at yale.edu.

Best wishes,
Andrew

Andrew F. March
Associate Professor
Department of Political Science
Yale University
http://www.yale.edu/polisci/people/amarch.html

Sunday, 2 September 2012

Two post-docs with Scots Gaelic and Italian

For colleagues out there looking for post-doctoral research positions:

1) Research Assistant in Scots Gaelic Women’s Poetry 1400-1800

Aberystwyth University - Department of English and Creative Writing

(Fixed term for 3 years)
Grade 6: £25,251 - £30,122 per annum

This post is part of the Leverhulme project 'Women's Poetry 1400-1800 in English, Gaelic, Scots Gaelic, Scots and Welsh'. The start date is 1 February 2013. If you have the relevant specialist knowledge of Scots Gaelic (with a doctorate in Scots-Gaelic or equivalent), this post provides an excellent opportunity to develop your academic research career.

Informal enquiries welcome: contact Dr Sarah Prescott, on 01970 622791 (scp at aber.ac.uk).

Ref: E.12.02
Closing date: Monday 10 September 2012

For information and application forms please go to www.aber.ac.uk/en/hr/jobs/vacancies-external

2) Research Associate, Dante in Modernism

The University of Manchester - School of Arts, Languages and Cultures

Closing date : 19/09/2012
Reference : HUM-01610
Salary : £29,249
Employment type : Fixed Term
Duration: 15 weeks
Hours per week : 0.7FTE



Applications are invited for a British Academy / Leverhulme Trust Research Associate post.

You will work with the Principal Investigator, Dr Daniela Caselli, on her project 'Dante in Modernism' (phase 1) and be responsible for sifting the primary and secondary sources for occurrences of Dante (both in digitalised and textual format), electronic downloading of periodical articles found; documenting them with full bibliographical reference; reproducing every occurrence in its original context; and ultimately integrate all the findings into a database in beta form.

This appointment will begin on 15 October 2012 and last 15 weeks.

Informal inquiries may be made to Dr Daniela Caselli, Principal Investigator, Division of English and American Studies. Email:  daniela.caselli at manchester.ac.uk

More information at http://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/AFB604/research-associate-dante-in-modernism/

Thursday, 16 August 2012

Free download: how to write clearly


Readers may be interested in the European Commission's publication 'How to Write Clearly'. This guide is available in all official languages of the European Community. It's part of their campaign for more straightforward, readable documentation (the same campaign which used to be called 'Fight the Fog'). 

It can be downloaded free in any of the official languages from the EU institutional bookshop.

Monday, 13 August 2012

Recently advertised internships

Two translation internships seen recently:

STAR in Dublin is offering internships for translation project management, beginning September for a period of 5-6 months. No details about remuneration.

Remote internship offered by Coalition for International Initiatives for a French or Spanish native speaker to translate their materials out of English. Minimum 10 hour a week commitment. Seems pro bono.

As always, disclaimer: all information provided in good faith, but I don't know these organisations personally and make no claims or guarantees.

Wednesday, 8 August 2012

jobs, internships, PhD funding etc.

A few translation opportunities, seen recently around the web:

An advertisement in the Guardian for an experienced Project Manager in London. Posted today. No deadline given.

The company Synonyme in Madrid is advertising for a multitasking English native speaker with French, German or Spanish as interpreter, translator and project manager. Also looking for conference interpreters. Contact a.edwards at synonyme.net. Found on the website of the Chartered Institute of Linguists; other positions also advertised.

The pharmaceutical company Roche is looking for an English Sprachexperte for their language service in Basel (German-English translation, translation revision, etc.). Found via the ITI website. Further details here.

Seen on the BDÜE website (job postings can be found under Aktuelles):
The company Comlogos is looking for a project manager based in Stuttgart. The company also seems from their website to offer internships. Other posts also regularly advertised.

In Europe, the EPSO competitions for Estonian, Irish, Latvian and Portuguese translators close on 14 August. The link is here. The deadline for translation traineeships in the European institutions beginning in March 2013 is 31 August. There are two rounds of these a year; more information here.

Two PhD studentships at the School of Applied Language and Intercultural Studies at Dublin City University for the academic year 2012-13. The scholarships cover fees and maintenance for the first year of study; may be extended subject to suitable progress, etc. 

There's a PhD studentship offered in Denmark in the field of intercultural business encounters which may interest translation researchers. Deadline is imminent: 15 August.

As always, the writer of this blog makes no guarantees about, and has no vested interest in, any of these opportunities. Good luck to any of our readers who apply.

Wednesday, 1 August 2012

Poems about translation 11: Guillaume Colletet contre la traduction

I figure there are two excellent reasons for another Poem About Translation: 

1) It's been nearly a year (!?!) since I posted the last one
2) I have just arrived in Paris for a brief break to catch up with friends, films, the French language, etc.

As it happens, serendipitously, we have never had a Poem About Translation in French. So here is Guillaume Colletet, an early Academician and poet (1598-1659).* He has strong feelings about translation: 

Discours contre la Traduction

C'est trop m'assujetir, je suis las d'imiter, 
La version déplaist à qui peut inventer,
Je suis plus amoureux d'un Vers que je comp[o]se, 

Que des Livres entiers que j'ay traduites en Prose. 
Suivre comme un esclave un Autheur pas à pas 
Chercher de la raison où l'on n'en trouve pas, 
Distiler son Esprit sur chaque periode,
Faire d'un vieux Latin du François à la mode, 

Eplucher chaque mot comme un Grammairien, 
Voir ce qui le rend mal, ou ce qui le rend bien; 
Faire d'un sens confus une raison subtile,
Joindre au discours qui sert un langage inutile, 

Parler asseurement de ce qu'on sçait le moins, 
Rendre de ses erreurs tous les Doctes tesmoins, 
Et vouloir bien souvent par un caprice extréme 
Entendre qui jamais ne s'entendit soy mesme; 
Certes, c'est un travail dont je suis si lassé,
Que j'en ay le corps foible, & l'esprit émoussé. 

[...]

(I hasten to say that this does not reflect how I feel today about translation, though having got up at oh-dark-thirty this morning to get the 9.21 Eurostar the corps is feeling pretty foible.)

Colletet's full rant, sorry, Discours is available via UMass here. This is also the source of the text above - I thought I might find a facsimile copy on Gallica but have had no luck. There is a wonderful translation into Italian by Valerio Magrelli here

I haven't come across a translation into English but if any reader would like to undertake one and pop it in a comment, that would be excellent! :)

[UPDATE 13 October 2013: There is an English translation by Anthony Molino of Valerio Magrelli's Italian translation of the poem in the collection The Contagion of Matter published in 2000.]

* (Pleasingly, one of his books is entitled Le trébuchement de l’yvrongne [The staggering of the drunk])