Happy St. Jerome's day (aka International Translation Day)

It's nearly 30 September, the feast-day of St. Jerome, patron saint of translators. Here he is, in the familiar painting by Ghirlandaio, looking overworked and ergonomically challenged. (You can find other representations of him here). Happy birthday, St.J.

Alas, the International Translation Day symposium at the British Library in his honour has sold out for this year - that's a pity because the lineup looked wonderful. But it's now in its fourth consecutive year, so let's hope it'll be on again next year, and book early...

We can console ourselves with the following online event:

3) EVENT WEBCAST: UTB'S FIRST INTERNATIONAL TRANSLATION DAY COLLOQUIUM

The University of Texas at Brownsville will celebrate its First International Translation Day Colloquium on Monday, September 30 from 4:30-7:30 p.m. (US Central Time). The event will be webcast live at http://utb.edu/its/olt/livewebcast/Pages/default.aspx

UTB's First International Translation Day Colloquium seeks to discuss a number of key aspects related to the practice of translation and interpreting in professional settings as they impinge on different areas of specialization, such as literary translation, court interpreting, and sign language interpreting.

Three experts from across the state of Texas will bring their insights to the colloquium: Dr. Marko Miletich (University of Texas at Arlington), Dr. Melissa Wallace (University of Texas at San Antonio), and Professor Rosemary Liñán-Landa (University of Texas at Brownsville).

Our keynote speaker will be Dr. Elena Fernández-Miranda (Directorate General for Translation, European Commission), who will present her latest publication: Sobre la traducción (Cátedra, 2012), a Spanish translation of two foundational texts in Translation Studies: Eugene Nida's Toward a Science of Translating and The Theory and Practice of Translation.

The schedule (US Central Time) is as follows:

4:30 p.m. | Welcome remarks

4:40 p.m. | Opening by Dr. Javier Martínez, Dean of the College of Liberal Arts

4:50 p.m. | Dr. Elena Nida (DGT): Eugene Nida, Pioneer of Modern Translatology: His Theory and Ideas as Presented in Sobre la traducción, a Spanish Translation of Toward a Science of Translating and The Theory and Practice of Translation

5:35 p.m. | Q&A

5:45 p.m. | Dr. Marko Miletich (University of Texas at Arlington): The Gendering of Translation

6:05 p.m. | Q&A

6:15 p.m. | Dr. Melissa Wallace (University of Texas at San Antonio): You've Got Work to Do: TI Graduates as Changemakers in Policy, Research, Training and Practice

6:35 p.m. | Q&A

6:45 p.m. | Rosemary Liñán-Landa (University of Texas at Brownsville): 'Stepping Stones into the Sign Language Interpreting Profession'

7:05 p.m. | Q&A

7:15 p.m. | Concluding remarks

For more information, please contact event organizer Jorge Jimínez-Bellver at jorge.jimenezbellver at utb.edu or (956) 882-7450 or UTB's Translation and Interpreting Office at tio at utb.edu or (956) 882-7450.

Mother tongue English translators sought

Just received via a colleague from a Bristol alumnus:

An Italian agency is looking for English mother tongue translators from Italian to translate legal and finance texts. The agency is Accademia delle Lingue http://www.accademiadellelingue.it and they can send their CV to curriculum at accademiadellelingue.it. Thank you very much!

The usual disclaimers apply: I don't know the agency and am just passing this information on. On looking at the agency's site, they seem to have a general call out for English mother tongue translators as well here. 

Free translation studies journal content online

Continuing the theme of Translation Studies For Free:

Of the many journals in translation studies, some are entirely open access, some are paywalled, and some are partly paywalled. As regular readers will know, I'm a fan of open access publishing (e.g. this post and this post). A number of well-known journals, including Meta and TTR on the erudit.org platform, have rolling paywalls which means that all but the most recent few years of content is on open access. (At the moment, and without any privileged knowledge of how these journals work, this seems to me a good compromise: it is likely to maximise citations at the same time as democratising access, and presumably high citation rates make the journals attractive to subscribers who want the most recent content. Slightly makes you wonder why more journals don't choose this route.)  

But even journals which function entirely on a subscription model often offer some free content for marketing purposes. If any of this blog's readers are looking for bedtime reading at no charge, they might be interested in a quick browse.

For instance, free sample issues. At time of writing, Translation and Literature offers volume 15:1 from 2006. Translation Watch Quarterly's 2005 inaugural issue on translation quality is available here. Translation Spaces, recently launched by Benjamins, offers part of its first issue for free here. Across Languages and Cultures offers part or all of several issues for free, including volume 8:1 (2007); volume 10:2, a special issue on translation process research; and bits of volumes 12:1 and 13:1. Machine Translation offers a small selection of free articles here (scroll down to the end of the page). Translation Studies (Taylor & Francis) offers volume 4:3 (2011) here. Perspectives: Studies in Translatology (also Taylor & Francis) offers volume 19:4 (2011) here. UPDATE 8 FEB 2014: Translation and Interpreting Studies offers free access to issue 7.1 (2012) here.

Translation Review, unlike the other Taylor and Francis journals, doesn't offer a free sample issue, but I see that issues 62-78, from 2001 to 2009, are available as free downloads from its old website at http://www.utdallas.edu/alta/publications/translation-review/tr-past-issues.

The three Taylor & Francis translation journals, Translation Studies, Translation Review and Perspectives: Studies in Translatology, also all offer a selection of articles free to read under the heading of 'most read' on the journal homepage. Seasonally speaking, these journals have bundled some articles as free content to celebrate St. Jerome's day on 30 September: the link is in the banner below.

Translation Studies For Free

There's a great blog called FilmStudiesForFree which collects open access materials for film studies researchers. It's always seemed like a brilliant idea to me, and I thought it could work for Translation Studies as well. So I am trying it out on a very small scale by inaugurating a 'translationstudiesforfree' tag on this blog.

I am partly inspired by the fact that a journal I really like, the euphoniously-named Linguistica Antverpiensia, has just opted for open access. You can now find all journal content from 2002 to 2008 in pdf form at the journal's website. This includes Dirk Delabastita's and Rainer Grutman's lovely themed issue on fictions of translation, interpreting and multilingualism from 2005, and the special issue on audiovisual translation from 2007, edited by Aline Remael and Josélia Neves (this is a topic very close to my heart, and this issue all the more so as I was lucky enough to have an article in it). As I understand it, the journal will have a rolling firewallpaywall, so watch the site for more recent issues in due course.

Linguistica Antverpiensia isn't the only translation journal which offers open access content. There are many more, some of which are listed here, on the website of the European Society for Translation Studies. A new one which just started this year is L'Écran Traduit, published by the French audiovisual translators' association, the ATAA.

Other free translation resources I'm very attached to include

• the bibliographical translation research database BITRA, hosted by the University of Alicante
• the SubtitlingWorldwide Youtube channel, with nice examples of good and bad subtitling of the same clip
• The Bottom Line, the wise words of Fire Ant and Worker Bee, a long-running agony column for translators published in the Translation Journal. Here's an example.   
• Translation in Practice, which is an excellent short introduction to literary translation as a professional practice. It can be bought in hard copy here, but it is also available as a free download. (The link seems to have vanished, but can be retrieved via the wonderful Wayback Machine if you type in http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/resources/download.cfm?GCOI=15647100138250&thefile=Translation_in_Practice_book.pdf.)

I hope readers of this blog find some of these resources useful. All further suggestions for good free resources for translation studies are most welcome.

New issue of the Journal of Specialised Translation

Dear readers,

The latest issue of the Journal of Specialised Translation has hit the newsstands!

Issue 20 of this leading open access translation journal is a special issue on multimodality, co-edited by Carol O'Sullivan and Caterina Jeffcote at the University of Portsmouth. The issue covers a very wide range of multimodal problems and solutions in translation, and includes articles on term banks, accessible filmmaking, board games, museum audioguides, website localisation, dubbing, choral scores, book paratexts, Cosmo magazine, audiodescription and mobile accessibility for live performance. Something for everyone!

The issue also includes a short film, Joining the Dots, made by Pablo Romero Fresco to illustrate the challenges of accessible filmmaking. The film can be watched here.

The introduction, 'Multimodality as Challenge and Resource for Translation' can be read here or downloaded from the journal website as a pdf.

Poems about translation 15: Valerio Magrelli on moving house

Having trailed the excellence of Valerio Magrelli as a translator in a previous post, I think it is only fair to give a space in our irregular Poems in Translation series to his wonderful poem 'L'imballatore'. This is a poem which speaks particularly to me at the moment because I am moving home, job and city.

'Imballare' in Italian is 'to pack', as in to pack boxes. 'L'imballatore' would, literally, be something like 'the packer'. More idiomatically it could be 'the removal man'. 'L'imballatore chino/ che mi svuota la stanza' (or, more accurately, the seven removal men) did a wonderful job yesterday and this morning:

For Magrelli, 

Sto spostando me stesso
traducendo il passato in un presente
che viaggia sigillato
racchiuso dentro pagine
o dentro casse con la scritta
"Fragile" di cui ignoro l'interno.

[I am displacing myself /translating the past into a present /which travels clearly labelled /wrapped securely in pages /or packed in tea-chests marked /"Fragile" whose contents I don't know.]

Already, in translating this into English, I traduce Magrelli's masculine first person, unobtrusively personalising it for my own story. But this is far from the most knotty translation problem in the poem. Towards the end of it, he suggests that

È questo il futuro, la spola, il traslato
il tempo manovale e citeriore;

How on earth to translate these lines? The 'spola' is the shuttle on a loom. 'Fare la spola' is to go back and forth, to commute. So the future for the translator, and for the travelling object, is the shuttling back and forth, the 'carrying over' ('traslato' being the past participle of the Italian verb descended from the Latin 'transferre'). 'Manovale' is an unskilled or manual labourer; 'citeriore' 'nearer' in the ancient sense of 'nearer Gaul'; what is on this side, rather than the far side. Time is both a time of labour, and something which is still on this side, still not yet the future.

Somewhere among my boxes of books I have a yet unopened copy of Magrelli's The Contagion of Matter containing an English translation of this poem by Anthony Molino. I look forward, for all sorts of reasons, to finding it.

Photo credit: CCT.