Bristol students in translation news this week

It was a really nice start to the teaching year to find not one, but two of our students in the translation news this week.

Hayley Wood, a student on the MA in Translation, was commended by the judges in the Birkbeck/And Other Stories Sample Translation Competition for her translation from Alexandre Postel's Un homme effacé. The competition was a collaboration between the Birkbeck 'Use your language, use your English' translation summer school and the independent publisher And Other Stories. The judges were translators Ros Schwartz, Roland Glasser, Margaret Jull Costa and  Francisco Vilhena and editor Sophie Lewis. Warmest congratulations to Hayley! :)

Meanwhile Charis Fisher, a final-year undergraduate student in the School of Modern Languages, published a very interesting piece in the latest edition of The Linguist, the professional journal of the Chartered Institute of Linguists, which can be read online here.  

On her placement with UPS Translations this summer, Charis came across a scam (which was certainly a new one on me) whereby the CVs of professional translators are downloaded from online translation portals, the contact details are replaced, and the CVs are then submitted to translation agencies with the scammer's own email address and covering email. Charis was alerted by the odd inconsistencies between the very professionally-produced CVs and the poorly phrased and formatted covering emails. The article offers some practical hints to companies and to translators on how to protect themselves. For more on scams affecting translators, see the Proz scam alert board. Many congratulations to Charis too for making such good use of her placement and for this contribution to the translation community. 

Translation Studies for Free, part 3

The translationstudiesforfree material seems to have been of interest to readers, so I thought I would add some more resources.

One fast-growing type of resource is recorded lectures, both audio and video. Anthony Pym has some 91 recorded lectures and interviews with eminent researchers at his Youtube channel. The Fondazione San Pellegrino also has a youtube channel with a number of lectures and interviews linked with the annual Misano Adriatico translation school including very interesting lectures by Lawrence Venuti and Anne Coldiron. Recordings of the annual Sebald Lecture on literature in translation are available on the website of the British Centre for Literary Translation. There is a lecture about translation by Umberto Eco (in Italian) here.

A number of translation scholars have repositories of publications on sites such as academia.edu, or on their own university websites (see e.g. Theo Hermans' website which has a number of fascinating papers on open access (though I found the UCL eprints site a bit clunky). Hermans is one of the contributors to a wonderful-looking 2013 lecture series, also at UCL, entitled 'Translation in History'. The lectures are downloadable as pdfs.

Other useful resources include the Translation Studies Portal. It has a Chinese site, and one for the Arab world, broadly speaking. The latter site includes a number of recorded lectures which can be accessed here. The TSP is not to be confused with the Routledge Translation Studies Portal, which has lots of resources relating to the Routledge catalogue of translation studies books and journals.

There are lots of talks and interviews featuring translators also on the web. Lydia Davis is interviewed on her translation of Proust here. Anthea Bell, one of the UK's best-known translators, can be seen discussing her practice with one of her source authors here.

An increasingly popular event format is the 'Translation Slam' where two translators get together to discuss their approach to a text. Examples can be found here (Adam Talib and Randa Aboubakr on translating an extract from Yusuf Abu Rayya's novel Ashiq al-hayy) and here (Frank Wynne and Ros Schwartz on translating an extract from L'enquête by Philippe Claudel).

Lastly, one source of free books about translation is the EU bookshop. EU publications can be downloaded without charge in pdf format. They include the useful guide How to Write Clearly, available in all the languages of the member states, and the recent report by Pym, Grin, Sfreddo and Chan The Status of the Translation Profession in the European Union (ignore the actual description of this volume on the website which seems to have been pasted from a completely different book). A keyword search for 'translation' brings up lots of other interesting-looking things.

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.