Critical Link community interpreting conference, July 2010, Aston, Birmingham

A big conference coming up on community interpreting. A quick reminder from the organisers:

This is to remind you that the 6th International Critical Link conference will be held from 26-30 July 2010 at Aston University in Birmingham. The main theme is 'Interpreting in a changing landscape'. It is for the first time that this conference which is specifically devoted to Public Service Interpreting is being held in the UK. About 300 participants have registered so far. If you wish to attend but haven't booked yet, please do so via the website
http://www1.aston.ac.uk/lss/news-events/conferences-seminars/july-2010/critical-link/
You can also find the draft programme and a list of presenters on the website and other useful information.

PEN translation anthology and stuff

The PEN Writers in Translation section has just published a good-looking anthology of translated works supported by the programme over the past five years. It can be downloaded free here. The site also has lots of other goodies including a list of links and resources and some sample translations of likely texts for publication. May well be of interest to students taking the Translation Project and translating literary texts.
And remember the deadline for the Harvill Secker Young Translators' Prize is only a month away! (Language pair this year is Spanish to English).

guess the misunderstanding (DE-EN)

The world needs translators who are real people partly because words can have more than one meaning and so far, human translators have the best record in working out from context which of multiple possible meanings is meant. Of course, it would be boring if they always got it right! German-speaking readers of this blog are invited to take a look at this story about a Legoland giraffe in Germany missing a vital body part, and guess where a possible misunderstanding might arise. The answer can be found here. A cautionary tail for us all! (sorry)

How to be a better proofreader

Corinne McKay just posted a very nice snippet on how to be a better proofreader with some excellent tips (e.g. always proofread in a different format). One other suggestion I read recently (can't alas remember where) was to proofread a text in a different font - maybe worth trying out!

subtitling blunders, Polish-English

Just read a very funny post on a site called Polandian about the subtitling of a Polish film (which I haven't seen) called Dom Zły. The wonders of screenshot technology allow the poster to show us the subtitlers' amazing coinages (the mind boggles at 'dephlegmator'), poor syntax (a sentence beginning 'Probably you can' is unlikely to originate in English), collocational innovation and disregard for niceties like apostrophes and capitalisation.
Of course it's a tiny bit unfair to take single subtitles out of context and subject them to minute scrutiny, but here one can understand the temptation. Always get a native speaker to do your subtitles (and then a second native speaker to check your first native speaker). And then people won't mock your film in public. Well, they might, but not because of a bad translation.

Swedish-English doctoral translation bursaries

From the department of Scandinavian Studies at University College London, a great-looking opportunity for translators from Swedish to English:

Two fully-funded PhD Studentships in Swedish-English Translation are available at UCL, starting this autumn. The deadline for receipt of applications is 14 July.

The advertisement is available on the UCL Vacancies site. There are three ways to find the advert online: (a) go direct via http://tinyurl.com/28oe44k; (b) visit our departmental homepage at http://www.ucl.ac.uk/scandinavian-studies; or (c) visit http://www.ucl.ac.uk/hr/jobs/ and enter reference 1143976.

A more detailed project description is available to download from our departmental homepage at http://www.ucl.ac.uk/scandinavian-studies.