Translationstudiesforfree part 5: Conference proceedings online

Today is the thirteenth annual Portsmouth translation conference, and I wish I could be there. It is the first conference I haven't been at in ten years. 

But here's hoping they are having a great day, and I thought I'd give them a shoutout, in the form of a link to some online translation conference proceedings as part of our ongoing occasional series on Translation Studies for free.

The Portsmouth conference has put several years' worth of proceedings online: click here for 2007, here for 2008, here for 2009. Some of the contributions to the 2011 conference on multimodality and translation were published as part of issue 20 of the Journal of Specialised Translation, which will also publish a special issue in 2014 based on this year's topic of translation and crime.

There are a few other conferences which put their proceedings online. There tends to be a mixture of full texts, powerpoints, handouts etc. Click here for the proceedings to a 2013 conference held in Liège entitled "Impliciter, expliciter: le traducteur comme équilibriste interculturel".

SEPTET, a translation research group based at the University of Strasbourg, has put online the proceedings of a conference on "Les relations internationales à travers les traductions françaises au siècle de Louis XIV" which look very interesting. Both mostly/all in French.

Lastly, we can't forget the proceedings of three Marie Curie-funded conferences on Multidimensional Translation (the MuTra conferences) held in 2005, 2006 and 2007 and containing useful papers on lots of topics including my favourite, subtitling.

I don't know quite where one draws the line between online conference proceedings and online downloadable books based on conferences. A good example of the latter is the 2010 book Translators' Agency, edited by Tuija Kinnunen and Kaisa Koskinen, based on a symposium held in Tampere in 2008 [the link is to a direct download of the book]. I'd love to see more books circulating via this route.

As always, feel free to link to any other online translation conference proceedings in the comments.

Viva voce congratulations to Alice Colombo!

Warmest congratulations to Alice Colombo for her successful PhD viva today, with a thesis looking at textual reworkings of Jonathan Swift from a translation point of view.

Brava! 

\o/\o/\o/\o/

Poems about translation 17: epitaph for Henry G. Bohn

Henry George Bohn has popped up in this blog before, as publisher of Ichabod Wright's translation of Dante. He was a Victorian publisher who, in the late 1840s, established the series known as the 'Libraries' (the Standard Library, the Classical Library, and many others) which became a widely known brand. They featured literal translations which were popular with students, and the Libraries continued to be published by George Bell & Sons until well into the twentieth century, eventually supplanted by Everyman and Loeb.

Bohn's output of translations was so substantial that, according to Kenneth Haynes in the Oxford History of Literary Translation into English, “it was Henry Bohn, more than any other publisher, whose series actively influenced the formation of a canon of world literature in translation” (2006: 8). The Libraries' attractive and inexpensive volumes were eagerly awaited by Victorian readers with three-and-sixpence or five shillings to spare:

When Bohn died in 1884, Punch published an affectionate obituary (6 September 1884, p.110), which gives some sense of the institution that was Bohn, and the reputation the translations enjoyed:

Eh? Dead at Eighty-nine? A ripe old age.

Dear renderer of many a learned page

Into the—rather dryasdust—vernacular;

True source of many an utterance oracular

From many a pseudo-pundit, who scarce owns

To wandering in that valley of dry Bohns.

Thousands should thank thee who will hardly do so—

In public! From Catullus down to Crusoe,

From Plato, Xenophon, and Aristotle deep,

To Goethe, Schlegel, Schiller we drink pottle-deep –

Of Learning’s fount from thy translated tap!

And what though o’er it one may nod and nap?

‘Tis wholesome, if not sparkling, with sound body,

If not the glint of true Pierian toddy.

Gone from thy roses underneath the daisies,

We echo Emersonian thanks and praises,

And say (Pundits make puns, and sometimes own ‘em),

            “Vale! De mortuis nil nisi Bo(h)num!”

(Ralph Waldo Emerson, a man who compared reading foreign languages in the original to swimming across the Charles River when he wanted to go to Boston, had said, in a judgment much-quoted in Bohn's advertisements, that Bohn's translations "have done for literature what railroads have done for internal intercourse".)

I have the good fortune to be talking about Bohn the translation publisher on Thursday 14 November 2013 as part of the UCL 'Translation in History' series.

Translationstudiesforfree part 4: Repositories of researchers' publications

This is the next instalment in the translationstudiesforfree series, which tries to highlight good open access resources for translation researchers.

I mentioned in a previous post that some translation scholars have their own websites where selections of their work can be downloaded. Theo Hermans was the scholar in question, but of course there are many others. Anthony Pym's website has a huge quantity of resources. Many of Andrew Chesterman's publications can be found on the open web. His homepage has a number of links. His short article from 1996: 'Psst! Theory can be useful!' cheers me up with its practical good sense. He offers a useful overview of Skopos theory here. On conference interpreting, see the rich resources gathered by Daniel Gile. On public service interpreting, see Holly Mikkelson's page.

Several scholars have extensive publications lists on academia.edu, including Mona Baker (lots of her work here on translation and narration). Another senior scholar represented is Douglas Robinson, who has several articles on the site including his '22 theses about translation' which remain as rich as ever.

In fact, academia.edu has unending riches for translation scholars, from Catherine Baker on military interpreting in the Balkans to Chris Rundle on translation and censorship in Fascist Italy; from Rachele Antonini on child language brokering to Federico Zanettin on comics translation; from Chris Larkosh on sexualities and translation in Latin America to Kyle Conway on news translation.

Of course this is a tiny and reductive selection of topics; there's much more to be found with a bit of patient rummaging. Note that on academia.edu it would be usual to find preprint versions of articles, but one may also find extended or alternate versions of work (e.g. Nicholas Watson's 'Director's Cut' of his entry on theories of translation in the medieval volume of the Oxford History of Literary Translation into English - nice!) It's also a place where people upload drafts of conference papers. So in textual terms, one needs, in the words of Alastor Moody, 'constant vigilance!'

PhD theses can increasingly be found on the open web, either on their authors' webpages, in institutional repositories or via services such as the British Library's Ethos in the UK (try looking up 'subtitling' or 'literary translation' to see the range of theses available). Abstracts of PhD theses are published regularly in New Voices in Translation Studies.

More suggestions for academics' pages with good resources are welcome in the comments.

Seminar on du Bouchet as poet and translator, Oxford, 7 November 2013

Looks fascinating; may be of interest to readers in hailing distance of Oxford: 

Oxford Modern French Research Seminar

  

Emma Wagstaff (University of Birmingham) will speak about 

 

'Poetry and Translation: the work of André du Bouchet'

   

André du Bouchet (1924-2001) was a poet, translator, and, along with other major poets of the post-war generation in France, a founding editor of the literary review L'Ephémère. This paper will discuss his understanding of translation, his work as a translator, and the ways in which translation is bound up with his poetic practice as a whole.

  

Thursday 7 November, 5.15, Maison française (Oxford)

Tea and coffee will be available from 5p.m. All welcome.

Poems about translation 16: Traduzioni da Torquato Tasso

For our next Poem About Translation, here is a piece of gamery by the writer and critic Guido Almansi (who turns out to have been a lecturer, among other places, in the city of my birth at University College Dublin, and at my formerformer place of work in Norwich - who knew??).

It's called 'Traduzioni da Torquato Tasso' and is from Imimitazioni (Cooperativa scrittori, Roma, 1974). You can read the full text here.

'Gerusalemme liberata' works so well, for me, because it draws on very everyday translation practices and shifts to achieve its purpose - it plays with cognates, with word-for-word translation, with collocation, with rhyme, with ambiguity and misunderstanding. And it only cheats sometimes.

For more of this sort of thing, see the 'Mistraduzioni' in Almansi's marvellous book Maramao (Longanesi, 1989) (but be warned, those of a prudish disposition may wish to steer clear). My favourite part is the dedication:

A David O’C., studente di primo anno a University College, Dublino, che gloriosamente mistradusse le prime due parole degli Indifferenti di Alberto Moravia, “Entrò Carla”, con “He entered Carla”.

[For David O'C., first-year student at University of College, Dublin, who gloriously mistranslated the first two words of Alberto Moravia's Gli Indifferenti, “Entrò Carla” [Carla came in] as "He entered Carla".

Photo from http://www.aforismario.it/guido-almansi.htm with thanks.