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.

CFP: Special Issue of JoSTrans 'Suspicious Minds, Crime in Translation'

JoSTrans, The Journal of Specialised Translation, is an electronic, peer-reviewed journal bringing non-literary translation issues to the fore (see www.jostrans.org). Published bi-annually, it includes articles, reviews and streamed interviews by translation scholars and professionals. The journal is pleased to announce a special issue on crime in translation in July 2014 (issue n°22), guest edited by Karen Seago, Jonathan Evans and Begoña Rodriguez.

Crime fiction and its translation is experiencing a boom: Scandinavian Noir and Eurocrime feature regularly on the bestseller lists and in 2005, a special prize for translated crime fiction was created after the Gold Dagger had been won by non-English language crime authors three years in a row. Mysteries, thrillers and crime series occupy a prime spot in film and on television and recent screen adaptations of classic crime fiction such as Sherlock Holmes are an indication of our continuing fascination with the genre. But it is not only in fiction that translation meets crime. The police and the courts rely heavily on public service interpreters and translators. Translation itself is criminalised in various ways, e.g. in relation to copyright infringement, legal proceedings against translators of ‘problematic’ texts and various forms of piracy. This issue aims to explore the different facets of translation and crime.

Contributions might relate to, but are not limited to:

•    The characteristics and challenges of translating crime fiction
•    The constraints of formula fiction and how they impact on translation
•    Transmedial adaptations of crime narratives
•    True crime, its translation into text and across languages and cultures
•    Specialist knowledge, research and documentation in crime fiction translation
•    Subtitling and dubbing thrillers
•    Coherence and ambiguity in crime translation
•    Crime, translation and the law
•    The role of translation and interpreting in criminal justice
•    Translation by and for criminals
•    Translation as a crime
•    Translation and forensic linguistics
•    The representation of translation and interpreting in crime fiction and film

We welcome contributions of full length papers (between 4000 and 7000 words including endnotes and references), reviews (500-800 words) and shorter, more practical pieces for the Translator’s Corner section of the Journal. The journal style sheet can be downloaded from http://www.jostrans.org/style.php.

All contributions will be peer-reviewed.

Please send contributions to guest editor Karen Seago at karen.seago.1 [at] city.ac.uk with the Subject line JoSTrans Issue 22 by November 30th, 2013.

                                                                       *****

Selected papers from the Portsmouth Translation conference on Translation and Crime will be published in this issue of JosTrans.

The 2013 Portsmouth Translation Conference on Saturday 9 November 2013 aims to bring the different facets of translation and crime together in an interdisciplinary one-day conference, allowing exchange of ideas between translators, criminologists, interpreters, literary scholars and translation researchers.

The organisers invite proposals for 20-minute papers and 60-minute practical workshops on any area connecting crime and translation or interpreting. Enquiries and/or 300-word abstracts should be sent to translation [at] port.ac.uk by 15 June 2013.

For more information on the Portsmouth conference and the Call for Papers, please visit the Conference Website: http://www.port.ac.uk/research/translation/events/translationconference/

open access translation journals

Since I'm getting around to revamping our website with new resource pages, I thought that a list of open-access translation journals might be of interest to readers. There are other good lists (see below); criteria for this list are that the journals be peer reviewed and all (or nearly all) open access. Suggestions of additional journals are very welcome.

Meta (one of the top journals in the field; recent issues are firewall-protected)

TTR (ditto)

Journal of Specialised Translation (a personal favourite)

New Voices in Translation Studies

TranscUlturAl (new but promising)

Transversal, published by the European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policy (some of the most interesting writing about translation on the web).

Quaderns: revista de traducció is a Catalan journal published by the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Other Iberian journals include Doletiana, *Trans, *1611: A Journal of Translation History, the *Revista de Lingüística y Lenguas Aplicadas, the *Revista tradumàtica : traducció i tecnologies de la informació i la comunicació and *MonTI (issues online six months after publication).

Italian journals include the irregularly updated Intralinea and the more literary La nota del traduttore - perhaps not strictly speaking a periodical but I like it and it's my list, so hey.

French journals include recent issues of **Palimpsestes at the http://www.revues.org open-access journals site. The sociolinguistics journal **Glottopol sometimes carries useful translation articles.

Portuguese-language journals include Cadernos de Tradução, Scientia Traductionis, Confluências, *Babilónia. Revista Lusófona de Línguas, Culturas e Tradução, *Tradução em Revista  

From Colombia, Mutatis Mutandis; from Australia,*Translation & Interpreting. The international journal of Translation and Interpreting Research (has stolen the honours for longest journal title), from India, Translation Today; from Slovakia the SKASE Journal of Translation and Interpretation (honourable mention for least intuitively designed website).

More specialist journals include the Journal of Translation on Bible translation. On pedagogy of translation and interpreting, the Revista Electrónica de Didáctica de la Traducción y la Interpretación.

New Voices in Classical Reception Studies does just what it says on the tin.

Nice to see that back issues of New Comparison, the journal of the British Comparative Literature Association, are now downloadable as pdf files here, including some issues on translation.

Mona Baker's site has a useful list which also includes subscription-only journals. Another list here at the EST website or see Intute for more ideas. Comments on broken links are appreciated, as are suggestions of other open-access scholarly journals.

*added on 11 October 2010.
**added on 22 October 2010.

Translators on translation 2

Hi all,

The last post about translators on translation seems to have been useful, so I thought I would post a few more links.

I liked very much the recent issue of TranscUlturAl on 'The Translator as Theorist'. (In passing, yay for open-access peer-reviewed translation journals. Some of them really hide their light under a bushel.) One of the best open access translation journals and probably already familiar to you is the crunchy and delicious Journal of Specialised Translation. The January 2010 issue focuses on Chinese, including an interesting-looking article on what goes wrong with those badly translated signs which infest Flickr which I'm looking forward to reading. I have a feeling that I recklessly promised more links to non-literary translators on translation, and lots of them can be found on the JoSTrans website. The current issue features a useful interview with Yinghong Huang & Linda Liu on becoming a freelance translator in London and other riches.

There are hours of viewing pleasure to be had here, on the National Network for Translation website with practical presentations and interviews with translators on the profession.

In the literary translation field, Sarah Adams has pointed me to an excellent collection of videos on the London Review of Books website from the World Literature Weekend 2009. These include a lovely round table with well-known translators (oxymoron? Never say it!) including Anthea Bell, Anne McLean, Daniel Hahn and Frank Wynne talking about their work. I very much liked the talk with Faïza Guène and her translator Sarah Ardizzone too. You can find more clips of authors talking to their translators here.

The Center for the Art of Translation has a series of audio discussions on their website including discussions with some well-known American translators. Lots of goodies here. I really enjoyed José Manuel Prieto's chat with his translator Esther Allen where they discuss the complicated relationships between translation and writing. Still in the US, Three Percent, based in Rochester, had a fizzy and charming round table on translation which has been immortalised on film here. Lastly, the online journal Cipher contains marvels, both translations and essays by translators.

Journal of Specialised Translation

Dear all,
May I remind you to keep an eye on the website of the very useful Journal of Specialised Translation (www.jostrans.org). Issue 8, on translation revision, is now online. Issue 7 contains a salutary article by Jody Byrne on the consequences of translation errors - read and be warned!
Carol