Translationstudiesforfree: online modules in translation and interpreting studies

ARTIS (Advancing Research in Translation and Interpreting Studies) developed out of the TRSS (Translation Research Summer School), based in the UK and latterly also in Hong Kong, co-organised by Edinburgh, Manchester, UCL and Hong Kong Baptist University.

The TRSS produced an online course in translation and interpreting studies which is now available on the ARTIS website. There are two modules: one on Theories of Translation and Interpreting and one on Research Methods in Translation and Intercultural Studies.

The module Theories of Translation and Interpreting has four units: an overview by Professor Theo Hermans; a unit on descriptive approaches by Siobhan Brownlie; a unit on interventionist approaches to translation by Sebnem Susam-Saraeva; and a unit by Sameh Hanna on translation as social practice.

The module Research Methods in Translation and Intercultural Studies has three units: a unit on translating point of view, by Charlotte Bosseaux; a unit on translation as interpretation by Theo Hermans; and a unit on translation as renarration by Catherine Mansfield.

The course has no formal teaching, no charge, no sign-up dates. The materials are presented as is, for self-study.

New year, new #translationstudiesforfree

A new year is upon us and one of my resolutions is to continue with the #translationstudiesforfree series for this blog (see also on Twitter). This tag aims to make free translation studies content more visible and more easily available.

One of the features of free access to paywalled journal content is that it can be a bit unpredictable; you have to snaffle it while it's available. I thought that it might be useful to make a list of Translation Studies content that is currently on free access. So here's a list of freely available articles (not including book reviews) at time of writing, in alphabetical order.

Blumczyński, Piotr (2013) Turning the tide: A critique of Natural Semantic Metalanguage from a translation studies perspective, Translation Studies, 6:3, 261-276, DOI: 10.1080/14781700.2013.781484

Chandran, Mini (2011) The translator as ideal reader: Variant readings of Anandamath, Translation Studies, 4:3, 297-309, DOI: 10.1080/14781700.2011.589653

Cronin, Michael & Sherry Simon (2014) Introduction: The city as translation zone, Translation Studies, 7:2, 119-132, DOI: 10.1080/14781700.2014.897641

Daldeniz, Elif (2010) Introduction: Translation, modernity and its dissidents: Turkey as a “republic of translation”, Translation Studies, 3:2, 129-131, DOI: 10.1080/14781701003647327

Fu, Liangyu (2013) Indigenizing visualized knowledge: translating Western science illustrations in China, 1870–1910, Translation Studies, 6:1, 78-102, DOI: 10.1080/14781700.2012.724784

Guo, Ting (2015) Interpreting for the enemy: Chinese interpreters in the Second Sino-Japanese War (1931–1945), Translation Studies, 8:1, 1-15, DOI: 10.1080/14781700.2014.881302

Kershaw, Angela & Gabriela Saldanha (2013) Introduction: Global landscapes of translation, Translation Studies, 6:2, 135-149, DOI: 10.1080/14781700.2013.777257

Koskinen, Kaisa (2014) Tampere as a translation space, Translation Studies, 7:2, 186-202, DOI: 10.1080/14781700.2013.873876

Littau, Karin (2011) First steps towards a media history of translation, Translation Studies, 4:3, 261-281, DOI: 10.1080/14781700.2011.589651

McDonough Dolmaya, Julie (2015) Revision history: Translation trends in Wikipedia, Translation Studies, 8:1, 16-34, DOI: 10.1080/14781700.2014.943279

Marinetti, Cristina & Margaret Rose (2013) Process, practice and landscapes of reception: An ethnographic study of theatre translation, Translation Studies, 6:2, 166-182, DOI: 10.1080/14781700.2013.777258

Markey, Anne (2011) Valparaiso: Translation and Irish poetry, Translation Studies, 4:3, 325-341, DOI: 10.1080/14781700.2011.589655

Olohan, Maeve (2011) Translators and translation technology: The dance of agency, Translation Studies, 4:3, 342-357, DOI: 10.1080/14781700.2011.589656

Owen, Ruth J. (2011) Freedoms of expression: Poetry translations in the East Berlin Poesiealbum, Translation Studies, 4:2, 133-148, DOI: 10.1080/14781700.2011.560015

Pas, Justine M. (2013) Language and belonging in the Polish translation of Eva Hoffman's Lost in Translation, Translation Studies, 6:1, 64-77, DOI: 10.1080/14781700.2012.725568

Sánchez, Marta E. (2011) Pocho en español: The anti-pocho pocho, Translation Studies, 4:3, 310-324, DOI: 10.1080/14781700.2011.589654

Takatori, Yuki (2011) The myth of the “A-bomb statement”, Translation Studies, 4:3, 282-296, DOI: 10.1080/14781700.2011.589652

Translation Studies Forum: Translation and censorship, (2011) Translation Studies, 4:3, 358-373, DOI: 10.1080/14781700.2011.589657

Venuti, Lawrence (2011) Introduction: Poetry and Translation, Translation Studies, 4:2, 127-132, DOI: 10.1080/14781700.2011.560014

Wakabayashi, Judy (2012) Japanese translation historiography: Origins, strengths, weaknesses and lessons, Translation Studies, 5:2, 172-188, DOI: 10.1080/14781700.2012.663600

Wang, Pu (2013) The Promethean translator and cannibalistic pains: Lu Xun's “hard translation” as a political allegory, Translation Studies, 6:3, 324-338, DOI: 10.1080/14781700.2013.811836

UPDATE 21 January 2015: For a range of articles from other Routledge translation journals as well click here.

UPDATE 26 January 2015: For several more articles from Translation Studies, including Anne Malena on the city of New Orleans, Sharon Deane-Cox on Antelme, and Siobhan Brownlie on translating great historical documents, click here. Available until June 2015.

UPDATE 2, 26 January 2015: Yet more articles from Translation Studies, including Martha Cheung on the (un)importance of flagging Chineseness, Judith Kaufmann on translation & interpreting in Welsh language planning, plus other translation-related goodies here. 

Translators' notes

I've long thought that there's not enough writing out there by translators about specific knotty problems in texts. You can track them down sometimes in the prefaces of books, and there's always one's own experience to draw on, but one can never have too many examples to hand of real problems which have come up in authentic translation contexts, especially in a translation class with seven language pairs represented.

So I was delighted when the Translators Association's excellent journal In Other Words added an 'in brief' section where translators discuss fascinating questions such as how to translate 'del rancho de la chingada' in Mexican writer Juan Pablo Villalobos' Down the Rabbit Hole (Rosalind Harvey in issue 39) or the kind of relationship known as a 'Bratkartoffelverhältnis' (Anthea Bell in issue 40, on translating Eugen Ruge's In Times of Fading Light).

And now I am very very pleased to see that there's a new wordpress community, Brouillon, dedicated to the same thing - short pieces by translators about very specific words and phrases that proved a problem in translation, and how they got solved. So far, all the posts are, predictably enough, about fiction translation but it seems to be open to all sorts of translation (screen translation, anyone?).

Reviewing translated films in the mass media

In an excellent article in the latest issue of L'Écran Traduit, Anne-Lise Weidmann looks at how/when translation gets talked about in film reviews, and concludes, unsurprisingly, that it doesn't.

There are several salutary points made in the article. One is that screen translation is much less visible than book translation or even than theatre translation, in that order. In a year of reviews from the radio show Le Masque et la plume, Weidmann finds that the translator was named in 100% of reviews of print translation, 50% of reviews of translated plays, and an impressive 0% in the case of translated films.

Weidmann is looking at France, specifically, but I'm not sure that there would be any great difference in the Anglophone world. If we just look at subtitling, part of this probably has to do with the fact that in most cases the subtitler is credited (if at all) at the end of the credits. Almost everyone will have left the auditorium or paused the DVD before they get there. It hasn't always been that way, at least for successful subtitlers. The example below is from a VHS edition of Visconti's 1954 Senso, subtitled by the great Mai Harris, whose subtitling career lasted from the 1930s to the 1960s; by the time this film came out she merited a line of her own in the opening credits (the word you can't see because it's drowned out by the dress is 'Version'.

Another point Weidmann makes is that when screen translation is addressed in film criticism, it tends to be in derogatory terms. When was the last time you read a review which said 'the subtitles were exceptionally well done'? For me, it was in 2008 in David Cox's review of Welcome to the Sticks [Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis] in the Guardian, where he said

The subtitler succeeds in matching French mis-speaks with plausible English equivalents in a tour de force which merits the creation of a whole new Oscar category.

Even then, Cox doesn't name the subtitler, Michael Katims. And fun fact: apart from two pieces of academic writing on translation, this article seems to be the *only source of the phrase 'The subtitler succeeds' in the whole of Google. (I also tried 'The subtitlers succeed' and 'The subtitles succeed': nowt.)  This example is an outlier; I agree with Weidmann that subtitlers and dubbing scriptwriters don't get even the passing mention of the 'fine, fluent translation', etc., which fellow translators of print literature would usually hope to have.

By contrast, Weidmann gathers evidence of lively interest on the part of reviewers in the 1930s. Just after the translation revolution that followed the advent of sound, reviewers quite often commented on the new technologies of dubbing and subtitling. One reviewer of a French subtitled version of the Mae West film She Done Him Wrong (aka Lady Lou, 1933) finds that the film is excessively translated. The subtitles are 'trop nombreux, trop longs et tenant trop de place, plus gênants pour suivre l'action que ne l'étaient ceux du film muet [...]' [too numerous, too long and taking up too much space, more annoying for those trying to follow the plot than the titles of silent films]. Too much translation! Stop!!! We would like our film underdone, today, pls thks.

I jest, but in my own searches I've also found the odd example of early reviewers objecting to over-translation. A reviewer of Pabst's Kameradschaft in the Christian Science Monitor of 12 November 1932 grumps that "one rather deplores the wordy English titles that are too frequently superimposed upon the film".  Of course, they were only just getting used to having English titles on films at all, after a translation dry spell of several years - and, even in the era of intertitles, there had been a heated debate about how densely titled films should be.

Now, reviewers seem to think there's nothing to talk about. I concur with Weidmann that there is a really bad visibility problem with audiovisual translators. Reviewers and critics seem pretty bent on pretending that they are not there.

There is, of course, one big difference between print translation and screen translation, which I touched on in a recent post, 'What does it mean to 'translate' a film?'. Dubbing, subtitling and voiceover translate some, but not all of the codes which make up a film. Subtitling translates using a supplement in the form of a condensed translation in lines of text on the screen. Films for dubbing have 'international versions' which consist of the images and the sound effect and music track, which can then be supplemented by a rerecorded dialogue track. Speech is usually translated; written text in the image is often translated; music and images are (as a general rule, with exceptions) not translated. Films consist of translated elements, and invariant elements which need no translation.

Print translation doesn't have these 'invariant' elements. Words are all, or at least most, of the meaning of a printed text, and translators are named as the authors of those words. But, one might argue, stage translators are also named as authors of their translations, as a rule, and in theatre translation translator are responsible, again, for translating only part of the codes which go to make up a play. They translate speech, stage directions, perhaps text that is used on stage, but they are not usually responsible for the target-language production's mise en scène, costumes, lighting, set etc. So one might ask why screen translators and stage translators cannot enjoy similar levels of recognition.

Weidmann gives four possible hypotheses for the invisibility of screen translators: translation is always 'invisible'; everybody's got so used to AVT that they don't notice it anymore; translation has a bad reputation; general lack of interest. I wonder whether the answer lies partly in different ideas of authorship? It is a play's author, not its director, who is credited with the lion's share of its creation; but it's the director of the film, not the screenwriter, who is credited with the main creative input. Screenwriters have often had a rough deal; for decades, the Writers' Guild of America has fought for  better recognition for them, and I think the current agreement that screenwriters should be credited immediately before the director on opening credits is only about ten years old. But the WGA's website shows how complex the issues around screenwriting credit are. So perhaps the low recognition that screen translators receive is a side-effect of the low status and multiple authorship of screenwriting in general.

That doesn't mean things have to stay that way. The status and recognition of screenwriting have changed over the years. Where your name appears in the credits of a film is important, and if the place where your name appears changes, then your status changes with it. When book translators gained the right to a credit on the title page and a credit on the copyright page, it was an important step. Occasionally, one may even see the name of a translator on the front cover, or on the spine - usually with less commercial publishers. These are important aids to visibility.

Another place of recognition is in reviews. There's been a flurry of comment in recent years by distinguished translators about how translations should be reviewed (Nicky Harman; Jo Balmer; Susan Bernofsky here (offering a set of guidelines for translation reviewing) and here; Words Without Borders, including a post by Daniel Hahn here). Balmer argues that 'Reviewers need 'an understanding that translation [...] revolves around the act of choice – and that such choices are not necessarily compromises, as often assumed, but informed judgements, both technical and creative, made after careful consideration'. (This presupposes a willingness to envisage that translations may not simply be a 'filtered copy' of the original which is, perhaps, not so present in film reviewers.) Daniel Hahn is characteristically fair and sensible. He argues that in a 500-word review there may not be space to mention the translation, but if the review comments on the quality of the writing, then that's the translator's work they are commenting on and the translator should be acknowledged accordingly.

To paraphrase Hahn, is it so unreasonable to expect professional film reviewers to have some understanding of what the job of a translator entails, and what the translator’s contribution to the film might be?

[Post updated with corrections and staircase thoughts on 8 June 2014.]

Spontaneous quiz just because: 6 song translations

In honour of the Translation in Music conference which is taking place down the road in Cardiff this weekend, I thought it might be nice to have some song-related translation fun.

What popular English-language songs, most famously sung by which artists, are the originals (or indeed the translations) of the songs here? Answers in the comments please...

1) This one I had no idea about until I came across a link on Twitter:

2) It's the song that opens this interview clip:

 

3) This one is a perennial favourite:

4) I couldn't resist:

5) Ah, memories of summer camp circa 1989:

6) With thanks to Ali O., who introduced me to Jack Lukeman and the Black Romantics:

If anyone wants to read any more about song translation, you could try this old but fun NPR programme. There's an article about the translation of Stevie Wonder's 'I just called to say I love you' in Meta on open access. There's another article in the same journal by Ronnie Apter about translating opera (link is to direct download). There are good articles by Peter Low and others in various paywalled journals. There's an AHRC-funded project on 'Translating Music' with a list of further reading here. There was a special issue of The Translator on translation and music in 2008 (paywalled). There's an interview with Jonathan Burton and Judi Palmer of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden in the Journal of Specialised Translation here.

UPDATE: Thanks to Sam B. for pointing out this article by Nicolas Froeliger on translating Bob Dylan into French. 

Munday on the creative voice of the translator

I recently came across a really satisfying article by Jeremy Munday in a 2009 issue of Romance Studies. The article is called 'The Creative Voice of the Translator of Latin American Literature' and it outlines some of the debate there has been around the notion of creativity in Translation Studies. It uses Michael Hoey's notion of lexical priming to look at the ways in which we might read lexical and phrasal choices in translation as elements of creative practice. 

As with all the most satisfying articles, I don't agree with every step in the argument - for instance, I have more time than Munday does for wacky exercises like translating from languages one doesn't understand - but it's an elegant and wide-ranging treatment of creativity in translation. I absolutely agree with Munday that 'there remains a relative absence of detailed descriptions of the creative process by which the translator reshapes the text [...], of the nitty-gritty detail of the whys and wherefores of textual modification [...]'. He quotes the translator Peter Bush (aptly enough, since Bush has contributed a lot of nitty-gritty detail over the years) on where the translator 'sits' in the creative process:

Translatorly readings of literature provoke the otherness within the subject of the translator, work at a level not entirely under the control of the rationalising discourse of the mind, release ingredients from the subconscious magma of language and experience, shoot off in many directions, provoked by the necessity of the creation of new writing. A professional translator is one who is aware of this process, gives it full rein, and is able to hold it in check [...]

He also turns to Junot Díaz to refute the idea of loss in translation:

So many writers take the position that with translation you lose a lot. But really, how much do you lose? Do you lose more than when you speak any language? Isn't language already an act of compromise with reality?

I'm just sorry I didn't find the article in time for a recent encyclopedia entry on creativity that I wrote for the John Benjamins Handbook of Translation Studies - it should be included.

It's a timely reminder of the importance of working with physical books and journals. All my keyword searching for the Benjamins book didn't come up with this article (which in retrospect seems surprising); it was through coming across a physical copy of the journal issue that I became aware of the article (and another great article by Andrew Rothwell in the same issue: 'Translating 'Pure Nonsense': Walter Benjamin Meets Systran on the Dissecting Table of Dada').

This kind of bibliographical encounter is something which, to some extent, we are losing with the shift to ejournals and ebooks. Keyword searching and library-shelf-browsing juxtapose items in very different ways. Even library-shelf-browsing and ejournal-table-of-contents-browsing don't necessarily yield the same results. Let's hope that academic libraries remain places where we can do both.

Screen translation history for free

.I'm greatly looking forward to my trip to Edinburgh tomorrow to talk about early screen translation history to the Heriot-Watt/Edinburgh joint translation studies research seminar. Spoiler alert:

In honour of the event, I'd like to share a few links to useful resources in screen translation history in the #translationstudiesforfree series.

The first is to the lovely journal Cinema & Cie, published by Carocci. The first six issues are freely downloadable online and include two important special issues on multiple-language versions.

The second resource is the brilliant Media History Project, a treasure trove of 800,000+ pages of film magazines and journals from the teens to the 1970s, many of them covering the early years of sound and the arrival of dubbing and subtitling. It is funded by donations, so please consider giving. 

The third resource is the Pacific Film Archive's Cinefiles database, including a large body of free scanned archival documents on major directors and films including lots of films released in subtitled or dubbed versions, and fascinating distributors' and exhibitors' materials.

And as a bonus, not directly related to screen translation but incredibly interesting for silent film (which has, as far as I can see, been completely ignored to date by audiovisual translation scholars), the nutty-but-fabulous intertitle-o-rama: full transcripts of the titles of dozens and dozens of silent films.

(Btw if I'm wrong about researchers ignoring the translation of silent films, please feel free to pelt me with peanuts and point me in the direction of interesting stuff to read...)

UPDATE Wednesday evening, 12 Feb: Despite croaking like a frog, I really enjoyed the paper this evening and warm Edinburgh welcome, including thought-provoking questions.

A couple more rich resources on this topic (links are behaving oddly but copying and pasting should work):

Das Sprechen der Filme. Über verbale Sprache im Spielfilm. PhD thesis by Chris Wahl, 2003, downloadable at

-->webdoc.sub.gwdg.de/ebook/dissts/Bochum/Wahl2003.pdf.
Reproducing Languages, Translating Bodies: Approaches to Speech, Translation and Cultural Identity in Early European Sound Film, PhD thesis by Anna Sofia Rossholm, published by Acta Universitatis Stockholmiensis, 2006, downloadable at su.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:189903/FULLTEXT01

Bless Thee, Bottom...: Writers on Being Translated

Over the last couple of years I have had the very happy and odd experience of having bits of my academic work translated into French. A piece on languages in Inglourious Basterds was translated by Sophie Goldet and friends on the ATAA blog, and an article on the localisation of written text in dubbed film appeared in both English and a French translation by Marie Causse and Betty Serandour in L'Écran Traduit. I am very flattered to have had this experience, and at the same time I am always taken aback by the feeling of reading 'my' work in a language that I read fairly easily but that isn't native for me. The precision of expression in the translations seems to me very impressive. I get a sense of occasional shifts of emphasis and tone, and the kinds of slight rephrasing inevitable when dealing with two languages which have quite different traditions of academic writing; though in fairness, it's just an impression, because I don't have enough command of nuance in French to gauge exactly how the French texts read. Meanwhile, I (re)learn lots of useful French turns of phrase, which is lovely. And I discover that being translated is a salutary way of finding out whether the original text makes sense or not.

It occurred to me that it might be interesting to look for writers writing about the experience of being translated, hence this post.

(The image is from the 1943 Bugs Bunny short Wackiki Wabbit. It shows a shipwrecked sailor, startled at finding himself unexpectedly subtitled. The whole short can be viewed on Youtube here). 

There are quite a few writers out there who've written about this. Without a doubt my favourite piece is this essay by Lawrence Norfolk. It's a charming, effervescent piece that I urge you to go and read right now. Really - don't even finish reading this post, go and read Mr. Norfolk.

Among the themes that come up are the kinds of questions that translators ask writers. Culturally specific references are a perennial problem. Dennis Borisov, Russian translator of Scarlett Thomas's Going Out, has trouble with kitten heels, Essex girls, display cases, French plaits, water features and going out on the pull. J.M. Coetzee's Korean translator writes to check on thanatophany, off-spin, Esther Williams, the Isles of the Blest, and the charge of the Light Brigade. His Icelandic translator needs help with South African vocabulary including muti, snoek and Kaffraria. The Australian writer Shane Maloney first has to deal with being translated into English by his American publisher:

Could I please provide meanings and possible replacements for the following terms? Franger. Duco. Shoot through. Op shop. Furphy. Laminex. Ruckman. Fibro. A piece of piss. An unreconstructed Whitlamite.

Then, as Maloney tells it, things get technical with his French translator:

Not content with definitions for hoon, Paddle Pop, blue heeler and doona, my traducteur also requested clarification on the issues of bonking her ears off, living the life of Riley and being off with the pixies. By the time we’d finished with Clive James, Melbourne-Sydney rivalry and the witchetty-grub cappuccino, I could have taught a course on antipodean social anthropology at the Sorbonne.

The translator is the closest and best reader any writer will ever have; this has its downside, too, when the translator politely brings home to the writer errors or infelicities in the text. Lawrence Norfolk points out wryly that translators' questions 'are not designed to make authors feel good about themselves':

  So: 'How many legs, if any, does Captain Roy have? On page 170 he is described as the amputee and it says that he has lost one leg; whereas on pages 389 and 478 he appears to have no legs at all.'

Or: 'The coach turned left before the Marché des Innocents as though to cross the river by the Pont ....... are you sure you mean left and not right?'

Authors' preoccupations understandably include the dreaded howler. Coetzee notes that 'in the Italian version of Dusklands, a man opens a wooden crate with the help of a bird (what I wrote was that he used a crow, that is, a crowbar)'.

Gender turns out to be a recurring problem. Ruth Brandon, in a short but excellent piece in The Author, describes her communication with Camille Fort-Cantoni, the French translator of her book Ugly Beauty: Helena Rubinstein, L'Oréal and the Blemished History of Looking Good. One chapter in the book is called 'Consumers or Consumed?' The chapter envisages consumers who are both male and female, but the French translator originally rendered it 'Sommées à consommer' - a solution which is both very neat and quite misleading, since the use of the adjective in the feminine limits the scope of the chapter to women only.

In another case, the Croatian writer Mima Simić was furious to find that a short story of hers in which the narrator's gender is deliberately ambiguous was heteronormalised in translation so that it suggested a male heterosexual narrator. The translation was in fact by Simić herself, but between submission and publication an editor had made changes which the author found unacceptable.
 
Some writers, like James Bradley, don't seem to have much contact with their translators. P.C. Jersild becomes 'suspicious if a translator has no questions at all'. Others report tremendously enriching dialogues with their translators. Brazilian short story writer Lúcia Bettencourt finds the experience of being translated (by her English translator, Kim Hastings) an enlightening one which foregrounds the limited control which a writer has over their own text and the contribution that a good translator can make:

Let’s suppose [...] that an author tosses her pebble and it lands close to shore. The ripples formed won’t reach very far. Yet a translator nearby might detect a shimmer in the pebble and, seduced by this quality, pick it up. With his or her skill/translation, the pebble/story is tossed back into the lake. Only this time, the pebble skips before sinking, and the ripples therefore multiply, create patterns, and expand further. I’m lucky to have one of the finest translators I know: Kim Hastings. She’s collected my pebbles and cast them with skill, generating ripples to the extent that some of my stories are stimulating the imagination of people farther away than I’d ever have thought. [...] Through her, I have learned that translators have a far more analytical relationship with language (I should say, languages) than everyday speakers have.

On the whole, authors express deep appreciation for their translators. Kerstin Ekman hopes that 'there are places in the text, passages that may ignite a spark in the mind of the translator and make the entire artificial Christmas tree open up once again' [...] I can hardly bear the thought, although I know it is possible, that my stories might be nothing but a yoke of obligation under which the translator bends at the publisher's behest, and nothing more.'

Diego Marani writes, in a lovely short post on the PEN website,

What I can do in order to help the translator is not to check words in a language I do not know and presume meanings I cannot completely grasp, but rather give him the most exhaustive information on the spirit of the text, the ideas that lie behind it, my thoughts and my feelings on the matter. Then there has to be trust.

When the trust breaks down, things may not be so pretty. The translator Marilyn Booth has written an interesting article on her experience of translating a writer who wanted to retain creative control of the translation (see below). And of course the less said about Milan Kundera, the better...

LATE ADDITION: I was just reminded of Brecht's testimony before the House Un-American Committee, when asked to acknowledge a translation of his writing:

Offline and paywalled resources:

Marilyn Booth, "Translator v. Author (2007): Girls of Riyadh go to New York" in Translation Studies 1:2 (2008), pp.297-211. The article can be accessed above on subscription, or here for free (I think) by registering with the Routledge Translation Studies Portal. You may need a university email address. I'd be interested if readers could confirm either way whether that works.
Ruth Brandon, 'On being Translated', in The Author, Summer 2011, pp.66-67
J.M. Coetzee, 'Speaking in tongues', in The Australian, 28 January 2006 (now offline), republished in Meanjin 64:4 and in Alexandra Lianeri and Vanda Zajko, Translation and the Classic: Identity as Change in the History of Culture (OUP, 2008)
John Derbyshire, 'On being translated into Russian', in New Criterion 27 (February 2009)
Kerstin Ekman, 'On Translation and Being Translated', translated by Linda Schenck, in World Literature Today 77:1 (April-June 2003) pp.34-39
P.C. Jersild, 'On Being Translated', translated by Joan Tate, in Swedish Book Review 1983 (Supplement), pp.39-40
Milan Kundera, Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts. Translated by Linda Asher (New York: Harper Collins, 1995)
Gareth D. Jones, 'Speaking in Tongues' in Focus 56 (Spring 2011), pp.22-23
Susan Sontag, 'On Being Translated' in Where the Stress Falls (London: Jonathan Cape, 2002), pp.334-347

More links to writers talking about the experience of being translated are, as always, welcome. 

Translationstudiesforfree: Ten historical texts about translation

More free goodies for translation studies researchers. This time, it's interesting texts from the history of translation theory. Some of these are downloadable as pdf files, others readable online. (I haven't quite worked out the Google Library setup yet, but it should work OK.)

1. Etienne Dolet's La manière de bien traduire d'une langue en aultre (1540)
2. Earl of Roscommon, An Essay on Translated Verse (1684) 
3. Charles Batteux's Principles of Translation (1760)
4. Alexander Fraser Tytler's Essay on the Principles of Translation (1797)
5. Francis Newman, Homeric Translation in Theory and Practice (1861)
6. Matthew Arnold's On Translating Homer: Three Lectures Given at Oxford (1860). The links are to Google Library; versions of Arnold's and Newman's texts can also be downloaded here. 
7. Thomas Norton's preface to his translation of Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion.
8. A 1905 edition of Fitzgerald's Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, one of the best known translations in English literature
9. Castelvetro's Lettera di Lodovico Castelvetro scritta a m. Guasparro Calori a Roma del traslatare at the Galileo digital library (not the most intuitive layout ever)
10. Jean le Rond d’Alembert's Observations sur l'art de traduire (1763). This is part of Julie Candler Hayes' impressive text bank entitled 'French Translators: 1600-1800: An Online Anthology of Prefaces and Criticism' which includes works by Guillaume de Colletet, Nicolas Perrot d'Ablancourt, Anne Dacier, the Abbé Desfontaines and many others. 

Flora Ross Amos's 1920 book Early Theories of Translation is available to download from archive.org.

Readers working on translation history may also be interested in the Renaissance Cultural Crossroads Catalogue (a searchable, analytical and annotated list of all translations out of and into all languages printed in England, Scotland, and Ireland before 1641; also includes all translations out of all languages into English printed abroad before 1641.)  

Translators on translation

I'd love to see more pieces by translators about getting into the nitty-gritty of texts. Sometimes we ask our students to analyse translations against the translators' own discourse (from prefaces, interviews, notes etc.). It can be tricky to find these at short notice, except perhaps in the case of older translation prefaces which can sometimes be tracked down via repositories like Project Gutenberg.

So here are some suggestions for finding translators talking about their work.

The Centre for Translation Studies at the University of Texas at Dallas has collected interviews with a number of eminent translators, many from Spanish.

Words Without Borders has a series of posts 'From the Translator'. 

There is a growing collection of pieces by translators on the authors they have translated at http://authors-translators.blogspot.co.uk/p/translators.html. 

The Necessary Fiction blog has collected a number of Translators' Notes.

Peter Bush's 2003 essay on translating Juan Goytisolo remains a great point of reference and shows how enlightening it can be to look at successive drafts of the same passage.

Lydia Davis has been widely interviewed about her translations of Proust and of Flaubert. For instance, peeping out from behind the Paris Review paywall are the intriguing opening paragraphs of this essay.

We have previously mentioned William Weaver's wonderful piece on translating Gadda.

And Daniel Hahn is nearing the end of a diary about his translation of a novel by Saavedra (it might be worth saving these pages as you go, because I don't know how long they will be available; a previous blog on translating Agualusa was later collected and published and is no longer on the web).

UPDATE 14 November 2014: There's a new blog on the block called brouillon, which collects translators' reflections on specific knotty words and phrases. There are just a few posts at time of writing but it looks very promising! 

Crowdfunding translations

I've been an admirer of crowdfunding, specifically Kickstarter, for the last couple of years. For readers who don't know Kickstarter, it's a US-based website where creators and entrepreneurs pitch ideas for projects, which readers then then decide whether or not to fund, in exchange for various kinds of material or immaterial rewards. It's been in the news in recent years for the large sums which some projects have raised and for the fact that very well-known figures like Spike Lee and Hal Hartley (twice) have funded projects on the site. There are other sites too like indiegogo and the Irish site fundit. (There seem to be intriguing differences in success rates - 75% on fundit, 43% on Kickstarter, reportedly 9.3% on indiegogo.)

I was originally a bit surprised by how few translation projects there were on Kickstarter, but that has changed. There are recent or current pitches for a translation of Christopher Okigbo's poetry into Spanish; the translation into English of a French graphic novel series by Benoît Peeters and François Schuiten, a games localisation project; a translation into English of the children's book Cuentos de la Selva by the Uruguayan writer Horacio Quiroga; the translation into Spanish of an Oxford University Press book about the Costa Rican cloud forest; and the translation into Vietnamese of a textbook on molecular biology, among others.

Words Without Borders have run no less than three successful funding campaigns on Kickstarter, one for a special issue translating Afghan writers in 2011, one to support a special issue on the Mexican drug war in 2012, and one to support Eduardo Halfón's The Polish Boxer later the same year.

Other crowdfunding platforms also had interesting translation projects like this translation by Artur Zapalowski of Foreign Bodies based on a script by the Polish playwright Julia Holewinska, produced at the Project Arts Centre in Dublin in summer 2013; a bilingual Irish and English adaptation of Collodi's Pinocchio staged at Smock Alley Theatre in Dublin in 2012; and a 2013 translation workshop in Toronto to finalise and present a French version by Nadine Desrochers of Heather Hermant's performance piece ribcage: this wide passage about 18th-century cross-dresser Esther Brandeau/Jacques La Fargue, "said to be the first Jewish person to set foot in what is now known as Canada". 

This is encouraging and it would be good to see more of it. 

There are lots of posts out there recommending how to put together a pitch (e.g. this one for fundit). I'm just an onlooker, but as someone who has translated and (once or twice) been translated, and someone who participates in a minnow-like capacity in sites like Kickstarter, here are some things I really like to see in translation project pitches.

I like projects that:

1) Tell readers where the money is going. What funding has been raised so far, from where, and for what exactly; what elements of the project remain to be funded.

2) Show that they have a sense of how translation works, by securing someone(s) with a track record to carry out the translation, specifying the size of the project (how many thousand words are involved?), providing a brief translation sample, showing an awareness of the challenges posed by the text, giving convincing costings. This last one is difficult, admittedly, because a lot of people aren't necessarily aware of the cost of professional translation (i.e. the time and expertise of a qualified person translating 2000-3000 words a day). Pro bono translation seems very often to be part of the mix, and is arguably better than translation at a rate which undercuts professional translators.

3) Give a compelling rationale for why the translation needs to be done (especially important if it's a text that has been translated into that language already).

4) Have a plan for disseminating the translation as widely as possible, e.g. on the web (though I am also very sympathetic to live performances and to beautiful book-objects).

5) Edit, polish and proofread their pitch very, very carefully. Maybe it's because I'm a part-time academic editor, but I really notice sloppy presentation and it puts me off. Most translation projects have a publication element, and if the pitch isn't executed to a professional standard, it doesn't help to convince potential supporters that the translation will be.

STAIRCASE THOUGHT: 6) Have all the copyright stuff sorted. V. imp.

Good luck to anyone pitching translation projects to crowdfunders in 2014!

Translationstudiesforfree part 7, including fictions of translation

Continuing with the Translationstudiesforfree theme, here are a few bits and pieces which have crossed my path recently.

The Canadian Review of Comparative Literature/Revue Canadienne de littérature comparée is available online on open access up until 2008. It has plenty of translation-related content, including a special issue on translation in the Renaissance (volume 8, no. 2, spring 1981). This weekend I've read and found interesting George Lang's 1992 article 'La Belle Alterité: Towards a Dialogical Paradigm in Translation Theory?'

In our last MA Cultural Encounters class of the term we talked about narrative and fictions of translation, which reminded me to post a link to Borges' brilliant story 'Pierre Menard, Autor del Quijote'. There appear to be three translations at least into English. Here is a html version of the translation by James E. Irby. A copy of the translation by Anthony Bonner can be found on Columbia University's website here. A copy of the translation by Andrew Hurley can be downloaded via the CUNY website here (I think, though my browsers are being tedious about doing downloads of pdf files).

But really it's Borges, and it's ChristmasWinterval, so you should get someone to go to a proper, bricks-and-mortar bookshop and buy a paperback copy of Fictions for you.

For those of you looking for other stories about fictional translators, again, I direct you to your nearest b.&.m. bookshop where you will find lots of them (for some ideas, see here or here). Neither of these lists mentions my very favourite story featuring a translator, which is 'The Kleptomaniac Translator' by Dezső Kosztolányi, from the novel/story collection Kornél Esti. You can download a French translation of this story by Péter Adám and Maurice Regnault from the publisher's website. You'll find an English translation of the story in Bernard Adams's Kornél Esti published by New Directions (alas not online, but think, what a great way to start your new year's resolution about reading more fiction in translation).

Translationstudiesforfree part 6: Journal special issues on translation

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In a previous post in the translationstudiesforfree occasional series I linked to free content from a number of translation journals. Of course there are lots of non-translation-studies journals which do special issues on translation too. A few are even open access. For instance:

reconstruction: studies in contemporary culture has a 2011 issue on 'Multilingual realities in Translation'.

Volume 5, issue 1 of the Journal of Writing Research has a special section on writing and translation process research.

The French sociolinguistics journal Glottopol has an interest in translation; see e.g. this 2010 issue on orality and writing in translation (and there's a call out for a 2015 special issue on self-translation which looks interesting (useful bibliography provided, too); deadline April 2014).

Helsinki English Studies has two special issues on translation, issue 1, edited by Ritva Leppihalme,  and issue 4, 'The Road to Translation', a Festschrift in Leppihalme's honour edited by Outi Paloposki (Finnish and English content) (which includes by-the-by an interesting article on dissertation supervision from the student's point of view by Mika Loponen). 

New Comparison, the old journal of the British Comparative Literature Association, ran several special issues on translation which are available for download here.

There's a special issue of the Portuguese journal Anglo-Saxonica (Series III, No.3) on 'New Directions in Translation Studies' edited by Anthony Pym and Alexandra Assis Rosa on translation here (click on the cover image to download the whole issue). 

The Revue française de linguistique appliquée has a couple of special issues on translation, one from 2003 on 'La traduction aujourd'hui: théories et pratiques' which includes an interesting-looking article on the translation of philosophy, and one on 'linguistique et traduction' from 2009 which includes a useful article by Kirsten Malmkjaer revisiting definitions of translation competence. There's a 1994 Langages special issue on 'Le traducteur et l'ordinateur'.

UPDATE 5 March 2014: Gisèle Sapiro has edited a special issue of the journal Bibliodiversity on translation and globalisation. The issue is dedicated to the publisher and champion of translated literature André Schiffrin. Articles in French, English, Spanish. Downloadable or readable online.

UPDATE 6 March 2014: The journal Book History has an issue free to access (no.16) at time of writing which includes a number of interesting articles relating to translation and publishing.

A keyword search for translation in the 'journal' field in the Directory of Open Access Journals turns up some 45 journals, and a keyword search under articles brings up nearly 7,000 hits, in many languages. There turn out to be many open access journals which have an interest in translation, without being translation-focused (e.g. journals not on the European Society for Translation Studies list of translation journals). Next time you're looking for secondary literature, a direct search on the DOAJ might be worthwhile.

Another great site is revues.org. It lists 13 special issues on translation, including:

A 2011 issue of Trivium on medieval translation and information exchange in the Mediterranean region; 
A 2002 issue of ILCEA on cultural factors in translating pragmatic texts (in Delisle's sense) and a special issue of the same journal from 2011 on the ergonomics of translation (a nice, catchy way of talking about translators and their tools).
A 2002 special issue of IDEO on translation and reception of the literatures of Asia in French
There's a special issue of Études irlandaises on translation in an Irish context, including a very good interview with Michael Cronin or, as he is sometimes known in Ireland, Micheál Ó Cróinín. His observations on Ireland's 'sociolinguistic deficit' have a wider application too.
There's a very interesting-looking 2011 special issue on the translation of Flaubert, including Sharon Deane on the retranslation of Flaubert into English, here.

France seems very well provided with open access journal repositories, what with www.cairn.info and www.persee.fr (where a keyword search on translation is also worth doing). The latter has a nice 1999 special issue on literary translation in the nineteenth century from Romantisme. This portal also has a very substantial 2002 special issue of Actes de recherche en sciences sociales on translation and international literary exchanges edited by Johan Heilbron and Gisèle Sapiro.

I note with interest the charges obtaining on www.cairn.info: between 3 and 5 euro per article, e.g. the 2011 special issue of the Revue de la BNF on translation or the 2011 special issue of Études de linguistique appliquée on 'Traduire des français: des mots et des mondes'. This is refreshing, in an era when articles on the big publishing platforms can be priced at £30 or more for individual download. Could this be a trend? Is anyone else exploring the potential of mini- or micropayments for academic publishing?

Speaking of matters financial, it's worth noting that there is a potential ethical issue around open repositories like the DOAJ, which may include journals which impose publication charges on authors. There's a search on the DOAJ to filter this, if you feel that open access content should be free for both authors and readers.

On the same theme, for readers who know Italian I recommend an excellent, thought-provoking article, 'Autori nella rete', by the dubbing scriptwriters Eleonora di Fortunato and Mario Paolinelli, authors of Tradurre per il doppiaggio (Hoepli 2005), on the impact of the move to open access and free content on writers who are not also salaried academics.

Photo credit: Flickr Commons

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.

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.

Initiatives in scholarly translation

I've just been reading a series of articles from a special issue of Art in Translation (volume 4, issue 1, from 2012, paywalled) on the translation of art history. The journal is the only periodical I know whose main function is to publish and discuss research in translation. There's a fascinating piece, 'Honor Thine Author' by Fiona Elliott, about being a translator of art-related texts and what that actually means. She has some very interesting reflections on ambiguity, author sensitivities and the ethical stance of the translator. On a light-hearted note, I like her remark that

if I get the chance, I always make sure I ask authors to avoid using the word 'aufheben', and any words deriving from it. What English verb could match 'aufheben', meaning to pick something up from the floor, to save something up for later, to close a meeting, to terminate a siege, to remove restrictions, to cancel or annul, to repeal or revoke, to compensate, neutralize, offset, or elevate?

More seriously, it's great to see the arts and humanities gradually get more interested in the role of translation in the transmission of research findings. There's a long history of debates about translation in the history of ideas, of course, about translation of Freud, Derrida, de Beauvoir, Cixous, Barthes, about the problems of translating philosophy in general (for readers with a JSTOR subscription I recommend this article by Jonathan Rée), or the 'epistemicide' wreaked on ideas by scholarly translators, as per Karen Bennett's argument.

But what I really wanted to write about today is practical initiatives to support scholarly translation in the arts and humanities.

Namely:

The Getty-funded Art in Translation has a standing call for suggestions of important work in art history which deserves to be translated into English. They also have an annual student prize with a first prize of £250 for the best proposal by a registered art history student (next deadline 1 November 2013).

The Organisation of American Historians (OAH) offers a biennial prize, the David Thelen Award, to the author of the best article on American history published in a foreign language. The winning article is published in English translation in the Journal of American History. Next deadline 1 May 2015 for articles published in 2013 or 2014.

The European Society for Translation Studies has a new grant, the Translation Prize, which offers up to €2000 to support the translation of a key text or texts in Translation Studies. It was awarded in 2013 for the first time, for the translation of Anton Popovič's Teória umeleckého prekladu [Theory of Literary Translation] from Slovak to English. The next deadline is 1 June 2014.

On a related note, I see that the long-running Polish literary translation journal Przekładaniec has made several recent issues available in English on its website. I didn't know that there was a lively debate about the translation of Derrida's term différance into Polish, but I do now. 

The Society for Cinema and Media Studies has a Translation Committee which has a brief to promote the translation of scholarship in film and media studies not written in English. I have a memory of a page on their old website with a collection of texts proposed for translation, which was a very nice idea, but I don't seem to see it on the new website.

Lastly, there was an initiative a few years ago by the American Council of Learned Societies, part-funded by the Ford Foundation, to produce guidelines for translators in the social sciences. It culminated in Michael Henry Heim and Andrzej Tymowski's 2006 Guidelines for the Translation of Social Science Texts, which can be downloaded in English, Arabic, Chinese, French, Japanese, Russian, Spanish and Vietnamese here.

UPDATE 28 December 2013: I've just been reminded of the wonderful-looking Paul Celan Fellowships, 3-6-month funded residencies for translators of works of criticism and research publications from and into Eastern European languages. The website gives the following description of the programme:

The aim of the Paul Celan Fellowship Program is to overcome deficits and asymmetries in the exchange of ideas and the reception of scholarly literature which result from the division of Europe in the 20th century. Therefore, the program supports translations of canonical texts and contemporary key works in the humanities, social sciences and cultural studies from Eastern to Western, Western to Eastern, or between two Eastern European languages. Special emphasis is put on translations of relevant works written by East European authors and/or by female scholars.

I'd be very interested to hear from readers of more initiatives to promote and support scholarly translation.

UPDATE 26 January 2015: I've just read an excellent short report on a French government-funded project commissioned by the Institut Français and run by Gisèle Sapiro on the translation of French research in social sciences and humanities. The project makes a number of recommendations and it will be very interesting to see how many of them will be taken up. More on the project here (in French).