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César Vásquez Becker presentó recientemente su libro Literatura: ensayo y traducción, una publicación que hace énfasis en la importancia de considerar la traducción como un género literario más. César Vásquez, durante la presentación del libro. El acto fue en Alianza Francesa, con la participación de Alcira García Vassaux y Bruno Lecat. La primera parte del libro contiene ensayos sobre traducción de poesía y prosa. La segunda incluye las transcripciones del francés al español, de la tragedia Fedra, de Jean Racine; del italiano al español, la comedia La criada brillante, de Carlo Goldoni, y el drama El hombre de la flor en la boca, de Luigi Pirandello; del portugués al español, la novela Triste fin de policarpio Quaresma, de Lima Barreto. Así como del español al italiano de El hombre que parecía un caballo, de Rafael Arévalo Martínez. Vásquez Becker es abogado y notario por la Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala, y politólogo diplomado por la Universidad Rafael Landívar. Ha efectuado estudios de lingüística, idiomas, filología y semiología.
October 31 2012 at 10:15am
By Dr Marcelyn Oostendorp
INLSA
Most South African students are not being educated in their first language, says the writer.
Most South African students in higher education are not being educated in their first language. English dominates the higher educational context, including learning material and the circulation and distribution of new knowledge.
The debate about the language of instruction in higher education is usually reduced to the position that English is an “international” and a “common” language and should therefore be the main medium of instruction. In South Africa, other languages are usually only mentioned when proclamations are made that Afrikaans should be used in higher education to maintain the status of the language, while African languages are seldom mentioned.
Surprisingly, very little research exists on the effects of increased exposure to a second language on students, perpetuating myths or pieces of folk wisdom. One such notion is that English has to be the primary medium of instruction at school if one is to succeed at university. Another is that the use of a second language negatively affects one’s first language, and that learning should therefore ideally take place through the medium of the first language. However, based on my research, neither of these two arguments is necessarily true, and the debate should really be about more than just language.
Abstract Over the centuries, translation as a phenomenon has been addressed in several fields of study: literary studies, cultural studies, linguistics, etc. In the last quarter of the 20th century scholars’ continuous attempt and perseverance to establish a discipline gained momentum in 1970s, in which the designation translation studies was suggested and in its turn widely accepted. It is also claimed that its subsequent development as a separate discipline is a success story of the 1980s. Now the subject has developed in many parts of the world, as such that there is a tendency in translation studies to emancipate oneself as a discipline through a drastic separation from the contexts of the other disciplines in question. While this tendency may be historically understandable, one may be led to a loss of contexts which are crucial to an understanding of the phenomena of translation. This paper will address questions that centre round the state of translation studies development as a discipline in its own right and their points of contact with other disciplines, and those that are associated with the notion of translation itself.
Traduire (2) : La “part de l’étranger”
Retour au Colombier... Qu'est-ce qui est traduit ? essentiellement du ro-man. Avec une préférence, dans les romans arabes ou turcs traduits, pour leur côté “socio-ethnologique”, note Ghislaine Glasson-Deschaumes (pour Transeuropéennes) : ces œuvres apparaissent comme des “documents”, des témoignages, l'intérêt pour la qualité littéraire d'un texte s'en trouvant alors singulièrement affadi. Une remarque générale, d'ailleurs, pas réservée aux livres traduits de ces deux langues. Farouk Mardam Bey, qui dirige la collection “Sindbad” chez Actes Sud, remarque la forte tendance à la politisation de la littérature arabe : si un auteur est interviewé, on l'interroge d'abord sur la situation politique de son pays. Côté critique littéraire, ce n'est pas brillant non plus : en général, les critiques ne creusent guère l'étude de la “part de l'étranger” dans les traductions. Gema Martin Muñoz (professeure de sociologie du monde arabe et islamique à l'Université autonome de Madrid) déplore, elle, que les “experts” ne connaissant pas la langue arabe, souvent très médiatisés, “poussent comme champignons après la pluie” ; “les vrais spécialistes”, eux, sont “soupçonnés d'être amoureux de leur objet de travail”. Traduire le roman, oui... traduire les sciences humaines, et dans des langues
As a scientist working in the beauty industry for the last 18 years, I have experienced first hand how chemistry improves the lives of millions of people, in small but meaningful ways, via the beauty products they use every day. I believe scientists have a duty to translate their work for the public, or they become less relevant to society, which then becomes less supportive and distrustful. Translating cosmetic science may seem less relevant than, for example, biomedical research but it seeks to overcome the same issues – the accessibility of science and technology. In some ways, a consumer products company can be thought of as an expert translator – turning science and technology into familiar and engaging products for a non-expert audience. Innovative chemistry and sophisticated industrial processes convert raw materials into products, which are dressed with scent, colour and other aesthetic features to communicate the product’s value to the consumer. This value is also communicated via advertising, using imagery, metaphor and brand stories.
New edition. This series of interconnected texts, devoted to the act of translation and to the works of Jacques Ferron, falls somewhere between theory and creation. Drawing from her experience as a translator, critic and teacher, Betty Bednarski explores the meeting points between translation and the other forms of reading she has studied. She also pursues spiralling thoughts that aim to be both rigorous and personal, starting from an infinitely small translation problem and rediscovering, in light of Bakhtine, the painful issue of alterity in Ferron’s writing. Published first in 1989 at Éditions du GREF (Toronto), the first edition won the Gabrielle Roy Prize (1990), the Prix de l’Association des professeurs de français des universitiés et collèges canadiens (1991), and was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award (1991). Four essays with a widened scope and deepened thinking are published under the heading Lecture inachevée: quatre fragments in this new revised and updated edition.
Nicholas Lezard marvels at the translator's art... After only a few short chapters, I had my first uncomfortable moment: "Reviewers … have customarily declared in order to praise a translation to the skies that it sounds as if it had been written in English. This is hollow praise ..." At which point I became all too conscious that only last week I had praised Sophie Lewis's translation of Marcel Aymé's The Man Who Walked Through Walls in almost exactly that fashion. "Where," asks Bellos, "is the bonus in having a French detective novel for bedtime reading unless there is something French about it?" I then remembered that I had also said that Lewis's translation retained the Gallic flavour, so consider myself mostly off the hook. Towards the end of the book, Bellos gives a scornful list of the meaningless adjectives used by book reviewers to describe translations they think are good: fluent, racy, stylish ... I have used "damned fine", which doesn't feature in the list. Is that OK? Is That a Fish in Your Ear?: Translation and the Meaning of Everything
by David Bellos Buy it from the Guardian bookshop
Search the Guardian bookshop Tell us what you think: Star-rate and review this book
Bellos has used this book, in part, as a means of demolishing received ideas about translation. I am all in favour of demolishing received ideas but, as Gloria Steinem said, the truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off. I would have lazily assented to the proposition that a translation is no substitute for the original, but this, as Bellos points out, is a stupid thing to say when you consider that, in fact, a substitute for the original is exactly what a translation is. And if we didn't have translations, then we would, as he points out, have no knowledge of the Bible, the works of Tolstoy, or Planet of the Apes. People have always been saying daft things about translation. José Ortega y Gasset said "almost all translations done until now have been bad ones", which Bellos demonstrates is ludicrous by experimenting with replacements, eg "Almost all firefighters up till now have been bad ones." Referring to the "extravagant" amount of attention that has been paid by scholars to the story of the tower of Babel – our search for an original, unitary human tongue being its testament – he says "it is far from obvious that their time is well spent." (If anything, the idea of there being one original language and now many is exactly the wrong way round.)
Inversas (I) Por Alicia Martorell La traducción es un oficio reciente en la forma en que lo conocemos. Hace cincuenta años, un traductor era cualquier persona capaz, gracias a sus habilidades lingüísticas, de poner en conocimiento de otros lo que por el idioma en el que estaba redactado quedaba fuera de su alcance. Dada la penuria de este tipo de mediadores, y la necesidad de entendernos con los que no hablaban como nosotros, en realidad cualquier intento se daba por bueno, porque la alternativa para la mayoría consistía en vivir encerrados dentro de su propio idioma. En cierta forma, la traducción sigue siendo en algunos casos una mediación de emergencia y no es malo que así sea, pero parece que ya hay un consenso sobre la necesidad de adquirir algunas destrezas complementarias para ejercer esta profesión y, muy especialmente, sobre el hecho de que cualquier intento no es bueno, es decir, sobre la exigencia de un nivel mínimo para que una traducción se considere «profesional». Ya no basta con «entenderse», afortunadamente, cada vez es mayor la exigencia de traducciones de una calidad estándar, difícil de definir en abstracto pero relativamente fácil de cotejar con situaciones concretas, al menos en los casos más extremos. Sin embargo, esta evolución, que parece el nivel básico de la dignidad profesional de un traductor consciente, no ha llegado a todos los estratos de la profesión. Uno de los aspectos con más resistencia a asumir la traducción como profesión, con todo lo que conlleva, es el que atañe a las traducciones llamadas «inversas». Para entender este concepto, debemos retroceder al estadio anterior, cuando las personas que hablaban idiomas tenían una condición casi mágica de mediadores que les permitía actuar en cualquier situación y circunstancia.
1813-2013:
Two centuries
of reading
Friedrich
Schleiermacher’s
seminal text
“About the different methods of translation” 7th Colloquium on Translation Studies in Portugal
24-25 October 2013
Faculty of Letters, University of Lisbon Call for Papers
Two hundred years after his famous lecture at the Royal Academy of Science in Berlin, during the Napoleonic era, Friedrich Schleiermacher still remains an assiduous presence in Translation Studies bibliography all over the world. His definition of two (and only two) methods of translating has become indispensable to the common core vocabulary of both translators and researchers of translation alike. This binary opposition dates back to Saint Jerome, or even Cicero (De Oratore) and still retains all of its attractiveness, being referred to by different designations such as translation methods, strategies, procedures or norms. Among its best-known contemporary representatives are Gideon Toury’s initial norm of adequacy vs acceptability (Toury 1995) or Lawrence Venuti’s foreignizing vs. domesticating strategies (Venuti 1995), in either empirical or post-modern studies. Many other researchers, however, also structure their reflections on translation according to binomials that, when submitted to closer scrutiny, immediately reveal their close resemblance to Schleiermacher’s proposals. However, such proposals are far from being circumscribed to the definition of methods of translating, since they encompass a basic reflection on the relationship between thought and discourse, the translator, the typologies of translation, translation quality assessment, the reader/addressee, or even the need for a translation policy within the framework of a language policy, which is evidently relevant for the cultural dynamics he aspired to find in his country and language at that time. Despite some features that may be considered controversial nowadays (such as the idea that “one must be loyal to one language or another, just as to one nation, or else drift disoriented in an unlovely in-between realm”, which is so dear to the proponents of the hybridity and the “in-betweenness” of the translator), Schleiermacher still inspires important reflections on translation to this day. This conference seeks to offer a privileged forum for such contemporary reflection on translation. Papers will be accepted on the following topics (among others):
•Contemporaneity vs. timeliness of Schleiermacher’s proposals
•Translation and Language
•Language and translation policies
•Methods, strategies, tactics, procedures and translation norms
•Translation and ethnocentrism
•Translation and nationalism
•Translation and power Keynote Speakers
Lawrence Venuti
José Justo Conference Languages
Papers may be presented in Portuguese, English and German. Submissions should be sent to schleiermacher.2013@gmail.com
and they should include: Title of Paper
Name
Institutional Affiliation
Abstract (500 words in English)
Bio-Note (max. 100 words, mentioning main research interests, projects and selected publications)
Audiovisual Requirements Deadline for proposals
31 December 2012 Communication of Acceptance
31 March 2013
Era a última pergunta da plateia antes do encerramento do debate e um garoto disparou sem sequer pedir o turno: - O jovem leitor russo, hoje, lê Tolstoi com a mesma facilidade que eu consigo ler a tua tradução? A resposta daquela figura sossegada, discreta e docemente culta foi não. Tolstoi não é lido com a mesma fluidez no original pelo jovem do seu país, assim como Shakespeare não é tão fácil para o leitor inglês do nosso tempo, como, provavelmente, Machado de Assis é mais truncado para nós que para o leitor da versão estrangeira. Esta impressão de “facilidade” não estaria associada à qualidade do texto traduzido em relação ao original – levando em conta, aqui, apenas as realizações felizes desta passagem. Segundo Rubens Figueiredo, a questão é que a tradução dá uma nova vida à obra e, sem comprometer o original, traz marcas sutis do contemporâneo, por isso melhor dialoga com seus novos leitores.
A l’occasion de la re-parution (légèrement modifiée) de « Le nom de la rose » (Grasset), un entretien avec le grand sémiologue, romancier, agitateur d’idées, qui évoquera notamment ses « expériences de la traduction », non pas mot à mot mais « monde à monde », formule qui résume l’aventure intellectuelle tous azimuts de ce grand brasseur de signes et d’images.
I tend to think of translation theory as not divorced from translation practice. It is the same as if you learn how to play chess or golf. How can you separate the theory from the practice ? So when I blog about theory, to me that is also practical. I like to do so to help myself understand it better, and hopefully, someone else might read it and gain from my blog too. One of the big conflicts or splits in translation is between being faithful to the source text and author, and being loyal to the reader and situation. Which is right ? Which side do you as a translator tend to come down on ? (remember: you can't be both at once). There are those who believe that we translators should be faithful to the author and source and "what is on the page". This is certainly true if we are translating the Bible (but even then, there are exceptions), but is it always true in every instance ?
In his book, "Verstehen und Übersetzen", Dr. Paul Kußmaul mentions that translators do more than just de-code an re-code words (as is naively believed by people who don't fully understand what translation is about). There are dimensions far beyond the black text on the white paper - the semantic level of word meaning. Translators are located, writes Dr. Kußmaul, at the intersection of two overlapping worlds of meaning:....
Functional Translation
I have blogged recently on how there is no such thing as "perfect" translation. Just as there is no such thing as the perfect painting or novel, there is no such thing as "perfect" translation. But there is such a thing as functional translation. What does that mean ? Well, functional meets a specific function. Just like a specific building can meet a function, or a painting can meet a function (whatever that may be). One of the centers of functional translation, in the world, but particularly in the world of German translation, is the University of Mainz, Germersheim, where I went to school. Dr. Paul Kußmaul teaches there and is one of the main proponents of functional translation. I will be blogging about his book "Verstehen und Übersetzen" (English: "Understand and Translate") in the next few blog posts. I don't think his book has ever been translated. What is functional translation ? It is sometimes referred to as "good enough translation". What does that mean ? Well, one factor is the pragmatic elements of the text: the non-linguistic factors like culture, situation, and intent (the semantic aspect is how the words relate to concepts, etc.). An example of this would be a German who is applying for a professorship at Harvard. She has a CV in German. But the reader at Harvard does not need to understand all of the minutiae of German academic life. He merely has to understand the function of the CV. The function is: "hire me, I am qualified".
ENTREVISTA A CARLOS FORTEA, traductor - “Me pregunto si los autores del boom leyeron a Faulkner en inglés o habían leído las traducciones que circulaban desde los años 30”.
“Translations are like wives: the faithful ones are not beautiful, and the beautiful ones are not faithful.” A horribly misogynistic quote to begin an essay with, I know, but it’s a quote that has stuck in my head since I encountered it a quarter century ago. I could have sworn I read it in Edward Seidensticker’s introduction to his translation of The Tale of Genji, but looking over it now I can’t find it. I may have attributed the quote to Seidensticker after the fact, since he was a translator who understood that what makes translation enormously difficult–and arguably impossible–is not whether or not you know the “words”, but rather the task of recreating as faithfully as possible the experience of reading the original. Seidensticker said, “I always liken the translator to a counterfeiter … his task is to imitate the original down to the last detail.” Some translators of manga today might misinterpret that simile to justify the inclusion of Japanese honorifics such as “-san,” “-chan,” “-sensei,” etc., but they would be missing the point. Seidensticker wrote beautifully, and he knew what made writing beautiful. One word that comes up again and again in his writings is “rhythm.” There’s no diplomatic way to say this, so I’ll be blunt. The vast majority of my kouhai, my juniors in the field of manga translation, have no sense of rhythm, so sense of meter, so sense of what makes a line worth reading, and no sense of how to write a line worth reading. This becomes painfully clear when you read something they’ve written that is not a translation. A blog entry, for example. I recently read a self-introduction by a professional translator of manga in which the word “awesome” was used three times, without irony. Other essays by this same translator read like…well, like the blog entries of just about any non-writer with a basic grasp of grammar but no flair for writing whatsoever.
ANLE pide ensayos sobre teoría y práctica de la traducción entre inglés y español... PES.- Según las predicciones de la Oficina del Censo de Estados Unidos, para mediados del siglo XXI la población hispana se verá triplicada: uno de cada tres residentes estadounidenses será hispano. Teniendo en cuenta estos datos, la Academia Norteamericana de la Lengua Española (ANLE) desea dedicar el próximo volumen de Monografías de ALDEEU (2012) al tema de la traducción: teoría y práctica. Para ello que solicita ensayos, con enfoques interdisciplinarios, cuya finalidad sea una reflexión sobre las experiencias del hispanismo en los últimos años dentro del espacio de la traducción y de la interpretación. No es necesario que sean miembros de la asociación (aunque tendrán prioridad los miembros de ALDEEU). Los artículos deberán ser inéditos e individuales. Se aceptarán artículos escritos en español o en inglés. Los artículos deberán seguir las directrices del MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers. Los interesados deberán remitir sus trabajos por correo electrónico en documento adjunto y en formato Word a Gerardo Piña-Rosales ( acadnorteamerica@aol.com ), o a Ana Osan ( aosan@iun.edu ). El plazo límite para la recepción de manuscritos será el 1º de septiembre de 2012.
I have written before on how translation is a creative profession. Translators have to continuously make decisions and they are creative decisions. An example of this is Freud translations. Sigmund Freud is of course one of the great psychologists of all time and one of the major thinkers of the twentieth century. And yet, when his works were translated into English, some, like Dr. Bruno Bettelheim, himself a psychoanalyst from Vienna, claimed that the works had been altered in a major way. How so ? Well, according to Bettelheim (in his book, "Freud and Man's Soul"), English translators of Freud turned what was a humanistic Freud into a scientific Freud. The translators made the decision to use terminology from Latin and from the natural sciences, whereas Freud, although he was a medical doctor, was more anchored in the humanities. How did this play out ? Well, if you are German or Austrian, the terms "Ich" (I), "Über-Ich" (Above-I), and "Es" (the It), have very direct and emotional meaning. For instance, when a child does something, in German one says "Es hat das getan".
La 12ème édition du colloque a pour thème central Pour qui traduit-on? Le Département de Langues Modernes Appliquées et le Centre des Industries de la Langue de la Faculté des Lettres de l’Université Babeş-Bolyai Cluj-Napoca (Roumanie) se font un plaisir de vous inviter, vendredi le 12 octobre 2012, au colloque international consacré aux professions de la traduction et de l’interprétation de conférence organisé annuellement en collaboration avec l’Université Otto-Friedrich de Bamberg (Allemagne) à l’occasion de l’ouverture des cours du Master Européen de Traductologie-Terminologie (METT), du Master Européen en Interprétation de Conférence (MEIC), et du Centre pour les Industries de la Langue (CIL)
et s’adresse aux chercheurs, spécialistes, doctorants et étudiants en master dans les domaines de la traductologie, de la terminologie, de l’interprétation de conférence, ainsi que dans des domaines connexes.
At Trusted Translations Inc. we are known for the 3-Step Translation Process. Many times, when clients call us to request a quote for a translation, they are stunned by our 3-step-translation process including our Quality Assurance Procedure. In the following paragraphs, I will explain how this really works.
The server in McDonald’s is shown speaking Chinese: her speech bubble consists of Chinese characters, which it is assumed the English speaking (or, in the un-translated version, French speaking) audience cannot read. Unlike languages using the roman script, Chinese is not phonetic: the sounds of the words cannot be guessed from the characters alone. When the narrator speaks Chinese in a later restaurant scene, he speaks in a roman script, transliterating the Chinese characters: he points at his neighbour’s food and says ‘Yi ge’ [one of] (30, 4). Interestingly, later in the story, when he is more comfortable with his environment he is shown speaking in Chinese characters: ‘你好’ [ni hao; hello] he says in response to a co-worker’s greeting (112, 7). While neither ‘yi ge’ nor ‘你好’ are explained, an Anglophone (or Francophone) audience can read the sounds of ‘yi ge’, making the phrase appear less opaque. The Chinese characters in the interpreting scene reinforce the perception of difference, foregrounding the narrator’s lack of understanding. The chief manager also speaks in Chinese characters, but the interpreter offers an English version of his speech. She speaks in the third person, ‘Chief Manager like to invite you’ (11, 6), deviating from recommended interpreting practice (Jacobson 2009, 64). Her English is also unidiomatic and incorrect. For example, there is a lack of definite article before ‘Chief Manager’ and ‘like’ should be ‘would like’. Her speech shows negative transfer (Toury 1995, 275) from the grammar of the Chinese source, hinting at her lack of ability in English, which is also questioned later when she does not answer a simple question correctly (Delisle 2006, 14, 1-3). The text also suggests a reversal of causality through the positioning within the panel of the two utterances: the interpreted utterance is placed on the left of the Chinese utterance, making it appear to happen earlier (or simultaneously) as it will be read first by an audience reading from left to right. All these features serve to highlight the lack of trust the narrator has in the interpreter. In another scene, the narrator is shown explaining how a sequence of animation needs redoing, followed by his question ‘Understand, yes or no?’ (25, 3-4). Seven panels show the discussion between the interpreter and the Chinese animator, in Chinese characters. There is a panel where no character speaks (26, 2), before the narrator asks ‘So? Understand?’ (26, 3) to which the interpreter replies ‘Yes… No problem’ (26, 4). The pause between the two panels shows the narrator’s doubt that understanding has taken place, due to the quantitative difference between the narrator’s initial question and the Chinese discussion that follows. As Anthony Pym has noted, translations are expected to be quantitatively equivalent to their source texts (2004, 87-109). This quantitative equivalence is at best a problematic concept, as Pym notes, because different means are required in each language to express information (2004, 88). However, when an utterance is significantly longer or shorter than its source, suspicion is aroused, questioning the trust placed in the interpreter. Despite these repr
Reading More Intimately: An Interrogation of Translation Studies through Self-translation Anil Joseph Pinto
Dept of English and Media Studies, Christ University, Bangalore (Published in Salesian Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, Vol 3, No 1, May 2012. Pp 66-73) Abstract
While the poststructural turn has made the study of translation more self-reflexive, it has not made translation studies scholars rethink the fundamental assumptions of translation process, which poststructuralism should have. As a result, many practices in the nature of ‘translation’ have not only got marginalised but have got relegated to absence, within translation studies. One such practice is self-translation. This paper tries to read the process of self-translation closely and thereby raise critical questions on the fundamental assumptions about translation. The paper will conclude by positing self-translation as an important domain for scholarly engagement by drawing attention to its potential to make translation studies more nuanced.
IKEA's odd Swedish product names sound even odder when translated into Thai.
The question comes up as to whether translation is creative or not. One of the naive views of translation, propagated by people who don't know the subject well, is that translation is about replacing words or slotting in one word for another, just in a different language. And the notion that basically almost anyone can do that who has a bit of knowledge of both languages (the famous "I'll get my secretary to translate the manual" phenomenon). The modern translation world of low-paid post-editors in third world countries also assumes that translation is about "slotting in words", and is not really creative, and does not require linguistic analysis. This is very far from the truth. As David Bellos has pointed out, no one really ever defended what we now call "literal translation". No one ever truly defended the notion that we should replace one word with another, and "just translate what is on the paper"....
A l’occasion de la re-parution (légèrement modifiée) de « Le nom de la rose » (Grasset), un entretien avec le grand sémiologue, romancier, agitateur d’idées, qui évoquera notamment ses « expériences de la traduction », non pas mot à mot mais « monde à monde », formule qui résume l’aventure intellectuelle tous azimuts de ce grand brasseur de signes et d’images.
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