Call for Papers

Swansea University put out a Call for Papers (see below) for a translation conference next summer. I wonder if any of you would be interested in putting together a proposal on Nordic author-translators. If so, contact me privately via my website (see http://awaywithwords.se/).

--BJ

Call for Papers

The Author-Translator in the European Literary Tradition
Swansea University, 28 June – 1 July 2010

Confirmed keynote speakers include:

Susan Bassnett, David Constantine, Lawrence Venuti

The recent ‘creative turn’ in translation studies has challenged notions of translation as a derivative and uncreative activity which is inferior to ‘original’ writing. Commentators have drawn attention to the creative processes involved in the translation of texts, and suggested a rethinking of translation as a form of creative writing. Hence there is growing critical and theoretical interest in translations undertaken by literary authors.

This conference focuses on acts of translation by creative writers. Literary scholarship has tended to overlook this aspect of an author’s output, yet since the time of Cicero, authors across Europe have been engaged not only in composing their own works but in rendering texts from one language into another. Indeed, many of Europe’s greatest writers have devoted time to translation – from Chaucer to Heaney, from Diderot and Goethe to Seferis and Pasternak – and have produced some remarkable texts. Others (Beckett, Joyce, Nabokov) have translated their own work from one language into another. As attentive readers and skilful word­smiths, writers may be particularly well equipped to meet the creative demands of literary translation; many trans­lations of poetry are, after all, undertaken by poets themselves. Moreover, translation can have a major impact on an author’s own writing and on the development of native literary traditions.

The conference seeks to reassess the importance of translation for European writers – both well-known and less familiar – from antiquity to the present day. It will explore why authors translate, what they translate, and how they translate, as well as the links between an author’s translation work and his or her own writing. It will bring together scholars in English studies and modern languages, classics and medieval studies, comparative literature and translation studies. Possible topics include:

· individual author-translators: motivations, career trajectories, comparative thematics and stylistics

· the author-translator in context: literary societies, movements, national traditions

· the problematic creativity of the author-translator

· self-reflective pronouncements and manifestos

· the author-translator as critic of others’ translations

· self-translation: strengths and weaknesses

· authors, adaptations, re-translation and relay translation

· the reception and influence of the work of author-translators

· theoretical interfaces

Proposals are invited for individual papers (max. 20 minutes) or panels (of 3 speakers). The conference language is English. It is anticipated that selected papers from the conference will be published. Please send a 250-word abstract by 30 September 2009 to the organisers, Hilary Brown and Duncan Large (author-translator@swan.ac.uk):

Author-Translator Conference
Department of Modern Languages
Swansea University
GB-Swansea SA2 8PP

http://www.author-translator.net/

Translatology - 2

I've been reading Brian Harris's interesting paper on the origins of translatology (traductologie), the concept and discipline which he named and founded, and am left with two overriding initial impressions: one is that the term itself denotes something very simple - the idea and practice of "reflections on translation". The other is that the term "translation" itself covers a vast area of meaning, from the literal ("A process by which a spoken or written [or signed] utterance takes place in one [natural] language which is intended and presumed to convey the same meaning as a previously existing utterance in another [such] language") to the religious and the metaphysical. The author comments:

Whenever I address professional translators or translation teachers about Natural Translators, I have to preface it by explaining that what I mean by ‘translator’ is not what they understand by ‘translator’; it is because I am speaking in a different paradigm and describing a different object from the ones they are used to. If they do not accept the paradigm shift, they will not accept that what I am talking about is translation, nor even be interested in it.

See also in this blog: Translatology

Translatology

As this is a translation blog, I'm wondering if someone who has actually studied the theory of translation - as distinct from the practice of it - as an academic subject (B.J., others?) would be prepared to come on here and explain just what the subject involves and entails. Most of us here are practicing translators or readers of translation rather than theorists, and I thought it might be interesting to hear from someone who has delved into the sociological and non-linguistic aspects of the activity that keeps us so busy. Also, if it could be put into a Nordic context, and given a literary angle, that would be additionally relevant.

In Wikipedia, for example, I read of the science of Cultural Translation, which "is a concept used in cultural studies to denote the process of transformation, linguistic or otherwise, in a given culture. The concept uses linguistic translation as a tool or metaphor in analysing the nature of transformation in cultures. For example, ethnography is considered a translated narrative of an abstract living culture."

I would be fascinated to know more about this, if anyone can explain it further. If not now, then later...