“It may come to us as something of a shock to realise that many of the texts that we treat as English originals are in fact translations, some from other languages, some from older forms of English, some from both. The Bible, The Iliad, Beowulf, the works of Dante, Chaucer, Cervantes, Ibsen, Tolstoy, Hugo, Goethe, […]
The fledgling discipline of Walking Studies finally looks set to emerge onto the world stage as more and more scholars start to take it seriously, no longer regarding it as an unscientific field of study, or at best an adjunct to Running Studies. In the early years of this globalised new millenium it has started […]
The belief that the translation should be free of the original, which some would have you believe is no more than a necessary evil, is an obsession in some areas of translation studies. Here’s Theo D’haen in his article “Antique Lands, New Worlds? Comparative Literature, Intertextuality, Translation” taken from a special number of the Forum […]
Here’s Peter Bush, in his “The Writer of Translations,” on The Way Things Are for translators: they are dead; their names appear on “…the back flap [of books] as a bleak epitaph to the months of labour that selflessly, neutrally and most economically secreted the new spread of words.” It is simply not true, as […]
Pym, this time, in an article called “On Cooperation,” telling us what translation students should be trained to do. Translate? Well, yes, that too but there are all sorts of other exciting things: “training programmes should progressively be oriented to the production of intercultural mediators.”* This would reflect what is already happening at the “commercialised […]
House, quoted in Kiraly, quoted in Kelly (under heading “What not to do!”), paraphrased by me: Don’t set translation students a text to translate that is full of traps, let them prepare it and then go through it sentence by sentence, student by student, eliciting alternative translations for each sentence before plumping for the one […]
“Translation is the performative nature of cultural communication. It is language in actu (enunciation, positionality) rather than language in situ (énoncé, or propositionality). And the sign
A while ago, I came across Charles Baudelaire’s famous poem À une passante in an American journal article that was discussing the evolution of the city during the 19th-century. The poem is often referenced in this context–the new, impersonal city that emerged in the West at this time–because it’s considered one of the first works […]
Perhaps I should make this a regular feature – if I could be bothered buying Rzeczpospolita regularly. Today’s paper, as usual, contains translations of editorials from foreign papers on page two. One is from the Daily Telegraph. The Rz writes: “Tymczasem teoria, ?e za kryminalne zachowania obywateli odpowiedzialne jest spo?ecze?stwo, jest nieprawdziwa.” This means: “The […]
Bertie Ahern, Taoiseach (or “prime minister”) of Ireland, has an article in yesterday’s Gazeta Wyborcza. While it is too boring to read, one thing does stand out: the man’s impeccable Polish (no translator is credited). Unless – perish the thought – a Polish politician or bureaucrat wrote it and Ahern just put his name to […]
