We often ask ourselves what gets lost in translation—not just between languages, but in the everyday trade-offs between what we experience and what we are able to say about it. But the visionary poems of this collection invite us to consider: what is loss, in translation? Writing at the limits of language—where “the signs loosen, fray, and drift”—Alan Shapiro probes the startling complexity of how we confront absence and the ephemeral, the heartbreak of what once wasn’t yet and now is no longer, of what (like racial prejudice and historical atrocity) is omnipresent and elusive. Through poems that are fine-grained and often quiet, Shapiro tells of subtle bereavements: a young boy is shamed for the first time for looking “girly”; an ailing old man struggles to visit his wife in a nursing home; or a woman dying of cancer watches her friends enjoy themselves in her absence. Throughout, this collection traverses rather than condemns the imperfect language of loss—moving against the current in the direction of the utterly ineffable.
Liberties Journal of Culture and Politics is devoted to educating the general public about the history, current trends, and possibilities of culture and politics.
A fascinating collection of essays and conversations on the changing nature of language. From award-winning, internationally known scholar and translator Ilan Stavans comes On Self-Translation,a collection of essays and conversations on language in its multifaceted forms. Stavans discusses the way syntax is being restructured by texting and other technologies. He examines how the alphabet itself is being forgotten by the young, how finger snapping has taken on a new meaning, how the use of ellipses has lapsed, and how autocorrect is shaping the way we communicate. In an incisive meditation, he shows how translating ones own work reinvents oneself in another tongue. The volume includes tête-à-têtes with Pulitzer Prizewinner Richard Wilbur and short-fiction master Lydia Davis, as well as dialogues on silence, multilingualism, poetry, and the durability of the classics. Stavanss explorations cover Spanish, English, Hebrew, Yiddish, and the hybrid lexicon of Spanglish. He muses on the meaning of foreignness and on living and dying in different languages. Among his primary concerns are the role and history of dictionaries and the extent to which the authority of language academies is less a reality than a delusion. He concludes with renditions into Spanglish of portions of Hamlet, Don Quixote, and The Little Prince. The wide range of themes and engaging yet informed style confirm Stavanss status, in the words of the Washington Post, as Latin Americas liveliest and boldest critic and most innovative cultural enthusiast. On Self-Translation is a beautiful and often profound work. Stavans, a superb stylist, offers erudite meditations on translation, and gives us new ways to think about language itself. Jack Lynch, author of The Lexicographers Dilemma: The Evolution of' Proper English, from Shakespeare to South Park Stavans carries his learning light, and has the gift of communicating the profoundest of insights in the simplest of ways. The book is delightfully free of unnecessary jargon and ponderous discourse, allowing the reader time and space for her own reflections without having to slow down in the reading of it. This is work born out of the deep confidence that complete and dedicated immersion in a chosen field of knowledge (and practice) can bring; it is further infused with original wisdom accrued from self-reflexive, lived experiences of multilinguality. Kavita Panjabi, Jadavpur University
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Seven-year-old Chula lives a carefree life in her gated community in Bogotá, but the threat of kidnappings, car bombs, and assassinations hover just outside her walls, where the godlike drug lord Pablo Escobar reigns, capturing the attention of the nation. “Simultaneously propulsive and poetic, reminiscent of Isabel Allende...Listen to this new author’s voice—she has something powerful to say.” —Entertainment Weekly When her mother hires Petrona, a live-in-maid from the city’s guerrilla-occupied neighborhood, Chula makes it her mission to understand Petrona’s mysterious ways. Petrona is a young woman crumbling under the burden of providing for her family as the rip tide of first love pulls her in the opposite direction. As both girls’ families scramble to maintain stability amidst the rapidly escalating conflict, Petrona and Chula find themselves entangled in a web of secrecy. Inspired by the author's own life, Fruit of the Drunken Tree is a powerful testament to the impossible choices women are often forced to make in the face of violence and the unexpected connections that can blossom out of desperation.
A collection of 20 articles published as a series in The Linguist 1989-92, discussing the place of translation in health and social services; some particular requirements of opera, erotica, economics texts, and other works; quotations, symbols, and synonymous sound effects; the subordination of the translation to the two languages, the meaning, logic, and right and wrong; and a wide range of other topics. No index or bibliography. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Drawing on work from both eminent and emerging scholars in translation and interpreting studies, this collection offers a critical reflection on current methodological practices in these fields toward strengthening the theoretical and empirical ties between them. Methodological and technological advances have pushed these respective areas of study forward in the last few decades, but advanced tools, such as eye tracking and keystroke logging, and insights from their use have often remained in isolation and not shared across disciplines. This volume explores empirical and theoretical challenges across these areas and the subsequent methodologies implemented to address them and how they might be mutually applied across translation and interpreting studies but also brought together toward a coherent empirical theory of translation and interpreting studies. Organized around three key themes—target-text orientedness, source-text orientedness, and translator/interpreter-orientedness—the book takes stock of both studies of translation and interpreting corpora and processes in an effort to answer such key questions, including: how do written translation and interpreting relate to each other? How do technological advances in these fields shape process and product? What would an empirical theory of translation and interpreting studies look like? Taken together, the collection showcases the possibilities of further dialogue around methodological practices in translation and interpreting studies and will be of interest to students and scholars in these fields.
The volume is a collection of papers that deal with the issue of translation quality from a number of perspectives. It addresses the quality of human translation and machine translation, of pragmatic and literary translation, of translations done by students and by professional translators. Quality is not merely looked at from a linguistic point of view, but the wider context of QA in the translation workflow also gets ample attention. The authors take an inductive approach: the papers are based on the analysis of translation data and/or on hands-on experience. The book provides a bird's eye view of the crucial quality issues, the close collaboration between academics and industry professionals safeguarding attention for quality in the 'real world'. For this reason, the methodological stance is likely to inspire the applied researcher. The analyses and descriptions also include best practices for translation trainers, professional translators and project managers.
Contra Instrumentalism questions the long-accepted notion that translation reproduces or transfers an invariant contained in or caused by the source text. This "instrumental" model of translation has dominated translation theory and commentary for more than two millennia, and its influence can be seen today in elite and popular cultures, in academic institutions and in publishing, in scholarly monographs and in literary journalism, in the most rarefied theoretical discourses and in the most commonly used clichés. Contra Instrumentalism aims to end the dominance of instrumentalism by showing how it grossly oversimplifies translation practice and fosters an illusion of immediate access to source texts. Lawrence Venuti asserts that all translation is an interpretive act that necessarily entails ethical responsibilities and political commitments. Venuti argues that a hermeneutic model offers a more comprehensive and incisive understanding of translation that enables an appreciation of not only the creative and scholarly aspects of what a translator does but also the crucial role translation plays in the cultural and social institutions that shape human life.
This text focuses on the construction of Englishness through vernacular translations. It suggests ways of looking at the questioning of the English subject through texts that engage with translation in differing ways.
