J.K. Rowling, Finland, and Translation
Jill Timbers is a translator from Finnish to English who recently posted on the ALTA listserve about a very curious situation going on in Finland w/r/t the new J.K. Rowling book. I asked her to expand on this a bit, since it’s a situation that raises all sorts of questions about translation quality, profit versus art, ...
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Balls of Gold
Over at Salon, Kevin Canfield has a nice piece about the challenges of translation and the way translators are underappreciated: Gavin Bowd, the English translator for Michel Houellebecq, was working on the controversial French novelist’s “The Map and the Territory” — Knopf will publish the first American edition ...
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Michael Cunningham on Translation
Below is a guest post from intern/translation grad student Acacia O’Connor, who also used to work at the Association of American Publishers. Over the weekend the New York Times published a really great editorial about writing as an act of translation by Michael Cunningham, author of the Pulitzer Prize and PEN/Faulkner ...
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The Dangers of Translation
A few people have directed me to this post on Language Log which illustrates some potential dangers of translation: An appellate court has upheld 20 year prison sentences for Ahmad Ghaws Zalmai, who translated the Qur’an into Dari, one of the two major languages of Afghanistan, and Mushtaq Ahmad, a cleric who ...
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Salzburg Global Seminar on Translation
This February, a very interesting seminar on translation is taking place as part of the Salzburg Global Seminars, an organization that “convenes imaginative thinkers from different cultures and institutions, organizes problem-focused initiatives, supports leadership development, and engages opinion-makers through active ...
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Interesting Comment of the Future of Translation
From Harold Augenbraum’s Reading Ahead post regarding the rise of immigrant fiction in foreign countries: I wonder, however, if the specific minority group fiction in foreign languages—say, Paris’s banlieue—will appeal to the American sensibility, as did Zadie Smith with White Teeth or Hanif ...
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Interesting Translation Issue
In reading the new translation of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, Levi Stahl came across a really interesting translation issue. In “The Prisoner,” when Madame Verdurin suggests inviting Comtesse de Mole to a party, the Baron de Charlus insults her: “Well, well, there’s no accounting for ...
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