Conference: Entre liberté et contrainte : La traduction et la question du choix

Self-translation will be a topic of several talks at the conference Entre liberté et contrainte : La traduction et la question du choix taking place in Paris, France, 25-26 April 2014. To see the full programm: Please click here.

25. April
11.30-12.00 Olga ANOKHINA (ITEM) : Traductions vers l’anglais et le français de Vladimir Nabokov : traduction ou auto-traduction ?
Après avoir présenté rapidement la typologie des pratiques scripturaires des écrivains plurilingues, nous nous arrêterons sur l’autotraductionque nous considérons comme l’écriture consécutive, par opposition avec l’écriture parallèle, le code switchingou encore la séparation fonctionnelle des langues, stratégies créatives que nous avons pu observer dans le processus d’écriture de ces écrivains. L’autotraductionpermet à l’écrivain de prolonger le travail d’écriture, en créant un continuum créatif grâce au passage à une autre langue. En nous appuyant sur le cas de Vladimir Nabokov, qui avait pour l’habitude de superviser la traduction de ses œuvres du russe vers l’anglais et vers le français, nous interrogerons la frontière difficile à déterminer entre l’autotraduction et la traduction.

15.00-15.30 Rainier GRUTMAN (Université d’Ottawa): Autotraduction et génétique. Regards croisés
Dans cette communication, nous voudrions continuer le dialogue, récemment entamé ici même à l’Institut des Textes et Manuscrits par différents membres de l’équipe « Multilinguisme, traduction, création » (Olga Anokhina, Chiara Montini), entre l’étude génétique des textes et l’autotraduction comme objet d’étude. Après avoir examiné la nature spécifique de la contribution que peut faire l’approche génétique à l’étude du processus autotraductif (direction, part de cotraduction, augmentation/effacement de l’hétérolinguisme etc.), nous nous arrêterons à l’energeiapropre à l’autotraduction comme réécriture et comme chaîne (inter)textuelle, dynamique qui permet de faire un retour sur la notion d’inachèvement (fondamentale dans la philosophie sous-tendant les travaux génétiques).

26. April
12.00-12.30 Dirk Van HULLE (Université d’Anvers) : Twin Geneses: Hesitation, Decision Making and Creative Undoing in Beckett’s Selftranslations
Making use of the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project’s first two modules (Beckett’s L’Innommable / The Unnamableand his last works; www.beckettarchive.org), the paper explores the exo-, endo- and epigenesis of Beckett’s bilingual works, paying special attention to moments of doubt and decision making in the translation process, as manifested in traces of creative undoing (cancellations, omissions, cuts, revisions). The awareness of manuscripts’ intellectual value culminates in the work of twentieth-century authors such as Samuel Beckett, who presented a new image of writers who fumble for words and therefore keep looking for them. This notion of continuous incompletion becomes even more striking if the genesis continues after publication, e.g. in the form of self-translation. A particularly interesting facet of genetic translation studies is the process of linguistic decision-making. The special case of Samuel Beckett’s works, however, forces us to also take into account the notion of ‘indecision-making’ and to investigate its interpretative relevance. The paper suggests a cognitive approach to genetic translation studies, to examine the role of hesitations and cancellations in enactive cognition on the basis of notebooks and drafts; and to explore the ways in which (and to what extent) this process of cognition can be made accessible to students and researchers in the form of a digital genetic edition.

Call for abstracts: Self-Translation as Transfer of Knowledge

Call for Abstracts: Self-Translation as Transfer of Knowledge
Conference in Berlin, Germany, 27.11.2014.

Deadline: March 31, 2014

As today’s knowledge society grows increasingly international—both in terms of medial acceleration and global networks—it demands more and more language skills from its actors. Quite often scholars and scientists completely or partially translate their own texts from one language into another. Given the practical implications of these developments, the time has come to reflect on their methodological and historical significance, and this is precisely the aim of the workshop »Self-Translation as Transfer of Knowledge.«
[...]
At the workshop, participants will present case studies on individual authors/translators. Specific attention should be given to the historically variable status of scientific and scholarly authorship and to the transitions between self-translations and non-authorial, external translations (e.g., ›assisted‹ self-translations). We have already accepted papers on Carl von Linné, Wilhelm and Alexander von Humboldt, Hannah Arendt, Kurt Goldstein, and Wolfgang Iser. We look forward to expanding this list with additional contributions.

The workshop will examine the following systematic aspects of self-translation:

• What pragmatic conditions lead to the production of self-translations? (Changes in the prestige of scientific idioms; changes of addressees, e.g., for the purpose of popularization; shifts in other scientific cultures due to exile/emigration; etc.)
• How are self-translations being received and commented upon within scientific communities in different cultures?
• What semantic, terminological, and structural qualities do the respective self-translations have? Have the original texts been radically changed, maybe even completely reworked?
• What kind of reflection on language arises from self-translations?
• What concepts are suitable for this field of research? Currently in translation studies, we find terms such as equivalence, imitation, representation, appropriation, assimilation, adaptation, amplification, substitution, transformation, interpretation, intention, inculturation, acculturation, compensation, as well as metaphors such as alienation (with regard to the source language) vs. naturalization (with regard to the target language), freedom, service, fidelity, and refashioning. At the workshop, we would like to test and discuss the interpretive capacity of these and other terms.

Conference languages are English and German. Presentations should not exceed 30 minutes.
Please send your abstracts (max. 500 words) by March 31, 2014 to Stefan Willer (willer@zfl-berlin.org)

To read the full call for abstracts, please click here.

Second call for papers: Self-Translation and Power: Negotiating Identities in European Multilingual Contexts

SECOND CALL FOR PAPERS
Self-Translation and Power: Negotiating Identities in European Multilingual Contexts

EDITED BY:
Dr Olga Castro, Aston University, Birmingham – o.castro@aston.ac.uk
Dr Sergi Mainer, the University of Edinburgh – sergi.mainer@ed.ac.uk
Dr Svetlana Skomorokhova, the University of Warwick – s.skomorokhova@warwick.ac.uk

RATIONALE AND POSSIBLE TOPICS:
The question of power has been central in the development of Translation Studies as a discipline in the last few decades. Edited collections such as Translation, Power, Subversion (Álvarez and Vidal 1996) or Translation and Power (Tymoczko and Gentzler 2002), published in the wake of the cultural/ideological turn, put the word ‘power’ in the axis of debate in Translation Studies. Ever since, the symbiosis between ‘power’ and translation has yielded fruitful academic outcomes.
When focusing on the topic of self-translation, the growing scholarly attention it has received in the last few years also proves its dynamism, strength and potential for further research. Different conferences have recently taken place in Europe (Barcelona, Pescara, Bologna, Perpignan, Cork) and a number of special issues and collections of articles have been published focusing mainly on the Iberian Peninsula and touching upon power relations and the specificities of self-translation.
The forthcoming collection of essays Self-Translation and Power: Negotiating Identities in European Multilingual Contexts seeks to contribute to current debates on self-translation by placing an emphasis on the role of power within it and by opening new avenues of enquiry to encompass different milieus in Europe. Multilingual situations in Europe offer a prolific intercultural and intracultural context to examine power relations with regards to the political, social, cultural and economic implications and consequences of self-translation. Indeed, the interactions between official state languages and both non-state official and unofficial languages tend to generate a series of cultural and linguistic tensions affecting the notions of hegemony, resistance, dominance, subversion and (inter-)dependency between literary polysystems. Given their double affiliation as authors and translators, self-translators are placed in a privileged position to problematize power and to scrutinise minorized/peripheral and hegemonic/central cultural identities. Self-Translation and Power: Negotiating Identities in European Multilingual Contexts aims to explore the self-translators’ powerful role as cultural and ideological mediators between languages and literatures of disparate status in Europe from interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary approaches.
The volume pursues a balance between theoretical/methodological chapters and empirical chapters focused on contextualised case studies.

Suggested topics may include, but are not limited to:

• Power relations between translations and self-translations
• Self-translator as an Empowered Translator 
• Conflicting ideologies in self-translation  
• (In)visibility in self-translation
• Language politics: diglossia, bilingualism, multilingualism 
• Language and cultural planning 
• The book market and reception 
• Cultural mediation 
• National/territorial identities 
• Hegemony and resistance 
• Self-Translation as rewriting 
• Authorial voice/intervention/representation

SUBMITTING A PROPOSAL:
NEW DEADLINE - All potential contributors are requested to send in a detailed summary of their proposed paper by 15 March 2014 to the editors.

FORMAT:

• Title of the article
• Author’s name, affiliation, e-mail
• Proposal of 500 words, including:
• the description of the proposed article
• the ways in which it fits with the general aim of the edited collection.
• Keywords
• Short biographical statement (approx. 150 words)
• Times New Roman, 12 pt, single space

LANGUAGE OF THE PUBLICATION:
The language of the publication is English.

TIMELINE:

• Deadline for submitting proposals: 15 March 2014
• Notifications of provisional acceptance will be sent by: 15 April 2014
• Deadline for submitting full articles: 15 December 2014

CONTACT:
Please email enquiries to the editors. See contact details above.

Interview Rolando Hinojosa-Smith

Novelist and bilingual self-translator Rolando Hinojosa-Smith has recently been interviewed by Gábor Tillman. Rolando Hinojosa-Smith talks about his first self-translation experience, the reasons for not self-translating his English work into Spanish and the adopted translation strategies in his self-translations from Spanish to English:

"Whenever I’m to translate from Spanish to English, I always stop to think of the what but, just as importantly, of the how I’m going to translate what is said by the characters or what is in the narration.[...] I think it’s a rendition more than a translation, but there is translation, of course. So, it’s a rendering of a society, a linguistic sect with another society (English-Spanish/Spanish-English). It’s presenting two societies who live in close, at times, intimate proximity." 

The interview has been published in the journal Americana in Spring 2013 and is available online.

Update Bibliography on Self-translation

The bibliography on self-translation has been updated. To access the pdf-file, please click here.
The next update is scheduled for April 1, 2014.

L’Italie au miroir : bilinguisme et auto-traduction dans la poésie de Christina Rossetti

In her recent article titled "Italy in the Mirror: Bilingualism and Self-Translation in Christina Rossetti's Poetry", Mélody Enjoubault discusses Rossetti’s own translations of her nursery rhymes published under the title Ninna-Nanna. 

The article is available online.

Self-translation / Self-destruction

Ian Monk, member of Oulipo, writes about his self-translating experiences by comparing himself to Dr. Frankenstein:

"And what a pain it turned out to be. The further I got stuck into the two texts in question, the more my translations seemed utterly limp and lifeless. And the more I worked over them, the more I felt like some kind of Dr. Frankenstein, with a monster on the slab which was staying stubbornly dead, no matter how many lightning flashes were aimed at its heart."

Nevertheless, the piece we can read on Wordswithoutborders has been self-translated!
So please head over to the fantastic Wordswithoutborders to read the entire article - worth reading!

“Self-Translation and the Nobel Prize: 100 years of Tagore’s Gitanjali”.

Harish Trivedi gave a talk with the title “Self-Translation and the Nobel Prize: 100 years of Tagore’s Gitanjali” in March this year at the Centre for Translation at the Hong Kong Baptist University.
You can read the abstract of his talk here and watch the whole talk (123 minutes!) here.

Cfp: “Autotradução nas Américas” / Self-translation in the Americas

Volume 16 of the Brazilian on-line and Open Access journal Tradução em Revista (jan-jun 2014) will be dedicated to self-translation in the Americas. The volume is edited by Maria Alice Gonçalves Antunes and Rainier Grutman.

Here is the call for papers in English:

Issue No. 16 of Tradução em Revista will include previously unpublished articles on topics related to “Self-translation in the Americas”. The guest editors, Maria Alice Gonçalves Antunes (Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, Brasil) and Rainier Grutman (University of Ottawa, Canada), welcome any contribution dealing with interlingual text-to-text transfers in which author and translator coincide, without geographical (from Nunavut to Patagonia) or historical (from colonial encounters and even pre-Colombian times up to today's migration and minority writing) restrictions. Articles in Portuguese, English, Spanish and French are accepted.

EDITORS: Maria Alice Gonçalves Antunes (UERJ) and Rainier Grutman (Universidade de Ottawa, Canadá)

Deadline for reception of articles (minimum 3,000 – maximum: 4,000 words): March 31, 2014.

Send the articles in .doc, .docx or .rtf format to Maria Alice Gonçalves Antunes (aliceenglishuerj@gmail.com) and Rainier Grutman (rgrutman@uottawa.ca).

Please include an introductory page with the following information:
- the title in Portuguese and English, Spanish or French, if the article is written in Portuguese;
- the title in the language of the article and in Portuguese, if the article is not writtenin Portuguese;
- the name(s) of the author(s);
- information on the author’s/authors’ academic affiliation and whether the paper (or part of it) has been previously presented at any academic event;
- a 90-word abstract in Portuguese plus an English translation if the article is in Portuguese;
- a 90-word abstract in the language of the article plus a Portuguese translation, if the article is not written in Portuguese;
- biodata of the author(s) and his/her/their email address(es).

Conference Littératures en langue française : Histoire, Mythes et Création

Self-translation will be the topic of two talks at the conference Littératures en langue française : Histoire, Mythes et Création, taking place 21-22.11.2013 at Paris, France.

Michel Calapodis will give a talk on Vassilis Alexakis with the title: "D'une prose de la migration à l’incarnation du paradigme historique de l’hellénisme : l’œuvre francophone de Vassilis Alexakis".

Here is an extract of his abstract:
"Auteur à double résidence, bilingue, auto-traduisant ses propres romans, V. Alexakis inscrit tous ses récits dans un va-et-vient de nature identitaire entre la scène française et la scène grecque. [...] D’une certaine manière, sous la « parole » francophone de souvenirs érigés en fiction, transparaît le type d’histoire qui est activé : une histoire-mémoire de la nation hellénique dont la diglossie narrative renforce le caractère ipse (ipséité) de son identité."


Ghenadie Râbacov will give a talk about Linda Maria Baros with the title: "Vues sémiotiques sur la création poétique bilingue et l’autotraduction chez Linda Maria Baros"

Here is an extract of his abstract
"[...] Tout en se basant sur la théorie du sens et les postulats des sémioticiens Ch. Pierce et A. Ljudskanov, le chercheur tâche de démontrer que l’acte autotraductif est de nature sémiotique, que c’est un cas spécifique de l’automatisation des activités créatrices de l’homme, relevant du processus mental qui se projette dans le duo auteur-traducteur. L’auteur présente aussi un modèle d’analyse sémiotique de quelques poésies écrites et autotraduites par le poète roumain L. M. Baros. Il propose sa propre définition de l’autotraduction et insiste sur la notion de double : double activité mentale, double identité linguistique, double original."

To read the full abstracts and for more information on the conference, please click here

Cfp: Self-translation and Power. Negotiating Identities in Multilingual Contexts in Europe

Call for Papers for chapters and contributions to the collection of essays edited by Olga Castro, Sergi Mainer and Svetlana Skomorokhova. Deadline for proposals: 1 March 2014.

[...] The forthcoming collection of essays Self-Translation and Power: Negotiating Identities in European Multilingual Contexts seeks to contribute to current debates on self-translation by placing an emphasis on the role of power within it and by opening new avenues of enquiry to encompass different milieus in Europe. [...] Given their double affiliation as authors and translators, self-translators are placed in a privileged position to problematize power and to scrutinise minorized/peripheral and hegemonic/central cultural identities. Self-Translation and Power: Negotiating Identities in European Multilingual Contexts aims to explore the self-translators’ powerful role as cultural and ideological mediators between languages and literatures of disparate status in Europe from interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary approaches.

Suggested topics may include, but are not limited to:
- Power relations between translations and self-translations
- Self-translator as an Empowered Translator
- Conflicting ideologies in self-translation
- (In)visibility in self-translation
- Language politics: diglossia, bilingualism, multilingualism
....

Language of the Publication: The language of the publication is English.
Timeline:
Deadline for submitting proposals: 1 March 2014
Notifications of provisional acceptance will be sent by: 15 April 2014
Deadline for submitting full articles: 15 December 2014

To read the full Call for papers, please click here.