Literature and Global Culture: The Voice of the Translator

The conference Literature and Global Culture: The Voice of the Translator taking place January 23-24,2015 at the University of California, Santa Barbara will have on session on Saturday dedicated to "Collaborative and Self-Translation: Authors as Translators, Translators as Authors". Also the self-translator Ngugi Wa Thiong’o has been invited as plenary speaker.

For more information please click here.

Appel à contributions – “Figures du traducteur/de la traductrice”

http://listesocius.hypotheses.org/4646

Pour son deuxième numéro (juin 2015), la revue Convergences francophones (ISSN 2291-7012) recherche des articles portant sur le thème suivant : Figures du traducteur/de la traductrice.

Il s’agira d’interroger dans une perspective diachronique les représentations du traducteur/ de la traductrice émanant au niveau social mais aussi personnel ainsi que leurs conséquences :

• Comment le traducteur/la traductrice et son activité sont-ils perçus ? 
• Comment se perçoit-il lui-même ? 
• Comment la propre perception du traducteur joue-t-elle sur la traduction ? 
• Qu’en est-il de l’autotraduction où la séparation traducteur/auteur est plus que jamais remise en question? 
• Quels peuvent être les effets d’un discours social ou épitextuel sur le traducteur et son activité ? 

Domaines envisagés : traduction littéraire, traduction audiovisuelle, traduction technique, autotraduction.

Les propositions ne devront pas dépasser 300 mots et doivent être envoyées à Antoine Eche (aeche@mtroyal.ca) et Justine Huet (jhuet@mtroyal.ca). Leurs auteurs enverront également une brève notice bio-bibliographique.

• Date limite de soumission des propositions : 24 octobre 2014
• Notification des propositions retenues : 14 novembre 2014 
• Date limite de soumission des articles retenus : 30 janvier 2015 

Les articles soumis seront ensuite évalués par deux membres du comité de lecture ou spécialistes sollicités pour l’occasion. Convergences francophones (http://mrujs.mtroyal.ca/index.php/cf/index) est une revue semestrielle, pluridisciplinaire, en libre accès.

Update Bibliography

The bibliography on self-translation has been updated. To download the pdf file please click here.
The next update is scheduled for January 2015.

Jon Gower on translating his novel Dala’r Llanw / Uncharted

Jon Gower is a Welsh autor who has self-translated his novel Dala’r Llanw (2009) into English as Uncharted (2010) In an essay and an interview he reflects upon his experience, in which he also chose to alter the ending of the novel:

"I usually try to write prose that has a melody and found writing the English translation difficult at first as I was trying to impose the Welsh "music" on the English version, that is until I decided to go with the English music. Adapting the book also gave me a chance to winnow out some weaknesses, and to alter the ending." (interview AmeriCymru)

Continue to read:
Jon Gower: The dynamism of switching between languages
AmeriCymru (2010): An Interview with Welsh Author - Jon Gower

Tradução em revista: Special issue on self-translation

Tradução em revista: Special issue on self-translation edited by Maria Alice Antunes and Rainier Grutman has just been published!

Content overview:

• Rainier Grutman/ Maria Alice Antunes: Introduction
• Rainier Grutman: Beckett: a quintessência da autotradução?
• Maria Alice Antunes / Bianca Walsh: A decisão de traduzir o próprio texto, motivações e consequências: um breve estudo dos casos dos escritores brasileiros Ana Maria Machado e Joao Ubaldo Ribeiro 
• Paulo Fernando Henriques Britto: Lorem Ipsum Uma Autoversão Poetica
• Valentina Mercuri: Re-autotraducción: El caso de Piccolo Karma de Carlo Coccioli
• Alessandra Ferraro: Antonio d'Alfonso ou du vertige autotraductif
• Paola Puccini: De l'écriture à l'autotraduction: l'histoire migrante de Gens du silence de Marco Micone
• Valeria Sperti: Autotraduction et figures du dedoublement dans la production de Nancy Huston
• Trish Van Bolderen: Huston, we have a problem...: (or what on earth is canadian self-translation supposed to mean?)
• Tiziana Nannavecchia: Italian Meta Reflections On Self Translation An Overview

All articles are available as pdf files on the website of the journal. I have provided the link to each article.

Access to the journal: Please click here.
Abstracts of the articles: Please click here.

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 October 1, 2014.

Alexakis at the Festival Vo-Vf

The festival Vo-Vf La Parole aux Traducteurs will take place from 10 to 12 october 2014 in Gif-Sur-Yvette, France. On Sunday afternoon Vassilis Alexakis will talk about his self-translations:

14h - 15h15 Carte blanche à la Bulac
Conférence animée par Clotilde Monteiro sur l'autodraduction, avec l'écrivain Vassilis Alexakis dont l'œuvre, dans ses versions grecque et française, est présente dans les collections de la BULAC. Grand habitué des aller-retours entre le grec et le français, cetaficionado s'est mis un jour en tête d'apprendre une troisième langue, le sango. Vassilis Alexakis qui se définit comme Grec par ses parents et Français par ses enfants a aussi coutume de dire « j'ai une langue pour rire qui est le français, une langue pour pleurer qui est le grec et une troisième le sango, l'idiome de la république centrafricaine, pour jouer ». Comme d'autres noms prestigieux avant lui, tels que James Joyce, Vladimir Nabokov, Julien Green ou Samuel Beckett, Vassilis Alexakis a fait le choix de l'auto-traduction, un exercice qu'il considère comme faisant partie intégrante de son travail d'écriture. Au cours de cette rencontre, il lèvera le voile sur sa pratique de la traduction tout en abordant une question essentielle à ses yeux : « Y a-t-il une vie en dehors du roman ? ».

To see the full programm and for more information on the festival, please click here.

Doireann Ní Ghríofa: "My translation process went from exhausting and difficult to exciting and nourishing."

The Colony Literary Magazine conducted a very interesting interview with the poet Doireann Ní Ghríof (*1981), who writes in both Irish and English. She talks about language choice, translation strategies and how her approach to self-translation has changed over the years.

To read the full interview please click here. You can also read a couple of her poems in both languages.

Cfp: Tracing Self-Translation : discursive perspectives in context

This is a call for paper for panel 11 at the IATIS Belo Horizonte Conference. The panel is being organized by Maud Gonne, Klaartje Merrigan, Reine Meylaerts and Katarzyna Szymanska.

Deadline for abstracts: 1st August 2014

Once known as a marginal field of study, self-translation has recently attracted a considerable amount of scholarly interest. Current theories vacillate between opposing understandings of self-translation, depending on whether the focal point consists of the self-translator as a unique, 'privileged agent of transfer' (Tanqueiro 1999), or of the self-translated text as the result of an act of re-writing, and thus essentially no different from any other text that is reshaped or 'fragmented' in view of a new readership (Lefevere 1992, Bassnett 2013). The focus on the agency of the self-translator has led to passionate pleas to 'move beyond Beckett' in order to place reflections on self-translation in a broader sociological framework of a competing world system of languages (Grutman 2013). Theoretical reflections on the self-translated text have, in turn, defined the latter as a complex cultural artifact which constantly questions binary oppositions underlying key-concepts of translation studies (Cordingley 2013).

Nevertheless, current approaches tend to neglect the specificity of the self-translation process, which implies a cross-fertilization between writing, translating, reading and often re-writing between languages as well as an act of world-construction across languages. While self-translators are often exceptional 'cultural brokers', they are also the creators of complex literary scenographies, which necessarily bear the traces of the multilingual enunciative conditions out of which they emerge. By focusing on literary scenographies, this panel aims to extend current research on bilingualism within linguistic theories of discourse by reflecting on the ramifications of the 'bilingual condition' on the literary discourse of self-translating authors. The term scenography, as introduced by Maingueneau (2004) refers here to the narrative scene constructed in a fictional text, which reflects and legitimate the genre in which it partakes and in turn influences the 'image' of the author perceived as the creator of that particular scenography. In the case of literary self-translation, we believe these scenographies need to be linked to (i) the specific language(s) in which they are written and (ii) the complex author-translator status of the writer who created them.

The purpose of this panel is therefore to study self-translation as both a translational and literary activity, with highly complex modes of interaction which can be traced discursively. Concretely, we aim to (1)open up new methodological questions on how translation strategies between versions can be linked to narrative and/or discursive structures which concur across versions (2)study the continuities (and not only the dissimilarities) between versions and analyze how these deepen or problematize the relationship between a given literary scenography and its double context of reception.

Possible research questions are:

- Are there recurring topoi, stereotypes, discursive strategies within the self-translated text/discourse? What kind of discursive 'traces' (narration, voice, time, space, ...) emerge out of the conditions from which self-translators write?

- Is it possible to speak of a self-translating 'ethos', at once inscribing itself in authorial and translational discourses?

- To what extend does self-translation constitute a meta-literary or meta-translational practice? Can it be analyzed as the (self-)translator's comment on either the original or translation process?

Timeline for submission within a panel:

By 1st August 2014: Deadline for submissions of abstracts

By 25th October 2014: notification of acceptance of abstracts

For more information and for the modalities of submission, please click here.

New book on self-translation: Brodsky translating Brodsky

Bloomsbury has published Brodsky translating Brodsky. Poetry in Self-translation by Alexandra Berlina.
For more information on the book please click here. The book contains a foreword by the poet and translator Robert Chandler.

7th Annual International Conference on Languages & Linguistics, 7-10 July 2014, Athens, Greece

Self-translation will be a topic at the 7th Annual International Conference on Languages & Linguistics, taking place from 7-10 July 2014, Athens, Greece.

Yu-Fen Tai, Assistant Professor, Tamkang University, Taiwan:Rewriting or Creation: Self-Translation of Eileen Chang´s the Rice Sprout Song

For more information on the conference, please click here.