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.

"Je suis un autre: Authorship in Self-Translation"

Self-translation was a topic at the 7th Translation Studies Conference in Portugal, Faculty of Letters, University of Lisbon, 24–25.10. 2013.

Here is an extract of the abstract of the talk “Je suis un autre: Authorship in Self-Translation. Notes on Migration, Metamorphosis & Translation” given by Alexandra Lopes:

"This paper aims to critically engage with Schleiermacher’s arguments, reflecting on their import to understanding the meanders of self-translation. Taking Schleiermacher’s views on the ideal comprehension model for translation as a starting point, I examine the work of a German-born immigrant writer and translator in Portugal: Ilse Losa (1913-2006). My paper focuses particularly on Losa’s 1962 novel Sob Céus Estranhos [Under Strange Skies], which she later translated into German under the title Unter fremden Himmeln. In my paper, I discuss Schleiermacher’s dictum that the translator must be ‘conscious of the difference between that language [the source language] and his own’ [ibidem], and argue that difference is not necessarily a category of the Other, as it visibly inhabits the contemporary displaced self. As Rushdie famously put it in ‘Imaginary Homelands’, the identity of the migrant ‘is at once plural and partial’ (1991:15). Thus, what Losa’s narrative brings to the fore is the complex web of relations between self and language, self and other(s), creativity and defamiliarization, authorship and translationship, and showcasing the often unacknowledged fact that translatability and translatedness inhabit the creative gesture." 

For more information on the conference and to read the complete abstract, please click here.

Conference: La traduction, médiation et médiatisation des cultures

Self-translation will be a topic at the conference: La traduction, médiation et médiatisation des cultures (21-22.11.13) taking place at the University Orléans, France.

Bernardo Toro (Écrivain): Écriture et auto-traduction 

Evelio Miñano (Université de Valencia) : Auto-traduction et médiation dans l’univers littéraire de Jorge Semprún 

To see the full program, please click here.

Conference: Translating European Languages

Self-translation will be a topic at the conference Translating European Languages.History, Ideology and Censorship taking place 01-02.11.2013 in Oxford.

Olga Castro (Aston): The politics of self-translation in multilingual contemporary Spain: conflicting ideologies and peripheral literatures

To see the full program, please click here.