Three Monkeys Online - the free current affairs & arts magazine

In a straight news article it can sometimes be difficult to figure out where the reporter’s sympathies lie but for the careful observer there are a few clues. Take the article in today’s Dziennik about the decision to fund private third level colleges from public funds. The headline reads “Government to finance private colleges” (“Rząd dofinansuje uczelnie prywatne”). How very kind of the government (Donald Tusk and Co.). You can bet if the paper disapproved of this handover of public monies to private business the headline would read “Taxpayer to finance private colleges.” There are clues as to the sympathies of the newspaper within the article too. For instance “…as a result they [private colleges] will be able to reduce their fees” (“Dzięki temu będą mogły obniżyć czesne”). They could use the taxpayers’ money to reduce fees for the students, sure, or they could use it to increase dividends, buy walnut dashboards for the boss’s company car or just about anything really.

Stanisław Mocek, of the private school Collegium Civitas, has a wonderful comment to make on the matter: “…it’s time to end the stereotype of the division into public and non-public colleges and start dividing them into good and bad” (“…czas zerwać ze stereotypem podziału na uczelnie publiczne i niepubliczne, a zacząć je dzielic na dobre i złe.”) A stereotype? There is a difference between public and non-public colleges: the former are public and the latter are not. It’s not a stereotype. It’s a fact, not a terribly complicated one, I would have thought – but I’m not the pro-dean for didactics in a private university.

After the years of whinging about lack of recognition, low status and how people think that anyone who knows two languages can translate translators – at least in Poland – are finally gaining some ground on their mortal enemies: original artists.

Today’s Gazeta Wyborcza reports how a translator, Hanna Szczerkowska, forced (by use of the courts) a theatre group to take their production of a play she translated off the stage. They had broken her copyright by – oh perfidy! – adapting her translation of a play by Adam Rapp. The production that took to the boards had rude words in it that were not present in her translation. They call it “ochrona praw autorskich” here: “protection of authors’ rights.” Asked for comments, one Dariusz Kosiński of the Jagiellonian University in Kraków described it as an ominous sign of the domination of authorial rights over all others. But no discussion of a matter that concerns the Polish intelligentsia would be complete without a put down of the Unqualified. Tadeusz Słobodzianek of The Drama Laboratory in Warsaw says “The improvement of plays is taken on by amateurs who have no idea about the written [sic] word.” Best leave things to the professionals, eh? Like Hanna Szczerkowska, who has demanded of another theatre group a 10,000 zloty forfeit if she is not given the script 10 days before the premier or if there are any changes in the script not previously agreed with her. Finally, the professionalism that translators have always dreamed of.