The fledgling discipline of Walking Studies finally looks set to emerge onto the world stage as more and more scholars start to take it seriously, no longer regarding it as an unscientific field of study, or at best an adjunct to Running Studies. In the early years of this globalised new millenium it has started […]
Susan Bassnett is a leading representative of the translators are great school of thought, a school which holds that translators are as good – oh, hell, why not come out and say it – actually better than original (or rather, “original”) writers. I wouldn’t deny that translation is a creative activity – not after working […]
Here’s the RTE (Irish TV and Radio) news website today. It was also on air in more or less the same form: Employers earlier warned that future investment by multinational companies could disappear with many job losses if they were forced to recognise unions. No big deal there, just the usual threats. But here’s where […]
The belief that the translation should be free of the original, which some would have you believe is no more than a necessary evil, is an obsession in some areas of translation studies. Here’s Theo D’haen in his article “Antique Lands, New Worlds? Comparative Literature, Intertextuality, Translation” taken from a special number of the Forum […]
Here’s Peter Bush, in his “The Writer of Translations,” on The Way Things Are for translators: they are dead; their names appear on “…the back flap [of books] as a bleak epitaph to the months of labour that selflessly, neutrally and most economically secreted the new spread of words.” It is simply not true, as […]
Pym, this time, in an article called “On Cooperation,” telling us what translation students should be trained to do. Translate? Well, yes, that too but there are all sorts of other exciting things: “training programmes should progressively be oriented to the production of intercultural mediators.”* This would reflect what is already happening at the “commercialised […]
House, quoted in Kiraly, quoted in Kelly (under heading “What not to do!”), paraphrased by me: Don’t set translation students a text to translate that is full of traps, let them prepare it and then go through it sentence by sentence, student by student, eliciting alternative translations for each sentence before plumping for the one […]
“Translation is the performative nature of cultural communication. It is language in actu (enunciation, positionality) rather than language in situ (énoncé, or propositionality). And the sign
A danger with living abroad too long – and one I have failed to avoid – is to start thinking the second country, in my case Poland, is uniquely rubbish. A return to the mothership reassures you that it’s not just Poland – everything is shit
Not having Polish children, this was something I only noticed very lately.
