Here’s a report from the Irish national broadcaster’s news site which may be beyond parody but by jingo that isn’t going to stop me. For those unfamiliar with the subject, two pieces of background information: (1) the Irish economy has hit a brick wall (2) “Tánaiste” is the Irish name for the post of deputy […]
With a trip to Kraków on the cards, I decided it was time to go up to the attic and dust down a guidebook to the old town. The book I came across, blocking a hole in the thatch, was called simply Kraków and was published in 1951 with a print run of 20,300. I […]
Congratulations to Micahel Cronin and all at Routledge, who have put out Mr. Cronin’s book, Translation Goes to the Movies, bearing the date 2009. You can find it in bookshops already, three months before time. Then again, Cronin is so prolific it may have been a good idea to spread things out a little. Translation […]
“It may come to us as something of a shock to realise that many of the texts that we treat as English originals are in fact translations, some from other languages, some from older forms of English, some from both. The Bible, The Iliad, Beowulf, the works of Dante, Chaucer, Cervantes, Ibsen, Tolstoy, Hugo, Goethe, […]
These are exciting times with banks crashing, insurance companies being nationalised (by GW Bush!) and so forth. Back on page 33 of today’s Guardian there is an article headlined “Merrill Lynch boss to get $11m payoff after nine months’ work.” The same man, John Thain, was given $15 million just for taking the job. He […]
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 […]
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 […]
