“This book makes no secret of the fact that it is aimed at specialists, containing as it does only four pages that are not structured as a list.” This is the encouraging opening of a review of Seamus Heaney: A Bibliography, by Rand Brandes and Michael A. Durkan which appeared in the ever-gripping Irish Times […]
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 […]
Watching cartoons the other night, I heard someone say to a schoolgirl “Welcome to the glamorous world of unpaid internships,” or words to that effect, before the glamorous world of exploitation and skivvydom was portrayed in primary colours. I don’t recall receiving such good career advice when I was in school. My generation had to […]
“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
The Corporate Takeover of Ireland, by UCD’s Kieran Allen, was published in 2007 by the Irish Academic Press, where he is joined by such as Bryan Fanning (also of UCD) and Diarmaid Ferriter. Heavyweights, in other words. A serious business. So why is the book so badly marred by typos and other errors? “complimentary” where […]
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
Back in Dublin again. While I was away the LUAS trams mysteriously filled up to standing room only. The antiseptic pre-recorded voice announcing the stops has, as a result, more to say for herself:
Not having Polish children, this was something I only noticed very lately.
