Research Theme: Translations, Adaptations and Modalities

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Conference: Art Writing: Translations, Adaptations and Modalities: 23-24 April 2009

Translation Seminars: Autumn 2010: 18 and 25 November

Translation Seminars: Spring 2010: 18 March and 22 April

Translation Seminars: Autumn 2009: 22 October and 26 November

Conference: "Romantic Translation, 1780-1830": Tuesday, 12 May 2009

Practical Translation Workshop: "Alice in Real Life": Thursday, 7 May 2009

Seminar Programme: Spring 2009

Seminar Programme: Autumn 2008

Conference: Art Writing: Translations, Adaptations and Modalities: 23-24 April 2009

Translation Seminars: Autumn 2010

Thursday, 18 November
4.00 pm, Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, Hope Park Square

Professor Philip Bennett (Professor of Medieval French Language & Culture,University of Edinburgh): Translating Charlemagne in the Medieval West

Abstract: Although Charles, King of the Franks and first ruler of what became the Holy Roman Empire, was an historical figure, his place in the history of Western European culture is that of a transhistorical literary, artistic and political icon known by the label "Charlemagne". Giving a brief presentation of the project "Charlemagne: a European Icon", directed by Dr Marianne Ailes and myself, and its parent project "Charlemagne in England" directed by Dr Ailes, the paper will consider in detail the cultural and literary appropriation of Charlemagne in the medieval French-speaking world, which includes England and southern Scotland. This translation is both linguistic and a removal of Charlemagne from his original political and geographical setting to new centres of imagined activity. A briefer account of this appropriation and transmogrification of the ninth-century ruler in Scandinavia and northern Italy will close the paper.

Thursday, 25 November
4.00 pm, Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, Hope Park Square

Dr. Dagmar Motycka Weston (Architecture, School of Arts, Culture and Environment, University of Edinburgh):
Architecture of the Greek Theatre as an Embodiment of Cultural Meaning

Abstract: The paper springs from a conviction that significant architecture has always been the expression of its physical and cultural context, providing a setting for human activities, and a durable embodiment for cultural meaning. The architecture of the medieval civic square or cathedral, for example, has provided existential orientation to the town's inhabitants, helping them, to paraphrase Karsten Harries, to understand their own situation in the world and to feel at home in it. Analogical thinking plays a key role in this. To explore this communicative function of architecture within its culture, the paper focuses on Greek theatre. Seeing it as one of the most vivid illustrations of architecture as an expression of religious, philosophical and political thought, it interprets the form of the theatre in the context of the festivals of the god Dionysos and of Greek cosmology. It begins with a discussion of the evolution of theatre from the archaic circular dance performed ritually on the sacred threshing floor, a place of hierophany, which had associations with the grain-mother goddess and cyclical renewal. It explores the cult of Dionysos, with its connotations of fertility, regeneration and religious ecstasy. It sees the gathering of all strata of the polis in the theatre during the religious festivals as a primary vehicle not just of ethical orientation, but also of social cohesion and identity formation. Focusing on the theatre at Epidaurus, the paper further interprets the building's geometrical form (the circle of the orchestra, bounded by the ring of the sunken channel, and so forth) as a microcosmic representation of the Greek world, with the earth circumscribed by the great cosmic river okeanos, with the omphalos at its centre, and underworld below. The paper ends with a brief reflection on the significance of theatre as cultural expression, and on the pervasive image of the theatrum mundi.

Translation Seminars: Spring 2010

Thursday, 18 March
3.00 - 5.00 pm, Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, Hope Park Square

Professor Thomas Munck (Early Modern European History Department of History, University of Glasgow): Putting the European Enlightenment back together? A historian's view of translation, transmission and reception across literate Europe in the later 18th century

Abstract: There is little consensus amongst historians regarding the Enlightenment: what it was, where it came from, and what its most important strands were. Post-modern criticisms have signally failed to undermine possible answers (but have helped historians develop new techniques and approaches); and arguments about 'national' enlightenments, whilst fruitful, have often ended up in disagreements and blind alleys. The history of print culture has substantially changed the way we tackle questions of diffusion and reception (of both new and old work), and has of course immeasurably expanded the 'canon' of texts that might now be regarded as part of the Enlightenment. However, so far, historians have largely ignored the extent to which books and ideas were transformed during the processes of translation, adaptation and intellectual piracy that were so large a component of 18th-century publishing. This paper will look at transmission processes across some of the more literate parts of Europe - Britain, France, the Netherlands, northern Germany and Scandinavia - on the basis both of actual patterns of translation of major works, and of a sampling of the growing range of literary review journals which offered running commentaries on the international Enlightenment. Historians have mostly failed to realise how these review journals in themselves provide a large body of evidence on the evolution of their respective languages, and of the underlying conceptual frameworks. But equally, the journals offer unique insights regarding the extent to which a 'European' Enlightenment came about through loose translation and cultural adaptation.

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Dr Réka Forrai (Centre for Hellenic Traditions, Central European University, Budapest; IASH Mellon Fellow): The 'medieval trend' among humanist translators
Abstract: While medieval translators left an extensive body of work, there is little evidence about how they approached their task. Their successors in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were more loquacious. Not only did humanists translate newly available Greek sources, they re-translated old ones and debated at length about how one should translate in the first place. Most humanists argued that translators must attend, above all, to literary style. Nevertheless many translators continued to use the more literal medieval approach, and to defend its validity. Even among Leonardo Bruni's peers there existed an influential faction which continued the tradition of more literal renderings.

At the core of this paper will be the major fifteenth-century debates against and in favour of the medieval literal translation technique, especially those between Leonardo Bruni and Alonso of Carthagena, and those between Ermolao Barbaro and Pico della Mirandola. I will also compare this material with the actual translations of some medieval and humanist translators. I intend to show that the actual practices of medieval and humanist translators were less starkly opposed than the heated polemic would suggest; humanist practice defined itself in opposition to the medieval, and therefore brought no true paradigm shift. In both medieval and Renaissance translation theory the two extremes of verbum vs. sensum were used (and abused) as either praise or critique, depending on various circumstances. If this is the case, a reassessment of the relationship between medieval and renaissance translation practice will be necessary, together with a reassertion of the importance of medieval practices within the larger framework of the history and evolution of translation.

Thursday, 22 April
3.00 - 5.00 pm, Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, Hope Park Square

Iain Galbraith (Independent Scholar; Visiting Fellow of IASH): The translation of 20th-century Scottish poetry into German: Cultural Aporiai and the negotiatory strategies of translation
Abstract: Identifying specific instances of impasse encountered in German translations of Scottish poetry since 1900, and reviewing typical benchmarks of translation criticism such as gain/loss, betrayal, metaphor, equivalence and rewriting, this paper will argue that the task of translation invites the more or less inventive re-negotiation of the terms of cultural, historical and linguistic discontinuity, reconstituting the parameters of poetic coherence in new media and contexts. In so doing, translations not only evince historical and cultural incongruities, but may also stimulate exemplary reflection on the conditions of knowledge acquisition, transformative resources, and the evolution and modification of traditions.

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Dr Sheila Dickson (Senior Lecturer in German and Adviser of Studies, Faculty of Arts, University of Glasgow): The Creative Imperative. German Romantic Translation
Abstract: "In the final instance, all poetry is translation.” (Novalis) German Romantic theorists and writers recognised all narrative mediation as an act of subjective transformation and enrichment. Translation as a second level of mediation could therefore add a further layer of individual creativity and so become not just a metaphor for poetry but also a practical modality. The paper will briefly characterise the Schlegel/Tieck Shakespeare translation before concentrating on the international folk literature source base of later Romantic works. As epitome and impasse of German Romantic translation it will examine Goethe’s Correspondence with a Child, the English translation of Bettina von Arnim’s work, which she undertook herself, without any previous knowledge of the English language.

Translation Seminars: Autumn Semester 2009

Thursday, 22 October
4.00 - 6.00 pm, Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, Hope Park Square

Cultural Translation I: Reception and Perception in the Making
The joint seminar provides the opportunity to examine how translation enables a certain range of discourses by taking the historical cases of Arabic literature and the Bible as cases in point.

Professor Marilyn Booth (Iraq Chair of Arabic and Islamic Studies, University of Edinburgh): "The Muslim Woman" as Celebrity Author and the Politics of Translating Arabic: Girls of Riyadh Goes on the Road

The recent production of texts in English that construct and rely on repeated and homogenized images of Muslim women is a noticeable aspect of dominant contemporary Euro/American discourse on the peoples of the Middle East and North Africa. This talk focuses on a translated fictional text but argues for its contextualization within the market of popular memoir. Taking the recent translation of Rajaa Alsanea's (Raja' al-Sani') Banat al-Riyadh into the English Girls of Riyadh as a case study, it argues that revisions made by the press (Penguin/Fig Tree) and author to the translation (commissioned by Penguin to the author of this paper) assimilated to chick-lit generic conventions in the Anglophone marketplace. This battery of revisions carried out without consulting the translator muted the gender politics and situatedness of multiple kinds of Arabic that acted, in the Arabic novel, as a critique of Saudi gender and other politics. Paratextual framing of the marketed book (such as reviews) and translational choices emphasized the fiction as a writing of "experience," bringing it closer to the memoir genre and linking it to a tradition of what the author calls Orientalist ethnographicism. These effects produce a work and author-figure both exotic and familiar.

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Dr Frantisek Trstensky (Andrew Mellon Fellow, IASH; Faculty of Theology, Catholic University, Ruzomberok): The perception of the biblical text and its adaptation to the reader's circumstances

The paper focuses on the way in which the biblical text is interpreted in the present time and seeks to provide the theoretical foundation of how the Bible can be understood. The study of the methodological principles of interpretation and explanation is the main domain of hermeneutics, a discipline which has emerged in theological, philosophical and literary circles. In dealing with understanding, interpretation and translation of written texts, hermeneutics is mainly preoccupied with four distinct elements: situation, text, author and reader. All elements are interconnected and are indispensable for allowing us to see both the parts of a text and the text in its entirety. In the case of the Bible, each element enables a different approach to its perception. Thus, the text can be considered as a window giving access to a certain period of its history (what can be called 'the world behind the text'). It can also function as a picture of the narrative world presented in the story ('the world of the text'). Finally, the text can serve as a mirror challenging our own worldview and practices ('the world in front of the text'). Different thought these approaches might seem, the paper seeks to argue that any and all of them should incorporate the historical and literary aspects.

Thursday, 26 November
4.00 - 6.00 pm, Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, Hope Park Square

Cultural Translation II: Reception and Perception in the Making
The second joint seminar continues the exploration of the workings of translation in recreating and shifting meaning. This time, the emphasis is on beliefs associated with Romanticism; in particular, the politically consequential adaptations of Haydn's songs and the British reconfiguration of German aesthetics.

Dr. Sarah Day-O' Connell (Fellow, IASH; Department of Music, Knox College, Illinois): Translations on Record: Eight Decades of Joseph Haydn's English Songs

In what ways are musical recordings like translations? In this paper I examine recordings (by Marian Anderson, Peter Pears, and Elisabeth Schumann, among others) of Haydn's English songs (1794-1795), using three types of analysis: musicological performance analysis, translation studies' negative analytic, and (as a sort of hybrid tool fashioned from both fields) discourse analysis of jacket art, liner notes, reviews, marketing materials, and artist interviews. The result is a multivalent narrative describing how the original meanings of the songs transform in response to target culture contexts. First, whereas the songs had originally served as a site of cross-fertilization between long-standing conventions of polite culture and new expressions of contemporary anxieties (about science and industrialization in particular), early twentieth-century performances construe these intersections more narrowly, concentrating on perspectives about the nature of femininity. Next, the songs gain a new significance when they are implicitly divorced from Haydn himself and reinterpreted as quintessentially folk-like or inherently "English." Finally, the recordings play a pointed role in the construction of Haydn's twentieth-century reputation; they are marshaled in support of competing conceptions of the composer as mercenary (rapidly cranking out music with mass appeal despite his relative financial security) or Midas (able to turn even a traditionally impoverished genre into a "masterpiece"). I conclude with a brief consideration of what the fields of translation studies and musicology might have to offer one another.

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Dr Richard Adelman (Postdoctoral Fellow, IASH; formerly Department of English and Related Literature, University of York): Aesthetic contemplation in Britain: Matthew Arnold & Friedrich Schiller

Nineteenth-century models of the utility of culture and of the manner in which it is to transmitted can be understood as attempts to translate late eighteenth-century German idealism into a British context characterized by wide-ranging social problems and increasing scepticism over the category of aesthetic contemplation. Matthew Arnold, most notably, is the legatee of the style of thought shared by Friedrich Schiller's On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge's On the Constitution of Church & State (1829). His notion of the "best that has been thought and said", engendering the "free play of thought" in the individual who has experienced it, represents a clear echoing of the operations of Schiller's "play-drive".

The contemporary challenges to this simple model of cultural translation are manifest, however. Charles Kingsley sets aesthetic repose at odds with political engagement and social amelioration in his mid-century novels (Yeast, Alton Locke), while those succeeding Arnold depict the aesthetic most often as a species of morbid "narcosis", rather than as the dynamic category that will unify and facilitate all others. This paper will seek to trace the pertinence of these challenges to the successful translation of a German paradigm into British thought to Arnold's writing itself. Concerning itself with both poetry and prose, it will trace the significances of the category of idle, aesthetic contemplation across two decades of Arnold's career, questioning the sustainability of idealist psychology on British soil.

Tuesday, 12 May 2009

9.00 am - 5.00 pm, Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities
2 Hope Park Square

"Romantic Translation, 1780-1830"

Programme:

Abstracts:

Paul Barnaby (University of Edinburgh): "Translation and the Romantic Right: A.J.B. Defauconpret and the Waverley novels"
The first translations of the Waverley Novels made by Auguste-Jean-Baptiste Defauconpret (1767-1843) from 1817 onwards tailor Scott's fictions of revolution, religious war, and regime change to the highly sensitive political climate of post-Napoleonic France. Through an analysis of his translations of Old Mortality (1817) and Rob Roy (1818), this paper will show that Defauconpret is pivotal in establishing the Restoration perception of Scott as arch-legitimist and crypto-Catholic and in assuring his positive reception by the Romantic Right. A radically rewritten Scott is forced to surrender his relative political impartiality, to condemn all challenges to constituted authority, and to equate Royalist and Catholic, Protestant and Republican, Puritan and Fanatic. The paper will discuss how Defauconpret subsequently revises his translations as the Romantic generation both embraces Liberalism and demands that translations retain something of the 'foreignness' of the source text.

Tom Toremans (Catholic University, Brussels): "Translating Idealism: Carlyle's Sartor Resartus"
Written between 1830 and 1832 and published serially in Fraser's Magazine from November 1833 until August 1834, Carlyle's Sartor Resartus presents itself as a late-Romantic fictionalisation of the process of translation. More specifically, Sartor develops as the fictional account of a British Editor's attempt at translating a German Idealist philosophical manuscript with the explicitly moral aim of intervening in the utilitarian ideology that dominates British society. Rather than reading Sartor as a philosophical tract or a novel, this paper approaches the work as primarily a work of and on translation. In its complex narrative development, Sartor foregrounds material, ideological and linguistic aspects of translation, generating a complex and incisive critique of all too idealistic accounts of cross-culturaland inter-linguistic mediation. In this way, Sartor actually articulates a 'theory' of translation that radically departs from Carlyle's earlier practice as a translator of German Romantic texts.

Jochen Petzold (IASH, University of Edinburgh): "For a' that -- Trotz alledem!: Burns, Freiligrath and a Slogan for the Labour Movement"
Ferdinand Freiligrath (1810-1876) is among the first poets to translate Robert Burns into German: his Gedichte of 1838 includes 13 translations of Burns (among numerous other translations). In his collection Ein Glaubensbekenntniß: Zeitgedichte (1844), which marked Freiligraths transition to left-wing politics and social activism (he was later dubbed the 'trumpeter of the revolution'), he included a translation/adaptation of Burns' A man's a man for a' that (Is there, for honest poverty), Trotz alledem! Arguably, this piece and a later, modified version under the same title had an extremely large influence on the Burns reception in Germany -- although it might well be called a 'veiled reception', since few people would have been aware of Freiligrath's source. In my paper, I will look at both Freiligrath as an early translator of Burns, and at his role as 'creator' of a highly influential (and productive) left-wing slogan -- on the basis of a poem by Burns.

Kurt Johnson (University of York): "'Lisping Tongues' and 'Sanscrit Songs': Poetic Form as Translation in Sir William Jones' 'Hymns' to Hindu Deities"
In the mid-1780s, Sir William Jones, wrote a series of nine original 'Hymns' to Hindu deities. The 'Hymns' poeticize Hindu mythology and theology and utilize Hindu names and imagery within the idiom of a distinctly British poetic form. Jones' 'Hymns' were well received in Britain as works of translation from the ancient Sanskrit - a misapprehension which would last well into the twentieth century. After all Jones had been celebrated for his earlier translations of Persian poetry, a process he dubbed adorning the "compositions of Arabia and Persia…in an English dress." The process of dressing Hindu literature has led some scholars such as Kate Teltscher and Javed Majeed to interpret Jones' hymnody as an extension of his professional tasks of translating Hindu legal material into English in order to expand British knowledge of Hindu culture, and thus to enhance colonial control. This paper, by contrast, explores poetic form as a site and as a means of cultural translation that complicates such interpretations. Firstly, the hymn offers the formal flexibility and poetic reflexivity through which to accommodate a largely alien and foreign mythology for British readers. Secondly, my paper considers the political and religious conflicts which issue from the use of the hymnal form. Central to these points is the question of translation - what did it mean for Jones' 'Hymns' to have been thought translations and later revealed not to be? What was at stake, culturally and poetically, in having a foreign deity invoked by British hymnody? And how does the hymn offer a means of translation between two cultures separated geographically, religiously and colonially?

Catherine Jones (University of Aberdeen): "Romantic Opera in Translation: Mozart and Weber on the British and American Stage"
This paper explores what is preserved, lost or gained in the translation and adaptation of continental European opera for the British and American stage, with particular reference to Henry Bishop's version of Mozart's Don Giovanni (1787) and Washington Irving's translation of the librettos of Weber's Abu Hassan (1812) and Der Freischütz (1821). It suggests some of the ways in which Romantic opera is transformed in the processes of motion, and in relation to a newly established history of interpretation, notably the criticism of E.T.A. Hoffmann.

David Constantine (University of Oxford): "Journeying and homecoming: Hölderlin's idea and practice of translation"
The paper involves journeying and homecoming, fact and metaphor, in Hölderlin's life and work, chiefly in relation to his idea and practice of translation. He believed, as many poets have, that in order to come fully into one's own language it was necessary to spend time 'abroad', that is, in a thorough study and translation of a foreign tongue. Translation then becomes a way into one's own poetic voice. The focus will be particularly on Hölderlin's translations of Pindar and Sophocles, but also on his revisions - very like translations - of his own poems into a strange late diction.

Krzysztof Fordonski (University of Warsaw; Mellon Fellow, IASH, University of Edinburgh): "'Starched like Horace's Odes'? Coleridge (mis)translates Sarbiewski"
The paper presents a comparative analysis of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's translation of the ode Ad Aurelium Lycum ne plus aequo de adversa fortuna queratur (Lyr. I 2) by Maciej Kazimierz Sarbiewski (1595-1640). The focal point of the analysis will be Coleridge's treatment of Sarbiewski's poem aimed at making the resulting translation a comment on current events rather than a Neo-stoic contemplation of the human condition the original is. The first part of the paper will be a brief introduction to Sarbiewski's life and work. It will be followed by a presentation of his British translators of the Romantic period (Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Hucks, sir John Bowring, Jesse Kitchener etc.) and their respective translations. This part will attempt to decide whether we can talk about Romantic translations of Sarbiewski or whether Coleridge is actually a unique exception. The main part of the paper is a comparative analysis of Coleridge's poem Lines. To a Friend in Answer to a Melancholy Letter, a translation/emulation of Sarbiewski's ode. The analysis will follow a discussion of the political situation in the period when the translation was written (c. 1795), and of Coleridge's knowledge and possible understanding of the original and its philosophical background. His personal situation at the time will also be presented so as to provide a context for the discrepancies between the original and translation.

Laura Kirkley (University of Cambridge): "Rewriting Women: Manon L' Escaut and Maria"
In the eighteenth century, women writers were often disenfranchised by the masculine bias of dominant discourses, which masqueraded as universal by silencing modes of expression liable to undermine male supremacy. This paper argues that translation returned power to these disenfranchised women, enabling them to engage critically with the authoritative texts of the period without risking the stigma of authorship. Concomitantly, the anti-feminist revisions of conservative translators countermanded the feminist creativity of women writers. The paper is divided into two sections. The first focuses on Charlotte Smith's feminist translation of Abbé Prévost's Manon Lescaut, Manon L'Escaut, or the Fatal Attraction. The second considers the Jacobin Basile-Joseph Ducos's anti-feminist translation of Mary Wollstonecraft's last unfinished novel, Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman. In the French version, this novel becomes Maria, ou le malheur d'être femme. In general, Smith's translation choices alternate between those which demonstrate identification with her homeland and those which suggest attraction to the otherness of the foreign text. In this way, Manon L'Escaut dramatises the loyalties to, and dissatisfactions with, particular nations that Smith experiences as she attempts to translate the ideological discourses of eighteenth-century Europe into a language that expresses her uneasy national allegiances and unrealised feminist and cosmopolitan ideals. Le Malheur d'être femme, on the other hand, was created in response to an ideological climate and reading public uncongenial to feminism. Accordingly, Ducos's translational choices work to subdue Wollstonecraft's call for women's rights, transforming Wollstonecraft's text from feminist polemic to sentimental Gothic. Ultimately, this paper examines both the extent to which interventionalist feminist translations could counteract the misogynist ideologies of eighteenth-century texts, and the extent to which Revolutionary feminism could survive the 'traffic accidents' of translation.

Registration fee (to include lunch and coffees/teas): £10

To register, email Maria Filippakopoulou, mfilipp1@staffmail.ed.ac.uk

Thursday, 7 May 2009
2.00 - 4.00 pm, Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities,
2 Hope Park Square

Practical Translation Workshop: "Alice in Real Life"

Workshop leaders:
Dr Fiona Elliott (a full-time freelance translator and editor working in the visual arts, German to English; formerly University of Edinburgh); and

Dr Paul Castro (lecturer in the literature and culture of the Portuguese-speaking world, University of Edinburgh. One of his research interests is the practice and theory of literary translation.)

Event Description:

Alice in Wonderland has been translated many times, in many wondrous ways. The participants in this hands-on workshop are invited to tackle the word plays, the subtle references and sheer fun that have made Alice popular the world over, either by producing their own translation or a detailed analysis of an existing translation of the 'Tea Party'. If time allows, we will also look at 'Twinkle, twinkle little bat…' and 'Jabberwocky'. The purpose of the seminar is to generate a structured discussion and to consider the skills and techniques needed by the professional translator.

As preparation for the workshop, participants will be given an excerpt from Warren Weaver's Alice in Many Tongues: the Translations of Alice in Wonderland (Madison: Wisconsin University Press, 1964).

The organisers will provide copies of published translations of Alice in the languages of the workshop participants.

Report: Click here for a report on the Workshop

Seminar Programme: Spring 2009

A series of fortnightly seminars on Tuesdays at 4 p.m.
in the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, 2 Hope Park Square

If you would like to join the mailing list for information about these events email Maria Filippakopoulou

27 January
Dr Charlotte Bosseaux (Translation Studies, University of Edinburgh)
Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Characterization in the Musical Episode of the TV Series

Translating audiovisual material, such as songs, that contribute to a film's narrative is a challenge yet to be systematically researched in translation studies, more specifically in its branch of audiovisual translation (AVT). This paper suggests a new line of research, focusing on characterization in the dubbed French version of a musical episode of the American TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and more specifically on a song entitled 'Something to Sing About', translated as 'Donnez-moi ma vie' (Give me my life) in French. Lyrics, which are instrumental in allowing the viewer to make sense of the storyline and in constructing the characters' personas, thus provide the main data for analysis. Characterization is investigated by examining shifts at the level of linguistic elements, including modality, complemented by an examination of parameters from cinematic modalities, such as shot composition, performance and voice quality. The analysis reveals shifts in the way Buffy is perceived in French.

10 February
Jen Ross (Research Associate, School of Education, University of Edinburgh)
Was that infinity or affinity?: Qualitative research transcription as translation

As a liminal act sitting on the border of data generation and analysis in the social sciences, the process of transcription of qualitative research interviews is one of translation from speech to text. Like any translation, this is an act of negotiation. Errors, interpretations and decisions made in transcribing form part of the data to be analysed. This seminar will explore some current issues in translation studies, and apply them to qualitative research transcribing, touching on concerns relevant to both social scientists and translators: power, situatedness, and the non-transparency of language. I will argue that in drawing on important theoretical work being done in translation studies, social scientists can make more conscious decisions about how they interpret and represent their data, and ultimately can conduct better research.

24 February
Professor Laura Marcus (Regius Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature, University of Edinburgh)
"The dark region of psychology": Virginia Woolf, Russian literature and translation from Russian

This talk looks at the translations from the Russian which Virginia Woolf undertook with the Russian emigre S.S.Kotelianksy, and the ways in which she defined her role as 'translator'. It also discusses the impact of reading, and working with, Russian literature on her aesthetic theories and her fiction in the 1920s and 30s.

10 March
Dr Richard Williams (History of Art, University of Edinburgh; Director, ACE Graduate School)
Brazil/Europe: Sexuality, modernism and architecture c. 1930-1960

To European observers, Brazil has often represented erotic possibilities unimaginable at home. A fantasy projection this may be, but its impact on the theory and practice of modernist architecture is considerable. This paper explores the translation of concepts of sexuality in architecture between Brazil and Europe during the period 1930-1960.

24 March
Joint seminar:
Sharon Deane (Doctoral Candidate, University of Edinburgh) Multiples of one: Retranslation and the accumulation of target texts
Retranslation compounds the potential modalities of source texts Drawing on a case study of British retranslations of Flaubert and Sand, this paper will explore how an overarching title can dissimulate a multitude of representations. Firstly, the very existence of plural target texts allows for an investigation of the dynamics between these versions themselves as sites of interference. Secondly, an intra-cultural perspective can be adopted in order to determine how the target texts may have been shaped by issues other than the purely linguistic. Finally, existing theory will be examined in relation to the qualitative and quantitative behaviour of selected retranslations.

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Svenja Wurm (Doctoral Candidate, Heriot-Watt University)
Translation in flux, or how definitions of translation and interpreting need to be stretched when sign languages and new media come into play
Translation and interpreting are by now established disciplines, both in terms of professional practice and academic enquiry; yet, how they relate to each other is rarely questioned. In this paper, I challenge the universality of existing conceptualisations of these two modes by presenting a case of sign language 'translation', i.e. the transfer of a chapter from a textbook written in English into British Sign Language, recorded on DVD. Due to the visual/gestural modality and the multimedia recording of the target text, the process adopted by the translator in my study does neither match prototypical translation nor prototypical interpreting.

Seminar Programme: Autumn 2008

23 September
Panel discussion on Translation in the Humanities
To speak about interdisciplinarity is to assume a gap to be bridged. Translatability, or transculturation can interrogate any such gaps or deny them altogether, allowing for issues of political appropriation or decentralisation to become obvious. The round table addresses questions such as the use and exchange of texts, bodies and technologies of knowledge through translation, the position and claims of minor languages, the mediating role of patronage in canon (re)formation in literature and the visual culture and the potential of translation as a critical tool of cultural understanding in the humanities.

Speakers:
Professor John Corbett (Professor of Applied Language Studies, Department of English Language, University of Glasgow)
Dr Jeremy Howard (Senior Lecturer at the School of Art History, University of St. Andrews)
Dr Claudia Heide (Managing Editor of Art in Translation)
Fiona Elliott (Arts' Translator)

7 October
Dr. Stuart Gillespie (English Literature, University of Glasgow): Ted Hughes's first translation: 'The Storm' from Homer's Odyssey, V

What are the conditions necessary for creative engagement with a classical text? Translators need to be alive to the alterity of their original, otherwise they will only reproduce themselves; but they must also be able in some sense to adopt that alterity for themselves. Hence strong elective affinities must be present. Hughes's sole Homeric translation from 1960 remained for accidental reasons unprinted until his Collected Poems of 2003, and this paper is the first in-depth account of it. It argues that, contrary to first impressions, Hughes's emphases are not so much those usually associated with his own original work; he stresses instead the existential plight discerned in this Homeric passage by other English translators of it such as Alexander Pope.

21 October
Professor Alison Phipps (Faculty of Education, University of Glasgow): Translating perception? Land, languaging, and the cultivation of translation

This paper attempts to answer the following question: What does translation become if we uncouple language from culture and link language to perception and experience of the land? What would happen to translation if the culture concept was not the starting point for theorising? In order to answer this question I examine the contributions of Eagleton, Keesing, Cronin and, most particularly, of the anthropologist Tim Ingold. I then proceed to develop a relationally grounded, phenomenological view of translation. This view privileges both the land and the work of languaging as key aspects of translation, inhabiting positions in the world, rather than constructing and mediating views of the world. The paper argues for a view of translation as a mode of perception, a sensory even empathic mode, a languaging response to phenomena, its primary relationship, not with culture and genealogy but as positionality - in and with the land and to develop towards a geopoetics of the taskscape of the translator. The paper makes use of a variety of media - visual image, performance, poetry, languages and prose.

4 November
Professor Andrew Ginger (Hispanic Studies, University of Stirling): Different but the same? Equivalent ideas during the origins of Atlantic Modernism in France and Latin America (1850-1870)

This paper will consider the parallels and analogies between innovations in the visual arts in the very different socio-economic contexts of France and Latin America at the dawn of modernité in the mid-nineteenth-century. It will ask to what extent apparent analogies are the result of direct transmission of ideas from France, and if so, how and why similar approaches to form and content could be applied in the Latin American context. But, perhaps more importantly, it will consider cases where there is no evidence of direct transmission of the most innovative artistic ideas, and yet similar styles appear to emerge simultaneously. In such instances, there is still evidence of the impact of earlier, more mainstream thinking, shared across the continents due to direct transmission. But these cases beg the question of how those common earlier ideas, developing in apparently very different contexts, could lead autonomously to similar formal innovations.

18 November
Professor Simon Biggs (Research Professor in Art, Edinburgh College of Art): From transculturation to transliteracy

What effect are the current profound changes in global communications, transport and demographics having on language, its readers and writers and all those defined through their engagement with and as a function of language? What happens to our identity when the means of communication and associated demographics shift? What is driving this? Is it technology, the migrations of people or a mixture of these factors?

Language is motile, polymorphic and hybrid. Illuminated manuscripts, graphic novels, the televisual and the web are all linguistic phenomena. The commonly held belief that the written word is the ultimate source of knowledge/power has never been the case. Don Ihde's 'expanded hermeneutics' proposes, as part of an expanded signification system, that what appear to be novel representations of phenomena and knowledge are, whilst not new, now apparent.

Fernando Ortiz's concept of 'transculturation' offers possible insights in relation to these questions. In a communications-saturated world of highly mobile peoples, we are all engaged in a complex interplay of cultural interactions and appropriations. Language, a technology fundamental to the human condition, is the primary means by which this process occurs. The demographic implications here give rise to the question: are we creating a common 'neo-pidgin' or are our cultures fragmenting further into linguistic ghettoes?

Does creative work with language, that employs digital media and necessarily exposes the dynamic processes of signification, lend itself to reflecting upon the technological, social and linguistic changes enveloping us? Does the notion of 'transliteracy' offer the possibility of reconciling cultural and linguistic differences whilst allowing difference to function, or is it an aspect of a bi-directional compacting and potentially dessicating dynamic?