Translating Translations Translators

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Seven-year-old Chula lives a carefree life in her gated community in Bogotá, but the threat of kidnappings, car bombs, and assassinations hover just outside her walls, where the godlike drug lord Pablo Escobar reigns, capturing the attention of the nation. “Simultaneously propulsive and poetic, reminiscent of Isabel Allende...Listen to this new author’s voice—she has something powerful to say.” —Entertainment Weekly When her mother hires Petrona, a live-in-maid from the city’s guerrilla-occupied neighborhood, Chula makes it her mission to understand Petrona’s mysterious ways. Petrona is a young woman crumbling under the burden of providing for her family as the rip tide of first love pulls her in the opposite direction. As both girls’ families scramble to maintain stability amidst the rapidly escalating conflict, Petrona and Chula find themselves entangled in a web of secrecy. Inspired by the author's own life, Fruit of the Drunken Tree is a powerful testament to the impossible choices women are often forced to make in the face of violence and the unexpected connections that can blossom out of desperation.

In this book, both beginning and experienced translators will find pragmatic techniques for dealing with problems of literary translation, whatever the original language. Certain challenges and certain themes recur in translation, whatever the language pair. This guide proposes to help the translator navigate through them. Written in a witty and easy to read style, the book’s hands-on approach will make it accessible to translators of any background. A significant portion of this Practical Guide is devoted to the question of how to go about finding an outlet for one’s translations.

"Why Translation Matters argues for the cultural importance of translation and for a more encompassing and nuanced appreciation of the translator's role. As the acclaimed translator Edith Grossman writes in her introduction, "My intention is to stimulate a new consideration of an area of literature that is too often ignored, misunderstood, or misrepresented." For Grossman, translation has a transcendent importance: "Translation not only plays its important traditional role as the means that allows us access to literature originally written in one of the countless languages we cannot read, but it also represents a concrete literary presence with the crucial capacity to ease and make more meaningful our relationships to those with whom we may not have had a connection before. Translation always helps us to know, to see from a different angle, to attribute new value to what once may have been unfamiliar. As nations and as individuals, we have a critical need for that kind of understanding and insight. The alternative is unthinkable"."--Jacket.

As the discipline of anthropology continues to chart a course along various turns (ontological, ethical, and otherwise), in this pathbreaking volume Carlo Severi and William Hanks return to the question of knowledge and translation as a theoretical and ethnographic guide for twenty-first century anthropology. Translation has played an important but equivocal role in the history of anthropology and linguistics. At least since Ferdinand de Saussure and Franz Boas, languages have been seen as systems whose differences make precise translation exceedingly difficult, if not impossible. Others have argued that, in purely abstract terms, translation between languages is in principle indeterminate. This collected volume suggests that the challenge posed by the constant confrontation of incommensurable paradigms, or worlds, may be the most""fertile ground for state-of-the-art ethnographic theory and practice. With contributions on topics that range from the philosophical to the ethnographic (with refelctions on themes as diverse as tourism in New Guinea, shamanism in the Amazon, the globally ubiquitous restaurant menu, and oral traditions in the Himalayas), this volume provides a new anthropological way to define translation, not only as a key technique for understanding ethnography, but also as a general epistemological principle. "

To most people, translation means making the words of one language understandable in another; but translation in a broader sense-seeing strangeness and incorporating it into one's understanding-is perhaps the earliest task of the human brain. This book illustrates the translation process in less-common contexts: cultural, religious, even the translation of pain. Its original contributions seek to trace human understanding of the self, of the other, and of the stranger by discovering how we bridge gaps within or between semiotic systems. Translation and Ethnography focuses on issues that arise when we attempt to make significant thematic or symbolic elements of one culture meaningful in terms of another. Its chapters cover a wide range of topics, all stressing the interpretive practices that enable the approximation of meaning: the role of differential power, of language and so-called world view, and of translation itself as a metaphor of many contemporary cross-cultural processes. The topics covered here represent a global sample of translation, ranging from Papua New Guinea to South America to Europe. Some of the issues addressed include postcolonial translation/transculturation from the perspective of colonized languages, as in the Mexican Zapatista movement; mis-translations of Amerindian conceptions and practices in the Amazon, illustrating the subversive potential of anthropology as a science of translation; Ethiopian oracles translating divine messages for the interpretation of believers; and dreams and clowns as translation media among the Gamk of Sudan. Anthropologists have long been accustomed to handling translation chains; in this book they open their diaries and show the steps they take toward knowledge. Translation and Ethnography raises issues that will shake up the most obdurate, objectivist translators and stimulate scholars in sociolinguistics, communication, ethnography, and other fields who face the challenges of conveying meaning across human boundaries.

The most comprehensive collection of perspectives on translation to date, this anthology features essays by some of the world's most skillful writers and translators, including Haruki Murakami, Alice Kaplan, Peter Cole, Eliot Weinberger, Forrest Gander, Clare Cavanagh, David Bellos, and José Manuel Prieto. Discussing the process and possibilities of their art, they cast translation as a fine balance between scholarly and creative expression. The volume provides students and professionals with much-needed guidance on technique and style, while affirming for all readers the cultural, political, and aesthetic relevance of translation. These essays focus on a diverse group of languages, including Japanese, Turkish, Arabic, and Hindi, as well as frequently encountered European languages, such as French, Spanish, Italian, German, Polish, and Russian. Contributors speak on craft, aesthetic choices, theoretical approaches, and the politics of global cultural exchange, touching on the concerns and challenges that currently affect translators working in an era of globalization. Responding to the growing popularity of translation programs, literature in translation, and the increasing need to cultivate versatile practitioners, this anthology serves as a definitive resource for those seeking a modern understanding of the craft.

This volume extends and deepens our understanding of Translator Studies by charting new territory in terms of theory, methods and concepts. The focus is on literary translators, their roles, identities, and personalities. The book introduces pertinent translator-centered approaches in four sections: historical-biographical studies, social-scientific and process-oriented methods, and approaches that use paratexts or translations to study literary translators. Drawing on a variety of concepts, such as identity, role, self, posture, habitus, and voice, the various chapters showcase forgotten literary translators and shed new light on some well-known figures; they examine literary translators not as functioning units but as human beings in their uniqueness. Literary Translator Studies as a subdiscipline of Translation Studies demonstrates how exploring the cultural, social, psychological, and cognitive facets of translatorial subjects contributes to a holistic understanding of translation.

This book begins by investigating, through the use of think-aloud protocols, the mental processes of students when they translate. The creative and successful processes observed can be used directly for teaching purposes, while the unsuccessful ones can serve to find out where remedial training is needed. The book then goes on to discuss methods for improving a translator's competence. The strategies offered are based on the pragmatic and semantic analysis of texts from a functional point of view, and they include such practical matters as the use of dictionaries and the evaluation of translations and error analysis. The book is intended for teachers in translator-training institutions, but it can also be used by students for self-training.