Abstracts
Abstracts and Biographies
Spencer Allman – ‘Lost lexis’: the translation into English of the Finnish word ‘SUURI’
The sheer size of the English language’s vocabulary can be a somewhat daunting prospect for learners, writers and other users of the language. In terms of grammatical formations, English does not feature the same scale of complications found in most – if not all – other European languages, but the language’s lexical wealth, for example in the area of adjectival synonyms, presents opportunities, but also challenges, to those who have to write in English as part of their day-to-day work, be they native speakers of the language or otherwise. This also applies to translators into English.
Researchers in the field of corpus linguistics and in other areas have proposed several differences in the language of translated English texts compared with original, authored ones. For example, it has been suggested that translated English texts are ‘simpler’ than authored texts: the lexical density of translated texts is less great than in original ones. This talk takes this idea further by postulating that another feature of translated English is its tendency towards lexical impoverishment. Put in plain terms, the translator into English does not exploit the full range of lexical possibilities in English during the process of translation.
This idea is developed in the talk by mapping possible translations of the Finnish word ‘suuri’, meaning ‘large’ and some words synonymous with that. The contention is that ‘suuri’ is normally translated using a very narrow range of synonyms resulting in a text which may seem less ‘colourful’ than if it had been written in English originally. This is due to several factors: the time pressures which frequently apply to commercial translations, translators being ‘led’ by source texts, text type, etc. As a result, much English lexis gets ‘lost’.
The implication for translators into English is that it may be an area of translational development for them to be more adventurous lexically when translating into English.
The talk focuses on commercial, rather than literary translations. The examples given are in the context of Finnish-English translation, though the general principles apply to translation into English from any language.
Spencer Allman, who was born in London, has been a freelance translator of Finnish into English for 18 years. Before that he taught English to business professionals in the UK, Finland, Sweden and Italy. He is also a tutor on the University of Birmingham’s MA in Translation Studies programme.
Eva-Maria Arntz – Language up to date – How to stay in touch with the Scandinavian languages
This seminar provides participants with hints and ideas on how to refresh and retain their skills in Nordic languages even while living outside Scandinavia. Participants learn which communities and strategies can be used in order to keep in touch with a Nordic language both in speech and in writing.
In a second part we will focus on linguistic traps, formalities and cultural peculiarities and go in depth with some of the latest trends among the Nordic languages. Is there a reliable standard? Where do I find help? Participants will have the opportunity to test their skills and be introduced to some important items, which help to preserve the ability to express oneself in Danish and Swedish for example.
This workshop is held by one of our Danish language specialists and relevant for translators, interpreters and other professionals, who use a Nordic language in their everyday work, but not live in the Nordic country in question.
Eva-Maria Arntz is from Scandinavian Language Service I/S
Karin Axelsson – Tag questions in translations between English and Swedish
Tag questions consisting of an anchor clause and a grammatically dependent question tag, as in (1), are a typical feature of spoken British English (Tottie & Hoffmann 2006:288).
(1) You can see to it, can’t you? (ESPC-EO, DF1)
Tag questions are, however, also found in fiction. As most other languages do not have gram-matically dependent question tags, and often use invariant tags or other structures such as mo-dal particles for similar functions, it is interesting to look at the translations of tag questions from and into English.
It has been shown earlier that there are considerably fewer tag questions in English fiction text translated from Swedish and Norwegian than in equivalent original English fiction text (Axelsson 2006:10).
This paper looks at the Swedish translations of English tag questions, and compares them to the sources of tag questions found in English translations from Swedish. The data, 119 Swedish translations of English tag questions and 48 Swedish sources of English tag questions, come from the fiction parts of The English-Swedish Parallel Corpus (ESPC).
The Swedish translations of English tag questions are quite distinct for three types of tag questions:
1. reversed polarity question tags after declarative anchors, as in example (1)
2. constant polarity question tags after declarative anchors, as in (2):
(2) You have, have you? (ESPC-EO, RD1)
3. question tags after imperative anchors, as in (3):
(3) Make us a cup of coffee, will you? (ESPC-EO, DL1)
Constant polarity question tags constitute about a tenth of the tag questions in both the English originals and the English translations from Swedish. Typical Swedish equivalents are interjections and the modal particle alltså.
There are ten tag questions with imperative anchors in the English originals, but none in the English translations from Swedish. The Swedish translations are mostly phrases which might as well be translated into please.
The invariant tag eller hur is the most common Swedish translation of English reversed polarity question tags after declarative anchors, which seems to be a clear overuse, whereas the modal particle väl is the most common Swedish source for translations into English tag questions. About a fifth of all Swedish translations are “double” in that there is a combination of a modal particle and an invariant tag, a sentence type never found in the Swedish original texts in the ESPC.
Karin Axelsson is a Ph.D. student at the English Department of Göteborg University, Sweden. Her dissertation will compare the use and function of tag questions in BrE fiction and BrE real-life conversation, using data from the British National Corpus. She is also doing research on the typology of question tags and the translation of tag questions from and into English.
Klaus Bischoff – Nordic languages in practice: Pan-Scandinavian dreams and the reality in the 21st century
Whatever happened to the idea of Scandinavians (Danes, Swedes and Norwegians) having immediate access to understanding each other? A provocative stance or a real problem? Nordic co-operation, an ideal of the past? This paper discusses:
How the EU deals with interpreting and translating between Danish, Finnish and
Swedish
A “matter of fact” statement with figures and a PP presentation of how (by way of
example) the DG SCIC handles this challenge
The reality of spoken Nordic languages in the EU institutions
The principle of respect for cultural identity and language — not just in Scandinavia and
Northern Europe, but everywhere in the EU
Where will this lead us in the North of Europe. Will we still be using our native
languages in the future? In contacts with our neighbours, internationally or only as a
regional deviation from standard English ? Will English become a widespread, common
communication base of last resort?
Klaus Bischoff has a cand.mag. in Nordic languages and literature plus German from the
University of Århus, Denmark. European Commission conference interpreter 1981 - 2007 (EN-DE- FR-NL-SV into DA); seconded by DG Interpretation to training and recruitment of university postgraduates in the three Baltic States 1998-2004. Since June 2007 DG Translation language officer in Copenhagen to promote multilingualism in Denmark.
Victoria Cribb – On translating Skugga-Baldur by Sjón from Icelandic to English
In 2005 a slim novella by the Icelandic author Sjón was awarded the prestigious Nordic Council Literature Prize. Praised for its terse, poetic style and skilfully handled presentation of a timely ethical question, the book has since been translated into fifteen languages, including my English version, due out in March 2008.
At first glance Skugga-Baldur appears a simple story, the odd but sweet little tale of a disabled girl, set against a picturesque Icelandic backdrop. But readers who know Sjón in his other incarnations as surrealist poet, lyricist for Björk and author of experimental novels, will be on the alert for a work of infinite complexity. The author himself has called his book a “hypertext”, a hotbed of intertextual links.
The challenges facing the translator begin before we get beyond the cover, with an untranslatable title and an additional pun. The Icelandic word skuggabaldur has a dual meaning, signifying both a malign creature of folklore, half-cat, half-vixen, and consequently a person of sinister character. Although the word crops up nowhere in the actual story, it is hinted at, significantly, in the name of the antihero, Reverend Baldur Skuggason. This is only the beginning of the translator’s woes. Throughout the story names, whether of people or places, are imbued with significance. But leaving aside the title for the moment, we turn to the first word of the novella; more semantic disorientation ensues. Icelandic mórauðar tóur, literally “peat-red vixens” are confusingly not a reference to the European red fox but an Arctic fox of a colour known in English as “blue”.
For such a short book, Skugga-Baldur, or The Blue Fox, presents the translator with a disproportionate number of headaches: the 19th-century Icelandic setting with its concomitant issues of historical dialect and unfamiliar culture, Sjón’s idiosyncratic style, the bleak humour, symbolism and allusions at every turn, culturally bound references, poems and puns, and above all the winter landscape with its inimitably rich vocabulary for snow. Inevitably, much has to be sacrificed in translation, but does enough that is essential remain?
Skugga-Baldur deserves to reach a wider audience for its delicate and unsentimental, even darkly humorous, handling of its central moral message. This is an account of my attempt to help it on its way.
Victoria Cribb works as a freelance translator from Icelandic to English and currently also teaches Icelandic to undergraduates in London and Cambridge. She has an MA in Icelandic and Scandinavian Studies from UCL, a BPhil in Icelandic from the University of Iceland, and lived and worked in Iceland for a number of years as a publisher, journalist and translator.
Pernilla Danielsson – Jag höll på att skriva (kärleksfulla): A closer look at the use of the progressive form in translations between Swedish and English
This is a corpus-based study of translations of Swedish verb phrases into English progressive (or ongoing) form. Scandinavian languages are said not to have an equivalent of the English progressive form, making it a problem for Scandinavian learners of English. This study, however, is not concerned about the learners’ problems, but instead focuses on how professional language users, the translators, handle these cases. In English, we recognise progressive form by the use of the lemma BE + VERBing (any form of the lemma be followed by a verb ending with –ing). The closest equivalent we have in Swedish to a progressive form is the phrase ‘HÅLLA på att + VERB’ (any form of the verb HÅLLA followed by ‘på att’ plus a verb, for example, ‘jag håller på att diska’, eng. ‘I am washing up’). Interestingly, the Swedish phrase ‘HÅLLA på att’ is ambiguous and can also be used to denote catastrophic or ‘almost’ events (for example, jag höll på att falla, eng. I almost fell). The data shows that these almost-events can most often be disambiguated by the fact that they are only found using höll på att (past tense). In this study, we will look closer at the English translations of Swedish sentences with ‘HÅLLA på att’-phrases in a parallel corpus. A subset of the progressive forms found in the English translations will also be investigated in order to identify how they were originally dealt with in the Swedish texts. The data is taken from a sentence-aligned parallel Swedish English corpus, based on four Swedish novels, and consisting of 1 million words in each language.
Dr . Pernilla Danielsson is the Academic Director of the Centre for Corpus Research at Birmingham University. After receiving her PhD as a computational linguist from Gothenburg University, Sweden, she has spent the last 7 years working with corpus linguistics in the UK. She is currently writing a book on ‘Exploring a Language Corpus’ together with Judith Lamie, to be published by Cambridge University Press in 2008. Together with Kristin Ewins she is editing a collection on Selma Lagerlöf’s work, to be published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing in 2009. Previous publications include ‘Meaningful Texts’, edited together with Geoff Barnbrook and Michaela Mahlberg, Continuum 2005 in which she also has an article on extracting meaningful units from a Chinese English parallel corpus.
Eric Dickens – Macaronics and Regionalism When Translating Finland-Swedish Literature
This paper describes practical translation problems encountered when translating the macaronic and regional aspects of Finland-Swedish literature, i.e. texts that are there openly or subliminally in a language other than Swedish. The languages involved are Finnish and, in older literature, Russian or German.
Regional allusions from certain parts of Finland and geographical pointers are also a minefield for translators.
The brief general introduction mentions these aspects in other, non-Scandinavian languages, such as Yiddish in North America (e.g. Yezierska), Afrikaans in South Africa, French and dialect in Flanders. The flattening of the Low German dialogue in Thomas Mann’s “Buddenbrooks” will also be mentioned.
The Finland-Swedish dimension will principally involve the works of five authors: Jac. Ahrenberg (1847-1914; Viborg/ Helsinki); Elmer Diktonius (1896-1961; Helsinki); Lars Huldén (born 1926; Ostrobothnia), Kjell Westö (born 1961; Helsinki) and Robert Åsbacka (born 1961; Ostrobothnia/Sweden).
For architect and prose author Ahrenberg, the problem of semi-lingualism stood central. He was brought up in multilingual Viborg, then part of Finland. His story “Utan modersmål” tackles the sadly mangled mixture of languages spoken by Fritz Nikolaievich von Dravershausen Kaporien whose very names exemplify his mixed ancestry.
Diktonius came from a working class Helsinki background and was virtually bilingual. His novel “Janne Kubik” and stories “Medborgare I Finland” are partly set in the Finnish working district of Berghäll / Kallio.
Lars Huldén has written a large amount of poetry in standard Swedish. But what is the translator into English to do with a collection such as “Heim/Hem” written “i munsalamål och högsvenska” in parallel text? Most translation strategies involve a degree of loss.
Kjell Westö still faces Diktonius’ dilemma, but the problem is exacerbated as working class Helsinki is now overwhelmingly Finnish-speaking. Westö’s problem is dialogue spoken in Finnish in a novel written in Swedish. For readers in Sweden, Diktonius’ macaronic strategies are no longer acceptable.
Finally, Robert Åsbacka in his novel “Fallstudie” has to tackle place reference. A Finland-Swede moves to Sweden. Which place names are in Finland, which in Sweden is obvious to Scandinavians; not so to the English reader. The language of the Norwegian character Øystein is, however, normalised by the author.
Eric Dickens (born 1953) is principally a translator of Estonian literature (5 books). During the 1970s, he did however, live for three years among the Finland-Swedish population of Finland and has picked up their accent. Owing to his reading knowledge of several other languages he is well acquainted with texts involving mixed language.
Anna Elgemark – Textual meaning in translations between English and Swedish
How do I optimize? What do I give priority to? These are two major questions underlying the work of the translator. The choices being made in the translation process contribute to create meaning in the translated text. Different choices result in different meanings. The choices are not unlimited, however, but depend largely on a number of factors such as the cultural context, the environment, the situation, the linguistic systems, text type constraints etc., what Chesterman (2002:54) refers to as the translator’s cognition, the translation event and the socio-cultural constraints, and Toury (1995:249) as the translation act, the translation event and the socio-cultural norms. But when working with translations of texts, what is really given priority to?
According to Matthiessen (2001: 94) translators tend to focus predominantly on the ideational meaning i.e. the content of the message, whereas they may not always be aware of the significance of the textual meaning, i.e. the organization of the message. In Systemic Functional Linguistics the textual metafunction plays a significant role in the creation of meaning in language. Two central concepts are Theme and Rheme. Theme is the first constituent of the clause, what we choose as the point of departure of our message (Halliday & Matthiessen 2004:64), whereas Rheme refers to the rest of the clause. Fries (1994:234) found the term Rheme too inclusive and coined the term N-Rheme for the last constituent of the clause or clause complex. The N-Rheme is important in building the textual structure of the text as it usually contains newsworthy information.
In this presentation I will demonstrate the importance of acknowledging the textual metafunction in the translation process. I will present examples of different ways in which the textual structure has been altered in the translation process and discuss some of the possible causes as well as some problems involved in conveying the textual meaning in translations between English and Swedish. The examples are taken from non-fiction texts in the English-Swedish parallel corpus. The study aims to raise an awareness of the importance of textual meaning in order to make it possible for the translator to reflect about it when making a certain choice in the translation process.
Anna Elgemark is a PhD-student at Göteborg University, the Department of English. She is writing a Thesis on N-Rhemes in translations using texts from the English-Swedish Parallel Corpus.
Irene Elmerot and Rawoens – Contrastive linguistics and translation studies with a focus on Swedish and Danish
In this workshop we would like to discuss a few topics relating to the different degrees of transparency between two closely related languages, viz. Swedish and Danish. The relationship between these languages has been the subject of numerous studies such as e.g. Christensen & Christensen (2004) and Lindgren (2001). These studies either analyze apparent differences, viz. clear syntactic or semantic differences, and less apparent but nevertheless important differences, such as pragmatic or stylistic ones, or concentrate on the question of translatability between these two languages.
In this workshop the approach is two-fold. On the one hand, we welcome contributions from the area of contrastive linguistics where similarities and differences between these languages are highlighted. On the other, we would like to include topics relating to translation from Swedish to Danish and vice versa and even from e.g. English to Swedish or Danish. More general discussions e.g. relating to language policies in Sweden and Denmark (e.g. regarding EU-translations, the use of sex-neutral pronouns) are also welcomed.
Topics of interest include:
• Contrastively relevant differences between Swedish and Danish, both syntactic (e.g. phrasal verbs) and semantic (e.g. false friends)
• How does the relationship between languages from similar (e.g. Swedish to Danish or English to Danish) or different (e.g. Italian to Danish) language groups affect the translation process?
References
Christensen, Lisa & Robert Zola Christensen (2004). “60 svensk-danska syntaxskillnader”. In: På godt dansk. Festskrift til Henrik Galberg Jacobsen i anledning af hans 60 års fødselsdag den 4. februar 2004. Wessel & Huitfeldts 2004, 61–72
Lindgren, Birgitta (2001). ”Guts och ruter – från danska till svenska”, In: Allén et al. (eds) Gäller stam, suffix och ord Fetskrift till Martin Gellerstam den 15 oktober 2001. Göteborgs Universitet, 266 – 275
The workshop organizers have experience from working with both Swedish and Danish. Irene Elmerot is a freelance translator and proof-reader since 2001, working with EU translations from both EN and DA into Swedish as well as proofreading of a DA–SV pocket dictionary, amongst other things. Gudrun Rawoens is a post-doctoral academic researcher and has conducted linguistic research on Swedish and Danish mainly focusing on causative constructions.
Tina Engström, Helena Johansson, Erik Skuggevik, Kenn Nakata Steffensen – Substandard Subtitling – No Longer A Laughing Matter
Most people watching foreign language television, DVDs and films at the cinema will no doubt have come across some rather odd – and sometimes hilarious – subtitles. There was a time when this could perhaps have been seen as occasional, unfortunate – but nonetheless slightly amusing – mistakes. Today, however, poor subtitling has almost become the norm.
Subtitles are amongst the most read texts in the Nordic countries. Traditionally they have therefore been of a very high quality. Recent developments in the entertainment industry – e.g. the introduction of DVDs, the ever-increasing number of TV channels – together with advances in software technology, have had a detrimental effect on the quality of subtitles. Subtitling was once regarded as an essential part of bringing a film or programme to an international audience, and therefore considered a highly skilled craft; now it has almost become an incidental part of the post-production – something that should be done as cheaply and quickly as possible. Experienced subtitlers are now often being replaced by inexperienced and/or unqualified translators, who rarely have the linguistic and intercultural skills required to transmit audiovisual content to a discerning audience.
Our presentation will focus on:
• how the quality of subtitling to and from the Nordic languages is rapidly deteriorating
• the negative effect this has on the enjoyment and understanding of foreign films/programmes
• the potentially damaging effect it has on the audiences' understanding and usage of both the source and the target languages
• potential ways of reversing this trend so that subtitling in the Nordic languages could regain the respect and the high quality the audiences expect and deserve
Tina Engström (Swedish) has been a freelance subtitler for 15 years, working on many different films/programmes for both commercial and corporate clients. She teaches Swedish at various London colleges and lectures in audiovisual translation at University of Surrey.
Helena Johansson (Swedish) has been a freelance subtitler/proofreader for nearly 10 years, working on a wide variety of TV programmes, DVDs and films. She is currently doing an MA
in Advanced Scandinavian Translation Studies at University College London.
Erik Skuggevik (Norwegian) is an experienced freelance subtitler, who also lectures in audiovisual translation at the Universities of Surrey and Westminster. He is currently pursuing his PhD in audiovisual translation and communication theories at University College London.
Kenn Nakata Steffensen (Danish) is a partner in the consultancy Cultural Meanings. He is a political analyst, cultural and language consultant, translator, interpreter and subtitler. He has published and lectured on Japanese and international politics and subtitling.
B.J. Epstein – In Name Only?: Translating Names in Children's Literature
At first glance, it seems easy enough to understand what the word “name” means. Quite simply, it is a designation for an object, whether that object be a person, animal, location, book, or anything else. A name could be said to be just another word. In fact, however, there are many interesting issues in regard to how and why things are named. A word represents a sign, a name is a label – but with what sort of meaning and how much meaning do we imbue each label and why? What connotations do names offer, whether in “real life” or in fiction, and how can this be translated?
In this paper, I will discuss how proper names are used and translated in children's literature, using examples from four of Roald Dahl's books and the thirteen books in Lemony Snicket's Series of Unfortunate Events and all of the Swedish translations of these texts. I will analyse seven translatorial strategies to see which ones are used in the translation of proper names in children's books and why.
B.J. Epstein is a PhD student in translation studies at Swansea University in Wales, researching the translation of children’s literature. She is also a writer, editor, and translator from Swedish to English.
Janet Garton – Ibsen in Different (Dis)Guises
This paper will look at the various ways in which Henrik Ibsen’s plays have been translated from his original written scripts. Taking my point of departure in the three categories of translation suggested by Roman Jacobson in “On Linguistic Aspects of Translation”, I shall examine how Ibsen’s works have fared in the process of interlingual, intralingual and intersemiotic translation.
I shall begin by considering “translation proper” or interlingual translation (in this case translation from Norwegian to English), and the ways in which the nuances of the text have been conveyed, confused or lost by different translators. I shall then look at some examples of intralingual translation, focusing on ways in which Ibsen’s original text has been changed – modified, updated, adapted – whilst remaining in Norwegian. Finally I shall examine intersemiotic translation, what happens when a drama moves from being a written script to being a stage performance or a film. What happens to Ibsen’s detailed descriptions of setting and gesture, his carefully embedded subtext, his subtle indications of character and motive, when interpreted by actors, directors, designers? How far is it possible to move away from the original text and its expressed intentions and still call it a work by Ibsen? Discussion will focus on Fru Inger til Østråt, Et dukkehjem, Hedda Gabler, Rosmersholm, Fruen fra havet.
Janet Garton is Professor of European Literature at the University of East Anglia, Norwich. Associate Dean for Postgraduate Learning and Teaching in Arts and Humanities Faculty. Editor of Scandinavica, an international journal of Scandinavian studies, since 1990. Managing Director of Norvik Press, a publishing house devoted to publishing translations of Scandinavian literature and critical works on Scandinavian literature.
Jan Ragnar Hagland – On translating Icelandic sagas – the problem of scaldic poetry in particular
As is well known saga texts are, very often, characterized by their frequent inclusion of scaldic poems– a textual feature that usually constitutes an integral part of the saga narratives. For the translator of sagas from Old Norse or Old Icelandic into various Nordic languages – as well as into other languages for that matter – this implies some rather specific challenges and problems. The difficulties of translation scaldic verses are, to say the least, considerable. Is it at all possible to translate them, we may well ask. I propose, in consequence, to present a paper in which I shall try to bring into the open and discuss problems of how to translate these highly technical parts of saga texts. In so doing an overview of translatory practices over the years will be offered. A striking feature frequently met in earlier saga translations is the omission of scaldic verses included in the source language texts. Even such drastic solutions will be highlighted and discussed. In order not to exceed time limits the illustration of earlier practices and translatory ideologies behind them should be, I suggest, restricted mainly to translations into the Norwegian.
Jan Ragnar Hagland is a professor of Old Norse Philology in the Department of Scandinavian Studies and Comparative Literature at Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). He is also a member of The Norwegian Association of Literary Translators. Has translated sagas and legal texts from Old Norse into modern Norwegian (nynorsk) - Fostbrœðra saga, Njáls saga, Gisla Saga Súrssonar, Landnámabók among many others
Anne-Charlotte Harvey – Interpreter or Dramaturg: Translating the world of Ibsen and Strindberg theatre translation
The Nordic world of the 19th century is today foreign country, not only to the English-speaking world but also to the Nordic countries themselves. Much has happened to transform the societies into which Ibsen and Strindberg were born, in which they functioned, against which they rebelled, and which they assumed—if not directly, by choice of subject matter, always indirectly by concern for their reception in the homeland. From agricultural, poor countries fighting for a “Nordic” identity and shunned by unconventional artists, to industrialized Americanized welfare states nurturing avant-garde art: Norway and Sweden have indeed come a long way.
The changes that have taken place are of course in part linguistic. Judging from the current national editions of Strindberg and Ibsen, Swedes and Norwegians are expected to require glossaries to be able to read the plays in the original. But more than so, the changes are certainly social and cultural. A mere glossary may not suffice to “read” a text from the 1870s today. The question arises: should we modernize or “translate” Ibsen’s Gengangere (1880) or Strindberg’s Fadren (1887) into, e.g., nynorsk or modern Swedish? Into cartoon versions? Into Rinkeby Swedish? How sacred is the original text in its own country?
When it comes to translations into English, the reader is never facing the original but one or a series of gradually updated, adjusted, “modern” versions, which helps keep the linguistic gap between the text and the reader bridgeable. On the other hand, the social and cultural gap, which has always been present in translation into English, has widened with time.
In other words, the farther we get in space and time from the origin, whether we are English, Norwegian or Swedish, the greater the need for an informed reading of all texts by Ibsen and Strindberg.
But what of the dramas, which are mere “commanding form” or blueprints for action, to be further interpreted and fleshed out by a team of theatre practitioners? The translation, the informed reading resulting in a text in another language, must communicate the play’s social and cultural sphere, associations, assumptions, value systems—Bourdieu’s capital—as well as the lexical content in such a way that those responsible for the final result, the production on stage, have maximum access to the text and the playwright’s world reverberating in that text.
My paper will deal with strategies of translation for the stage that circumvent some of the traps set for the theatre translator and mobilize the creative energies of not only the director and designers but also the actors of a given production. In the process, they are led to explore the playwright’s world. My examples are drawn from actual work with productions of Ibsen and Strindberg plays at various levels in the United States, from professional Broadway shows (Hedda Gabler) to experimental community and university productions (A Dream Play, Ghosts) and concert readings (Abu Casem’s Slippers, The Crown Bride).
Anne-Charlotte Harvey is Professor Emerita of Theatre at the School of Theatre, Television and Film at San Diego State University in California. She is active as a translator/dramaturg, with particular emphasis on Ibsen, Strindberg, and Chekhov., and a member of ALTA, STiNA, LMDA, Strindbergssällskapet, and board member of The August Strindberg Society of Los Angeles (TASSLA) and the Ibsen Society of America (ISA).
Raila Hekkanen – Sociological context of the translation of Finnish literature into English during three different periods of time
In this presentation, I intend to discuss the sociological context of the translation of Finnish literature into English during three different periods of time, the 1920s, late 1950s and 1990s. The translation of Finnish into English has rarely been discussed in academic circles but provides a very revealing view of the situation of Nordic literatures (perhaps not including the more established Swedish and Danish) as minority literatures attempting to enter a majority literary polysystem. The three time periods have been selected on the basis of the quantity of translations, which was significantly higher during these periods than otherwise during the 20th century. They also provide three very different examples of sociological translation networks, all of which are interesting in their own right. The first period is characterised by strong plans by the Finnish state to promote the translation of Finnish literature into different European languages to improve and consolidate the recipient cultures’ knowledge of the young minority nation, while the second provides an example of the powerfully market-driven import of translations from Finnish into the English-speaking countries. At the same time, it also demonstrates the effect this had on the features of the translated texts, and calls into question different notions of translation quality. The third time period demonstrates recent developments, but also shows the wide range of practices that still persist.
The theoretical frameworks of the presentation are primarily descriptive translation studies, polysystem theory and actor-network theory. However, these will not be discussed at greater depth, given the constraints of time. The presentation will be set within a clear descriptive framework.
Raila Hekkanen is a postgraduate student at the University of Helsinki, Finland, researching the translation of Finnish literature into English 1945–1995, its reception and translation strategies. She is also a translator of specialised medical texts.
Amanda Hopkinson – The Politics and Policies of Literary Translation
How literary translation works in contemporary Britain, and who pays. The role of the government and the European Community's Cultural Commission; the Arts and the British Councils; publishers and funders. That of the literary translators themselves and the agencies and associations that represent them (a brief tour of the Translators' Association and the Society of Authors; within Europe through CEATL and RECIT; inter-continentally through the FIT and UNESCO). The way in which this maps onto a deeply divided society: the meta-language of ‘multi-pluralism' and ‘cultural diversity' that denies recognition to the wealth of languages spoken in the primary schools of big cities. The mismatch between the linguistic skills of new minorities and the dearth of language teaching to the Anglophone majority. Discussion of the cultural – and specifically literary – outcomes.
For the past four years, Amanda Hopkinson has been the director of the British Centre for Literary Translation, based at the University of East Anglia, and a centre for research, training and practice in literary translation. Before then she was the international literature officer for Arts Council, England and a senior research fellow at Cardiff University. She is also a literary translator, principally of works from Latin America and Europe, translating out of Spanish, Portuguese and French, and writes extensively on Latin American photography. Her most recent translations are the novels Malvinas Requiem by Rodolfo Fogwill and Dead Horsemeat and Lorraine Connection by Dominique Manotti. Poetry translations this year include poems by the Argentine author Tomas Eloy Martinez for Patagonia and by the Angolan Conceicao Lima for the Words without Borders website. Her most recent photography monographs are those on the Peruvian/amerindian photographer Martin Chambi and the Mexican Manuel Alvarez Bravo. She is currently writing A History of Photography in Mexico .
Britta Kallevang – A close reading of Trilogy by Finnish postmodern poet, Pentti Saarikoski
For this paper I will conduct a close reading of Trilogy by Finnish postmodern poet, Pentti Saarikoski, translated by Finnish-American postmodern poet and translator, Anselm Hollo. Considering texts by Jacques Derrida and Walter Benjamin on translation, influences Hollo says inform his translations, and assessing what other academics have written on Hollo’s translations of Saarikoski, I will begin to approach questions regarding the transformation of the text that occurs as it is being translated, as the translation is being read, and the affects of that transformation. A significant question I will address is how Hollo’s translation of Saarikoski’s poetry, especially from a threatened, or minor, language, serves to preserve the history, culture and expression, as the author intended, when he was writing from that Nordic space?
The many layers of the intangible ‘stuff,’ the detritus, that is a product of the translation process (time, distance, perspective, language and culture differences), has the potential to color the poem’s meaning, but can also open the text beyond its original translation. In what manner is Saarikoski present in the end? If author and his translator connect through the translation, do the continents from which they write connect as well? Finland and America certainly connect for Hollo. What about his readers? It seems the phenomenon of a reincarnated moment in poetry can only occur if a deep connection between reader and translation exists.
In the case of Saarikoski and Hollo, does Hollo experience a more intimate, more enlightened relationship with Saarikoski than his readers do? If so, how necessarily removed are readers of the translation from the original text? Will they feel the postwar tension Saarikoski writes about between the Soviet Union and the United States? Will they feel it as Hollo does?
When does the translation process stop? Where does it begin? Additionally, I will focus on the process of translation itself, the living poem, in hopes of revealing the dynamic conversation between Hollo and Saarikoski as it exists in the realm of the rewritten, written upon, the rebirthed.
Britta Kallevang received her MFA in Writing and Poetics at Naropa University in Boulder, CO, where she studied translation and poetry under Anselm Hollo. She is now a student in the Scandinavian Studies Master’s program at the University of Washington in Seattle.
Karita Kerkkä– On Subtitling Name Calling in Crime Films
One of the subtitler’s aims is to create an illusion of reality or fictious world in the film with language but under restricted circumstances, i.e. lack of time and space. Subtitling is a challenge since subtitler needs to compress the contents and often also compress by linguistic means. It is often by linguistic variation the personalities are characterised in the original dialogue in the film. In subtitling a part of variation in the original dialogue vanishes when a translator needs to compress and balance between the most central contents of a film, linguistic variation and film viewers possibility to concentrate at the same time on the one hand on subtitles and on the other hand picture and sound in order to get an enjoyable experience. It is important that subtitles, picture and sound together create a meaningful whole. In spite of the need to compress, translators aim is to create an illusion of varied language that actually has been used in the original dialogue. For creating this illusion, it is often enough to pick up a couple of characteristic linguistic features, so that reading subtitles does not demand extra attention of the film viewer.
In this paper, I focus on how translators of Swedish crime films have translated utterances that include somebody calling someone names. These kinds of utterances are essential in crime films, because they e.g. transmit emotions or atmospheres, not only by means of sound, tone or accent, but also diverse names, such as English you fucking idiot or Swedish ditt jävla kräk. I describe translators’ choices and how subtitles show differences or features between characters, for example between crime investigators and criminals. The Finnish subtitles are compared to the original Swedish dialogue and also to Norwegian and Danish subtitles. In this study, I intend to capture what kinds of strategies there are used in order to create an illusion of different personalities and how the choices made by translators contribute to the picture of characters.
Karita Kerkkä teaches translation and interpreting at Department of Translation Studies, University of Helsinki, courses mainly dealing with translation from Swedish into Finnish. She is a PhD student, studying subtitling in Swedish crime films and aiming at her special interest at the moment in subtitling crime related utterances in Finnish, Norwegian and Danish.
Jannika Lassus – Similarities and differences between social insurance brochures in Finland and Sweden. An analysis of the influence of translation and other text production on interpersonal relations in the texts.
When talking about Finland and Sweden from a Swedish linguistic point of view, many Swedish-speaking Finns comment on the differences between Swedish used in Finland (Finland-Swedish) and Swedish used in Sweden (Sweden-Swedish). However, seen from a global point of view the two countries are similar, Northern European welfare countries, and there are no big differences between the two varieties of Swedish. Nevertheless, I ask what similarities and differences can be found between Finland-Swedish and Sweden-Swedish brochures from social insurance institutions in the interaction between the institution and the reader/client, and within institutional text production?
My present thesis work focuses on brochures from the social insurance institutions in Finland and Sweden. The brochures give information for parents and parents-to-be. The study analyses 12 brochures and 16 fact sheets in Swedish, collected during 2003–2006. The analysis is both quantitative and qualitative, and the aim is to look at the written interaction and communication in the brochures. I analyse, among other things, this brochure genre, and how the institution addresses the reader and mentions the institution, and the participant roles of the institution and reader in the interaction. The overall methodological frame is systemic-functional linguistics (Halliday & Matthiessen 2004, Holmberg & Karlsson 2006), used together with theories from Bakhtin (1986 [1952-53]) on language and dialogism, and from Bhatia (2004) on genres.
In the paper that I am proposing, I will talk about my findings on what similarities and differences on different levels (ideational, interpersonal and textual) can be found between the Finland-Swedish and Sweden-Swedish brochures, and how the text production practices of the two institutions Försäkringskassan and Folkpensionsanstalten clearly influence the brochures, for instance on the interpersonal level. The brochures in the study have been written directly in Swedish, translated, or revised based on previous translations. The paper will consider the Finnish brochures, but the main emphasis lies on the Swedish brochures as Swedish texts.
It is obvious that the brochures differ in terms of addressing the reader, mentioning the institution and using different terms for the benefits and participants involved. The similarities include for instance the overall information strategies (brochure printing in format A5, services on the internet) and varying degree of intertextuality with previous brochures and laws on social security benefits.
Jannika Lassus is a doctoral student at the University of Helsinki, department of Scandinavian languages and literature. She currently gets her funding from her employer, the Society of Swedish literature. The thesis work analyses Swedish brochures to parents from the social insurance institutions in Finland and Sweden, Folkpensionsanstalten and Försäkringskassan. Besides doing research and teaching at the university, she also works occasionally as a translator (Finnish-Swedish) and proofreader (Swedish).
Rika Lesser – Poetry and its Translation: Forms of Form
Like many second-generation Americans, I grew up in a household that was basically monolingual. My parents sometimes spoke a secret language they did not entirely command (Yiddish), and they recited prayers in a language they did not comprehend (Hebrew). When I was eight years old I was sent to an afterschool school we called cheder (Hebrew for “room”) and was given instruction in Yiddish for a year. The seed must have been planted. After five years of French in junior high and high school, having devoured all of Hermann Hesse available in English at the time (1969), I demanded to learn German. It was arranged that I begin study at Brooklyn College – the City University of New York was still tuition-free then – which happened to be across the street from my high school. I was a “science jock” back then, and I thought I would continue studying math and the natural sciences like my dad and my two elder sisters. This was not to be. As an early Yale “co-ed” (class of 1974), I dropped out of the sciences, I stopped singing and practicing piano, but I did learn how to read and write, and I have continued to practice the two ever since.
The first book I published, at the end of 1975, was a selection of poems by Rainer Maria Rilke entitled Holding Out , “printed by hand . . . during the spring and summer of the centennial of Rilke's birth,” one of Harry Duncan's Abattoir Editions. The recipient of the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship and a grant from Yale to further my studies in Swedish literature, I had read proofs that winter living in Göteborg, where I would stay up “ ensam i tysta natten” writing or translating Ekelöf; in February I escaped to London for a month of theater and proper (i.e., non-Scandinavian) English. (The Lowell fellowship stipulated that I not return to America for twelve months and write at least three poems.)
Princeton republished my Rilke as Rilke: Between Roots in 1986, and in 1993 brought out my selected Sonnevi : A Child Is Not a Knife. Ekelöf's Guide to the Underworld came out from another university press and stayed in print for nearly two decades. My own books of poetry appeared among and between all these and other translations – of German and Swedish poetry, novels, and works for young people. My own collections of poetry are four: Etruscan Things (1983), All We Need of Hell (1995), Growing Back (1997), and Questions of Love: New & Selected Poems (forthcoming later this year). Recently I served as the Swedish-language editor for the Graywolf anthology of New European Poets, also to be published later this year.
In the workshop I will touch on the different modes of translation that Dryden termed (and no one has named better) metaphrase, paraphrase, and imitation . Translation's eternal questions will pose themselves: Does one remain “faithful” to the word or the spirit? How is translating the dead (or the classics) different from translating the living (our contemporaries)? Is there a “timeless” diction, a timeless voice? How does one capture the “tone” of the original work? Should one translate a received form only with that same received form?
For three years I have been a student of tai chi chuan. Some weeks ago my teacher remarked that tai chi form is nothing but the expression of tai chi principles. Every day I try to enact the principles as I practice the form I am still learning and refining. I still translate Sonnevi, Ekelöf, and others. I still write poetry.
I will leave you with a few lines of Göran Sonnevi's poem “Dyrön, 1981”; it appears in English on pages 18-20 in A Child Is Not a Knife (Princeton, 1993) and in Swedish on, pp. 112-114:
I said: first consider the construction
bread for a knife, and then
a knife for bread; or knife for the bread
Time's forms moved, discretely,
analogously, con-
tinuously
It made no difference; beyond
all these dichotomies
a third term must exist; it cannot
exist in language; or perhaps:
in language alone:
Rika Lesser – On Translating Göran Sonnevi (Among Others)
Göran Sonnevi (b. 1939) is not merely the leading poet of his generation writing in Swedish and arguably one of Sweden’s greatest living poets, he has served as a political conscience for the nation. In 2006 he received the Nordic Council Literature Prize. Esteemed authors and critics in Scandinavia have described his work as a single long poem, a commentary on everything that comes within range of his language, comparing him to Lucretius – part scientist, part philosopher. I think of him as many poets in one: poet of nature and the natural sciences, of politics between individuals and nations, of language, of love, of human possibilities. He is a poet who does not hesitate to confront the unknown; indeed, he courts it – historically, philosophically, linguistically. His voice is European; it cannot be compared with that of any one American poet, although his natural descriptions and scientific leanings at times resemble those of A. R. Ammons. If he were like any American poet, I don’t think we would need him so much in English. While unavoidably conscious of its European and Swedish points of view, in his poetry Sonnevi has always looked toward the world in its entirety. Among those he has translated into Swedish are Pound, Celan, and Mandelstam.
I have been translating Sonnevi’s work since 1984 – about 23 years now. Princeton published my selection of his poems written between 1971-1989 as A Child Is Not a Knife in 1993; I have completed the 190-page meditative/visionary poem Mozart’s Third Brain, the title poem of his thirteenth collection (1996). I have translated additional poems, including sonnets from earlier and subsequent volumes and continue to work on poems from Oceanen (The Ocean, 2005, his sixth book to be nominated for the Nordic Council’s prize). The basic concerns of poetic translation are always present: fidelity vs. freedom, translating form with an approximation of the same form or the creation of another. Additionally and most crucially – for Sonnevi stutters when he speaks but almost never when he reads his poems aloud – translating for a living voice that sings in a very special way. I have translated Sonnevi’s poems so that he can read them aloud in English, and so that I or we can read them as well.
Rika Lesser is the author of three books of poetry already published, and the forthcoming Questions of Love: New and Selected Poems. She has also published five books of poetry in translation—by Claes Andersson, Gunnar Ekelöf, Hermann Hesse, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Göran Sonnevi—as well as translations of various works of Swedish or German fiction and nonfiction. Among the many grants and awards she has received for her work are the Landon Translation Prize from the Academy of American Poets, a Fulbright Fellowship, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, the American-Scandinavian Foundation Translation Prize (twice), and the Poetry Translation Prize of the Swedish Academy. Her translation of Hesse’s Siddhartha: An Indic Poem will be published in the Barnes & Noble Classic Series in winter 2007. She teaches both poetry and literary translation and resides in Brooklyn Heights, New York.
Marjatta Liljeström – Translation and Interpreting in the formal Nordic co-operation
Formal co-operation between Finland, Iceland, Norway, Denmark, Sweden and the autonomous territories of Åland, the Faroe Islands and Greenland emerged in response to the challenges they faced in the aftermath of World War II. The two main platforms for official collaboration are the inter-parliamentary Nordic Council, which takes political initiatives, discusses topical issues and submits resolutions to governments in the region at an annual plenary session, and the Nordic Council of Ministers, the body responsible for co-ordinating inter-governmental affairs.
I will start with a brief description of the history, scope and structure of official Nordic co-operation. The Council and Council of Ministers have separate secretariats but a joint Communications Department based in Copenhagen. The Translation and Interpreting Unit, the remit of which is to co-ordinate and provide translation and interpreting services to both organisations, is part of the Communications Department. The main focus of the presentation will be on the need for, and provision of, translation and interpreting services as part of official co-operation. My starting point will be the Nordic language community and the general language policy adopted for formal co-operation. In this context I will also touch briefly on the Helsinki Convention, the Nordic Language Convention and the ministerial declaration on Nordic language policy. I will then explain Nordic language procedures and how the translation and interpreting services are organised and managed. Finally, I will mention some of the special difficulties associated with the provision of translation and interpreting services to Nordic bodies.
Marjatta Liljeström, MA in translation and interpreting from the University of Helsinki, Department of Translation Studies. Freelance interpreter and translator 1995-2004. Since 2004 special adviser and since 2005 Head of Unit, Translation and Interpretation, at the Nordic Council of Ministers. Certified translator. Member of the Finnish Association of Translators and Interpreters. Member of FIT’s Committee for Legal Translation and Interpreting 1999-2005.
Åge Lind – Navigating the minefields: On legal translation
In common with the translation of other special-purpose material such as financial and scientific texts, legal translation requires highly specialised knowledge, training and skills. However, legal translation also has its own particular principles and problem areas. The transposition of legal terminology is perhaps one of the most fraught or difficult areas of translation, since there will rarely be complete or direct equivalence between concepts in two languages. A number of factors such as statutory law, common law, legal precedent and consuetude, in addition to court practice and procedure, contribute to setting them apart.
As a translator of legal material, as well as a lexicographer, linguist and teacher of translation, I am well aware that the translation of legal documents is a virtual minefield, with bombs and booby-traps everywhere.
This paper will look at some of the strategies a translator may use in order to avoid the pitfalls of culturally bound concepts, deliberately ambiguous language, terms with no equivalents in the target language, etc. Frequently, when having to translate the “untranslatable” the translator will have to paraphrase, adopt source language terms, or construct terminology. And what principles should be followed in constructing (coining) terms?
The paper will also consider different solutions for different target groups: is it necessarily true that a literal translation, sometimes becoming a kind a ritual incantation carefully rendering every frozen collocation or doublet and triplet, will best serve your client’s needs? Should the translator facilitate the recipient’s understanding of a legal document by untangling complex or intricate structures, ie act as a “cultural mediator”? Besides, what are the potential pitfalls involved in adopting such a role?
Åge Lind is an Associate Professor at the Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration and a government- accredited translator for Norwegian-English/English-Norwegian.
Peter Linton – Computer Tools for Translators
A review of computer tools -- hardware and software -- of all kinds that can boost a translator's productivity, improving both quantity and quality. Covers electronic dictionaries, speech recognition, CAT tools, project management, editing tools, and tools for handling PDF files.
My talk is basically a survey of the computer hardware and software that I find useful for improving translation productivity, and in rough order of precedence:
1. Hardware. Like many translators these days, I have a powerful PC with 2 large screens. This gives a double width desktop, which makes it possible to have several windows open and visible at the same time. I find this a significant productivity boost (though admittedly not cheap). I also use a programmable keyboard which allows me to record multiple keystrokes in one key, for example my email address.
2. Software (in order of preference):
2a. Reference (electronic dictionaries, encyclopaedias etc), particularly the Swedish product WordFinder (which is now trying to market itself internationally -- see http://www.wordfinder.com/
2b. Speech recognition.
2c. CAT tools
2d. Business tools (Project management software such as Translation Office 3000, invoicing, taxation)
2e. Editing software (I use a product called UltraEdit for creating my own dictionaries etc from glossaries)
2f. PDF conversion software. A growing number of translation jobs arrive in the form of PDF files -- which by their nature cannot be edited. It is desirable to convert such files into editable electronic format (and essential if using CAT tools).
2g. Web tools of various kinds, for creating and managing your own website; for gathering news (using RSS -- Really Simple Syndication); and software for taking part in webinars.
The aim of the talk is to give people some idea of what is available and what they might find useful. I have of course no commercial interest in any of these products. I speak only as a more or less satisfied customer.
Peter Linton has been a translator for five years, after having worked in journalism and IT. Because of his IT background, he has a particular interest in computer tools for translators, particularly how to handle PDF files.
Kirsten Malmkjær – Wreaking havoc: On forgetting the poetry in the prose
According to Jakobsen ([1960] 1987: 69),
Any attempt to reduce the sphere of the poetic function to poetry or to confine poetry to the poetic function would be a delusive oversimplification. The poetic function is not the sole function of verbal art but only its dominant, determining function, whereas in all other verbal activities it acts as a subsidiary, accessory constituent.
In this paper, I explore the stylistic function of poetry in one specific prose text, Tom Kristensen's novel Hærværk of 1930, and I probe the effect of forgetfulness or neglect of this dimension in its translation by Carl Malmberg, Havoc , of 1968.
I move from this overt example to examine more covert examples of poetic effect in Kristensen's prose in Hærværk and its translation, and further to a general discussion of the desirability of keeping the poetic dimension of prose in mind in translating.
Kirsten Malmkjær is professor and chair of Translation Studies and Literary Translation at Middlesex University. She is the editor of Routledge's Linguistics Encyclopedia.
Silvester Mazzarella – Translating Swedish song texts into English with a view to performance
We shall aim to discuss any problems of interest to participants, as for instance:
- Should a song have unity of tone? (remembering e.g. Bellman's mixture of low life with rococo classical elegance).
- Should one aim at a contemporary tone or an archaic tone, and if the latter is it permissible to create pseudo-archaic terms?
- The difficulties of translating rhymed verse, such as sequences of several short lines with the same rhyme, and how important a particular rhyme may or may not be in the original song.
- Cultural problems, e.g. finding English equivalents for Swedish drinks, etc.
- Fitting English words to the music, including possible rhythmic differences between Swedish and English, and should the translator avoid English phrases the singer may find awkward to pronounce?
- What to do with the sections of spoken prose that occur in some songs.
- We shall consider critically examples of translated songs, my own and others.
My background: very much a translator rather than a performer, but I have a particular love of sung music, especially classical and folk, and connections with the Bellman Societies of Sweden and Finland, and the Evert Taube Society of Stockholm. My main work is translating Swedish prose into English, most recently Bengt Ohlsson's novel Gregorius, short stories by Tove Jansson, and books in both 18th and 21st century Swedish relating to Linnaeus.
Martin Murrell – Cultural Competence and Literary Licence
The paper comprises a set of reflections based on my experience over many years as a translator of a range of literary text types, from folktales to modern classics, both verse and prose works. My examples are drawn from Swedish, Finland-Swedish and Finnish writing, from such authors as Runar Schildt, Eino Leino, Dag Hammarskjöld and Eva Ström. I briefly define some senses of “translator” and discuss the essence of bicultural awareness. Developing a spiritual relationship with an author and a feeling for their individual rhythms, getting inside their idiolect, becoming attuned to their inner and outer worlds, setting and time – all these are pre-requisites for successful translation, just as is knowledge of the general workings of both languages, of language-specific methods of foregrounding and of contemporary fashions in imagery and register. How to take liberties and the parameters within which such decisions can be defended are also touched on. I will provide a sheet of short extracts as illustration, which I hope will be both amusing and instructive.
Martin Murrell has degrees in German studies and TESOL (MA, Institute of Education ). Lectureships at the Universities of Bucharest , Lund and Thessaloniki . Head of Teacher Education, S E Essex College. Co-author of Teach Yourself Romanian , 1970. Co-translator, with his wife, of Runar Schildt, The Meat-Grinder and Other Stories , Norvik Press, 2004. Regular translations of stories and book reviews in Facts & Fiction and contributions to Swedish Book Review . Co-translator of Linné-apostle Carl Peter Thunberg’s Speech on the Japanese Nation 1784 , published by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, 2007.
Raisa Murto – Tips of the trade
End of paragraph not found? Freelance translators often find themselves spending an inordinate amount of time trying to solve practical problems relating to their day-to-day work with various translation tools and other applications, with no one to ask for advice. This workshop presents some of the most useful tips and tricks when it comes to using Trados Workbench, TagEditor, Excel and Word in a professional translation environment. The tips and tricks have been gathered over the past few years as easy introductions to handy features and applications and as solutions to commonly occurring problems in a busy translation agency environment.
The workshop will be divided into two parts. In the first part, I will introduce a selection of useful applications and plug-ins such as Trados Glue and Bookmark Handler, TagEditor TableView plug-in, and a custom-made tool for translating Excel files using Trados. The second part of the workshop will be dedicated to tips and tricks of the trade and includes topics such as how to set a length checker in Excel, how to format Word documents with Trados tw4winExternal font and how to solve the Trados error message End of paragraph not found. Because of the practical nature of the workshop, it is aimed for translators already familiar with Trados (still the industry leader in the CAT market).
Raisa Murto is Production & Quality Manager at Sandberg Translation Partners Ltd.
Rennesa Osterberg – The Elusiveness of Language: Translation as Transformation
Gregory Rabassa once said that translation is more accurately a transformation, an artistic re-creation that strives to convey the same experience to a new audience as the original. It is not simply a matter of going through the text word by word and replacing each Norwegian word with the English equivalent. Often no “equivalent” exists in the second language; the translator must instead create a description, or a metaphor, that approaches the original meaning in the second language. I will discuss the elusive nature of language and translation by giving examples from my own work translating Hanne Ørstavik’s novel Presten into English. These examples will help illustrate some of the challenges of “transformation”: conveying unique cultural concepts, maintaining multiple levels of meaning, retaining the author’s unique style and tone, and keeping the text as accurate and readable as possible. In particular, when the subject matter of the novel itself is the slipperiness of language, this dilemma becomes a double burden upon the translator.
When a translator contemplates the nuances of language, he or she realizes that the words available are often unable to convey exactly what one wants to express. Presten highlights the dilemmas of literary translators particularly well because the protagonist, Liv, experiences a crisis of language. She is a novice pastor who has been grappling with an existential crisis ever since her friend Kristiane committed suicide a year earlier. Words have become empty to Liv, they no longer seem to carry or bear weight. In addition, Liv is writing a thesis on the 1852 Sami uprising in Kautokeino, which she believes was triggered by the translation of the Bible into the Sami language. She is frustrated that no one seems to understand the significance of bringing biblical words to one’s native language. Most of the novel is a meditation on the properties and lacks of language, and the reflexive nature of this narrative invites the translator to reflect upon the process of translation itself and function of language as a means of communication. I will be relating these issues to Rabassa’s theory of translation as transformation, as well as Richard Rorty’s claim that language has the ability to create change and provide hope.
Rennesa Osterberg is pursuing her Ph.D. in Scandinavian Languages and Literature at University of Washington. Her primary focus is upon contemporary Norwegian literature, women’s writing, and metafiction. She recently attended the Copenhagen Classroom program during the summer of 2007, where she was instructed by Tiina Nunnally. She has previous experience working in publishing, and would like to bring more Scandinavian literature to an English-speaking audience.
Outi Paloposki – The way to the author: how translators take their readers towards the writer
Goethe’s two maxims are often quoted when translators’ strategies are described: either the foreign author is brought over to the readers or the readers cross over to the author. What interests me at the moment are literary translations into Finnish from the late 19th century and early 20th century and the ways the translators used to take their readers towards the foreign authors. It is not merely a question of retaining foreignness in a text – in many circumstances, a text would be rejected if it was not understood – but of retaining the foreignness coupled with trying to explain it to the readers (educating them, as Goethe would say). “World literature” was only making its way to Finland during this time, hence it was a formative period in both translated and original Finnish literature.
Foreignness can be manifest in several different ways; I will be concentrating here on cultural foreignness (so called realia), and not, for example, on syntactic foreignization or deliberate archaization.
In my corpus of turn-of-the-century texts, there is much variation in the ways of retaining cultural foreignness and how it was explained (if at all). There are a number of loanwords in translations, but there are also explanations either in parenthesis or as footnotes. In my presentation, I will discuss the different translators’ strategies, the languages they were translating from, and in some cases, how footnotes got transferred from Swedish translations of foreign texts to Finnish translations (Swedish played an important role as an intermediate language in translating into Finnish). I will tie up the results with the work on translators’ agency, as the findings show clearly how important the role of the translators was. They were the experts on cultural matters, they bridged the gaps between Goethe’s two maxims. This leads to a discussion on the difficulty of categorizing translations into either foreignizing or domesticating: the practice of writing footnotes carries elements of both strategies.
Outi Paloposki was previously a practicing translator, and now teaches translation and researches as a Lecturer at the University of Helsinki. Dr. Paloposki has written several scholarly articles on translation history and methodology, and was on the editorial team of the two-volume, 1300-page History of translation in Finland, which was published in the spring (in Finnish).
Gudrun Rawoens – Causative constructions in Swedish and Danish. A study of translation patterns
In this paper I will present a number of results from a contrastive study on causative constructions in Swedish and Danish.
First, I will give an overview of various expressions of causality in modern Swedish and Danish, including both verbal and non-verbal constructions. The non-verbal constructions include e.g. causal conjunctions and prepositions. Among the verbal constructions there are both lexical and productive causatives (cf Shibatani 1976). The group of productive causatives contains analytical causative constructions and morphological causatives. The latter are practically non-existent in Swedish and Danish. The former are the subject of the study presented.
Second, I analyze Swedish and Danish analytical causative constructions from a contrastive perspective. An overview of the translation patterns is given (e.g. the Danish translations of the Swedish causatives få and låta). The material used for this study is taken from a translation corpus containing Swedish texts and their Danish translations.
Gudrun Rawoens is a a post-doctoral researcher at Ghent University, mainly conducting contrastive linguistic research on Swedish, Danish and Dutch.
Martin Ringmar – “I had the misfortune of being introduced by a rotten translation”: Some remarks on Halldór Laxness’s relations with translators and on his views on translations
Having decided to become a writer in his native language – rather than Danish or English – it was clear to Halldór Laxness (1902-98) that translation of his works was imperative. Apart from being a goal in itself, success abroad would strengthen his position at home and make him less dependent on the small domestic market and on capricious state grants. Translations, and translators, were thus an indispensable part of the project that made Laxness into the dominant novelist of the 20th century in Iceland.
Laxness accordingly invested considerable time and effort in working with his translators, especially when languages he knew well were involved. Some of these translators had substantial cultural capital in their own right, which proved helpful in “consecrating” Laxness abroad; witness his compatriot Gunnar Gunnarsson, who as a renowned writer in Danish in 1934 produced the first ever translation of a Laxness novel. There is also an impressive group of distinguished academics among his translators, e.g. the Swede Peter Hallberg, who proved instrumental in paving the way for the Nobel Prize in 1955.
Obviously, capable translators who could work directly from Icelandic were few (and for many target languages non-existent), and second-hand (or even third-hand) translation was often resorted to. Indirect translation is often deemed a priori inferior to direct, but the matter is seldom that straightforward as different competences have to be balanced. Laxness, it seems, wanted both a philologically correct understanding of the ST and a stylistically versatile and sellable TT, but he also realised that the former was sometimes achieved at the expense of the latter, and vice versa.
Laxness’s opinions on the translations of his works were more or less well founded, but at times irrelevant factors, like personal antipathies, seem to have influenced his views on this or that translation/translator. Preserved correspondence offers a fascinating insight into how opinions on translations circulate between author, translators and publishers. This raises more general questions on how opinions on translations are formed and spread, and on where the limits of e.g. the author’s competence to judge are. What lies at the bottom of categorical statements by Laxness that this particular translation is “brilliant” whereas that one is “rotten”? Who is competent to and who may, after all, give opinions on translations?
Martin Ringmar has a BA (Major: Icelandic; minor: Finnish) from the University of Iceland, and MA (in Scandinavian languages) from the University of Umeå, Sweden, and is now at the University of Lund, Sweden, writing on a PhD-thesis on the translations of Halldór Laxness’s novel Salka Valka into the Scandinavian languages (including Finnish) and its overall reception in Scandinavia. He has also been a journalist, translator and teacher.
Douglas Robinson – Adding a Voice or Two: Translating Pentti Saarikoski for a Novel
This paper will take a close look at Pentti Saarikoski’s 1961 Finnish translation of J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye and my own back-translation of various passages of that translation for a novel I wrote on Saarikoski as a translator. Using Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of double-voicing, I will show not only that Saarikoski’s infamous “distortion” (väännös) of Salinger’s original in his translation is simply a matter of adding a voice or two, but that all translating adds voices to the original.
Douglas Robinson, professor of English at the University of Mississippi, is the author of The Translator’s Turn, Translation and Taboo, What is Translation?, Who Translates?, Performative Linguistics, Introducing Performative Pragmatics, and Estrangement and the Somatics of Literature. He has been a translator from Finnish to English since 1975, most recently of Elina Hirvonen’s novel When I Forgot, and he spent one semester directing the translation workshop at the University of Iowa.
Geoffrey Samuelsson-Brown – The translation process and elements of added value
It is generally assumed that translations are made for commercial reasons. This is perhaps a narrow view since translations are made for various purposes each of which will have a considerable impact on how the translation is made. A translation made to gather information will be different from a translation used to market a product or service. Each will demand a particular approach. The lay person may not have an informed view of what is involved and this is where the project manager or translator can act in advisory capacity. Managing a translation assignment, either as a translation project manager with a translation company or as a professional who is commissioned to make the translation, demands a range of skills designed to provide added value to the end product.
When teaching students of translation studies and discussing career progression I have used the analogy of learning to drive. You receive instruction from your driving instructor and, if all goes well, you will reach a level of proficiency that will permit you to drive on your own on the public highways. Now imagine driving off with your brand-new licence and joining the traffic on the M25 on a Friday evening in the rush hour when it is dark and tipping down with rain. Earning your living as a translator may not be quite such a physical shock but is nonetheless a daunting challenge. You will be competing for assignments with experienced translators and the pace can be as hectic. Translation can present difficult challenges and the results of your efforts can be enormously gratifying but, on the odd occasion, less than fulfilling. Many freelance translators who work for agencies seldom have any direct contact with the end client and this precipitates other considerations. This presentation considers practical issues such as accepting or rejecting an assignment, assignment management, the translation process, terminology compilation and verification, quality control, client feedback, skills clusters and continuous personal development and added value that the translator delivers to the client. The presentation also considers example subjects for translation and the particular challenges they present.
Geoffrey Samuelsson-Brown is a technical translator from Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish into English, and author
Holger Scheibel – Stepping-stone Re-creation of Poetry
During the last ten years I have conducted two extensive projects on translation of rhyming verse, both of which were realized in cooperation with an expert in the linguistic area that is not my mother tongue.
The first one was a complete translation of Iván Krylov’s Fables into Danish. One of the foremost slavists in Denmark, mr. Lars Poulsen-Hansen, MA, did a scrupulous – almost word-to-word – transformation from Russian into Danish with several notes as to variations and connotations. After that I recast the material in exactly the same metre and exactly the same position of rhymes all the way through approximately 6.600 verses, now in Danish. A few months after the publication we were honoured with the first H. O. Lange-prize from The Royal Library of Copenhagen, a prize given for outstanding presentation of research and inquiry.
Shortly after that I was called upon by that very same library to translate into English each and every word of the 234 songs that the composer Carl Nielsen had written. This should be an important part of the revised publication of his total work that The Royal Library is heading, symphonies, chamber music, operas, cantatas etc. etc. With the good help of mr. Stuart Henney I completed this work last summer and am now waiting for the material to be published next spring. Mr. Henney cooperated with me after my first drafts, made his own propositions, and once a month joined me face to face in a thorough going through the verses. In these songs, too, exactly the same metre and exactly the same position of rhymes had to be used, of course, as the songs at a given time might be performed in English as easily as in Danish.
The above-mentioned way of working I have called stepping-stone translation because in both cases we have not taken the direct jump from one language to the other side of the waters, but so to say used a stepping-stone in the middle of the stream. The feeling of security thereby became exactly the side profit of the process that we all expected.
Holger Scheibel is a former teacher and headmaster. He now is a student at the University of Copenhagen and a translator.
Frankie B. Shackelford – Establishing the Voice of Conjecture in Fictional Biography
In translating Edvard Hoem’s 2005 memoir Mors og fars historie (Forlaget Oktober) from nynorsk to American English, I found it challenging to mimic the tone of the original account, which is a mix of fact and fiction. At the outset of the story, the narrator establishes his credibility with a vivid memory from his own childhood. But he soon undermines the factual account of events by admitting that some parts are imagined or dreamed. The resulting fictional biography, which Hoem calls a ‘novel’, is grounded in remembered details, family conversations, interviews with his parents’ peers, and a limited number of written sources. But the authorial voice is not that of a traditional biographer. Rather Hoem creates, as he did in a previous autobiographical novel Heimlandet Barndom, a stance of the well-wishing, but far-from-omniscient chronicler of the twists and turns of his parents’ lives. He aims not only to reveal what motivated and shaped their fates, but to place them in an almost mythic relationship to a misunderstood period in Norway’s history. It is the narrator’s ability to trigger the Norwegian collective memory through this narrowly focused, personal account that propelled the book into the spotlight and its nomination for the 2006 Nordic Council Literary Prize. Exploiting the voice of conjecture to paint a larger-than-life, yet convincing rural and religious portrait was a complex linguistic task, which I endeavored to perform in translation in part by drawing on the local culture and vernacular of my own childhood in the southern United States. This paper offers some examples of the lexical and syntactic challenges I faced and the choices I made in recreating the voice of the memoirist as he attempts to tell the truth, yet to couch it in a nostalgic tone that elevates the story of his parents to that of an entire generation of Norwegians during the Nazi occupation and its aftermath.
The translation is to be recorded by the author for an American books-on-tape publisher and will be forthcoming in 2008. I have previously translated Hoem’s debut novel Kjærleikens ferjereiser (The Ferry Crossing, The Garland Library of world literature in translation, vol. 10, 1989) and his 1987 novel Ave Eva: Herregårdsroman (Ave Eva: A Norwegian Tragedy, Xenos Books, 2000), as well as numerous short prose pieces and poetry by various Norwegian authors. I serve as professor of Norwegian and department chair of the Department of Modern Languages at Augsburg College, Minneapolis, USA.
Frankie B. Shackelford is Professor of Norwegian at Augsburg College, in Minneapolis, USA.
Turið Sigurðardóttir – Translation and Children’s Literature in Faroe
In this paper I will look at the situation of translated children’s literature in Faroe and reflect on the relations between original and translated literature especially regarding translated children’s literature within the overall literary system of Faroe.
I n the two hundred years old history of Faroese literature translations constitute roughly 50 % of all publications. But if we look at the one hundred years of Faroese children’s literature translation plays an even bigger role. Thus, of the 317 books for children published in Faroese between 2000 and 2006 more than 90 % were translations and less than 10 % written in Faroese.
The explanation to this overhwelming dominance of translations lies partly in the general history of Faroe and includes the fact that the Faroese language community consists of no more than around 60,000 individuals. In order to view the extensive translation activitiy in its broader literary and cultural context I will involve the pheriphery-center theory of Itamar Even-Zohar. To investigate the attitude to translated literature, I will look at how a book about Faroese children’s literature in the period 1956-2006 treats translated literature. Also I will consider reviews and discussions of translated children’s books in literary and pedagogic fora. Finally I will reflect upon the importance of the Faroese translations of children’s literature historically and today.
Turið Sigurðardóttir is an associate professor at the University of Faroe, an author, and a translator to Faroese.
Kenn Nakata Steffensen – “The empire that dares not speak its name: The politics of translating the Danish constitutional order”
The paper analyses the construction of identity and production of international political space in some English-language texts published by Danish state agencies. Translation into English is one of the main means for constructing and projecting the state’s identity internationally. It highlights the apparent discrepancies between the meanings attributed to the terms rigsfællesskab, Danmarks Rige, and rigsenhed by most native speakers, among them the country’s leading constitutional lawyers, and the chosen English translations. The paper argues that the translations systematically favour certain interpretations over others and represent the relationships associated with the translated terms in ways that preserve existing power relations between the constituent parts of the realm/empire (rige). The choice of translations constructs a preferred image of Denmark as an international actor and shields it from external criticism of its constitutional arrangements.
There is no consensus among different Danish state agencies on how to translate rigsfællesskab, Danmarks Rige, and rigsenhed into English. These terms define the legal and political nature of the relationship between metropolitan Denmark, Greenland and the Faeroe Islands. While different ministries translate the terms differently (as United Kingdom of Denmark, Danish Commonwealth and Kingdom of Denmark), the translations have one element in common: They obscure the past and arguably present formally imperial nature of the relationships between the metropole and its dependent territories. Instead of using the more accurate, but politically problematic, translations of “empire” and “imperial” for Danish compounds with rige, the discursive strategy is to appropriate British and Commonwealth diplomatic/legal terminology in a familiarising move. Although the state appears to speak with at least three tongues when narrating itself in English to the wider world, the colonial legacy and incomplete decolonisation of the Danish state/empire today is silenced in all the translations. Ironically, the appropriation of British and Commonwealth terminology by the Danish metropole can be interpreted as an attempt at manipulation and simplification from a peripheral position in order to gain recognition as a postcolonial, multi-ethnic, composite state, rather than a politically unacceptable colonial empire, i.e. to conform to an international standard.
Kenn Nakata Steffensen is a partner in the language and research consultancy Cultural Meanings and a committee member of SUBTLE: The Subtitlers’ Association. He grew up in a multilingual family in Europe, Asia and Africa and has been based in London since 1994. He holds degrees in politics and anthropology from the universities of London and Copenhagen. He has worked as a freelance translator and interpreter since 1991 and full time since 1999. He is a political analyst, cultural and language consultant, translator, interpreter and subtitler. His working languages are Danish, English and Japanese. He has published and lectured on Japanese and international politics and subtitling.
Björn Sundmark – But the Story Itself Is Intact: The Case of the English Translations of The Wonderful Adventures of Nils
In the foreword to the first English translation of The Further Adventures of Nils (orig. 1907, transl. 1911) Velma Swanston Howard acknowledges that “some of the purely geographical matter in the Swedish original … has been eliminated” and that “with the author’s approval, cuts have been made where the descriptive matter was merely of local interest”. She concludes with the words: “But the story itself is intact”. Now, one can certainly sympathize somewhat with the translator and a presumptive international audience and feel that they should be spared some of the geo-trivia of the original. On the other hand, the first book, The Wonderful Adventures of Nils (1906, transl 1907), had not been subjected to the same kind of topographic cleansing, and it had still been a resounding success internationally – so, why the change of editorial practice? Even more troublesome: despite Howard’s protestations it is clear that what has been eliminated is not just “geographical matter”, but key scenes of great importance to the overall story. In my paper I will focus on two of the most interesting elisions: the death and burial of Little Mats, and the pivotal actions in the Uppsala chapter. The latter episode actually does exist in an English version, but one based on an abridged and simplified version (1962/1989); and the Little Mats-episode has never been translated as far as I know. I will discuss how Howard argues and negotiates the issues at stake with Lagerlöf in their correspondence, material that has hitherto remained unexamined in the Royal Library collection in Stockholm. I will also examine in what ways later translations and adaptations depart from Howard’s version. The argumentation leads up to a call for a new (complete and unabridged) translation of Lagerlöf’s international classic.
Björn Sundmark is a Senior Lecturer in English, Education, at Malmö University in Sweden.
Riitta Taipale – Culture and languages as a challenge for translators and interpreters in Sámi
Sámi, the home region of the indigenous people in northern Europe, reaches from Central Norway and Sweden and the northernmost parts of Finland to the Kola Peninsula in Russia. Sámi people live in four countries with four main languages: Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish and Russian. In the old days the Sámi used to move along a lot because o reindeer herding, fishing and hunting and so they built networks that suited their ways of living. But they were forced to leave their siidas (their villages) when the boundaries between the countries were set a new, i.e. after the war between Sweden and Russia in 1808-09. They had to adapt the traditional way of life to new circumstances. The cultural and political system in each country influenced both their culture and their language.
There are altogether 10 Sámi dialects/languages: lullisámegiella, ubmisámegiella, julevusámegiella, davvisámegiella, anársámegiella, nuortalašsámegiella, áhkkilsámegiella, gielddasámegiella and darjjisámegiella. The results of the changes in the history of the Sámi people can clearly be seen in the biggest of the Sámi dialects, davvisámegiella, which is spoken in Finland, Sweden and Norway.
There are big challenges in terminology – new words must be made to match the demands of the modern technology and the modern society. But that is not an easy task: how to build new words by using the resources of your own language? How to fight the influence from the “main” languages of the four countries? What about the influence from English? How to make the terminologies in the three countries match – in spite of the different systems in education, politics and so on?
In my paper I will present a few examples of concrete problems when translating or interpreting to and from davvisámegiella, the northern Sámi language.
Riitta Taipale has been training Sámi interpreters and translators since 1994 at the Sámi University College in Kautokeino, Norway. She has also been working as language teacher at universities (Umeå, Jyvaskyla, Helsinki, University of Lapland in Finland etc.) and high-schools and secondary schools in Finland, Norway and Sweden.
Anna-Riitta Vuorikoski – Political rhetoric in the European Parliament – a challenge for Nordic interpreters
According to the EP definition in their home pages, “[...] interpreting is not word-for-word translation [... ] but the faithful transmission of a message, captured in one language and then accurately rendered in another.”
The speech situation is subject to the EP Rules of Procedure, according to which “All Members shall have the right to speak in Parliament in the official language of their choice. Speeches delivered in one of the official languages shall be simultaneously interpreted into the other official languages and into any other language the Bureau may consider necessary”.
For the interpreter, speeches delivered in the EU institutions, and the EP plenary session in particular, are a challenging mixture of political rhetoric and specialised terminology; for the researcher, they are an interesting institutional genre that can be analysed from a number of points of view.
My paper focuses on some of the typical rhetoric features of the EP plenary session genre and the ways in which interpreters working from and into Finnish and Swedish convey these characteristics.
The research material consists of authentic speeches and interpreters’ renderings of these speeches, recorded in a number of part-sessions of the European Parliament.
Anna-Riitta Vuorikoski is a professional conference interpreter as well as university teacher and researcher.
