American Literary Translators Association Newsletter
Special Election issue July 2010
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 Voting
will be taking place this summer to elect
a Secretary-Treasurer of the Association as
well as two members at large of the Board.
Ballots will be sent out on July 15.
The deadline for returning the ballots
is September 17.
Thanks to Ellen Watson (Chair), Barbara Paschke
and Gary Racz for putting together this outstanding
slate of nominees.
You may have to click in your browser to view the photos
The slate of nominees is as follows (click to view candidate's statements):
For Secretary-Treasurer
James Hoggard
Russell Scott Valentino
At-large Board members
Anna Guercio
Stephen Kessler
Richard Newman
Sergio Waisman
Also in this issue
News from the Translation Field
Announcements
On the Lighter Side
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2010 Slate of Nominees
Secretary-Treasurer (Elect
one for two-year term):
James Hoggard
Having been a teacher and writer for decades, I
would like t o say that ALTA is one of the two organizations that have been
passionate and deep points of reference for me. My involvement with ALTA
has been a family affair, my wife Lynn and I having been loyalists to the cause
since the mid-1980s when I gave my first bilingual reading at an ALTA
conference. That first meeting excited me, and my commitment to the
organization has intensified through the years, so much so that I have to say
that, in many different ways, ALTA has given me much by way of cultural and
intellectual development, and I respect these gifts tremendously. An active
translator as well as poet, essayist, writer of fiction and playwright, I am
the Perkins-Prothro Distinguished Professor of English at Midwestern State
University in Wichita Falls, Texas. Named Poet Laureate of Texas for 2000, I am
a former NEA Fellow and past two-term president of The Texas Institute of
Letters. I have served ALTA in several ways, including as an ongoing member of
the Investment Committee and as a board member this past year (to fill a slot
that vacated mid-term). I see my involvement with translation in general and
ALTA in particular as a lifetime commitment.
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Russell Scott Valentino
I am the
editor of The Iowa Review and  founder
and publisher of the non-profit independent press Autumn Hill Books, which
publishes only literary translations. I'm also a professor of Slavic and comparative
literature at the University of Iowa, where I've done lots of administrative
work (as a department chair, on advisory boards, selection committees, and task
forces) that has provided invaluable experience in how large organizations
work. At Iowa, I teach in the Translation Workshop, which offers an MFA in
Literary Translation, and many of my students and former students are ALTA
members and frequent conference attendees. I think it's very important to get
as many young translators involved with ALTA as possible in order to keep the
organization developing and improving. My translations (from Italian, Croatian,
and Russian) of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry have been published in a variety
of venues, from trade and university presses to specialty journals and micro-lit magazines. Increasing the presence of publishers at ALTA events and activities
is another important way of keeping the organization relevant to its members,
and I would hope to see that as a priority of the ALTA board in the coming
years. I've received two NEA literature grants for translation (2002, 2010),
one from the Howard Foundation (2005), and another approximately $500,000 in
research and institutional grants in the past ten years, which has given me
some solid accounting experience (at the very least, I know when to let the
accountants take the lead). Finally, I've been an ALTA member since
approximately 2004, a frequent contributor to ALTAlk since its inception, and a
regular attendee of the annual national conference since 2005.
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At-large Board
Members: (Elect two for three-year terms):
Anna
Guercio
I be gan my
ALTA experience as a Fellow, and have since had the privilege of being a reader for both the Fellows competition and the National Translation Award, as well as a conference reader and panelist. Though still a recent member of the organization, I've always identified foremost as a literary translator in both my critical and creative endeavors. After majoring in literary translation at Brown, I had the privilege to take part in the Iowa Translation MFA as an Arts Fellow and an avid supporter of the International Writing Program.
I'm now in the final stages of a PhD at the University of California, Irvine, where I hold the International Center for Writing and Translation's Schaeffer Fellowship. My dissertation argues for the figure of the translator (and widespread study of translation practice and theory) as key to the theoretical and pedagogical problems posed by "world literature."
As for my creative work, I'm writing this from at the Banff
International Literary Translation Centre, where I'm polishing a collection by Mexican poet and "underclown" José Eugenio Sánchez. A sample can be found at the ever-wonderful Words Without Borders.
For me, the most valuable aspect of ALTA is the sense of community and support it provides those of us who so often feel far-flung and ill-understood. The unabashed excitement of ALTA conferences, ALTAlk, and the broader network is truly remarkable, and I'd love the opportunity to shoulder some responsibility for sustaining and nurturing it as a member of the board.
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Stephen
Kessler
I fir st
joined ALTA in the early 1980s but let my membership lapse for several years
before Carolyn Tipton cajoled me to join up again in the late 1990s. Since attending the conference in New York
City in 1999, I have been a regular at ALTA conferences, especially valuing the collegial
friendships it inspires. (I also met my
wife at an ALTA conference.) Translation
has been an integral part of my literary practice -- as a poet, essayist,
journalist, editor, publisher, and novelist -- since the early 1970s. My versions of Spanish and Latin American
writers such as Vicente Aleixandre, Pablo Neruda, Julio Cortázar, Luis Cernuda,
Jorge Luis Borges, Fernando Alegría, Ariel Dorfman, César Vallejo and others
have appeared steadily over the last 35 years in periodicals, anthologies, and
more than a dozen books. (A more
comprehensive account of my publishing history can be found at www.stephenkessler.com.) What I love and admire about ALTA and its
members is their devotion to literature and their mutual respect for and
encouragement of one another. As a
graduate school dropout and someone who has worked for my entire adult life
with small independent presses and alternative newspapers, I lean more toward
alliances with PEN and AWP than with ATA or MLA. I am most interested in encouraging younger
writers and translators to engage in the intrinsic pleasures and rewards of
immersion in other languages and literatures, as well as in the professional service
of making such works available in English.
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Richard
Newman
I  became a translator of classical Iranian
poetry by chance, when a friend recommended me as a native-English- speaking
poet with some command of Persian to the International Society for Iranian
Culture (ISIC), a non-profit organization looking to produce and publish
literary retranslations of some of the masterpieces of classical Iranian
literature, a body of work to which very few contemporary translators are
paying attention. ISIC commissioned me to do five books, three of which I have
completed: Selections from Saadi's
Gulistan and Selections from Saadi's
Bustan (Global Scholarly Publications, 2004 and 2006 respectively), as well
as The Teller of Tales: Stories from
Shahnameh (forthcoming from Junction Press). I also co-translated with
Professor John Moyne all of the poetry in his A Bird in the Garden of Angels: On the Life and Times and An Anthology
of Rumi (Mazda Publishers 2007). ALTA, mostly through its annual
conference, has been central to my development as a translator. As a forum for
presenting my work and hearing the work of others, it has provided me with a
marvelous education in a field to which I was entirely new. Equally
importantly, however, despite my initial sense of myself as an "accidental
translator" -- not to mention an ignorant one, since I knew next to nothing about
the work I was translating before I was commissioned -- the warm and collegial
atmosphere of the conference made me feel immediately welcome among peers,
which helped to build my confidence.
I would welcome the chance to give back to the
organization, and when I think of what new and useful perspective I could bring
to the board, I think of the fact that I teach at a community college. Two-year
schools have become sites of real growth in higher education and a lot of
talented writers and translators are taking jobs in such schools. In my
department alone, there are four translators besides myself, and I know of at
least one more in the Department of Foreign Languages. As far as I know, none
of is a member of ALTA. I am active in AWP's Two Year College Caucus, and
my experience there demonstrates that two-year college faculty can be an
energized and enthusiastic constituency. It would be good to bring that kind of
energy to ALTA.
I am a Professor in the English Department of Nassau
Community College, where I coordinate the Creative Writing Project, which will
soon be offering an AA in Creative Writing. (One further note: as Coordinator,
I participate in AWP as a Program Director -- which might be useful in finding
ways for ALTA and AWP to connect.)
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Sergio
Waisman
I n 1995, I was an ALTA Travel Fellowship Winner and
was able to attend my first ALTA conference in Austin, Texas; I have been an
enthusiastic ALTA member ever since. I have translated two books by the
Argentine Ricardo Piglia; three books for Oxford University Press' Library of
Latin America; and a new version of The Underdogs:
A Novel of the Mexican Revolution for Penguin Classics. I am a contributing
translator in the MLA's An Anthology of
Spanish-American Modernismo and have published other Latin American
writers in translation in various U.S. journals and anthologies. In 2000, I
received an NEA Translation Fellowship Award for my work with The Absent
City by Ricardo Piglia. In 2005, I published the book of criticism Borges and Translation: The Irreverence of the
Periphery, which was also published in Spanish that same year. In 2004, I
published my first novel, Leaving,
which I myself translated into Spanish and published in 2010 in Argentina as Irse. I am currently Chair of
the Department of Romance, German & Slavic Languages & Literatures and
Associate Professor of Spanish & International Affairs at The George
Washington University.
I believe ALTA should be actively addressing the divide
between theory and practice. In my opinion, ALTA's strengths reside in the
collegiality and linguistic and cultural diversity of its members. Some see
literary translation as an art; others as scholarly research and investigation;
in most cases it is surely a combination of the two. I would like to find ways
for these two approaches to speak to each other, a conversation certain to be
rich and productive. Such dialogues would allow ALTA to further increase its
academic and intellectual rigor without losing any of its creativity and
relaxed nature. As a board member I would seek to reach out to graduate
students, junior faculty, and young translators or scholars of translation
studies, even as we maintain and continue to learn from the legacy of our more
established literary translators.
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NEWS FROM
THE TRANSLATION FIELD
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LISTENING TO (AND SAVING) THE WORLD'S LANGUAGES
New York is the most
linguistically diverse city in the world, with a remarkable trove of endangered
tongues that have taken root there - languages born in every corner of the
globe and now more commonly heard in various corners of New York than anywhere
else. "It is the capital of language density in the world," said Prof. Daniel
Kaufman, an adjunct professor of
linguistics at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. "We're sitting in an endangerment hot spot where we
are surrounded by languages that are not going to be around even in 20 or 30
years." In an effort to keep those
voices alive, Professor Kaufmanan has helped start a project, the Endangered Language Alliance, to identify
and record dying languages, many of which have no written alphabet, and
encourage native speakers to teach them to compatriots. Read the entire article
in the New York Times of April 28.
On the same topic, the website of WNYC points out that there are over
140 languages spoken in New York City. Over 46% of New York residents speak a
language other than English at home. More than 25% of residents have limited
English proficiency and say they cannot adequately communicate with their
health care providers. The website offers four
maps of languages spoken in New York, and an additional bonus - links to the
live audio streaming of stations WNYC and WQXR. Read it (and hear it) at the WNYC website.
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Vantar þýðendur úr
íslensku á ensku-næg vinna!
If you know what that means, then Iceland has a job
for you. Iceland's
banking system has collapsed, its economy is in turmoil and its volcano has
blotted the sky with ash. As a result, things have never looked better for the
small cadre of Icelandic translators who render the North Germanic tongue of
320,000 island-dwellers into something the rest of the world can understand. The
remnants of Iceland's three major banks conduct creditors' meetings in
Icelandic. Many of the creditors are foreign. Interpreters are needed. Read the
article in the Wall Street Journal of April 30.
BILL WOULD REQUIRE SUPREME COURT JUDGES TO BE BILINGUAL
No, that's not the
U.S. Supreme Court, but the Supreme Court of Canada, where judges may have to become
fully bilingual if a bill brought before the Senate passes into law. Bill C-232
would require all judges in the highest court of the land to be able to read,
speak and understand both French and English without the use of an interpreter.
The bill is meant to
champion "justice and equality for all citizens in our country," according to
Liberal Senator Claudette Tardif. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms
and the Official Languages Act say there should be equal access to both
languages.
"Its purpose is to
correct an injustice and that Canadians should not only have the right to be
heard in the official language of their choice, but should also have the right
to be understood." Read the entire article in the Toronto Globe and Mail of April 20.
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WHY MACHINES DO NOT UNDERSTAND
HUMAN SPEECH
From the
moment people are born, they learn to make associations and to understand words
depending on the context of a sentence. This
learning continues throughout life, so teaching machines to make common sense
assumptions about language is a mammoth task. Over the years, researchers have
been making inroads into improving voice recognition and speech-to-text
software, but being able to recognize words is still a long way from machines that
actually understand what people are saying.
Now the Palo Alto Research Centre
(PARC) in California is working on an ambitious project with the aim of taking
computers' language skills to the next level. To read the rest of this
interesting article, go to BBC online. In an accompanying video, Danny
Bobrow, a research fellow at PARC, explains how models of the world help
machines begin to understand context.
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SUMMER READING?
NPR has recommendations for summer reading on its
website. A number of lists can be found under headings such as Best Of
The Bestsellers: Wisdom Of The Crowds, Summer
Books That Make The Critics' Cut, Top
Reads: Summer Heat Sparks Rise In Crime Novels, and Fiction,
Long And Short, For Summertime Escapes. For all the details, go to the NPR website.
IS FRENCH A LANGUAGE BARRIER IN HAITI?
Creole
is the only language spoken and understood by all Haitians, and the majority
speak Creole only. Yet, the language of instruction in schools is French. The
use of French as the language of instruction excludes around 90 percent of
Haitians for whom French is an inaccessible foreign tongue. In an article in
the Boston Globe, MIT associate professor of
linguistics Michel DeGraff,himself a native speaker of Creole born and
raised in Haiti, proposes that Spanish
or English, not French, be promoted as a link between Haiti and its neighbors. Read the article and join the discussion at
this link to the Boston Globe dated June 16.
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BEST EUROPEAN FICTION 2010
REVIEWED
The collection Best European
Fiction 2010, published by Dalkey
Archive Press and edited by Aleksandar Hemon is available $15.95 (paper) from
the Amazon.com website. The book is also available on Amazon's Kindle reader. The
site features a review by Publisher's Weekly and Booklist, and sample pages are
available to read on the site. You may find it at Best European Fiction 2010.
USING
THE WISDOM OF CROWDS
TO TRANSLATE LANGUAGE
Linguists are trying to harness the wisdom of crowds to do what machines
can't. It's known as crowd-sourcing, and researchers think it could help them
get closer to something they've been pursuing for decades: the perfect
translation machine.
According to Philip Resnik, who teaches linguistics
at the University of Maryland, computer translators like Babelfish and Google
Translate work best when they have lots of translation data to learn from. "It's
possible that crowd-sourcing will not get us all the way to fully automatic,
high-quality translation," Resnik says. "But it can get us a lot
closer, by bringing humans and machines closer together in a way that hasn't
happened before. See the entire article on the NPR website.
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CUTS IN FL PROGRAMS AT CAL STATE
As reported on Southern California Public Radio, language professors at
Cal State rallied to support the foreign language curriculum as the university
sought to close a nearly $39 million funding gap. The university plans to drop the bachelors and masters degrees in German
as well as the masters degree in French. Professors argued that cutting
the majors would disrupt business school programs that train students to
conduct business in European countries. Public schools would suffer,
instructors said, because some students who earn those foreign language degrees
plan to teach in public schools. Read
the entire article online here.
In a similar story, Southeastern Louisiana University (SLU)
may bid French studies adieu due to budget cuts. From
a numerical standpoint, there aren't many people to harm. According to a
university spokesperson, people majoring in these subjects make up the smallest
group of SLU students -- 20 in French and five in French education. The
resulting saving, which also will mean one less department head and the loss of
3 faculty members, should amount to about $400,000 a year. You may read the
story in the Times-Picayune of June 21.
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ESTRIN REPORT DEBUNKS SOME
MYTHS ABOUT TRANSLATION
Surely none of us would have a problem designating the
following statements as false but they are neatly and systematically refuted in
the latest Estrin Report
- You just "run the document through your
computer" and then print out the translation
- Anyone who took a foreign language in high school
or college can translate
- All you need is a dictionary to translate
- Any bilingual person can translate
Read the complete article on The Estrin Report.
CRIME WAVE IN LITERARY TRANSLATION
Spurred
by the popularity of Swedish writer Stieg Larsson's trilogy, which has sold
more than 40 million copies world-wide, U.S. publishers are combing the globe
for the next big foreign crime novel. While major publishing houses have long
avoided works in translation, many are now courting international literary
agents, commissioning sample translations, tracking best-seller lists overseas
and pouncing on writers who win literary prizes in Europe and Asia. The result
is a new wave of detective fiction that's broadening and redefining the classic
genre. Read the rest of the article in the Wall Street Journal of July 2.
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SOME
LIBRARIES BEGIN
LOANING BOOKS ELECTRONICALLY
In
attempting to adapt to the Internet age, several public libraries, including
Boston's, plan to launch a novel approach to loaning books: letting patrons
check-out digital scans over the Internet of books still protected by
copyright. About 2/3 of libraries now permit downloading of books. The
advantage of this arrangement is that libraries are thus no longer limited by
the number of books on their shelves and at the same time can make their own
collections more accessible. You may see the entire interview in a Wall Street Journal video dated June 28.
THE PITFALLS OF INTERPRETING
A British-born interpreter, Amanda Galsworthy, chief translator to French presidents, gives
her insights into the pitfalls of her profession in an article in the online
BBC News. One of her favorites stories was how a Japanese translator was struggling
to translate a joke that was really not funny, and not translatable. He
told his waiting listeners "the speaker was telling a joke which was
unfunny and impossible to translate but it would give him great pleasure if you
would all laugh". That brought down the house. See the whole article in
the BBC News article of May 29.
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ANNOUNCEMENTS
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SPECIAL ISSUE FORTHCOMING IN SEPTEMBER
The September issue will include a section entitled
"Members in the News" listing personal and professional achievements
of ALTA members. Sections will include Book Translations, Articles in Anthologies and Journals, Critical Articles about Translation, Readings,
Presentations, Awards and Grants. Please share your news with your fellow
members! Information should be provided using our questionnaire and following
our format. Please try to follow this format, as without some order of presentation, the
time required is just too great. Please use the Submission Form which is online
at Submission Form for ALTA Members. (A reminder will follow in late August).
SUMMER ISSUE OF CERISE PRESS NOW ONLINE
The summer issue of Cerise Press, an international online
journal founded in 2009 and based in the United States and
France, is
now available. The emagazine sets as its goal "building cross-cultural bridges by featuring artists and
writers in English and translations, with an emphasis on French and Francophone
works." http://www.cerisepress.com
7TH ANNUAL INTERNATIONAL TRANSLATORS CONFERENCE
ProZ.com, the translation workplace http://www.proz.com/about
holds its 7th international event from October 1-3 in Prague, Czech
Republic, where translators worldwide will meet to network, expand their
business and learn about the new trends of the language and translation
industry. Join this celebration of the languages and translation profession! Enquiries:
anne@proz.com.
Web address: http://www.proz.com/conference/157
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ON THE LIGHTER SIDE
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WORLD'S LONGEST PLACE NAME
Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateaturipu-
kakapikimaungahoronukupokaiwhenuakitanatahu
is the Maori name for a hill, 305 m high, in New Zealand. The name on the sign
that marks this hill translates roughly as "The summit where Tamatea, the
man with the big knees, the climber of mountains, the land-swallower who
traveled about, played his nose flute to his loved one." At 85 letters, it is
one of the longest words used in English.
THE PERILS OF VOICE RECOGNITION TECHNOLOGY
This is a short, hilarious Scottish
video about the perils of voice recognition
technology on the Singularity weblog. While it is dangerously funny it does
raise some good questions about the cultural biases of voice recognition in
particular and technology in general. You may view it at the Singularity weblog.
INTRODUCING GOOGLE TRANSLATE FOR
ANIMALS
A new application, Google Translate
for Animals, translates animal speech into human vernacular. A handset records
the animal sounds and transmits them to the Google server, where the speech
recognition and translation software analyzes the neurological and biological
acoustics... To see more of this nonsense, click here.
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ALTA NEWS
ALTA News is a
monthly publication of the American Literary Translators Association.
Please send all news items to Lee.Chadeayne@verizon.net PLEASE FEEL FREE TO FORWARD THIS NEWSLETTER TO YOUR FRIENDS. A LINK FOR THAT PURPOSE IS BELOW.
The
next newsletter will be published in September. The deadline
for submissions is September 6.
Contact
information: Tel.
978-263-0613
AMERICAN
LITERARY TRANSLATORS ASSOCIATION
The University of Texas at Dallas
800
West Campbell Road - JO 51
Richardson, TX 75080-3021
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