Translation Seminar Series (Since 2001)

The Value of Menggu mishi in Translation Studies

Date: 22/09/2016
Time: 12:00 am - 12:00 am
Speaker: Professor Alatan
Translation Seminar Series
seminars_20160922

Abstract:

本文通過分析《蒙古秘史》的內容特點、文本形式、版本流傳、語言特徵、翻譯歷史等要素,探討了這部蒙古族典籍的翻譯學價值,並提出宏觀譯學和微觀譯學概念,指出只有充分認識其譯學價值,才能使民族典籍的翻譯研究更加全面。

About the Speaker:

阿拉坦教授,內蒙古工業大學國際教育學院院長、國際合作與交流處處長、教授。在國內刊物發表英語教學及翻譯研究論文多篇,譯著《孔子的故事》(2004)。完成科研項目包括「典籍翻譯中的原文本動態性特徵研究」(2011-2013)。現為內蒙古自治區大學外語教學研究會副會長。

Images of the Western Balkans in English Translation for Children

Date: 21/04/2016
Time: 12:00 am - 12:00 am
Speaker: Dr. Marija Todorova
Translation Seminar Series
seminars_20160421

Abstract:

Since the late 1990s there has been an increasing interest in the representation of Balkan culture in the literary works of authors writing in English. Scholars (Bakić-Hayden 1995, Todorova 1997, Goldsworthy 1998, Norris 1999, Hammond 2010) have shown how literary representations of the Balkans have reflected and reinforced its stereotypical construction as Europe’s “dark and untamed Other”. However, the contribution of translated literature in the construction of these images has rarely been considered. Thus, this study of representations of the Western Balkans in translated literature, published since 1990, addresses a gap in the study Balkanist discourses and helps shed a new and more complete light on the literary representations of the Balkans, and the Western Balkans more precisely. Children’s literature has been selected for this study due to its potential to transform and change deeply rooted stereotypes (Sutherland, 1997). This presentation looks at the use of paratexts, and especially the cover (front and back), in the translated books as framing and representation sites that contest or promote stereotypes in the global literary market. English has been selected as a target language due to its global position as а mediating language for the promotion of international literature. However, translations in other languages, where they exist, are also examined for comparative purposes. The study adopts Kress and van Leeuven’s (1996) model of multimodal analysis which will be used to look at three distinct case-studies. The discussion considers how covers changed over time, in different editions of the translated book. It also examines adaptations accompanying the introduction of the translated book into the target society, such as documentaries, music scores and theatre performances.
Bakić-Hayden, Milica. 1995. Nesting Orientalisms: The Case of Former Yugoslavia. Slavic Review, 54.4:917-31.
Goldsworthy, Vesna. 1998. Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination. London: Yale University Press
Hammond, Andrew. 2010. British Literature and the Balkans: Themes and Contexts. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Kress, Gunter and Theo van Leeuwen. 2006. Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design. Second edition. New York: Routledge.
Norris, David A. 1999. In the Wake of the Balkan Myth. London: Macmillan Press.
Sutherland, Zena. 1997. Children and Books. New York: Longman.
Todorova, Maria N. 1997/2009. Imagining the Balkans. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

About the Speaker:

Marija Todorova holds a PhD in Translation Studies from the Hong Kong Baptist University and in Peace and Development Studies from Ss Cyril and Methodius University Skopje. She has more than 10 years of experience as interpreter for various international organisations including UNDP, UNHCR, DfID, and OSCE. She is also a literary translator with more than 30 published works in Macedonian and English. For her literary translations Todorova received the 2007 National Best Translation Award in Macedonia, and the 2008 Skopje Book Fair Best Translation Award. In 2014, she was awarded the Anne Frank Prize for her achievements in children’s literature. In 2008 she has established and taught at the Translation Programme of the University American College Skopje. She published two monographs on children’s literature and translation, and her articles appear in refereed publications. Currently, she is an Adjunct Scholar of the HKBU Centre for Translation. Her research interests are interdisciplinary and include interpreters in conflict, children’s and young adult’s literature in translation and visual representation. Todorova is an Executive Council member of IATIS.

Translation and Popular Music

Date: 31/03/2016
Time: 12:00 am - 12:00 am
Speaker: Dr. Sebnem Susam-Saraeva
Translation Seminar Series
seminars_20160331

Abstract:

The seminar will focus on how the performance of popular music, as well as its reception, can be influenced and shaped by translation and other interlingual activities. It will first offer an overview of the phenomenon by discussing music’s various forms of materiality and the accompanying forms of translation. It will elaborate on what non-translation of lyrics may signify within a particular socio-political context, how translation and music may interact on paper (e.g. album inserts), and how popular music may be consumed on digital platforms through the circulation of translations of lyrics.
The seminar will then concentrate on a particular form translation may take within the context of popular music: interlingual cover versions. These are cover versions of songs which are sung in a different language than the original. It will be argued that the latter coalesce into a phenomenon which seems to fall between the cracks of academic disciplines. Neither popular music studies nor translation studies seems willing to own it fully as worthy of study, despite its prevalence as a means of contemporary intercultural import/export. The former, dominated as it is by an interest in Anglophone popular music and its travels across the globe, has little to offer in the way of research on interlingual remakes and prefers instead to concentrate on intralingual cover versions from different time periods. The latter, anxious as it is in demarcating its disciplinary borders around the notion of translation as ‘transfer of meaning’, finds it challenging to take up cases of interlingual give-and-take where there is little or no transfer of meaning. Examples from a particularly noteworthy case of interlingual cover versions will then be provided: a Turkish song which crossed the borders of more than 20 languages and many more countries across the globe since 1997.

About the Speaker:

Şebnem Susam-Saraeva is a Senior Lecturer in Translation Studies at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, U.K. Her research interests have included gender and translation, retranslations, translation of literary and cultural theories, research methodology in translation studies and internationalization of the discipline. She is the author of Translation and Popular Music. Transcultural Intimacy in Turkish-Greek Relations (2015) and Theories on the Move. Translation’s Role in the Travels of Literary Theories (2006), and guest-editor of Translation and Music (2008) and Non-Professionals Translating and Interpreting. Participatory and Engaged Perspectives (2012, with Luis Pérez-González). Beyond the University of Edinburgh, she is a Steering Committee Member of ARTIS (Advancing Research in Translation and Interpreting Studies).

The Translation and Contestation of Political and Scientific Concepts across Time and Space: A Corpus-Based Study

Date: 18/02/2016
Time: 12:00 am - 12:00 am
Speaker: Professor Mona Baker
Translation Seminar Series
seminars_20160218

Abstract:

This seminar will report on a large, interdisciplinary research project based at the University of Manchester in the UK and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. The project involves compiling large electronic corpora of ancient Greek, medieval Arabic, early Latin and Modern English to examine how central concepts in the humanities and sciences have been (re)translated into these three lingua francas, and how they have been interpreted and reinterpreted as they entered new cultural and temporal spaces.
The focus of the study is on key historical moments that have brought about transformations in the interpretation of two sets of concepts, the first relating to the body politic (democracy, polis, polity, citizenship, nation, state, natural law, human rights, equality, etc.) and the second to scientific, expert knowledge (experiment, observation, evidence, proof, episteme, truth, falsehood, causation, validity, expertise). These are all key cultural concepts with a long history that remain central to social and political life today. The project also examines the ways and means by which civil society actors involved in radical democratic groups and counter-hegemonic globalisation movements contest and redefine the meaning of such cultural concepts today. In response to state-centred forms of democratic praxis, for example, civil society actors are shifting towards a non-state model of democracy based on principles of diversity and horizontality. In this fluid context, the concepts that have traditionally underpinned scientific discourse (such as evidence and truth) are becoming less central to the construction and dissemination of knowledge, which is now regarded as partial and provisional.
The presentation will engage with some of the ways in which corpus-based heuristic techniques will enable researchers involved in the project to analyse and map the historical transformation of concepts across time and cultural and linguistic spaces, as well as the ongoing processes of knowledge renegotiation involving these concepts in the 21st century. It will further highlight some of the technical and methodological challenges involved in examining corpora of this scale, and incorporating three scripts: Greek, Arabic and Latin.

About the Speaker:

Mona Baker is Emeritus Professor of Translation Studies at the Centre for Translation and Intercultural Studies, University of Manchester, UK, Principal Investigator on the AHRC-funded project Genealogies of Knowledge: The Evolution and Contestation of Concepts across Time and Space, and co-editor, with Luis Pérez-González and Bolette Blaagaard of the Routledge series Critical Perspectives on Citizen Media. She is author of In Other Words: A Coursebook on Translation (1992/2011) and Translation and Conflict: A Narrative Account (2006), Editor of Translating Dissent: Voices from and with the Egyptian Revolution (2016), the Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies (1998/2001/2009); Critical Concepts: Translation Studies (4 volumes 2009); and Critical Readings in Translation Studies (2010). Her articles have appeared in a wide range of international journals, including Social Movement Studies, Critical Studies on Terrorism, The Translator and Target. She is founding Editor of The Translator (1995-2013), former Editorial Director of St. Jerome Publishing (1995-2013), and founding Vice-President of the International Association for Translation & Intercultural Studies (2004-2015).

seminars_20160121

Abstract:

Chinese women’s appearance on the scene of literary translation has been a long-acknowledged fact. The earliest written record of Chinese women’s translation can be traced back to 1898, and the first woman’s translation of western literature is Xue Shaowei’s (1900) rendition of the French writer Jules Gabriel Verne’s Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours (Around the World in 80 Days), though via its Japanese version. The first climax of Chinese women’s translation activity occurred at the 1920s when Chinese women made a manifestation as a collective group on the stage of literary translation. Women translators “who can be identified” between 1898 and 1922 amounted to as many as 45 persons, which “marked itself as an epoch-making phenomenon in the history of both Chinese literature and Chinese translation”.

The larger part of the twentieth century ever since 1919 has seen Chinese female translators not only growing larger in number, but also playing an ever-increasing role in the field of literary translation. This observation is especially true of the cases of Taiwan and Hong Kong, where women translators are contributing what male translators seem to have failed to in a “male dominant” society. Across the Strait, a group of ever-young female intelligentsia have been working indefatigably, both as professors and as translators. Nancy Ing (1920-) and Pang-yuan Chi (1924-), for example, have been devoting themselves to the introduction of Taiwan literary works into the English world, primarily but not exclusively by means of The Chinese Pen: Contemporary Chinese Literature from Taiwan, a quarterly journal launched since 1972. In Hong Kong, Martha Cheung (1953-2013), Jane Lai and Eva Hung have not only been “spearheading translation from Chinese into English” (South China Morning Post), especially through Renditions: A Chinese-English Translation Magazine which has been published since 1973. More importantly, they have been reflecting critically on “issues pertaining to traditional and modern Chinese translation through the perspective offered by present-day theories and research methodologies in western translation studies”.

Nevertheless, amidst the ever-emerging studies of Chinese translation history, scant attention has been paid to the many women translators, especially contemporary females in Taiwan and Hong Kong. This situation unfortunately “drowns the vast group of women translators in the long river of history”, which in the long run leaves the historical contribution of women translators in oblivion. Martha Cheung thus seems justified when she succinctly pointed out that, “There have not been studies of women’s translation history in China, despite the fact that the introduction of Western feminism into China at the outset of the new century has spurred studies in women’s translations from this perspective.” This talk will first make a brief review of current studies in the field of women’s translation history, and then illustrate the significance of timely studies in making up this inadequacy. Following a demonstration of the potential methods whereby such studies might proceed, this talk will conclude with some preliminary observations. It is hoped that future studies in this field should serve to trace the history of women’s literary translation of the mainland, Taiwan and Hong Kong in the last century, delineate representative women translators and their translations, and assess their historical and socio-cultural role.

About the Speaker:

Mr. Liu obtained a Ph.D. in translation studies from the National University of Singapore (NUS) and is now teaching at the School of Foreign Languages as Professor Emeritus (i.e., “The Yellow River Scholar”) at Henan University, Kaifeng, China. He has primary interests in corpus-based translation studies. He has chaired three national projects, including “A Study on the Construction and Application of the Chinese-English Parallel Corpus of Hong Lou Meng (Dream of the Red Mansion)” (2005), “The Compilation of A Corpus-based Chinese-English Cultural Dictionary of Hong Lou Meng” (2010), and “A Critical History of Women’s Literary Translations of the Mainland, Taiwan and Hong Kong (1899-1999)” (2015), and has published widely in both international and domestic journals, such as Meta, Journal of Chinese Linguistics, Translation Quarterly, and Journal of Translation Studies, etc.

Cultural Consciousness and the English Translation of Chinese Classics

Date: 21/12/2015
Time: 12:00 am - 12:00 am
Speaker: Professor Luo Xuanmin
Translation Seminar Series
seminars_20151221

Abstract:

文化自信與文化自覺相輔相成,但文化自覺過去沒有得到足夠的重視。 要提升國家形象需要有高度的文化自覺,文化自信只有建立在文化自覺之上才是可靠的。就翻譯而言,文化自覺的最終目的就是要在不損害中國文化精神的前提下,以最合適的方式來解讀和翻譯最合適的典籍材料,從而達到消解分歧,促進中外文化的交流,極大地滿足西方受眾閱讀中國典籍的需要。綜合考察中國經典英譯狀況,我們認為中國經典翻譯需要借船出海、中西合作,以達到文化傳播的最佳效果;對外翻譯應該抱著厚今薄古態度去做,能反映當代的文學藝術和社會文化作品都需要得到更多的關注,需要有系統的規劃,以便我國的文化戰略能夠得到最好的效果。衡量中國文化經典翻譯的優劣以及海外傳播的有效性應該充分考慮物件國的需求,國外的銷量,國外圖書的流通量,被引用資料等。只有這樣,我們的文化傳播機制才能客觀、暢通。

About the Speaker:

羅選民,廣東外語外貿大學雲山領軍學者(2015),清華大學二級教授(2007)、人文社會科學傑出人才(2011),博士生導師。主要國際兼職有:澳大利亞研究委員會(ARC)委員,(香港)大學教育資助委員會(UGC)人文學科組委員,英國Routledge出版社英文學術期刊Asia Pacific Translation and Intercultural Studies主編,歐洲A&HCI源刊Perspectives: Studies in Translatology 國際編委,加拿大翻譯學會會刊TTR 國際顧問,香港中文大學《翻譯學刊》編委;國內主要社會兼職:中國英漢語比較研究會會長,國家人事部、外文局翻譯資格證書考試英語專家,第二、三屆中國圖書政府獎評委,第六屆魯迅文學獎評委。年來先後獲得美國學術聯合會(ACLS)、富布賴特、奧地利Salzburg Global Seminar、劍橋大學等多項研究基金和獎學金,曾應邀在牛津大學、耶魯大學、東京大學、巴黎東方語言文化學院等三十餘所國際知名高校做學術演講。主要學術發表有著譯作有《翻譯與中國現代性》、《話語分析的英漢語比較研究》、Translating China (Bristol: Multilingual Matters)、Translation Studies: An Interdisciplinary Approach (Beijing: Foreign Language Press)、《藝術與詩中的創造性直覺》、《耶穌基督的上帝:現代語境中的上帝觀念》等30餘部;在內外重要期刊發文百餘篇;目前正在主持國家社會科學基金重點項目《中國典籍英譯的傳播與評價機制研究》,已主持完成國家社科基金項目兩項以及省部級社科基金專案多項,曾獲湖南省首屆優秀教學成果二等獎、北京市第七屆哲學社會科學優秀成果二等獎、第三屆全國優秀教育科學研究成果三等獎,從1993年10月起享受國務院政府特殊津貼。

Norms, Resources and Constraints in Professional Interpreting

Date: 26/11/2015
Time: 12:00 am - 12:00 am
Speaker: Professor Daniel Gile
Translation Seminar Series
seminars_20151126

Abstract:

Interpreting has become a visible and attractive profession in some parts of the world, but many people know little about what it involves in its various branches above and beyond a good mastery of the working languages. Far from being ‘language converting devices’, interpreters constantly analyze incoming (source language) speeches and make decisions on what and how to formulate their target-language speeches. The efficiency and outcomes of such analyses and decisions depend to a large extent on their mastery of their working languages, but also on other factors, including but not limited to their perception of their role in the interaction between speakers and listeners, their encyclopedic (extralinguistic) knowledge, the conditions under which they have access to source-language speeches, including speaker-specific parameters, their cognitive skills, on effective reactions and perceived future reactions of the principals (the speakers and the users of their interpreting services) and of other stakeholders, including colleagues and recruiters.
These and other factors will be discussed, especially in the context of conference interpreting, media interpreting and signed language interpreting, with a number of examples.

About the Speaker:

Studied mathematics, sociology, Japanese. ESIT (Paris) graduate in conference interpreting (French, English, German). PhD in Japanese, PhD in Translation Studies (doctoral thesis on conference interpreting). Technical translator, then conference interpreter and trainer over more than 35 years. Research into translation and interpreting since the early 1980s, more than 200 publications, including Basic Concepts and Models for Interpreter and Translator Training and a book on translation which have been translated into several languages. Numerous lectures and courses given in various countries, with a particular interest in Asia. Guest-editor of a special issue of the Korean The Journal of Translation Studies on translator and interpreter training in East Asia (Seoul, October 2015). Founding member and former president of the European Society for Translation Studies. Currently Professor Emeritus, Universite Paris 3 Sorbonne Nouvelle. http://cirinandgile.com/DGCVEN.htm

Mediation, Reception and Marginality: Translations of Modern and Contemporary Chinese Literature in Spain

Date: 24/09/2015
Time: 12:00 am - 12:00 am
Speaker: Dr. Maialen Marin-Lacarta
Translation Seminar Series
seminars_20150924

Abstract:

Eighty four translations of modern and contemporary Chinese literature were published in Spain between 1949 and 2010. The history of this under researched corpus of translations and their reception will form the basis of the discussion in this seminar. I will try to demonstrate two interrelated arguments: the marginality of modern and contemporary Chinese literature in Spain and the mediation of the Anglophone and Francophone literary systems in the Spanish reception. To do this, I will focus on the history of translations and I will use concrete examples from back covers, prefaces and reviews of translations. A detailed analysis of the reception process of Mo Yan’s works in Spain will also illustrate the main arguments. Ultimately, the recent history of translations of modern and contemporary Chinese literature in Spain will help us reflect on the complexity and the hierarchical nature of literary exchanges in a global scale.

About the Speaker:

Maialen Marin-Lacarta is a translator and Research Assistant Professor in the Translation Programme at Hong Kong Baptist University. She holds a PhD in Chinese Studies and in Translation and Intercultural Studies from the National Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilisations (INALCO) in Paris and the Autonomous University of Barcelona. Prior to joining HKBU, she taught at INALCO and the Open University of Catalonia. Among other works, she has translated Shen Congwen’s Calma (Alpha Decay, 2010) and La ciudad fronteriza (Bellaterra, 2013) in Spanish. In 2013, she was awarded the Jokin Zaitegi translation prize for the Basque translation of Mo Yan’s short story collection Hori da umorea, maisu! (Elkar, 2013). Her research areas include literary translation, modern and contemporary Chinese literature, literary reception, translation history and digital publishing.

Cultural Roles of Chinese Migrants in Edo Japan: Translation, Interpreting and Beyond

Date: 15/04/2015
Time: 12:00 am - 12:00 am
Speaker: Dr. Emiko Okayama
Translation Seminar Series
seminars_20150415

Abstract:

During Japan’s self-imposed isolation (1639-1859), Nagasaki was the country’s only port open for international trade: merchants from two nations, Holland and China, were granted access. While in Nagasaki, the Dutch and Chinese were each confined to their own tightly controlled districts: on Dejima Island 出島 (from 1639) and in Tōjin yashiki 唐人屋敷 (Chinese Quarter, from 1689) respectively. The Chinese enjoyed a larger share of the trade and at its peak over ten thousand Chinese arrived in Nagasaki in one year. In order to maintain order and trade, the Japanese created a special profession, Tōtsūji 唐通事, who were chosen from resident Chinese and whose activities extended beyond translation and interpreting. Most of the hereditary Tōtsūji families in Nagasaki were also migrants who had left China between the end of Ming and beginning of Qing dynasties. This is because in the early years of the Edo period, unlike Christians who were persecuted, movements of Chinese were not strictly controlled until 1689 when the enclosed area of Tōjin yashiki was built.
A political refugee, Shu Shunsui 朱舜水 (Zhu Zhiyu 1600–1682), brought a new strand of Chinese philosophy and had great influence on the formation of Mitogaku 水戸学—a school of Japanese historical and Shinto studies based on Confucian and nationalistic thought that arose in the Mito domain of Japan. A Linji Chan monk, Yingen 隠元隆琦 (Yǐnyuán Lóngqí, 1592-1673), arrived in Nagasaki after repeated requests from prominent resident Chinese. He opened Manpukuji temple in Kyoto and founded the Ōbaku school of Zen Buddhism 黄檗宗 in 1661 sponsored by shogun Tokugawa Ietsuna. Yingen and his successors brought southern Chinese culture. The influence of Ōbaku went far beyond religion: new forms and styles in painting, calligraphy, tea ceremony (煎茶 sencha), pottery, architecture, landscape, etc. spread quickly among the ruling class and wealthy merchants and farmers. The paths of Ming refugees, Ōbaku monks and Tōtsūji were intertwined and influenced the spread and popularity of Chinese culture in Japan. This presentation will explore the role of Chinese migrants and Nagasaki Tōtsūji as mediators between the two cultures (China and Japan) under the condition of controlled national seclusion.

About the Speaker:

Dr Emiko Okayama is a translator and researcher with special interests in Historical Linguistics, Japanese visual culture and literary history. She has an MA in Translation Studies (DCU) and a PhD in Linguistics (Sydney). She is currently an honorary fellow at the University of Melbourne and a Japan Fellow at the National Library of Australia. Her latest research is on 18th and 19th-century Sino-Japanese cultural exchange that generated literary interactions and adaptations.

Serendipity in Theorizing Translation

Date: 23/03/2015
Time: 12:00 am - 12:00 am
Speaker: Dr. Piotr Blumczynski
Translation Seminar Series
seminars_20150323

Abstract:

Is translation indispensable or expendable? Is it a necessary evil and a constant reminder of our limitations or rather a powerful way of enlarging our understanding and experience? Is translation always benign, beneficial and positive or can it turn into a sinister, malign and ethically dubious activity? Are we always in control of what we translate? Is translation an end in itself or a means to an end? Why do we translate (not just what for)?
These and similar questions demonstrate that while reflecting on translation we inescapably reflect on much larger issues, such as meaning, sense and purpose; identity, sameness, and similarity; the relationship between part and whole; between the message and its medium; between ideas; between texts; between individuals; between individuals and texts; between communities; between texts and communities; between different times and places; between what is fixed and what is dynamic; between exercising force and experiencing influence, etc.
In this seminar, I propose a certain thought experiment, founded on serendipity, in order to offer a new method of theorising translation. At the centre of my approach is the conviction that when it comes to translation – as well as to other mental processes of understanding, reasoning, and explaining – the HOW is at least just as important as the WHAT. Perhaps scholars in other disciplines (e.g. philosophy, logic, linguistics, social sciences, anthropology, and theology) are saying something important about translation without fully realising it? If this indeed should be the case, then translation studies (an inter- or trans-discipline by definition) may serendipitously learn from as well as contribute to other fields.

About the Speaker:

Dr Piotr Blumczyński is a lecturer in translation and interpreting at Queen’s University Belfast. His areas of interest and research include translation theory, ethnolinguistics and cognitive semantics as well as translator and interpreter training. He has published in leading journals in the field, including TARGET, Translation Studies and translation. He is the principal investigator in an international research network studying English valuative concepts in translated religious and devotional texts. Recently he has been working on a monograph that seeks to integrate reconceptualised insights from philosophy, theology, anthropology and linguistics into translation theory.

Toward an Intercivilizational Turn: TS and the Problem of Eurocentrism

Date: 05/03/2015
Time: 12:00 am - 12:00 am
Speaker: Professor Douglas Robinson
Translation Seminar Series
seminars_20150305

Abstract:

Charges of Eurocentrism have been troubling the TS scholarly community lately, leading recently to a prominent countercharge in the pages of Translation Studies from Andrew Chesterman, who argues that science is always universalist, and that cultural relativists who accuse scholars like him of Eurocentrism are therefore simply wrong. This paper will offer a new way of thinking about Eurocentrism (or for that matter Sinocentrism, or any -centrism) based on the theoretical framework developed by the Japanese theorist Sakai Naoki around “cofigurative regimes of translation.” If Orientalism and its backlash Occidentalism are cofigurative–developed in relationships of unequal power–they aren’t “centered” in Europe or Asia or anywhere else, but globally networked. I will argue that the new voices emerging around this idea might be thought of as developing an “intercivilizational turn” in TS.

About the Speaker:

Professor Douglas Robinson is currently Chair Professor of English and Dean of Arts at Hong Kong Baptist University. Before coming to Hong Kong in 2010 as Tong Tin Sun Chair Professor of English and Head of the Department of English at Lingnan University, he worked at the University of Mississippi for over 20 years in various academic and administrative positions. Professor Robinson received his Bachelor’s, Master’s and Licentiate degrees in English from the University of Jyväskylä in Finland, and later obtained his second Master’s degree and his PhD in English at the University of Washington, Seattle.

Professor Robinson is a critical theorist whose “somatic” and “performative” theories of communication have broken new ground in literary studies, linguistics and translation studies. He has an impressive publication record which includes more than 20 monographs and 5 textbooks as well as articles in refereed journals and translation work from Finnish, German and Russian; he has been cited over 2700 times.

Plagiarism, Irony and Incense Stick: A Sketch of Thai Translation Traditions

Date: 22/01/2015
Time: 12:00 am - 12:00 am
Speaker: Dr Phrae Chittiphalangsri
Translation Seminar Series
seminars_20150122

Abstract:

In the light of current translation studies scholarship, Southeast Asia is largely underresearched compared to other parts of Asia. Translation traditions in a region so diverse in politics, geographies and cultures such as this cannot easily be accommodated by established notions of literal vs free, domestication vs foreignisation, or the post-colonial pattern of appropriation, resistance and hybridity. Thailand, known for its absence of colonial past, is an interesting case of translation tradition that does not directly deal with colonialism and its consequences, but shows the different practices of translation that are problematic, ironic and even unimaginable.

In this lecture, I will discuss three key events in Thai translation history in order to provide the audience with a glimpse into my ongoing project on Thai translation traditions. First, I will discuss the case of “Lak Wittaya”, a journal of which the name can be translated as “plagiarism”, as the major outlet for translation of western literary works, and a conceptual benchmark for the practice of translation in the early period of prose translation. Second, I will look into the Thai translations of Anna and the King of Siam using what Theo Hermans calls “irony’s echo.” The lecture will be concluded with the discussion of the Bangkok-based Butterfly publishing house and contemporary leading figures in literary translation whose ethos of fidelity can be likened to the ceremonial practice of lighting incense sticks.

About the Speaker:

Phrae Chittiphalangsri is currently a lecturer in Comparative Literature and Translation Studies at Chulalongkorn University, Thailand. She received a BA in English in 2003, and was then granted the Anandamahidol Foundation Royal scholarship to continue her postgraduate study in UK. In 2009, she completed her doctoral thesis Translation, Orientalism, Virtuality: English and French translations of the Bhagavad Gītā and Śakuntalā, 1784-1884, at University College London. She served as co-editor of the online journal New Voices in Translation Studies from 2009-2012. Her current research includes studies of Thai translation history, with a particular focus on Thai translation concepts and traditions. The article ‘On the virtuality of translation in Orientalism’, in which she develops the concept of virtuality in translation and representation initiated in her thesis, was published in Routledge’s Translation Studies in 2014.

The Life, Works, and Translations of Gu Hongming (1857-1928) as Masquerade

Date: 04/12/2014
Time: 12:00 am - 12:00 am
Speaker: Professor James St. André
Translation Seminar Series
seminars_20141204

Abstract:

Joan Riviere’s article “Womanliness as a Masquerade” will form the basis of a discussion of the late Qing intellectual and noted translator Ku Hung-ming. Specifically, this paper will argue that, just as some women can be seen as performing ‘womanliness’ as a masquerade, so too we may theorize the translations of Gu Hongming as a type of masquerade, a conscious adopting of a role that draws on pre-existing norms relating to that role. This understanding of his work, in turn, allows us to see how his translations, his original writings in English, and his life in China fit together to form a performance of Chineseness, not for his compatriots, but for foreigners. Yet while drawing on pre-existing stereotypes of Chineseness built up in Europe over two centuries in order to be seen as Chinese, Gu managed to avoid a simple self-orientalizing persona, arguing for the continued relevance of Chinese thought in the modern world. Although he may have only enjoyed limited success in his own lifetime, his work deserves more attention at a time when translations out of Chinese by Chinese translators are on the rise.

About the Speaker:

After completing his PhD in comparative literature at the University of Chicago, James St. André spent a year in Taiwan doing postdoctoral research on translation history. His first teaching position was in the Chinese Department of the National University of Singapore, where he spent six years. He then accepted a joint appointment in East Asian studies and translation studies at the University of Manchester, where he taught history, theory and practice of translation for eight years before moving to The Chinese University of Hong Kong’s Department of Translation. Recent publications include an article on ‘face’ in The Journal of Pragmatics, various articles in The Translator, TTR, and Translation and Interpreting Studies, as well as two edited volumes, Thinking Through Translation with Metaphors (St. Jerome 2010) and, with Peng Hsiao-yen, China and Its Others: Knowledge Transfer through Translation, 1829-2010 (Rodopi 2012). He is currently preparing a monograph, Queering Translation, to be published by University of Hawai’i Press.

Cultural Translation: Speaking to you about me – Pema Tseden in dialogue with Evans Chan

Date: 31/10/2014
Time: 12:00 am - 12:00 am
Speaker: Pema Tseden & Evans Chan
Translation Seminar Series
seminars_20141031

Abstract:

Hong Kong film maker Evans Chan lives between Hong Kong and New York, making films and writing about Hong Kong to an international audience and reader. The inter-lingual, intercultural and inter-medial conditions face by both Evans Chan and Pema Tzeden are representative of contemporary creativity. The HKBU Centre for Translation and The Asia Society are pleased to engage the two distinguished artists in a dialogue sharing with the audience their experience of interlingual, intercultural and inter-medial creativity.

About the Speaker:

Born of Tibetan descent in the Amdo Tibetan region of Qinghai Province, educated in Qinghai and Beijing. As an auteur in the cinema he has on major international prizes with his films including The Silent Holy Stones and Old Dog. His short stories, some written in Tibetan and others in Chinese, have also captured international attention and been translated into English, French, German, Czech and Japanese. His is also a prolific literary translator of Tibetan literature into Chinese. Pema Tzeden’s films, short stories and literary translations are expressive moments of self-representation of contemporary Tibetan lives. His use of varying media in the context of international reception have allowed his works to develop unique inter-medial and inter-cultural dimensions.

Contructing the Musicality of Language: With Examples from Scene 2 of the English Translation of Yuanye by Jane Lai

Date: 25/09/2014
Time: 12:00 am - 12:00 am
Speaker: Professor Zhang Xu
Translation Seminar Series
seminars_20140925

Abstract:

誠如西方學者所言,儘管當今的描寫翻譯學研究已經取得長足的進展,然而由於戲劇翻譯問題之複雜,並且缺少令人滿意的解釋性理論,迄今就其展開深入研究的甚少。此種情形同樣適用於當今中國的戲劇翻譯界。當代西方翻譯理論家蘇珊•巴斯奈特曾反覆強調,文本功能是翻譯的中心問題。落實到戲劇翻譯領域更是如此。巴斯奈特尤其重視戲劇文本的可表演性(performativity)、可言說性(speakability)和讀者/觀眾的接受問題。既然戲劇最重視的是其演出效果,而演出中劇本的語言問題又尤為實質,因此如何體現戲劇的可表演性或可言說性就成了中西無數戲劇創作家的努力追求,同時也成了眾多翻譯家在戲劇翻譯中重點探索的問題。當代香港就活躍著一位戲劇翻譯家黎翠珍,她長期從事英漢雙語寫作,又有不少的英漢和漢英翻譯作品(主要是戲劇翻譯作品),且精於戲劇表演之道,這也註定她的翻譯會頗具特色。本篇試以黎翠珍英譯曹禺的《原野》為個案,討論她是如何充分發揮自己的雙語特長,利用自己的戲劇表演經驗,通過翻譯來營構戲劇語言的音樂性。

About the Speaker:

張旭,香港浸會大學哲學博士,先後執教於長沙鐵道學院、中南大學、湖南師範大學;現為福建工程學院人文學院院長、教授、閩江學者特聘教授,香港浸會大學翻譯學研究中心榮譽研究員,中國英漢語比較研究會常務理事兼副秘書長,主要研究方向為翻譯與跨學科研究,興趣兼及哲學、歷史學、語言學、英美文學、比較文學、中國現當代文學等。先後主持並完成國家社會基金專案1項(結項等級為優秀)、國家出版基金專案1項、教育部人文社科專案1項、省級專案9項。《通天塔叢書》主編。個人學術專著有:《林紓年譜長編》(福建教育出版社,2014)、《中國英詩漢譯史論》(湖南人民出版社,2011)、《湘籍近現代文化名人•翻譯家卷》(湖南師範大學出版社,2011)、《跨越邊界:從比較文學到翻譯研究》(北京大學出版社,2010)、《視界的融合:朱湘譯詩新探》(清華大學出版社,2008)等;合著有:《越界與融通——跨文化視野中的文學跨學科研究》(北京大學出版社,2012)、《外國文學翻譯在中國》(安徽文藝出版社,2003)等,譯著有《一門學科之死》(北京大學出版社,2014)、《印度的世紀》(湖南人民出版社,2011)、《翻譯學導論)(合譯,北京商務印書館,2009;香港中文大學出版社,2009)等,另有學術論文80餘篇散見在海內外學術期刊上。2007年獲“香港翻譯學會獅球教育基金會翻譯翻譯研究獎學金”;2013年度獲福建省社科優秀成果二等獎一項。

Translation, Representation, and Narrative Performance

Date: 29/05/2014
Time: 12:00 am - 12:00 am
Speaker: Professor Mona Baker
Translation Seminar Series
seminars_20140529

Abstract:

Translation is one of the core practices through which any cultural group constructs representations of another and contests representations of the self. Part of its power stems from the fact that as a genre, it tends to be understood as “merely” reporting on something that is already available in another social space, that something being an independent source text that pre-exists the translation. Using concrete examples of subtitled political commercials and video clips created by both political lobbies and activists, this presentation will attempt to demonstrate that far from being a documentary practice that follows and is subsidiary to an independent source text, translation is imbricated in an ongoing process of (re)constructing the world through narrative performance.

About the Speaker:

Mona Baker is Professor of Translation Studies at the Centre for Translation and Intercultural Studies, University of Manchester, UK and is currently leading the Citizen Media at Manchester initiative (www.citizenmediamanchester.wordpress.com). She is author of In Other Words: A Coursebook on Translation (Routledge, 1992; second edition 2011) and Translation and Conflict: A Narrative Account (Routledge, 2006), Editor of the Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies (1998, 2001; second edition, co-edited with Gabriela Saldanha, 2009); Critical Concepts: Translation Studies (4 volumes, Routledge, 2009); and Critical Readings in Translation Studies (Routledge, 2010). Her articles have appeared in a wide range of international journals, including Social Movement Studies, Critical Studies on Terrorism, The Translator and Target. She is founding Editor of The Translator (St. Jerome Publishing, 1995-2013), former Editorial Director of St. Jerome Publishing (1995-2013), and founding Vice-President of IATIS (International Association for Translation & Intercultural Studies – www.iatis.org).

《法句經序》之由來

Date: 24/04/2014
Time: 12:00 am - 12:00 am
Speaker: Professor Luo Xinzhang
Translation Seminar Series
seminars_20140424

Abstract:

《法句經》於三國時期由著名譯經家支謙譯成中文,由支謙所撰的《法句經序》,更是中國現存最早論及翻譯理論的文章,其翻譯風格對後世的佛經翻譯不無影響,因此,此序對中國譯學研究別具意義。

講者先作文獻考索,試圖探索博極群書、晚年專精佛學與佛經翻譯的梁啟超,為何無視《法句經序》?講者繼而嘗試探討《法句經序》的文本價值 ── 支謙既無意為學,此序怎成中國譯學開山之作?

About the Speaker:

一九三六,生於上海。一九五七,北大畢業,曾在外文局《中國文學》雜誌社長期從事中譯法文學翻譯工作。一九八○,調入中國社會科學院外國文學研究所,專攻法國中世紀文學。譯有《特利斯當與伊瑟》、《列那狐的故事》、《紅與黑》、《栗樹下的晚餐》、《不朽作家福樓拜》等。關於數字用法,發表有《阿拉伯數字莫亂用》、《自家文字“他者化” 》、《愛護文字的諧和自然》等文章。編有《翻譯論集》、《古文大略》。出有《譯藝發端》一書。

Towards a Yin-yang Poetics of Translation: Getting Translation Down to a Fine (Martial) Art of ‘Pushing Hands’

Date: 27/03/2014
Time: 12:00 am - 12:00 am
Speaker: Professor Zhu Chunshen
Translation Seminar Series
seminars_20140327

Abstract:

This seminar will begin with a few minutes of live Tai Chi demonstration to the accompaniment of a strain of non-Chinese music, to illustrate how the flow of energy enables a ‘stigmergy’ among the faculties of a human body, both physical and spiritual, to bring about a kinaesthetic experience of articulation in a yin-yang response to the rhythm of the music. The audience will then be invited to mentally translate the lyrics of an English song into Chinese and, through the translation, to feel for, as it were, the information flow that is maintained by the syntax and enhanced by the melody. This inter-semiotic prelude will lead to a presentation on a yin-yang epistemology of translation, which is based on my (2008) plenary speech at the 2nd HCLS Conference on Translation, Language Contact and Multilingual Communication under a similar title. From this yin-yang perspective, translation can be seen as a reciprocal verbal articulation in which one is expected to ‘give up’ one’s presuppositions in order to achieve a maximum degree of relaxation, agility, and vigilance in one’s use of language so as to ‘listen’ (tingjing, ‘listen to the energy flow’) and respond to an advancing flow of energy from the source text, as in the budiu buding (‘neither separating nor confronting’) engagement in Tai Chi pushing hands. Such responsive ‘listening’ and adhering to each other keeps a dialogic rather than confrontational interaction between the two systems involved. Translation perceived as such, it argues, serves to sharpen a culture’s sensitivity about its own and the Other’s presence and to develop its capacity for accommodating, containing, absorbing and deflecting the momentum of the energy from the Other in the creation of a target text.

About the Speaker:

Chunshen Zhu (朱純深)received his PhD from the Department of English, University of Nottingham, in 1993 and is currently teaching translation at the City University of Hong Kong. He is the founding instructor of The Universe Tai Chi Wu Shu Society of the University of Nottingham (1988).

Towards a Material Poetics in Chinese: Text, Translation and Technology

Date: 27/02/2014
Time: 12:00 am - 12:00 am
Speaker: Dr Lee Tong King
Translation Seminar Series
seminars_20140227

Abstract:

How do text, translation and technology intersect and interact in contemporary poetics? This project attempts an answer to this question through a case study of the avant-garde Taiwanese poet Chen Li (b.1954). In Chen’s oeuvre, translation as a concept is instantiated in a number of different ways: as translingual signification where different languages encounter within a text; as the displacement of a printed book by its electronic version (media translation); and as the creative transposition (intersemiotic translation) of a poem into a musical performance complete with vocals and piano accompaniment. In these cases of virtual movement between languages and/or media, translating as a textual event (translation proper) sometimes takes place, where semantic content is transported from source to target language. Chen Li’s experimentation with translation and technology thus produces discursive sites where translation takes place at various levels: within the translingual text, between media platforms, between languages and between semiotic modes of literary communication.

About the Speaker:

Lee Tong King is currently an assistant professor in translation at the University of Hong Kong, and a NAATI-accredited professional translator. Currently the associate executive editor of Translation Quarterly, he has research interests in culture and ideology in translation, intersemiotic translation, and postmodernist poetics. He is co-author of Translating Chinese Drama (in Chinese) and author of Translating the Multilingual City: Cross-lingual Practices and Language Ideology.

Teaching Translation in Contexts: With Special Reference to the Social Context of Macao

Date: 21/01/2014
Time: 12:00 am - 12:00 am
Speaker: Professor Zhang Meifang
Translation Seminar Series
seminars_20140121

Abstract:

Socio-cultural context is an important aspect in the study of language and translation, because the three, namely, context, language and translation are inextricably linked. This paper attempts to discuss the translation of different text types which are functioning in the social contexts of Macao and other areas of China. It tries to deduce about the contexts in which the ST and TT were produced, the purpose for which they were produced, and the target reader for whom they were produced. The study is carried out in the light of functionalist theories of the German School and the Hallidayan systemic functional linguistics. Examples for the analysis are extracted from the database for teaching and research built up by the present author. Case analysis is intended also to show how to apply the functional theories to the practice of English-Chinese translation teaching, and to discuss how the acquisition of competence for text analysis and for translation can be improved through actual translation practice guided by these functional theories.

About the Speaker:

ZHANG Meifang was awarded a PhD degree specializing in Translation Studies from Hong Kong Baptist University (1999). She is currently professor of English and Translation and Coordinator of the MA Programme in Translation Studies at the University of Macau where she also supervises PhD students in Translation Studies. Before she joined the University of Macau, she was Professor in English and Translation in the School of Foreign Languages of Sun Yat-sen University, where she also served as Head of the English Department. She has published extensively on translation and English Studies, including the widely quoted monographs Functional Approaches to Translation Studies and English/Chinese Translation Textbooks in China (1949-1998), and her contributions to different refereed academic journals.

Meifang is Vice President of the Macau Federation of Translators and Interpreters, and council member as well as expert member of the Chinese Translators’ Association, and life member of Hong Kong Translation Society. She also serves on several editorial boards of academic journals. Her main research interests include: Functional Approaches to Translation Studies, Translation for the Media, Translation Teaching and Translator Training, Discourse Analysis, Cross-cultural Studies.

Homer my Homey: Transatlantic Rewritings of the Iliad and Odyssey

Date: 09/01/2014
Time: 12:00 am - 12:00 am
Speaker: Dr Scott G. Williams
Translation Seminar Series
seminars_20140109

Abstract:

English-language and German-language cultures both claim the same shared classical Greek tradition. Even though knowledge of classical Greek is hardly wide spread, the Iliad and Odyssey are familiar to a wide audience through translations and other rewritings across different genres and media, from fiction to non-fiction, prose and poetry to film, stage, and the internet. Ideological and aesthetic considerations shape these rewritings within the particular national and cultural contexts. Rewriters may, for instance, pursue or eschew the performative aspects of the texts, cutting parts considered repetitive in modern prose or finding ways to stage parts of the text across continents. One might see in the texts a way to educate about PTSD or an avenue for addressing generational consequences of war. On both continents the texts also serve as the first great Story, to be retold and refashioned.

About the Speaker:

Scott G. Williams earned his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at the University of Texas at Austin and a Magister Artium in Greek and Roman history and archaeology from the Universität Hamburg. He is Associate Professor of Germans Studies at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, Texas USA, where he was named Honors professor of the year in 2009. He has published translations of over 20 contemporary German-language authors. He has written articles on, for instance, classical myth in Paul Celan and Christoph Ransmayr, concepts from translation theory and the image of classical Rome in post-1945 German-language Literature, and the application of translation studies concepts to one of William Faulkner’s short stories and its cross-cultural intertextuality. He is currently working on issues of translation and performance. He was president of the South Central Association for Language Learning Technology 2005-2007 and was a member of the Executive Board of the American Translation and Interpreting Studies Association 2011-2013.

Traditional Chinese Theories of Translation: Terminology

Date: 05/12/2013
Time: 12:00 am - 12:00 am
Speaker: Professor Chu Chi Yu
Translation Seminar Series
seminars_20131205

Abstract:

傳統翻譯研究主要集中在技術層面,強調與實踐的關係;這一點在中國尤其顯著。其中譯名問題的研究最為突出。本研討會試討論中國譯名方法的原則,並總結機構為統一科學譯名做出的努力。

About the Speaker:

畢業於天津外國語學院英語系、香港中文大學哲學碩士(比較文學)、香港大學博士(比較文學)。曾任《譯叢》(Renditions)助理編輯。現任教於香港理工大學中文及雙語學系,教授翻譯理論,翻譯史等課程;兼任香港理工大學翻譯中心主任。目前主要研究專案包括中國翻譯理論發展史。發表譯著有《一個冬天的童話》(遇羅錦著)、《顧城詩選》(顧城著)的英譯。

Translating the Chuci: Old Approaches and New Problems

Date: 21/11/2013
Time: 12:00 am - 12:00 am
Speaker: Dr Nicholas Morrow Williams
Translation Seminar Series
seminars_20131121

Abstract:

The Chuci 楚辭 (Songs of the South or Incantations of Chu) is one of the two oldest and most influential anthologies of Chinese poetry. Its poems depict the enduring tension of loyalty and dissent for the scholar-official of traditional China. The anthology is also notable for its regional elements, representing the culture of the ancient state of Chu (centered in the area of modern Hubei and Hunan provinces).
Yet despite the importance of the anthology, there is only one decent translation into English, completed in the 1950s by David Hawkes. Hawkes’s translation was remarkable for its time, but has come to seem more limited and unsatisfactory with time. First of all, the field of Chuci studies has advanced dramatically over the past few decades, particularly through the efforts of Chinese scholars and with the aid of excavated manuscripts and artifacts that have shed light on ancient Chu culture. Second, Hawkes’s approach to understanding the Chuci focused on using philological tools to identify the earliest strata within the anthology and to place them in specific historical settings, an approach that discounted the intertextual and ideological factors common to all the poems. Hawkes himself later admitted that he had not sufficiently appreciated the role of religion and mythology in structuring the anthology.
This talk will examine the presuppositions and strategies of Hawkes’s translation in light of new evidence and interpretations of the anthology, and present some alternate readings and renderings of selected passages.

About the Speaker:

Nicholas Morrow Williams is research assistant professor in the Mr. Simon Suen and Mrs. Mary Suen Sino-Humanitas Institute, Hong Kong Baptist University. He is currently revising his book manuscript, Jiang Yan and the Spirit of Six Dynasties Poetry, and working on a translation of selected poems by Jao Tsung-i.

seminars_20131031

Abstract:

This talk examines the translator-author relationship against the backdrop of governmental and non-governmental (publishing, editorial, and the translator’s own) censorship in present-day China. I distinguish three types of translator-author relationship affected by censorship and/or self-censorship, resulting in three categories of translations, i.e. full translations, partial translations and non-translations. The several relationships described will adhere to the traditional concept of translatorial ‘faithfulness’. Full translatorial ‘faithfulness’ results when the translator is fully committed to his/her author and represents the author as faithfully as s/he possibly can. In this case, the work being translated falls entirely within the category of ‘translatable/importable’ foreign literature, defined in turn as being ‘harmonious’ in relation to existing Chinese constitutional laws. The second type of relationship culminates in ‘partial translations’, whereby omissions, shifts of meaning, or the modulation of overall author-tone necessarily change the intentions of the author, so as to avoid potential conflict with government censors. Typical examples in this second category include the partly censored PRC versions of Hilary Clinton’s Living History and Henry Kissinger’s On China. The final category of translator-author relationship involves prolepsis, i.e. the translator’s anticipatory relationship with a work that has not been — and may not be — translated under existing conditions. Whether or not, in fact, such a ‘zero translator-author’ relationship eventually can emerge, thus converting non-translations into translations or partial translations, is worthy of further research. On this basis, the talk offers a theoretical framework for discussions about how various types of (self) censorship impact the translator-author relationship and the activity of translation within the context of the PRC.

About the Speaker:

TAN Zaixi is Professor of Translation at Hong Kong Baptist University. He obtained his first degree in English Language and Literature at Hunan Normal University (China), and postgraduate degrees (both MA by research and PhD) in General and Applied Linguistics (specializing in translation studies) at Exeter University (UK). He is the author of over a dozen books including 《翻譯與翻譯研究概論——認知•視角•課題》(Translation and Translation Studies: Perceptions, Perspectives and Methodology, 2012), 《西方翻譯簡史(增訂版)》(A History of Translation in the West: Revised Edition; recommended by the Chinese Ministry of Education as a postgraduate research coursebook in universities; 2004/2006/2008/2009/2010/2013), 《翻譯學》(The Science of Translation; 2000/2005), and 《新編奈達論翻譯》(Nida on Translation—New Edition, 1999/2003), and a wide range of articles on translation and translation studies published in major, refereed Chinese and international journals including Meta, The Translator, Neohelicon, Across Languages and Cultures, Perspectives, Babel,《中國翻譯》(Chinese Translators Journal),《外語教學與研究》(Foreign Language Teaching and Research),《外國語》(Foreign Languages),《東方翻譯》(East Journal of Translation) and 《外語教學與研究》(Foreign Language and Their Teaching).

Translation as Intercultural Event

Date: 25/09/2013
Time: 12:00 am - 12:00 am
Speaker: Professor Anthony Pym
Translation Seminar Series
seminars_20130925

Abstract:

Belated interest in the aesthetics of the event (variously from Badiou) has brought renewed attention to the performative nature of translation. Part of this might be attached to the technologies that now favour groups of volunteer translators, who are at once the producers and consumers of translations (hence “prosumers”). Such translating subjects are able to enact the cultural products they desire, going beyond some of the discursive constraints of the Western translation form. More traditional prosumers can be found in the local translation committees and consultants of the United Bible Societies, where many interactions socialize the principles of Nida’s dynamic equivalence. A further group can be identified among activist translators, where the narrative of the cause is sufficient justification. In all these variants, as at points between, the participative capacity of the translation may be of more value than its representation of anterior text.

On this view, an effective translation is one that maximizes involvement by the translating community, where “involvement” can be understood in terms of interactive conversation and the shared construction of knowledge (Gumperz, Tannen). A translation thus becomes part of an ongoing conversation, en exchange, indeed as a prerequisite for participative democracy (Habermas). On the other hand, in situations where discursive involvement is minimal, as for example in most official translations done for the European Commission, a society of official event-less information sheds not only affective identification but, with it, the desire for participative democracy.

When a translation becomes a participative event, however, does that status not comprise its purported representative function? What happens to the trust that is traditionally placed in the eclipsed mediator? What are we to make of the concomitant threat of deprofessionalisation? Where does responsibility lie if conveyance of information is no longer a criterion for success? And what is the lasting ethical value of an event from which there is no critical distance (the Nuremberg rallies were also a participative social events)? In short, are we not back to the classical arguments of rhetoric versus ethics, where most participative events become potentially unethical?

These objections will be met, and a possible resolution will be proposed.

About the Speaker:

Anthony Pym works on sociological approaches to translation and intercultural relations. He is currently Professor of Translation and Intercultural Studies at Rovira i Virgili University in Spain. He is also President of the European Society for Translation Studies, a fellow of the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies, Visiting Researcher at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, and Professor Extraordinary at Stellenbosch University. He had written or edited some 23 books and 160 articles in the general field of Translation Studies, including Exploring Translation Theories (second edition 2014).

Schleiermacher and Plato, Hermeneutics and Translation

Date: 26/07/2013
Time: 12:00 am - 12:00 am
Speaker: Professor Theo Hermans
Translation Seminar Series
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Abstract:

Schleiermacher’s German translation of Plato’s philosophical dialogues, the first five volumes of which appeared between 1805 and 1809, has received little attention from students of translation. Yet it embodies Schleiermacher’s understanding of Plato, which he further elaborated in the introductions he wrote to each of the dialogues and in his general introduction to Plato’s work as a whole. Schleiermacher’s effort to understand and then translate Plato in turn laid the foundation of his hermeneutics, which provides the key to his 1813 Academy lecture ‘On the Different Methods of Translating’ with its famous distinction between ‘foreignising’ and ‘domesticating’ translation.

About the Speaker:

Theo Hermans is Professor of Dutch and Comparative Literature at University College London. He is editor of The Manipulation of Literature (1985), Crosscultural Transgressions (2002) and Translating Others (2005), and series editor of ‘Translation Theories Explored’ (St Jerome Publishing, Manchester). His monographs include The Structure of Modernist Poetry (1982), Translation in Systems (1999) and The Conference of the Tongues (2007). His main research interests are in theories and histories of translation.

Foreign Echoes & Discerning the Soil: Dual Translation, Chineseness, & World Literature in Chinese Poetry

Date: 30/05/2013
Time: 12:00 am - 12:00 am
Speaker: Dr Lucas Klein
Translation Seminar Series
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Abstract:

What constitutes the relationship between world literature and Chineseness? How has translation shaped Chinese poetry, and can translation be understood as at the foundation not only of world literature, but of Chineseness, as well? This talk will begin to answer these questions by demonstrating how Chineseness as an aspect of the Chinese poetic tradition is itself a result of translation. Looking at Chinese poetry’s negotiation with concepts central to translation – nativization and foreignization, or the work’s engagement with the Chinese historical heritage or foreign literary texts and contexts, respectively – I argue not only that Chinese poetry can be understood as translation, but for an understanding of the role of such translation in the constitution of both Chineseness and world literature. After contextualizing recent debates in the field of Sinology and translation studies, I will examine the work of Bian Zhilin 卞之琳 (1910-2000) and his implicit vision for a world literature able to merge the Chinese literary heritage with Western influence. Since debates around world literature, especially in Chinese literary studies, focus on the modern era, however, I shift focus with a discussion of the Tang dynasty (618-907), when China had earlier become highly international, even cosmopolitan, in a detailed look at the history of Regulated Verse (lüshi 律詩), describing not only its origins in Sanskrit but how it maintained associations with Buddhism. Following this, I consider the work of Du Fu 杜甫 (712-770) to understand how the canonization of his work nativized Regulated Verse through its historiography. I conclude with a reconsideration of the ethics of world literature and translation in determining our understanding of the local.

About the Speaker:

Lucas Klein is a writer, translator, editor, and Assistant Professor in the dept. of Chinese, Translation & Linguistics at City University of Hong Kong. With Haun Saussy and Jonathan Stalling he edited The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry: A Critical Edition, by Ernest Fenollosa and Ezra Pound (Fordham University Press, 2008), and he co-translated a collection of Bei Dao 北島 poems with Clayton Eshleman, published as Endure (Black Widow Press, 2011). His translation Notes on the Mosquito: Selected Poems of Xi Chuan 西川 (New Directions, 2012; for more, see http://xichuanpoetry.com) was shortlisted for the Best Translated Book Award in poetry, and he is at work translating Tang dynasty poet Li Shangyin 李商隱 and seminal contemporary poet Mang Ke 芒克.

What Is the “Original” in Cultural Translation?

Date: 23/05/2013
Time: 12:00 am - 12:00 am
Speaker: Dr Nana Sato-Rossberg
Translation Seminar Series
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Abstract:

Those with an interest in Ainu oral narratives will soon come across the name of Mashiho Chiri (1909 – 1961), who today would be called a ‘native anthropologist’.
Mashiho’s translation style is strongly influenced by the work of his well-known sister, Yukie Chiri (1903 – 1922). Regrettably, most translations of Mashiho appeared only with the Japanese text. Only one of the original Aynu texts used by Mashiho has remained (Japanese title: ‘Ainu Shinyou Gin no shizuku fure fure mawari ni, ‘Fukurou shin ga jibun wo utatta uta’).
In this paper, I compare the Ainu original text of this myth and its translations by Yukie and Mashiho based on their personal backgrounds, recalling discussions about “originals” in ethnographical texts by Kate Sturge and others. So analyzing what is tradition and what is creation, I will explore what Mashiho understood as the original he was to translate.

About the Speaker:

Dr Nana Sato-Rossberg is a lecturer at the School of Language and Communication Studies, University of East Anglia. Her recent publications include Translating Culture – Creative Translations of Ainu Chanted-Myths by Mashiho Chiri (2011 Sapporodo), Translation and Translation Studies in the Japanese Context (2012 Continuum Publishing, London, co-edited with Judy Wakabayashi), and “Conflict and dialogue: Bronisław Piłsudski’s ethnography and translation of Ainu oral narratives”, Translation Studies, 5(1), 2012.

Self-Translation and the Nobel Prize: 100 years of Tagore’s Gitanjali

Date: 28/03/2013
Time: 12:00 am - 12:00 am
Speaker: Professor Harish Trivedi
Translation Seminar Series
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Abstract:

The first non-European and Asian writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature was the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore; he is still the only Indian to win the prize and one of under half a dozen writers from Asia. Though the prize is awarded not for a single book but for a body of work, Tagore won it apparently for just one slim book of poems published in his own English translation under the non-translated title Gitanjali (A Handful of Offerings of Songs; 1912).

In this lecture, I examine this highly exceptional occurrence in the history of literary translation with particular focus on the following issues.

(a) Self-translations: their motives, nature and efficacy, especially with reference to bilingualism. Gitanjali remains probably the only work of self-translation to be awarded the Nobel Prize.

(b) Self-translation, Re-writing, and Editing. What are the special virtues and limitations of self-translators? How is the picture altered when some (invisible) editing takes place to ‘improve’ the translation, as for example by W. B. Yeats in the present case?

(c) Translation and Paratexts. D translations including especially self-translations require a paratext such as an explicatory and enthusiastic ‘Introduction’ to be able to make any impact? What is the role of such an ‘Introduction’ (such as the one by Yeats in the present case)?

(d) Self-Translations and Other Translations. How do self-translations compare with translations by others, including native speakers of the TL, as in this case by William Radice (2011)?

In conclusion, as the proof of the pudding, I shall compare three versions of the same poem from Gitanjali, the first a self-translation by Tagore, the second this translation as silently edited by Yeats, and the third a new translation by Radice.

About the Speaker:

Harish Trivedi is former Professor of English at the University of Delhi, and has been visiting professor at the universities of Chicago and London and at various other universities in the USA, Canada, the UK, Europe, China, Japan and Australia. He is the author of Colonial Transactions: English Literature and India (Calcutta 1993; Manchester 1995; Delhi 2013), and has co-edited The Nation across the World: Postcolonial Literary Representations (New Delhi 2007; New York 2008), Literature and Nation: Britain and India 1800-1990 (London 2000), Post-colonial Translation: Theory and Practice (London 1999), and Interrogating Post-colonialism: Theory, Text and Context (Shimla 1996; rpt. 2000, 2006, 2013).

He has edited with an introduction and notes Hardy’s Tess (Oxford University Press, 1988; several reprints) and Kipling’s Kim (Penguin Classics 2011). He is currently editing an anthology of Indian Literature from 1500 B.C. to 2000 A.D., and is one of the co-ordinators of an international project based in Stockholm for writing a history of World Literature. He is Chairperson of the Indian Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies (2005– ) and Vice-President of the Comparative Literature Association of India (2007– ).

談翻譯文化史研究的若干模式

Date: 21/03/2013
Time: 12:00 am - 12:00 am
Speaker: Professor Wang Kefei
Translation Seminar Series
seminars_20130321

Abstract:

翻譯文化史重在探討翻譯對於文化(尤其是譯入語文化)的意義和影響,翻譯在文化史上的作用,以及文化對翻譯的制約。翻譯的過程也是一個文化感受的過程,它不同程度地包含著理解、比較、選擇、融會和創新,從中可以對翻譯的原因和意義獲得更充分的理解。
不同於一般翻譯史的是,翻譯文化史注重對種種翻譯現象、事件作文化傳播意義上的分析與解釋,而不僅僅是翻譯史實的敍述和鈎沉;即不僅僅是描述性的,還應是解釋性的。以中國翻譯文化史上的種種現象來分析,我們可嘗試提出若干翻譯文化史模式概述之,解釋之。其一是“借體寄生”,多見諸於文學翻譯,如中國林紓的翻譯,如日本明治時期的翻譯,莎士比亞戲劇的翻譯等,其特點是以本土傳統文學之體寄生域外文學之新奇。其二是“煉石補天”,多見諸於思想翻譯,如中國的嚴復、日本的福澤諭吉、中村正直等啟蒙思想家的翻譯,其特點是譯者選譯有明確的目的性,翻譯過程中可分析出多種思想因素參雜,似煉西方域外之石補本土殘破之天。

About the Speaker:

王克非:北京外國語大學博士(1993),教授(1997- ),博士生導師(2001- ),學報《外語教學與研究》(教育部名刊)主編(1999- ),教育部人文社科重點研究基地“中國外語教育研究中心”常務副主任,北京外國語大學“英語語言文學”國家重點學科學科帶頭人,校學術委員會委員。曾三十餘次應邀赴國外境外大學或研究機構從事研究和講學,受聘為日本文部省國際日本文化研究中心客座教授、英國蘭卡斯特大學 (Lancaster University) 高級研究學者、臺灣輔仁大學客座教授及國內多所大學兼職教授。
主要研究領域為語言學和翻譯學。主持過包括國家社科重大招標項目在內的十餘個國家級、省部級科研項目。主要著述有《中日近代對西方政治哲學思想的攝取》、《翻譯文化史論》、《雙語對應語料庫:研製與應用》、《語料庫翻譯學探索》等,在國內外發表論文120多篇。曾獲第三屆中國人文社科優秀成果、北京市第二屆哲學社會科學中青年優秀成果、全國高校人文社科學報優秀主編等學術獎勵,享受國務院頒發政府特殊津貼(1999)。現指導雙語對比研究、翻譯研究、語料庫研究等方向碩士、博士生和博士後十餘人,獲評全國百篇優秀博士論文指導教師。

Institutions of Translation, (Literary) Modernization and the Problem of Knowledge

Date: 28/02/2013
Time: 12:00 am - 12:00 am
Speaker: Dr Omid Azadibougar
Translation Seminar Series
seminars_20130228

Abstract:

A notion that has long dominated our understanding of the role of translation in (literary) modernization comes from postcolonial theories that emphasize the agency of the translational space (i.e. the third space) in the process of “importing” ideas. The descriptive and analytic limits of post-colonial thoughts are due to their reliance on colonial institutions (e.g. languages, literatures, universities, etc.) which are/were immediately available and advantageous to them. In this light, imagining an a priori role for translation without exploring the impact and function of institutions that participate in the production and transfer of knowledge is untenable particularly because without considering the inevitable epistemological transformations that occur in cross-cultural relations, investigating the role of translation in modernization would be incomplete. As a result, such theories do not shed substantial light on semi-colonized contexts’ (e.g. Iran) experiences of the impact of translation in (literary) modernization.

An example from the asymmetrical relationship of centers and peripheries in World Literature will emphasize the epistemological implications of the institutions of translation. In order to further explore the issue, I will elaborate upon an experiment which was conducted during the 2011-2012 academic year to examine the scientific validity of Area Studies. Inspired by the Sokal case, a computer-generated abstract was submitted under a pseudonym to two major Area Studies conferences held respectively in October 2011 and August 2012. The abstract was accepted to both conferences and described as “theoretically advanced.” After analyzing the experiment to differentiate it from the Sokal case, questions will be raised regarding the impact of institutions not only in the transfer of knowledge but also in its production and legitimization.

About the Speaker:

Omid Azadibougar holds a PhD in Comparative Literature and Theory from the University of Leuven. His research focuses on the crossroads of literature and translation in intercultural exchange. As of November 2012, he has been a visiting assistant professor at the department of Chinese, Translation and Linguistics at the City University of Hong Kong doing research on Chinese, Brazilian and Persian novelistic traditions.

seminars_20130131

Abstract:

Teaching translation in a research-informed instead of an impressionistic manner to ensure the pedagogical quality of translator training is, ceteris paribus, dependent on the extent to which the formulation of a text, be it a source or a target text, can be perceived and explained as accountable for its function and effect. This presentation will focus on an on-line platform (the Platform) specifically designed for an accountability-driven mode of teaching and (self-)learning for translation and bilingual writing, which is currently under construction at the City University of Hong Kong. The presenter will explain and illustrate how the rationale of textual accountability has sustained the formulation of a system of specifically defined ‘tag-words’ as the operational framework for the annotation of data, design of exercises, explanation of answers, and compilation of knowledge-intensive topical boards as the key modules of the Platform. In actual use, the tag-words are meant to serve as ‘road signs’ to facilitate instant cross-modular navigation in an integrated manner to increase learning efficiency. The Platform is designed to realize a better regulated and systematic methodology for the teaching and (self-)learning of translation and bilingual writing. As such, the presenter will also report on the results of one of the questionnaire surveys and analyze the responses from student users regarding the Platform’s operation.

About the Speaker:

Mu Yuanyuan received her Ph.D. from the City University of Hong Kong and currently works as Senior Research Assistant in the Department of Chinese, Translation and Linguistics, City University of Hong Kong. She is the manager of the Platform project. Her research interests include corpus-based translation studies, translation teaching, and stylistics.

Translation and Globalization. Why, How and Where Translation May be a Key to the Dynamics of Culture

Date: 06/12/2012
Time: 12:00 am - 12:00 am
Speaker: Professor José Lambert
Translation Seminar Series
seminars_20121206

Abstract:

This lecture focuses on fundamental and fast GLOBAL(izing) changes;
In fact most academic guest lectures are an illustration of mobility (in – scholarly – communication). (Cf. Ong 1982.)
In the present case: (a) intercontinental contacts/exchanges (are in fast progress); (b) the focus is on (global and other) Communication
Globalization: just an idea/buzz word? Or is it real? (Or rather: an economic strategy on behalf of (colonial) partners?
Counterchecking…. Is Internationalization (Globalization) really a 20th (and 21st) Century phenomenon? – How and why contemporary translation(s) both reflect and support globalizing trends.
Particular position of translation and Translation Studies (TS)
(Under the waterline: why translation always refers to more than translation)
TS is indebted to Globalization, and vice versa:
1° as an instrument (a service?);
2° as a discipline created by Internationalization?
3° are universities aware of the strategic/symptomatic value of translation(s)/linguae francae?
New challenges, resources, responsibilities in TS
Splendid new equipment(s) (and theories, goals, tools, programs)
Are we really well prepared? (human resources, structures, scholarly communities…)?
The privileged position of networks/peripheral countries/communities (Cf. Lambert 1995)
Multilingualism, translation in transit/mobile communities
Samples and Discussion of innovative approaches
The book market (and the languages of translation);
Media and/as communication (…TV…the Internet)…and other “global” problems: legislation…religion… scholarship, etc.
Methodological models: the Bourdieu team(s); K.Van Bragt, Covadonga Fouces Gonzalez
Interdisciplinarity:
How and why institutions and institutionalization may be a handicap
There is no way back:
Why it would be disastrous to reduce translation to language issues/departments

About the Speaker:

José Lambert is a professor and scholar in Comparative Literature and Translation Studies from KU Leuven, Belgium (1972-2006). His international career started around 1975. He is the founder of CETRA (Centre for Translation Studies: 1989- ) at Leuven, where some 500 young scholars from 5 Continents have been trained; many among them belong to the new generation of talented researchers in the field. Lambert is also the co-founder and he was the co-editor of Target (John Benjamins, 1989-2010), together with Gideon Toury. He is well-known also as the author of more than 100 articles where Literary Studies as well as Translation Studies have always been approached from a methodological and from an interdisciplinary perspective. It has often been stressed, even by the team around Pierre Bourdieu (Actes de la Recherche en Sciences sociales, Paris, Sept. 2002) that Literature and Translation (Leuven, Acco: 1978), which he edited with James Holmes and Raymond van den Broeck, was one of the key moments of the new discipline that was going to be called Translation Studies. At a later stage he co-edited with colleagues from different countries and disciplines Translation in the Development of Literatures (1993), Translation and Modernization (1995), Communication, Technologies and Translation in the “Global Village” (1996), Translation Studies in Hungary (1996) and Crosscultural and Linguistic Perspectives on European Open and Distance Learning (1998). He has been a guest professor at universities such as the University of Pennsylvania, New York University, University of Alberta, University of Amsterdam, Sorbonne III, Sorbonne IV, Georg August Universität Göttingen, etc., – having lectured in many others as well. Since 2010-12 he serves a two-year tenure as a guest professor at the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina in Brazil.

Art in Translation

Date: 29/11/2012
Time: 12:00 am - 12:00 am
Speaker: Mr Zoran Poposki
Translation Seminar Series
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Abstract:

There is a growing tendency in contemporary art to explore the bonds and interconnections between text and image. The plethora of possible relations between the textual and the visual, across a variety of contemporary art practices, creates a vast geography of image as language and language as image, from typography to language-based art practices. Contemporary study of how language is translated into image, and the meaning which is constructed, displaced or altered in that process of translation, blurs the dividing line between the visual and the verbal, arguing instead of a dialectical relationship between representation, vision and language. More broadly, the cultural landscape that today’s artists navigate is one saturated with signs, a centerless space-time of global negotiation and interchange between agents from different cultures, an emerging network of new pathways of translation between multiple formats of expression and communication.

About the Speaker:

Zoran Poposki is a transdisciplinary artist and researcher exploring issues of liminality, identity, and public space. His digital paintings, performance, video, and photography works have been shown in more than 50 exhibitions, screenings and festivals internationally. His public art projects have been presented on urban LED screens, video billboards, posters and billboards in New York, Dublin, etc. Artist residencies include: School of Visual Arts (New York), Wooloo (Berlin), Dia: Beacon (New York), Pacific Northwest College of Art (Portland, OR), etc. Awards include: CEC Artslink Fellowship (New York), Sondika09 (Basque Country, Spain), etc. Poposki is an author of a book on artistic interventions in public space and researcher in the field of visual semiotics and immaterial artistic practice.

Mutual Acceptance between American Redology and the Two English Versions of Hong Lou Meng

Date: 25/10/2012
Time: 12:00 am - 12:00 am
Speaker: Dr Zhang Hui
Translation Seminar Series
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Abstract:

There exists mutual acceptance and interaction between American Redology and the two English versions of Hong Lou Meng. Obviously, the translations influence American Redology and are also being influenced by American Redology. The translation serves to enhancing reputation and foreign understanding of the original text, hence making it not only a part of Redology, but also a key element in promoting the Redology and enriching the original.

About the Speaker:

Dr. ZHANG Hui is a Joint-PhD of Peking University and Columbia University in U.S., and a Visiting Scholar of Harvard. She is now Research Assistant Professor of Department of Chinese Language and Literature at Hong Kong Baptist University. She is also a member of the Council of Chinese Nanshe, the Deputy secretary-general of Chinese Nanshe, and a Research Fellow of Research Centre of Chinese Nanshe. Her research interests are on Redology and translated fictions from late Qing to early public China era. Her recent publications include “Mutual Acceptance between American Redology and the Two English Versions about Hong Lou Meng” (The Journal of Chinese Language, Literature and Translation, South Korea, 2011); “An Authentic Interpretation of Baoyu’s Passing the Provincial Examination in the Last Forty Chapters of Hong Lou Meng” (Wuhan University Journal, 2012); “The Modern Value of Chinese Classical Literary Theory: Enlightenment Triggered by Western Sinologists’ Reconsideration of the Structure of Ancient Chinese Fiction” (Journal of Sun Yat-sen University, 2012); “Study on the Original Version of Hu Shih’s Fiction Translation and the Relationship between his Translation and his Research on Hong Lou Meng” (Forthcoming); “Survival in Westernization: The Explanation of the Chinese Allusion Embedded into Translated Fiction in Late Qing Era” (Forthcoming).

Culture, Interculture, Intraculture: Brave New World

Date: 27/09/2012
Time: 12:00 am - 12:00 am
Speaker: Professor Eugene Eoyang
Translation Seminar Series
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Abstract:

“Culture—Interculture—Intraculture” identifies three stages of cultural identity: cultural: where the foreign is clearly marked, as in Euripides’s Medea, the book of Ruth in the Bible, Shakespeare’s Henry V; intercultural: where the foreign is absorbed in the native, as in the Pole Joseph Conrad, the Czech Tom Stoppard, and the Japanese Kazuo Ishiguro in Great Britain, the Pole Czelaw Milosz, the Russians Vladimir Nabokov and Josef Brodsky in the United States; and the Romanians Paul Celan, E. M. Cioran, Eugène Ionesco, the Irishman Samuel Beckett, and the Chinese François Cheng in France. A new state, which I call “intracultural”, is one where the foreign is recognized in its own language but is viewed as a global patrimony, or as part of the native culture. Chief among these exponents would be the great modernists, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and James Joyce; the filmmaker Jean Renoir, especially in his La Grande Illusion. The “intracultural” factor has been by no means marginal or incidental in world culture: many modern Indians have discovered their own Sanskrit tradition through English translations; contemporary Japanese reacquaint themselves with their own Heian classic, Genji monogatari (The Tale of Genji), through Arthur Waley’s and Edward Seidensticker’s English translations; nor should we forget that the entire Renaissance was sparked by the discovery of Aristotle through the Arabic translations of Avicenna and Averroes. The greatest modern exponent of the intracultural perspective would be the novelist Haruki Murakami.

About the Speaker:

A scholar on comparative literature, translation, East-West literary relations, English, and the humanities, Eugene Eoyang is Professor Emeritus of English, Humanities, General Education, and Translation at Lingnan University (Hong Kong), as well as Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature and of East Asian Languages & Cultures at Indiana University (Bloomington). At Lingnan, he was also Director of General Education from 2000 to 2008. He is the author of The Transparent Eye: Translation, Chinese Literature, and Comparative Poetics (University of Hawaii Press, 1993); Coat of Many Colors: Reflections on Diversity by a Minority of One (Beacon Press, 1995), ‘Borrowed Plumage’: Polemical Essays on Translation (Rodopi, 2003), Two-Way Mirrors: Cross-Cultural Studies in Glocalisation (Lexington Books, 2007), and The Promise and Premise of Creativity: Why Comparative Literature Matters (Continuum Books, 2012).
Professor Eoyang was President of the American Comparative Literature Association in 1993-1995 and is a fellow of the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce. The Indiana University Asian American Alumni Association conferred on Professor Eoyang the 2012 Distinguished Asian/Pacific American Alumni Award.

Translators’ Deliberate Interventions

Date: 06/08/2012
Time: 12:00 am - 12:00 am
Speaker: Professor Georges L. Bastin
Translation Seminar Series
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Abstract:

Shifts in translation have been extensively visited and revisited. Many different taxonomies exist that intend to list most decisions taken or choices made by translators, be these decisions called shifts, techniques, procedures or strategies. The problem is that there’s no explicit distinction between compulsory and deliberate interventions. We believe that a clear distinction must be made between these two categories. Compulsory shifts belong to the usual practice of any translator. Compulsory shifts are usually “unconscious” because of the very nature of translation arising from its linguistic and cultural material. Nevertheless translators often consciously decide to intervene in texts for syntactic, semantic and mainly pragmatic reasons (Chesterman). Those deliberate decisions might be dictated by a third “party” such as the client or the commissonner, or by the translator himself for many personal, cultural or ideological reasons. Those decisions are not uncommon and are sometimes dramatically “unfaithful”. Do they imply treason, logics, relevance or simply a translator’s whim? Do paratexts explain such deliberate interventions? Is the concept of “assumed translation” sufficient to justify such distance? What about “telos”? By means of examples taken from Latin American history and contemporary pragmatic texts, we will tackle these issues.

About the Speaker:

Georges L. Bastin (www.georges.bastin.ca), Ph. D. in Translation Studies from the Université de Paris III, is Full Professor at the Université de Montréal and Head of the Literatures and Modern Languages Department. He has taught PhD courses and workshops on theory, revision and history in various Spanish and Latin American Universities. His research interests lie in the fields of translation pedagogy and translation history. He is author of Traducir o adaptar, co-author of Charting the Future of Translation History and Profession traducteur (2012) and has published in Routledge Encyclopaedia of Translation Studies, and various journals. He co-edited two issues of TTR on translation training (2008) and one on East-West Encounters (2010). He heads the Research Group on Translation History in Latin America (www.histal.ca) and edited two META special issues on translation history (2004 and 2005). He has been President of the Canadian Association for Translation Studies (2006-2010) and from 2009 he is Chief Editor of META.

seminars_20120524

Abstract:

Jiang Rong’s semi-autographical novel Lang Tu Teng (《狼圖騰》, first published in 2004) has been a huge literary triumph (winner of the Man Asian Literary Prize in 2007) and an unprecedented cultural phenomenon in Mainland China, breaking all-time sales records as the second most read book after Chairman Mao’s little red book. Howard Goldblatt’s lucid translation of Wolf Totem (2008) has also made the novel into an exciting popular work of narrative fiction for the international community of literary readers and cultural critics. This talk proposes to look at how Jiang Rong the original author and Howard Goldblatt the translator, with similarities and differences, (re-)construct narratives of collective and personal memories, Chinese state ideology and Mongols’ nomadic culture, modernity and tradition, ecological warning and political indictment, existential struggle and spiritual survival around the stories of Chen Zhen the protagonist and the tales of the Han Chinese, nomadic Mongols (descendants of Genghis Khan) and their fierce yet worthy foes – the Mongolian wolves on the grassland of Olonbulang in Inner Mongolia steppes that, for centuries, the Mongols had been “religiously” instructed to contend with, to worship and to learn from. The presentation will share a few points of textual and contextual understanding when literary texts move across languages and cultures.

About the Speaker:

Mao Sihui received his B. A. (in English Language & Literature) and M. A. (in English & American Literature) from the Guangzhou Institute of Foreign Languages (now Guangdong University of Foreign Studies), his second M.A. (in Contemporary Literary & Cultural Studies) from University of Lancaster, UK and his PhD (in Comparative Literature) from the University of Hong Kong. After many years of teaching at Guangdong University of Foreign Studies (from 1982 to 2000) and then Hong Kong Lingnan University (2001 to 2003), he has been Professor of English and Comparative Cultural Studies and Director of MPI-Bell Centre of English, Macao Polytechnic Institute. He has also served as Vice President of Sino-American Comparative Culture Association of China since 2000, President of Federation of Translators and Interpreters of Macao since 2007, Chairman of FIT Translation and Culture Committee since 2009 and FIT Council Member since 2011.
Mao Sihui has taught BA, MA & PhD courses such as “Modern British & American Drama”, “Contemporary Critical Theory”, “Comparative Cultural Studies”, “Film Culture”, “Translation for the Media”, “Translation of Texts in Popular Culture”, and “Translating Cultures”. His publications include Technologising the Male Body: British Cinema 1957-1987 (1999), New Perspectives: Contemporary Literary and Cultural Studies (2000), Decoding Contemporary Britain (2003), Literature, Culture and Postmodern Transformations: 8 Case Studies from William Shakespeare to James Bond (2009). He is General Editor of the New Topics in Contemporary Cultural Studies Series (6 books, 2007-2009) and co-editor of Critical Arts: Media Discourses and Cultural Globalisation (Routledge & UNISA, Vol 25, No. 1, 2011). He has also published over 60 academic journal papers and book chapters in literary, cultural and translation studies. He has been working on Representations of Macao in Contemporary World Cinema.

New Territories of Translation Research: the City

Date: 03/05/2012
Time: 12:00 am - 12:00 am
Speaker: Professor Sherry Simon
Translation Seminar Series
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Abstract:

This seminar will explore the ways in which the city has become an object of translation studies – by investigating some of the recent advances in translation theory that expand the field. Work to be discussed, among others, are books by Michael Cronin, Doris Sommer, Emily Apter, Maria Tymoczko, Edwin Gentzler, Vicente Rafael.

About the Speaker:

Professor Sherry Simon earned her PhD from the Université de Montréal. Her primary expertise is in the field of translation and literature, and is built on a broad understanding of questions of cultural identity. She is Professor in the Département d’Études françaises and held a Canada Research Chair Tier 1 in Translation and Cultural History at Glendon College, York University, in 2005. She has extensive experience in interdisciplinary research, was co-editor of the Quebec cultural review Spirale for ten years and directed the interdisciplinary PhD in Humanities program at Concordia from 1995-2000. Her publications include Fictions de l’identitaire au Québec, [in collaboration], (XYZ, 1989); Le Trafic des langues. Traduction et culture dans la littérature québecoise, (Bordal, 1994); Gender in Translation. Cultural Identity and the Politics of Transmission, (Routledge, 1996), and she also edited Culture in Transit. Translating the Literature of Quebec, (Véhicule, 1995). She is co-editor with Paul St-Pierre of Changing the Terms: Translating in the Postcolonial Era, (Ottawa University Press, 2000). In 2006, her book, Translating Montreal: Episodes in the Life of a Divided City, (McGill-Queen’s University Press) was shortlisted for the Raymond Klibansky Prize, Canadian Federation for the Humanities and won the Mavis Gallant Prize for non-fiction from the Quebec Writers Federation. In 2008, Dr. Simon was elected to the Royal Society of Canada, Academy of Humanities and in March 2009, Dr. Simon was awarded a Killam Research Fellowship.

Considering the Reader

Date: 12/04/2012
Time: 12:00 am - 12:00 am
Speaker: Dr Valerie Pellatt
Translation Seminar Series
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Abstract:

In the study and discussion of translation, the reader has not gone unnoticed, and deservedly is becoming more important to translatologists. Readers of translations span a spectrum, from those who do not speak any foreign language, and urgently need a translation for instrumental purposes, such as a manual, to those who, in spite of their proficiency in the target language, choose to read a translation in order to exercise their powers of critical analysis. Some scholars take sides and debate in terms of extremes, particularly it seems, those who prefer author-oriented, foreignised approaches, such as Nabokov and Venuti. In practical terms, however, the translator working towards a deadline will be looking for balance, creating a work that is not necessarily easy to read: no reader has a right to expect that from any author, and no author has a responsibility to write ‘easy-reading’. Rather, the translator will be working towards a text that is coherent, unambiguous (unless required to be ambiguous) and holds the readers’ interest.

There may be contexts in which the reader does need help. Information contained in data analysis in a scientific paper, or mechanical processes in a patent application, for example, must be as full as possible.

Clients, as Nord points out, do not always give an explicit or correct brief: an agent may not know for sure the purpose or ‘skopos’ of the translation required (Nord 2001: 30. We do not know for certain who the reader is. We can target a certain kind of reader, but there is no guarantee that that kind of reader will be the actual recipient, or that they will react in the way we expect. Readers change books, and translators are readers. How do we give the best service to the reader we do not know?

About the Speaker:

Valerie Pellatt is Senior Lecturer in Chinese Interpretation and Translation at Newcastle University. Her research interests include the interpretation of numerical values, numbers in Chinese language and culture, translation theory and practice, including transcreation and re-writing, and paratext. She co-authored Thinking Chinese Translation with Eric Liu. She is a Fellow of the Institute of Linguists and in addition to teaching and researching, has been an examiner of Chinese language and translation and interpreting for over twenty years.

Translation in the Eyes of Klio: A Preliminary Research into Translation History

Date: 23/02/2012
Time: 12:00 am - 12:00 am
Speaker: Mr Huang Yanjie
Translation Seminar Series
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Abstract:

Translation history, specializing in translation phenomena through history, has earned a niche in the hall of Klio, the mythical Muse of history. The knowledge system of translation history prepares for its research system as an inter-disciplinary subject. Then what is translation history? And what is its relationship with both history and translation studies? What paradigmatic shifts have occurred in translation history? And how is its future charted? In this seminar, the speaker will try to answer these questions so as to sketch a preliminary research into translation history.

About the Speaker:

Huang, Yanjie, associate professor, Anhui Polytechnic University and PhD candidate in translation studies, Beijing Foreign Studies University. He is now studying as a visiting PhD student at Centre for Translation, HKBU. Research interest includes translation history and translation theory.

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Abstract:

The first seventeen years of the People’s Republic of China (1949-1966) was a critical period for the newly-born modern Chinese nation to gain recognition in the international world. The same period also witnessed a unique translation activity, i.e. source culture-generated translation of a large number of classical and modern/contemporary Chinese literature into English and other foreign languages mainly undertaken by teams of Chinese and foreign translators in the Foreign Languages Press (FLP) in Beijing, a state-sponsored institute, in an attempt to reshape the image of China, hence rendering legitimacy to the newly-born nation. In light of contemporary views on the relationship between translation and nation-building and ideology, the present research sees the outward translation of Chinese literature in the first seventeen years of the PRC as a means of imagining and building the modern Chinese nation, and explores how English translations of Chinese literature played their role in the projection of the image of China and the building of the modern Chinese nation.

About the Speaker:

NI Xiuhua, PhD candidate in Translation Programme, HKBU. Research interest includes translation history and translation theory.

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Abstract:

The creation, translation and publication of love letters boomed in the1920s-1930s, a period of the Republican Era of China. Quite a few renowned writers or the young keen to be literarily known were then in an effort to publish their love letters or novels written in letter format, or to render the love letters of famous persons. This boom indicated that the “love letter” as a genre not only had established its status in the literary field, but had been becoming the stakes of the field. In this seminar, the speaker will depict the rise of love letters in the literary field of China and the tensions of the field to help elaborate the strategies Mao Dun adopted in his translation of Ovid’s The Heroides.

About the Speaker:

Lu, Zhiguo, PhD candidate in translation studies, HKBU. He got his BA in Henan University and MA in Shanghai International Studies University. Research /Interest: Translation history, translation theory and comparative literature.

Translation of Literature in Ancient Greece

Date: 24/11/2011
Time: 12:00 am - 12:00 am
Speaker: Professor Ruan Wei
Translation Seminar Series
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Abstract:

The translation of the Bible into Greek before Christianity took shape is well-known, but the translated nature of ancient Greek literature as a whole before Christianity emerged has not yet been fully explored. The present paper argues that ancient Greek literature was heavily indebted to West Asia. Yet due to the nature of information traveling in Antiquity – for a long time oral transmission was the dominating way for messages to be communicated from one language/culture to another, in which case semantic ‘accuracy’ in translation is meaningless – translation of literature in Greece basically did not take the form of textual rendition aiming at close sentence-to-sentence correspondence familiar to us today, but of source texts being rendered into target texts through rewriting, or adaptation, modification, augmentation and diminution of the original themes, scenes and characters.

About the Speaker:

Ruan Wei, Professor of English, Acting Chairman of Academic Committee, Shenzhen University.
He received his Ph. D from Edinburgh University in 1986 and has been teaching at University of Shenzhen since 1989. Research Fellow at Harvard-Yenching Institute from October 1998 to October 1999, and academic visitor at Cambridge University from April to October. Professor of English at the School of Foreign Languages, Peking University from August 2002 to March 2003.
He has been engaged in civilizational studies, studies in contemporary British fiction and translation studies. He is a well-published writer of the highly prestigious intellectual monthly READING in China and has written on a wide range of topics concerning civilization and cultural studies. His publications include Geo-Civilization (Shanhai Sanlian, 2006; a Korean version has been published by Simsan Cultural Publishing House), Fifteen Lectures on Civilizations (Peking University Press, 2008), A Comparative Study in Religions, Cultures and Civilizations: China and the West (Social Science Documents Press, 2002), and The Performance of the Civilizations (Peking University Press, 2001).

Translating Theory: The Transparence and Opacity of the Japanese Intellectual

Date: 13/10/2011
Time: 12:00 am - 12:00 am
Speaker: Dr Dennitza Gabrakova
Translation Seminar Series
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Abstract:

This presentation will focus on the significance of translation of theory for the self-fashioning of a type of identity of the Japanese intellectual. After briefly outlining the significance of translation for Japanese modernity, the work of several translators of theory will be discussed. The study of the creative transformations accompanying the translations of T. Eagleton (Literary Theory), Ed. Said, G. Spivak and J. Derrida will provide a unique perspective to the Japanese intellectual as “translator”, a complex identity negotiating with issues of originality and commitment.

About the Speaker:

Dennitza Gabrakova is an assistant professor at the Department of Chinese, Translation and Linguistics of City University of Hong Kong. She is interested in the cultural and intellectual history of modern Japan and in postcolonial theory.

The Polysystem Writes back: On Prescriptive Cultural Relativism and Radical Postcolonialism

Date: 25/08/2011
Time: 12:00 am - 12:00 am
Speaker: Professor Chang Nam Fung
Translation Seminar Series
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Abstract:

In the past two decades there has been a tendency to politicize translation studies and other disciplines in the humanities, alleging that the dominance of theories originating from the West is the result of power differentials instead of academic merits. Scholars of periphery origin who embrace central theories and values are accused of “self-colonization”. Such postcolonialist thinking is based on a strong, prescriptive version of cultural relativism, which claims, in disregard of evidence to the contrary, that “cultures are equally valid”, presumably on the grounds that any standards for measuring the validity of cultures must be ethnocentric. However, there are objective or at least cross-culturally intersubjective standards for certain aspects of cultures, such as academic research and human rights, and by these standards some cultures are indeed superior to others.
The fallacies of prescriptive cultural relativism are that the nation-state is regarded as the only legitimate unit of culture, that national differences are over-emphasized, and that an “is” is turned into an “ought”. Built on these fallacies, postcolonialism serves as an ideological weapon to challenge the political establishment in central countries, and becomes a pro-establishment excuse to suppress diversity and human rights in peripheral countries. In both types of countries it has enabled scholars to gain academic and/or political power.
Some theorists prefer postcolonialism only because Marxism has fallen out of favour. They have overlooked a fundamental difference between the two: the former is universalist while the latter is particularist, and they have put academic integrity at risk. Intellectuals are duty-bound to speak what they believe to be the “truth” to all people, including the powerful and the powerless, especially those in “their own” cultures.

About the Speaker:

Chang Nam Fung Professor, Department of Translation, Lingnan University, Hong Kong. B.A. and M. Phil., University of Hong Kong; Ph.D., University of Warwick, all in translation studies. Has translated into Chinese Oscar Wilde’s four comedies, and Jonathan Lynn and Antony Jay’s Yes Prime Minister. Academic works includes Yes Prime Manipulator; Criticism of Chinese and Western Translation Theories (in Chinese); and a number of papers in journals such as Target, The Translator, Perspectives, Babel and Foreign Languages. Four-time winner of the Stephen C. Soong Translation Studies Memorial Award.

Translation and the Disciplinary Development of Rhetoric

Date: 25/07/2011
Time: 12:00 am - 12:00 am
Speaker: Professor Yameng Liu
Translation Seminar Series
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Abstract:

While a rhetorical perspective on translation has started to attract scholarly attention, translation’s impact on the disciplinary development of rhetoric remains unexplored by practitioners in the fields concerned. Even a cursory look into rhetoric’s long history, however, would turn up much evidence of translation’s crucial role in shaping up the conceptual and institutional contours of the art of persuasion. And questions such as “how key rhetorical concepts became translated from one language into another” or “when and what seminal texts were rendered available interlingually to rhetorical practitioners in different cultural contexts” actually point us to a more intelligent understanding of the way rhetoric has been constituting itself as an important area of studies.

About the Speaker:

Yameng LIU (Ph.D. in English, University of Southern California, 1992), formerly an associate professor of English and rhetoric at Carnegie Mellon University, is currently Professor of English at Fujian Normal University, China, and a visiting professor in the Department of Chinese, Translation and Linguistics at City University of Hong Kong. He has published in the areas of rhetorical studies, argumentation studies, comparative cultural studies and translation studies, in journals such as Philosophy and Rhetoric, Rhetoric Review, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Argumentation, Philosophy East and West, and Chinese Translators Journal. Among his more recent publications are In Pursuit of Symbolic Power (Beijing SDX Press, 2004; in Chinese); A History of Rhetoric in the Western Tradition (Beijing Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, 2008; in Chinese); “Towards Representational Justice in Translation Practice” (in Jeremy Munday, ed., Translation as Intervention, Continuum, 2007); and C-E translation of Xu Chongxin’s “Artistic Translation: Some Theoretical Issues Investigated” (in Mona Baker, ed., Translation Studies: Critical Concepts in Linguistics, Routledge, 2009).

Why Bother? – Subtitling with Cantonese

Date: 23/06/2011
Time: 12:00 am - 12:00 am
Speaker: Dr Gloria Lee Kwok-kan
Translation Seminar Series
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Abstract:

Subtitles do not simply transcribe the dialogues of a film. Subtitles involve specific groups of audience and seek to enhance their viewing experience. Based on this function of subtitling, I examine the Chinese/Cantonese subtitles provided in the DVDs of two films: The Brothers Grimm (2005) and Shrek 2 (2004). I demonstrate how the subtitlers explore room for manoeuvre as they match the original scripts and visual images with Hong Kong style Cantonese expressions to create meaning catering for the target group. I start with a brief account of written Cantonese in Hong Kong society and why ‘written Cantonese’ appears to be an obscure option for subtitles from the outset. This is followed by an analysis of the subtitles of the two films with examples illustrating different linguistic and translational styles adopted by the subtitlers to impress the target audiences. The two cases of subtitling will shed light on the relation between the practice of the subtitler and the conception of translation (the function of subtitling).

About the Speaker:

LEE Kwok-kan, Gloria has recently completed her PhD thesis which examines the translator as an agent within the social structure. She is now teaching as an instructor in the Department of Translation, The Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her current research interests include the sociological approach in translation, audiovisual translation, translating narrative discourse and translation discourse in modern China.

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Abstract:

What would happen if translation theories and cultural studies talk to each other? In this talk, Dr Cynthia Tsui will reveal that “translation” can be used as a thinking method that sheds light on other disciplines. Although translation is traditionally viewed as a linguistic practice, it visualizes a reasoning model of the “in-between”. Meanwhile, the humanistic concerns in cultural studies provide an applicable context that help us better understand the significance of “translation” in contemporary world.

Drawing support from western translation theories, the concept of “translation” will be explained as an independent space overarching the source and target texts as well as cultures. Translation thus informs a crucial middle process of mediation, negotiation and rewriting between languages, cultures and national boundaries. This new perspective will be applied on four notions in cultural studies—namely “subjectivity”, “difference”, “hybridity” and “power” – which are all vital ideas in rethinking questions and our identities in the postmodern global age.

This talk substantiates “the translation turn in cultural studies” proposed by Susan Bassnett, showing the strength of the concept and theories of “translation” in interdisciplinary research. “Translation” will be brought to a new horizon that is built upon but extended beyond what we conventionally thought about “translation”.

About the Speaker:

Dr Cynthia SK Tsui read her PhD at the University of Warwick, UK. Her research focuses on the independence in the concept of “translation”, which is a cutting-edge invention in the theories of translation studies.

Dr Tsui is keen on promoting “translation” as a new thinking method. This applies to East-West comparative studies in literature and multimedia, cultural and interdisciplinary research, and issues in globalization. Another aspect of her scholarship is to bring Hong Kong culture and Chinese / Asian perspectives to the international platform of translation studies.

Before going academic, Dr Tsui worked in the sector of public relations and publishing in the Hong Kong government and private companies. Her career experience enables her to communicate effectively between the professional and academic spheres of translation.

What is Translator Competence?

Date: 07/04/2011
Time: 12:00 am - 12:00 am
Speaker: Professor Kirsten Malmkjær
Translation Seminar Series
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Abstract:

In this seminar, I will compare the concept of Translation Competence with a concept that I have called Translator Competence and which is more closely associable with (though very far from alignable with) the notion of competence which we find at play in theoretical linguistics. I will explore the cognitive foundations of this phenomenon, the more conscious text processing elements of it insofar as we have any grasp of what they may be, and finally I will touch on less systematisable, socio-cultural elements, which are blatantly obviously conscious, willed, strategic translator behaviour.

About the Speaker:

Kirsten Malmkjær is Professor in Translation Studies and Director of Translation Studies Programme at the University of Leicester. Her research interests include translation theory, translation studies, translation and language, translation and philosophy, and Hans Christian Andersen’s language and literary production in Danish and in translations into English. She is the author of Linguistics and the Language of Translation (Edinburgh 2005) and editor of The Linguistics Encyclopedia (London 1991; second edition 2002; third edition 2010), Translation in Undergraduate Degree Programmes (Amsterdam and Philadelphia 2004), Translation in Language Teaching (Manchester 1998), and, with Kevin Windle of the Australian National University, of The Oxford Handbook of Translation Studies (2011). Forthcoming books are on translation and on Hans Christian Andersen’s language.

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