Translation Seminar Series

冷戰期間，香港和台灣都在美國的保護傘之下，位於圍堵共產中國的前緣。然而，事實上兩地都頗為依賴中國的翻譯。一方面，兩地譯者絕大多數為出生於中國的流亡知識份子，彼此關係密切，另一方面則是大量使用中國譯者的譯作。

This presentation explores a unique courtroom in the common-law jurisdiction. This uniqueness is particularly characterised by the use of English as the trial language in a predominantly Cantonese-speaking society and the presence of court participants who are proficient in both languages.

A number of approaches can be used to detect the presence of translation in Wikipedia: identifying the rare cases where its presence is documented, comparing extracts from different parallel articles or digging back into the articles’ history to discover the origin of translated text fragments.

In this talk I will discuss my recently published monograph, Ethics and Aesthetics of Translation (UCL Press, 2018). Ethics and Aesthetics of Translation engages with translation, in both theory and practice, as part of an interrogation of ethical as well as political thought in the work of three bilingual European authors: Bernardo Atxaga, Milan Kundera and Jorge Semprún.

Translation process research (TPR) has been said to be in need of being reembedded in a new conceptual and methodological framework (Muñoz ed. 2016). The main reason for this is that meaning has been found or claimed to be '4EA': embodied, embedded, enacted, extended, and affective.

The old Italian adage "traduttore, traditore" does no justice to the valuable work of translators, especially literary translators. Rendering a literary text into another language is no easy task, and although there is general consensus that literature -particularly poetry- is best read in the original language, there are instances in which translations are necessary.

This talk will look at literary illustration as intersemiotic translation, as the "interpretation of verbal signs by means of signs of nonverbal sign systems" (Roman Jakobson). Using as examples illustrations of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, it will ask, amongst other things, how beyond representing scenes and characters, illustrators have "translated" into their own sign system literary elements which have no immediate visual equivalent, such as the verbal nonsense games that characterise Carroll's novel.

Tibetan director and fiction writer Pema Tseden's films and fictions from The Silent Holy Stones 《靜靜的嘛呢石》to Tharlo 《塔洛》are acclaimed by scholars and critics to be rare moments which individuate Tibetan characters, rather than conceiving of the Tibetan people en masse as the ethnic and cultural Other of China.

This highly illustrated talk explores food in performance and food as performing art; the performative in cookery, its staging in the kitchen and at the table; exploring piquant analogies and correlations; the theatricality of food and food as a model for theatre, multisensory, processual and communal.

This seminar will focus on a central argument on the task of the translator as a diplomat, by drawing upon my ongoing experience as the series editor and chief translator of the Intellect China Library, a book series that publishes English translation of the latest Chinese scholarship of art and culture.