 This is the first time I've had teaching a translation course actually, so I don't have that much experience. I'm here primarily to learn. At the same time, I'm very excited about this course and I hope that I have something to offer here. So building on my background as a scholar and as a creative writer, I constructed this course with two assumptions in mind. These assumptions are, I don't think they are particularly controversial and they are, I think, commonplace as well. First, even contrary to what the title of the panel is, there is really no such thing as monolingualism when you think about it. Or at least there is no such thing as monolingualism in a typical upper level English classroom at a public university like mine in Maryland in 2015. UMBC is actually known as being one of the most diverse campuses in the country. So in this particular classroom, my students indeed possess varying levels of readiness and linguistic expertise. In Spanish, French, Japanese, German, Russian in addition to English. Also there is a considerable group of students who are not native English speakers. So they come into the classroom with native knowledge of another language, whether it be Spanish, Korean or Chinese. So these are bilingual individuals like default. So we try to capitalize on that. So there's no, really no among the 18 or so students that I have, there's no exclusively or perfect monolingual person there. So everyone has had some exposure to another language, whether as speakers or as listeners or as readers. What I'd like to emphasize on the first day is that I described all of us as translingual. We are translingual, but borrowing a term from the French philosopher Michel Laurent, translingual meaning that we all have had some experience to another language, however imperfect it may be. We are making our way toward another language, we are learning it. I attended a Friday session about translating from a source language that you may not know very well. And at that session, Jerome Rottenberg said, what is fluency anyway? When do you reach the point where you can call yourself fluent in the language? Are we all fluent even in our own native languages? Or different levels of control and proficiency in our own languages or first languages? So this is what I tried to emphasize. That was my first assumption. The second assumption is that you can't teach the art and craft of translation without some attention to translation theory and history. Again, that is probably relatively obvious, but it needs to be said. In this class, I assign a lot of translation theory and history. I don't construct this course as a workshop. There's a little bit of workshop that has mainly a lot of focus on the translation history. And in the theory, where do you find the theory and history? I, too, want to find it in the translation studies reader edited by Lawrence Wendlutti. Now it's a third or fourth edition, which contains almost all the major statements about translation. Jerome's letter to Pamakus, Schleyer-Mappers, on the different methods of translating Nabokov's piece on translating to Gino Niegi. Of course, both of them means the path for the translator and many others. Surprisingly, that does not have one of my favorite pieces, essays on translation, which is, like I said, the misery and the splendor of translation. So I gave it to my students a minute of wonderful conversation on the first day about language, about thought and speech and translation. So I do recommend that text. It's not in that anthology. I said surprisingly, but it actually anticipates some of Wendlutti's own theories of translation. So it's not surprising for that reason, but it's not entirely wrong. As far as my strategies, so I'm just outlining the syllabus again of a course that is very much working progress right now, meaning I'm teaching it. What is a translator? That's the title of the course. As I said, modeled after Michel Foucault's question, what is an author? The idea for the course is to investigate what the translation function has been over the centuries. This is one strategy for making the translator visible rather than invisible throughout history. And most of us probably know Wendlutti's book, The Translator's Invisibility, which I'm also using in order to provide a background theoretical kind of underpinning for the course. There's a little quote I had here by Catherine Porter, who makes a connection actually between Foucault's essay, who talks about how important it is to think specifically about what authorship meant at a different historical period, and he comes up with a term author function. So Catherine Porter wrote an essay in 2014 called The Expository Translator, in which she makes a connection between Foucault's thinking and her own thinking about the translator's function. So she says, just a very short quote, like the author function, the translator function too is bound up in the legal and institutional way surrounding discourse. It operates in varying ways, according to the era, the culture, and the discursive realm in which it is practiced. It has to be defined in a precise and complex way rather than by the spontaneous attribution of a translator's text to its author. So we try to look carefully about what the translation function has been in many different instances throughout history. As far as the content, we are doing a lot, probably too much. We trace the fascinating histories of English translations of the Bible. Of course, the short story, what is a much larger story, and Homer's Delia as well. We explore debates surrounding translations of 19th and 20th century French and Russian literature, some, again, more telling or interesting anecdotes. Then we investigate experimental approaches to translation. By the drabound in translation from the Chinese, he's making new of certain ancient Chinese poets in F.A., Celia and Luis Zucowski and their homophonic translation of Cthulhuos, coming up with their incredibly opaque, linguistically heterogeneous English versions of Latin. Another example, Jack Spicer, exploring the idea of translation as dictation, making the translator almost as a kind of an idiot, in his bizarre translations of Federica Garcia Lorca, after Lorca. Caroline Bergwald and her text, called Via P.I.A., which is a rethinking of the first tree. The beginning of the Inferno, the first tree lines, you know, the most famous ones, in El Menzo del Camino, in Ostra Vita, basically what she does, if you don't know that word, she sub-titles the 48 doctor variations. She just reproduces English translations of the first tree lines of the Inferno, going back to the 19th century, but mostly 20th century, as many as 48 of them. So we end up with a kind of conceptual piece, also telling you some interesting things about the history of translation, and what the translation has meant over the years. Christian Focchi and his book, again, Traqua, which applies all kinds of formative practices on the work of Austrian poet Georg Traqua. You know, the publisher of that book just yesterday referred to his practice, Focchi's practice as over-riding, over-riding, and that's probably what it is as well. We end with El Carso and some of her translations from Sattles. These are the textual examples. If you know these texts, you realize that they represent the more creative, in some cases, even radical approaches to translation, all undertaken in the last, at this century, in the spirit of modernist experimentation. This is what I, at least, emphasize in the class, experimentation in terms of form, the concept of translation, the dynamic between author and translator, text A and text B. So far, we've had a lot of interesting conversations. And lastly about the projects, what are the assignments? There are two kinds of assignments here. First, in my course, students have an opportunity to pursue their own projects as scholars, but also as practitioners, as translators. As scholars, I asked them to construct the biography of the translation, modeled after an essay by, I'm sure that there are other similar projects of that nature, but the particular model that we used was Emily After's essay, called Marx's Barbarie. Marx's Barbarie, and it's a piece about different translations of Madame Barbarie, especially one by Eleanor Romare, like the retranslated by Paul de Man. So it's a wonderful, very illuminating piece. So what I'm asking my students to do on a smaller scale, obviously, is to choose a foreign literary text of any genre and research the history of its translation into English. Or at least provide some more interesting episodes from that history, paying attention to translation practices, textual variants, etc. And then they are asked to write an essay that synthesizes those five things. Very interesting assignment. My criteria include questions like, does the paper provide sufficient background information about the text and its author, as well as translators' publication reception history? Does the paper include comparative readings of selected passages, side-by-side readings? Does it analyze translators' preferences or post-publication reviews if possible? Or if available? Does it incorporate scholarship on the text, the author of the translations, or any larger issue under examination? Of course it's written to it. Does it state the implications of its findings to translation theory? So either the criteria is just a couple of weeks ago. I created a whole bunch of papers. Some of them, obviously, like in any classroom, more or less successful, more or less good. But I'll just give you a list of some of the topics, some of the things that were chosen. And I let the students do the choosing. I let them choose the work. Pablo Neruda loves songs. That's he ballooned me. And who changed ends journey to the west? Riensochi Akutagawa's short story in a Dalmugro, Kyun Suk Shin's novel. Please take care of my mom. Paul Verlaine's poem. There's no poem. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, 100 years of solitude. It's a hypochritic poem. Suseki Natsumi's novel. I'm a cat. Jorge Luis Borges' The Garden of Forking Paths. Camus, the stranger recently translated as The Outsider. Or three different translations of Don Quixote. So you can imagine, and I also ask students to give presentations on those texts, on their own papers. All kinds of interesting discoveries were made in the process. All kinds of cases and issues to talk about. What it means to translate, not only in particular texts, but also from a particular linguistic or literary tradition. And secondly, and this will be my last point here, my students are also asked to choose a foreign literary text, or part of the text, and translate it into English. Ideally, I want them to model these assignments on some of the practices that we're also reading. Some of the authors and poets, especially that I mentioned. Now they were translating with a difference. Translating in a more creative or radical way. But really, my students are free to use any method they are comfortable with as long as their translation mirrors a meaningful relationship to the source of the text. And I also ask them to submit a short preface, like a typical translator's preface, explaining their choices, describing their philosophy of translation, strategies used, challenges encountered, departures from existing translations, which we are welcome to use as well. As a way of doing some translation practice as well, assuming again that some of them may not be familiar with the source language, but leaving it open for more experimental approaches. Now of course the difficulty for this assignment is coming up with viable criteria, fair criteria, and evaluating these assignments, because there is an important creative component that comes into play as well. So I'm looking for help in that regard, especially. I'm still in the process of figuring those out. There's one other assignment, the smaller one that I may talk about later, but at this time, at this point, this is all I have to say. Thank you. Next we'll hear from Robin Davidson. Robin Davidson is a poet, translator, and professor who's been downtown. She's authored several poetry collections and co-translator of the New Century, almost by Emily Lyft, excuse me. The recipient of the Fulbright and NEA awards, she serves on the editorial board of Calypso Editions and has been named since Second Poet Laureate. So first of all, thanks so much Janelle for organizing this panel, and I'm thrilled to be here with these particular translators, Natasha and Phil. I learned so much just from listening to Phil. I have been teaching the very translation for only about three semesters, about every other semester, so there's lots still that I need to learn. But what I'd like to do in terms of my discussion here is to tell you a little bit about the student population that I work with and talk a little less about a theoretical approach and more about some of the assignments that I have my students do in order to get their interests, and I'll tell you why in just a moment. So at my university, which was initially an open access institution, a lot like City University in New York, for example, we were no longer in the last year or so an open access institution. But many of the students that come to us are first generation college students, often very minimal reading and writing capabilities, and so that underpins some of the choices that I have to make as an instructor when I work with students in a translation class. We have about 14,000 headcount there, and we are both Hispanic serving as a data, as a Hispanic serving institution and a minority serving institution by the U.S. Department of Education. 44% of our students are Latino, about 25% are African American, 70% Anglo, and then quite a few international students. So I really admire what Pyoche said in terms of there not being really any pure or perfect monolingual student in our classrooms, even if it is simply the multiple languages that they have access to as listeners. Many of the students that come into my classroom don't have any language other than English as their first language, and even the Latino students that we see at UH Jentown often don't even have access to Spanish and are very sensitive about that issue because they are often expected to have Spanish because they come from Spanish speaking families and yet they do not speak or read Spanish. They are certainly not well. And in addition, I have many international students who are English language learners, so they might have Farsi or the Nigerian language of Ibo or Tagalog or Vietnamese, all of those students just beginning to learn English. So they all come into this particular introductory literary translation class. Just another component, another factor that informs how we work together in the classroom is that many of my students sign up for this class because it's part of a creative writing curriculum, not part of a larger literary translation curriculum. They believe that it is literature in translation. So many of them come to the class thinking that they will be reading modern poetry or modern literature fiction, pre-non-fiction in translation. And they're quite stunned to discover that in fact they're going to be asked to translate. So with all of that in mind, I don't begin with any kind of theoretical underpinning in the first week or two. Instead, I try to engage them really in the, I would say the joys and the humor of language as it comes to us. So let me give you some ideas about that. I start with, we do start with introducing just a few issues related to translation theory and craft. Certainly one of those early on in the first couple of days we do talk a little bit about fidelity to the original text and all of the complications of what constitutes an original text. We also talk a little bit about the relevance of multiple translations of a single text, particularly with regard to translating poems. And we talk about the incorporation of scholarship in the translation process. I mention that, but I really only mention it before we begin to read any theoretical material. And so then what we begin with in that first few, two, three, even sometimes four class meetings is a discussion of what I would consider dubious translations or mistranslations where I might show them a bunch of, give them a bunch of links on instructional, using instructional technology or examples of mistranslations where you see Cubasa, so for example Polish sausage translated into French as Policé de Saussage, which means polish the sausage. So we go through a sequence of those kinds of mistranslations which they think is funny and they begin to feel less frightened really of the idea that they're going to have to confront language in a new way. And particularly first generation college students I feel need that confidence building before they face some sort of material that we will come to read them later. Another thing that I ask them to do is to think about idioms in the language that they feel most comfortable in themselves, their own first language and if some of these students are certainly bilingual. So are there, is there an idiom in Spanish or is there an idiom in Farsi that they know and if they were to speak that to their colleague in the classroom how would their colleague respond if they say well you shouldn't have don't get a watermelon head or it's raining cats and dogs or does that ring a bell or just some of the, there are many of these idioms that the students will know depending on their language or their cultural background ethnic background and experience that get them thinking a little bit about the pleasures of language and so they're not, it's not as off putting a process in to begin to read about translation. I also ask them to take a small text and I will typically ask them to simply choose a text, a small text in a language they think they want to work in and plug that into a few machine translators. Now this is horrible, I know it's a terrible thing to do but what is great for them to see particularly if they are a native Farsi speaker Spanish speaker, English speaker and they plug those texts in to being or Google translator or babble, there's several of these things they begin to recognize the ways in which those machine translations are inaccurate, miss certain kinds of subtleties and so forth. So that's how we start. From there, and one other thing that we do that first and then we talk a lot about the fact that even, and Piotr really spoke to this as well, even in our own very familiar tongue, we are translating all the time between or among ourselves and so I ask them to take, to read a couple of passages from Milan Punderas The Unbearable Lightness of Being in English and do you know this section of that book, dictionary misunderstood words and throughout the book there are two or three different moments of these dictionaries of misunderstood words and they're wonderful. So parades, when Sakina thinks of parades she envisions you know, the Soviets marching into Czechoslovakia when Franz thinks of parades, etc. So in Punderas book, each character when they think about a particular word that word has many very meaningful connotations for them and so that when Sabina and Franz speak to one another they are completely miscommunicated. Well we do this all the time. So when I ask my students to choose two different words and then to write up what two different people, either one of them and their parent or one of them and their lover or their mother and their father or the member, when so and so thinks of home they think of and this is actually quite it begins to tie back to creative writing for them and so that's how we start with that kind of I guess you call them warm ups in a way but it's a way really to break the ice with them and it takes a couple of three weeks for these particular students I think to feel comfortable. We then are also reading the kinds of theoretical texts we begin reading in about two and a half, a week or three the kinds of theoretical texts that Peugeot mentioned and I use different texts I experiment with a few different things one that my students do seem to be able to relate to are some of the texts that are in theories and translation edited by John Megano and Liner Schulte we also sometimes use the crafted translation also edited by those guys I'm really looking forward to learning more from Peugeot about the essays that he's using because I heard him use some that I don't use and I think they would be terrific so we do begin that reading early on but slowly for this particular group and then we launch immediately into one of three major assignments so I ask them to choose a source language our target language of course for this course is English since everyone has different source languages in the class we have to have one you know, target language there's no way that at the end of the semester I can really assess how well anyone student has translated anything from Farsi for example into English if I'm not a translator a Farsi or a speaker of Farsi but we start with a poem so I ask them first to identify a source language they would like to work with throughout the semester and then to identify a short possibly lyric poem or I think usually a lyric poem but a short poem that they will then work to translate from that source language into English using the strategies that we begin to look at as we move through the theoretical texts so for example I ask them to provide and this is a workshop we do love this course as a workshop so I ask them to take their transliteration their trots maybe work for word translations and bring those to class we put them up on the using blackboard we use blackboard to show those and we work through those initial drafts of a small short poem for each two they take those poems through multiple drafts and then submit those for review by me and in the process of doing that it does allow us an opportunity very early in the term to talk about fidelity to the original about I would say the advantages particularly in poetry in consulting multiple translations if they've chosen a poem by Neruda or Lorca that has been translated by multiple others I ask them to certainly try to form first on their own but to consult those other translations and then talk about why their particular they make the choices that they have and this is all very hands on initially just linguistically I also have a very good friend who's a linguist on the faculty in the department of English where I teach and she comes in and talks to them about various matters of linguistics for a couple hours for one class meeting so that's part of the working with the poem so I ask them mostly to start with the poem even though I understand that poems are probably the most fraught with difficulty in terms of translation that some even talk about what some translators say is the untranslatability of poetry which I hope none of us so we discuss that issue as well then after we have gone through that process of looking at a single poem I ask them to envision a larger project so if they want to stick with that particular poet and look at a cycle of poems by that poet or they want to switch to fiction or a creative nonfiction maybe a lyric essay or a segment of a memoir they're most welcome to do that I do ask them to stay with the same language they've been translating from the gap go and we move them to the next phase of the class the very first thing that I ask them to do when they're excited on an author and a language for that larger project is to interview a native speaker and there are a bunch of things I ask them to talk with that speaker about so first I ask students to explore the background of this speaker's experience with the source language of what language community they were born into or reared him did both of their parents speak that source language does the speaker herself have more than one first language and so forth so that's one category of question I also ask them to ask this native speaker what kinds of difficulty the speaker has encountered with regard to humor puns idiomatic expression when moving between languages there also has to discuss with the speaker any grammatical structure in the source language that may or may not be applicable in English for example matters of gender so in a language for example where gender is marked either by verbs by nouns by articles to discuss that whereas in Polish for example we have no use of definite indefinite articles so to come up with at least an element linguistic element related to that language that the speaker herself herself has had difficulty with and does the speaker prefer the use of her native language over other languages and specifically what circumstances mark that preference and so forth so there are sequence of questions that we talk a lot about in class I ask you to go to the native speaker write up that interview once they talk with them and this I feel like it's a way of introducing the student in a very practical way to the kinds of issues they're going to confront as they work on a little bit larger project from there I ask them to develop an annotated bibliography and in that bibliography I ask them to identify sources in several categories that will come to inform their translation practice of the larger work so for example they need to list and discuss those particular essays either that we have covered in class or once they discover on their own that discuss the theory that has informed their or that is informing their own practice so they will turn to these essays that we've read in class and be able to discuss those in an annotation associated with the citation I also ask them to come up with sources that address at least one of these linguistic issues like definite, indefinite pronouns gender or whatever other tense so for example they are translated from an Asian language and there are no verb tense no verb tenses but there are other kinds of markers that indicate time to discuss that issue third what kinds of sources about their particular author and project offer the most historical the best historical and cultural information on that work we do talk a lot about how history one that's right and then lastly the author's biography to what extent are there sources out there about the author and to what extent has the author's life also informed this work and from that bibliography then they're able to develop a preface companies their final project so that they do discuss each of those issues in a preface that accompanies the final manuscript and that final manuscript also goes to the workshop process many times well many times I would say three to four times which is the most we can do in a class of 18 to 21 people where the entire class will be helping thank you it's journal 91st and it's book serve series Natasha also teaches a variety of translation classes on world literatures world cinemas and new media she's the author of many episodes on translation and film we're very glad to have her so I am after since I'm in the pitch here I have a complete meltdown of the of the PowerPoint because it turns out that the projector does not accept supposedly privacy reasons doesn't accept whatever so we'll not accept my files so I am just praying here otherwise I will be reenacting oh there we go and also this is in the meanwhile timed out so while I'm talking we're talking to you so therefore it looks it looks a little funky and occasionally I think try to scroll down I'm not deleting an entire section so it's very anyway so it's really really interesting to listen to Kjelter and Robin because my translation courses are coming from different perspectives in part this is because so I teach regular translation workshop at the international writing program which is not a academic program I'd rather it's out of the graduate of research meaning that the international writing program doesn't have an academic obligation so in that sense we're not teaching as a part of the curriculum part of the college strategy but rather we're teaching in conjunction with the fall residence of the international writing program and the goal is ultimately as far as I'm concerned to kind of disperse and diversify the attention to international writing on campus through a variety of constituencies and in order to make that possible I also teach a first year seminar and that's a freshman seminar for little kids that just kind of do first semester the university pays for that as a retention service and often we serve them so these kids that come in are very very different from what the constituency that Kjelter and Robin are interested in describing one kind of hopes for that or wishes for that but in reality I have a lot of Iowa kids who have in some cases confessed that they've never seen or admittedly know what passivation is in fact they have because all of them have had to have some language training in high school in order to get into the college university but they deny and gladly they're completely denial about the relationship to foreign language and often consider to be somewhat redundant and then there's always the long Chinese student who's been brought in to finance our public institutions and so he or she sits there in the back, Julia, she whose relationship to the material that's being presented is completely different so I teach this first year seminar around the cinema tech that is curated by the writers in the international writing program because it seems to me that cinema often is the fluid medium in which language can be dissolved in order to be better absorbed to use against the numbness for I guess and in other words I really do teach translation to monolinguals in some kind of core sense of their own persuasion so therefore the goal is not to teach translation to say and I was taking assiduous notes for all the work that you were pitching but rather my goal is essentially to teach the notion of distance and to heighten the notion of tolerance to distance because it's resistance to distance that really seems to me to be the first threshold to overcome in other words they have been inkling but they don't have any reason to care and so to find a reason to care for why things sound differently why the world is full of people who don't speak English even though evidence is to the contrary which is the internet speaks English obviously so therefore why should we bother so really the point is to break through that kind of one way mirror of narcissism that the combination of internet and English and environment like I have produced giving you the impression that you can really just that there is absolute no reason for any effort there so the only way to really do this is by the way and because I don't really teach a language course I really do it largely as a through the notion of comparison through the notion of business the most rudimentary form of that plays so I'm first going to talk about different ways of making comparison and difference visible and then I'm going to briefly show some examples of how I actually work with the texts themselves so the most rudimentary form is that of a work play or a play so difference my emphasis is the most obvious is play and so therefore transposition into different verbal forms within the same medium of verbal expression and language that's the kind of at least the consciousness raising moment of the class that I'm in and this is of course completely invisible here but I think and I don't want to belabor this because this is exactly the kind of example that I'm going to talk about first and then Robin were highlighting this comes from the UPenn Charles Bernheimer's page on experimental language and so it's essentially the notion that within English itself difference is already embedded and then you can go to exercises like homolinguistic translation he do the police in different voices homophonic translation and all these examples some of them that have been already quoted by our previous two speakers you know the flowers of bad for flowers of bad kind of thing lexical translation battle mechanical translation writing a poem composed entirely of mischievous songs and lyrics etc so all of these ways are simply marking the difference within English itself my Tasman text however is one that I meant to bring with me but naturally forgot because life goes like that and that's the text that I recommend to everybody and I use it in almost every class I teach it's called 19 ways of looking in one way it's a time of the booklet and fishing right here to my own hands and just to open it up here maybe it's just those you lost but anyway this is a little out of print booklet but I have scanned it and I have to send it to whoever breaking all rules of decor Elliot Baumberger who is one of the two authors of this or editors of this text has encouraged me always to just read it because he doesn't get wrote he's anyhow who says so so 19 ways of looking in one way is basically a time of that's taken the four lines it's Chinese first and it's original characters then translation then including the radicals and the accents and then word by word trot and then 19 different ways and I use that text in almost every class that I do because it seems to me to do the work of difference that's just highlighting the difference and of course it's further compensated further complimented by the fact that on the right on the left hand side you have the translations and on the right hand side you have Elliot Baumberger who is incredibly a survey commentaries on the defaults it's usually on the translation of the left hand side so ripping them to shreds one by one in an incredibly analytic and very very precise language actually so and only a few snipers at the end are clear as it were but the exercise simply flipping through this book is a kind of indisputable explanation of or manifestation of all the points about the sentences with the the broken passage myself so but for one of them was it makes much more sense in order to get the comparison going beyond text to text what we want to move is from intracemiotic that is within the same science system to something that's intracemiotic in other words moving to different science systems where the difference itself becomes more visible and so in the absence of understanding a second language difference can for instance be passed those into difference between speech and writing and here I'm going to pray that my first slide will actually play and this is a short film that I sometimes use for students for secondary currents and well just see for yourselves here and I was thinking about the usefulness of the states by Peter Rose and as Brian created too and I was thinking about this today as I was in a reading and I was listening to a reader reading first in Mandarin and in Cantonese and then me straining to be able to hear the difference between those two I know this is not a complete film so here this is a film where we are all actually ignorant people who don't know what we are in this film in the picture, the people don't know they themselves don't know what part of them they get into the audio we have to jump this little bit just to be more interested in time but you can see, begin to see how this is kind of beginning to go this is a language that gets more more innate and more extravagant and it's impossible that what is being said it's actually So it's just this incredibly tangible way in which we can begin to understand the relationship between transcription and translation and the gap between those two. Transcription indicates where translation may become necessary. Transcription is already a form of translation and then translation is only a more sophisticated version of this kind of magical process if you will. And if nobody is convinced by how one needs translation with this film, nothing will ever convince them. So, but we can then take this issue to become more political and say, you know, if this is a question of not understanding and being able to try to sort out signal, out of noise, if you will, then we can move on to a film that which I also use all the time, which I use a lot for making this point. The point is this, the secondary card makes a point of relationship between writing and speaking in an abstract, comical, but still completely abstract way. Here it becomes an issue of politics. Most occasioned dictators are done with saying, the city of Tikrit, here in northern Iraq, is now firmly under the control of the American forces. Or is it, these members of the Iraqi resistance movement still loyal to the down to say, think otherwise? The Americans tell lies. Each day our forces go stronger. Each day we were closer to our goal of driving the incidents. What are they? Nothing, carry on. We are driving the invaders from our motherland. We are not afraid to add subtitles. They are, aren't they? What do I need subtitles for? That's what I understand what I'm saying. I'm pretty English, I'm from the American University, in Cairo. What do you see, I don't understand what you're saying. What do you see, how they come to say to us these subtitles? Well, maybe it's the interpretation of the hearing service. The strong and open thing is coming to a taste now. Oh, they may take on me again. My pleasure. Hey, I'm coming down to the next level. That is coming to a taste now. He might speak perfect English. She does teach, she'll buy the teacher. She can play, but pick up, pick up, pick up, pick up, pick up. The other end is close to the door. The situation remains as the Anderson-Ballazhan is at that here in northern Iraq. What do we do then, can see it? Listen to me please. What's amazing is that this is, we're fighting for decree, right? But 10 years later, this was made in South Africa, we completely lost. But it is this, I mean, this is a question of also fishing out signal, out of noise, right? And being able to determine which of the forms of English is viable, which is not. And also then raises the question of who does this transcribing, where does the voice of interpreting and then, therefore, translating come from, right? And once these modules, one of these questions have been raised, that one can move on to and ask that question in different contexts yet. And that is to take something like this, which is this, I don't know if any of you are familiar with the project called the Jesus Film, which is a campus missionaries project, which basically takes a film, which I'm not going to be showing you here, but it's easily accessible as you can see, the Gospel Translation, I call this page. And where each day the film, a kind of hour and a half long film, which is the history of basically the New Testament, is actually, no, it's the New Testament, is translated into a new language, additional languages. And so the current state is at 3,357 languages, which this film has been translated. And you start looking at the list of the languages in which this film exists. And it is probably one of the most awesome linguistic repositories that you can find anywhere on the Internet. I'm sorry, but you know, all you need to do is just look at the list that we can have up here. Yeah, well, this is the problem. But it's essentially 1,375 languages that are spoken by extremely small groups and which are then used for the purposes of translating, for purposes that missionaries have translated into Bible for the last 2,000 years. Missionaries at the heart of the Western experience is the missionaries to translate into the Gospel. And this is really the epitome of it. As I said, languages that I swear to you, none of us, I mean, none of us have really ever heard of, and which are sometimes subtyped, sometimes they are subtyping the film, sometimes they are dubbing the film. But they are always a kind of a linguistic supplement along the lines that we have just seen. See some years in this list of some of the languages. And even since I uploaded this 3 days ago, there are already 3 or 4 more languages. So you have exactly the configuration that you saw with the BBC in Iraq where an image is superimposed and interpreted in a particular language in the service and then what policy is the question that is raised. Okay, so once I think this notion of translation not only being pervasive, completely determined and deeply political and only present has been made, I don't think it's really that hard to make ultimately, then we can start looking at individual cases. And the example I'm going to be using here, which I sometimes use in class as well, so the work of translation itself is that I basically look at the textual edition of translation of films. And this is something that's only possible, that didn't used to be possible in film of celluloid. Now, of course, films appear in a very huge right to a different, what we would have to call, editions. So you can find DVD, even if you go to a local public university library, you can find 3 or 4 editions of different DVDs with different subtitles. And then we can start doing the kind of work of comparison that you can simply, you can set up 2 monitors and be looking at 2 different versions of the same film with different subtitles or different forms of translation, subtitled, dubbed, etc. But for the purposes of this presentation, I'm not talking, I mean, I do teach a course on history of translation in cinema, and I also do teach a course on translation in new media, so where language is dissolved in this digital and in technological environment. So far from apologizing to using technology, in fact, I think that it is the very medium in which translation, which translation we have, it's in the world. It just happens to be a good example because it's a film that's extremely popular with my students, it's called Let the Right One In, Swedish teams from horror films, it's really actually a terrific film, which it so happens to just type in compared to subtitled translation, you will find there's this great site in which somebody is going in and look and basically pull, pull frame enlargements and compare the original release version, which was a theatrical release version in Europe, especially, and then the American DVD translation. So if you just see, you can just glimpse a little bit, next door, where do you live, how do you know where I live, the American version is much more abbreviated, much more compact. You have other, so here's a little snippet, which is kind of good, you can see. The original release version says forgive me and the American release version says sorry. And then, because this is a website that's about comparison, film comparison, and there's a lot of websites like these, they actually go on and do a kind of a wide verbal riff on what it means to, what the difference is between saying forgive me and I'm sorry, I'm sorry. And then this website actually also has links to a place where you can just do a full comparison of the two subtitles. Oh, this happens to be, you know, it's called, this one is, you can just type in comparison trans subtitles, let the right one in, I'd rather not, I can do it afterward, but it's really, it's just Google stuff, you know, it's really nothing, especially magical about any of this. But what is particularly interesting about this one film is that of course, then we come to the ultimate form of trans-media translation that is the remake. And then you have to ask ourselves, why is it that American cinema has been, has completely absorbed remakes, and it's made, built a history of, its history is full of replete remakes, which is a form of extreme translation, you might say. So what is it that makes, let the right one in, regardless of which kind of subtitles you're using, not acceptable to an American audience, why do we have to go to remake it, right? And so this happens to be just a particularly interesting little website, which thinks that's actually the work of comparison itself. But again, this is one among many. And I'm going to play just this 30 minute comparison, again with the voiceover, to the serving and bearing element of the work of comparison. But I will show it to you just because it features an additional element, which is really, which raises additional questions about the status of translation and the legal status of translation as intellectual property and the control over translation. So. So. So. So. So. So the website itself was doing the work of comparison, I'll let you find for a very, very long way. But because the two films have completely different status in terms of intellectual property, one is available regularly for everybody to see and the other one is available regularly for everybody to see, and the other one is available regularly for everybody to see. And somebody, whoever those two people are who are doing the commenting, may pay out of it and essentially further highlight the uncertainty of the possibility of comparison and the different legal status of those two films. These are the, at least in the camera, so immediately on the platform, on the legal platform. So a lot of us don't need to talk about the differences. Actually, if one sits and has a patient, so sitting through 25 minutes, you can sort of discern the American version, which is otherwise not available. And in fact, even our universal language hasn't had it, but it could be, I'm sure it can be available somehow. But you could discern, you could certainly listen to the commentary and that, in and of itself, you could certainly listen to the commentary and that, in and of itself, is a perfectly good clause of passage. Does it, I think I'm going down, I just want to say, I think this is a way in which students who really don't have the traditional curiosity can be, as a protractor of the terminal threshold and many students since who have gradually become, you know, popular with bottom films because this is really great since I spread it. That all I consider I can have trying something. Thank you so much, Natasha. And we'll open up the floor to what I'm sure will be a rich discussion. Yes. Thank you all so much. Absolutely lovely. I know a lot of people live in room including myself for taking away so we can develop our own courses for our own students, so these are really helpful to me. In situations like this, I have a lot of questions that are really helpful to me. In situations like this, I always find myself struggling to think about English as the lingua franca in these classes and to what extent do the classes that talk about translating work or even with practical workshop component reestablish the centrality of English as the mode in which we talk about important things. And so what I'm wondering is are there ways that you've developed in the classroom setting or in other settings related to it where non-English language has actually become part of the productive process or part of the critical process? That's my question. I could respond to that just briefly. First of all, thanks for asking that. What a great question. One of my colleagues who is a Spanish prof has developed a Spanish translation minor at my school and his students translate from various things into Spanish. And so he has... We have students who are actually majoring in Spanish or wish to have a minor in Spanish. He's addressed that issue and I think it's been successful so far because we have a 44, almost 45% Hispanic or Latino student population. But it occurs to me that there would be ways that I could work with him that we could do, you know, we could experiment. But I don't know. I just want to mention it. The one? Secret. Secret. Secret. Secret. Secret. Secret. And we see that all 12 urges of the Kermis Code in and out of the military there is no stability, right? And mistakes, what we would call a mistake, or choices, especially in the lyric form, you know, just put everything back on the table. So that's an easy way, activating a lot of fun to show that English doesn't know anything about whatever they were doing in a sort of light-hearted way, but it brings all the questions about ownership really to the core of the game, right? Well, another exercise that we do to get students working along language, and I don't know if this is exactly what you're speaking, but at least trying to get students to talk outside of their language is when we try to exercise and call the page to the methods. I don't know, some of you know the heavier and bubble-on scheme and call the question, cannon, the Kutran, the Russian cannon, and even as they kind of dominated that market in the last 10, 15 years, more recently they've done a lot of controversy about their method and more than written about them, it turns out that she's a native speaker, it turns out that her husband, who does the actual, sort of final translation that's published, apparently his Russian is a Russian language, right? And when they describe their method, she basically does a trot and then hands it to him and then he kind of turns it into nice English. So we would pair students up as an exercise where you'd have someone from Arabic and then Chinese or the person in Arabic and sort of do a trot and the person who doesn't know the Arabic has to somehow be nice in English. So I mean, it doesn't get English out of the way here, at least getting students working across languages a little bit more, not just in English. That's great. I've said that because we have access to these 30-some writers every fall in the International Writing Program, we really make a point out of getting the two, to read out loud. So no translation workshop ever starts, so we do a translation workshop in which sometimes you find a good match, you find the Mongolian, the graduate student who does Mongolian but who can translate for the Mongolian poet, but sometimes not and so sometimes it's a paired translation but it's always centered on the performance of the poem in, and then the author coming in and saying, this is what I most care about in terms of my style, et cetera, but that's a privilege of having the author there. That's certainly the sound of the language alone, which is one of the reasons why I'm so attached to it, it's because even without having it, the acoustic quality and the immersion and the encounter with the difference itself, I think is sometimes a bit of a shock because the media so easily isolates us from that. When we do our workshop part that was, we always have students read the session and their source language before we move to their application. Yeah, yeah. In power, but also students. Yeah, that you don't have to be speaking in an accent. Thank you. Other questions, yeah. Are you so aware of the text, the critical text that you use? Mm-hmm. Well, the one that I mentioned by Jose Ortega-Igas said, is actually included in the book that you use, right? In the theories of translation. Theories of translation, so that was another text I was considering at one point. So theories of translation edited by Rainer Schulte and John... Bigonet. Bigonet. The one I'm using is the translation studies reader edited by Lorenz Benuti, published by Rutledge. Again, it has some of the major texts in translation theory, as well as some recent examples of translation scholarship as well. So it's a wonderful, kind of chronologically arranged anthology with prefaces, with a lot of introductory information provided by the editor himself. So I recommend that textbook, especially for the class that I'm, at least I'm teaching, which I described, and which does play so much emphasis on the history and even theory. In a more workshop or in the class, I'm not sure if that would be the ideal text necessarily. It depends on the amount of the history or theory you want to bring in. But I wonder if there are any other texts out there that people can recommend? Yeah. It was a book that I speak eight stages for translating a poem. And it's wonderful because it takes you through first to thinking about sound, thinking about tone, thinking about diction. And he uses translating a real poem as an example. But it's really great because you can have the students take one text and go through all the stages. But you can also ask them what stages is he missing? What would you add to this? And I recommend that you have really, really good results, especially at the beginning of the semester, for students who want to just translate literally in half a second. And it's also fun to criticize it. That, yeah, I borrowed Jennifer has been generous enough to pass that on. I use it almost always in a translation workshop because it gives people vocabulary for describing, breaking down the process. Another text I was interested in, and I use some sections from it, is actually David Bellows's Is That a Fish in Your Air. Yeah, me too. Yeah, very, very accessible, as opposed to the Venuti material, which can be kind of, you know, altervenium in it. And it can be, you know, come across as a little, you know, dance for students. But David Bellows writes wonderfully about some of the same issues. There's a wonderful chapter there on the history of machine translation, for example, which in my class we discussed, and we actually looked at Google Translate. We all tried to learn how it works. But, you know, we used it in class. We did all kinds of interesting exercises. But not before we had read that chapter on Google Translate in Bellows's book, providing some of the historical background on machine translation and what Google Translate is all about. It's fine. How that works as an industry, so that they can then choose some of these other literary methodologies instead. Because Tim gives, he has a really light-hearted approach, I think, to issues of localization and translation. And he gives really nice examples that students hear a lot. And I want to add to this that we've been teaching in our course on globalization, translation and globalization. We have been using Michael Cronin's work a lot. And Cronin is one of those people who has a new book every year. So whatever is hot right now, there'll be a very thin and very expensive book by Roudledge published on it. But that should detract from its usefulness and it's extremely teachable. So in particular, Michael Cronin's translation in the digital era, I think it's called, the most recent one. So Cronin, C-R-O-N-I-N. And he's originally a medievalist and it really informs his approach. But it's extremely knowledgeable and he has sections on technology. And he doesn't have like Bellos, who's really a literary translator and who wrestles with the problem of translation as a kind of an agonist-y relationship to make machine translation. Cronin really thinks about translation as a kind of a sociological labor and economic fact of history, period. And so he is much less, he is much less of this kind of a fraud relationship. Everything's translational for him and he's very methodical about it. So it's really terrific book and very, very helpful, especially for technologies of translation. Other questions or suggested texts? Oh, sure. Should we pass it around to... Well, you know, I think that's what supposedly the new author website is going to be doing, teaching you translation resources. So maybe under that aegis, that could be a subcategory or something. Well, I wanna just say thank you to my fellow panelists. I mean, I volunteered for this panel mostly to learn something because I feel like there's so much I don't know. So this is great for me. Thank you very much. And thank you to you all for your suggestions and enjoy the remaining two events at our conference. Take care and safe travels to wherever you're going next.