 I'm very glad to see that we still have so many people this late on a Friday afternoon. This is our third panel of the evening and my name is Sonia Collina, I'm in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. I'm the moderator for the panel and I'm going to introduce our three next panelists. And they're like Professor Adji just mentioned, we have a variety of people from different departments, the university and this panel I think is a very good example of that, like other panels we've seen today. So we have Professor Yurenda Almeida from the Department of French and Italian, Professor David Christensen, right, did I get it right, sometimes I get the Christensen's then confused, and the Department of German Studies, I'm sorry, classics, sorry, trying to work my memory, and Professor Thomas Kovach in the Department of German Studies. The way we're going to do this is first they're all going to tell us a little bit about their work with translation. As David mentioned earlier, you have detailed bios on the program so now they're going to give us a little bit of detail about their present projects on translation. And then I'll have a couple of what I think are somewhat interesting questions and hopefully we'll stir up a little bit of debate in the audience and I'll first give them the chance to answer those questions, the panelists, and then hopefully we'll get a little bit more audience involved then, okay. All right, so Professor Almeida, oh you get your own, yeah you're right. Hi, can you hear me? Okay, my first work of translation was the translation of a novel by Chinua Chebe, whom as you know passed away last week as I was at the conference of the African Literature Association. So it was a sad event but it was good that there were 400 people there who deal with African Literature who could do a memorial for him. So the book was Chebe's third book, Arrow of God, and I translated it into French with a friend under the title La Flesh de Dieu. Now I would very much like to translate this book again because I translated it 20 years ago and I feel that I have a little more experience today to do a better job at it. So I'm in negotiation with Presence African in Paris to see they're going to allow me to re-translate it, especially since nobody else did another translation of that book. Now I think we're going to come back to this later because, well maybe I'll make just one point about that book because I am from Benin in West Africa, a French-speaking country, translating a book by a Nigerian with an anglophone and who is also an Igbo within the Nigerian society, so it was a very distinctive culture. So I will talk about the challenges if we have time. My second translation work is the one that is on display outside and it's a translation of African Women's Poetry. Even though I'm not officially the translator of that book because what I did was more the work of gathering all this work that African women have done and which has remained invisible even within the French-speaking world, let alone the English-speaking world. So that's another definition of translation, this transfer of knowledge from one language to the other. And then the colleague who was working with me who is an African American, so her language is English. So that's why I was interested in that concept of what in which language you translate in, you know, where you are more at ease. But what I'm working on now and that I'm very passionate about is on translating oral traditions by women in four, F-O-N, which is one of the main languages spoken in Benin. So I was on sabbatical last year, spent a whole year in Benin collecting all this poetry, but I mean there are many challenges. The first is that it's poetry in four that have to translate into English, into French, and eventually into English. So we have a translation of a translation and also because it's oral tradition, it's how do you translate pitch? How do you translate, you know, the chanting? How do you translate? I mean there are so many questions that we can talk about later. So I want to, that's all I want to say now. Okay. We can come back to it. Yeah. Okay. Am I audible? No. That should be on. Should be on. What about now? Nothing? What about now? That's most natural. All right. Thank you. I unfortunately wrote something up ahead of time after I did not have the advantage of Professor Raji's wonderful talk, which I learned a lot from. So this will give a much less nuanced view of the relationship between source and target text. But here it goes. The focus of my current and previous translation projects is on the translation of the current and previous translation projects has been ancient Roman comedy and the Roman comic playwright, Plotus in particular. Plotus wrote and produced plays around 200 BCE, just after the Romans had taken a major step toward acquiring an empire by defeating Carthage in the Second Punic War. Roman literature thus grew out of imperialism as its creation was part of Rome's project to establish a cultural identity as it militarily and politically colonized Europe. Every culture and literature were rapidly being absorbed by the Romans when Plotus came onto the scene, though not without conservative resistance to the newfound cosmopolitanism in Rome. Drama came first in Latin literature because the Roman soldiery had enjoyed theatrical productions of Greek plays while on campaign in Hellenized regions of southern Italy. One outcome of this early explosion of Roman interest in drama was the survival today of 20 complete or nearly complete Latin comedies adapted from Greek sources by Plotus. Until relatively recently, classicists had only begrudgingly accepted Plotus's chronological primacy in Latin literature. Plotus's plays were mostly marginalized as degenerate translations of presumptively superior, albeit almost entirely lost, source plays of Greek new comedy. This dismissed Plotus's plays as linguistically frenetic and extravagantly jokey corruptions of their sources. And given their general disregard for consistent development of character and plot, they could not as readily be made to conform to modern traditions of theatrical naturalism as could surviving specimens of other new comedy playwrights. It thus was generally agreed that the best use to which Plotus's plays could be put was to reconstruct their lost or highly fragmentary Greek source texts. In the late 1980s, my choice of Plotus as one of my special authors for my comprehensive exams in my Ivy League PhD program was mostly met with snickers from my peers and professors, apparently because up to that point I had been thought to be a capable and serious student. Extensive 20th century papyrus finds of the Greek new comic playwright Menander, however, have gradually revealed that the lost Greek comedies behind Roman drama were not all they had been cracked up to be, and that Plotus adapted his sources more liberally for his target audience and to better effect than had been presumed. Near the end of the 20th century, a few scholars began to look more closely at the extant text of Plotus as scripts were performance and demonstrated that the plays were much richer when imagined as complex spectacles enacted at a particular historical moment. Much of the performative power and interest of Plotine comedy is in fact derived from the shifting dynamics of actors and audience, and it turns out that Plotus in some ways is a very modern and thoroughly metadramatic playwright. Plotine meta-theater goes far beyond Kleber quips about the play's status as a performance in progress in that it aggressively exposes the underpinnings of Plotine comedy, especially its conventions, its stock roles, and role-playing as the constructions they are. Contemporary Roman society was deeply theatrical in its scripting of public events, as seen especially in its spectacular religious rituals, military triumphal processions, elite funerals, and even the daily obligations of political patronage, all of which enacted in an often elaborate social script, firmly grounded in rules and conventions designed to affirm social hierarchies and relationships of power. A Roman of this period who had seen any form of drama would easily have grasped the meaning of the Shakespearean dictum all the world's stage. It seems no accident, for example, that in this age of fierce competition among the elite for the right to celebrate military triumphs, in association with empire building, several Plotine comedies feature a braggart soldier drawn to absurdly egotistical extremes. The study of Plotine metadrama holds much potential for shedding light on the nature of Roman society in the dynamic period of economic and social change following the Second Punic War, especially as it relates to such issues as the effects of new cultural influences, the possibilities for social mobility or rebirth, personal and group identity, gender, sexuality, and otherness. My own scholarly work, Outside Translation, largely focuses on how Plotine comedy addresses these kinds of issues within the confines of state-sponsored dramatic festivals and in so doing subtly interrogates Roman systems of power. This reinvigorated interest in Plotis has resulted not only in fresh scholarly studies of the place in their ancient performative context, but has also opened the way to revival performances and to a number of new translations, which, like my own, actively bring an awareness of recent scholarly developments to the translation enterprise. In the prefaces of my two published volumes of translations of Roman comedy, I emphasize that I translate for the classroom and that my primary aim is to provide students with a readable and well-informed introduction to the place and to the distant cultural environment in which they were produced. Although the striking similarities between ancient and modern colloquial conversation often lead to readily domesticated English dialogue and translation, overall I aim to retain the foreignness of ancient Rome in general and the strangeness of Plotine verbal prolixity in particular. Plotis abounds in neologisms hyperbole and often bizarre and baroque conceits, which, when left relatively undomesticated, may seem as unexpected and jarring to a modern audience as they were meant to be for an ancient one. One simple method I use to broadly preserve the otherness of the source text and perhaps induce students to appreciate differences in that source text and its culture, even if they are reading in their own language, involves not modernizing the names of the characters and leaving in references to Roman and Greek places, persons, deities, personified abstractions, institutions, currency, and the like. These are explained in notes at the bottom of the page or less frequently in appendices. The same treatment generally extends to Roman cultural beliefs, values, assumptions and ideologies, and thanks to a sympathetic publisher, this process of defamiliarization can be carried out at the most minute linguistic level. For example, a common Latin way of expressing the proverbial notion stuck between a rock and a hard place is between the knife and the victim. In these instances, I literally translate the ancient proverb or give a domesticating equivalent, but in either case include a brief note on the prevalence of animal sacrifice in the ancient world and its pervasiveness in the colloquial lexicon. I of course acknowledge that this degree of foreignization may not be a reasonable goal for all translations. For my first two volumes of translations, I was most fortunate to have worked with Focus Publishing, a press in Boston well established in my field for its translations of ancient drama that allows translators to include notes on the pages of the translated text, which greatly increases the chances that students may actually read them. I had to negotiate for notes on the page in the contract for my current translation project with Oxford University Press, whose normal practice is to relegate notes to the back of their editions. These notes can be interpretative as well as merely informative. In the case of Plautine Metadrama, for example, I often include a brief explanatory note about the possible meta-theatrical import of something a character says when this is not immediately obvious. And in the more obvious cases, such as when the playwright figure of Plautus' Casna, Cleostrata, who at the play's end, after she has subjected her lecherous husband to a humiliating transvestite punishment, arbitrarily declares that she will forgive him, quote, only because this play is long enough as it is, unquote. I include a note, referring the reader to a general discussion of Plautine Meta-theater in the introduction of the volume. This kind of interpretive direction clearly illustrates how translations may be inscribed within current scholarly discourse on the source text. I do not apologize for this sort of interpretive transparency as translation like scholarship is an historicized cultural product and we should not pretend otherwise. And this is just one reason, in the case of ancient Greek and Latin text, to be sure, why commonly read works should be re-translated every generation or so. Thank you. Do I need this one? Can you hear me? Okay. Thank you. So I'm going to, as you suggested, come out of the closet and talk about my early experiences in translation before I get to my professional work. And I'm thinking back to studying German in college, where I learned the language for the first time, and believe it or not, I was taught in the now totally discredited grammar translation approach, which had one advantage. Not that I'm advocating it, but it did make me aware of translation from a very early stage of my kind of engagement with the German language. In my college days, we were very immersed in the works of Thomas Mann. That was really the dominant figure in my studies. And because I was just learning the language and sort of struggling with it, I did consult translations quite a bit. And back then, there was only one translation available of Thomas Mann's works. It was the translation of Helen Lowe Porter, which struck me as rather stuffy Victorian in style. We also made a number of blunders, which even I as a second or third year student could spot. But it just didn't seem to me faithful to the style and spirit of Mann's texts. And so I remember when I was now in graduate school in comparative literature, I did sit in on a workshop on translation. And for that, I submitted my version of a translation of the first paragraph of Thomas Mann's Der Toten Venedig, Death in Venice. Those of you who know the work know it's about this writer who is in this very overwrought state of mind from the very beginning of the text. And that psychological state is conveyed by the very convoluted prose, which of course German is known for, but this is particularly convoluted. And of course, Helen Lowe Porter in her translation had broken it down into many easily flowing English sentences, which had none of the feel of the original I felt. So I tried to replicate this totally convoluted syntax in my English translation. And I'll never forget the response of the professor who was leading this workshop. He looked at it and said, that's not English. And this did teach me a lesson that, you know, however much we try to think we can manipulate our target language to accomplish an expressive goal, every language has its own parameters that must be taken into consideration. And this is a lesson I learned early on. Now, you know, just quickly referring to the theme of this panel, translation as scholarship, and in what sense it is, I can sort of confess that for much of the early part of my career, apart from doing sort of various projects to serve community requests or colleagues requests, I wasn't really engaged in translation professionally as part of my scholarly profile. Until more recently, I was involved in a publication of essays and also poems by the German Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig. And then just moving on, in 2002 I published, I edited a volume of essays on the Viennese writer Hugo von Hoffmann style that I'd written my dissertation in another book on. And a couple of the submissions to that volume were in German, so I had to translate them. A couple of years later, my colleague Steve Martenson edited a volume in the same series on Früder Schiller. And one of those essays was in German and he asked me to translate. So, you know, this was my first sort of professional experience, in this case translating academic prose into English. Then more recently, I published a volume consisting of speeches and essays by a contemporary German writer, Martin Walser, all related to Germans dealing with the Nazi past and how that has really impacted German national identity. So, my volume consisted of translations of his texts, as well as introductions and commentaries. Now, what's interesting about these works is that the genre is kind of slippery. I mean, on the one hand, you might think, well, this is a writer functioning as a public intellectual, you know, declaring his stance on various issues in public life. But Walser would often kind of retreat into very literary devices, for instance, jumping into third-person forms. And so, you know, this was, in a way, an initial encounter with literary translation as well. I've more recently translated novella by another contemporary German writer, Peter Schneider, which is a very, also a very loaded one. It is fictional, but it is clearly based on the testimonies of Rolf Mengele, the son of the notorious Auschwitz doctor, Josef Mengele. And it's had a very kind of rocky history because of that. But I don't want to get into that right now, although we can talk about it more later. I guess, you know, what I want to sort of bring out is the different genres involved in translation. You know, from philosophical essays to academic articles to speeches and essays which have some literary flavor, then finally to a clearly literary work of fiction. I do think that the whole topic of genre is a very important one, because to me, the rules of the game are quite different, depending on the genre. And, you know, for instance, on one end of the spectrum, translating a scholar the article on the other, translating a poem. In the former case, the main focus is really the content of the message, what is being said, and you want to convey that as accurately as possible in your target language. Now, if the scholar resorts to some literary flourishes in the style, well, you can try to convey those. But that is, as I see it, not really central to the enterprise. Apart from sort of amateur attempts to translate to the text of some German leader or art songs, I have generally shied away from translating poetry. But I think poem, you know, the translation of a poem is the perfect example of, really, a counter example to the scholarly article. Here, really, what is central is the tone, the figures of speech and the formal elements that play a role, you know, even if you can speak of the content of a poem, which is far greater than the content. And, again, here I kind of want to hark back to my lesson from graduate school that I mentioned before. And that is, you have to convey the reading experience of someone reading the original text, but you have to do it in a way that is possible within the parameters of your target language. So those are, you know, what I thought I'd just close with some reflections on the whole theme of our panel, and that is the whole question of translation of scholarship. And, you know, as it has been mentioned several times before, it used to be the case that translation was, did not count in any regard to scholarship, was regarded by many in the academy as a rather menial task. I think we're all encouraged to see that that is beginning to change, that people are more and more inclined to view translation as a scholarly activity. And I think one can argue that translation does accomplish a goal comparable to a work of literary criticism or scholarship, which is to interpret a work to make it accessible to a new audience. So let me just close with that. Thank you. Go ahead, the microphone, please. OK, I think, Iran, you wanted to add a little bit about the type of one of your projects. You wanted to go into a little more detail? No, I thought that you were going to ask us the questions. I would do that within the questions. Oh, we would do that within that context. And I just wanted to make sure that you had the opportunity to tell us about it a little bit more. Now, what I see listening to all of you, what I hear, actually, after, I don't know if it's been 15 or 20 minutes, is that each one of you, you're all talking about translation in a similar context in a way, but at the same time, you're all talking about different types of translation, right? Translate in the classics for college students or for textbooks. You have a certain type of purpose, in mind, a certain type of audience that makes you do certain things and makes certain decisions that someone else would not make with a different type of translation. An oral translation is a different type, from oral text to written text, from what language was it? I'm sorry, I can't remember the phon. Into French and then into English. And the same thing, Thomas referred to. You talked about grammar translation at first, and then you're talking about different genres and different purposes. So it seems to me that the issue of translation as scholarship or in scholarship is closely connected to the issue, the topic, the theme, the notion of translation and what people understand when we talk about translation. And in many cases, what's happened in the past, in my understanding, is that we have a very simplistic notion of translation. And many people out there who made decisions and thought about translation, of course, just transferred whatever they thought translation was to other contexts that may not have been the same type of translation. As we get to understand the field a little bit more and the activity, then we'll start realizing all the differences. And whether we understand translation as scholarship will probably depend on all those subtleties. I mean, that's my understanding of it and what's the reason developments out there in translation. As people get more interested, then all these things start to surface. So my question to you would be to sort of elaborate a little bit more on your understanding of translation in relation to your projects and how that impacts the scholarship aspect of it. In the sense that it is scholarship because this is what we're doing that is related to scholarship versus someone else's understanding of, for instance, grammar translation, like you mentioned. So I don't know if, okay, that's good, right, Vane? Actually, I don't need that. Can you hear me? Actually, when I read the question, the first question which was how, why, when and in what sense can translation be a form of scholarly research, I thought that I would gently, gently, nicely take issue with the formulation of the question itself. You know, because this implies, the way it is formulated, it implies that it's not really scholarship, it's a form of scholarly research and I think that translation is always, scholarly research, except, of course, if somebody asks you to translate their birth certificate, for instance, and even though, you know, even then, if you have a birth certificate of an African person who was born before the 50s, I would say, you would say, né vers 1945. He was born around 1945. Now, if you don't know the culture, you would say, what, you're born on a date, you're not born around a date. And it's because, you know, people said, well, he was born during the last drought. You know, there was not a specific date. So apart from, even in those cases, you have to know the culture, but I think that to me, translation is not just translating from one text to the other, from one language to another, but also from a culture to another, or a set of cultures, you know, because Africa is a very large continent and it makes me mad when people speak about Africa as a country. I always remind my students that there are 54 countries in that continent, but so there is all those subtleties of culture that need to be taken into account. The second thing that I have to talk about here is the whole politics of translation. What gets translated? What does not get translated for whom and who makes the decisions, right? So I think that that is a very important aspect of translation, even especially in the so-called minority languages or minority cultures. And that's why the work that we did on the translation of African women's poetry is so important, you know, to show first of all that the poetry exists, right? And also to give a wider audience to these African women. And I'm going to share that in a minute, but what I wanted to say also about that is also the politics of editing and publishing, I want to say. Because we wanted, on the book of the translation, the two titles, the title in French in Prix de Mou, and in English it's A Rain of Words, and we wanted the two, since it was really a bilingual edition, but the editors refused to have the title in French because it was for an American audience. And I said, well, but it could be for an African audience as well. So what we did was, you know, on the cover, you know, to have lines that would, and right in between the lines, in Prix de Mou, in Prix de Mou, in Prix de Mou, but they cut it and said, no, okay, so, well, I think that's, yeah, that's enough. Well, you know, it's interesting, and this refers also, made me think when you were talking about the whole decision about whether to use footnotes. And this really does, you know, and here is where the problem arises when you're translating a text, when you're presenting a text from a different culture to, let's say, an American reading audience, how do you provide the context? How do you provide the cultural context that is necessary? And I mean, for instance, the essays and speeches I translated, I did use footnotes. There were a number of references to figures in German public life or to events that would not be familiar to an American audience. I have to admit, though, if I'm translating a novel or a short story, I would probably feel more reticent because somehow, you know, again, it gets to the question of genre, I would think you don't want to break the flow of the reading. So I don't have an answer to that question, but I think it is an interesting challenge for translators. And I'm sure if I were translating for a non-academic context, I would grapple with that question more seriously. On the other hand, and I do, I know something in the work of Lawrence Venuti, is that his name? Who has come out for years now, I think, in favor of translators uncloseting themselves. And I think that includes things like footnotes and why should they be invisible? And you're not, even if you are reading a novel, you're not reading the original author, you're reading something else. Someone's version of that novel. But I don't know, I don't work in that genre. It works perfectly for me to have footnotes and I couldn't function as a translator without them for what my purpose is. Anyone else? Which I think, I mean, I don't want to talk too much, I always end up talking too much, but which I think takes us back again to the purpose of what it is that we're trying to do. Depending on the genre and whatever it is that we're trying to translate in the audience or what we're trying to accomplish, then we may use one research or the other. Any questions from the public? I want to involve the public, the audience a little bit more. Questions, comments for the panel, for everyone, for... You mentioned translating Thomas Bond and major translations, the local order of translation, the way in which the novel that you mentioned doesn't fit, where Ashton Vaughn can't decide whether to say it or not, it's a leaf. And it's about a leaf. And it gets to an alimactic point, it's really conflicted, and Thomas Bond switches to present tense. And it's very effective, it makes the very leaf that you feel like you're there, both local order and language of choice, put it in past tense. Ah, interesting. I'll never forget with Low Porter, in Dr. Faustus, as a reference to the Händstadt, the city where Händel, the composer lived, and she translated it as the industrial city. Oh, okay. They're just talking about major blunders, that one stuck in my mind. Any other questions, comments from the audience, in terms of translation, as in scholarship, or any other issues that the panelists hit? Well, since you used the word audience, I guess I want to return to that. I mean, I talked about how genre is, really a crucial dividing issue in different kinds of translation. But I think along with that, the audience, and this really gets back to what David was saying, that if you're translating for a scholar, the audience, there's no question that footnotes are appropriate. But if you are trying to sell a work of fiction to a more general reading public, that's when it will become more problematic. And again, I don't have a clear answer to that question. Exactly, because, I mean, in my opinion, that basically has to do with what it is that you want to do with it. Someone else? I think though, in terms of the development of this new phenomenon of international writing, right now we are exposed to more literature from a broader range of cultures. We really have to also attend to translation of scholarship. Most of these people that get translated, especially in terms of contemporary, they are people of some note, some importance. And there is hardly any study that is being translated from the home countries where these authors are, in some cases, studied. So, I mean, the translation as scholarship also has to have that dimension of translation of scholarship. I mean, what you're doing with regards to bringing attention to the moral of church, I mean, that's where you have translation working as a scholarly filter or scholarly conduit through which you're doing preservation work. And so, in fact, these are also extremely important for our effort to recognize different things. On the panel? Okay, go ahead. Who does decide what gets translated? I'd like to hear more about that. Publishers, readers, economics? I would say, I don't know what all of you think, but I would say in general, I mean, there's a little bit of literature on that, people who work in translation studies, but I would say all of the above. And again, I would think it depends on what area you're focusing on. In some areas, the publishers, things that are for the market, the publishers have a bigger say. It may depend on what countries, too. So, I don't know what the other panelists... Well, I'm tempted to be cynical and say, publishers slash economics and the readers fall somewhere under those two, but... Eighty-five percent of the work, literary work that you translated to English are from the three or four languages, French, German, and some Russian and some Chinese, but really still, French, German are still very prominent. And yet, 85% of the rest of the time are almost always recommended by the translators. They are the first to encourage attention. So it depends on where you are in the hierarchy, so to speak, of languages. I was also going to ask a question for panelists in relation to that, which... Maybe, don't you speak? Do you have a question? I think that in terms of Polishability and Translatingness, one category of text that has difficulty getting translated is multi-colonel text themselves. So code switching texts. Texts that tend to have a lot of code mixing culture with writing, and they're all ready. It's almost like it's not the market saying those can't be translated, as much as translation practice as such doesn't have quite what to do with the text that's partially Puerto Rican Spanish, partially New York dialect. I was so surprised last, yesterday, when I was looking for translations of this Langston Hughes poem in German, that the poem that was major American poets has not been translated. Probably this poem, because of its dialectal code blending and things that scares off a lot of translation. So I'm kind of wondering what you think about the practice of politics of translating multi-lingual texts themselves. Does that make sense as a question? Yeah. Well, it's a challenge. I mean, the multi-lingual text, by definition, I think prescribes a fairly relatively limited audience who can fully appreciate all the aspects of that text. And then if you translate it, how do you reproduce the correspondence of New York English and Puerto Rican Spanish, let's say, for a German reading audience? I mean, you might have to come up with analogous dialects, and then really use your imagination, take a huge leap and try to recreate maybe some Swiss native in the middle of Berlin or something, but, you know. Actually, no, no, no, okay. No, actually, the colleague who translated the reign of words with me, she's doing something like that. She read all the translations of Toni Morrison in French. And she said that, you know, the African-American language, if you will, the tones, the kind of codes that they have, that it's completely flattened. And so she is redoing those translations. And she has a theory that she calls the transatlantic translation theory, in which, in fact, she tries to see in which way you can render that idiom that is specifically African-American, right? So, is it on this that you wanted to talk? Yeah, so why don't you, and then I'll come back to your question. Yeah. I was just to argue in favor of that, and to say that it offers more, just more points that I would like to hear from you. Well, that's an interesting point. I guess, you know, I would still think that a reader who would be enticed by that, even if that reader did not have mastery of, let's say, all three languages, would still be a fairly literate person, someone who really was open to that kind of interplay of different languages, which, you know, we like to think that's a large audience. But I think certainly, yeah, no, I see the point you're making that that would really, at least, offer different points of access to the text. And I'm wondering in which sense we can use the new technologies, like, you know, translate stuff and put it online, you know, because the question that you pose, poses, I mean, brings up the problem of finding publishers, you know, you may want to do that. The audience will be limited, but it's still interesting. But will there be enough people that it was going to be financially worthwhile for an editor to do that? So maybe that's where we can explore working on the internet and, okay. And the other thing that I wanted to respond to what you said or comment to what you said about preserving the culture by translating it. And this morning there was some questions about ethical questions, you know. For instance, I would go to Benin and I would go to villages to record all these songs that have existed for a long time. But at the same time, there is a kind of resistance, you know, too, because now with globalization they know that they can record these things, but there is at the same time, a kind of protection, you know, of that. And so the ethical question is, you know, what right do I have to make it, you know, to take it out of its context if the people themselves, you know, want to keep it that way? So that was one question. But the idea, at the same time it is in contradiction with the idea of wanting to show it to the world because it exists. And I have here a quote by Ngugi Watyongo who is a writer from Kenya. And his latest book is called Something Torn and New, An African Renaissance. And he attributes the fragmentation of Africa to what he calls europhonism. And he describes it as a replacement of native names, native languages, native identities with European ones. And he says that the result was a dismemberment not only of African people, but also of African memory. And one way of remembering, in the sense that Toni Morrison uses, remembering the memory, but remembering, putting all the members together, not only of African people, but also of African memory is through translation that he calls a patriotic act in this context. So there you go. I think some of the other questions that we were hoping to address in a way you've already touched on those issues, but I still like to just bring them to the foreground a little bit more and recapitulate on what you said so far. And it's, I mean, we were talking about scholarship and it is very clear that that putting some of these oral traditions into a written form and translating them is very clear as a form of scholarship. So if we turn it around, how, I mean, I think again, we've already talked about this, but how does that also influence you and your own scholarship in terms of your other work in your other scholarship? And I'm using the example that you're on mentioned, but I'm also wanting to see how David and Thomas see that. How does that affect your own scholarship, your own work, and at the same time, not just your own work, but how does translation in general affect scholarship and research in the humanities and the social sciences? What role does it play? Well, one point I wanted to make, and this gets back to the point you made earlier, that one thing to be said for translation is it really intensifies your reading experience. It really makes you a much more discerning reader. And so I think that to me was an interesting insight and I think that certainly speaks to one way in which translation feeds into your scholarship as well. Yeah, and I would just agree with that, that I'm writing a book on Roman comedy and there are 26 extant comedies. I wish I could translate them all before I go undertake those larger, interpretive leaps because there is no closer intimacy with the text in no way you can achieve that other than through translating, it's a great experience. Yeah, yeah. Actually, I agree also with this idea that it teaches you to be better readers, as I say. Everything has been said and we come to Taitediae, Miss Amlédagne, anyway, but yeah, I think that as I said before, but I want to say it in another way, that meaning is not only located in words, but it has a very close link with the culture from which those words emanate, okay? So it has, of course, influenced my scholarship, but also my teaching because I teach courses in literature in translation and pedagogically, I think it's important to show students that that is a translation because the invisibility of the translator that you were talking about, they read those texts without knowing that they're, well, they know that the course is called African Literature in Translation, but you have to let them know all the time and make the translator visible and use the translation as a critical tool also, as it was said this morning. But now, when you say translations in the humanities, I would say that translation has helped shape disciplines, and even has helped determine and define disciplines. Where would the English departments in North America be without the translations of Foucault, Derrida, and Deleuze, for instance? So those translations have shaped what happened in English departments even more than they do in French departments at these points. So, and everybody's talked about the globalization, one of the good aspects of globalization has been the fact that we are moving from culture to culture, we are more open to the world, we have more opportunity to know each other through translation. Now, I think that what we have to do is to continue the fight so that it is recognized as the scholarship that it is. I was telling a group earlier that when I came to the United States, what I wanted to do was translation, and there were a few schools that could teach me how to do this, and secondly, one of my mentors said, why do you do this? You'll never have a career in the academic world through translation, just forget it. So this new development is really exciting, you know. That's very interesting. I actually like to take a survey and see how many people have gone through that exact same experience, the exact same thing happened to me. I approach at the MA level, I approach a professor and I said, and this was in the US, I said, I wanna do translation, I wanna do a PhD in translation. He said, don't even think about it, you know. That's academic, this was academic suicide. This was about 20 years ago, so things are changing significantly, mm-hmm, you know. Well, in my case, it would be more than 20 years ago, and it wasn't even, I mean, I was always fascinated by it, but I never even had the illusion that it was. You were too bright. Oh, no, it was just. No, you, yeah, you followed their directions, yeah. Yeah. I did both. Any other comments, questions about this? Any other questions for the panel? Lovely, should we talk about some things to eat, so if your stomach is ready for some food, we have it. One thing that I just add to this is that we're also, for the first time, competing with this simultaneous global dissemination of content and equivalents provided by private sector platforms. Yes. And 20 years ago, we didn't have those, so one more reason why translation is scholarship is that we're offering an alternative to that model. We suddenly were the alternative, you know. Whereas 20 years ago, we were the only game in town that started translation, sort of thing. But that, the fact that we have, what a, we always have these sort of resources, that's, that's. I want to also say something that you mentioned is before there is that, you know, Google's platform is very interesting. You probably noticed, when you ask to translate something from Turkish to English, what it does is it surveys existing translations. And then based on the recurrent translations of the same word, they confuse you when it says that it's correct or not. But in a way then, the people who are working in Google to improve this machinery are themselves translators. I mean, Google is in fact waiting for us to keep translating because that's, their accuracy depends on the availability of translation. So there is also a way to benefit from that synergy. Yeah. Oh, I guess you don't need to. Oh, I don't need to. No, I'm sure that many people now are aware of this MLA thing that's called Evaluating Translations as Scholarship, Guidelines of Peer Review, which is really when I saw that I just almost fainted because, you know, as we know, MLA is, you know, is a sacrosanct gatekeeper, you know, of our profession and for them to come up with this is just quite remarkable. So I think we're on the right track, David. Have you seen that? No. It's quite amazing. Just go in. Thank you particularly to our guests from Iowa and Turkey and also from our speakers here on campus. Thank you so much. Please join us for a meal right outside. Thank you. Thank you.