 There is in fact right now a podcast on internet you can find where he talks that after that look it has become an obsession for him. Every morning he in fact has a ritual of translating this form again. They interviewed him on Radio Lab. He is a portion of a larger show but he talks about that project. That is the other thing is that there is so much online now that people translate it, translate it, writing and speaking. So there are so many and our students can find more than I can at least you know of resources. So theory is a part of it and I have already done introductory course of these people so we have done some basic theoretical background but the main idea is probably thematic to going through some of the different challenges that you come up with. And then after that we do exercises at home and bring them to class and work through those and then from there each student has a project going into their native language, something untranslated if at all possible. The other thing we did is do audiovisual translation which is a complete learning experience for me and I had a student who actually was working on video game translation so he kind of took over and helped me do that section because I don't know what I was doing. But it is fun too because it is so creative and it really is. There is a lot of similar and same strictures that you have to face. It is very fun class to do. I would love to be able to do it in a more multilingual format like some of you have done. I would be curious how you have done that because I think that is what our university is going to try to move towards is more teaching a workshop like they do at Kent or something where they do it in English and then break off. I would like to be able to do it. I am not sure how to do that so that is my question. I want to start with that question. The multilingual environment, they break it up. It is not related to language at all together. I don't currently teach people like that but there may be an opportunity for me to do that on an online site in the near future and I was hoping to later ask them ideas. I am really raising my hand because I have actually done it. But you want to know. When I was a graduate school I took a seminar. This was a very long time ago which I took my first ever seminar on organization here in practice. And what my professor had done, because none of the students in the class spoke the same language, he used Navajo's very eager, ego-survived, literal translation of Pugina Megan as the trot that everyone would use to translate it into these languages. I tried doing it. My name is Margaret. I teach at Hunter College. This year for the first time I am serving pilot, running a translation major in a Russian program. I have a lot of experience in that. I have a lot of experience in that. I have a lot of experience in that. I have a lot of experience in that. I have a lot of experience in that. I am running a translation major in a Russian program for under-graduates. Which is why I came here hoping to steal ideas from everyone else. I have to teach this to under-graduates. And one of the challenges that I faced was designing what was called a foundational translation course that would introduce students to basic tenets of translation. And then after I finished designing it, they told me that the world made the enrollment to non-Russian majors. The students who knew their scope of language is an algae professor. So to translation majors from other countries would have to by the way an excellent program that stands for translation. And also to students who thought they might be cool to speak other languages. So I tried a smaller version of that of taking something that they could translate from a normal translation. And it worked okay. So you started with a literal translation and that they worked with different languages? Yes. And then it also allows them to do, they can translate it into another language. But if they don't have a language, they can simply translate it in English. So how did the discussion go? Well, it took us inequivably into directions. It really allowed the students to focus on a notion of literality. And how that itself can be problematic. I had to read a household article about that. And of course, the community changed from that book. And everyone will sit around the time it was published. But also the possibility of translating poetry. I have a very productive discussion of a very interesting book, which is Poetry, Seeking for the Eosocratic Structure. Could you repeat the name of the work or the person at the Bacchus? It's Eugene O'Negan by the translation of Bacchus. I was going to add that with a multi-lingual group. I don't teach at the University, I teach community at the Bethesda Ryder Center. I'm Nancy Lee and Carlson. And when we have a group of everybody speaking different languages, one technique that I like is taking a Shakespearean sonnet and then having everyone translate into English. And that way you get into the whole concept. How to look for beginners, how to look at translation, how it really stresses that it brings out the point that it has to read like a contemporary, contemporary written piece. And that gets them talking, even though they come from different languages. I should mention while I go when you ask my target audience that these are undergraduates and they're liberal arts students, select liberal arts. But I probably should have included with what's the value of it. You know, I don't have to tell us where the congregation. But I thought it was very interesting to end the keynote when, you know, here's some like from Middlebury saying, oh, by the way, translation. And we have that same polemic in our department where when you ask, is this done in English or in Spanish? This is done in English. And I felt maybe my colleagues weren't looking down, but I felt like I had to defend it a little bit. And one of the things that I started using these as cliches and after a while I sort of convinced myself it's true. What the course evaluations have said that they've gotten out of the thing is not only a better understanding of language, but critical thinking in that you can't translate and not work with critical thinking skills. I think this was at first bogus, but now understand what they're saying. And it was the ability to really have a collaborative project. You know, when you're dealing with two and then four and then eight and 16, this generation has to learn how to collaborate. And so they, and then the final thing was this, I hate this cliche, but it's this tolerance of ambiguity and, you know, this notion of even though it's the humanities, they still are told all the time what's right, wrong, and binary type way. And they really, it's a liberating thing to find out that your translation and mine are both okay, but now how are we going to defend it? And the final clue on that at the end, this is something we should probably all be doing with all our students, is when I do criticize them, they get upset. And at the end of the semester, I show them my own comments that I've gotten from editors and they think, wow, they really, I can't believe an editor told you this. It's like, yeah, this is what happens in translation. So these are the values that go beyond just the product that I think we can tell our own. We can do a better job telling our own colleagues who are not in translation what the value our students receive in these translation workshops. I want to say something here because last year, I'm at the University of Iowa. I direct the MFA in Literary Translation, which is a multilingual graduate level program where any given year we may have anywhere from 6 to back last spring we had 13 different languages in the class. A couple of people were translating from more than one language. It's really amazing, we gifted group and everything. The other interesting thing that happened in Iowa is that the program moved into the division of world languages, literatures and cultures. It's a little bit like putting the lamp inside the lion's den right now. And there was quite a bit of resistance because of the paradigm, right? I mean Russell has written very beautifully about this. In language instruction, translation is a pedagogy to learn language. And so we began... It is an outmoded pedagogy. It is an outmoded pedagogy. So we began my arrival there with conversations like saying, of course we're translating today. Of course they don't have enough language skills to really do translation, to do justice and all that. So one thing that occurred to me, and I am surprisingly managed to convince everyone, is we created an undergraduate minor in translation for global literacy. Now, so that students can actually take courses bi-directional. The courses they take in Spanish and French and German where they translate into the forum language also count toward this minor. Because the goal of the minor is to encourage an exploration of translation as both a mode of inquiry and a mode of exchange, right? I mean value exchange. So we created a course called Transition and the Global Society. That's the gateway course. And here students will be sort of exploring translation in all sorts of contexts. Human rights, health, public health, literature, arts and everything. And then students have to take two just outright translation workshops. These are going to be geared more toward the textual literary translation. But then students can take two additional courses in their language programs. Because again what we did is we sort of broadened the frame and we said okay what we're doing here is understanding the functions of translation in the global era. And you know there's a huge amount of literature right now about global literacy as a liberal arts objective. And it has learning outcomes. If you go to the Association of American Universities and Colleges, the website there you can download all their learning outcomes and rubrics up to your nose if you want. But the interesting thing here is those documents give you a safe, neutral, common space to not even engage that age-old friction between literary translation and language inquisition. Language pedagogy. But this was a good one. One example is one of our very brilliant and seasoned, like 20-20 years he has been teaching a stylistic course. French studies and he always underscores French. After this dialogue he came and said, you know what maybe I can do this multilingual. So there is an interesting thawing that happens when people engage the questions somewhere outside their territories. If you're interested in all this it's all on the website. Just go on the MFA in Literary Translation at the University of Iowa and there is a link there, Translation for Global Literacy. And the whole program is Outline Goals and all of that. And it surprises this. I don't know where you are but public research ones are suffering tremendously from budget cuts and all of that. And lo and behold the college fast tracked this minor. So much so that the minor got approved before we could finish putting together the syllabiants. They got so excited. So I mean there is an interesting new space you can carve for yourself. I'm laughing because I used to be at that institution. So I know that the multilingual environment, the multilingual workshop pretty well from having taught in it and it's very dynamic. It's also a little slightly, I mean I commiserate with Aaron all the time because he's now in it and I'm not. And I recognize the slightly privileged environment and it probably looks slightly privileged from your standpoint too because it's highly writer centric environment. There are lots of writing programs. There are five different invent bays in creative writing. Creative writing for non-fiction, fiction, poetry, play writing and then the translation workshop. And there are all these writers all around. And so all you got to do is add a little bit of language expertise and you get great translations. You get fantastic translations. And so it's in a way it teaches itself when the director of the program retired. There were a couple of years, Danny Weissport, when he retired there were a couple of years when there was nobody to teach in it. And the students were so good they just did it themselves. These are grad students that they just taught themselves. Last night they had the session. I mean this includes Jennifer Croft. She was a graduate of those years. She has published like three or four Polish translations already. Becca McKay and Jamie Richards. They were all graduates of that year. Jamie is a finalist in the NTA for this year. So they all pretty much did it themselves. They were just amazing. Very high quality students. So I sort of think if I look at it now from outside I think, wow that was great that I could teach in a program like that. But we don't all have that kind of luxury. Well undergraduate translation workshops, I mean we begin as if this is a creative writing workshop because they had to first figure out how to read and how to read a work to understand how it is constructed. I mean that's really what we do as translators, right? That's where it begins. So it's perfectly fine to spend the first month feeling like am I teaching translation here or is this really a literary analysis course? Well you're doing literary analysis but you're also constantly infusing that conversation with translation techniques with terminology. That's where I was going. So I'll go to the next step is not being in that environment. I took things from it that I think are highly important. You can take them to a lot of different places. So one is an environment where you're just teaching an undergrad lit class. Just undergrad lit any kind of literature. And one of the exercises you can have students do is you take, it has to be a work that has some canonical status because you need multiple translations. You get five translations of the same passage from this work and you give it to students and you say, well let's look at, first you do a little analysis, you look to see what the stylistic differences are and you talk about choices. Well why is this line different from that line? Not better, just different. You're not looking at the source text. They don't even have access to the source text. I don't even show them the source text. You talk about the stylistic differences and then you say, okay, well this is a page taken out of the Writers in the Schools program in the Center for Theory, Art and Translation. You do this with third graders. You say, well let's make our own. Let's make our own versions. You pick the lexical pieces that you think are better or the lines that you think are better and make your own version of whatever this is. I've done it with five tercets from the Inferno. Just five different versions of three tercets, let's say, nine lines from the Inferno. I've done it with the first paragraph of notes from, does Dayeski know it's from underground? Which is really, really good because the differences in lexical choices are really amazing. Is he wicked? Is he evil? Is he spiteful? I mean, he didn't really change the psychology versus the morality of the character and you talk about those things and then when they create their own version you don't just stop with that. You say now you write me 500 words about your version. In other words, tell me why you made the choices that you made and what it is you're trying to do. That's the only way I can judge it. Right? It's a rhetorical document. You're trying to convince somebody, you're trying to move somebody somehow so you have an audience in mind. Is it high school students? Is it college students? Are you going to create a scholarly apparatus? Is it people who read Twitter feeds? Have had students do their version? Is it a series of Twitter feeds? Just tweets. Have had students do LOL cat speak. You know, LOL cat speak? Cats that talk on the internet, anyway. But the 500 word description is the real thing because then they have to describe what it is that they just did and then you can judge by comparing what they say that they think they did with what they did. And then you can say, well, you know, a third grader is not likely to know these words. So you should think about your audience a little bit more. It's too sophisticated for an audience or your apparatus is all wrong for the audience that you're thinking of. So it's a very easy thing you can throw into any course as long as you have multiple translations of the same work. Are there other multiple translations that people use that they recommend? Let me say to you that Russell and I, because we've talked about this before, so this year I went and put together a course called re-translation. And the whole course is on re-translation. And in fact, it so happens that the translation studies people having nothing else to do now are very heavily into theorizing about re-translation, which in the end you realize you really can't. You can be theoretical about it, but I don't know that you can have a theory. But we did some theory things, and then I asked each person to choose a landmark text in the language culture they know and present sort of an analysis of re-translations. And it's just going wonderfully. They can do this work now. There is a beautiful handbook, Princeton. No, is it Princeton or Oxford? Guide to Translation in English. It's a handbook that lists all the translations done into English of all major works. I mean, there is a section on German. You have all the real-key translations, all the gaze transitions. So you can also populate the course if you want with them yourself. But the students themselves and then the third piece of the course will be when they will re-translate a passage from those texts. So they will have also experience with it. But it's a great pedagogy. The other thing is, you know, we talk about the 3%, just think about it. So there are about 500 titles that get translated into English. Most of these books sell about from 200 to 500 copies. So we really need also to emphasize a cultivation of a learned audience for translation. The performing arts colleagues are ahead of us, right? They had these courses on music appreciation. I mean, really badly unfortunate the title. But they know that they have to create patrons of their art. So in a way, teaching students about translation and the undergraduate level is all about teaching them to become learned appreciators of translated texts. Because if we don't increase the number of readers, it would be really lethal to increase the number of translations out there. I was going to add to one of the things I do that I didn't know whether to have the right to use the 500 word essay how to make your choice and then I found in times they would vary from they would want to spend four paragraphs on sort of showing off why they chose that word and other times they wanted to go quick. So what we ultimately decided on I thought it would be terrible but I think this generation doesn't mind at all. They just use, we do everything on word and sharing, they just use the comments and the margins. That also helped them with their partner then go through and either accept it or decline it. They got them in that editorial mode and that was a very quick way for me to go through and let them take my eyes to where they wanted to see them. That was a very easy way to grade things too. So a book that I've used that I think is pretty helpful it's called The Poem Itself. It's a Stanley Burns shop. The reason I like it is that it's got everything you need on two pages. So let's say it has a poem by Baudelaire in the original and then it has a linear translation so it's a literal pretty rough translation. Then some discussion of commentary the context, a little historical literary historical information and some interpretive like a man analysis but it's all in two pages and so you can give that to the student. There's no polished translation there. That's what's not missing what that's what's missing. So you can give them those two pages and say let's make a polished translation on the basis of this. And it's called The Poem Itself. And I think he's got French, German, Spanish, Italian in that. There may be one or two Russian poems in there but mostly it's French, German, Spanish, Italian and mostly canonical writers. Then he has a second book I think it's called The Hebrew Poem Itself. So if you want to pick a language that nobody knows in your class you could try Hebrew but you have to make sure nobody knows Hebrew whereas everybody else that's going to be able to usually Spanish or German or so they're going to find something in that book that they know. Yes. And then you can do your own. Natasha just comes in and 19 ways of looking at one way. A major advocate for the book. Yes. More books have been sold. A very popular book turned out for undergraduates who took the translation workshop was in fact the beautiful collection of essays that Susan Bernofsky and Esther Allen put together in translation. These are also essays that are very accessible but also very sort of hands on. They really focus on the practice of translation. Students absolutely loved it. Can I say one more thing about you asked about multi-lingual workshops and I've seen a whole bunch of a pretty wide variety of approaches. Some people don't use any modeling at all besides the students own work and some people like to use a lot of modeling so they bring in samples and you do analyses and then in between there's a variety. Some people use trots very heavily so they ask the students to create their own trots a kind of homey for the work a very literal translation where they show the original at least in a Romanized form assuming you can do that with Latin letters and then pretty much show the words that correspond to those underneath and then show even an intermediate translation in some cases they show an intermediate like a first try or a second draft something like that and then a polished version and you go through all of that together and I've seen all of those and I think they all work pretty well it really depends on your proclivities and your emphasis in your class. It's a professor how much creative writing to a figure in a graduate literary translation program because for a non-lative speaker that's in English it's your four language your second language they can get all the grammar right they can do all the grammar you know analysis but they cannot do great writing in English would you get the translation it reads so bad and it's just a for a non-lative speaker it's not a literary work if you walk into the graduate workshop any given evening you will wonder if this is a creative writing workshop or not in part because we focus quite extensively on the literary properties of a literary translation so we have to actually ask the translator not to come clear about come clean about the equivalency between words but whether this piece of writing now works as a piece of literature in the receiving language what are the analogs what are the correspondences what are the correlatives and the other thing again Rina Russell mentioned this it's a very it's a very exclusive place Iowa because the translation workshop will have the MFA in poetry people there and MFA in fiction people there and they will in fact insist on keeping the literary discussion going the literary and creative discussion going how much do you so the question though that I take from this is how much might you engage in editing or a discussion of editing at the stage where someone has brought work to the class who is a non-native speaker of English let's say and the articles might all be wrong from the standpoint of the native speakers they're looking at it saying well I can't make heads or tails because I think this needs an uh and this should be plural and that should be past tense and so on how much of that discussion do you actually have in a class environment like that I think it's a hard question well for example tomorrow there is going to be a session on punctuation you know not to anticipate but these sort of it's about how you approach these questions because for example when you have a sentence in a prose translation you can ask this you can say to the student this is not reading well in English and that's not necessarily a translation statement but when you ask the student why did you create this particular syntax why are the articles missing and in fact because sometimes they remove the articles because they are counting beats they are trying to create a certain cadence now that becomes a translation discussion do you see what I mean so the onus is on the translator and our job is to make them more and more conscious and deliberate about their translation of choices well I asked the question because the translator you have I mean that literature course appreciation of literature itself the origin of the text of the translation falls down 19 weeks of translation in one way if you are asking me I would say 17 or 18 of those translations miss the whole point it's because one way the poem is zen and the the invisibility of the subjectivity of the poetry I almost all the English translation so far from the I is the subjectivity there it doesn't matter how good we have a one way specialist in the background that's my no no no you're up so the sense of the literature appreciating the origin and also for me the bias is the translator a specialist in poetry he or she better be a poet sort of too I know Natasha you want to say something about one way well I do because I want to say that in fact the genius of that book is the group of combination of the translation of the chemical commentary which is a competitive of strategies and methods probably furthered by the inevitable language barrier of voice so which in fact is furthered in the sense that it gets as good as personal take so that it's one and that you know that it would be three more in fact I wrote a personal file of poetry which I collect additional translations of the beer park as one of the language group's losses has it because the latter is really looking for and in some ways that is also where for we're going to do the things that is what you say go ahead produce two things produce seven, eight, seven, eight and supply and loss where you clarify what you're going to do the things because in other words the translation of the poetry of the beer makes the sunny and the full way to be close to everything at all I mean quite fatigued because there are two people who are completely off in language they're working in everything so we have to simply say there are different personalities, there are different views, there's an audience, there's an audience there's always a way you're always passing for that invite just to act and generate but yeah I think precisely one of the strengths is the shortcomings of some of those transitions and the idea is also that they were actually projecting their own global bias that is all but I think that's interesting and I just wanted to give you by heart I'm going to use one of the things that I've tried to do when I'm dealing with speakers of different languages that really helps them understand that translation is first and foremost a process of interpretation and at the same time introduces some fundamental translation is have them first you've got to and then they could and then do so called a truly bold translation practice where I will assign it to a complicated text like two-pack paragraphs or some very two-paragraph or some very dense or some dense literary text and then I'll have them read their translations and discuss and then we'll sort of have an entire class discussion of how was it that they were translating the text from English to English and they have 17 completely read text so in a way you can sort of do this exercise without even having to go to the realm of inter-world relations so that is a actually that's a that's a pre-step to the use of a book like itself before you give them a trot and an explanation and say go make your own poem you do a series of exercises of paraphrase where you say okay I want you to take this text and make it sound biblical or take this biblical text and make it sound like bureaucratis and so they're translating stylistically where you can take I don't know exercises in style and take any five of the things that he does in there and say I want you to take this one and just look at the model and now I want you to take this passage from this ordinary language piece and make it into that retrograde or its surprises or whatever it is the totes he uses all sorts of them and that's a stylistic exercise it becomes a writing class it becomes a translation class and then you give them the next stage which is the poem itself with the paraphrase I think we're really lucky to be in this room with all these people because you don't get to talk to people about this very often and I'm curious what other people are doing or what their experience is I think that even a privileged situation is not necessarily is not necessary for this kind of thing you might be teaching in a community college or a high school and have people who have really linguistic and cultural knowledge that some people who are translators don't have so I'm curious what people are doing or ideas that or other text ideas to please share I did teach well I am teaching again, I retire but now Denver School of the Arts which is a bi-audition high school a variety of arts majors dance and music and all the usual things but it also has a creative writing major and that's what I taught in and working with the high school creative writing majors it also has a middle school so the majors they go through seven years of a creative writing program and full of music program and we often the feedback we often get from those kids when they go off to college is these people don't know anything about writing because they have to take their freshman courses so I tried to do a little translation workshop with them in the last couple of years without really knowing what I was doing and today's going to be some great ideas already but I just took because what they teach at the SA and so I took a couple of little a lot of New Yorker check homes was there any New Yorker check homes a couple of little small ones they're small but they're difficult those little homes and some French I forget who I used French I don't know but it didn't matter because there were students who did and I divided them into groups and they worked on their translations and we had this whole discussion about to go to Google Translate here are the cautions and here's what you've got to do and here's the best way to do that you know because that's what they're going to do immediately and I gave them some time to do that and then when we came back and people read their lines and we got the variety of vocabulary that they came up with for a particular noun say something easy still it was pretty neat to watch the light you know this is what translation it is and my favorite one was a senior creative writer who said to me Mr. Bravo I am going to translate something every day from now on so and there are a couple of people who have told me I'm still working on trying to do translation but it's not something people who are not in this realm ever think about that and especially about high schoolers that oh there are choices involved here there's interpretation there's interpretation so that was fun but that's all I've ever done it's just that little in the morning or in the afternoon but not first period for seniors because they'll be asleep you know basically in that program I was at a faculty symposium this year we heard about the companies that tested teachable loan literature and they talked about the comparison of multiple translations which I always was my favorite exercise especially my teacher literature but when I got feedback on the genius foundation translation course for the first time there's a comment that we heard in literature and we didn't simply have a very good translation they were all divided by their names I hope they had a good translation translation for bills and fund dollars funeral and have them think about what they think what they were trying to do did you think that a positive feedback was that they had a communication part of our education this month when the student comes to the another edition of a foreign language program says do you mind writing to this edition instead and you look at the comment because the edition is not acknowledged in the presence of a trustee the one one caution that I have that I always feel the need to express I always feel the need to express the caution about doing just a little bit of translation in a class where I remember a story told by a teacher of mine where he did that one day he was a translator so he was committed to it but he did a little bit of translation in this class and after the class he talked about differences among like a variety of translations and after the class the student came up and said thank you professor for showing me the differences in these translations it really opened my eyes to translation I don't think I'm ever going to read another translation in the world again because I see that oh I failed I'm just doing a little bit can be dangerous that's also why I would really encourage you to consider taking this global literacy angle and creating a modest four course sequence or five course sequence and just let it come then you have more space to do all of that yes discussion of all the amount visible in the language itself all the text that comes with it so I give them an exercise early on sometimes right away sometimes I get it to them before the class is even back it's a great place because I'm from Spanish I often use for instance a page from the opening page of Pride and Prejudice and because this is something that I can then get I can then get a translation of the Spanish version and I can use different texts from Spanish to English I have all of them translated both eventually when I work individually they will translate but for this exercise they're supposed to do each text both ways knowing presumably nothing or very little some readers among my students will know they're usually not that many of them and so immediately they have turns like an illness Poach and Four you know other people's part is left at last and so the irony the vast irony about the truth university knowledge but just makes it really to have something sure in a context do this then makes it really clear what we're being about note cards are passing around asking you to put your email addresses because one of the projects that we're working on is to have a website, a resource website teaching translation and I'd like to connect with you Natasha you had your hand up you wanted to see it's you in the workshop format it's a task format that I think is adjusted to in fact I worked with you in the very last session of this conference and I did an unfortunate happy hour moment but that's one way in which one can raise consciousness about the question of translation because that's how obviously I feel immediately that circulates has always circulated in translation and everything that has to do with you cannot help by me and you can do it either way you can take a John Ford film subtitled into Mandarin and dubbed into a Spanish with the possibilities are endless you can start asking questions almost every aspect of the translation and it's easier with other graduates to promote themselves to it than it is to go with each subject because then other issues come up one language both tone voice etc I was going to ask you with your emails that are passing around is it possible that that could become a I know we have our lists with ALTA but if we knew who's teaching Larry I can say by the end of the year the next phase of the website is supposed to be launched including discussion forums so if you're interested in teaching translation then you'll want to be in that forum your emails can go in there what I am asking your emails for is that I'm going to send you an email when I get back asking for you to send me electronically your ideas or your syllabi or what not and I will create a reserve now once the ALTA website creates this we will migrate that there but for the time being because you know this is the third such session I've attended every year we have a session like this and it has probably the most animated conversations and we need to really keep us in touch after the session I think one of the other practical questions I have is I'll be teaching undergrads liberal arts this will be their one touch translation and the the reality is at the end they get a grade so my question is how you evaluate this kind of work the analysis that goes with right so if you're asking them to create a rationale or there you have to spell it out what goes in the rationale what do you want to know I want to know why you picked these words I want to know who your audience is for instance and the audience is a big part and then you give them some variety of possible audiences and also you want to know why they've chosen the form that they've chosen so in some cases they'll say well they look at that first paragraph of notes from underground and they say this is a lot like a dialogue isn't it a dialogue but he's talking with himself so they make it into a dialogue and that's a really good way to do it and it's kind of exciting but they have to explain what in the original text made them think that it looked like a dialogue they think that piece out so if they're able to do that what you're grading on it is a kind of coherence of their rationale with what it is that they've done also you can ask them to evaluate their attempt I mean what are the parts that gave you the most difficulty and what are the parts you think you've done I am doing an independence study with an amazing polyglot freshman I gave him one of the most translated real case the archaic torso of Apollo he got so excited he came with two versions of it and I of course had about 18 others but the beauty of it is he said you know I spent an hour on this but what is so wonderful though is he now has spent several weeks on this one poem and willingly understanding so really we have to remind ourselves that like those emotional stages denial, anger whatever translators also go through them there is a moment of surrender the acceptance is not right away evident to even the translator and I think these stages have to be recognized by our students that in fact it takes enormous amount of time and effort and creativity and intellectual labor as well to come up with that transition and this may not work at all universities but so in my grading I do put a lot of emphasis on the comments the justification comments and the margin but the majority of the grading since this is a collaborative workshop where they're in pairs, then teams, then units they do, I give them a template but they do peer evaluation and at first I didn't think that would work but undergraduate can be brutal with each other I mean the first week they're all hunky dory and they fill you know a little bit but once they have confidence they can be much more brutal with their comments with their peers than I really would be and so I rely a lot on peer evaluation and not only do I give them a template but I remove names and details but I give them peer evaluations for former years to show them we need to keep it civil but it's got to be constructive and so forth but they really don't want us to the course when they begin to learn how to evaluate somebody else's work and then that goes to the grade as well I can give the template what the other thing is there are also preliminary stages you can ask them to do one is they have to give you a trot and then there is something called mapping right, map this text what are all the non-negotiables that you really need to you know Venuti talks about the ratio of gain and loss and so what are the things that you will fight the hardest not to lose right so I mean they have to really map that piece to also give us some encouragement this summer three groups of high school students arrived in Iowa City a group from Armenia a group from Turkey and a group from the US and we put them through a very interesting exercise and we ask each person to bring a poem or a passage, a literary passage that they would like to give the other as a gift from their own language and then we ask them to help the other translate that poem to the other's language so they work very closely with each other and this can be done very well with heritage speakers in your classes and again it's highly unlikely that the exercise will yield award winning translators but most of the translation I do even in order to get to the final published translation is not award winning so I mean we're sort of giving them the experience with all the stages anything else yeah yes yeah it goes to Rilke when he says when you come back from another country you bring a word or a phrase that's what is lasting yes I mean it depends on what you're looking for there are two major source books out there one is Venuti's translation studies reader the other is Danny Weisbord's reader translation and the Venuti one is much more like a critical theory collection and I would strongly discourage you from using it with unsuspecting students because it is quite substantial but there are pieces there Jakobson is there Steiner is there there are some landmark statements about translation that you will find there the advantage of Weisbord is that he always combines theory with examples so we will talk about Bible trust as you will have Martin Luther and all the prefaces to King James but then he will also give you versions that you can incorporate so it's very handy I have a couple more so I like this I've used this book called The Craft of Literary Translation which is a University of Chicago reader that Reiner Schulte and John Fagan put together there's a bunch of short pieces The Craft of Literary Translation Reiner Schulte and John Fagan they're the editors and it's a collection a bunch of different things and then the other one I've used in class is by Lefebvre translation in a comparative literature context and the reason I like that one is that it has a lot of very short sections it's all written by the same person Andre Lefebvre but each one is very short and so I find them portable in a way you can take a little section and say let's look at what people have done with homophonic translation and it's a very short little section that deals with Zukovsky's experiments in homophonic translation and it talks about why the Katalas and why it's very thin it's only about 120 pages so I find it's not too intimidating there's also an article in translation review that Kelly Washburn about translation workshops that has a good that Zukovsky site and that's a great one Lefebvre thank you guys