 Edwin Gensler, what do you do in the academic world? What do I do in the academic world? I do a lot of different things. I work primarily at the University of Massachusetts. I direct the University of Massachusetts at Amherst where I direct the translation center and I teach in comparative literature. So those are my two main jobs. The translation center provides translation and interpreting services to businesses, hospitals and schools. And it's a business and then the course... I'm running that. This is a very innovative model. The training, you're doing translations, you're doing research. And then I'm doing the teaching. I teach primarily my courses, deliver the MA in translation, and we have a very successful master's degree. And then what's really nice is the synergy between the two because all of our students do translations for businesses, hospitals and schools. And then they get feedback not just from faculty members but also from people in the field. And the evaluations that a business gives to a translation are very different than what a faculty member gives. So those synergies have worked really nicely. And it's changed my teaching a much stricter with deadlines and extensions. I give A's or F's a lot. One or two mistakes is not a B, it's an F. And it's changed my teaching and I think it's really helped the students. Our placement record is excellent. Our students are getting tremendous jobs in big multilingual translation companies but also teaching and having that sort of double feedback really gives them confidence. This is going to be surprising to anybody who's read your books. And they think this guy's comparative literature, his cultural studies, his critical academic view. You're right in the thick of the professional... Yeah, no, I do a lot of practice. A lot of practice. A lot of proofreading. A lot of proofreading. Night after night after night. Does that contradict with the academic work that goes into those books? Well, I don't think so. I was educated in Europe primarily in Berlin, Germany. And I sort of read my translation studies scholarship in Europe. And I thought I'd came back to Massachusetts and I'd be able to teach Spanish and French and German translation. When you were in Berlin, what were you doing there then? I was a student in German. At master's level then? Master's level. And your doctorate was done with it? At Vanderbilt University. That was later. So you came back? I came back. But you're from Ohio? Let me back up. I want to finish the first answer and I'll get to that life story stuff too, which is all translators of course have a very diverse pattern on how they came to it. But then when I arrived in Massachusetts, I'll talk a little bit about that today at this multilingualism and translation seminar here at the University of Arizona. But I discovered that what we need in the United States are not those European languages. We need Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Haitian, Creole, Bosnian. The incredible diversity. The top ten languages in my state are very different. So I had to re-educate myself and I have done so many things. I have taught Haitian Creole on Sundays, so we standardize our Haitian Creole translations. I have had seminars on how to word process in Vietnamese because the Vietnamese all had different word processing programs and none of them were compatible with what the industry wanted. I've taught how to word process in Cambodian. I've had to proofread Vietnamese, making decisions about what is to use the Southern Vietnamese that's prevalent in the United States or to use Northern Vietnamese which is academically pure and liked better by scholars in Vietnam. So all sorts of different, I've had to sort of retool almost everything I knew about translation based upon the practice working with the immigrant groups in the state of Massachusetts. So yeah, they're teaching me as much as I'm teaching them and the theory that I do, yes, that's abstract but it's also, I'm trying to break down misconceptions about transferring meaning and sort of several generalizations that are in the field about how easy that is and I'm always throwing in social, political, ideological, gender, race, ethnic variables into anybody's model. So I've attacked some people in the field and sometimes it goes over well and sometimes it hasn't. Life story. Life story. Well I did a bachelor's degree at Kenyon College and I studied English literature with some German literature and then I went to the Free University of Berlin where I continued in Germanistic, linguistics and German literature and then I came back to the United States where I got a job at the University of Iowa as an administrator for the International Writing Program. Did that for five years, probably the happiest period in my life. I was able to help 30 or 40 writers get stories and poems and plays translated and then I helped them get them published and we'd send them out to see Bly in Minnesota or Fairland Getty in San Francisco and we had a nice dialogue with a lot of the small presses, 50s magazine, City Lights in the United States at the time. That period is a very fertile period for study. There's a lot going on in translation at the time and then I went back to school, I went back to Vanderbilt to get a PhD basically to have the license to do what I was already doing in comparative literature and I wrote the thesis on translation and reception in the United States and that's been at the basis of almost all my subsequent publications although I try to look at as many different perspectives as I can. In that history, the book that you're still well known for contemporary theories of translation. Yes. Many of us are surprised to see the translation workshop as a chapter in that book. Is that related to the Iowa experience? Certainly. But it's also in the United States that's probably the predominant approach to translation even to this day. The workshop approach is taught at more schools than any other approach. But to call it a theory? Well, there are people who are theorizing about how to, yes, I would call it a theory, or different kinds of theories about capturing meaning and movement and tone and rhythm and it's one that I think should better inform other translation theories which neglected a lot of things such as metaphor. The research in translation studies on metaphor is pretty, pretty, pretty sorry. But at Iowa, when James Holmes or André Le Favre would come, people would leave the room. They just say that theory in Belgium is not theory. So the center in the United States is different than the center in Belgium. When I go to Belgium and then talk about, say, deconstruction in France, they go, oh, that's not theory. What we do is theory. And if I go to France and tell them what the Belgians are doing, they go, well, that sort of empirical studies, that died almost a century ago. So everybody thinks they're the center. And there are different centers and now we're looking at the direction the field is going. We're looking to India and we're looking to China and we're looking to Japan. The center is moving. What kind of research should we be doing? In the United States, perhaps. Well, this conference is very good. The United States, over 150 languages are spoken in the United States. And my university, we teach maybe 12 languages. What we need are Vietnamese is in the top 10, Tagalog is in the top 10, Chinese is in the top 10. We need to revise what it is we're teaching and develop translators in what we call these lesser known languages or languages of limited diffusion and to improve the quality of translation in those languages. I think every country is experiencing this. Turkish and Russian and Slavic and languages in Germany or in Italy, the North African immigration and teaching Arabic and Persian and Berber. Every country now is having these waves of immigration and we need to do a much better job of providing translation services in those non, dare I say, sort of European languages. And then in terms of the theory, if I may. The last thing. We've got a conference beginning here. Yeah, would be the internationalization of the field. We really do need to look at translation theory in China, in Japan, in Latin America, in Africa, in the Middle East and not with our sort of set definitions of what translation theory is as we've learned in many European universities but to be open to new ideas and new insights and new approaches. Sure. Edwin, thank you very much. Thank you, Anthony.