Post-Mortem: FIT Congress 2008
Poorly Managed, Occasional Bright Spots
I could swear those long-legged seraphs were headhunted from the professional model community in Shanghai and Dalian, but what do I know?
The “18th World Congress of the International Federation of Translators” (Shanghai August 4-6) featured dozens of seminars with over 200 speakers from all over the world—and an opening banquet starring those women, performing what was billed as a Tibetan folk dance.
My neighbors, two immaculately coiffed, fluent English-speaking Iraqi women in China for the first time, were blown away by the spectacle. They couldn’t have cared less where those “Tibetans” came from!
But I wasn’t in town for the dancing. I paid RMB4,000 for entry to the conferences + RMB1,660 for a round-trip air ticket between Shenzhen-Shanghai + RMB800 for 3 nights in a hotel, in the hopes of hearing a host of speakers deliver their (hopefully unique!) presentations.
In the event, most of the seminars were rather disappointing, because:
- Each speaker was strictly limited to 15 minutes, and most Q&A were put off for 30-45 minutes, i.e., until all speakers had first presented;
- Many speakers chose to read out their research papers word-for-word, projecting text-heavy PowerPoint slides virtually identical with their scripts;
- Ironically, only a handful of seminars—this was an international translation conference!—offered simultaneous interpretation;
- There were often 10 or so seminars on at one time on two different floors of the meeting center, each featuring 3-6 speakers, but no obvious way of learning when a given speaker would appear. No list outside the door of each seminar venue, for instance, stating the names of the speakers, their topic, and the order of their appearance.
Nor was much attention given to informing us which scheduled speakers would be absent. I learned only belatedly that Turkish scholar Bengu Ergin would not be presenting “What do we observe in the Chinese translation of Orhan Pamuk’s novel, ‘My Name is Red’?” What a pity!
Ah, well. Here’s a quick list of topics/speakers/e-mail addresses for those topics that might be of interest to Chinese-English translators: “法国对中国现代作家选择之思考” (高方, gaofangparis8@126.com); “Creating the Self-image of New China: ‘Outward’ Literary Translation in the First 17 Years of Socialist China (Ma Shi-Kui, mashikui01@sina.com); “The Chinese-English Parallel Corpus of ‘Hong Lou Meng’: A Working Report” (Liu Ze-Quan, zqliu@ysu.edu.cn); “A Dialectical view of ‘Chinese’ and ‘Non-Chinese’ Features in Chinese Translation Theory” (Tan Zai-Xi, than@hkbu.edu.hk); “A Translation Anthologist’s Reflections on the Ideological Complexities of Translating China” (Martha Cheung, marthach@hkbu.edu.hk).
By Bruce Humes, August 10, 12:37a.m.