Translators Struggle to Prove their Academic Bona Fides
While other forms of scholarship are more obvious—every critical act flagged or footnoted—translation, too, "is a serious intellectual enterprise," says Ms. Porter, who has just finished her year as the MLA's president. "A translator is the most intimate reader of a text, sort of the consummate interpreter, the ultimate comparatist."
Comments
Wow.
Micah Sittig, January 27, 2010, 4:57a.m.
How many universities treat translation as research?
After being appointed as a lecturer in a in translation and interpreting masters program, our Jane was officially informed that her future translations would not count towards academic merit accumulation.
And yet any old gobbledygook generated by "translation theorists" counts. That's why translation theorists outnumber practitioners.
A quality translation is the result of serious research but has to be invisible. For many translators the "hunt" for some tiny detail that can add to the translation is pure joy. Reading translation theory is not.
Martin Merz
Martin Merz, January 28, 2010, 4:36a.m.
Then again, maybe its a good thing that literary translation is considered something separate to academia. Aren't translators artists, translating works of art? I think if you scrutinize the inner workings of something too heavily then you can't help but destroy the art.
I'm not saying that translation shouldn't be an academic discipline in it's own right, but maybe the translators should get on with their translations, and let the academics get on with their acadmeic analysis.
After all, to speak Chinese you don't have to know that "in most dialects of Mandarin velars and alveolar sibilants are palatalized when they occur before palatal glides." This kind of stuff is left to linguists, as should the academic study of translation be left to academics.
Tom Saunders
Tom Saunders, January 28, 2010, 1:04p.m.
I enjoyed this: In a forthcoming book, Why Translation Matters (Yale University Press, to be released this March), Edith Grossman describes the process this way: "What we do is not an act of magic, like altering base metals into precious ones, but the result of a series of creative decisions and imaginative acts of criticism." The celebrated translator of Cervantes and many Latin American authors, she calls translation "a kind of reading as deep as any encounter with a literary text can be."
Cindy Carter, January 28, 2010, 1:19p.m.