Upcoming Events
October:
Translation Discussion and
Workshop
"Translations that Sound Right"
October 20, 2022
6-7:30pm (PT) on Zoom (registration required)
Reilly Costigan-Humes and Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler will give a discussion on October 20 titled, "Translations That Sound Right" [simpsoncenter.org] about about their work translating two novels by Ukrainian author Serhiy Zhadan, Mesopotamia and The Orphanage. This event is co-sponsored by Slavic Languages and Literatures; UW’s Ellison Center for Russian, East European, and Central Asian Studies; Northwest Translators and Interpreters Society (NOTIS); and Third Place Books [thirdplacebooks.com], where Serhiy Zhadan’s book in the guest speakers’ translations can be purchased.
"Translating the Eccentric and the Commonplace"
October 25, 2022
6-7:30pm (PT) on Zoom (registration required)
The October 20 discussion will be followed on October 25 with an interactive workshop from the two translators titled, "Translating the Eccentric and the Commonplace. [simpsoncenter.org]". In this workshop seminar, Costigan-Humes and Stackhouse Wheeler will draw from their own experience to help participants avoid the stilted, overdesigned sentences that often plague literary translation, and more closely replicate the original reading experience.
November:
Marketing Translations
"Found in Translation, Or Why to Translate & for Who?"
November 15
CMU 202, 11:30am-1pm
In “Found in Translation, Or Why to Translate & for Who?” [simpsoncenter.org],
Piotr Florczyk [piotrflorczyk.com] will discuss choosing an (unknown) author, strategies for pitching the work to editors and publishers and for marketing the book after it is published.
The paradox of the U.S. literary marketplace is that it is both diverse and insular; with various interest groups and communities vying for attention and recognition, translators need to be cognizant of the repercussions of their decisions to translate this or that author. Consequently, the goal of this colloquium is to share ideas and experiences of navigating the fraught process of translating and publishing unknown poets and writers in the U.S. Topics covered will include choosing an (unknown) author, strategies for pitching the work to editors and publishers and for marketing the book after it is published.
Piotr Florczyk is Assistant Professor of Global Literary Studies at UW-Seattle, and an award-winning poet and translator from Polish. Learn more about his work at www.piotrflorczyk.com
This event is hosted by the Translation Studies Hub at the Simpson Center for the Humanities.
Past Events
Translating African Worlds: A Conversation with Filmmaker Abderrahmane Sissako
Tuesday, April 26, 2022, 7 - 8:30pm
University of Washington, Kane Hall 210
What is the place of West Africa in the world and of the world in West Africa? These are the questions that the Oscar- and Palme d’Or-nominated filmmaker Adberrahmane Sissako asks insistently in films that address the impact of World Bank and IMF policies in Mali and beyond (Bamako, 2006), the confrontation between extremist and moderate Islam in the southern Sahara (Timbuktu, 2014), and exile in Europe and the difficulties of returning home (Life on Earth, 1999). In all of his films, Sissako brings a worldly sensibility to the representation of the most pressing concerns of the continent, but always with an eye for the beauty and tenderness in everyday life, no matter how difficult, and for the moral ambiguities and linguistic complexities that evade so many representations of West Africa.
Abderrahmane Sissako, born in Mauritania, raised in Mali, trained in the Soviet Union, France, and elsewhere, is the director and writer or co-writer of four award-winning feature films: Life on Earth, 1999; Waiting for Happiness, 2002; Bamako, 2006; and Timbuktu, 2014. He recently staged his first opera, Le Vol du Boli, with music from Damon Albarn (Gorillaz, Blur). He has also made numerous short films and served as producer on the films of promising, young West African filmmakers. He will be joined in conversation for this event by Berette Macaulay (founder and co-lead organizer of Seattle’s Black Cinema Collective) and Maya Smith (director of the African Studies Program at UW).
Co-sponsored by the UW African Studies Program, the Black Cinema Collective, the Henry Art Gallery, and Northwest Film Forum.
Registration Required (link forthcoming). Accommodation requests related to a disability should be made by April 16 to scevents@uw.edu, 206-685-5260.
Writers as Translators, Translators as Writers with Jennifer Croft and Boris Dralyuk
Friday, April 22, 2022, 12:30 - 2pm (ONLINE)
At what points do creative writing and literary translation converge? How do the two activities enrich each other for individuals who practice both? What skills of the creative writer is it essential or even possible for the successful literary translator to adopt? And how can we best teach and learn those skills? Join our conversation with two of America’s most prominent contemporary literary translators, Jennifer Croft and Boris Dralyuk, for the UW Translation Studies Hub’s featured spring 2022 event on this year’s theme of Teaching and Learning Translation.
Jennifer Croft, author and translator, won the 2020 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing for her illustrated memoir Homesick and the 2018 Man Booker International Prize for her translation from Polish of Nobel Prize laureate Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights. She is the author of Serpientes y escaleras and Notes on Postcards and the translator from Spanish of works by Federico Falco, Romina Paula and Pedro Mairal. Her translation from Polish of Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob appeared in 2022. She holds an MFA from the University of Iowa and a PhD from Northwestern University.
Boris Dralyuk, a poet, essayist and translator, is the editor-in-chief of the Los Angeles Review of Books. He is co-editor of The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry (2015), editor of 1917: Stories and Poems from the Russian Revolution (Pushkin Press, 2016), and translator of books by Russian prose writers Isaac Babel, Leo Tolstoy, Mikhail Zoshchenko, Andrey Kurkov, Maxim Osipov and others. His poems have appeared in The New York Review of Books, The New Criterion, The Yale Review, The Hopkins Review and elsewhere.
Accommodation requests related to a disability should be made by April 12 to the Simpson Center, 206.685.5260, scevents@uw.edu.
Registration required: https://bit.ly/TSHub-Apr22
Hamid Ismailov in the Context of Central Asian Literature
Thursday, April 14, 2022, 6 - 7:30pm
University of Washington, Thomson Hall 317
Uzbek author in exile Hamid Ismailov will discuss the different storytelling techniques he has used in his published novels, as well as the traditions and folklore that appear in his work, spanning the cultures and history of Central Asia, the larger post-Soviet world, and traditions ranging from Irish myth to Jungian psychology. He will discuss how his writing relates to the history of literature in Central Asia and its key actors.
This talk will take place in-person only. It will not be a hybrid or recorded event.
"Let’s Glocalize!" A Design-Thinking Approach to the Teaching and Practice of Localization
Friday, April 8, 2022, 12:30pm - 2:00pm
How do we apply translation techniques to make digital and material products ready for the world? When moving beyond text, other aspects of target cultures need to be addressed, such as color meanings, hand gestures, icons, and their associated emotions and history, not to mention mundane but vital issues such as the direction of the script, the length of software strings to fit into fixed fields, and the sustainability of materials and packaging for the intended geographic area. Join the Translation Studies Hub for a workshop to learn by doing: participants will work together to prototype an artifact that is culturally sensitive and effective in another culture. No prior experience necessary.
Zakiya Hanafi (Human Centered Design & Engineering) teaches international communication and user experience at UW. She is the author of The Monster in the Machine: Magic, Medicine, and the Marvelous (2000) and over a dozen translations of scholarly books from Italian. Her other professional roles include medical interpreter, technical translator, and linguistic quality control reviewer for the life sciences industry.
The Lives and Labors of Professional Translators and Interpreters
Friday, February 25, 2022, 12:30pm - 2:00pm
A Translation Studies Hub and NOTIS Round Table Seattle-area translators and interpreters will join the UW Translation Studies Hub community for the 3rd annual roundtable on the practical and ethical dimensions of working in their professions. Topics will include translator/interpreter training and education, the joys and frustrations of the working life of a translator/interpreter, the tension between accuracy and efficiency, and the prospects and perils of voice-to-text and machine-translation technologies in the field.
Featuring:
Elizabeth Adams, certified Russian-English legal translator
Kenneth Barger, Spanish and French interpreter and translator
Shelley Fairweather-Vega, freelance literary translator and past president of NOTIS
Yoseph Petros, native of Ethiopia and multilingual interpreter and translator
Brianna Salinas, translator of Latin-American poetry and director of communications & marketing for NOTIS
Yuliya Speroff, Russian-English certified medical and social services interpreter
Part of the Translation Studies Hub colloquium series. Register: https://bit.ly/lives-and-labors
Accommodation requests related to a disability should be made by February 15, 2022 to the Simpson Center, 206-685-5260, scevents@uw.edu.
Laura Marris, "Plague Chronicles: On Translating Albert Camus in a Pandemic"
Friday, January 28, 2022, 12:30pm - 2:00pm
The summer before COVID-19, Knopf commissioned a new translation of Albert Camus’s classic novel, The Plague. Though it was originally intended as an allegory of the Second World War, the past two years have transformed that reading tradition, bringing the novel close to readers who experienced the themes of the novel firsthand. In light of this context, Laura Marris will discuss the process of creating a new translation of Camus’ text—preserving his restraint and lyricism, his ideas of separation and porousness, and his deep engagement with contagion and immunity.
Laura Marris is a writer and translator. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, The Believer, The Yale Review, The Point and elsewhere. Her work has been supported by a MacDowell Fellowship and a Daniel Varoujan Award. Recent translations include Albert Camus’s The Plague, out from Knopf in November 2021. Books she has translated have been shortlisted for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize, the Baille-Gifford Prize in the UK, the Mark Lynton History Prize, and the French-American Foundation Translation Prize. With Alice Kaplan, she is the co-author of States of Plague: Reading Albert Camus in a Pandemic (2022). She is currently at work on her first solo-authored book, The Age of Loneliness, which will be published by Graywolf in 2024.
Part of the Translation Studies Hub colloquium series.
The Lives and Labors of Professional Translators and Interpreters
Friday, February 19, 2021, 12:30pm – 2:00pm PST
Seattle-area translators and interpreters will join the UW Translation Studies Hub community once again to discuss the practical and ethical dimensions of working in their professions. Topics will include translator/interpreter training and education, the joys and frustrations of the working life of a translator/interpreter, the tension between accuracy and efficiency, and the prospects and perils of artificial intelligence/machine translation in the field. Featuring:
Yasemin Alptekin, specialist in literary, legal, medical, and educational interpretation/translation. Yasemin Alptekin studied linguistics, literary translation theory and techniques while pursuing a BA in Western Languages and Literature at Bosphorus University in Turkey. She specializes in legal, medical and educational interpretation/translation as well as literary, and has an academic interest in translation theory.
Chris Kunej, Manager of Interpreter Services at King County Superior Court, Seattle Washington. Chris Kunej is currently the Manager of Interpreter Services at the King County Superior Court in Seattle; the program schedules interpreters for 150+ language events daily and has covered 170+ languages. Chris is a certified court interpreter in over 10 US states, is a published linguist in both the US and internationally and has taught advanced language and culture at a major US university as an Adjunct Professor.
Yvonne Simpson, Director of Interpreter Services at Harborview Medical Center. Yvonne Simpson is Director of Interpreter Services at Harborview Medical Center. She is a DSHS and nationally certified medical interpreter. Yvonne began her career 15 years ago in Arizona after completing her Master’s in Spanish sociolinguistics.
Mia Spangenberg, literary translator, Finnish and German to English. Mia Spangenberg is a literary translator who translates from Finnish and German into English. She is particularly passionate about children’s literature and a regular contributor to the WorldKidLit blog.
Moderated by Shelley Fairweather-Vega, freelance literary translator, Russian to English
Translating Poetry and Teaching Translation for Publication
Friday, January 15, 2021, 12:30pm – 2:00pm PST
Presentations by Paul Atkins, Justin Jesty, and Ping Wang, UW Department of Asian Languages & Literatures
Ping Wang: Translating “Nature” and the Nature of Translating: Classical Chinese Poetry as a Global Phenomenon
Paul Atkins: Translating Medieval Japanese Zen Poetry
Justin Jesty: Teaching Translation for Publication
Vicente Rafael on Translation in Colonial and Post-Colonial Philippines
Friday, December 4, 2020, 12:30pm – 2:00pm PST
Vicente Rafael (History) compares in this talk the practice of translation between the Spanish Habsburg and contemporary US empires. He focuses on what they have in common – an enduring attachment to logocentrism, or a metaphysics of the sign – and shows how the practice of translation alternately enables and disables this metaphysic from functioning in such disparate areas as Christian conversion, counter-insurgent warfare and the work of the Summer Institute of Linguistics.
Vicente L. Rafael is Professor of History and Southeast Asian Studies at the Univ. of Washington. He is the author of several books and works on the cultural and political history of the colonial and post-colonial Philippines and occasionally writes on the United States and the Spanish Pacific. Currently, he is finishing a book on the necropolitics and aesthetics of authoritarianism, Sovereign Trickster: Death and Laughter in the Age of Duterte (Duke University Press, forthcoming).
Human + Machine Translation
Friday, October 30, 2020, 12:30pm – 2:00pm PST
Machine Translation dates back to the 1940s and rose in popularity in the mid-1990s with the advent of the World Wide Web. However, we know little about how people use machine translation in their lives. Daniel Liebling will present a brief history of machine translation, followed by some state of the art results. To what extent do algorithmic measurements correlate with end-user satisfaction? He will then cover recent ethnographic and systems research on how well machine translation currently serves its users, followed by opportunities for translation studies scholars to inform the development of future human + machine translation systems.
Daniel Liebling (he/him) is Staff Engineering Manager at Google Research where he leads a team of scientists and engineers on human language technologies like speech recognition and machine translation. Before Google, Dan worked on human-computer interaction and information retrieval at Microsoft Research. He has over 40 publications and 15 patents. Dan holds a M.S. in Computer Science and Engineering from UW and a B.S. in Engineering and Applied Science from Caltech.
Classics of Translation = Translation of Classics
Friday, October 9, 2020, 1pm – 2:30pm PST
Featuring two presentations by faculty from the UW Department of Classics:
“Inspiring Revelations: Simultaneous Classroom Translations of the Old and New Testaments in Greek and Latin,” presented by James Clauss
“Drawing on Multiple Translations of Homer in the Classroom,” presented by Olga Levaniouk
Aria Fani on the Allure of Untranslatability and Hamza Zafer on Translating Quranic Narrative
Thursday, February 13, 2020, 12pm – 1:30pm PST
In the first part of this talk, Prof. Aria Fani (assistant professor of Persian and Iranian Studies) will do a presentation on the idea of untranslatability, which has been used as a normative framework for the discussion and analysis of linguistic and cultural difference. Whether done in the name of cultural recognition or cultural chauvinism, he argues that the rubric of untranslatability places too many restrictions on our understanding of linguistic and cultural difference. In fact, untranslatability is best viewed as a remnant of romantic nationalism and its monolingual ethos. This presentation will engage the work of a prominent Persian-language scholar in conversation with theorists of untranslatability in comparative and world literature today.
In the second part of this talk, Prof. Hamza Zafer (assistant professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies) will do a presentation on the challenges and strategies of translating Quranic narrative as the citational, non-linear style of Quranic narrative poses a unique set of challenges to the conscientious translator. The presentation will focus on translating “The Surah of Noah” (Q. 71), the Quran’s highly stylized retelling of the Noah story from the Book of Genesis. Most translations of this Surah attempt to coordinate the Quran’s idiosyncratic telling with its Biblical Vorlage. In so doing, they inadvertently frame Quranic narratives as disjointed or confused Arabian “translations” of pristine Biblical “originals”. The presentation will explore translation strategies that preserve the interpretive agency of Quranic narrative and highlight the rhetorical force of Quranic narrative through the use of sound and structure.
Roundtable: The Lives and Labors of Professional Translators and Interpreters
Friday, January 17, 2020, 12pm – 1:30pm PST
Seattle-area translators and interpreters join the UW Translation Studies Hub community to discuss the practical and ethical dimensions of working in their professions. Topics include translator/interpreter training and education, the joys and frustrations of the working life of a translator/interpreter, the tension between accuracy and efficiency, and the prospects and perils of artificial intelligence/deep learning in the field.
Featuring:
Shelley Fairweather-Vega, freelance literary translator, Russian to English
Tim Gregory, FBI linguist, Arabic-English
Norma Kaminksy, medical translator, English to Spanish
Frazier Lowell, court interpreter, Mandarin-English
Mary McKee, freelance technical/business translator, Spanish to English
Yuliya Speroff, community interpreter and interpreter trainer, Russian-English
José Alaniz and Jason Groves on Russian Comics and “Weak” Translation
Friday, November 22, 2019, 12pm – 1:30pm PST
In the first part of this talk, Prof. José Alaniz, associate professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and the Department of Comparative Literature (adjunct) at the University of Washington, Seattle, examines the theory and practice of translating comics (graphic narrative), with an emphasis on Russian comics.
In the second part, Prof. Jason Groves attends to, and tentatively advocates for, the low threshold of plausibility and admissibility for “translation” in a range of literary texts and practices, following recent articulations of “weak theory” and “weak environmentalism”—with “weak” variously understood in non-derogatory senses of partial, provisional, centrifugal, leaky, impromptu, reparative, etc.
Amelia Glaser on Teaching Translation Studies: A Literary Science for a STEM Campus
Tuesday, October 29, 2019, 12pm – 1:30pm
The humanities and sciences often appear to fall on separate sides of an academic culture divide. At a moment when many universities are becoming increasingly STEM-focused, the study of literature is both challenging and necessary, and translation offers a way of bridging disciplines by emphasizing language and interpretation. At the undergraduate level, translation courses offer an opportunity for student collaboration, experimentation with language, and a discussion of disciplinary differences in language. Amelia Glaser, who has developed translation curricula for a variety of contexts and levels, from K-12 to graduate study, will share methods and observations from her experience developing a large lower division translation course for undergraduates at U.C. San Diego.
Translation Everywhere
Monday, October 7, 2019, 2:30pm – 5:00pm
This is the first of a series of working colloquia and guest lectures, featuring three presentations:
“Translation and its Publics” by Richard Watts (UW French and Italian/Canadian Studies Center)
“Translation, Circulation, the International Prize System, and World Literature” by Heekyoung Cho (UW Asian Languages and Literature)
“How Kovačič’s Fur Coat Is Made: What a Formalist Analysis Tells Us about the Art of Translation” by Michael Biggins (Slavic Languages and Literatures)