Student Spotlight: Owen Harris

“Prior to coming to Seattle, I lived in Turkey and worked as a literary translator from Turkish to English. Most of the the books I translated were science fiction. I also worked at an NGO serving refugees. Some were French speakers from West and Central Africa while others were Arabic speakers from Syria and Iraq.  My work blurred the line between interpreting and translation as I both interpreted during doctors appointments or meetings and translated things like medical reports or asylum testimonials. After moving to Seattle, I volunteered with a few local non-profits as an interpreter and also continued freelance translation work. My first quarter in particular, I did a lot of Turkish to English translation for Ahval, a Turkish news site. In the Summer of 2019, I also did subtitling for a documentary on Turkish rap music.

As a concurrent student in both the Evans and Jackson schools, my work focuses on Languages and Migration in the Eastern Mediterranean. I have used my Turkish and Arabic skills in interviews for my research as well as reading primary sources. Until this year, my translation priorities were always from Turkish, Spanish or Arabic to English. However, this quarter I am taking “TKISH 402 The Modern Turkish Republic Through Popular Songs” in which professor Kuru challenges us to translate from English to Turkish. While I have built up a lot of machinery in my brain for translating Turkish into English, my Turkish writing has never felt fluid and natural. I’m excited for this class to help me hone my English to Turkish translation skills, and enhance my Turkish writing.

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I think that students in both the Evans and Jackson schools as well as many other schools could benefit from a translation studies community for a number of reasons. First of all, professional translating is a great career for students and I have always been curious about academic translation. Being able to read Turkish and Arabic academic works has been critical to my own studies, but I think that scholars writing in those languages deserve to be translated so that people working in the same field in other languages can share knowledge without having to learn 5 or 6 languages. Secondly, there is an enormous collection of untranslated work right here at the UW. The most obvious example for me is the Ladino Collection at the Sephardic Studies department. I had a chance to take a Ladino course and work on cataloguing the collection. There are whole novels and biographies and diaries and other works sitting in Sephardic Studies collection which currently exist only in Ladino. These are written by people who lived fully in Ladino and expected that the language would survive with an international readership. The language survives only among a small but dedicated group of Ladino speakers and enthusiasts. However, I think translating these Ladino works into English would resurrect a whole world of experience that is currently limited to those who can read Ladino.  Honestly, reading some of those works while cataloguing them made me want to drop everything just to translate them as my life’s work. Translating them to English will make the works more accessible and I think translations from Ladino might also spur increased interest in the language and aid in current efforts to revitalize it.

Finally, with so many untranslated novels and other works in Turkish, Arabic and Ladino; I would love to see the UW establish a translation prize or fellowship. Students should be able to pursue an academic program where they develop their language skills, writing skills, and translation techniques. In the end, they could publish a previously untranslated work in their target language. Many of us write MA theses or PhD theses and wonder whether our research was relevant or moved the field forward.  I think making a previously unavailable novel or biography available to the world in a new language is a demonstrably relevant and productive goal.”