El 9 d'Octubre

Another diversion from NT for a cel-
ebration.

Today is October 9, El Nou d'Octubre in Valencian, the festival of the Valencians and a holiday in their capital city and its region. It celebrates the entry of James I of Aragon, who had received the surrender of the city from the Muslims a few days earlier. A medieval cross at the end of the main street of the village where I live commemorates his army’s encampment in the area, which is on the coast 5 km south from the city centre.

That was in 1238. By the 15th century, Valencia was a rich centre of Mediterranean commerce – it has a magnificent Gothic silk exchange – with a flourishing literature in its own language, Valencià (note the accent), one of the several major varieties of Catalan. There was still a numerous Moorish population; their expulsion was as yet far off. Valencia sent a whole family of popes, the Borgias, to Italy and in return soon received Renaissance art. By 1474 the printing press had reached Valencia. One of the first books printed here, in 1478, was – you guessed it – a translation, in fact one of the earliest of all printed Bibles and the first in the Iberian Peninsula. The translation is attributed to a Valencian cleric, the Carthusian brother Bonifaci Ferrer, who worked on it at the charterhouse of Porta Coeli not far from the city (see photo). Unfortunately, only one leaf from it has survived. The source text was in Latin and perhaps partly in French; the translation was into Valencian, hence it is known as the Bíblia Valenciana .

Soon afterwards, the Spanish Inquisition clamped down on vernacular translations of the scriptures. When the interdiction was lifted in the Spain of the Enlightenment nearly three centuries later, the first authorized Catholic translation of the Vulgate into Spanish was also published in Valencia (1790-1793).

References
The Wikipedia Español articles on Bonifacio Ferrer and on Felipe Scío de San Miguel, principal translator of the 1790-1793 Spanish Bible.

The most famous work of 15th-century Valencian literature is Tirant lo Blanch (Tirant the White Knight) by Joanot Martorell and Martí Joan de Galba, published in 1490. Cervantes admired it so much that he said, "As far as style is concerned, this is the best book in the world." As part of today’s celebrations, there will be public readings from it in Valencia. It’s very long, and too often long-winded, but there’s an abridged English translation by Robert S. Rudder (1995) available free online from the Project Gutenberg website and there are translations into Spanish and numerous other European languages as well as Chinese and Japanese (see http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tirant_le_blanc#Les_traductions_de_Tirant_le_Blanc_dans_d.27autres_langues_que_le_fran.C3.A7ais). Rudder describes it as “this spicy, brutally realistic novel of kings and knights of the fifteenth century.”

One curious but by no means unique thing about the Tirant is that it’s a pseudo-translation, that is to say an original work that pretends to be a translation, in this case from English.

Photo: community.eu.playstation.com

Coming Soon…

(or fairly soon) to this blog:

Karpov vs. Kasparov
Another church interpreter
Early sign language bilingualism
The Bookseller of Kabul
More scanning: Ronjat’s Le développement du langage
The need for several levels of translation quality

And on November 11, at the International Symposium on Interpreting Studies in Castellón de la Plana, Spain, the opening paper will be A Cognitive Perspective on Natural Translation by Prof. Ricardo Muñoz of the University of Las Palmas.
Another distinguished speaker will be Ann Corsellis, the Cambridge magistrate who has had an important influence on the development of accreditation for court and public service interpreters in the UK.

There’s no lack of material out there. The blog, with its concomitant correspondence (which I enjoy), is threatening to snowball, and I don’t want it to snow either you or me under. So I mean to keep it to two postings a week, one midweek and one at the weekend.

Language Brokering Research in London

Diana Cossato has kindly drawn my attention to a research project at the Thomas Coram Research Unit, Institute of Education, University of London. It’s called Transforming Experiences: Adults Who Interpreted For Their Parents in Childhood, and the leading investigator is Prof. Anne Phoenix, who teaches psychology.

According to the description on the internet:

An increasing number of adults in Britain have, as children, done some interpreting for their parents. This means that they sometimes have to assume responsibilities in situations (for example in shops, in schools and at GP surgeries) where children are often expected to be relatively silent. Very little is known about how the experiences of people who have grown up translating and interpreting for their parents have influenced how they think about themselves over time. In other words, there is little understanding of the impact of such experiences on their identities. The project aims to develop an understanding of how the experience of interpreting and translating as a child impacts the identity and life perspectives of members of a group about which very little is known. The research involves interviewing adults and audio recording their stories.

So the approach is retrospective, and personality oriented. I notice that one member of the project Advisory Group is Nigel Hall of Manchester Metropolitan University, the leading promoter of Language Brokering research in the UK; the others are all psychologists, sociologists or educationists without any apparent connection with interpreting.
It would be interesting if somebody could eventually compare the results of this British research with those of the American researchers like Orellana (see blog posting of September 19).

The project is looking for people to interview.

Reference
http://www.irr.org.uk/pdf2/Langage_brokering.doc

September 30, Feast of St. Jerome

Today is the feast of St. Jerome, the patron saint of translators. The patron of Professional Expert Translators, that is; because he had to be a multilingual expert for his work on translating the Bible (the so-called Vulgate version), and he was a professional in that he was commissioned to do it by Pope Damasus I. That’s why associations of professional translators around the globe celebrate today as World Translation Day. It’s perhaps ethnocentric to choose the feast of a Christian saint for World Translation Day, but never mind, for he was a great translator. Furthermore, he had definite views about translating and he put them into a long epistle defending them, his Letter to Pammachius on the Best Method of Translating.

The oft-quoted key sentence in the Letter is:

Not only do I admit, but I proclaim at the top of my voice, that in translating from Greek, except from Sacred Scripture, where even the order of the words is of God’s doing, I have not translated word for word, but sense for sense.

People focus now on the last part of the pronouncement (meaning before words) because it supports the popular norm for 'good' translation; but in religious translating "God's doing" is also important. It explains why many Muslims are against any translation at all of the Koran.

Today I reflect, therefore, that we’re commemorating a religious translator. I’ve long been dismayed at the lack of interest shown in this branch of translation by our university professors of translation studies. When they introduce it into their graduate programmes, they usually treat it historically and ignore its continued contemporary vibrancy, which among other things has given us Eugene Nida’s classic Toward a Science of Translating. A great many of them are concerned these days with the cultural causes and effects of literary translation, but don’t they realize that religious translation has had an even greater impact on culture? Why so? Because religion moves the masses.

From my 20 years at the University of Ottawa, I can only recall one thesis on the Bible or any other religious translation – and that was on St. Jerome. We were once approached by the Wycliffe organization of Bible translators to host a summer school for them, and none of my colleagues was interested.

So I think I may return to the topic, because it has connections with Unprofessional Translation. But first, here’s an old Canadian joke.

You have to know that there were, and indeed there still are, many ‘rednecks’ in English Canada who regard the official requirements for the use of French as an intolerable imposition. The more open-minded son of one such man tells his father that times are changing and he’s decided to learn French. “Why in Heaven’s name learn another language?” asks the father. “If English was sufficient for God when he composed the Bible, it ought to be enough for you.”

Well the old man, who was probably a Protestant anyway, certainly didn’t know about Jerome’s Catholic Latin. But the point of the story is, of course, that many people aren’t even aware that the Bible they are reading is a translation – far less that it’s often the translation of a translation. Indeed it’s always a translation of a translation in part: Christ, for example, spoke in Aramaic and his words were translated into Greek and from there to Latin and from Latin to the European vernaculars, and from those to the indigenous languages spoken in the colonies, so on. It may well be the longest of all the chains of ‘relayed’ translations, and there have been important spin-offs from it like the invention of writing systems by missionaries for languages that didn’t have one. Someone might well do a survey of people’s awareness in this respect.

References
The full Latin text of the Vulgate is available on the web, intercalated with a famous English translation of it, the Douay-Rheims Bible (1582-1610). It’s at http://vulgate.org.

I was introduced to Jerome’s Letter to Pammachius through the English translation made in the 70s by my Ottawa colleague Louis Kelly, who now lives in retirement in Cambridge, England. Unfortunately that translation is not now available, but Kelly discusses the Letter in his book The True Interpreter: A History of Translation Theory and Practice in the West, which is on sale at www.amazon.co.uk.

Online there’s another translation of the Letter at http://mb-soft.com/believe/txuc/jerome18.htm.

The Nida classic is:
NIDA, Eugene A. (American Bible Society). Toward a Science of Translating / With special reference to principles and procedures involved in Bible translating. Leiden: Brill, 1964. 331 p.

Postscript
I see I should have called it International Translation Day not World Translation Day, because that's UNESCO's and FIT's official name for it. Never mind, it's St. Jerome's Day.

Fan Translating

Dr. Sebnem Susam-Sarajeva of the University of Edinburgh is currently conducting research on fan translations of lyrics.

I think she’s on to something new, and one implication is that the concept of fansubbing (i.e., subtitling of videos by their fans) needs to be broadened to include other media. Hence we require a cover term, perhaps simply fan translating. No doubt it’s a partial synonym of collective translating (see blog posting of Feb. 16, 2009) but in principle I don’t see why it shouldn’t be an individual activity.

Dr. Susam-Sarajeva’s email address is s.susam-sarajeva@ed.ac.uk

She’s slated to talk about ‘Non-professionals translating/interpreting’ on Monday, December 7 at the Centre for Translation & Intercultural Studies of the University of Manchester (Samuel Alexander Building , Room A101, 2-4 p.m.). I think it will be a first for the CTIS, so here's hoping there will be a good attendance.

If anybody has news of other research projects in the fields covered by this blog (namely Natural Translation, Native Translation and Language Brokering), I’ll be happy to post it up.

Louis Hémon

The French international TV channel TV5 Monde often broadcasts Quebec films. We Canadians find it amusing that they sometimes take it on themselves to subtitle the Canadian French dialogue in ‘international’ French, but that could be taken as an example of intralingual translation (translation within the same language).

Last Monday they showed a beautiful Quebec documentary about the life of Louis Hémon: Sur les traces de Louis Hémon, directed by Monique Miguet, 2006.

Louis Hémon, 1880-1913, was a restless young Frenchman who travelled and worked in Canada from 1911 to 1913, and who was moved by his experience there, especially his stay in the Northern Quebec village of Péribonka, to write his masterpiece, the novel Maria Chapdelaine. It has the unusual distinction of being considered a classic of Canadian literature as well as of French literature, in spite of the brevity of Hémon’s stay in Canada. This is because he observed the Catholic rural society and harsh living conditions of the people of Péribonka with ethnographic realism. The result, for French Canadians, is a nostalgic portrait of an almost mythical period of their own history. But Hémon didn’t write for Canadians, he wrote for his own countrymen in terms they would understand and his book was first published in France; and so he became for the French a cultural translator. (Cultural translation does not necessarily require a change of language.)

And not only for the French. There have been nearly 90 editions in other languages, including five in Japanese. (There’s another Canadian classic, Anne of Green Gables, that’s very popular with the Japanese thanks to translation, and hundreds of them visit her house on Prince Edward Island every year.)

But the French don’t look at the picture with the same eyes as Canadians. For the French, it illustrates the survival of their own people and culture under harsh conditions in a faraway place. This is reflected in the film adaptations, of which there have been three. The poster for one of them is reproduced in miniature at the head of this posting. It’s for the 1934 version made in France by Julien Duvivier with Madeleine Renaud, Jean Gabin and Jean-Pierre Aumont – distinguished credits. It’s full of folk songs, but songs that are more typical of France than of Canada. (It also shows Maria picking blueberries in a tree.)

Meanwhile there’s another side to Hémon and translation. It’s that Hémon was himself a translator on and off. Before he went to Canada he had lived for nearly a decade in England, earning his living as contributor to French newspapers. So he learnt English well and even translated a Kipling story. In Canada he was short of money, and for two periods he found paid employment as a translator, not of literature but of commercial correspondence. The first time it was for a pulp and paper mill in Northern Quebec, and the second time for a firm of ironmongers in Montreal. His Montreal translating job equipped him with the typewriter on which he also typed his novel.

The Sur les traces documentary mentions that he obtained both the translation jobs “because he was bilingual”. Perhaps his fluency as a writer of French also helped, but there is no question of any training as a translator. Indeed, where would he have found training in those days? The first ‘professional’ (i.e., Expert) translation course in Canada was at the University of Ottawa in 1936. Hémon was therefore a typical advanced Native Translator. He honed his natural translation ability on French literature and journalism and the examples of translation that he read in Canada, England and France. Although, in those days of grammar-and-translation language courses, he would also have had to do some translation exercises at school, it was translation of a special kind about which I hope to write later. Anyway his work as a language translator was insignificant compared with his role as a cultural translator and as a novelist.

References
There’s a Louis Hémon page with editions of Maria in both French and English on www.amazon.com.

Both the French text of Maria and the English translation by W. H. Blake (Maria Chapdelaine: a story of French Canada, Toronto, 1921) can be downloaded free from Project Gutenberg.

Another English translation, with the title Maria Chapdelaine, a romance of French Canada, was published in Montreal, also in 1921, the same year as the original appeared in book form in Paris. (It had previously been published as a serial in a Paris newspaper.) Therefore the interest of translators and publishers in producing an English version was immediate. Notice that both translators (or perhaps their publishers) thought it advisable to expand the title to attract English Canadian readers, with the Montreal title slightly the more informative. For English Canadians, French Canadian society was an object of curiosity, a different country within their country. The Montreal translation was by Sir Andrew Macphail, a noted professor of medicine and a soldier as well as man of letters, and it was enhanced with illustrations by Suzor-Coté.

A DVD of the 1934 film is available from several French internet vendors.

How a Three-Year-Old Translates digitized

Correspondence has been delayed at my end by my having to go through the learning curve of a new computer. It’s one of the new generation of ‘netbooks’, half the size and footprint with twice the power of my five-year-old laptop, and with a real seven hours of battery life. I had a computer this size 20 years ago, a NEC UltraLite, but its screen was blue and white, it had no hard disk (just a small flash memory) and it was pre-Windows. I’m discovering the pros and cons of netbooks, but this is not the place to discuss them. Switching to another computer provides a good example of the human power of conversion that I talked about in my posting of 25 July under Innateness. If I’d bought a full-size laptop, I’d have had to do even more switching because they all come now with Vista fatware whereas this netbook still uses good old XP. Even so, I haven’t been able to avoid new editions of Windows Explorer and Word, neither of which IMHO is worth the changeover from the previous versions.

In the meantime, the digitization of ‘How a Three-Year-Old Translates’ (1980) has been completed, and so it is available from me free on request. This is the companion paper to ‘Translation as an Innate Skill’, but it’s much less known because it was published in Singapore, where I happened to be teaching at the time, and for the same reason it’s always been hard to find. Yet it’s no less important. ‘Innate Skill’ has been criticized as being “anecdotal”, which is unfair to the serious longtitudinal studies by Ronjat and Leopold on which much of it is based; but anyhow the same criticism can’t be leveled at ‘Three-Year-Old’, which distils a mass of carefully recorded experimental data gathered from a single bilingual subject over a short period.

In future, the two papers will be supplied together. If I’ve already promised you a copy of ‘Three-Year-Old’, you’ll get it this week.