Transcast

25 Feb 2014 - Kirk Akdemir - AA Global Language Services at University of Hull by Transcast

Performing Recognition: El castigo sin venganza and the Politics of English Translation Changes in the economic, political and social landscape mean received ideas about identity, nation and ethnicity no longer stand; struggles for the ‘recognition’ of cultural difference in society are the defining conflict of our age. On the translated stage, this politics of recognition is present not just in the ways in which local audiences receive and respond to the presence of the ‘foreign’ in translation, but also throughout the translation process, as translators and directors negotiate the full range of linguistic and cultural knowledge implicit in the original before crafting its translation. As a series of ‘recognitions’ with, and across, the boundaries of linguistic, cultural and historical knowledge, the translated stage operates as an interface between the foreign and the familiar, mediating not only how we conceive of and respond to cultural difference but also reinterpret it to meet the needs of local audiences. This paper discusses the translator’s recognition of the presence of the foreign in the development of a performance script for Lope de Vega's El castigo sin venganza, in English translation as part of the Golden Age Season at the Theatre Royal Bath. By tracking multiple negotiations of culture, language and history on the part of translator, director, actor and audience, this paper will report on the politics of recognition inherent to the translation process, to question the role of the translator and representing stage in mediating the presence of the foreign in performance to local audiences.

TranslatorCast With Joseph Lambert, MA In Translation Student At University Of Hull On Reflective Practice And The Translator by Transcast

12 April 2013 - Sarah Maitland - Cultural Translation Gangnam Style: What The Spread Of Music Video Memes Can Teach Us About Cultural Translation by Transcast

6 March 2013 - Brian Porro - Comparative Law at EU level: Law, Language and the Lawyer-linguist by Transcast

21 November 2012 - David Johnston - Translation and Performance: The 't-effect' by Transcast

31 October 2012 - Sarah Maitland - What is Cultural Translation? at University of Hull by Transcast

Discourse, power, ideology and translation at University of Hull by Transcast

What is translation? at University of hull by Transcast

Sarah Maitland - 6 September 2012 - The Politics of Recognition & Ethics of the Intercultural Stage by Transcast

View the slides for this seminar at www.slideshare.net/transcast This paper presents the background to an experimental project newly funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council under the Digital Transformations Research Development Fund (grant for Feb-Sept 2012). The longer-term aim is to build an interactive public web interface which will facilitate explorations of variation across multiple translations of the ‘same’ source text, using visual information designs to aid user navigation, present the results of statistical analyses, support the collection and curation of user-generated content, narrow the gaps between languages, and make interlingual translation culturally visible in new ways. The term ‘translation array’ intends to suggest that multiple versions of a text can be used as a lens for exploring cultural histories and contemporary cultural dynamics. In short, we are trying to create an entirely new kind of participatory resource for exploring global culture – one which could only be conceived as a digital device. The corpus for experimentation consists of about 40 German versions of Shakespeare’s Othello, dating from 1766 to 2006 (so far). In an initial phase of work in 2011, funded by the College of Arts and Humanities, the texts were digitized by Alison Ehrmann, a Swansea PhD in translation studies, and prototype visualisations were developed by Zhao Geng, a Swansea PhD in data visualisation,. The current AHRC-funded phase of work involves two co-investigators: Dr Robert S Laramee (Swansea U), a data visualisation specialist, and Dr Jonathan Hope (Strathclyde U), a specialist in literary linguistics, stylistics, and algorithmic reading. The bulk of the work will be done by a research assistant and a design consultant. Kevin Flanagan, our research assistant, is a translation software developer and Swansea PhD student in translation studies. Stephan Thiel is a freelance information designer based in Berlin. By September 2012 we aim to have a small-scale working model of an array which enables readers not only to explore the variation across German translations (with machine- and user-generated back-translations), but also, and crucially, to explore the way the propensity of the source text to provoke variations varies from speech to speech (in terms of speech-specific statistics of target text lexis) and hence also between character parts, scenes, and sections of scenes. This will offer a new way of reading a Shakespearean text, through the prism of its translations, even without knowledge of languages other than English. A fully operational translation array will work with any sets of multiply-retranslated texts. That will take some years of further funded work.

Both as a creative practice and cultural product, translation is at its most insightful when construed as a locus of intercultural encounter: between the cultural world of the foreign text and the subjective world of a translator, influenced by the social, cultural, political and aesthetic contingencies of the local audience to whom their work is directed. Yet, as an interpretive regime, translation also stands for the mediation, transformation and change that take place when one cultural entity enters into thoughtful encounter with another. At a distance from the object of interpretation, the translator must make an imaginative leap into the unknown: to attempt to render near that which, by necessity, is always at a distance. When pen meets page, the resulting translation reveals as much about the subjectivity of the translator behind it as it does the ‘reality’ of the foreign text itself. It is precisely the contingency of this complex hermeneutics that impedes translation from reaching a full understanding of the texts it attempts to approximate, for if every translation is shaped by the subjectivity of the translator behind it, then the possibility of a final, ‘perfect’ translation is forever suspended. This paper will draw on a range of textual and cultural contexts to demonstrate these processes, and will discuss how the interpretive mechanics at the heart of translation challenges our view of translations within the social disciplines and advances through its highly-contextualised engagement with its respective ‘others’ a mode of contemporary critical reflection constitutive of Humanities practice itself.

John Lewis - 15 Nov 2010 - "Renaissance Cultural Crossroads"

Piotr Blumczyński - 8 Nov 2010 - "Tinker, Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor…Metaphorical perceptions of the translator and translation"