Interview Tips, Part 1

As spring is approaching, that means interview season is closing in (at least for those of us in the northern hemisphere). Even if many writers, editors, translators, and teachers work freelance or work with “parallel careers” (i.e. they have a number of part-time jobs), interviews are still a part of what we do, especially in regard to teaching. And yet they are not something we often think about or prepare correctly for.

I’ve had the pleasure of being on a number of interview panels since starting work at the University of East Anglia in England and one of the things I’ve learned most from this experience is what to do – or not to do – at interviews and presentations. It’s amazing how a candidate’s behavior, appearance, and level of preparedness can completely change the minds of the panel; someone who sounds really appropriate on paper can come across as arrogant and hard to work with in person, while someone who sounds possible but not like the best choice can blow us away with his/her intelligence and enthusiasm. Since I have participated in interviews for jobs related to literature, writing, and translation, here I will offer tips that are particularly appropriate for people working in those fields, but the general ideas can be applied to many interview and presentation situations.

Since I have so many tips, I am going to divide them into three posts.

General tips

--Wear clothes that actually fit you. Too often I’ve seen people come in wearing shirts that gap, showing off their bellies or breasts, or trousers that are too tight, offering a view of a camel toe or the outline of underpants, or that otherwise don’t fit. Don’t just trudge out your interview outfit the night before the interview; try it on days in advance and go purchase something new if necessary. People get an impression of you right away and you don’t want to make your interviewers embarrassed by the sight of too much flesh. It’s just unprofessional.

--Similarly, wear clothes that are clean and neat. I’ve been astonished to see people come in wearing stained or hole-ridden sweaters or trousers; it just suggests that they don’t care too much about their appearance, which makes the panel wonder what else they don’t care about. You may wear those clothes when writing at home, but don’t wear them to the interview. Also, if you have a presentation one day and the interview the next, don’t wear the same outfit. It gives people the impression that you aren’t particularly clean.

--Jeans generally aren’t appropriate interview wear. You don’t have to come in a business suit if that’s not your style, but don’t wear sloppy, wrinkled, overly casual clothes either. If possible, spend a day on the campus/grounds before your interview and see what the staff members seem to wear, and then dress slightly better than that.

--Also, don’t wear any heavy colognes or perfumes. I work with several people with severe allergies and you don’t want to make the interview panel gasp for breath. You also don’t want to walk out of the room and leave the panel wishing for fresh air rather than wishing for you to join their department.

--In general, try to look like you take care of yourself. While we aren’t judging you on your looks, it can put us off if you have messy hair, an unshaven face (not that you have to be cleanly shaven, just that you shouldn’t have a day or two’s worth of shadow), bad breath, or too much make-up. Your look should reflect who you are, obviously, but also remember that you’re in a professional setting and should look fairly, well, professional.

--Be aware of any nervous habits you have – biting your nails, picking your nose, jiggling your foot, playing with your hair, and so on – and avoid doing them. It’s very distracting to people who are trying to listen to you. We sympathize with you because we know interviews are nerve-racking, but a key for you is to appear calm and confident.

A Round-Up of Blogs/Websites

Here are a few blogs/websites you might want to check out.

This collection of awful library books might make you laugh. My childhood friend Yvette, who used to work at a library, sent me the link.

Those of us who are bibliophiles will enjoy this bookshelf “porn”.

Another link for the bibliophiles. This is called the Joy of Books, and rightfully so. My mother, who is a librarian, sent me this.

I think Leah Palmer Preiss’s art is beautiful and it clearly appeals to literary types.

Finally, here’s a new blog on audiovisual translation.

Quote on Translation

The process of translating comprises in its essence the whole secret of human understanding of the world and of social communication.

--Hans Georg Gadamer

A Round-Up of Articles

Here are some articles you might find enjoyable/interesting.

This first article is by translator and writer Tim Parks. Do you need to know the language you are translating from? To what level? Does this affect translation?

The next piece is on harsh book reviews. Ouch! As a reviewer myself, I try to be fair and balanced, but never mean. Life’s hard enough without being cruel, I think.

Here’s an article about writing novels. Is the novel a dying art? Is it still relevant?

If you can read Swedish, this piece is about new Swedish words from 2011.

Finally, my mother sent me this link about the power of vowels.

AHRC Funding Opportunity: Doctoral Studentship

Some BNW readers might be interested in applying to do a PhD in translation. If so, here's a scholarship opportunity.

The Translation Group at Imperial College London invites applications for a 3-year doctoral studentship funded by the AHRC to begin in October 2012.

Research in Translation Studies at Imperial College is carried out in a vibrant environment. Members of staff of the Translation Group are highly research active, and the Group is home to many PhD students conducting doctoral research in areas such as translation studies, translation technology, localisation, audiovisual translation and accessibility to the media. The Group nurtures a subject-specific research culture by scheduling research seminars, inviting guest speakers from the UK and abroad, welcoming academic visitors who wish to spend periods of research at Imperial College, and organising seminars, colloquia and conferences at our institution and other venues.

For further information about the Translation Group research, visit: www.imperial.ac.uk/humanities/translationgroup/ourresearch.

Studentship Award

Standard tuition fees and a maintenance grant will be paid by the AHRC for three years. For 2011-12 the maintenance grant for students in London was £15,590. EU candidates are normally eligible for a fees-only award, unless they have been ordinarily resident in the UK for 3 years immediately preceding the date of the award.

Eligibility

In line with research council requirements, applicants must meet UK residency criteria or be ordinarily resident in the EU. Applicants should hold a first or upper second class degree, and hold or be studying for an MSc or MA degree in modern languages, translation, or in another relevant area related to Translation Studies. Applicants should also fulfil Imperial College English language requirements, and be supported by two strong academic references. Further details concerning eligibility are available via the AHRC website at:

www.ahrc.ac.uk/FundingOpportunities/Documents/GuidetoStudentFunding.pdf

(pages 39-46).

How to apply

Applicants are invited to suggest their own topics of study, within the field of Translation Studies and submit a fully developed proposal. They are advised to contact a prospective supervisor to discuss their interests. For research interests of staff and of recent and current doctoral students, please visit:

www.imperial.ac.uk/humanities/translationgroup/phdstudy.

Applicants should send the following documents to Tom Barbanneau at t.barbanneau@imperial.ac.uk by 19^th March 2012. Please note that all documentation is required in English:

• A research proposal including information about the research background/context, research aims and questions, methodology, any required resources and/or sources, and accompanied by a complete bibliography. The following document provides some advice on how to write a PhD proposal.
• Curriculum Vitae.
• Two academic reference letters.
• A supporting statement of academic interests and reasons for applying for this studentship. This statement should also include details of academic achievements and any relevant research experience.

The deadline for applications is 19^th March 2012. Interviews will be held at Imperial College soon after the deadline. For enquiries, please contact Dr Rocío Baños-Piñero at r.banos-pinero@imperial.ac.uk.

Passionate Engagement

I have enjoyed novelist Caryl Phillips’ work since I was first introduced to it when I was doing my MFA in fiction. So I was very excited when I saw his new collection of non-fiction pieces, Colour Me English. This book is worth reading for lots of the pieces (the piece on James Baldwin was really sad and touching; Mr. Phillips’ remembrances of September 11 were likewise moving; his discussions about what it means to be English are thought-provoking), but I especially liked a section early on in the book:

***

I believe passionately in the moral capacity of fiction to wrench us out of our ideological burrows and force us to engage with a world that is clumsily transforming itself, a world that is peopled with individuals we might otherwise never meet in our daily lives. As long as we have literature as a bulwark again intolerance, and as a force for change, then we have a chance. Europe needs writers to explicate this transition, for literature is plurality in action; it embraces and celebrates a place of no truths, it relishes ambiguity, and it deeply respects the place where everybody has the right to be understood, both the thirteen-year-old boy whose books are thrown out of a bus window, and the boys who are throwing the books, and it judges neither party in the hope that by some often painfully slow process of imaginative osmosis one might finally recognise what passed before one’s eyes today, what occurred yesterday, and what will happen tomorrow, and it implores us to act with a compassion born of familiarity towards our fellow human beings, be they Christian, Jew, Muslim, black, brown, or white. This truly is my hope for Europe, and I know that the writer has a crucial part to play in this. I believe this. And this only.

***

I confess that I’m rather idealistic about fiction, the way Mr. Phillips is (and I’d expand his description above to include the whole world, not just Europe), and this sometimes make me feel like I don’t belong in my literature department at the university. There, people talk about theory and about authors being dead and about the intricacies of metaphor, and while these things are indeed important to discuss (I’m not so keen on the idea of authors being dead, myself, but that’s a different story), they aren’t all there is. I’m interested in how literature affects readers and how it can change people, and ultimately change the world. People tell me I’m silly, but like Mr. Phillips, “I believe passionately in the moral capacity of fiction to wrench us out of our ideological burrows and force us to engage with” the world and with other people.

Read Caryl Phillips’ book, and read his novels, and engage with the world around you.

Market Research

Short Fiction is a literary magazine devoted to, well, short fiction. The magazine accepts translated short stories.

Top 10 Blogs on Translation

’Tis the season for blog and website awards! Brave New Words has been listed as one of the top 10 blogs on translation. See the list here, and ignore the fact that I’ve been referred to as male, even though I’m actually female.

All these nominations and awards are much appreciated. Thanks so much to all my readers for reading, commenting, and nominating this blog!

Reading Before/After Vacationing

I have a friend who loves to read novels set in the city or country he’s about to travel to. For example, last year, we both attended a conference in San Francisco, and he prepared in part by reading novels (and also watching films) set in that city. I know other people who like to do the same thing as a way of entering holiday mode.

As for me, I actually prefer reading such novels after I’ve been on the vacation. That’s because then I can picture the scenes and I can understand the interaction of setting with plot and character better. Also, it keeps that holiday mode going a bit longer. It’s just a matter of personal preference, though.

Not long ago, I was at the library, browsing shelves, and I randomly picked up a book called Ashes to Dust by Yrsa Sigurdottir, translated from Icelandic to English by Philip Roughton. I turned to the back cover and saw that this crime novel was set in Iceland’s Westmann Islands (the so-called Vesuvius of the North), where I’d been earlier this year. That immediately sparked my interest and I checked out the book. I loved that the book was set in a place that I’d visited and that I knew something about. It made my enjoyment of the story much deeper and more personal somehow. And reading the novel also brought back wonderful memories from my holiday to Iceland.

What about you? Do you enjoy reading books before/after a vacation that are set in the vacation destination? Why or why not? And do you have any favorite such novels to recommend?

Market Research

Transcript Review is a literary magazine devoted to smaller languages. I only just learned about it, but it sounds interesting, so check it out.

Best Blog Award

Brave New Words has been nominated for the best blog about the English language by Macmillan dictionary. Please vote for BNW here (on the second page of the list).

Translation Goals for 2012

Happy new year!

What are your translation goals for this year?

One of my major goals is that I hope to continue promoting a couple of Swedish authors whose works are unfortunately not available in English yet. I’m working on some sample translations for them and I’m helping them query publishers in the US and the UK. They are wonderful authors but because they are neither well-known nor crime novelists, it’s hard for them to find publishers who will publish translations of their work. But I’m hopeful!

Happy Holidays

I hope you have a lovely and relaxing holiday season. Personally, I plan to take some time off to read for pleasure and to work on my own writing and translating.

Charitable Feelings and Translation

Though most of us who translate need to earn a living from our work, there are times when we will take on translation, editing, or writing jobs for no money. Mostly this is when we are feeling charitable and want to donate to an organization and when our donation comes in the form of our time and effort and not tangible money.

For example, I organized and edited the Bryn Mawr College Cookbook, a project that took months. All the proceeds went to my alma mater. I must confess that I was a bit surprised and offended when the college wrote me later that year to urge me to donate money to the school; I did a quick calculation and found that the time I’d spent putting the book together equaled several thousands of dollars worth of donations to the school, and that didn’t even include the time others had donated to the project or the proceeds the school received. Still, I was happy to do it.

But a university is not a charity. I’ve also done writing, editing, and translating for charitable organizations and for individuals, as a way of offering them some professional help that they might otherwise have had to pay for.

During this holiday season, I urge you to do likewise. If you can spare just a little of your time and your talents to help someone or an organization, I am sure that would be much appreciated.

Gillian Lathey and The Role of Translators in Children’s Literature

A few months ago, I published a review of Dr. Gillian Lathey’s latest contribution to translation studies. Her work on children’s literature is both important and fascinating, and she’s also a passionate speaker. Dr. Lathey, who teaches at Roehampton University in London, gave a great talk to my students this semester about the influence of translators on children’s literature and she also led a workshop for my MA students, encouraging them to look at various issues in regard to translating children’s lit. Here is the review:

The Role of Translators in Children’s Literature: Invisible Storytellers. Gillian Lathey. New York: Routledge, 2010. 241 pages. £76 (hardcover). ISBN: 078-0-415-98952-7.

Gillian Lathey’s latest contribution to the field of children’s literature in translation looks at the history of children’s literature in translation into English. Lathey provides an overview of translators and the role of the books and genres that they translated. As she points out, “Evidence from these biographical, bibliographical, and historical sources and from translators’ prefaces, afterwords, notes, and other writings has yet to be organised into a chronological account of translations and their resonance in English-language children’s literature. This book can only offer a starting point for such a major undertaking.” (5) It is an excellent starting point, and one can only hope that there will soon follow such histories of other languages.
Lathey’s book traces how early translators translated, without considering any particular special needs that children as an audience might have. Works for adults were read by and/or told to children, and this primarily included the Bible, romances/adventure stories, and fables and fairy tales. Even through the late 15th century, “[c]hildren were not yet regarded as separate consumers of texts other than books of instruction on courtesy and manners or schoolbooks.” (32) As Lathey points out, books became cheaper and more easily accessible via travelling booksellers, so children were able to read books not written or translated with a specific child audience in mind. Thus, children read what was available, and because such works were so popular, these were the ones that were most often translated. The style of translation generally seemed to include adaptation to the target culture. Lathey writes that “[i]t is hardly possible to speak of children experiencing cultural difference through these early translations of fables and romances, since multiple retellings had removed most cultural markers, but they did bring new kinds of stories to young readers. That novelty lay in the form of the short fable with its attached moral, or in the alternative, unsanctioned pleasures of the dramatic and episodic sixpenny romance.” (42)
Later on, writers and translators began to consider children as audiences with particular needs, and this led to the concept of writing works that could educate and improve children, while also entertaining them. A very popular book was Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, which was then translated and/or adapted in many countries. “Mapping and thereby controlling the natural world in fictional form was the province of the many European editions and reworkings of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, following Rousseau’s endorsement in Émile in 1762 of Defoe’s novel as the only text suitable for a child. The ‘robinsonnade’ was an unprecedented cross-cultural phenomenon in children’s literature, originating in Rousseau’s recommendation of Defoe’s novel as an exemplification of man’s autonomy and ability to improve his situation through intelligence, reflection, and hard word.” (62) This is a typical example, then, of adults using literature as a way of teaching children, and translators in turn felt they could change texts as needed, to better suit the target culture. The idea that the “child is a being whose natural instincts are not to be trusted, who is in constant danger of moral failure, disobedience, or succumbing to prejudice” (77) influenced how people then wrote or translated for children.
Things have changed today, so translators are very aware of who they are translating for. Instead of “religious persuasion, entertainment, and moral educational” (111), translators and theorists are more interested in a focus on child images and on appealing to what children want, rather than what adults think they need. “At the same time [as there has been increased academic interest in the topic] there has been an increase in the number of instances where translators directly address child readers, rather than their parents or teachers, in prefatory remarks.” (175) This affects what gets translated, by whom, and how.
Besides looking at which genres have been translated and how, Lathey also offers histories or case studies of some translators, such as William Caxton, Samuel Croxall, Helen Maria Williams, Thomas Holcroft, Mary Wollstonecraft, Edgar Taylor, Arthur Ransome (most people are unaware of his translation work), and Wanda Gág. She also has interviews with several more recent translators, Anthea Bell, Patricia Crampton, and Sarah Adams, about issues such as payment, working with editors, and methods for translation.
In this book, Lathey also briefly discusses topics such as the role of the Batchelder and Marsh awards, how the US and the UK were different in terms of translatorial strategies and practices in the 1930s, relay translations, women as translators and the related issue of the low status of translation, and more. Not all of these matters are covered in the detail that they deserve, but that is understandable given the scope of this work. Lathey aims here to “to trace in outline the chronology and impact of translators and translation on the history of children’s literature written in English and, wherever possible, to give an account of the motivation and methodology of translators working for a child audience.” (8) As such, her book is an important first step and it fills a gap in the field of translation studies. One can only hope that soon there will be such books for other languages/cultures as well, and that other researchers will pick up where Lathey has left off.

Reverso Website

Here’s yet another from the growing array of online translation websites. This is called Reverso and it includes a slightly different selection of languages, including Hebrew, Russian, and Arabic, than many other such sites.

End of the Semester Reflections

In just another week, the semester ends. It’s amazing how quickly the time goes by.

My teaching this semester has focused on children’s literature and on literary translation. I had 60 undergraduate students studying children’s literature and of course I made sure that we looked at texts for children from cultures other than English-speaking ones and that we discussed translation issues. In the MA course in literary translation, we looked at different genres, including children’s literature, drama, and detective fiction, with a brief foray into historical texts.

Besides the slight overlap in subjects, I noted that there was an overlap in the discussions the various classes had. Something that came up over and over again was power and the related issue of ethics. For example, in children’s literature, adults (in the form of authors, editors, translators, publishers, booksellers, librarians, parents, and teachers, among others) have power over the child readers (or the read-to) in terms of deciding what texts are available for them and how those texts tackle different topics. In translation, translators have power over their target audience in terms of what texts we make available to them and how, and editors and publishers and authors frequently have power over the translators in regard to strategies and approaches to translation.

That is to say that we must be aware of ways in which we might abuse our privileged positions, especially as adults and as translators. It’s easy to forget that we have this power, because we often complain about being overworked, underpaid, and invisible. But after having spent three months interrogating this subject in detail with my students, I am reminded that we would do well to always consider how our actions might affect others, whether in a translation or in some other way.

Market Research

The literary magazine Absinthe focuses on contemporary European writing and would be a good market for those who translate from European languages.

Translation on QI

On Stephen Fry’s wonderful QI, on the episode about “Inequality”, he recently mentioned that Louis Pasteur so hated the Germans after the Franco-Prussian war, that he would never allow his work to be translated to German. That then influenced the beer industry. See how translation crops up in the unlikeliest of places?

Funding and Grants

I’ve noticed that more and more often these days, publishers are contacting translators and asking us to find funding for books they want to publish but don’t want to pay for (or, to be fair, can’t pay for). Getting funding and applying for grants is not something we learn in university programs in translation and it’s not really something that many of us consider part of our jobs (see this article I wrote on getting grants awhile back). But it is something we have to learn more about; at the very least, we have to know how to advise publishers to go about finding and applying for the grants that governments and cultural institutions offer, even if we don’t do the actual applications ourselves. Sometimes we’re even asked to translate grant information (usually for free) and occasionally we’re begged to forgo part or even all of our fee so a book can get published.

Getting grants is not easy. It’s also quite a different skill from translating. Whose responsibility should it be? Personally, I’d like to be left to do what I’m good at (translating, editing, and writing), but I know that in this market, we have to be more willing to go into the business side of things and to help get the grants that will pay for our labor and get our work published. What do others think?

The Iowa Review

The Iowa Review wrote me quite awhile back to tell me about their new translation and literature forum. I only recently got around to looking at the site and I’m pleased to see such a high-profile literary magazine show translation some attention. You can check it out on the Iowa Review’s website.

Linguee Reference Site

The Linguee website might be of use to some of you, as it is an online bilingual dictionary for the language pairs English-German, English-French, English-Spanish, and English-Portuguese. It’s become quite popular and it might help those of you who work with those languages. Perhaps Linguee will expand beyond those tongues in the near future.

Translation at the European Parliament

The Terminology Coordination Unit at the European Parliament contacted me (and lots of other language professionals, I’m assuming) to tell me about their work translating between 24 languages. thought it was quite interesting. They wrote, for example, “Our activities also include maintaining external contacts with university departments, entities dealing with terminology and language specialists, informing more than 800 translators at the Parliament on various terminology- and language-specific conferences, organising three seminars per year under the general title "Terminology in the Changing World of Translation" as well as giving presentations in Luxembourg and abroad for terminology professionals and students.”

They run a website with information about their work and it’s worth having a look. Remember, the EU needs translators, so if you aim to be a full-time professional translator, this might be a place where you could work.

A PhD From the Other Side: Working with Supervisors

The past few posts were about getting a PhD, and they were from a student’s perspective, but here’s a link from the other side, i.e. your supervisor’s perspective. It talks about how to handle your supervisor.

I haven’t been on the other side that long (I only got my PhD in 2009) and I haven’t supervised that many PhD students, but I’ve learned a lot in that time. One is that it is incredibly enjoyable to work with PhD students and to help them on their journey.

But perhaps more relevantly for you, I’ve seen how things can go pretty wrong. Here is some simple and perhaps obvious advice.

If your supervisor asks you to submit work by a certain date, do it. If you don’t do it and your supervisor follows up (which, incidentally, is an annoyance for both of you and a waste of your supervisor’s limited time), respond to the message. Your supervisor cares and wants to make sure everything is okay. Your supervisor has an obligation to you, but you also have an obligation to him/her. Follow through and follow up.

When you submit work, make sure it is clean and clear. No grammatical or orthographic mistakes. No half-sentences. No unfinished ideas. No outlines (unless you were asked to submit an outline). Do the work that was requested and make sure you edit it carefully before turning it in. Be professional about your PhD; it is, after all, your job at this stage in your life.

If you are asked to submit your work in a certain format (by email, for example, or in hard copy), do it. Different teachers have different preferences for how they read student work. I prefer emailed documents, so I can use Microsoft’s Track Changes feature and edit the work in a neat fashion. But others prefer hard copies. So listen to what your supervisor requests and follow the instructions.

If you have a meeting scheduled, prepare for it. This means having the work finished and submitted on time, as discussed above. This also means that you come armed with questions and/or discussion points. Your supervisor will generally direct the meeting, but you should have some comments as well. This is your chance to get advice, so take advantage of it. Also, this should be needless to say, but come to meetings on time. It’s so irritating and inconsiderate when students are late or don’t show up at all.

Also in meetings, make sure you take notes. You’re not going to remember everything that was said, so make the most of your opportunity and write down the ideas and critiques you get. I’ve been in supervisions where a student just says “Yeah, yeah, yeah” and doesn’t write anything down. It won’t surprise you that such students don’t generally make the changes that have been suggested in the meeting. This means that the supervisor then has to repeat all those comments another time, and what’s the point of that?

You don’t have to agree with or do everything your supervisor says, but you should at least listen to it with an open mind. It’s pretty rude for a student to make faces, sigh, or interrupt while the supervisor is talking, and yet I’ve seen this more times than I would have liked.

Don’t waste time in meetings talking about your personal life, unless this is directly relevant to your studies (if you’re going through a divorce or you’ve had a death in the family or another difficult situation, you may need a break from your studies or an extension to a deadline).

Do be polite at all times. This means thanking anyone who exerts time and effort on your behalf, not just your supervisors but admin staff, other teachers, interview subjects, and so on. It’s just good manners. And to be crass about it, you’ll probably want or need a reference from your supervisor later, so it doesn’t hurt to make a good impression.

Good luck working with your supervisor!

Getting a PhD

The past two posts were about good and bad reasons for thinking you might want to get a PhD in translation studies. Here I want to write a bit more about what kind of person you should be in order to succeed in a PhD program.

I won’t lie to you. It is difficult to get a PhD and it takes a lot of effort, motivation, and perseverance, but if you are passionate and hard-working, you can probably manage it. You have to be willing to spend three or more years really focused on your topic and that means you have to choose a topic that you truly care about. It is easy to let yourself get swayed by what a supervisor suggests or wants or by a grant opportunity you spot (there are sometimes grants for people who agree to research a particular subject or agree to take on a certain job in exchange for having their PhD paid for), but I would personally recommend that you pick a topic you are fascinated by, or you will find your motivation dropping partway through the program.

You also have be able to work independently and to push yourself. You spend a lot of the time in a PhD program researching by yourself, reading and taking notes by yourself, writing up drafts by yourself, editing by yourself, and struggling by yourself. If you’re very sociable and can’t handle spending time on your own and/or if you find it hard to motivate yourself, then a PhD is not for you. If you can set goals and hunker down to make them happen, then you’d probably do well in a PhD program. A PhD is not like a BA, in that teachers won’t chase you to find out why you’re not attending seminars or turning in your work (or, okay, your supervisors will chase you a bit, but not as much as if you were an undergrad or a high school student). It’s all up to you to make sure things happen.

You also have to be the kind of person who can handle criticism. Your supervisors want to ensure that your work is as good as possible and that it will pass muster when it comes time for your defense/viva and for any possible publications. In most cases, they aren’t trying to be mean, but they may sound harsh (especially if you keep making the same mistakes and don’t seem to listen to what they are telling you). I’ve seen students cry over the criticism they get or go into a panicked spiral of self-doubt. That doesn’t help anything, although of course it’s okay to pity yourself a bit now and then. You have to learn how to hear what is useful in the feedback you get and to be able to brush yourself off, make changes, and carry on.

On the other hand, you have to believe in yourself and know how and when to defend your ideas or your way of writing. Your supervisors aren’t always right, even if they want you to think they are, and sometimes you have to tell them, “Thanks for the suggestion, but I think I’ll actually continue on in this way because…” or “I’m not so sure about that because…” You’re not always in the wrong and you have to know when to give in and when not to. You also have to learn how to defend your ideas and methods, as this is an important part of academia.

You also have to be fairly academic and interested in the theoretical side of things. You can’t just write a PhD thesis/dissertation on why you translate in a particular way or on suggestions for translators. While the practical aspect is essential and while there should be less of a practical-theoretical divide than there currently is, a PhD is pretty theoretical. I’ve talked to MA students who say they’re interested in doing a PhD, but “only if there’s no theory”. It doesn’t work like that, I’m afraid.

Mentioning the obvious, you have to know at least two languages. I’ve actually been contacted by people who’ve proposed that they study the translations of a particular author or book but without knowing the source language. Of course looking at target texts is essential, but that can’t be all you do. It’s not called “studying translations” but “translation studies” and there is a big difference there.

Ideally, you’d also be a translator yourself or at least have some experience translating. I’m sometimes surprised and dismayed by the number of people in translation studies who profess to be able to comment on what translators do but wouldn’t know how to translate themselves. An art critic has to know something about color and perspective and an expert in translation studies should know something – on a practical level – about words and context.

So, if you have many of the skills and qualities mentioned here and if you are interested in academia (whether for just a few years or for your entire career), why not apply to PhD programs? You sound like you could be a good candidate!

A couple of years ago, I wrote a post about what you actually do in a PhD program in translation studies, so you might want to check that out for more information.

Why Not to Get a PhD

This is a companion post to the last one. Here I’d like to mention bad reasons for thinking you might want to get a PhD in translation and/or signs that you are not suited to a PhD. These include, but are not limited to:

--You simply want “Dr.” before your name and “PhD” after it. Sorry, but a desire for titles is not a good reason to spend 3-10 years working on another degree. I’ve met people like this and I think they’re just wasting their time, because they don’t have the right sort of motivation.

--You aren’t interested in one particular topic. I know some people who are quite smart and engaged, but like to constantly change the subject they are engaged with. That doesn’t work in a PhD. Here you must be willing to work intensely on one subject.

--You don’t know what to do with your life, so getting another degree seems like a sensible option. Getting a PhD is a huge investment in terms of time, money, and effort, so actually, in many ways it’s not a sensible thing to do. I know people who’ve started graduate degrees because they didn’t know what else to do and partway through lost their enthusiasm. They ended up realizing that they wasted their time and money when they could have been finding a job they really enjoyed.

--You don’t enjoy translation theory or any sort of theory. If you’re purely a practice-based person – and there’s nothing wrong with you if you are! – then you probably don’t want to spend a number of years thinking on a theoretical level.

--You know you want to work solely as a translator and you already have a number of customers and/or a niche in the market. In this case, a PhD probably won’t help you too much, as you don’t seem to need much in the way of marketing your skills and services.

--You are the type of person who doesn’t like working independently. In this case, it’s hard to imagine that you will do too well as a translator, and you definitely won’t survive a PhD program, where you have to work on your own and be very motivated.

Again, as with the reasons for getting a PhD, these reasons can apply to many fields, not just translation.

See the next post for more on getting a PhD.

Why Get a PhD

I get quite a few emails from people who are considering getting a PhD in translation but want some sort of confirmation that it’s a good idea. While I obviously can’t offer that, because decisions about what to do with one’s life are extremely personal and context-dependent, I can say some of the reasons why you might want to get a PhD in translation. These include, but are not limited to:

--You want to go into academia. In most cases, you will need a PhD to get an academic job.

--You have a passion for a particular subject and want to explore it in depth. This is what a PhD is about.

--You want a qualification that will help you stand out from other translators. I know a number of translators with PhDs and they certainly say that in a glutted market, any extra qualifications or skills can help you get work instead of someone else.

--You want a qualification that will help you stand out from other writers. Some people get a PhD because they then want to write “the” book on a particular subject. Many PhDs do lead on to books based on the thesis/dissertation and having another qualification will help ensure a publisher that you are the right expert for the book.

--You love learning and would thrive in an academic environment for a number of years. Some people really enjoy attending classes, seminars, and workshops, spending time in the library, debating and discussing ideas with others, and so on. If that’s you, then getting another degree might very well suit you.

Obviously, many of these ideas are applicable to areas other than translation!

In the next two posts, I’ll write some more about getting a PhD in translation.

Diacritics Blog

I was recently sent the link to Diacritics, a new blog run by former linguistics students who are now in law school. They have posted a number of long, interesting pieces. Through their blog, I also read an interesting article about the speed of languages, and that led me to another article on how knowing more than one language can help delay the onset of Alzheimer’s. Lots of stuff to read here!

Why Translation Matters

I read Edith Grossman’s book Why Translation Matters and quite enjoyed it.

For those of us in translation already, Ms. Grossman is preaching to the choir, but she preaches so beautifully, so I recommend her book. She argues for the significance of translated work: for example, there are thousands of languages out there, though not all of them are written. Who would ever be able to read books in even a small percentage of those languages? Translation makes works available to us.

She also refers to the usual question of whether translation is possible. She writes, “It would never occur to anyone to ask whether it is feasible for an actor to perform a dramatic role or a musician to interpret a piece of music. Of course it is feasible, just as it is possible for a translator to rewrite a work of literature in another language.” (12) The question we should focus on, perhaps, is how well it can be or has been done.

Ms. Grossman also discusses xenophobia in the US and how this affects translation and, a related issue, how this is the case in the UK too. She points out that UK publishers “Anglicize” translations so they seem more British.

Other topics discussed here are how she translated Cervantes (she did not compared previous translations and she did decide to use footnotes), her work translating other authors, translating poetry in particular, her list of what she considers to be the most important translations, and her idea of how translations are never final (finality is bestowed by publishers’ due dates), among other things.

And The Winner Is...

It's time for yet another Nobel Prize in literature. This year's winner is Tomas Tranströmer. See the Nobel Prize website for more details.

What do you think?

Not So Delicious

I love to read food magazines to get inspiration for my own cooking. One night a few months ago, I was having trouble sleeping, so I was reading an English food magazine called delicious.

I was quite shocked to suddenly see my own words on the page. delicious was doing a feature on a cookbook that I had translated, but there was no reference to the fact that this book had been translated, and there was certainly no mention of my name.

I often think that food is a way of bringing different cultures together; it’s a low-risk way of getting to know people. But we wouldn’t be able to do that without translators; translators are the ones who make recipes available to people outside a particular culture. My own translation practice has included many menus, recipes, and cookbooks over the years, and I’ve even written an article about the challenges involved in translating food.

After seeing that article in delicious, I wrote to the editor. I received a response that said that the publisher didn’t tell them it was a translation, so it wasn’t their fault. Personally, I wouldn’t accept an answer like that from my students (at the very minimum, you might look inside a cover and note who was involved in the production of a book), but I thought delicious could use the experience to learn something new, so I suggested they do an article about the translation of cookbooks. Many cookbooks in the UK are translations, but no one ever comments on that. delicious didn’t bother responding, but perhaps another food magazine will pick up the topic at some point soon.

So that was really disappointing – so disappointing, in fact, that I won’t be renewing my subscription to delicious – and it shows how much work we translators still have to do to promote our own visibility.

Chinglish

This is not a post about odd English phrases or bad translations but rather about a play I saw when I was last in my hometown of Chicago,

The play is Chinglish by Tony Award-winning playwright David Henry Hwang and while it does include some funny or awkward English sentences and some humor at the expense of translation or language skills, that isn’t the main point. Really, I think the play is about the translated self, and how communication changes and selves change when we speak another language. As someone who spent a number of years living in another language, I could really understand the characters and their attempts to make themselves understood in a different culture/language.

Chinglish is heading to Broadway next and I definitely recommend it.

International Fiction Reading Group

I run an international fiction reading group at the Norfolk and Norwich Millennium Library here in Norwich, England. It meets once a month, on the second Wednesday of the month at 1.30 – 2.30 pm. The group is relaunching for the new academic year on 12 October and the first book we’ll be reading and discussing is Italo Calvino’s If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller. Everyone is welcome.

You can read more about it on the library’s blog.

A Good Review

I’ve sometimes felt that reviewers of translated books don’t seem to really understand translation. They might write that a review is “fluent” or “poor”, but they don’t say what they mean by those terms, and they don’t usually compare the source text to the translated text. They often appear to judge translations based on how they read in English.

So I was really pleased to see the recent review in the 29 August issue of the New Yorker by Daniel Mendelsohn, whose work I always find worth reading. In this article about Arthur Rimbaud’s career, Mr. Mendelsohn names various translators (sometimes even that is beyond reviewers), compares translations, and shows knowledge of the source text, which helps him to analyze the translations.

This is a well-done translation review and I wish more reviewers would review and think like Mr. Mendelsohn.

Eugene Nida

As many of you in translation studies will already have heard, Eugene Nida has died. While he worked in the field of bible translation, he had an influence on translation studies in general due to his work on dynamic and functional equivalence.

A Round-up of Articles

Here’s another round-up of articles to read.

Here is a piece on funny movie title translations.

My lovely cousin Chad Lieberman sent me this article on untranslatable words.

Thanks to Jens Hillman for this piece on language.

We translators already knew about the bilingual advantage, but it’s nice to read about it again.

My friend, the Swedish-to-German translator Dagmar Brunow, sent me this article about the first translation from Swedish to Yiddish.

What are the 50 foreign words every English-speaker should know?

Here’s an article about the 10 most lucrative languages.

The next piece is on invented languages.

And finally, here’s an article about reviewing literary translations.

Words Per Day

We know that how many words you can translate per day depends on what sort of text you’re working on. Some texts are so difficult a translator counts him- or herself lucky if 500 words get translated in one day. Other texts are a breeze.

I’ve heard from a number of people that 5000 words are about the maximum any translator can do in a day. Beyond that, our brains just get tired. But then I have a friend who claims to whizz through 1200 words per hour.

What do you find your average daily counts are? What’s a good day of translating for you?

FIT Conference Redux

Last month, I wrote about how I was looking forward to the FIT translation conference in San Francisco. Unfortunately, I must report back that it was probably the worst conference I ever attended. Were any of you there? What did you think?

Here are a few of the reasons why I was disappointed:

--The organization of the conference was very poor. For example, no lunch was provided. Although many attendees had breakfast at their own hotels, the organizers chose to provide a continental breakfast at the conference. Presumably the cost of this is why they did not offer lunch. Instead, we had one and a half hours to find a reasonably priced lunch in the neighborhood, which created a stressful lunch time when we could have been networking and discussing. Considering the cost of the conference ($500), lunch really should have been included. I have never attended a full-day conference that did not include lunch.

--Another organizational issue is in regard to technology. I gave a presentation and was shocked to learn that laptops were not provided. When I complained, I was told that this was because it was “too expensive” to rent laptops and that it was already costly enough for the organizers to rent the screens. Again, given the high price of this conference, I was stunned that such basic amenities were not provided. I was told to borrow a laptop from someone in the audience. Obviously, this is not appropriate, especially given that many attendees brought their computers with the aim of taking notes on them.

--This was also the first conference I attended where there were no chairs for the sessions. Chairs are essential parts of talks, I believe, because they ensure that everything goes smoothly. They introduce the speakers, help run question sessions, and ensure that the audience does not get out of control. I was in talks where speakers never bothered to say who they were or where they were from, where audience members simply shouted out questions or comments in the middle of the presentations, and where questions were posed rudely or in the form of a boastful monologue. All of this could have been avoided by the simple organizational tool of having chairs.

--Similarly, there were a number of talks that had no question sessions at all, including the keynote lectures. We attend conferences to learn and part of the learning process is dialogue. It is very unusual to attend a talk that does not include time for questions. This, too, was an organizational issue that could have been rectified.

--The keynotes were distinctly lacking in import and relevance. I got the impression that the speakers had been invited for reasons other than their expertise in translation, because they did not have much to say about translation. It is unacceptable to attend a major international conference and to feel that attending keynote talks was actually a waste of time.

--Quite a few of the sessions were cancelled, sometimes five or ten minutes after they were due to start. While it is not the fault of the organizers that people were unable or unwilling to attend the conference, it is rather suspect, and it shows poor organization that the audience was not informed of the cancellation until it was too late to slip into another session.

--There were scarcely any exhibitions and there were no poster presentations. Along with all the other lacks, this contributed to an overall feeling of a weak conference with little to offer attendees.

--When I asked for an evaluation form, so I could offer some of this feedback immediately after the conference, I was told that the organizers had “decided [they] didn’t want any feedback”. Again, this is a rather odd decision, and suggests a deep sense of apathy in regard to the conference and no concern about the attendees.

--I emailed some feedback to the organizers and got a response that suggested that they had scarcely read my email and didn’t really care what anyone thought anyway. My impression was that they had gotten their money and that was all that mattered.

So while I really enjoyed the FIT congress in Shanghai in 2008, I was deeply disappointed in the FIT congress in San Francisco in 2011. Given the lack of concern on the part of the organizers, this has made me decide that I won’t attend another FIT event again, and that’s pretty sad, since FIT is supposed to be an umbrella organization that really looks out for translators and promotes our translation work.

Incidentally, I’m not the only one to feel this way – many people I spoke to during the conference expressed these disappointments and a few said they were going to write letters to the organizers too. It’s just too bad that the organizers show no remorse or concern.

The Joseph Brodsky/Stephen Spender Prize 2011

You still have time to submit an entry to The Joseph Brodsky/Stephen Spender Prize 2011. See this website for details about this contest for the translation of Russian poetry into English.

Translator and Writer Piotr Rawicz

Due to my work researching how the Holocaust is written about and translated in children’s literature, I recently read A Thousand Darknesses by Ruth Franklin. I recommend the book to anyone interested in literature about the Holocaust. But for readers of this blog in particular, you might want to learn about Piotr Rawicz.

As Franklin writes, Piotr Rawicz was born in 1919 in Lviv and was imprisoned in Auschwitz (although he was Jewish, he managed to hide that fact, and he was put in Auschwitz as a Ukrainian). He committed suicide in 1982. In between World War 2 and his death, he had a variety of jobs, including as a translator. Franklin writes, “After settling in Paris in 1947, he earned degrees in Sanskrit and Hindi; in addition to those languages, he also spoke Ukrainian, Russian, Polish, German, French, English, Yiddish, and Hebrew.” Besides being a linguist, he was a novelist, and Franklin calls his novel Blood from the Sky “one of the most original works of fiction ever written about the Holocaust.”

I’d never heard of Piotr Rawicz until I read Ms. Franklin’s excellent book. I was fascinated and saddened to read about him and his life.