Category archives: Uncategorized

Encuentro de autores y traductores, XXI Feria internacional del libro teatral, Madrid 2020

Despite hopes that it might go ahead as scheduled in October, Madrid’s annual theatre book fair fell victim to the second wave of the Covid19 pandemic. However, with some last-minute funding, the meeting of writers and translators went ahead online. I received around 50 plays over the weekend of 21-22 November, and had a full more »

My year in translation: February

As a literary translator from Spanish, I often cast envious glances at colleagues working from northern European languages. The Scandinavians, in particular, seem to provide generous funding not only of samples but also, if rumour is to be believed, of whole books. It’s always been hard to imagine Spain providing public funding of that sort more »

What’s in a word?

Translators have a very intimate relationship with words. We are hypersensitive to nuance, tone, connotations, register… It’s something we are particularly aware of at those moments when we hit on that perfect translation, the word or phrase that captures the original – whether directly, because they match those of the original – or indirectly because more »

Aeolian harps and alien trinkets: talking to Tim Parks about translating style

It often seems as if there is only one debate in literary translation, despite our ingenuity in coming up with new terms to describe it. Is translation a discipline or an art? Are we “text-oriented” or “reader-oriented”? Are we literalists or activists? Sometimes, this dichotomy is expressed in metaphorical terms. You can choose old-world sexism: more »

ITI Scottish Network summer workshop: collaborative professional development for translators

Aberdour, 1 June 2019 Three years ago, Victoria Patience, Simon Berrill and Tim Gutteridge were looking for ways to improve the quality of our work. We realised we couldn’t afford to have each and every one of our texts professionally revised by another translator, so we decided that, instead of focusing on improving individual translations, more »

“In the blacksmith’s house…”: linguistic border guard or linguistic nomad?

Translators like to think that we facilitate communication, building linguistic bridges between the speakers (or readers) of one language and those of another. But that’s only half the story. In this job of mediating between two languages we are – we must be – almost neurotically aware of what belongs where. More specifically (although it’s more »