Dr. John Balcom, a professor in the Translation and Interpretation department at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, edited and translated the book entitled “Zero and Other Fictions,” written by Huang Fan.
MIIS professor, Anthony Pym attended the symposium on the translator profile for the European Commission on September 29th, where representatives of industry and academia met to discuss the changing nature of what is required of translators in the marketplace.
Pym co-chaired a panel discussion on “The Perspective for the Translation Profession”, alongside Kim Harris of the Globalization and Localization Association (GALA).
The 8th lecture in the Found in Translation series
When: Tuesday, November 16. 12:15 - 1:45 in Irvine
Speaker: Dr. Benjamin Zeng, Professor of the College of Foreign Languages at Zhejiang Normal University.
Lecture Title: The Translation Industry and University Translation Programs in China
The lecture will give an overview of the status quo of the translation industry in China (company structure, technology use, content domain, pricing, etc.), the plight of the translator, and university translation programs.
The 7th Found in Translation lecture series
When: Monday, November 8, 6:00 – 7:30 in McGowan 102
Speaker: Dr. David B. Sawyer, Chief of the European Languages Branch and Senior Diplomatic Interpreter for German in the Office of Language Services at the United States Department of State. Previously, Sawyer was a freelance conference interpreter and Associate Professor of interpretation and translation at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, where he was head of the German program. He was on the faculty at the University of Mainz in Germersheim, Germany, where he earned graduate degrees in conference interpretation, translation, and a doctorate. He is a member of the International Association of Conference Interpreters and the author of Fundamental Aspects of Interpreter Education: Curriculum and Assessment.
Title of Lecture: Interpreting for the United States Department of State: History and Current Practice
The mission of the Office of Language Services (LS) of the United States Department of State is to facilitate communication with non-English speaking governments and people by providing high-level interpreting and translating support to the Executive Office of the President, the Department of State, and other agencies of the United States Federal Government. The Office of Language Services carries on a tradition of language support for the conduct of foreign policy that dates back to 1789, when it was founded by Thomas Jefferson, the first Secretary of State of the United States of America. This presentation outlines the history of LS, looking in particular at the development of diplomatic interpreting and its current practice. The views and opinions expressed are strictly those of the speaker and do not necessarily represent those of the U.S. Government or the U.S. Department of State.
Video: Translation Scholars
Be sure to look at Anthony Pym’s interview with Professor Kayoko Takeda, where she discusses her role at MIIS as a professor in the Translation and Interpretation program, her current research interests, and how she got to where she is today.
She also discusses her new book, Interpreting the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal, which looks at the 3-tiered interpreting arrangement at the Tokyo War Crimes trial and included Japanese diplomats, Japanese-Americans, and U.S. military officials as interpreters. Lastly, Professor Kayoko Takeda gives a brief look at what’s happening in Japan today with translation, and gives a few words about translation research topics she’s still curious about.
Photo: jcolman
A panel of four MIIS International Policy Studies professors will analyze the upcoming US elections at 12:15 Tueday, October 26 in Irvine Auditorium.
Professor Steve Garrett will speak about the foreign policy factor in the elections; Professor Moyara Ruehsen, about economic issues; Professor Jason Scorse, about environmental policy; and Professor Peter Grothe, about political aspects. MIIS Translation and Interpretation students will be interpreting the event.
Comments and questions will follow the presentation.
The American elections are scheduled for Tuesday, November 2nd.
For more information contact Peter Grothe, at pgrothe [at] miis [dot] edu.
On July 4, 2010, Professor Miryoung Sohn offered a talk in Seoul, Korea for alumni and forty-six prospective MIIS students.
Recent T&I graduate, Shihee Yu emceed the 2 hour event. The information session began with a general introduction to MIIS and followed with testimonies from a number of MIIS alums about their degree experiences and careers since leaving the Institute. Among those giving testimonies were two 2005 International Policy Studies graduates, Katie Klemsen and Nicola Kim and three Korean T&I graduates, Hyunsuk John Lee of class ‘03, Aeree Park of class ’02, and Jiyoung Park of class ’09 for MACII and ’10 for MATFL.
The prospective students were introduced to the T&I curriculum and the MIIS application process, and the session ended with a chance for the students to ask their questions about the Monterey Institute and its programs. The session was well-attended, with 46 prospective students and 10 Korean T&I alumni at the event. Following the information session, there was an alumni dinner.
While most practitioners in the language business understand the critical importance of managing terminology, very few translators, let alone interpreters, actually create comprehensive, project-specific dictionaries. One of the reasons for this phenomenon is the lack of powerful, easy-to-use, low-cost tools for collecting and maintaining multilingual vocabulary. TermWiki, a new web-based terminology management solution developed by CSOFT in collaboration with professor Uwe Muegge, is a free community solution that allows global organizations as well as individual freelancers to manage term collections of any size without installing or buying any software.
After presenting TermWiki to the academic community at the Leipzig International Conference on Translation Studies (LICTRA) last month, Uwe Muegge has been invited by the publisher of tcworld to contribute an article on TermWiki and collaborative terminology management to a special print issue of the online magazine tcworld. In his fourth publication this year, Muegge discusses the implications of not managing terminology in the context of a large, multilingual translation project, and how TermWiki revolutionizes authoring, translation, and review processes.
John Balcom‘s translation of Cao Naiqian’s “There’s Nothing I Can Do When I Think of You Late at Night” won the 2010 Northern California Book Award in the category of translated fiction.
Cao’s novel (actually a series of inter-locking short stories) deals with the lives of poor Shanxi villagers who can scarcely rise above the level of necessity. The work is set in the early 1970s. The book was published in Taiwan in 2005 and in China in 2007, where it was rated one of the top-ten books of the year in one poll. Michael Duke said, “The best thing about these stories, aside from the realistic depiction of a world none of wants to visit and few of us can imagine, is their almost lyrical presentation of human poverty, depravity, and occasional comradeship and mutual warmth. An excellent novel; the image of these disposable lives stays with one long after reading.”
Cao Naiqian (b. 1949) works for the Public Security Bureau of Datong City. He began writing in 1986. Swedish Nobel academician Goeran Malmqvist wrote that Cao Naiqian is one of three Chinese authors who deserved the Nobel Prize.
Professor Balcom’s award-winning translation has made this novel accessible to English readers around the world.
On April 1, 2010, Peter Bush, an award-winning literary translator living in Barcelona, discussed his new translation of Fernando de Rojas’s Renaissance masterpiece, Celestina. This translation re-asserts Celestina‘s power as a pioneering work of fiction, written over five hundred years ago in a language and mood that is thoroughly contemporary. De Rojas’s original mix of street wit, obscenity and cultured rhetoric mark Celestina as one of the first prose masterpieces of European literature and a work of art to rival Cervantes, Velázquez and Goya. In his talk, Bush examined the tradition of translating this classic and discussed the strategy informing his decision to dispense with the dramatic structure imposed by de Rojas’s original publishers at the end of the fifteenth century. He compared different versions of a specific extract in English and French to facilitate a critical exchange on the theory and practice of translation.
Peter Bush studied French and Spanish at Cambridge and researched Spanish fiction and history in Oxford. He was Professor of Literary Translation at Middesex University and at the University of East Anglia where he also directed the British Centre for Literary Translation. Recent projects include Juan Goytisolo’s Juan the Landless, Valle-Inclán’s Tirano Banderas and Najat El Hachmi’s The Last Patriarch. He edited The Translator as Writer (with Susan Basnett), a collection of essays by leading translators on the art of literary translation.
Celestina by Fernando de Rojas, introduction by Juan Goytisolo, with an after word by translator, Peter Bush. Published by Dedalus Books (June 2009) and Penguin Classics USA (January 2010)
Fernando de Rojas was born in La Puebla de Montalbán in the early 1470s into a family whose Jewish forebears had been forced to convert to Christianity.