Citing an increased work load in his freelance translation business, Al Favela has announced that he is stepping down from his position as AATIA Director of Finance, effective immediately. The Board is grateful to Al for his years of service to the Association in this capacity.

Members interested in volunteering for the role of Director of Finance are asked to contact Secretary Julie Nordskog.

AATIA business member McElroy Translation Company is partnering with automated translation technology provider Asia Online Portals to collaborate on new technologies based on the symbiotic relationship between machine translation (MT) and human translation. The partnership combines Asia Online’s statistical MT platform and interactive continuous improvement environment with McElroy Translation’s linguistic expertise in technical and patent translations.

Source: Multilingual News, May 28, 2008; thanks to Julie Nordskog for the tip.

Words Without Borders, the online magazine for international literature, recently published Marian Schwartz’s translation of Mikhail Shishkin’s short story Calligraphy Lesson.

Schwartz introduces the translation with some thoughts about the specific problems she faced in conveying the story’s description of the calligraphy of Cyrillic letters to an English-speaking reader. She decided not only to translate the word in question, but also to reproduce the Russian word.

In the predigital era, when Cyrillic characters were technically difficult to reproduce and so were rarely included in translations, I might have been inclined (or forced) to go the other way. Thanks to modern technology and to the fact that Shishkin’s description was based on the letters’ visual characteristics, which English readers could see and appreciate for themselves, I did not have to forgo Shishkin’s tour de force….

Martyn Hitchcock’s translation of the poem "Da waren Deutsche auch dabei" ("Germans Among Them Did Abound") has been published in Schulhaus Reporter, the newsletter of the German-Texan Heritage Society.

Hitchcock describes the poem as "19th-century German-American chauvinistic doggerel." The author, Konrad Krez, was born in 1828 in Landau (Palatinate), Germany. He is one of several "1848’ers" who fled political repression. He was a lawyer, poet, and active in Wisconsin politics. He died in 1897 in Milwaukee.

Belgian Paul Verhaeghen, who won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for his novel Omega Minor, has decided to donate his prize money to the ACLU. Normally the prize is split between author and translator, but having translated his own novel into English from the original Dutch, he won the entire prize.

An excerpt from his acceptance statement (which can be found in its entirety on his blog Babylon Blues:

…to avoid supporting the regime with more tax dollars than I already owe them, I have asked the Arts Council England to donate the money associated with the Prize, all 10,000 pounds of it, to the American Civil Liberties Union. Withholding the tax portion of those 10,000 pounds from the US Treasury will shorten the war by a mere eye-blink - its cost is currently 3,810 dollar per second - but the ACLU can use that money to great effect in their legal battles against torture, detainee abuse, and the silence surrounding it.

We are not immune to history. But neither is history immune to us.

Thanks to Marian Schwartz for passing along this amazing news, which she found on E.J. Van Lanen’s Three Percent. 

The PEN American Center has announced the winner of this year’s Translation Prize, and it couldn’t have gone to a more accomplished translator. This year’s award goes to Margaret Jull Costa for her translation into English from the Portuguese of The Maias (New Directions) by Eça de Queirós.

From the judges’ citation:

Over the years Margaret Jull Costa has produced a number of notable translations of the fiction of Eça de Queirós, the great Portuguese novelist, who is widely considered to be one of the major European novelists of the 19th century, often ranked with Flaubert, Balzac, Dickens, and Tolstoy. Most recently, Margaret Jull Costa turned her hand to Os Maias, Eça de Queirós’s greatest work, and the results are stunning. The sensuous elegance of the prose vividly captures the greatness of the original, bringing the novel to life for the reader in a way only the most masterful of translations can do. Clearly a labor of love, Margaret Jull Costa’s brilliant translation of The Maias stands as a masterpiece in its own right. Eça de Queirós lives in English!

Ingrid Lansford has been busy, and here’s what she’s been up to, in her own words:

Three of my short story translations just came out, all in the spring 2008 issue of the journal Metamorphoses. This is almost weird, but for two years the editor ran special issues, so my contributions stacked up:

• “Down to the Lake with Flemming and his Pump Gun” from Jeg er stadig bange for Caspar Michael Petersen by Jan Sonnergaard (Gyldendal 2003)
• “Sidi el Barduk and Zuleima” from Kærlighedshistorier Fra Mange Lande (1867) by Meir Aron Goldschmidt
• “Pulling up Fishtraps” from Das Los unserer Stadt (Olten,1959) by Wolfdietrich Schnurre

In January I received a grant of $824 from the Danish government agency Kunststyrelsen for translating five short stories into English.

In other literary translation news, Michele McKay Aynesworth has edited the latest edition of Beacons, a publication of the Literary Division of the American Translators Association. Liliana Valenzuela and Tony Beckwith were also involved in this production: they collaborated on the translation into Spanish of some short fiction from the book Unlucky Lucky Days by Daniel Grandbois.

On Saturday, April 12, 2008, some two score and ten enthusiastic translators and interpreters gathered to celebrate the opening of the AATIA’s new home in downtown Austin. Housed at the ICA, the International Center of Austin’s premises at 201 East 2nd Street, the association now has a permanent office and some very convenient meeting and workshop space available to its members.

In spite of the glorious weather, the Open House was well-attended, and after champagne toasts and welcoming speeches by President Michael Blumenthal and other Board members, guests enjoyed refreshments (including cold boiled shrimp and a spectacular chocolate cake!) and the opportunity to visit with their colleagues.

This is the first time that the group has had a home of its own. Many thanks are due to AATIA founder (and new office manager) Esther Diaz for her tireless efforts on behalf of the association that have, once again, resulted in improved conditions and services for members.

Congratulations to all who contributed to making the event a success, and our sincere appreciation to Ralph McElroy Translations for their generous sponsorship.

Were you there? Or do you wish you could have been? Either way, please add your comments here, and share your thoughts with all the other members who visit this blog. Let’s keep the conversation going!