Language Interpretation and Translation Commons^™

Temporalities Of Translation In Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed, Rumi Coller-Takahashi

Living in Languages

Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1974 novel, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia features two fictional worlds, Urras and Anarres, with distinct political structures and languages. Anarres is created by the revolutionaries who departed capitalistic Urras to create a new anarchist community, and its language was invented so as to have no word for “property” or “class.” However, the artificial distinction in the languages do not hold up the binary of possession and non-possession in these worlds, as the word “possession” permeates interpersonal relationships even on Anarres. To replace the binary approach of the revolution, the novel proposes an alternative mode of …

A Street Singer’S Homage To A Father Of The Nation, Denish Raja Durai K

Living in Languages

Background Note:

Introduction to Mu. Metha

Mu. Metha was a renowned Tamil poet and songwriter, born in Periyakulam, Theni, Tamil Nadu. He taught Tamil at Presidency College, Chennai, until his retirement. A key figure in modern Tamil poetry (Pudukavithai). Metha played a crucial role in popularizing the form in the 1970s and 1980s. He authored over 30 works, including novels, short stories, and essays, and was an integral part of the ‘Vannampaadi’ literary movement, which aimed to write poetry from a Marxist and global perspective. His celebrated work, Agayathil Aaduthaveedu, won him the Sahitya Akademi Award (a …

Translation As Divination: Translating Naomi Sím’S Emerald Orchid Love Letter, Will Buckingham

Living in Languages

Naomi Sím’s Taiwanese (Tâi-gí) language short story, "Emerald Orchid Love Letter" (Chhùi-Lân ê Chêng-Phoe 翠蘭ê情批) engages deeply with the questions of politics, language and religion in contemporary Taiwan. The plot of the story pivots around the central question of what language the gods speak. In the story, the narrator—caught between Taiwanese, Mandarin and English languages—finds a strange growth on her inside lip. The cure turns out to involve the sea goddess Má-chó͘, and a renewed commitment on the part of the narrator to the Taiwanese language. In this paper, I read the process of translating Sím’s story from Taiwanese to …

On Translating Jean Giono’S “Possession Des Richesses”, Christopher J. Monier

Living in Languages

No abstract provided.

Feather And Freedom: A Fabled Land In The Mind, Yuan Tao

Living in Languages

Set in the deceptively tranquil Honest Town, “The Feather of Sister Zandan” is narrated from the perspective of Zaan, a younger brother, revealing his complicated feelings toward his sister. Written in a fable-like style infused with magical realism, the story explores the tension between restraint and longing, culminating in an abrupt and poignant ending that evokes the emotional sting of an O. Henry-style twist. The short story won the Gemini Prize for Short Fiction of China in 2021. According to the award citation, Lan Du’s writing demonstrates emotional depth, dazzling imagination, and striking narrative tension. Her storytelling defies conventional …

“From The Land Of Pain” By Hanni Ossott, Translated By April Schmidt, April Schmidt

Living in Languages

Translation of Hanni Ossott’s poem “Del país de la pena” (“From the Land of Pain”) from Spanish into English.

Introduction, Rumi Coller-Takahashi

Living in Languages

No abstract provided.

Benjamin’S Estranged Heim, Andrew Brooks

Living in Languages

This paper examines Walter Benjamin's engagement with the motif of Heim (home) as it interweaves with his intellectual and personal experiences during the early 1920s. Through an analysis of Benjamin’s writings and correspondence, including his plans for the journal Angelus Novus and reflections on his friendship with Fritz Heinle, the study explores Heim as both a real and rhetorical space. Initially conceived as an idealized site of intellectual and spiritual communion, Heim is transformed by personal tragedy and historical crisis into an unattainable, speculative ideal—a rhetorical atopos. This evolution parallels Benjamin’s philosophical pursuit of “pure language” and his reimagining …

Beyond Gaining And Losing: A Thematic Approach To The Translation Of Washington Square, Jin Li

Living in Languages

In putting a literary work into another language, the translator functions as a literary critic, whose task requires both language competence and critical perception. As Venuti writes, “A translation does not communicate the source text itself but the translator’s interpretation of it”. The translation, therefore, can be considered as another form of literary criticism, inspiring the reader to enrich the repertoire of the source text. A comparative reading of the source text against the translation engages the reader in processing three-fold interpretations, leading to a multifaceted communication among the source text, the translator and the reader. The reading of the …

“Two Friends” By Fadhy Mtanga, Translated By Jay Boss Rubin, Jay B. Rubin

Living in Languages

No abstract provided.

For The Love Of Subtitling: Analysing The Challenges In Audio-Visual Translations Of Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahani, Haritima Sharma

Living in Languages

Any form of audio-visual media utilises specific stylistic elements in order to represent the reality within which the media form is situated. These representations occur through the language and iconography of the media form, which works on stereotypical features that the audience can easily identify. Forming a pivotal part of the media, these representations must be rendered in the translations for a linguistically and culturally diverse audience. Audio-Visual Translation (AVT) has been used since the 1930s to make media accessible. Of the various modalities, subtitling has emerged as the most widespread mode of AVT due to time and cost benefits. …

Untangling Memories Of Violence: The Khipu In El Rincón De Los Muertos (Alfredo Pita), Jonathan J. Oliveri

Living in Languages

This research proposes a structural reading of El rincón de los muertos to decode and trace echoes to the khipu which are embedded throughout the novel. Contrary to a graphic writing system, the Incan empire’s khipu (khipu) was a mnemotechnic system—a three-dimensional communicative device, an archive of memory that recorded information using different colored strings, and a system of knots. Our concept of mnemonics is different than that of the indigenous communities who relied on oral tradition and specifically for khipu a khipukamayuq (reader of khipu), in a narrative and discursive manner, to reconstruct the message the khipu contained. …

Two Poems By Victoria Guerrero Peiranotwo Poems By Victoria Guerrero Peirano Translated By Ilka Kressner, Ilka Kressner

Living in Languages

Translation of the two poems "En la disco" and "Baile" by Victoria Guerrero Peirano into English and German.

Odesa Will Never Be A 'Russian' City Again, Ian R. Singleton

Living in Languages

Russophone poet Galina Itskovich wrote the statement serving as the title of this text about the identity of her native Odesa, Ukraine in 2023, more than a year and a half after the full-scale invasion by Russia. I propose an examination of the relationship of contemporary Odesan writers to the Russian language. Sources for this examination include the work of writers in or from Odesa such as Galina Itskovich, Maria Galina, Oleg Fesenko, and Igor Bozhko. To discuss what this situation means for translation, such as is demanded by Ukraine’s 2019 law on the status of the Ukrainian language, I …

Between Languages And Religions: Omar Ibn Said's Voice In The Arabic Narrative And English Translations, Rumi Coller-Takahashi

Living in Languages

The Life of Omar ibn Said (1831) is a narrative written by an enslaved person in Arabic and went through multiple English translations over the centuries. This article examines the ways in which these translations involve the nineteenth-century Christian agenda as well as the translators’ decisions in the twentieth-first century that multiply Omar ibn Said’s voice. In response to the recent scholarship’s effort to find Omar’s “true self” in his writings, which shows the meshing of Christian and Islamic faith, I aim to foreground his voice as a powerful presence at the intersections of the two languages and religions. My …

Introduction 2024, Andrew Brooks

Living in Languages

No abstract provided.

Retranslation And Interpellation, Andrew Brooks

Living in Languages

No abstract provided.

Confessing The Self Through Translation: The Evolution Of Proust’S Young Girl, Nicole A. Cosentino Phd

Living in Languages

No abstract provided.

A Study Of Cranf 1927: Woo Kwang Kien And Translation-Cultural Capital, Lisu Wang

Living in Languages

Largely ignored by Gaskell scholars, the early Chinese translations of Gaskell’s works have not been carefully looked at. From 1920 to 1945, the publication of four stories by Gaskell-- Cranford, Cousin Phillis, Hand and Heart, and The Old Nurse’s Story, witnessed the transformation from politics-orientated to independence in China’s publishing history. With their growing understanding of foreign literature, Chinese scholars had been translating and criticizing Gaskell’s works, and gradually formed a focus on Cranford. It was not by accident that Cranford has received great popularity: there is no similar novella in contemporary Chinese literature that …

Babel Blackness: The Aesth-Ethical Turn In Post-Colonial Translation, Emanuela Maltese

Living in Languages

“How do we make art in an ethical way?” (Marlene NourbeSe Philip) is the leading question lying at the basis of this article, which inspired by the story of the unauthorized Italian translation of Zong! seeks to investigate on the ethics of translation and propose a new turn in translation studies, namely a black aesth-ethical one. The proposal here examined is indeed informed by both aesthetics, and ethics. It presents translation as a practice, that draws on recent debates on black aesthetics, with specific reference to the Afro-optimism (AO) of cultural theorist and poet Fred Moten (2013, 2018, 2019) and …

Five Poems By Chase Twichell, Translated By Claire Gacioch, Claire Gacioch, Yolande G. Schutter, Chase Twichell

Living in Languages

No abstract provided.

“Foreign Soundingness” And Code-Switching Instead Of Translation: An Examination Of A Marketing Strategy In Contemporary Latino/A Music., Nerisha De Nil Padilla Cruz

Living in Languages

The focus of this investigation is to analyze the concept of “foreign soundingness” used by David Bellos in his essay “Fictions of the Foreign the Paradox of “Foreign-Soundingness” in the Latino/a music context. Specifically, it is interesting to see how code-switching between English and Spanish in certain songs can be used to connect with the US Latino/a community, but also be a “foreign soundingness” for the audience outside of the mainland. Additionally, I argue that due to the increase in the bilingual populace around the world, it is not necessary for contemporary artists to translate their music to a specific …

Belonging To Harlem: Reading Zora Neale Hurston’S Story In Slang, Rumi Coller-Takahashi

Living in Languages

This essay examines Zora Neale Hurston’s “Story in Harlem Slang” (1942) to analyze how the reading experience of the story captures relational dynamics in the community of Harlem. Written in the “Harlemese,” a distinctive lexicon developed in the 1920s, the story seemingly serves as a dictionary with an attached glossary and illustrations of the vernacular words. Reading the story, however, not so much allows the readers to join the linguistic community as requires them to be conscious of the border-crossing movements. Such a structure is intertwined with the character’s theatrical life as a male prostitute, whose way of belonging to …

Introduction To Living In Languages: Volume 2, Andrew Brooks

Living in Languages

No abstract provided.

Intentional Entanglement, Andrew Brooks

Living in Languages

No abstract provided.

Translations Of Mohamed Sehaba, Yolande G. Schutter

Living in Languages

No abstract provided.

“Tea, With Roti And Butter, Mister?” An Examination Of A Single Phrase In A Sentence From Finnegans Wake, Sudarshan Ramani

Living in Languages

My paper discusses issues of translation particularly in relation to the untranslatable as understood by Jacques Derrida in “Des tours de Babel.” A single sentence from Finnegans Wake by James Joyce: "cha kai rotty kai makkar, sahib" sheds light on the issues of polysemy in a novel that deliberately overturns assumptions about the English language. Finnegans Wake as can be seen in the study of this sentence, was composed in anticipation of a non-European reader and a non-European audience. Joyce in this instance is performing an act of translation, one which translates a sentence of Hindi (albeit grammatically suspect) in …

Perpetual Emergency: The Self, Translation And Border Crossing, Umar Nizarudeen

Living in Languages

In the contemporary cognitive militarism, which is fast gaining ground in terms of its popularity, self-narratives are sought to be pitted against the practice of translation. The `self’ in this sense is that which is produced as a result of a process of self-narration or autopoiesis. What is foregrounded in cognitive militarism is not poetic subjectivity, but rather an instrumental subjectivity in the form of auto narration and self-apprehension in the form of self-narratives.

Rewriting And Retranslation In Fernando Arrabal’S Exiled Cinematic Memory, John D. Sanderson

Living in Languages

The rejection suffered in Spain by Fernando Arrabal’s cinematography, specifically by his films dealing with the Spanish Civil War, Viva la muerte (1971) and L’arbre de Guernica (1975), stands in contrast with the international appraisal received in France or the United States. The Spanish playwright and filmmaker, exiled in France since 1955, confronted with his cinematic memory the established historical master narrative in Spain both during Franco’s dictatorship and the newly born democracy, and experienced accordingly a fierce national critical backlash.

The fact that Arrabal wrote both film scripts in Spanish, based on his previous literary and theatrical work, had …

Translating The Poetry Of Leena Malhotra, Komal Agarwal

Living in Languages

No abstract provided.