Ogden Nash in German

I’m teaching a German literary translation course at Wabash College. Needless to say, this has caused me to scramble quite a bit to get a collection of readings and STs together (!), but it has been really fun to reactivate my long-dormant German and explore this new translation world with 10 hard-working and committed students. Next week we read Dryden on translation, and then use his framework to discuss translations of Ogden Nash into German. Why Ogden Nash, of all people? Well, because I’ve always wondered how a translator would render his ridiculous rhymes (cf. “dad jokes”), long sentences, and arch tone. Here’s a sample:

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Pictures from the "Life Stories, Death Sentences" reading in NYC (June 2019)

Pictured: Eliot Borenstein's opening comments, readings from Brad Damaré, Annie Fisher, and Georgina Barker, and closing comments from Julie Cassiday. Closing pic is of John Cappetta who made the very complicated tech work beautifully.

June 14th, 2019: Bilingual Event in NYC to Celebrate "Life Stories, Death Sentences"

Thrilled to see this event coming together! We have all four translators coming to this bilingual reading, plus recordings from all eight authors, a video connection to co-editor Margarita Meklina, and commentary from Julie Cassiday and Eliot Borenstein. Thanks to Jen Zoble and everyone at InTranslation for not only accepting “Life Stories, Death Sentences” for publication, but also creating such an amazing event to celebrate these writers’ and translators’ important work. Click below for the full Eventbrite description!

Julia Lukshina's Nervous is forthcoming in Asymptote!

The good folks at Asymptote have accepted my translation of Julia Lukshina’s one-act Nervous for publication in the October issue! Very glad to see this piece come out. Нервы was read in 2016 in Russia (left, where it was a finalist at the 2016 Lyubimova Theater Festival) and Nervous was read in 2018 in the US at the ALTA conference in Bloomington. Startling to see how young an actor was cast as Ilona in the Russian version!

Vladimir Danay directed the staged reading of Нервы for the 2016 Lyubimovka Festival. (I couldn’t find the actor’s names, but they play Katya, Ilona, and Sasha/Announcer.)

Vladimir Danay directed the staged reading of Нервы for the 2016 Lyubimovka Festival. (I couldn’t find the actor’s names, but they play Katya, Ilona, and Sasha/Announcer.)

Student director Eleanor Sobczyk (not pictured) directed a staged reading at ALTA41 in Bloomington, IN performed by student actors Zack Rocklin-Waltch (Announcer), Meg Barton (Katya), and Haley Rose (Ilona), all of the Indiana University Department …

Student director Eleanor Sobczyk (not pictured) directed a staged reading at ALTA41 in Bloomington, IN performed by student actors Zack Rocklin-Waltch (Announcer), Meg Barton (Katya), and Haley Rose (Ilona), all of the Indiana University Department of Theatre, Drama and Contemporary Dance

Oyub Titiyev, Chechen Human Rights Defender - Story by Shura Burtin

I translated Russian journalist Shura Burtin’s piece “Monitor 1” for the new True Story Award, an initiative of the German magazine Reportagen to honor excellent long-form journalism and “supplement and broaden the predominantly Western view of the world with other perspectives.”

In “Monitor 1,” Burtin tells the story of Chechen human rights defender Oyub Titiyev (also transliterated “Titiev”), imprisoned by Chechen authorities on false charges in reprisal for Titiyev’s work with the Chechen branch of Memorial documenting state-sponsored violence against civilian Chechens.

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Burtin’s original Russian reporting in Meduza.

On March 18, 2019, Titiyev was sentenced to four years in a penal colony. His supporters were actually relieved to hear his sentence: it could have been far, far worse. Yet Titiyev is by no means safe.

You can read more about Oyub Titiyev’s case in English on the Frontline Defenders website here and on the Amnesty International website here.

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Memorial’s report on Titiyev’s imprisonment (in Russian).

Although colony rules allow family visits, most of Titiyev’s family members got so many death threats that Memorial moved them to Europe.

Check in for more updates…




Russian Translation Assessment Workshop at the Hunter College TIS Conference

I was hoping to gather information on best practices in assessing student translations, and the conference delivered in spades. In no particular order, here are some of the strategies and ideas gleaned from the workshop:

a)     there is a need for a collection or library of sample texts that present typical translation RU>EN challenges: participles, noun chains, verb tenses, passive constructions, etc. The group is working on an open, public place to store/exchange these sample texts. (I can collect them on this website, I can easily add a page for this)

b)    most of the group used either codes or numbers to indicate error, with additional marginal comments or end comments

c)     translations tend to be more successful if there is peer review before the final translation is submitted; most had from one to three intermediate drafts before final submission

d)    also helpful to do group workshops to produce intermediate drafts. (We didn’t discuss how to structure group work for online courses, since I was the only one there teaching online courses.)

e)    definitely need pre-translation exercises that make students slow down and focus on comprehension before they begin translating. Students can tend to work too fast, and can translate without actually understanding big picture of what their text is arguing. Some pre-translation exercises to help with this:

  1. изложение (abstracting and/or gisting); short first, then detailed

  2. retelling/intralingual translation: have students say what each sentence says, but in their own words (in the SL – no SL-TL translation in this exercise) (AOF note: this could be good peer exercise, where they have to explain their text to each other in SL?)

  3. scaffolding: have students parse sentences from the assigned text, then provide feedback on each other’s sentences (helps zoom in and focus on minutia of grammar, punctuation)

f)    tailor feedback to the level/”constellation of problems” of particular student. Some students require more help with understanding the ST grammar; other students struggle with TT style.

  1. in “overall/wrap-up” feedback, identify the primary levels/kinds of error

  2. keep “overall/wrap-up” comments to 3 things; if a TT requires more extensive feedback, deliver the rest through conversation or through targeted post-trans exercises that allow the student to work through the problem herself

g)     post-translation exercises (for refining drafts before final submission): have students go through and reread/revise for just one thing at a time

h)    Post-completion exercises (after final submission): instead of/in addition to written reflection, have students record a 3 to 5-minute screencast where they walk us through 3 translation problems and walk us through their research etc. to show how they solved these problems (AOF post-session idea)

i)      Observation: need to have students be aware of different levels of textual organization and cohesion: not just start at beginning and translate until you get to the end; but look at text at many different levels/units: term; phrase; period; sentence; section; whole text.

j)      Observation: not all assessments focused on same problems, and even the problems that were universally noted were not understood the same way by all assessors; interesting to consider that just as there can be more than one correct translation, there can also be more than one correct set of feedback or mode of feedback delivery

k)     for next time: I personally would like to see a workshop on how to help students edit and refine their own work. Also: how to actively hone students’ understanding of style in their TL? (Cf. “Translation-Adjacent Reading Practices,” Anne Janusch’s brilliant presentation on honing students’ awareness of writing style in English)

TECH TOOLS FOR DELIVERING FEEDBACK - Tips from the Hunter College TIS Pedagogy Conference

Since I teach online translation courses, I was hoping that the Hunter College CUNY TIS Pedagogy conference would give me some more tools for delivering feedback in several modalities. It did! Here are the technologies for delivering feedback that were mentioned during the conference: please add more in the comments, or email me at anne (dot) o (dot) fisher (at) gmail and I will add them to this list.

GoReact – https://get.goreact.com/ - videos with great functionality for audio-recorded AND typed comments (good for teaching interpreting)

CamScanner - https://www.camscanner.com/ - take a pic on your phone, turn it into a PDF

VoiceThread - https://voicethread.com/ - record audio or type in comments on docs, video, etc; also a very robust discussion feature

Screencastomatic - https://screencast-o-matic.com/ - for walking students through doing online research, or recording think-aloud protocols while you manipulate the document

SketchEngine - https://www.sketchengine.eu/ - language corpus management and query system – good for helping students do pre-translation text analysis and monitor terminology during translation

Hunter College CUNY Translation Pedagogy Conference, April 6-7, 2019

I am at the Hunter College CUNY Translation Pedagogy Conference today and tomorrow. What a marvelous conference and confluence of practitioners! Here from left to right we have the roundtable “Translation by Any Other Name: Living in Translation Outside the Classroom” with stellar moderator Julie Van Peteghem of Hunter College and four brilliant Hunter College undergraduates/recent grads with some truly humbling language pairs: Aziza Babaeva (Russian and Tadzhik>English), Darya Badikova (Russian>English), Fatima Tariq (Pashtun, Urdu, and Arabic>English), and Kimberly Martinez (Spanish and Japanese>English). Hearing them speak about TIS (Translation and Interpreting Studies), and about their experience studying TIS formally after being informal translators/interpreters for family members for years, was just superb. Thank you to Margarit Ordukhanyan and her cadre of dedicated student volunteers for organizing this conference!

Memorable conference phrases so far include (but are not limited to) “our literature in translation courses should be haunted by the specter of all the books that were not translated” (from Brian J. Baer’s introductory keynote), how disruptive technology actually is (from Caitlin Walsh’s talk), the Queen James Bible (from Adrian Izquierdo’s talk), and Aron Aji’s concluding keynote on using a practice-centered translation pedagogy to—among other things— open the learning space to heritage languages and thus to lives that otherwise sit silent in the classroom. Glad to see so many abilities, modalities, nationalities, and other ties being celebrated at this conference!

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