{"id":6130,"date":"2020-09-30T19:43:46","date_gmt":"2020-09-30T23:43:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.attlc-ltac.org\/?p=6130"},"modified":"2020-10-01T17:28:39","modified_gmt":"2020-10-01T21:28:39","slug":"celebrating-world-translation-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.attlc-ltac.org\/en\/celebrating-world-translation-day\/","title":{"rendered":"Celebrating World Translation Day"},"content":{"rendered":"

Literature in translation today touches on wide-ranging and often challenging themes: whether it\u2019s watching the last of a northern Canadian winter during a COVID-19 quarantine, bearing witness to oppression in Hong Kong or a critique of gender roles in post-war Denmark through the eyes of a young girl, translation offers the chance for important work to reach new audiences.<\/p>\n

All of these ideas and more\u2014including contemporary Arabic and Japanese poetry\u2014are brought to life by University of Alberta scholars with the Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies in this YouTube video<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In celebration of World Translation Day and the university’s annual St. Jerome’s Day translation conference and readings, five translators share their work in partnership with the Literary Translators Association of Canada.<\/p>\n

Hosted by Anne Malena<\/a>, University of Alberta professor and editor of TransCulturAl: A Journal of Translation and Cultural Studies<\/a>, the event is a virtual version of the annual St. Jerome’s Day conference\u2014something Malena has been organizing for 18 years. The event celebrates translation, translators and translation scholars. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the in-person event was postponed until 2021, and is planned for September of next year with a theme of ‘Translation and Queer’.<\/p>\n

This year, though, the community has come together to celebrate the festival virtually.<\/p>\n

One translator, Sof\u00eda Monz\u00f3n, reads her own poem in Spanish and her English translation: \u201cProceso de balc\u00f3n en cuarentena\u201d\/\u201dQuarantine Balcony in the Midst\u201d. A PhD candidate in transnational and comparative literatures, her first collection of poetry, Alas (Wings in English) was published in 2019.<\/p>\n

Another, Marina Allemano, reads a translation of the poem “The Ashtray” (Askeb\u00e6geret in Danish) from the poetry collection Odd Couples (Umage par, 1983) by Dorrit Willumsen. Allemano holds a PHd in comparative literature and has taught Scandinavian studies at the University of Alberta.<\/p>\n

Other featured translators and their work include:
\n– Matthew Danzinger, Master\u2019s student in East Asian studies
\no Translation of \u201cSigh\u201d by Kawaji Ry\u016bk\u014d (\u5ddd\u8def\u67f3\u8679 in Japanese)
\n– Wangtaolue Guo, PhD student in transnational and comparative literatures
\no Translation of an untitled Facebook post dated April 26, from Mandarin to English, by Chris Song, a poet and journal editor based in Hong Kong.
\n– Houssem Ben Lazreg, PhD candidate, modern languages & cultural studies
\no Translation from Arabic to English of the poem “A young woman” by Palestinian-Egyptian poet Tamim Al-Barghouti<\/p>\n<\/div>

<\/div><\/div>