Translation Across Disciplines - Panel 2: Translation, Technology and the Digital World

welcome everybody what a great conference I've learned so much already I can't wait uh my name is John kayy I'm a professor in the department of literary Arts I'm going to uh just name our panelists initially soak nakayasu Scott Ander and Matthew Reynolds uh I will very briefly introduce them and each when it's time for them to speak and we will have 15 minutes each then we will have a discussion amongst the panelists and then it will be open to Q&A so our first speaker is Soak nakasu who is uh an artist working with language performance translation her newest books include book notice books for newest pink waves Sako is also recently promoting yes as an associate professor in the department of literary Arts with tenure and she's the author of this pamphlet I'm going to take a little time which is say translation is Art uh a lovely little pamphlet I had it in my bag and then left it in my office um you should check it out but I want you to know there's two things about it one is that that word say in that context so difficult to translate because it say as say is a proposal or a challenge say translation is Art but it's also it also refers to the verbal the uh human embodied speech as essential translation it it makes constant reference to it the book repeats say as a challenge and a proposal all the way through every single nugget every paragraph Sako [Applause] thank you hi everybody uh thank you for this beautiful conference thanks John for the introduction I just want to say that I've got self-made bootleg copies of say translation is Art I can sell it to you in the back alley later um I am here to talk about a project that I've been working on with Brown University digital Publications I want to give my huge thanks to Alison Levy and Claire Jones who I've been working very closely with for with Allison for a number of years now um thanks to Jane Sakowski for the conference and my colleagues at Brown who made this possible and also to um Joie gustaly um Grace C vienti and W Jing Yap who have helped on the media components of this uh it's been a new exciting experience for me to work with translation in this capacity um and this is the landing page for the project I do want to say that we are very much in the thick of production right now so this is a little bit of a sneak preview we're not done yet but we're in the process of making this um it's based on the poet Saga Aika who is a Japanese modernist poet I'll give you a very brief introduction just to know something about her going into it she was born in 1911 in Hokkaido which is the northernmost Island in Japan very remote and very rugged the mountains go all the way up to the edge of the ocean um she was born there and moved to Tokyo when she was 17 and at that moment she jumped into this very very Lively artistic uh Community where they were um experimenting they were importing ideas from the West there was a lot of um self-publication happening because printing printing technology was improving at the moment um she died very young in 1936 so she only had six years of actively writing but she published over a 100 poems many of them in tiny tiny journals so one thing that's fascinating about her is that for every time a collected comes out it's never definitive because some other little Journal pops out later on and we discover a new poem Ms and she was also a translator which speaks to my heart as a translator and to many of you as well I think she's interesting to me partly because she was an early translator of some of our very well-known writers like Joyce and wolf but she also translated many lesser known writers and that was a big part of her development as a writer herself um after her death in 1936 she pretty much disappeared and people were not very aware of her her work appeared in these very limited editions of a couple hundred copies each they're very hard to get a hold of um but I discovered her work in 2002 and at that point she was an unknown she was like officially an unknown poet and if somebody knew them she'd go oh that's everybody's favorite unknown poet that's what she was at that time um as I started translating and Publishing her work I didn't care that she was unknown because I liked it so much and um I felt convinced and compelled just based on the work and I wasn't very concerned with translating the greatest Japanese poet even though I was um just new and getting my footholds as a translator at the time so you'll see 2006 was a pamphlet 2011 was my rogue experimental self-published work that I did in the middle of translating the collect Ed um so you'll see that in 2010 was yet the latest limited edition that also is out of print now but that's the book that my translation um these two are based on and then um I'll say also that between 2015 and 2022 there's a little chunk of time when saga's work was more widely available in English than in Japanese because of the circumstances and that brings us to the last two years um so 2022 this is the first time that her work has been widely available in Japanese it's done really well it's in its fourth printing even though it only came out two years ago and then this uh green book is published by yanami Bunko which is a major mainstream canonical translation it's this is like the equivalent of being a penguin classics but this is just last fall so it's really exciting to see the energy and momentum building around her work and then on the right is another English translation in collaboration between uh kuchina and Carol Hayes so that brings us to today this is poet Saga a late Gathering and it is a born digital scholarly publication I've been working on it with like I said with Brown University digital Publications for um for a while now and we called it late Gathering because it is a title of one of her poems it is also a title of one of her translations of a John sheer story and also because we are late and gathering around her work so that's uh that's the poem I I'll go back to this if I have time but I want to show you some uh excerpts from the project that we are building and this is the landing page where I guess it's the equivalent of a cover even though the whole point of the born digital publication is that it's not a book that's just online it's made in the digital space with the components as designed um from the beginning so we have a page that helps us organize the contents of the work um she was a poet who also wrote Pros um mostly poetry these are her poems they will be visible in English sometimes with multiple translations sometimes with Japanese there are Pros pieces that are important here because these are the few moments when you can see her speaking about the work um and it gives us a sense of her Poetics and then in the translation section we have works that she translated so that we get a sense of what she was like as a translator how she made her decisions and one of the essays in the project by Alice Moody talks about her as a global modernist poet working through different um different texts from that period so the galleries this is the space where we highlight different aspects of the project because there are so many different kinds of materials so um one example is this Gallery built around this one poem that begins with a manuscript version of her own handwriting which is very very rare and hard to get to I had to travel to Hokkaido to lay my hands on it myself but I wanted to share this she has beautiful handwriting I'll say that um there's a song there's another translation by Miriam SAS so there are multiple English language translations maybe I'll read this one one other thing a group of asparagus dives into the afternoon sun dirty their stems are severed by glass Blue Blood running down the window on the other side the sound of a fern unwinding and then further on in the gallery we actually have multiple versions of the same poem by by sagawa herself this I believe is circumstantial and not by Design but because she died before she was able to publish a collection of her own poetry what we're left with is these different variations that she published in journals so she herself has a variety of versions of the same poem just like we do in Translation have varieties of poems so there's no stable one single authentic authoritative version of the poem and that exists for many of her works so each gallery has a different uh concept around it sometimes it's thematic and um based on some of the essays that were written this is by Andrew compana who uses glitch Poetics to give a contemporary reading of her work I'll speak about him in a moment and I'll talk a little bit more later about Pascal Burton and her artistic response to sagaa so each gallery has a different idea and a concept this is about sagaa as a translator and as someone who is translated um so we've got Galleries and we've got essays which would be um more the traditional academic book you would collect scholarly essays written by um people who are specialists in the field so that's what we have they're gathered here as one grouping but they're also combined and rearticulated in the Galleries and then um I'll talk about the Zed unai first this is also a cult a cross-cultural project um I wanted to have an interaction between English language-based Scholars and Japanese Scholars so we brought together this um this mode of speaking about literature in Japanese communities that might bring together Scholars and Poets to sit down together sometimes it's very casual and sometimes it's formal they're recorded they're usually just audio recorded and then transcribed in our case we um video recorded and have uh a little bit of an excerpt to share with you so I'm going to move to that so this is toshiko Ellis who is a scholar of Japanese modernist poetry tree and here we are in the zanai um where we're sharing some [Music] thoughts chamber [Music] mus for thank you so so she goes on to give us more content text about the the space issues working in and Publishing in um and let me see I'm going to skip a little bit to um in another moment Ellis is talking about the specific Poetics of sagawa and she gives a reading of it that's very interesting in terms of how she handles the speaker of the poem and how it's almost not mediated but goes directly into the subject and um and I found it interesting that Andrew compana who came along later to write an essay through the lens of glitch Poetics was pointing to a similar thing that toshiko Ellis a Japanese scholar was pointing out in saga's work but giving it a different very contemporary and technological spin so I'm just going to read a little exerpt of Andrew um Andrew's essay where he says focusing on the concepts of the glitch and glitch Poetics as well as the related concept of disability Poetics I will explore how Sago as po approaches mediation in a way that centers non-normative embodiment and sensation I'm not arguing of course that saga's work was inspired by digital media which did not exist in anything resembling its current state until decades after her death or even that her work directly anticipates the digital but at a time when digital technologies have become so entangled with how we read write see and think whether or not we are actually on our devices there's an urgency in conceptual ing the digital or a broader kind of digitality beyond the screen SEO has glitched Poetics not despite but because of their pre-digital existence generate new ways of thinking about our relationship to technological mediation so I'm thinking about the ways in which the scholarship in different countries are um in conversation with each other and at the same time that a project like this allows for different modes of scholar ship and artistic uh response to coincide so I would like to um close by um by going to an excerpt um here we go this is a work by Pascal Burton who is a poet and a musician and this is a translation of a performance translation of my translation of saga's poems that Pascal Burton performed by typing and by recording the typing into a keyboard so she calls them keyboard performances and their documents of her writing into um into a digital space based on a translation of a text and this is why um we decided to use this as the cover page for the landing page also um this may be a little bit confusing I'm happy to talk more but I don't want to go over my time too much um just to give you a little sample of some of the things that are in this project thank [Applause] you so our next speaker is Scott andera and Scott is associate professor of linguistics at Brown and currently director of the program Brown program in linguistics I was interested to hear that that uh the Linguistics has established itself as a program distinct from uh what we call Clips cognitive linguistic for now for now for now uh Linguistics being perhaps not a science at all not in the traditional sense or perhaps perhaps a science that is a little bit unclear about what its object is I don't know Scott great uh thank you so much John and thanks to the organizers this is exciting to see so many people geeking out about language in so many different ways and different methods um yeah so I want to First say a little bit about the language communities in which I work just to provide context for the work that my colleagues and I are doing uh so the language uh that we that I work with is called a um also known as kofan um it's an isolate language meaning it's unrelated to any other language on Earth uh it's spoken in let's say 13 communities in Northeast Ecuador in the Amazonian part there that you highlighted in light green um and a few communities over the Border in Columbia all communities along the San Miguel and agaro rivers has roughly 1500 2,000 speakers something like that traditionally the AI the people that speak this language um lived more up in the andian Foothills and have been moving increasingly down river um into the Amazon um for reasons that we will see in a moment all right so the I are traditionally Hunter gathers living throughout that territory we just saw and there's lots of tales of people traveling much further a field many are still hunt hunter gatherers and this the extent to which this is true really varies a lot depending on the individual community and the particular situation of that Community is in so um some of the communities have roads that go to Major towns nearby some of them are a 5our motorboat ride away from the nearest road or cell signal so they are dramatically different from one another um in these photographs here on the right hand side you you can see some aspects of uh I.E material culture here so this is from a photo project that a photographer named Roberto berera did um the top one is the um cover photo of of a book called life in oil by an anthropologist Mike cek um that talks about the kofan people and their different you know varied positionalities relative to oil and extractive Industry in that region which is a huge thing there um in addition to the material culture here um there's various aspects of their traditional ways of life that are still quite thriving um so shamanistic religion and the use of yah or widely known as iasa among them there okay um so obviously the Spanish came to Ecuador as they did to many places um in you know the 15th 16th century and there indeed were Spanish missionaries in this region during that time despite that though the Spanish didn't really like the jungle there was diseases and things it didn't make them very happy um and the main missionary that went there was either killed or drove off a cliff on his horse or who knows um and they didn't really come back in large numbers and so the AI way of life was largely unaffected until the 1950s when oil was discovered smack dab in the middle of their territory in the middle of that light Green Dot that we have there um as you might imagine that caused a lot of change changes to happen very quickly so that much of the colonial encounter in this region has happened sort of within one lifetime from Soup To Nuts um so there's huge direct environmental impact of this oil and a decades long legal battle that's very famous um so if you've heard of the kofan people um either you know Ugo who I'll mention in a moment who is a brown undergraduate student and a cofound person who I collaborate with or you've heard of these lawsuits um so there's a lot of interesting scholarship on this by Anthropologist Mike cek and a lot of nonprofit that are doing really important work down there as well in addition to the oil itself um in order to facilitate oil exploration and later extraction they built you know roads and all kinds of things like that which has also LED in colonization and other extractive Industries like mining which are a key concern in some of the communities now um so here's just a few images of this so you can go take these toxic Texico tours now where you go walk through the jungle and see all of the oil that's still sitting there more or less un remediated um and this pipeline is kind of an everpresent um everpresent presence that's not very articulate um in this region all right uh so the work that my colleagues and I are doing is in this field of language documentation U so I want to say a little bit about what language documentation is so language documentation is an emerging interdisciplinary field uh really that's come into its own in the last 20 or 30 years and it aims to provide a comprehensive a multimedia multi-purpose record of linguistic practices of a given speech community and I think along with that part of the multi-purpose is to do that in a way that's dovetailed with um producing resources documenting different kinds of traditional knowledge different kinds of other kinds of things besides language so using language as a vehicle for all kinds of other different things um and so to do this we create things like grammars dictionaries text collections that people done you know since the days of France boas but also all kinds of other materials as well pedagogical materials electronic databases websites other kinds of things like that U so here's a few pictures of folks on our team engaged in various aspects of community meetings and um documentation here okay so our project the iay language documentation project um is is about 8 years old now and we go down there we collect audio and video do workshops to fac allow people there to collect audio and video as you can see here create a digital database out of this I I can show you sort of the web version of the part of the database that's on the website there and then we use this to co-construct community outcomes Community oriented publication so like an alphabet book here we have some digital animation work that are collaborator down there is doing a lot of and yes to answer scientific questions about the language as well um relating to its grammar and what it as a language unrelated to any other language on Earth can teach us about the nature of human language what kinds of languages are possible what kinds of grammatical rules exist don't exist um Etc um so that's sort of the broad um Pro broader project and so this being a translation conference I wanted to talk about the role of multilingual multimedia texts and the software that we've developed for for doing this here um so the team's goals and the broader profound Community as well Center obviously around the language I and so texts in I are of course a necessity and while there is some symbolic importance to monolingual texts in some situations in some contexts for some people that is ones that are not relying on a colonial language Spanish principally to you know go along with that allowing the iate to stand on its own there are also various purposes for which translations into Spanish and English especially also play Vital roles so when we're creating these texts we have kind of original recordings that are in I gay original texts in and then we're often co-constructing these Spanish and English versions along with it um so for cofound communities um this is a practical need for a variety of reasons so first there are much higher literacy rates in Spanish and among people who are not literate in Spanish there is a desire to become literate in Spanish or for their kids to become literate in Spanish and so having these kinds of at least bilingual versions is a vital necessity for sort of economic livelihood for many people um additionally especially in Colombia I is not fluently spoken by all young people in all communities it's an endangered language and so having a version that is bilingual um is also you know of vital importance in those communities as well and for those individuals um another thing that we found um in beginning this project was we sort of immediately met with this desire we want translations English also so you know from my perspective this isn't necessary for outside researchers like me if you're going to this corner of the world you already speak Spanish um but for people there they wanted English translations as well and this is partially for symbolic reasons I think that English has a certain Prestige and so seeing that it's there is important it's also partially for practical reasons because people in kofan communities have some amount of tourist infrastructure either in the cloud forest or in the Amazon proper or aspire to have that if they don't have that um it's also useful for for for researchers translations of course make the materials more accessible to outside researchers um and so I have you know collaborative projects working with other folks that don't speak Spanish and so having these materials in English as well is helpful for that and of course having them in Spanish is helpful for outside researchers I think it's for both outside and Community researchers an important thing as well um because we are talking about documenting and endangered language and so better ensuring that this IND dangerous knowledge that's embedded in these texts both knowledge about the language and its use and knowledge about other topics that's carried via language are shared um more broadly um and again as I noted you know there are some communities already where the language is not having robust intergenerational transmission and for which we therefore also want to have this okay all right so this is a picture of our our kind of core team from a from a workshop a few years back um so I co-direct the sort of this phase of the project at least with Dr Wilson Jula Silva at the University of Arizona and we have funding from the NSF documenting endangered languages program among other groups that allow us to go down there and pay all these fine folks working on our our team there so we have ai community members uh you can see we tend to have young people because we do a lot of work with computers and digital recording and digital animation and things um but we do have some people of different different ages and we have uh us-based students here that are working on projects of various kinds um in collaboration with everyone there and then we have collaborations with other researchers both from gofan communities and from elsewhere um and then with other Educators there as well um oh so I missed the first bullet point so this project began um in collaboration with ugol lucante um who's a brown undergraduate student who U many of you probably know at least some of you do uh so he graduated in 2019 here U with his ba at Brown and is now an anthropology PhD student at UT San Antonio so he's one of the 1500 speakers of this language um okay so what our team does then is just to sort of lay out the pipeline a little bit and then I can talk about the kind of technological solutions that we've come up with for this um so we've collected many hours of audio and video across different genres so we have traditional sto stories personal narratives um different kinds of traditional knowledge about how to make certain kinds of food about hunting fishing histories of the founding of these communities since many of these communities pretty much all of them were sort of founded as such within the lifetime of people that we interview um we've worked primarily in the four most major communities in Ecuador sabalo Theo duno and sangu um and so we have workshops where we you know go down and train people in videography and audio recording and metadata informed consent and having conversations about where these materials might be displayed and where people want them displayed and for what purposes they can be used Etc uh we train people in using software called Elon um which is very standard in linguistics and so that software that allows you to do timeline transcription translations you can kind of add whatever annotations you want in a Time aligned way um thanks and you can from there export it to subtitle YouTube videos if you want Etc and I'll show you sort of our interface that we've built that interfaces with that later uh we also have undergraduate students here along with me um who are working doing annotation of these materials in Flex or fieldworks language Explorer it's a sort of purpose-built linguistic database software um that is quite prevalent in the field okay so we make these primary materials annotate them and then use them for a VAR of different kinds of secondary purposes so this includes of course you know printed book collections of texts and things like that um which both have kind of a symbolic importance and also have a practical value um as well since not everyone has devices or at least not everyone has devices with big enough screens they want to see things on them I mean everyone's got a cell phone these days but um so yeah okay so we have these rich annotated multiply translated materials and then we Face a problem what do we want to do with them so traditionally there's kind of two kinds of outputs that come from this kind of work you know thinking 30 years ago or something and we can see here the sort of two primary collections of texts that existed prior to our project that show you what these outputs look like and their advantages and disadvantages right so on the left we have a collection of texts produced by um linguists from the summer Institute of linguistics a missionary linguistic organization that goes around the world translating the Bible and learning local languages to do that and and so they produce this text collection on the left you can see it has all kinds of different translations different kinds of linguistic annotations tells you what part of speech different things are all kinds of things you can also see that it's probably impossible to read if you're not a linguist kind of a pain in the butt to read if you are a linguist and so it's sort of not very user friendly in that sense on the right hand side you can see a text collection that one of our team members collaborators U amenda made with a different missionary um and you can see here well this is much more readable it looks much more like you would expect a book to look like but now suddenly all of those different translations and annotations are missing right and so in collect in creating these kinds of outputs we have to make kind of one-time choices what do we include do we include all this information do we include some of it do we include none of it and there is no one- siiz fits-all solution of what things an end user for this would want um and so what we've done in our project is create this software we call link view um that so I don't do a lick of programming the undergrads here do the programming um and we wrote a paper about it in the journal language documentation and conservation um the code's all on GitHub so you can use it for your own purposes but it's software that takes these F annotation files that are very standard in the field of linguistics and displays them online here so hopefully the website link will work here uh so this is a a St traditional story called edion that's about a young person who is captured by another indigenous group that is known for their savagery according to the kofun and taken away so you can see here so we have video we have all these annotations crucially though we can choose which ones we want right so this is an English audience so maybe I'll turn off some of the Spanish [Music] things I see a few linguists out there but maybe not enough that we want to see all the morphological analysis is here and so we can take this off here and then we play all right so you get a little bit of sense of what the software is like um and yeah um yeah all right so I guess I'm out of time so to get H thank you and thanks to everyone [Applause] else our next speaker is Matthew Reynolds who's a professor of English and comparative criticism at Oxford University uh that makes him a proper Dawn um I want you to refer I forgot to refer you to the website where you can get more much Fuller biographies of the speakers I also want to take the opportunity because I just want to for a little quip a a a a um a mode of translation which I came across when reading the section about Balck in in PR I was struck by this phrase it was her home that traveled rather than herself the in home obviously that's a problem for the translation part and this was about a woman who was in the hotel who uh was very well off and had her own curtains all of her photograph photographs from home brought to her H hotel room so that she felt completely at home within the little space of the Cocoon of the hotel and I suddenly thought of this as a as a metaphor for a certain mode of translation which uh is kind of interesting and which has been evoked a couple of times in speakers previous and I think also by Matthew thank [Applause] you it's because I've been identified as a as a Wanderer so I have to have this to be miced up like this uh it's yeah I should say it's lovely to be here and thank you so much to um to Jane and to everyone um everyone involved uh so uh yes so that's my title this um this this phrase Prismatic translation which I've um I guess I've been working with the idea of it is um to shift the emphasis in thinking about translation um well it's it's to recognize really that translation always generates Multiplicity um and to put that at the center of one's thinking and that's been evident um you know in the session in in you know in various ways earlier today um and uh I I sort of explored that um in this book which was a collaborative publication that John was involved in that was exciting and that so's work is also um disussed um and what I'm going to uh share with you today is a kind of massive instance of an exploration of plural translations um which is to focus on Charlotte bronte's novel J published in English in in 1847 um it's a it's a um it's a collaborative project there's a website um and then recently published is this um Open Access book um which is I I guess I kind of it sits quite interestingly in relation to the two in a sense more developed projects we've just been hearing about in that it's an exploded uh book so that it it exists it's got um quite a lot of writing and theorizing by me in it and it's got essays about particular translations in particular locations by my many collaborators um but it also links to interactive digital media so there are interactive maps um there are little verbal animations um when you're reading it online obviously you just click to open these things up when you're reading it as a physical book actually the book was too heavy for me to bring over on the flight I realized otherwise I would have it because it's too big but when you uh when you're when you're reading in a book you just point your phone at the QR code to open up these um these interactive media um I just want to uh recognize the funders and and assert the importance of this being a radically collaborative project I mean I guess like others in this session I'm not myself a technical person I'm just a litery person um and I found myself sort of moving into being interested in what one can do with some some of the affordances of technological and and and digital uh kind kinds of work because of the questions that I was interested in exploring and because I was interested in exploring them collaboratively so for me the kind of collaborative aspect of the project and the digital aspect of the project belong very much together um so what's the idea the idea is to say um charlot Bron's novel J published in English in in 1847 is not just an English novel um it's been translated many many times um I didn't realize quite how many when I started the project it's been translated more than 600 times um into at least 68 different languages um and um the idea is to say um that the novel is the coexistence of all these texts um um which is to say that you know as we know there's always something creative about any translation and that creativity leeches back into the source text um so that when you're thinking about it it really um you know you could describe this phenomenon um as saying well okay there's the original and here are all these translations which are kind of separate imitations and that's not a very good description a better description is to say and this is what I mean by the world work um that the existence of charlot bronto's J is in fact um co-constituted by The Source t in all these translations together and the aim of the project was to try to recognize the force of that and to find some way not just of kind of chronicling this phenomenon but also to to read it um because there are kind of some views in in in world literature that you know when you have a phenomenon as vast as this you can't really read it anymore all you can do is kind of treat it as data or as information and I wanted very much to kind of resist that and the other people participating in the project that as well we wanted to to sort of find find a way of reading um so okay so firstly um finding out where all the translations are took quite a lot of research there are databases that pretend to present this information but perhaps unsurprisingly they're they're in fact radically unrepresentative very eurocentric so a lot of research went into finding as many translations as we could so you have this great mass of information and how then do you make sense of it um and luckily at that moment um my dear friend and colleague javanni actually I didn't know but he is now my dear friend and colleague Javan showed up and said well you can make these interesting interactive maps um a map is great obviously in that it gives you a view of something I think the problem with a map is that it gives you a view of something in a way I mean it makes you think that you have the other kind of command of what you're seeing um so it was really important to to me and to us that the map should be interactive and that there should also be a variety of different kinds of them and I'm just going to show you some of these interactive maps over the next two or three minutes um so that's one kind of map that we presented that you can kind of zoom in on and click on the dots to open it up I like the way it represents the geographical spread the translations problem with it though is that each of those dots has got many others many other translations stacked underneath it so when you're looking at it you can't see you know how many translations there are in each place um here's a different map which should I hope start moving in a minute which has got got numbers on it so that when as a reader when you know I as a researcher or as a reader kind of opening this in the book you go in and you want to say oh yes look there's where should we go should we go to isir or should we go to Athens there are 19 translations in Athens and look I can click and open up and discover the first translation in Greek and be interested in that and then actually in the book you can turn to an essay about the Greek um about the Greek uh translations by Lenny philippo and discover actually the very interesting story about how come j was first translated into Greek in 1849 um here's a different kind of map um this was about which links uh covers of the books to locations of Publishers where we could could find out what the locations of the Publishers are to be moving um there we go um so these are these are translations into Persian and really the idea here was and experiential one and actually here I'm remembering the sort of um JD your presentation earlier which is to say one of the things I really wanted to get out was the sense of translation as a process being done by people and actually you know the the the the the gener ation of this multiplicity of texts is something that is happening you know being done by people through space and time rather than just something that you kind of Chronicle in an encyclopedia or in a dictionary um so the idea here was to get people to spend time paying attention to the uh cover images thinking about the production of the book and having some sense of the location um in which this was being done um this is another one which shows the translations appearing bit by bit through time um oops oops sorry it's meant to be uh quite sure why that's not working anyway it's meant to be um oh yes it's because I've gone to that too far okay anyway what's meant to happen they're meant to I don't quite understand whether that's not working anyway maybe I can do it from I can do it from here though H yes I I put this on the I mean it's it's a bit absurd because I put this on the fastest setting obviously because time is so limited and actually it's much better and kind of rather calming to watch it on a on a slower slower mode it's a nice thing to do at the end of a busy day um but um actually I wanted to show show that I mean a lot of translation of j a happening in East Asia in the late 20th and early 21st century you can you can see even from that highspeed rendition um but when you're looking at it more slowly because one of the things about these Maps is that they throw questions at you so here I've wound it back just to um the first few years after the publication of J in English so these are translations published up to 1851 and you can see there's a scattering of them in Europe as you might expect but there were also these translations being published in Cuba Chile and Bolivia which to me was a surprise um and then you say well okay I need to find out why this is happening so you go and do some archival research and some some reading and there's actually a really interesting story about Jenna being translated into into French in Paris and then that translation being translated into to Spanish also in Paris and that translation then being syndicated um to newspapers these are Publications in newspapers in in Chile CU and bivia which I I kind of write about at some length in the book um so I guess yeah so that's something about that's something about the use of these interactive maps um and I think so the issues I guess there are two issues for me or maybe three um one was about just being able to understand the vast amount of information that we've gathered um another one was this sense of holding on to the idea of translation as a process and the third issue for me was thinking about that mode of translation which was also been very visible in the the two earlier presentations in the session which is the translation of one's work into whatever kind of form one wants to share it with readers in um and I wanted this book to kind of open up so that readers can can explore um and the reason for that actually I think is I very much wanted to get away from the notion that Jane ER as a world work is something that you can encapsulate and kind of command as knowledge um it's only a phenomenon that you can enter into and explore um and I wanted to and I do some writing about that in the book but I also wanted to give readers that sense of kind of that the book was something that they were entering into and exploring and and actually um this disconnects with something that was said earlier kind of kind of never quite getting to the end of um the other aspect though is is uh is reading so we wanted to try to find a way of reading J as a world work um and one way of doing that I guess is the sort of traditional way of saying I'm going to select this translation or a couple of translations and look at them in context and think about what the translator was doing and so on so there's a whole series of essays in the book by by my colleagues that do that for a whole range of different contexts uh because obviously it's really important about any Act of translation that is being done by someone in a particular context in a particular moment but I also wanted to assert that another really important thing about any of these translations is that they also participate in the larger multilingual cloud of textuality which is j a as a world work and I wanted to find some way of I don't know making that available to experience um obviously when you're trying to do this you know you again need to select but you can select in a different way so that rather than saying I'm going to focus on this place you say well I'm going to focus on this aspect of the text and see what becomes of it across multiple translations and that's we that's what we did together as a group it was lovely actually and one of the things I most enjoyed about this project was the experience of kind of participating and collaborative close reading one of the things we did was choose particular words to trace um and one of the words was was passion um this is a really complex and important word for Charlotte Bronte and jire because she makes an argument with it a feminist argument in the mid 19th century which is to say that for a young woman in the mid-9th century The Passion of Love um is not a tender passion or a passive passion but it's continuous with other passions like rage and self assertion and standing up to Injustice so there occurrences of the word throughout the novel tell you know sort of make that assertion and so that's then a challenge to translators um so I'm just going to look at one instance of okay I'm just going to look at one instance of this uh so this is from you can represent the many translations like that and I do do that in the book I find that quite hard to spend time with and read so I did these also did these kind of very lowf fire animations just encouraging readers to spend a little bit of time looking at each uh looking at each translations this is from a moment very early on in the book when the young Jane is fighting against her bullying cousin I kind of disembodied voice comes and says did ever anybody see such a picture of passion I think this is a question for readers too you know what sort of passion are you seeing here and what you find in these many translations is that different readers are seeing different things so that for some people this is glorious moment an ecstatic moment for one of them uh for others it's a moment of malice or what's what's um what's what's manifested as a kind of beastliness um another thing to do though is to look at and we do this with passion as well but this is a different instance is to see what happens to word as it's repeated throughout the text and the corresponding words as they're repeated through a particular translation so another really important um word for Charlotte Bronte is plain and again she's making an argument with it which is to say that um if you're plain looking that's not necessarily a disadvantage because it takes you out of the social world and the marriage market and you can see things plainly and you have the space to speak out plainly um and the recurrences of the word throughout the book made that argument and actually they're contrasted they're very strongly associated with Jane the the protagonist and narrator and the word that's associated with Rochester is the word ugly and he's ugly physically and he's ugly ethically as well and indeed if I were to be asked to do a kind of three-word summary of the novel in uh of the English version of the novel it would be plain Meats ugly um but in French you can't maintain that distinction or it's very hard to and what you've got in the first uh full length French translation by no sylvestra is all these uh appearances of plain and ugly become get translated as lead so that breaks the pattern that there is in English and creates a differently significant pattern which is a pattern of different kinds of ugliness coming together in the source of the in the story so I mean as I say we did this as human readers with just the very basic technological help of kind of electronic text and word searches it does seem to me the kind of reading that um you know that that Ai and the and the new developments in the powers of technological translation could help one do a bit more of because you you follow these patterns and immediately it's just too many to follow there are too many different Pathways um we did a little bit though of um of close reading with digital help so this I don't really have time to talk about but it's a little um just just looking at type token ratio and seeing when the type token ratio in a translation diverges radically from the other translations and going to see why that is I found that quite an interesting experience um and this is some ongoing work being done by a colleague Sasha rudan just to sort of make it a bit easier to look at many translations together and and see what's going on in them um so uh but okay so that's yeah um that that's um so really the there is this sort of moving into the world of the of of the digital which I think I could do more of um if any wants to kind of help me do that that would be lovely um and I sort of but because I'm not quite quite sure where to go with it next but actually what I the emphasis I want to end on is that this kind of Adventure of um chy to regener as a world work which is vast and therefore impossible and therefore you reach out for help from technological affordances to help you do that but it becomes a kind of reading and it's a kind of reading that a new kind of a newish kind of reading that I very much enjoyed which I which I decided to call literal not literal reading but literal reading which is the sense you're always just on the edge of the vaster multilingual text which is always beyond your grasp and you can I'm quite sure where I'm going with this metaphor you can kind of throw out a net or you can capture little bits of it or something but the sense that you as a reader are participating in a much larger world of textuality multilingual textology that you can experience but you can't to some extent you can join in experiencing but you can't have a command uh to me that was a yeah a lovely a lovely thing to discover actually okay thank [Applause] you well we are a little pressed for time and we did start late I think we've got a good 10 minutes or so and if you guys are ready to do to set off on a conversation please go for it I have many questions if you want to be started off I had I had a question so about um just about so so I mean it look really wonderful and beautiful and and lovely to explore I just wonder about the sort of the moment of focus on the poem if that's something you wanted to create within um within the born digital publication or whether you're sort of imag because the that is also important isn't it it's important to explore but it's also important in Reading to have the moment of just I'm just I'm just reading this I've got this thing I'm just reading it and so do you do you sort of hope that somebody might also have the book of poems and and and then turn to your to to your born digital publication or do you try were you thinking about how to create sort of moments of focused reading within that space well I like the the idea of giving the reader all the options so you can spend your entire time with that publication with the poems and pros and translations just by Saga but I think because the essays and the other components refer to each other in so many different ways in a sense that the exploded reading brought back into one place so it's curated in such a way that um you might hear one of the scholars uh refer to a poem in their scholarly essay but that poem is within the same publication and you can move and hold those spaces together um but it's not the entire work so if you do feel inspired you need to actually get the book and read the whole thing so they they coexist I think but I have a question for you mat well I was just thinking about um your your sense of the world work and the the fact that you can't command it all because there's so many and that made me wonder how you even distinguish what gets included in a DOT on the map like does it have to be published does it have to be a big enough publisher can it be someone's dissertation there must be yeah an infinite range of engagements with jire maybe there are translations that are not official or accurate or whatnot but where are those lines yeah sure yeah no no absolutely really good question because there are many you know yeah absolutely there are many kind of plural responses reactions critical essays about etc etc um so we just and you know I write about this at some length obviously but um we just had other rule of thumb um and I I guess there were two things actually one was you have to have a rule of thumb because you can't write about everything but also I was just really interested in the particular claim that a translation makes on on the identity of the text which is to say that if you're reading a you know if you're reading something like white if you're reading a kind of creative reimagining it says well I'm a creative reimagining of this text I'm not this text um so that what and and you know for me that's the Paradox of that that is just the kind of amazing you know peculiarity of translation that here you have a text that's completely different from the source text and yet it's the same again um and so we we took that as our rule of thumb which is to say the text that presented themselves and this is the classic descriptive translation studies move to say a text that presents itself as a translation we'll call that a translation um but there was something so it had to be a um it had to be yeah it had to be print it had to be published um it had to be a work of fiction um it had it had to um it had to be kind of in a in a printed book um and it had to say in some sense I am jire now it's complex though because uh because what what it is to say I am jire is different in different cultures the title is often different Etc so there's kind of judgment you know and there are lots and lots of instances where one can contest what's included and what's not uh but it's yeah it's a really interesting interesting question um yeah yeah open it yeah sorry I'll ask a question fascinating I'm glad you ask just two questions but how do you account for not just the linguistic constraints on a translation but also the potential historical ones um and I don't know what they would be with J there but I was teaching last last term about translations reir completely different you know what I wondered if you account for that yeah um and then the bigger question is do you read the English Jer differently yourself yeah no no I do completely read the English J now differently and indeed one of the I mean I'm I'm I'm employed by an English Department and one of the things that one one of the things that really really always frustrates me is the kind of boundary that's drawn you know I don't know how much how strong that is here but in the UK really strong boundaries between you know the thing called English and all other languages literatures I mean now actually departments in English University are often reforming themselves as languages literatures and cultures departments which in exclude English English is different from that anyway so so so one of the things I I I I wanted was to show English readers why they should be interested in translations of English texts into other into other languages because it was going to change how they read you know the thing the text they thought they possessed you know the English the English faculty kind of possesses the text because it's an English litery text that's not the case at all and and so that that was one of the things I I I wanted to do was to kind of change how even mon even monolingual English readers would read J to something or at least create the possibility that that could change um the thing about constraints yes so there are lots of so here there are this is in the um the essays that focus in on particular context um and um it's a really important feminist text in in in interestingly related and yet different ways in many different contexts in Portugal in the 1880s um in uh in uh Chile in the uh 1940s Etc so there were various essays in the book that focus in on particular context um and make that argument um but actually one thing that really interestingly happens in relation to to censorship um is that in some context because it's a 19th century novel it's felt to be safe so for instance you know there's a lovely essay byav and about translations in Iran and there's an amazing burgeoning of translations of J in Iran after after the Islamic revolution in 1979 because a kind of writing that people had a hunger for was banned and those imaginative impulses could find a vent in translations of J so so that's a really interesting instance of that yeah I imagine we're running out of time I don't know if this is working or not I have a quick question for Scott um I love your text Time videos I want all for every I want those for every but I'm wondering if you could talk more about the material that you create and how the community uses them reacts to them and how they like participate in creating the materials yeah um thank you for the question yeah so I think the in general like my interest is in my selfish interest is in grammar and so I don't care what the materials are about I'm not like an anthropologist studying this specific cultural practice and so the folks on our team in from who are community members have a lot of latitude to decide what things interest them to record and to you know decide that in conversation with the people that they're recording so like we have one person on our team who was working on a master's degree in agriculture and environmental practices and so did a lot of you know very detailed interviews about decisions people were making about how what crops to plant and how and why and then other people make other decisions I think a lot of people sort of default to traditional narratives and so one interesting thing about that that we haven't done anything with yet is that we have you know maybe four or five different versions of certain very Salient narratives from different communities from different speakers of different ages and things and so there's a lot of potential for thinking about those um texts and how they do and don't differ from one another even within Productions within the same language um to say nothing of the different translations that I guess we have for each one into Spanish um as far as what community members do with them um well I mean they're on the website so people can access them there and depending on the community they might have internet access they might not um the communities havit to have highspeed internet access these days um so it's primarily in you know K through2 educational contexts that we're working with teachers to create physical books but also to make these materials go further so we have kind of meetings with folks who were down there to think about what the right outcomes are that are most productive for people there that's that's a great Segway that request teaching [Applause]

2024-07-04 18:32

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