"Translators Struggle to Prove Their Academic Bona Fides"

[Valentino, Russell]

On the subject of educating others about the work of translation, I wrote a short piece for Words Without Borders last summer -- http://wordswithoutborders.org/dispatches/article/teaching-in-translation/. There are a couple of others that followed that one that take the argument into some of the domains discussed here.



To expand a little on one of the points I made to the Chronicle writer, part of the problem is institutional: there is a scholarly stream in the academy that is comprised primarily of commentary and intervention (writing books and articles about X), and then there is a creative stream that is comprised primarily of poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, playwriting -- these are covered by MFA degrees in the US. As literary translation draws on but is not really central (in the minds of the gatekeepers) to either of these two streams, it is often seen as either deficient scholarship or deficient creative work. It's squarely in the middle, of course, right where it needs to be. But when the work is being evaluated by one's peers, for promotion purposes for instance, the absence of a category into which they can put it becomes a major hurdle. That's when the biologist, engineer, or historian on the review committee will begin to use her or his own, often unconsidered, notions of the nature of translation. They can be educated to think differently merely by getting a fuller explanation.



But in my experience, the most adamant opponents to seeing literary translation as constituting substantive academic research are other literary scholars, whose opinions were shaped by the institutional nature of teaching literature in the U.S. (my third WWB post). Teaching them differently would be a larger and more difficult task.



Russell Valentino





Russell Scott Valentino

Professor and Chair

Cinema and Comparative Literature

Editor, The Iowa Review

University of Iowa



-----Original Message-----
From: SEELANGS: Slavic & East European Languages and Literatures list [mailto:SEELANGS at bama.ua.edu] On Behalf Of Josh Wilson
Sent: Friday, February 26, 2010 5:27 AM
To: SEELANGS at bama.ua.edu
Subject: Re: [SEELANGS] "Translators Struggle to Prove Their Academic Bona Fides"



A couple cents on this -



[snip]



In short, I would guess that the reasons behind these issues are based in

the fact that the market is simply not educated about translation - and that

many who translate have not the time, energy, or perhaps even skill to

educate and press their market. Just as speaking a language is a separate

skill from translating into it, teaching something is a different skill from

actually doing it...





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