Category Archives: Humanities and Social Sciences

Anglophones wanted!

This post was contributed by Jozef van der Voort, an MA student in Translation Studies at the University of Sheffield

English is a global lingua franca, and researchers or authors seeking to reach an international audience are obliged to publish in English. Yet native English speakers are notoriously reluctant to learn foreign languages, and as a result there is a great deal of unmet demand for expert translators working into English. This applies across all industries but the need is particularly acute in academia, where high level language skills must be paired with expert subject knowledge.

The Use Your Language, Use Your English summer school sought to address this need by offering a week of intensive editing and translation training to English speakers with knowledge of one or more foreign languages. My source languages are German and French, but also on offer were Arabic, Chinese, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish. This made for a diverse group of participants who all had unique experiences and insights to share throughout the course, and I found that I learned as much from my fellow students as I did from the translation tutors themselves.

The tutors were also excellent – practising translators all, they brought a vast amount of experience to bear and provided invaluable advice not just on how to tackle the texts that we worked on over the week, but also on how to get established in the profession.

Translation – not just an academic pursuit

For me, this professional focus was the most invaluable aspect of the summer school. Rewarding as it was to debate the intricacies of German and French literary texts with my like-minded and enthusiastic fellow students, the tutors and organisers never lost sight of the fact that translation is a business – that to succeed as a translator it is vital to build strong networks in order to promote your work, and to keep your clients’ needs in mind. This applies as much to literary and academic translation as it does to the more commercial texts I tend to deal with on my MA course. Every text has an audience, and while it is easy to immerse yourself in fine detail when translating texts from one language into another, it is important not to lose sight of the fact that translation is always undertaken for a specific purpose.

All in all it was encouraging to see that the translation marketplace is in good health, and that opportunities abound for native English speakers with high-level foreign language skills. I would like to thank the organiser Professor Naomi Segal for all her hard work in putting together this extremely rewarding week, and I would recommend the course as an excellent introduction for anyone interested in getting into translation.

Use your language, use your English

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This post was contributed by Bryony Merritt from Birkbeck’s Department of External Relations.

Although I was not able to participate in this summer’s ‘Use your language, Use your English’ summer school, I was still interested to hear about Jamie Allen’s work as Head of English Translation at the International Olympic Committee (IoC), based in Lausanne, Switzerland. This is surely the dream job of many a modern foreign languages graduate. (Jamie’s admission that he has been at the IoC for 25 years confirmed this suspicion).

Jamie gave an interesting account of how translation at the IoC, and at the Games themselves, work. The IoC relies on a small pool of permanently employed translators and no interpreters. Instead, they rely on freelance support around key events.

The organising committees for the individual Games require a larger team. The London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games (LOCOG) has 75 translators and interpreters under contract, covering 11 languages. A further 28 languages are covered by volunteers. Each Games will have its own Languages Services Committee as part of the overall organising committee, and much work goes on between Games to ensure that the knowledge gained by each committee is passed on, so that each team does not have to start from scratch.

Although his team has little to do with the actual delivery of the Games, Jamie was quick to reassure us that they have plenty to be working on – they are currently doing work around six Olympic Games: 2014 Winter Olympics in Russia, the 2016 Summer Olympics in Brazil, the 2018 Winter Olympics in South Korea and two Youth Olympic Games.

The official languages of the IoC are French and English, so much of Jamie’s team’s work involves ensuring that all official documents are available in both languages. It was interesting to hear that when Jamie arrived at the IoC French was the more used of the two languages. Now, the number of speakers of English as their native, or first foreign language has greatly increased and a larger proportion of Jamie’s work involves proof-reading and revising texts written in English (often by non-native speakers), rather than translating into English from French or another language.

Jamie gave some interesting examples that demonstrate the vast variety within the types of documents that he works on. One day it might be a speech that the president of the IoC will deliver to a UN Committee, and the next minutes of a meeting about the maximum permitted size of manufacturers’ logos on swimwear!

Having come across a lot of ‘howlers’ over the years, Jamie and his team have created a style-guide, which aims to simplify writing in English for their colleagues. Having corrected dates from 1rd January and 3th April, umpteen times, they decided to officially move to a number-month convention (i.e. 3 April).

During the questions and answers one attendee was concerned about the use of volunteer translators and interpreters at the Games. Jamie reassured us that the individual Games organising committees do invest a significant amount in professional translation/interpretation services, but that volunteers are on hand to assist with matters such as showing guests to the correct seats and giving directions to and within the venues. It is a way of allowing people to become involved in the Games – as with the volunteers who are performing in the opening and closing ceremonies and carrying out various other tasks at the Games.

Many of the questions inevitably focussed on qualifications, experience and tips for getting a job in translation. Unfortunately for all of us, the lure of skiing in the Swiss Alps and summers by Lake Geneva means that turnover at the IoC is not high and there may not be any openings there for a while!

You can read more about the rest of the ‘Use your language, use your English’ summer school in blog posts here and here.

Freshwater

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This post was contributed by Roisin Lynch, an intern at Birkbeck’s School of Arts.

Virginia Woolf wrote her little-known and only play Freshwater in 1923, and revised it in 1935 for a single performance by her family and friends in her sister Vanessa Bell’s art studio in Bloomsbury.

Freshwater is a comedy, poking good-natured fun at Woolf’s great aunt, photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, and the artistic and moral sensibilities of her Victorian set. In the Cameron’s home at Freshwater Bay on the Isle of Wight, Alfred, Lord Tennyson (played by Woolf’s brother, Adrian Stephen, in 1935) lurks about the house reciting Maud at every opportunity, while Julia Cameron (played by Vanessa Bell) searches in vain to find a policeman with manly enough calves to play Galahad in one of her Arthurian photographs. The plot centres on Ellen Terry (Woolf’s niece, Angelica Bell), the sixteen year old wife of George Frederic Watts (Duncan Grant). Bored by life as a model for her elderly husband’s paintings, at the end of the play she escapes – wearing trousers, no less – to the dissolute freedom of a life in Gordon Square, Bloomsbury.

As part of a series of events during Arts Week, academics from Birkbeck’s Department of English gave a lively and enjoyable rehearsed reading of the play in the beautiful Keynes library in the School of Art’s buildings in Gordon Square, once home to Woolf herself. The performance was enthusiastically received by the audience, in particular the various props – a copy of Maud, a helpfully annotated picture of a leg, a small model omnibus – held up by Professor Hilary Fraser to embellish the reading, and the very special guest appearance at the end of the play by Queen Victoria herself.