Translating Without Betraying the Concept
A workshop with Hana Yoshimura and Layla Haddad
This event is part of a demonstration of what Lera offers for running knowledge events. Its content is written with care and draws on real sources, but the conference has not taken place, and apart from the convener its participants are fictional.
The Persian word ‘edālat comes from Arabic and sits beside dād, which has a much older history. In Arabic, ‘adl and ‘adāla each carry their own weight; in Japanese, seigi is a word that settled in during the modern period to render a European concept; and in English, ‘justice’ refers both to a virtue and to the courts. When a text about justice moves from one of these languages to another, which word does the translator choose, and what is left behind?
This workshop is about those choices. Its aim is not to teach ‘the correct translation’, but to practise a way of working in which a translator’s decisions are seen, recorded and kept for the next reader. By the end, participants will have glossary entries that show a concept in several languages, together with its gaps and mismatches.
Who it is for
Translators, editors, researchers and students who work between two or more languages. Knowing Persian, Arabic, Japanese or English is enough; you do not need to know all of them. The workshop is limited to thirty participants, and the work is done in small groups.
Programme
- 14:30 — Introductions: each participant presents one word they have never managed to translate well.
- 14:45 — First exercise: one paragraph, three translations. Groups render a short paragraph on justice into different languages and set the translations side by side.
- 15:20 — Second exercise: building a glossary entry for a concept, with an ‘untranslatable’ label wherever no equivalent is adequate.
- 15:50 — Third exercise: writing a translator’s note, short and precise, for a reader who does not know the source language.
- 16:05 — Wrap-up and discussion of what a machine can and cannot do in this process.
Read before the workshop
- Barbara Cassin’s introduction to the Dictionary of Untranslatables.
- The first chapter of The Translator’s Invisibility by Lawrence Venuti.
- A short text in your own working language containing at least one difficult word.
Outcome
The entries made in the workshop are published, with the names of their authors, in the conference glossary and placed beside the talks in which these concepts are used. Participants can continue to edit and extend them after the conference.
References
Cassin, Barbara, ed. 2014. Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Venuti, Lawrence. 1995. The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation. London: Routledge.
Yanabu, Akira. 1982. Hon’yakugo seiritsu jijō [How Translation Words Came to Be]. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten.