February 2005Chronicle
Focus: Literary Translation

Message from the Executive Director

A Visit to Your Local School Could Take You All the Way to Seattle
By Lillian Clementi and Amanda Ennis
ATA is now actively recruiting volunteers to speak at schools in your area and to help coordinate the school outreach effort through a national speakers bureau.

Technical Writers and Translators: When the Twain Meet What the Technical Writer Wants from the Translator (Part 1)
By Ury Vainsencher
A discussion of how technical writers and translators can work together to streamline the process of translation, improve quality, and lower costs.

Technical Writers and Translators: When the Twain Meet (Part 2)
By Eliezer Nowodworski
Learn what you can do to make your next technical translation progress more smoothly.

Teaching Literature in Translation
By Rosemary Arrojo, Marilyn Gaddis Rose, and Carol Maier
A discussion of some of the pervasive issues associated with using translated texts in the classroom.

Translating Roberto Sosa: I Needed Kunitz and KFC
By Jo Anne Engelbert
Translators often get a laugh by wryly observing how much easier it is to translate a dead poet than a live one. And from the writer's perspective, it's got to be a lot more comfortable to be translated after you've gone.

For texts that will be performed, translators have to fill cultural gaps for spectators and make sure that the language flows easily for the actors. When playwrights decide to play with food, the translator has to swallow hard and cook up solutions.

Bearing Witness Through Translation
By Lorena Terando
The translator of resistance literature plays hybrid roles: the enabler of a story, the witness to an event, and the bearer of news.

Can You Certify This?
By Barbara Müller-Grant
A discussion of some of the aspects concerning the certification of translations in Germany, including the qualifications necessary for a translator in Germany to be able to certify the correctness and completeness of his or her own translation of a document and the procedures for having such certifications recognized abroad.

Translation: The Importance of Getting the Whole Picture
By María-Luisa Arias-Moreno
Recent trends in sociolinguistics, pragmatics, semiotics, and discourse analysis have helped us gain some insight into the way language really works. The author will examine some translations from Spanish into English where discourse indicators were ignored, resulting in serious distortions affecting coherence and cohesion.

Common Statistical Errors Even YOU Can Find: Part 2
By Tom Lang
More common statistical errors found in biomedical literature that can be identified even by those who know little about statistics.

Inquisitorial Criminal Proceedings: The Cases of Argentina and Mexico
By Pablo A. Fernandez Ruffolo
A brief description of the functioning of inquisitorial criminal proceedings, including a methodological and practical approach for translating the most significant legal terms.