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Edith Grossman, Who Elevated the Art of Translation, Dies at 87

The New York Times (NY) (09/04/23) Chace, Rebecca

Edith Grossman, 87, whose acclaimed translations of Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez and Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes raised the profile of the often-overlooked role of the translator, died on September 4, 2023.

Grossman dedicated herself to translating Latin American and Spanish authors at a time when literary translation was not considered a serious academic discipline or career.

Translators had long been seen as the “humble Cinderella” of publishing, Grossman said in 2021. But as she wrote in her groundbreaking 2010 book Why Translation Matters, she saw the role “not as the weary journeyman of the publishing world, but as a living bridge between two realms of discourse, two realms of experience, and two sets of readers.”

Grossman was among the first to insist that her name appear along with the author’s on the cover of any book she translated, a practice that publishers had traditionally resisted for both financial and marketing reasons. Grossman said that publishers liked to think they could wave “a magic wand” and turn a book from one language into another. “And no human is involved. No human who needs to be paid?”

When Grossman’s translation of Don Quixote appeared in 2003—with her name on the cover along with author Miguel de Cervantes—it elevated not only her own career but helped raise the stature of literary translation. Her Don Quixote became widely admired as the definitive English version, and she went on to inspire a new generation of translators.

“Though there have been many valuable translations of Don Quixote, the critic Harold Bloom wrote in an introduction, “I would commend Edith Grossman’s version for the extraordinarily high quality of her prose.”

Getting her name on the cover was just one issue Grossman had with publishers. She also wanted publishers to commission translations of more books and accused them of “linguistic isolationism” for not doing so. Not only did publishers not want to pay translators adequately, she said, but in her view, they were ignoring a global conversation that builds mutual understanding through the exchange of ideas, culture, and a shared love of literature.

Grossman believed that translation was a creative act undertaken in harmony with the author, similar to the way an actor speaks the lines of a playwright. This view of translation reflected her own method, which she described as an auditory process. “I think of the author’s voice and the sound of the text, then of my obligation to hear both as clearly and profoundly as possible,” she wrote in Why Translation Matters, “and finally of my equally pressing need to speak the voice in a second language.”

Grossman’s technique helped make her one of the most sought-after translators of Latin American literature in the 1980s and 1990s. She was among those who gave English-language readers access to the works of Gabriel García Márquez, Isabel Allende, Carlos Fuentes, Laura Esquivel, and others who were writing in an entirely new genre known as magical realism. Nobel Prize-winning author García Márquez once paid her the ultimate compliment, telling her, “You are my voice in English.”

Grossman’s many honors and awards included the PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation, the Arts and Letters Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Officer’s Cross of the Order of Civil Merit awarded by King Felipe VI of Spain.

Growing Reliance on Language Apps Jeopardizes Some Asylum Applications

The Guardian (NY) (09/07/23) Bhuiyan, Johana

The U.S. immigration system has said it will provide immigrants with a human interpreter as needed, but refugee organizations say many are frequently left without access to one. Instead, the various agencies that make up the system, and even some refugee aid organizations, increasingly rely on AI-powered tools like Google Translate and Microsoft Translator to bridge the language gap.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has set up several contracts with machine translation firms. Immigration officials at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement have been instructed to use Google Translate to vet refugee applications. U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), which oversees border management, has even developed its own app, CBP One Translate, to help communicate with immigrants.

But Ariel Koren, founder of Respond Crisis Translation, a network of 2,500 people who provide urgent interpreting services, said agencies have come to rely on these tools without fully grasping their limits. “AI translation tools should never be used in a way that is unsupervised. They should never be used to replace translators and interpreters and should not be used in high-stakes situations—not in any language, and especially not for languages that are marginalized,” Koren said.

AI-powered translation tools are particularly unreliable for languages that are considerably different from English or are less comprehensively documented, said Damian Harris-Hernandez, executive director of the Refugee Translation Project, another group that helps refugees navigate language barriers. “It’s very tempting for a lot of organizations or companies to use machine translations,” Harris-Hernandez said. “But these discrepancies can void a whole immigration case.”

Volunteers at Respond Crisis Translation said problems with the translation tools occur throughout the asylum process, from border stations to detention centers to immigration courts. The CBP One app, which the Biden administration has mandated anyone seeking asylum to use to schedule an appointment with CBP before entering the country, is only available in a handful of languages, and errors are frequent. The version of the FAQ section of the app in Haitian Creole, for instance, largely shows a string of letters with no spaces or the necessary accent marks.

Volunteers also said asylum applications have been denied due to errors. For example, in one refugee’s statement, the CBP One app translated an “I” as “we,” making it seem as if it was an application for more than one person. They also recalled the case of a woman seeking asylum due to domestic abuse who described her abuser as “mi jefe” in her application. The woman was using the term colloquially to describe her father, but the app translated it literally as “my boss.” As a result, her asylum application was denied.

Volunteers said translation challenges have been particularly troubling in the case of Afghan refugees. Major machine translation systems like Google Translate, for example, do not offer translations in Dari, one of two official languages of Afghanistan. “Afghan languages are not highly resourced in terms of technology, in particular local dialects,” said Uma Mirkhail, the Respond Crisis Translation lead for the 40-person team representing Afghan languages. “It’s almost impossible for a machine to convey the same message that a professional interpreter or translator with awareness about the country of origin can do, including cultural context.”

“Data is still data and a human is a human,” said Muhammed Yaseen, an interpreter on the Afghan language team for Respond Crisis Translation. “We are dealing with people who are traumatized, so our approach is trauma-informed. As an interpreter, you cannot under-do or overdo, but at the same time, you should have empathy to convey their emotions and feelings, and that is only possible with a human being.”

Jersey City Municipal Court Discriminated Against Deaf Man Seeking Interpreter

Hudson County View (NJ) (08/31/23) Heinis, John

A federal judge has ruled that the Jersey City Municipal Court discriminated against a deaf man after failing to provide an American Sign Language (ASL) interpreter despite multiple requests.

Ryan Cuevas, who is deaf, alleged in a federal lawsuit that the municipal court violated the federal Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and the New Jersey Law Against Discrimination by failing to provide him with an ASL interpreter in a timely fashion.

The lawsuit stems from an incident on the night of August 22, 2019, when Cuevas was cited for parking his car in a bus lane, even though he was allowed to do so at that time of night. Just days before his January 2020 hearing in Jersey City Municipal Court related to the parking ticket, Cuevas was notified by the New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission that his driver’s license and registration were being suspended due to a separate infraction—his failure to present proof of liability insurance.

Cuevas had requested an ASL interpreter at his hearing, but the request was denied and the hearing delayed until the court’s March “interpreter day,” when he was told one would be available. Cuevas returned two months later, but an interpreter never showed up. It would take until August 2020 for Cuevas to finally get an interpreter and be declared not guilty. By then it had taken a year to have his parking ticket resolved and his license restored.

“Although the plaintiff promptly resolved the liability-insurance issue, the New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission refused to reinstate his driving privileges until the Jersey City Municipal Court adjudicated the ticket,” U.S. District Judge Susan Wigenton wrote in her decision.

“Here, when viewing the undisputed facts in the light most favorable to the defendant, it is clear that the Jersey City Municipal Court failed to comply with the ADA’s regulatory directives and, thus, discriminated against the plaintiff,” Wigenton wrote. “There is no dispute that the plaintiff proactively—and repeatedly—requested an ASL interpreter, and that the defendant failed to provide one for months.”

While the Jersey City Municipal Court argued that reasonable efforts were made to provide accommodations, Wigenton ruled this did not satisfy a public entity’s obligations under the ADA. Wigenton also criticized the court for refusing to provide an interpreter multiple times and called its “interpreter day” policy “both unrestricted and unreliable.”

“This court finds that the municipal court failed to accommodate the plaintiff’s disability, thereby effectively prohibiting him from gaining meaningful access to the court system to resolve the ticket,” Wigenton wrote.

“I think the judge had a very well-reasoned ruling,” said Andrew Rozynski, Cuevas’ attorney. “I think this decision will be an example that can be used for courts across the country to review their own policies and procedures and ensure that courts are accessible to the deaf community.”

Portland Gets Its First Bilingual Children’s Bookstore

The Oregonian (OR) (09/11/23) Silverman, Julia

When Rachel Kimbrow first started teaching at public schools around the Portland area, bilingual books for her Spanish-speaking students were hard to find, limited mostly to translations of popular authors like Dr. Seuss. Now, she has opened Linda Letra, Portland’s first bilingual bookstore dedicated to children’s books and perhaps the first of its kind in the state.

The goal, Kimbrow said, is to be a resource for Spanish-speaking parents who want to introduce their children to Spanish and teachers and librarians who still spend hours—and often, their own money—combing through catalogues to curate bilingual children’s books for classrooms and school libraries.

During a 20-year career as a teacher in both Portland and Paraguay, Kimbrow became skilled at finding the kinds of books her students craved—stories about soccer, about the folklore of their ancestral countries, or alphabet books where A is for Arroz, not Apple—written first in the language they spoke at home.

“I’m always on the lookout for first edition Spanish books. I think a lot of teachers are, too. They want authentic books, where meaning is not lost in translation,” Kimbrow said. “Linguistically diversifying their collections helps build connections with families, who see themselves in the books their children bring home. ”

The Portland area has long been a hotbed for niche bookstores dedicated to children’s books, all of which set aside a healthy amount of space for books in Spanish. But only Linda Letra dedicates its entire storefront to such books. In fact, there are only a handful of similarly focused children’s bilingual bookstores around the country, Kimbrow said, generally in large urban areas with a significant Spanish-speaking population.

Portland’s Spanish-speaking community is smaller, but Kimbrow said she chose her store’s location because of its proximity to a large number of Spanish-speaking families in East Multnomah County. She also hopes to attract families and teachers from nearby Washington, Clackamas, Marion, and Clark Counties.

Inventory is still filling out before a scheduled grand opening on September 16, but Kimbrow said she has been sourcing hard-to-find books from small, often female-owned publishers, many from Southern California, and from landmark events like the Guadalajara International Book Fair, the world’s second-largest book fair. Along her shelves, there’s a mix of books written solely in Spanish, books that give equal space to English and Spanish versions of the same text, and books that mix the two languages together. There’s also a small but healthy selection of books that draw on the varied Indigenous languages spoken around the Americas.

Kimbrow said she is looking forward to hosting events, including hosting local authors and potentially helping to sponsor a Spanish version of Oregon’s popular “Battle of the Books” reading competition. Kimbrow has also been working with local school districts to help them source and select Spanish and bilingual books, including those covering themes teachers often request, such as social and emotional learning.

“I try to think about themes that might be good to have not only in a bilingual classroom,” she said, “but in any class that wants to build linguistic diversity.”

ATA News

NEW! ATA Introduces Special Interest Groups

ATA has created three special interest groups (SIGs): Financial Translators, Interpreters & Translators in Education, and Southeast Asian Languages. Similar to divisions, members of SIGs get access to private discussion groups. To join or learn more, contact ftsig@atanet.org, itesig@atanet.org, or sealsig@atanet.org.

Online Meetup for Interpreters & Translators in Education SIG
Don’t miss the online meetup for the Interpreters & Translators in Education SIG! Join us on Monday, October 2, at 6:00 p.m. EDT. To register, email itesig@atanet.org.

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Early registration discounts for ATA’s 64th Annual Conference in Miami (October 25–28, 2023) end September 16. There is no better opportunity for you to learn, share ideas, and build invaluable personal and professional relationships than ATA64! Register by September 16 and save! Can’t attend the entire conference? ATA is offering a Saturday-Only registration rate.

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20th Annual Midwest Association of Translators and Interpreters Conference
September 30: 8:30 a.m. – 5:30 p.m. EDT
IUPUI Campus Center
Indianapolis, IN
Join the Midwest Association of Translators and Interpreters for our 20th Annual Conference in Indianapolis on September 30, International Translation Day! Don’t miss out on this great opportunity to learn and connect with your colleagues. This year’s conference theme is “Interconnections in Our Community.” Register Here

Northwest Translators and Interpreters Society One-Day Conference
September 30: 8:15 a.m. – 5:00 p.m. PDT
The Museum of Flight
Seattle, WA
In honor of International Translation Day, NOTIS will be holding a one-day in-person conference. This lively event will bring together local translation and interpreting professionals for a fun day of networking, conference sessions, panel discussions, and more. Don’t miss this opportunity to meet your present and future colleagues and learn more about language careers! Register Here

ATA German Language Division Co-Working Session
October 19: 11:00 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. EDT

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