Around the web – May 2020

Do you know how the month of May got its name? It may (pun intended) seem a simple word, but the origin is actually fairly complex and interesting. We could say the same about several articles listed here in the May 2020 round-up of this month’s most popular stories about language, translation and interpreting.

was Maia a Greek or Roman goddess?

• Colleague Judy Jenner blogged about interpreting depositions via Zoom. Is it possible, and how does it work?
• US/UK language specialist Lynne Murphy took a look at the different ways – linguistically speaking – that Americans and Brits are talking about COVID19/the coronavirus. She also looked at whether we “stay home” or “stay at home”. (Incidentally France’s Académie Française have decided that COVID is preferably feminine in gender).
• When we’re forced to stay (at) home, how do we talk about how we spend our time? Also, what are some of the current expressions people use to talk about health?

Off-colour and on the mend

• In times past, when frustrating circumstances demanded new ways of expressing what it means to be alive, it was often female writers who sculpted the fresh coinages that kept language rippling with poignancy and power.
• Colleague Nikki Graham helpfully shared her templates for purchase order checklists. There are different ones for translation, revision, edition, and localisation.
• If you’re an etymology buff you’ll love the fascinating infographics at The Etymology Nerd.
• The first-ever state-sanctioned North Korean novel has been published in English. The subject matter is quite surprising.

Esther Kim interviews the translator of “Friend”, Immanuel Kim

• The French government has unveiled 18 new official translations for tech-related words. (Here’s an article in French on the same subject).
• En français : Quelles sont les leçons linguistiques de la crise du coronavirus ?
• Lastly, a nod to the island where I live and its (food) culture: for week 41 of her ongoing #ThatTranslatorCanCook challenge, colleague Hannah Lawrence cooked “rougail saucisse” and discussed the meaning of rougail, Creole, and Creole sausages in her blog article.

#ThatTranslatorCanCook week 41: Sausage Rougail

 

Further reading:

• Around the web – April 2020
• Around the web – March 2020
• Glossary of some useful words in Réunion Island
• 7 facts about Reunion Creole

Translation-treason conference

I recently attended a two-day conference at the University of Reunion on the theme of “Translation-treason: translation in multilingual and multicultural contexts.” Local and mainland French University professors and PhD students presented a variety of papers, and there were debates after every session.

Conference poster

In the first presentation Prof. Bernard Terramorsi compared the 1920s translation of a traditional Malagasy story: Roze manan draza fia (literally “those who have fish ancestors”) with a more recent (2010) translation. The 1924 translation was carried out by a Lutheran pastor, and Prof. Terramorsi showed how – consciously or unconsciously – the pastor’s western and conservative mindset led to mistranslations, in particular concerning the main character of the story who is an ampela manana’isa or ‘woman with gills’, and not a ‘mermaid’ (sirène) or ‘nymph’ (nymphe) as he translated into French.

This was followed by a paper by Patrice Uhl about the difficult translation of the arabic sequence in the Vth song by the troubadour William IX, and then “The respective affinities of German and French in fictive descriptions” by PhD student Sylvia Boyer. Anca Andreea Braescu Chetrariu gave an interesting presentation about the prolific French to Romanian translator Irina Mavrodin. Prof. Gwenhaël Ponnau then talked about re-translations. Why do we re-translate literature? Is it to erase a past translation/translator, whom we are opposed to? Can it be likened to a ‘competition’ between translators? How easy is it to retranslate a “canonical” translation? And is the most recent translation always the best?

13-century miniature of William IX

I devoted a separate blog post to Georges Latchimy’s presentation axed on his personal translation of “Los Traductores” by Antonio Muñoz, which you can read here (in French). Next, Hajasoa Picard-Ravololonirina talked about structuralist descriptions of the Malagasy language, followed by Prof. Marie Brunette Spire who talked about (mis)translations in the first English to French translations of Israel Zangwill‘s Children of the Ghetto. She examined how linguistic and/or cultural ignorance as well as an ideological filter and conscious or unconscious prejudices can distort a text’s original meaning. Children of the Ghetto describes Jewish life, and some of the mistranslations she cited are translating ‘skullcap’ by bonnet; ‘minister’ by Ministre, and ‘best coat’ by veste de dimanche. The first day’s final paper was “Miss a word, change the world” by Laurence Gouaux-Rabasa, which coincidentally examined a somewhat similar theme to that of Prof. Spire: how Hinduism is expunged from the French translations of Indian-origin authors writing in English. She gave examples from Où irons-nous cet été ? the translation by Anne-Cécile Padoux of Where Shall We Go This Summer? by Anita Desai, and asked whether this negation is deliberate, or the result of an overly-superficial reading of the source text by the translator.

Israel Zangwill

Work commitments meant that I missed the first two papers of the second day, which were “Comparable corpora and aligned corpus – A contrastive English ↔ French approach” by Issa Kanté and a study by Christine Pic-Gillard of  how Guarani and Spanish are (supposed to be) used bilingually in Paraguay. I arrived in time for Jean Volsan and Prof. Jean-Philippe Watbled’s presentation about translating the New Testament into Reunion Creole. They raised the valid point of language hierarchy – why are some languages seen as linguistically richer or nobler than others? Although Jesus didn’t speak Reunion Creole, he didn’t speak French or English either, so there is no reason for a translation into one of the latter languages to be superior to a Creole translation. Is the current situation of ‘Reunion Creole vs French’ perhaps similar to that of  ‘French vs Latin’ in the Middle Ages? Continuing the Creole theme in the afternoon Evelyne Adelin and Mylène Lebon-Eyquem looked at the use of Reunion Creole in the classroom. They showed that teachers need to translate French ↔ Creole in order for the two languages to be recognised as distinct.

Prof. Claude Brissac-Feral looked at the interpreting during the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission and whether it betrayed the victims’ commitments and sacrifices. Given the great discrepancy between the emotions of the witnesses and those interpreting them, how much of the impact was lost in interlingual rendition? Nathalie Peyrebonne gave a presentation on title translation – while it is part of a book’s main identity, it also often the text that is the least faithfully translated. Finally Prof. Michel Prum wondered whether “Traddutore, traditore” is a paronomasia for the French translations of Charles Darwin‘s work. Darwin’s first French translator, Clémence Royer, was a Lamarckian and thus ‘Natural Selection’ became Election naturelle. Translators Jean-Jacques Moulinié and Edmond Barbier also changed certain sentences that they found to be too radical.

Clémence Royer, 1865

While highly academic and often far removed from my day-to-day preoccupations as a professional business translator, the conference was nevertheless very interesting and thought-provoking, in particular concerning the issues of retranslation, language hierarchy, and mistranslation arising from cultural prejudice.

Related articles

• How language can reflect cultural assumptions
• 7 facts about Reunion Creole
• Grâce au traducteur surviendra un miracle …
• Malagasy – the language of Madagascar
• European Day of Multilingual Blogging – Reunion Creole
• Taking turns

Glossary of some useful words in Réunion Island

Here’s a (non-exhaustive!) list of some words and terms that will be helpful to you if you visit Réunion Island. Some are Reunion Creole words, others are French words with a different meaning from that in mainland France, and some are straightforward French but with a particularly local meaning.  Many of the Creole words in this list are widely used in Reunion even in spoken French. This little glossary has no intention of replacing a dictionary or phrase-book however  – there are other resources for that.
Note that Reunion Creole has no fixed spelling, so written variations are possible. (All further references to Creole here suppose Reunion Creole).

• achard – picked vegetable salad, rather like a spicy coleslaw but without the mayonnaise.
• alizé – trade winds from the south-east.
• baba figue/baba-fig – blossom of the banana tree, which is chopped with boucané (smoked pork) and made into a carri.
• babouk – large brown huntsman spider that is found in and around houses.
• bibasse/bibas – Loquat or Japanese medlar (Eriobotrya japonica) – a small yellow fruit which mainly grows in the highlands.
• bichique/bishik – the fry of red-tailed goby (Sicyopterus lagocephalus) or Cotylopus acutipinnis which, at certain times of the year, are captured at river mouths as they swim upstream. They are caught using traditional techniques such as trap nets known as vouves.  The bichique are then sold for about €45/kg to be made into a carri.
• bonbon piment – small savoury treats made from finely ground lentils or lima beans mixed with spices (piment).

Bonbons piment

• boug – man.
• Bourbon – former name for Réunion Island 1649-1793 and 1810-1848; sometimes still used by companies as part of their trade name.
• brède – the leafy greens of various vegetables (there are ≈30 varieties) that are cooked and served with rice and carri, or made into a broth.
• cabri – an old French word for a kid; in Réunion the term covers all kinds of goats.
• cafre/kaf – a black Creole (feminine: cafrine/kafrine).
• cagnard – in the South of France this means a place where the sun beats down; in Réunion it means a thug or a delinquent.
• camaron – large freshwater shrimps, eaten in a carri.
• canal bichique – literally this is a channel of stones that’s been built to help fish bichique, but it now has a second meaning. When the Route du Littoral (coast road between St Denis and La Possession) has to be reduced to three lanes (instead of the normal four) after heavy rain, the resulting narrow roadway is unofficially known as the  canal bichique.
• carri/cari – general name for Réunion’s national dish, normally consisting of  meat or fish cooked with onions, garlic, turmeric (safran), thyme, salt, pepper and sometimes tomatoes. Normally served with white rice, rougail, lentils and occasionally brèdes.
• case/kaz – house.
• Cilaos – this is one of Réunion’s cirques, but it has also given its name to a good brand of sparkling water, bottled in the cirque. If you want to order locally bottled still water ask for ‘Australine’ or ‘Edena’.
• chouchou – a green, pear-shaped vegetable, known variously as christophine, chayote or choko in other parts of the world. Its green leaves can be used as brèdes.
• combava – a small, round, dark green citrus fruit with a rough, bumpy skin, known as kaffir lime (Citrus hystrix) in English. Its rind is used in Reunionese cuisine and has a very distinctive taste.

Kaffir limes (Photo: Wikipedia)

• cyclone – ‘hurricanes’, ‘typhoons’ and ‘cyclones’ are all different words for the same thing. As Réunion is in the southern hemisphere the official cyclone season runs from November 15th-April 15th, although out-of-season cyclones are occasionally possible. Reunion has a Regional Specialised Meteorological Centre, one of only six in the world, which keeps a close eye on things. Cyclone names are given by Mauritius or Madagascar.
• dalon – friend.
• dodo – unofficial, but widely-used name for a popular locally-brewed beer.
• faham – an orchid (jumellea fragans), increasingly rare and endemic to the Mascarene islands, that is used in rhum arrangé and some medicinal herbal teas (tisanes).
• fanjan – literally a tree fern, but more often used to refer to the mass of entangled tree fern roots that can be cut and used as a natural plant pot.

Fanjan

• fénoir – darkness, night. When the Pope came to Réunion in 1989 he said “sort dann fénoir” (‘Don’t stay in the darkness’).
• fet kaf – abolition of slavery which is celebrated every year by a public holiday on December 20th (20 desamb).
• filao – casuarina tree.
• Gabier – Guichet Automatique de Banque = ATM.
• gato – a sweet, confectionery. In Creole gato doesn’t have the wider French meaning of ‘cake’.
• goyavier – strawberry guava (Psidium cattleyanum), much-appreciated small red fruit that are ripe in May-July, and which grow in the highlands up to 1200m altitude.

Goyavier

• grains – the beans or lentils in sauce that traditionally accompany a carri.
• gramoun – old person.
• Grande Ile – Madagascar, the ‘Big Island’.
• guetali – a small gazebo-like structure typical of 19th century Creole architecture which could be found at the corner of the garden walls of large houses. From it the women of the household could watch people passing in the street without being noticed by them. Guetali are covered by a roof, and were often decorated with lambrequin. The name comes from “guette a li“, which means “watch him” in Creole.

Guetali, Hellbourg, Salazie cirque

• (les) hauts – the highlands of Réunion; places that are not on the coast.
• Ile soeur – Mauritius (together with Rodrigues the three islands form the Mascarene Islands).
• îlet– a hamlet, particularly in one of the three cirques. (The final ‘T’ is pronounced).
• kabar – a more or less impromptu concert, with local music, dancing, singing and sometimes moringue.
• la-di-la-fé – gossip; also the name given to the machine that moves the concrete barriers on the Route du Littoral to make it into a canal bichique.
• lambrequin/lanbrokin – useful and ornamental patterned window and door borders made out of metal or wood. Design themes often reflect plant life. Originally a feature of naval architecture, they were used in Reunion to deflect and channel rain water at a time when gutters did not yet exist. Known in Creole as dantèl-lakaz – literally ‘house lace’ (see pictures here).

Lambrequin

• letchis & mangues – lychees and mangoes are a national obsession from November to January when they are ripe. Prices start high but quickly come down as more and more fruit becomes available.
• lontan – in the past.
• macatia – a small slightly sweet bun, typical of Réunion.
• malbar – a Creole of Tamil origin.
• maloya – a traditional musical genre of Reunion, which has its origins in slaves’ music. Songs are sometimes politically oriented, and themes are often slavery and poverty. The most well-known maloya artists are Danyel Waro, Ziskakan, Baster or Firmin Viry. In 2009 Maloya was inscribed on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity of UNESCO for France
• marmaille/marmay – children.
• marron – a slave who escaped from their owner. By extension has come to refer to things that have gone wild or are illegal or ‘underground’.
• massalé – an Indian spice mix commonly used in cooking (chili, coriander, cinnamon, cloves, fennel seeds).
• métropole – mainland France; the part of France in Europe. Don’t forget that in Réunion you are already in France!
• moringue – a local, highly codified combat sport similar to Capoeira.
• paille en queue/payankë – white-tailed tropicbird (Phaeton lepturus), a seabird easily identified by its long tail feathers.
• papang – Reunion Harrier (Circus maillardi) is the last and only bird of prey on Réunion.
• peï – anything that is local.
• pistash – peanuts (not pistachios!).
• radier – a masonry structure in a road, built over the low point of a river, enabling the waterway to be crossed except during a period of heavy rain. (Never ever cross a radier when there’s been heavy rain!).
• rhum arrangé – literally means ‘arranged rum’ but is better translated by ‘macerated flavoured rum’.  One or several ingredients such as vanilla, bananas, cinnamon, geranium, lychees, ginger or faham are added to a bottle of white rum and left to macerate for several weeks or months (the actual length of time depends on the ingredient(s)). It’s mostly drunk as an after-dinner drink.

Shelf of ‘rhum arrangé’

• rougail – two meanings: (1) a cooked, main dish similar to a carri, generally with sausages, smoked pork (boucané) or dried, salted codfish (morue); (2) a spicy condiment similar to a chutney which accompanies every main meal in Réunion, composed of diced or crushed raw ingredients: ginger, chilli peppers, salt, onions and a main ingredient – most often tomato, but can be lemon or green mango.
• safran – not to be confused with saffron, this is the local name for turmeric, which is mainly grown at La Plaine des Grègues in the south of Réunion.
• samousa – triangular-shaped and similar to Indian samosas, local samousa are generally small with a spicy meat, fish or vegetable filling.
• séga  – a traditional music genre from the Mascarene islands, with an associated dance form. It originated among slave populations, and is danced without the feet ever leaving the ground.
• St Expedit – a Roman soldier saint who is particularly venerated on Réunion. Red Saint Expeditus shrines are often found by roadsides.

St Expedit shrine, Entre-Deux

• tang – tenrec (Tenrec ecaudatus), a mammal which looks rather like a hedgehog, with a long pointed snout. It can be hunted from February to April, and can be eaten in a carri.
• ti’jaque – jackfruit (Artocarpus heterophyllus), a very large green fruit with an uneven skin. In Reunion it is finely chopped and cooked with smoked bacon to make the dish ti’jaque boucané.
• vacoas – the pandanus or screwpine tree, which can be found on the coast (Pandanus utilis) or in the highlands (Pandanus montanus). It produces an edible fruit called a pinpin, and its leaves can be woven to make objects such as a bertèl, a flat bag worn on the back.

Vacoa (Pandanus montanus) (Wikipedia)

• varang – house verandah, typical of Creole architecture.
• yab – a white Creole from the highlands.
• zamal – local cannabis.
• zarab – Muslim Creole of Indian origin (Gujarati region).
• zoreil – person not from Réunion Island, in particular a European or someone from mainland France.
• zourite – octopus, often eaten on Réunion in a civet (stew).

You might also like: 7 facts about Reunion Creole

Books about Reunion and worldwide literature

[Updated January 2023]

A recent exchange with Ann Morgan, who’s currently reading her way round the world, got me thinking about Reunion Island books in English. As far as I’m aware, with the exception of ‘Bourbon Island 1730’, the list I came up with contains only books that I have been written directly in English and not translated. In fact as far as I know there are no English translations of books by well-known Reunionese authors like Daniel Vaxelaire or Axel Gauvin, although the latter’s books have been translated into German.

Books about Reunion I haven’t read myself (but which are all on my Bookmooch wish list!):

• Reunion: An Island in Search of an Identity by Laurent Medea
• Monsters and Revolutionaries: Colonial Family Romance and Metissage by Françoise Verges
• Island Born Of Fire: Volcano Piton de la Fournaise by Dr Robert B. Trombley

Bourbon Island 1730

Books I’ve read myself:

• Crags and Craters: Rambles in the Island of Reunion by William Dudley Olivier (this is my favourite).
• The Last Colony: An Experience of Reunion Island by Michael Steane (an e-book full of inaccuracies)
• Six Months in Reunion: A Clergyman’s Holiday, and How He Passed it by Patrick Beaton (I didn’t like this much).
• Bourbon Island 1730 by Appollo & Lewis Trondheim (a graphic novel)
• Island Awakening by Lynne Martin (romantic fiction)
• Second Chance and its sequel Second Chance Sister by Linda Kepner (romantic fiction – thinly disguised sequels to François Truffaut’s film The Mississippi Mermaid)
• Dead Sexy by Kathy Lette (a “satire on the sex war”)
• Madeleine’s Children: Family, Freedom, Secrets and Lies in France’s Indian Ocean Colonies by Sue Peabody. A very well-researched historical biography of the slave Furcy and his family who famously went to court to fight for his freedom.
• Vanilla: travels in search of the Ice Cream Orchid has four chapters set in Reunion Island.

I’ve written reviews of all of the books above.

Also: Bonnes Vacances!: A Crazy Family Adventure in the French Territories by Rosie Millard which is about a 4-month tour of the DOM-TOMs Rosie made with her husband and four young children to film a documentary series for the Travel Channel (“Croissants in the Jungle”). Its final chapter covers Réunion (briefly); see my review here.

In the introduction I mentioned Ann Morgan who is currently reading her way around as many of the globe’s 196 independent countries as she can, sampling one book from every nation. (She’s also recently included a Rest of The World wildcard section, hence our exchange about Reunion Island). However as she asked herself: what counts as a story? Is it by a person born in that place? Is it written in the country? Can it be about another nation state? While in some respects she’s still answering that question she had to lay down her terms and so decided to limit herself to all narratives that could be read to full effect by one reader on their own e.g. memoirs, novels, short stories, novellas, biographies, narrative poems and reportage, but not non-narrative poetry and plays.

It got me wondering about which countries I’d already read literature from, and after a quick tour of my bookshelves (and my memory!) this is the (non-exhaustive) list I came up with, in English and French:

• Algeria – L’étranger [The Outsider] – Albert Camus [Author/Setting]
• Australia – The Secret River – Kate Grenville [Author/Setting]
• Belgium – L’Enfant de Noé – Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt [Author/Setting]
• Bosnia – The Cellist of Sarajevo – Steven Galloway [Setting; Author is Canadian]
• Botswana – The Kalahari Typing School for Men – Alexander McCall Smith [Setting; Author is British]

The Kalahari Typing School for Men

• Brazil – Rouge Brésil [Brazil Red] – Jean-Christophe Rufin [Setting; Author is French] (added March 2014)
• Burma – The Piano Tuner – Daniel Mason [Setting; Author is British]
• Cameroon – La saison de l’ombre – Léonora Miano [Author/Setting] (added November 2013)
• Canada – Where White Horses Gallop – Beatrice McNeil [Author/Setting]
• Central African Republic – Princesse aux Pieds Nu – Evelyne Durieux [Author/Setting]
• Chile – Ten Women by Marcela Serrano (translated by Beth Fowler) [Author/Setting]

Ten Women

• China (Yunnan) – Leaving Mother Lake: A Childhood at the Edge of the World – Yang Erche Namu [Author/Setting]
• Croatia – Girl at War – Sara Nović [Setting; Author is US-born but of Croatian origin] [added August 2022]
• Czech Republic – L’Insoutenable légèreté de l’être [The Unbearable Lightness of Being] – Milan Kundera [Author/Setting]
• Cuba – Our Man In Havana – Graham Greene [Setting; Author was British]
• Democratic Republic of Congo – The Poisonwood Bible – Barbara Kingsolver [Setting; Author is American]
• Denmark (& Greenland) – Miss Smilla’s Feeling For Snow – Peter Høeg [Author/Setting]
• Egypt – Woman at Point Zero – Nawal El Saadawi (translated by Sherif Hetata) [Author/Setting]
• French Polynesia (Tahiti) – Breadfruit: A Novel – Célestine Hitiura Vaite [Author/Setting] [August 2014 – I read the French translation L’Arbre à Pain by Henri Theureau]
• Germany – The Book Thief – Markus Zusak [Setting; Author is Australian]
• Haiti – Island Beneath the Sea – Isabel Allende (translated by Margaret Sayers Peden) [Setting; Author is Chilean American]

Island Beneath the Sea

• Hawaii – Comfort Woman – Nora Okja Keller [Author/Setting]
• Hungary – The White King – György Dragomán (translated by Paul Olchváry) [Author/Setting]
• Iceland – L’homme du Lac [The Draining Lake] – Arnaldur Indridason (translated by Eric Boury) [Author/Setting]
• India – A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry [Author/Setting]
• Indonesia – Krakatoa – Simon Winchester [Setting; Author is British]
• (Inner) Mongolia – Wolf Totem – Jiang Rong (translated by Howard Goldblatt) [Author/Setting]
• Iran – Jamais Sans Ma Fille [Not Without My Daughter] – Betty Mahmoody [Author/Setting]
• Ireland – Angela’s Ashes – Franck McCourt [Author/Setting]
• Israel – The Red Tent – Anita Diamant [Setting; Author is American]
• Italy – The Baron in the Trees – Italo Calvino (translated by Archibald Colquhoun) [Author/Setting]
• Jamaica (& Dominica) – Wide Sargasso Sea – Jean Rhys [Author/Setting]
• Japan – Out – Natsuo Kirino [Author/Setting]
• Kerguelen – La Désolation – Appollo [Setting; author is French from Reunion]
• Kiribati – Paradis [avant liquidation] – Julien Blanc-Gras [Setting; Author is French] (June 2014)

• Lebanon – The Fifth Mountain – Paulo Coelho [Setting; Author is Brazilian]
• Madagascar – Muddling Through In Madagascar – Dervla Murphy [Setting; Author is Irish]
• Malaysia (Borneo) – My Life in Sarawak – Margaret Brooke [Author/Setting]
• Mauritania – Le Tambour des Larmes – Beyrouk [Author/Setting]
• Mauritius – Paul & Virginie – Bernardin de St Pierre [Setting; Author was French]
• Mayotte – Mon Mari Est Plus Qu’un Fou : C’est Un Homme – Nassur Attoumani [Author/Setting] [added January 2013]
• Mexico – Like Water for Chocolate – Laura Esquivel (translated by Carol and Thomas Christensen) [Author/Setting] [added January 2019]
• Montenegro – The Son – Andrej Nikolaidis [Author/Setting] [added August 2022]
• Netherlands – Girl with a Pearl Earring – Tracy Chevalier [Setting; Author is American]
• New Zealand – Behind Closed Doors – Ngaire Thomas [Author/Setting]
• Oman – Bitter Orange Tree – Jokha Alharti; translated by Marilyn Booth [Author/Setting] [added January 2023]

• Nigeria – Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe [Author/Setting]
• North Korea – The Aquariums of Pyongyang – Kang Chol-Hwan [Author/Setting]
• Norway – Sophie’s World – Jostein Gaarder (translated by Paulette Møller) [Author/Setting]
• Pakistan – The Reluctant Fundamentalist – Mohsin Hamid [Author/Setting]
• Peru – The Bad Girl – Mario Vargas Llosa (translated by Edith Grossman) [Author/Setting (two out of seven chapters take place in Peru)] [added January 2018]
• Portugal – Blindness – José Saramago (translated by Giovanni Pontiero)[Author/Setting] [June 2022]
• Rodrigues – Voyage à Rodrigues – JMG Le Clezio [Setting; Author is French]
• Russia – Dans Les Forets de Sibérie – Sylvain Tesson [Setting; Author is French]
• Seychelles – Travelling Hopefully – Maggie Makepeace [Setting; Author is British]
• Sierra Leone – A Long Way Gone – Ishmael Beah [Author/Setting]
• South Africa – Disgrace – JM Coetzee [Author/Setting]
• South Korea – Who Ate Up All The Shinga? – Park Wan-Suh (translated by Yu Young-nan) [Author/Setting]
• Spain – The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafón [Author/Setting]
• Sweden – Millennium Trilogy – Steig Larsson (translated by ‘Reg Kreeland’) [Author/Setting]
• TAAF (French Southern & Antarctic Lands) – La désolation – Appollo & Gaultier [Setting] [December 2021]
• Thailand – Bright – Duanwad Pimwana (translated by Mui Poopoksakul) [Author/Setting]
• Tibet – Voyage d’une Parisienne à Lhassa [My Journey to Lhasa] – Alexandra David-Néel [Setting; Author was French]
• Trinidad  – A House for Mr Biswas by V.S. Naipaul [Author/Setting]
• Tromelin – Les Naufrages de l’ïle Tromelin – Irène Frain [Setting; Author is French]
• Turkey – My Name Is Red – Orhan Pamuk (translated by Erdağ Göknar) [Author/Setting]
• Ukraine – Death and the Penguin – Andrey Kurkov (translated by George Bird) [Author/Setting]
• United Arab Emirates – The Wink of the Mona Lisa and other stories from the Gulf – Mohammad Al Murr (translated from the Arabic by Jack Briggs) [Author/Setting] [October 2015]
• Uzbekistan (& Iran) – Samarcande [Samarkand] – Amin Maalouf [Setting; Author is from Lebanon]
• Vietnam – L’Amant [The Lover] – Marguerite Duras [Author/Setting]
• Zimbabwe (Southern Rhodesia) – The Grass is Singing – Doris Lessing [Author/Setting]  [August 2014]

Samarcande

Notes:

• I’ve arbitrarily excluded the UK, France and the USA as I’ve read so many books from these countries I’d have trouble choosing just one!
• If I’ve read several books from a country I’ve generally just listed my favourite.
• I’ve also taken liberties by listing some non-independent regions (e.g. Rodrigues, Hawaii, Kerguelen, Tibet, Tromelin).
• I excluded some books (such as Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto, or William Boyd’s African novels) that take place in unidentified countries.
• I also excluded books (such as Elie Wiesel’s Night) whose action takes place in several countries.
• If I’ve read a book in French but an English translation exists I’ve added the English title in brackets [].
• I’ve included books not written by natives of the country in question.

My conclusions:

• I have vast swathes of the planet where I haven’t read any literature from, for example South America or the Pacific! Places like South East Asia or Central Asia are patchy too. Although I list Paul Coelho and Isabel Allende the books of theirs that I read were not set in their native countries. And despite living and travelling for three years in Asia I’ve mainly read Korean books (North and South) but very little from the many other countries we travelled to in the region. I need to broaden my horizons even more.

What about you? Do you enjoy reading books from other countries? Do you have any books to recommend? Is literature from your native (or adopted) country easy to find in English?

P.S. Here’s the link to Ann Morgan’s blog: A Year Of Reading The World. Other reading around the world blogs I’ve come across are: Reading the World, World Lit Up and Around the World in 180 books (specialised in children’s literature).

You might also like: A few books with linguists as characters.

Taking turns conference

Translation-related events on Reunion Island are sufficiently rare for me to get excited about whatever comes my way – I can’t afford to be fussy!

Which is why one recent Saturday morning I found myself with a few dozen other people in an amphitheatre of the Faculty of Letters and Humanities of the local University for a “journée d’étude” (literally a “study day”, but this was actually only a half-day), called Le Tournant Traductologique, literally ‘the Turn in Translation Studies‘.

Organised by the Centre de Recherches Littéraires et Historiques de l’Océan Indien (CRLHOI; Indian Ocean Centre for Literary and Historical Research), the introduction was enough to put off the most faint-hearted:

“Indissociable du tournant pragmatique en sciences du langage, le tournant traductologique s’opère au moment où les théories et méthodes de traduction visent une modélisation sémiotique des transferts culturels au lieu de se cantonner aux opérations de transfert d’un texte d’une langue dans une autre. Ce changement coïncide avec l’ouverture du champ épistémologique de la traduction à l’ensemble des sciences humaines. L’accélération du phénomène dans les années 1980 s’explique en bonne partie par les effets de la mondialisation sur les modes de communication et sur les diversités culturelles. La traduction joue alors un rôle crucial dans le rapprochement des hommes, l’échange des savoirs et des cultures. Or, l’idée du progrès et de la pacification de l’humanité à travers la médiation de l’altérité n’est pas propre à l’époque contemporaine, mais elle prend racine au XIXe siècle en Allemagne. La réflexion suivante de Wilhelm von Humboldt résume en quelques mots la problématique à laquelle sera consacrée notre journée d’études : « Tant que l’on ne sent pas l’étrangeté, mais l’étranger, la traduction a rempli son but suprême. »”

 

Wilhelm von Humboldt. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

{Inseparable from the pragmatic turn in linguistics, the turn in translation studies occurs when the theories and methods of translation aim for a semiotic modelling of cultural transfers instead of being confined to transferring text from one language to another. This change coincides with the opening of the epistemological field of translation to all of the humanities. The acceleration of this phenomena in the 1980s can largely be explained by the effects of globalisation on patterns of communication and cultural diversity. Consequently translation plays a crucial role in bringing mankind together, and in exchanging knowledge and culture. But the idea of progress and pacification of humanity through the mediation of otherness is not unique to modern times, but is rooted in 19th century Germany. The following reflection by Wilhelm von Humboldt briefly summarises the problems on which our day of study will focus: “As long as one does not feel the foreignness, yet does feel the foreign, translation has reached its highest goal”.} *

The morning’s programme

Participants were mainly doctoral candidates at the University, as well as several university professors.

For me one of the most interesting presentations was actually the first, by Laurence Gouaux, a critique of Rani Mâyâ’s French translation of Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni‘s “Queen of Dreams” as it covered ‘my’ languages (French and English) and had an accompanying written document.

All in all a half day very different from my typical morning as a translator; very intellectual, but it allowed me to take an in-depth look at translation, and that can’t be a bad thing.

* The rest of the quotation continues: “but where foreignness appears as such, and more than likely even obscures the foreign, the translator betrays his inadequacy”. Taken from the introduction to Humboldt’s translation of Aeschylus‘s ‘Agamemnon‘ from the Greek. In German: “Solange nicht die Fremdheit, sondern das Fremde gefühlt wird, hat die Uebersetzung ihre höchsten Zwecke erreicht; wo aber die Fremdheit an sich erscheint, und vielleicht gar das Fremde verdunkelt, da verräth der Uebersetzer, dass er seinem Original nicht gewachsen ist“.