Yanky Fachler kindly acceded to our request and  travelled to Cambridge to interview Professor Nicholas de Lange, the English translator of over a dozen books by Israeli author, Amos Oz, including Judas, which was short-listed for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize. An ordained Reform rabbi, Professor de Lange is Emeritus Fellow and Professor of Hebrew and Jewish Studies at Cambridge University's Faculty of Divinity and Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies. He has held visiting positions at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, the Jewish Theological Seminary of Hungary in Budapest, the École Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris, the Freie Universität Berlin, the University of Toronto and Princeton University. He is a prolific translator of contemporary Hebrew fiction, and has served as Chairman of the Translators Association. In the following extracts, Professor de Lange shares some insights on the art of literary translation.

Yanky Fachler is a translator, broadcaster and writer of  several books in the field of Jewish history. He was born in the United Kingdom, spent almost thirty years in Israel and currently lives in Ireland, where he is founder and chairman of the Jewish Historical Society of Ireland.

 

 

 Y.F. :  How would you define a translator?

A translator is a reader who is also a writer. I read the text, and then I write it. My aim is to write a book that is word for word like the original – without being a word for word translation. Since I also write many books of my own, I see no difference between a translator and an author. As an author, you convert material from your mind on to the page. As a translator, you convert someone else’s work to the page. I am uncomfortable being asked which specific words of phrases in Hebrew I find difficult to translate. I don’t like being asked whether I find Hebrew a difficult language to translate. The actual words are almost irrelevant. I translate paragraphs.

 Y.F. :  Do you read a book before you start to translate it?

I don’t like to read the book in advance. Partly because translation is so badly paid that it takes up too much time; and partly because I like to discover the book as I go along. This approach, though, can lead you astray. In Oz’s My Michael, there is a couple living in Jerusalem who drink endless cups of tea. One day, the man is ill and he asks his wife to bring him tea with milk. With my British background, I found this strange. How had he consumed all the previous cups of tea? Then I learned that in Israel, tea with milk is only given to sick people. I had to go back and rewrite all the tea scenes, replacing cups of tea with glasses of tea. Going back to the question of reading a book before translating it, some of the other translators at the Man Booker event agreed with my habit of not reading the book first. But one translator was adamant: “I must read the book first, because I might not accept it.” The only time I have turned down a translation job is when I was too busy.

 

Y.F. : The actor Lawrence Olivier claimed that actors must learn to love the unsavoury characters they portray on stage. Does something similar happen with translators? Do you have to love some of the unsavoury characters you translate?

N.d.L. :  Translation isn't impartial. Like Olivier rightly says, you must be on the side of the character. You must love the characters you translate. Many of the characters that populate Amos Oz's books are unpleasant, but I don't let my dislike of them stop me from portraying them as they should be portrayed. Anyway, unsavoury characters make interesting characters. You need enormous sympathy for the characters you are translating. For example, some of the books I translate have no narrator – they are entirely epistolary. Everything is in direct speech. Just as a theatre audience needs to know the distinct voice of each actor on stage, so the translator must make the reader aware of which character is speaking at any particular time in an epistolary piece. While on the subject of dialogue on stage and dialogue in translation, I once translated a piece for BBC Radio 3 that was only intended to be read aloud, not to appear on the printed page. The actress called me and said she had a problem with a couple of phrases. "Could you please go back and check the Hebrew to see whether that is what the author really meant?" My heart sank. This was going to be a disaster. Yet when I went back to the original, she was absolutely correct. Without knowing any Hebrew, the actress had stumbled upon a couple of places where my translation did not do justice to the original.

Y.F. : You are quoted as saying that a faithful literary translation demands transcending the words to convey the whole cultural context. Could you elaborate?

N.d.L. :  As a translator, you have to translate the context of the book you are translating. You are asking people to read about a culture they don't and can't know. You have to make the context clear in a subtle way. For example, when there is a reference to Chaim Nachman Bialik, Israel's national poet, you don'; have the luxury of using footnotes. You need to find a more subtle way of letting the reader know who Bialik is. It's the same with biblical and Talmudical references. I don't feel the need to explain what the Bible is or what the Talmud is. I leave it to my readers to pick up allusions and to look stuff up for themselves.

Y.F. : What is your latest Hebrew literature translation project?

N.d.L. :  I don't go out of my way to look for Hebrew books to translate, but I am currently engaged in translating perhaps the most challenging Hebrew novel, Days of Ziklag by S Yizhar. This hugely influential modernist work was first published in 1958, and is one of the two most difficult Hebrew books to translate. The other is Yakov Shabtai's Zikhron Devarim (Past Continuous). I was drawn to the Days of Ziklag project because it is the ultimate challenge for a translator – a bit like translating James Joyce. Although Yizhar was writing before the emergence of Holocaust literature as a genre, his War of Independence themes resonated with Holocaust themes such as ethnic cleansing.

Y.F. : Do you ever collaborate with other translators?

N.d.L. :  Right now, I am collaborating on S Yizhar's Days of Ziklag with a former student of mine, Yaacob Dweck. But what with me living in England, and Yaacob living in the USA, we have calculated that it will take us many years to complete the project [1] . I am not unaware of some of the perils of working with a collaborator. The translator Ros Schwartz once told me of her experience in co-translating a book with another translator. She soon discovered that they each had their own style, and this made it very difficult to find a consistent voice. Even little things like the propensity of one translator to use "start" where the other translator used "begin" caused difficulties. As a rule, I often feel uncomfortable reading other translators. If a book is translated from a language I don't know, I find myself asking what the original was like. I suppose I only enjoy translations that are extraordinarily well done.

 

Y.F. : In Judas, Shmuel gives Yardena a gift for her secular birthday and another for her Hebrew birthday. Having two birthdays is like having two identities. As a translator, does English represent your secular identity, and Hebrew your sacred identity?

N.d.L. :  That is a very subtle question. Yes, English is my secular identity. I certainly regard Hebrew as a sacred tongue, and I prefer to use it only for sacred purposes. I have translated more medieval Hebrew poetry into English than modern Hebrew literature. I don't speak modern Hebrew. I can't read a Hebrew newspaper. [2]  I can listen to the news, but I get lost when they talk about politics. I am unfamiliar with many modern colloquialisms. I do not even regard myself as an expert in Hebrew literature. At the get-together of the Man Booker Prize short-listed authors and their translators, the authors were asked to read from their work in the original language. Amos Oz wasn't there, and they asked me to read. I refused, because my spoken modern Hebrew is not good enough.

 

Y.F. : Jews have traditionally been multi-lingual. They spoke the language of the host country, they prayed in Hebrew, and conversed in Yiddish, Ladino, Aramaic or Arabic. Does the Jewish cultural DNA give Jews an edge when it comes to translating?

N.d.L. :  It is true that through the ages, Jews used their linguistic versatility to become great translators. But the golden age was during the medieval period. In the world of modern literature, Jews no longer have an edge. Most of today's best translators are not Jewish. A lot of translations of modern Hebrew literature used to be clumsy, with translators often not even translating into their mother tongue. But things are much better nowadays, because the authors themselves have learned to be more choosey about who will translate them.

  

Y.F. : You seem to be drawn to works associated with Israel's War of Independence. Do you think that the war could have been avoided?

N.d.L. :  The main theme of Judas is the conflict between David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister – a true-life character, and the fictional character of Shaltiel Abravanel. Ben Gurion believed that the Arabs would never accept a Jewish state in Palestine, so the only alternative was to fight them. Abravanel insisted that war was avoidable, and for his views he was expelled from the ruling elite. He did not think that Israel should be a Jewish state, rather a country in which all could live in equality as brothers. Whatever my views on Abravanel's views may be, I do not let this influence my translation.

 

Y.F. : In Israel today, some people brand Oz a traitor for his controversial political views. How have his views impinged on your long-term collaborator as Oz's translator?

N.d.L. :  I don't have any opinion about Amos Oz's political views. I am a translator, and I'm really not involved or interested in Israeli politics. I am an academic. It is not my job to pass judgement on the opinions expressed in the book. It is not my job to impose myself on the text. It's not my job to get involved in the politics. It is my job to translate what's put in front of me.

——————–

  The interviewee: Nicole Nolette joined the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, as Assistant Professor of French Studies in July 2017.  She is the recipient of the Ann-Saddlemyer prize, awarded by the Canadian Association for Theatre Research, and also the winner of the award for best work in theater research for the period 2014-2016, presented by the Quebec Society of Theatre Studies, for her book Jouer la traduction. Théâtre et hétérolinguisme au Canada francophone (2015). She has published numerous articles in the fields of translation, theater and French-Canadian literature. From 2014 to 2016, she was Social Science Research Council postdoctoral research associate of the Cultural Agents Initiative at Harvard University.

 

The interviewer: Geraldine Brodie is Lecturer in Translation Theory and Theatre Translation, and the Convenor of the MA in Translation Theory and Practice at University College London. She devised and co-convened the Translation in History Lecture Series and the Theatre Translation Forum, and was a co-editor of the online journal New Voices in Translation Studies from 2012 to 2015.

Geraldine's research focuses on theatre translation practices in contemporary London, including the collaborative role of the translator in performance and the intermediality and interlinearity of surtitles.She is a frequent presenter on these topics, in the UK and internationally, and her work has been published in a variety of publications. Geraldine is a member of the Panel of Associates of ARTIS, a new research training initiative in the broad area of translation and interpreting studies.

Geraldine has an MA in Comparative Literature from University College London and read English as an undergraduate at Brasenose College, Oxford where she specialised in Linguistics, Old and Middle English and Old French. She has a Diploma de Español como Lengua Extranjera from the Instituto Cervantes. Geraldine's research interests include the multiple voices of translation; direct, indirect and literal theatre translation; adaptation and version; the intermediality of surtitles; and ethics in translation. She is a Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales and a member of the Chartered Institute of Taxation. Geraldine's first monograph, The Translator on Stage, will be published by Bloomsbury in 2017.

Geraldine was our Linguist of the Month in August 2016.

 
The following interview was conducted in English by Skype between London and Ottawa.

——————-

GB:   Your recent book, Jouer la traduction, discusses translated and bilingual theatre in areas of Canada where French is a minority language. How did you become interested in this topic? What is your personal experience of working in French in Canada?

NN: My interest in bilingual  theater (French-English) and its translation began in 2005 when I was studying with Louise Ladouceur at the francophone Campus Saint-Jean, University of Alberta. At that time I became interested in the bilingual theater of Western Canada because its translation often seemed impossible. I examined whether, rather than considering this theater as untranslatable), one could see it as a game. I then wanted to see if this game of translation might also take place elsewhere, in other postcolonial or diglossic conditions, for example. I chose to study two other case studies similar to that of Western Canada: the province of Ontario, to the west of Quebec, and the region of Acadie, to the east. The city of Montreal and McGill University seemed to be the ideal places from which to observe the evolution and movement of theatrical productions from across Canada. I worked with Catherine Leclerc, a specialist in literary multilingualism and author of Des langues en partage? Cohabitation du français et de l'anglais en littérature contemporaine (2010).

I have also been able to visit the sites of production and translation of bilingual theater over the years. For three years I worked as a postdoctoral fellow in the United States with Doris Sommer at the Cultural Agents Initiative at Harvard University, supported by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. And for the past year, I have been teaching in Nova Scotia, on the extreme frontier (and origins) of the territory of Acadie. My studies in translation were conducted in French in English-language universities, and I continue to teach in a similar context.

 

GB: Can you give some examples of how French-language theatre is presented in areas where French is a minority language? What approaches to translation are taken, and what kinds of audiences are catered for?

NN: There is a quite significant difference between theater produced west of Quebec (Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, British Columbia) and that produced in the east (Acadia). In Ontario and Manitoba, for example, francophones make up about 4% of the population; in Alberta and Saskatchewan, the figure is more like 2%. In Acadian New Brunswick, on the other hand, French is the main language of 30% of the population. This difference in the demographics of minority groups also appears in the practices of production and translation of bilingual theater.

In Acadia, the francophone population, even though bilingual to a large extent, creates very little bilingual theater. However, a wide variety of French dialects inspires artistic production. Some of these local varieties of French (including Chiac, spoken in Moncton) also include borrowings and code-switching. This is the case, for example, in the futurist production Empreintes [Traces], presented by the Moncton-Sable Collective after a text by Paul Bossé, which includes an actor playing a Chiac-speaking cyber sapiens who has some fun with the translations she interprets for the audience.

In Ontario and especially in Western Canada, theatre practitioners are more likely to opt for bilingual theater. In Western Canada there is often a preoccupation with identity or community, whereas in Ontario there is a tendency towards the artistic, and sometimes post-dramatic, exploration of bilingualism on stage. I’m thinking, for example, of the production Le Rêve totalitaire de dieu l'amibe by Louis Patrick Leroux, in which the character of the Commentator makes ironic judgments in English on the dramatic action that takes place in French. In another production, L'Homme invisible/The Invisible Man, two actors share the action: one narrates, the other translates; the direction of translation is then reversed so that there is no longer any identifiable language of departure or arrival.

In accordance with these multilingual practices, it is also in the west that such theaters explore a variety of different translation strategies. Surtitling, for example, was used initially by the Théâtre Français in Toronto around 2005 and has rapidly been taken up by many of the minority theatrical institutions in Ontario and the west. In contrast, there is no surtitling policy in Acadie; when touring in the west, however, Acadian theater productions are sometimes surtitled.

I am interested in these regional differences with regard to bilingualism and translation, but I am also investigating how theatrical productions circulate and are legitimized in major theater centers in Canada: in French in Montreal, and in English in Toronto. Since theatregoers in these cities do not necessarily share the bilingualism of the minority communities who create the theatrical forms we are discussing, performances are developed to address new audiences. Thus, a particular bilingual production can become more or less bilingual for spectators who may not be able to fully comprehend it in French or English.

These two stages – the initial bilingual composition and its subsequent translations – are what I call “playful translation”. In the book, I discuss certain paradoxes in the reception of bilingual or surtitled theater productions in Toronto and Montreal. On the one hand, in Toronto, English surtitles not only succeed in attracting audiences with English as their first language, but also francophone audiences unused to hearing French regularly spoken in their minority context. On the other hand, francophone audiences in Montreal are themselves often bilingual, and are less resistant than might be expected to the presence of English on stage.

 

GB:   Your book investigates the concept of “playful translation”. Can you explain how this functions in relation to French-language theatre in Canada? Can this concept be applied to other forms of translated theatre?

NN: I consider “playful translation” at two levels: the playful inscription of bilingualism in a theater production, and its reinscription in subsequent translations of the same production for other audiences. In both cases, playful translation may take the form of performed translators, redistributed replicas or surtitles above the stage. The concept of “play” seems particularly potent: it is employed in language (“play on words”, for example) and in theater (where to act is also “to play”). Considering French-Canadian theater from the perspective of play is also quite innovative; it is customary to regret the ongoing assimilation that is manifested by the bilingualism of minority groups. It seems to me that the concept of “play” equally permits the development of opportunities with regard to translation. Creating a space (in the sense of the space necessary for movement) for "play" in the activity of translation is to follow in the line of word play and the play of multilingualism. It puts a stop to the consideration of such practices as fundamentally untranslatable.

I also consider that the concept of playful translation could be applied to other theatrical forms by minority groups on the boundaries of different languages. The work of Tace Hedrick on bilingual poetry (Spanish-English) in North America and its translation, for example, reminds me that there are international connections that can be traced through playful translation. There could also be other multilingual contexts where it would be interesting to test this concept, such as Hong Kong or Yakutsk.

 

GB:   I noticed that your book discusses translation theory from both English-language and French-language sources. How would you envisage a translation of your own book into English?

NN: In writing this book, I aimed to cross linguistic and cultural boundaries of translation theory, minority literature and production. The concept of play, for example, allows me to draw on Johan Huizinga and Roger Caillois, but also on French theory as it is reworked by American cultural studies. I wanted to dip into an interdisciplinary and intercultural repertoire to discuss productions dealing with translation and still in the process of translation. Discussing such productions was perhaps easier in French: the book caters for an audience that already has some awareness of French-Canadian theater. The translation of this book into English would require a fuller presentation of the context generating the issues of French-Canadian theater in order to inform a new audience.

 

GB:         Where will your research take you next?

Since the publication of this book, I have been pursuing several avenues of research. One of them is the contribution of technology, which is ubiquitous in multilingual theater productions and their translations. The character of the cyber sapiens interpreter in Empreintes [Traces] shows that the Chiac dialect and Babelfish style translation can go hand in hand. The use of surtitles is another example of the contribution of technology to the translation of multilingualism. I would like to expand these connections, perhaps by researching perceptions of stage technologies. I am also aiming to advance the theory of multilingual theater; beyond the drama of assimilation, beyond the concept of playful translation – itself carrying some sense of denunciation, I consider that new forms of bilingual theater are making further efforts to target intercultural encounter. To this extent, bilingual theatre presents the hope of potential encounters. In Canada, my concept of “play” relates primarily to French-Canadian theater practitioners, with “hope” attributed to English-Canadian practitioners. A more comprehensive review would consider these two possible forms of bilingual theater in Canada. We have yet to theorize the potential of these moments of meeting – and translation.

[1] Jouer la traduction. Théâtre et hétérolinguisme au Canada francophone
University of Ottawa Press
May 27, 2015

 

[1] Jouer la traduction
Théâtre et hétérolinguisme au Canada francophone
Les Presses de l'Université d'Ottawa
27 mai 2015

 

The following interview was conducted by Skype between Los Angeles and Montreal

S. S. – the interviewee	J. G. – the interviewer

   
                                       

Jonathan: Your parents were born in Toronto. You spoke English at home and despite studying French at school your first significant exposure to French came in your teens. How did that come about?

Sherry: My mom was very forward-looking…meaning that she recognized that French was important in Montreal! That may sound very obvious now, but I grew up in a city that was still practically a colonial city—with a powerful and very self-sufficient English-language minority. What was experienced by some as intolerable change starting in the 1960s (those who felt threatened or excluded by a French-language city) was experienced by others as a period of social, economic and political excitement. The fact that I took a university-level French course while I was still in high school changed my outlook entirely. I was increasingly attracted to French-language culture.

Jonathan: You found Montreal to be comparable with Calcutta in certain respects. (You later wrote « Villes en traduction: Calcutta, Barcelona, Montreal », Presses de l'Université de Montreal, 2013). Can you expound on that comparison.

Sherry: Calcutta and Montreal were founded in the same historical period of colonialism—1609 for Calcutta, 1642 for Montreal. Montreal was founded as a French city, then there was the Conquest of 1759 which meant that Ville Marie became Montreal. Both cities were the products of spatial division—a more modern, spacious area which contrasted greatly with the rest of the city. Of course the colonial divides of India were very different from the colonial divides of Quebec—where two European powers were in competition, and where the indigenous presence had been largely obliterated. But the linguistic and spatial arrangements of Calcutta and Montreal share the same colonialist premise and the interaction between parts of the city shared similar dynamics. What I learned was that there was a great deal to be discovered when you looked at Calcutta and Montreal as cities in translation. The history of the Bengali Renaissance as it played out across Calcutta is rich and fascinating—the story of innovations in science and the arts that were a product of the interplay between communities. The same is true of Montreal, mutatis mutandis. A cultural history of the city since the 1940s for instance tells of numerous new pathways created across the city. Literary personalities such as Mavis Gallant, F.R. Scott or A.M. Klein have woven cultural ties between the French and English speakers, both in journalism and in poetry. What is important to note, however, is that translation is not always successful and that failed translation can also be useful to explore.

Jonathan: You went on to study Comparative Literature at Brandeis University in the USA, and did your Masters in Paris, obtaining a Diplome de l'Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, and a doctorate in literature compareé from the University of Montreal. Your career-path is somewhat unusual: although you were initially a literary translator you soon moved into the academic study of translating. Your positions have included Professeure du Département d'études françaises at Concordia University and membre de l'Académie des lettres du Québec.

The long list of books you've written includes "Translating Montreal: Episodes in the Life of a Divided City", for which you reached the finals of the Ville de Montreal, Grand Prix du Livre. Although some might have regarded that as being an ivory-tower occupation, your writings were widely recognized, as witness the many prizes you have won, such as the Prix Andre-Laurendeau en Sciences humaines.

During your distinguished career, what advances have you seen in the role of the literary translator?

Sherry: The very fact of the expansion of Translation Studies as an academic field is a great success story of the last 3 decades or so. The growth has been exponential—books, journals, academic programs, summer schools, and the list goes on. The field is especially important in Europe, and literary translation is increasingly recognized as an important creative activity. Translators are getting more recognition, I think, in general—with the wonderful work of translators associations, of high-profile translators, and of academics who take the work of these translators seriously and are making their work the object of serious study. In Canada, literary translation benefits from government support and a certain degree of public recognition. But the same platitudes are often repeated. We still need to work towards further recognition of the creative value of translation—not only in relation to the Canadian scene but internationally.

Jonathan: Your very latest book, just published, "Translation Effects: The Shaping of Modern Canadian Culture" (written together with Kathy Mezei and Luise von Flotow, McGill-Queen's University Press, pp.496) deals, inter alia, with the subject of bilingualism. For the benefit of our readers who have not read it and may not manage to do so, could you give us one or two points on Canadian bilingualism?

Sherry: We argue in the book that official bilingualism has in many ways masked the multiform realities of translation within Canadian society. And so the book—which is a collection of 30-some essays—shows how translation is a factor is many aspects of literary and cultural life—through First Nations languages, immigrant languages, and the unequal transactions of French and English. While official bilingualism is an important element of our national self-definition, allowing the country to function, it only applies to the legal realities of the country. The cultural realities are messier, more unequal, but also creative of new mixtures.

Jonathan: So why has the Federal Government gone to such lengths to promote and preserve bilingualism?

Sherry: Official bilingualism in its current form was a result of the political unrest of the 1960s. There is a very significant separatist movement in Quebec, always ready to re-emerge, and in the 1960s it was very strong. Official bilingualism was one response to this crisis, promising a French presence from coast to coast. But Canada also has a multicultural policy, which gives cultural rights to 'ethnic' groups. These rights are sometimes in conflict with one another, or perceived as such. It is true that official bilingualism has remained in place for many decades now, and seems to have performed its task well. But while the government used to do all its translation in-house, it now outsources practically all translation tasks, and no longer ensures training.

Jonathan: Dr Paul Christophersen of the University College in Ibadan, Nigeria, in his book called "Bilingualism", is quoted as saying that it is almost impossible for a "so-called" bilingual speaker to achieve 100% efficiency in both languages. 

Sherry: Of course there is no such thing as perfect bilingualism. Bilingualism is almost always asymmetrical, however there are many Quebecers who function as well in one language as the other. Usually this is an oral skill. Writing is another story. There are very few people who write as well in one language as the other, and for instance, while many can read equally well in both languages, in Quebec the literary institutions are quite separate. But as for day to day functional bilingualism, there are an astonishing number of people who could claim this capacity in Montreal especially. And while French-Canadians in the past were 'forced' to be bilingual, it is now English-language Montrealers who are increasingly bilingual. But as for 100% efficiency, I would say that this is not really a useful marker. What is 100% efficient when language is concerned?

Jonathan: Mr John Woodsworth, a Russian-English translator who submitted a report to the Canadian government many years ago, proposed to CBC: Replace the current system of separate English and French-language TV networks by a single bilingual network, with a daily schedule of mostly (if not all) Canadian-produced programming originating alternately in English and French, with captions (sub-titles) provided in the second language.

Sherry: An interesting idea, but unlikely to happen. The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission regulates these matters. Twenty years ago it closed down a bilingual radio channel that alternated between French and English. With the present government's stance on public broadcasting, we will be lucky to retain public broadcasting, never mind revolutionize it.

Jonathan: In the course of this brief interview, we have only been able to touch on the diverse fields of erudition that you bring to historical and cultural aspects of translating. Nevertheless, we hope to have given our readers an idea of what they may find in any of the numerous books that you have written. Many thanks.

 

 

 Sherry Simon – The Flow of Languages, the Grace of Cultures (in French)

 

 

We welcome back [1] to the ranks of our contributors John Wellington a New Yorker whose art finds its inspiration in Old Master paintings, religious and pop icons, cinema, music, and his fascination with devotion, idolatry and the use of male and female imagery in art and life.  He has shown in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Miami, Paris and London.  His paintings may be seen on the website: johnwellington.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

YOU AND ME oil on aluminum, 68 x 48 inches See explanation below of the painting's legend [*]

John Wellington in his studio See "Studio Visit" video below [**]

 

John Wellington has recently released the first three volumes of Idols Demons Saints, a series of e-books based on his sketchbooks, showing the process of creating from the first inked line to a finished work of art. (See John Wellington : Idols, Demons and Saints by James F. Cooper)

John leads painting groups to Paris.

In the following article, John relates his friendship with Jean Giraud (1938-2012), the renowned French comic-book creator  known also by his pseudonyms Mœbius and Gir.

 ————

In 1977 a French comic – Métal Hurlant – was translated and reproduced for the American market as Heavy Metal Magazine.  At sixteen years old, looking through issue number one, I was visually transported by the storytelling of a number of European artists that I, like my friends, had never heard of.  There was one artist, whose masterful line work and surreal story stood out for me, even above the other exceptionally talented illustrators collected in that first issue.  His contribution was a wordless tale titled Arzach and he signed it “Moebius.”  That was my introduction to Jean Giraud’s world – a lone rider, flying a saddled Pterodactyl-like bird across an apocalyptic landscape to rescue what he believed to be a damsel in distress.  As a teenager I copied Jean’s drawings using Rapidograph pens and coloring my attempts with Dr. Martin’s Dyes or watercolors.  I spent hours trying to understand and unravel Jean’s magic of showing form and texture through the elegance of his line. It would be a few years later at art school, that when looking at the engravings of Pieter Brueghel the Younger, Albrecht Dürer, and Hendrick Goltzius that I would begin to understand the genesis of Jean’s hatch marks.

A decade later in 1988, two incidents brought me to France, both involving my creative life.  The first was my participation in a show at Centre George Pompidou.  The second was my involvement in both the pulp and graphic novel versions of a story for Marvel Comics.

Jean Dethier, the then Director of Architecture at Pompidou, visited my studio in Greenpoint, Brooklyn after seeing my painting Der Erzengle [2].  Monsieur Dethier invited me to be a part of the large scale show he was curating: Chateau Bordeaux.  Asking what I would need in order to participate in the exhibition I requested to be embedded in a winery to paint, sketch and find my inspiration.  Weeks later Jean proposed that I stay at Château Pichon-Longueville Comtesse de Lalande for five weeks as the guest of General and Madame de Lencquesaing.  They would provide a studio, car, and of course, room and board in their château.  For five weeks in the summer of 1988, I drove through the vineyards of Pauillac and neighboring villages, painted, ate, and of course drank the grand vins of the local wineries. 

To support myself during this time, I worked as a colorist for Marvel Comics.  A few months before the Bordeaux trip, the editors at Epic Comics (an imprint of Marvel) asked if I would color a two-part pulp comic of The Silver Surfer. “Pulp” was the term we used for low quality comics printed on newspaper and usually sold in newsstands.  The story was written by Stan Lee, the creator of many of Marvel's greatest superheroes, including Spider-Man, The Hulk, and Thor, but what made this job the best of my career in comics was that it was illustrated by Jean Giraud – Moebius – my teenage art idol.

Jean sent color notes to the Marvel offices at lower Park Avenue in Manhattan, consisting not of

actual colors, but rather the numeric and letter codes that were used to identify colors for comic books printed on pulp paper.  Jean marked up black and white xeroxed pages of his art with arrows pointing to letters and numbers like Y2R2, Y2BR3 and every other combination of Y (yellow), B (blue) and R (red) that could be made from 25% (2), 50% (3) and 100% of the dot pattern of those colors.  American pulp comics had a VERY limited color palette (the majority of the color choices looked a muddied greenish brown) and I don’t think Jean was ever happy with the results of the reductive and poor reproduction values of the final product.  Still, the two part pulp version of The Silver Surfer sold well and that summer as I was preparing to leave  for Bordeaux, I was asked to paint the pages of a high quality graphic novel version of the Stan Lee/Moebius The Silver Surfer.  This process was called “blue-line” as Jean’s pages were printed on large art board as blue, rather than black lines.  These could then be painted over in gouache or washed with watercolor where the pages would be scanned and photographed as original art with the black line work of Jean’s drawings overlaid on top of the painted pages.  

 

Before starting my five weeks of painting at Pichon Longueville Comtesse de Lalande in Pauillac, I spent a week in Paris to meet with Jean Dethier and some of the other artists and architects that would be contributing work to Chateau Bordeaux.  Jean Giraud had agreed to meet me that week so that I could show him some of my finished pages for the graphic novel.  As excited as I was to finally meet the artist whose line work I tried to emulate a decade earlier, it was also my hope that he would not be disappointed in these painted pages as he had been in the already published pulp version.  And so it was with equal amounts of excitement and trepidation that I went off to meet Jean Giraud for a drink at Le Select on Boulevard Montparnasse on August 15th of 1988.

I was already sitting on the terrace of the café when Jean Giraud approached me.  I was 27 years old and he had recently turned 50.  He seemed to my young eyes both boyish and old.  Jean’s hair was wild, receding and greying, his face showing deep furrows around the brow of his forehead and along the creases of his mouth, but his eyes, framed by thin wired oval glasses, twinkled with youth.  After we ordered drinks from the waiter, I produced the pages I had colored.  He studied each one carefully and smiled when he returned them to the portfolio.  Relieved that he approved of my work, we turned our conversation to art.  He was working on a new series of abstract paintings that he was planning to show at Pompidou at some point.  He joked that he would avoid his opening as he feared the reaction to a body of work that was far different from what he was famous for. 

 

After drinks, Jean invited me for dinner around the corner at a vegetarian restaurant called Dietetic Shop on Rue Delambre.  The bright green facade and large yellow lettering made this petite bistro near impossible to miss on the tranquil street behind Boulevard Montparnasse.  At the time, Jean was a practicing “rawist” and Dietetic Shop prepared all his food uncooked as to his wishes.  At dinner we showed each other the drawings in our sketchbooks as we both always kept one with us.  Jean was one of those artists that could draw anything from imagination.  I have met a few more artists like him in the decades since, especially in the world of concept illustration and comic book art, but the type of visual memory skill that Jean possessed, has to this day, felt as much to me like a super power as a talent.

Earlier that evening, before our rendezvous, I had watched an interview show on television to help improve my poor French.  I described to Jean the strange man that was being interviewed; disheveled, unshaven, his eyelids heavy and swollen, and chain smoking Gitanes.

This man, wearing a denim jump suit, went out of his way to antagonize the host, and when a photo was shown of him looking both straight at the camera, and in profile – an American ‘perp” photo – I was sure he was a criminal.  Well, a criminal that could sing, as the show then played a video of this man performing the ballade Mon Legionnaire.  Jean Giraud laughed and knew exactly who I had seen on TV a few hours earlier, not a criminal, but the great singer and song writer Serge Gainsbourg, promoting his latest album You're Under Arrest.  To Jean’s astonishment I still had no idea who this person was, so after our dinner, Jean took me to a record shop on Montparnasse where I bought two cassettes for my Walkman.  And so that evening was not only the occasion of my meeting one of the great artists of my youth but also my introduction to Serge Gainsbourg. I became the proud owner of the cassettes, Melody Nelson, and You’re Under Arrest.  Within a year I would own many more of Gainsbourg’s albums, and become such a fan as to mourn his loss on March 2, 1991.

Two days later Jean invited me to his studio to hang out with him while he painted his abstract paintings.  I pulled out my gouache paints and started a small portrait of him working over the drafting table, while he made his acrylic paints and brush do magical things on the page.  We talked of fame, comics, films, and the struggles of being an artist.  And most importantly, we began a friendship.

Over the years, Jean would visit me in New York City.  Once he came at my invitation to lecture at the New York Academy of Art.  Another time, after drinks, we drew in each other’s sketchbooks where till this day I know I got the better part of the deal.  His drawing depicted two cowboys of the future meeting in a desert called Providence, references both to the city where I went to college and, I imagine, to our friendship.  Above the drawing, he penned the letters “GG,”  a reference to the black Siamese cat I had at that time.  To this day I treasure the sketch for many reasons.  But one is because of his love of America and specifically of “the Wild West.”  He once talked about his earlier comic book work done under the nom de plume “Gir.”  Blueberry depicted with astonishing accuracy, cowboys and indians, Winchester rifles, and every other accoutrement of that genre, and like Sergio Leone and his “Spaghetti Western” films, Jean illustrated these comic books before ever visiting the United States.

 

A decade almost to the week after our first meeting, in the summer of 1998 I painted my last portrait of Jean.  We had finished dinner at his Paris studio on rue Falguiere behind the Gare Montparnasse, and our sons went down to the courtyard to play.  While drinking wine, Jean and I talked about art, children, women and life, stopping our conversations only when I needed to paint his mouth.  That portrait of Jean, painted in simple bold hatch marks, might have impressed him more than any other work I had done up to that moment.  When it was completed, he held the painting in his hands and said “magic.”  That was what art and the act of creating was for him.  Decades later, it is still what the act of creating is for me.  Magic.

 

[*] YOU AND ME, one of twenty-one paintings from the IDOLS, DEMONS and SAINTS series, references John Wellington’s travels to Asia.  The stuffed toys, burning on top of the Great Wall of China, are based on a character created by the Japanese artist Takashi Murakami.  Other paintings from this series may be seen at http://johnwellington.com/demons.htm

[**] John Wellington – Studio Visit (6:51 minutes)
New York Academy of Art © 2013

 

  

——–

[1] John's previous contribution: "12 August – the day Jean-Michel Basquiat died 27 years ago at the age of 27"

[2] The Archangel, in German.

Our linguist of the month was chosen following a chance encounter I had with him on a recent visit to Barcelona. Àlvaro works as a tour guide at Gran Teatre del Liceu (Opera House of Barcelona), which is situated on the Rambla, and has served as an arts center and one of the cultural landmarks of the city since 1847. The Opera House provides excellent tours of its magnificent buildings for groups and individuals, in Catalan, Spanish, English and French. When I went with my wife to the Opera House to book a tour, I was greeted by Alvaro, and I was immediately impressed with the high standard of his spoken English. In conversation with him, I learned about his love of languages, developed at an early age, and his impressive CV, which includes a stint of study at the Université de Lyon 2.

Although only 21 years old, Alvaro Mira has acquired a solid knowledge of Spanish, English and French (in addition to his mother-tongue, Catalan) and I predict a very successful career for him in some field of language.

Jonathan G.

J.G.:  Where were you born and which language did you speak at home.

A.M.: I was born in Barcelona and spoke Catalan to my parents and Spanish to my grandparents and great aunt.

J.G.:  At what age was your first exposure to another language?

A.M.: At the age of 3 we were taught some basic English vocabulary at school, but it was only at the age of 12 that serious instruction was provided, and I complemented my English studies with private lessons.

J.G.: What motivated you to study English so seriously at that age?

A.M.: Initially my strong interest in English was triggered by the fact that I was a fan of Bruno Mars, Joe Jonas and other American artists, but after I outgrew that stage, my love of English remained.

J.G.:  Were you able to practice your English outside of Spain?

A.M.: Yes, after hosting a Swedish student in Barcelona, I travelled to Forsheda, Sweden in 2013 and again in 2014, where I was a guest student for more than a week each time. My common language with my Swedish guest and then with my Swedish hosts was English. Between the two visits I gained a First Certificate in English from the University of Cambridge. I did two English immersion stints in California with Cultural Homestay International. That involved taking classes in the mornings and engaging in social activities in the afternoons. Also, I got to speak English with the American host family I was living with. It is so much easier to learn a language when you are having fun. Later I tutored students aged 12-18 in English.

J.G.:  How did you acquire your fluency in French?

A.M.: I found French to be relatively easy when I studied it in high school. This was partly due to the common roots of Catalan and French, which make French closer to Catalan in some respects than French is to Spanish. But to build on my basic knowledge, I was applied for and was awarded an Erasmus Scholarship to study French-Spanish translation and Grammaire contrastive pour hispanophones.  I am currently studying English and French Translation and Interpreting.

J.G.:  What stage have you reached in your studies and what do you have planned?

A.M.: Since 2015 I have been pursuing a Bachelor’s Degree in Translation and Interpreting in English and French at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona. Once I obtain the degree, I plan to do a Masters, but I have not yet decided in exactly which field. I find legal translation and multimedia translation particularly interesting, although interpreting is something I am very comfortable doing too.

J.G.:  What do you think of Machine Translation?

A.M.: I do not believe that it will ever replace humans, given the subtleties and nuances of each language and the need to bridge them. It is true that from the point of view of a translator, Machine Translation may be seen as a work tool. However, it should never be considered as the only means for translation.

J.G.:  In a recent edition of The Economist, there is an article on Catalonia, which ends with the words: “What is clearer is that Catalan society remains split down the middle.” Do you believe that this situation has a language component to it? Would the situation be worse if Catalan did not serve as a unifying force between both camps of Catalans?

A.M.: Recent studies have proven that those who have Catalan as a mother tongue have a greater propensity to seek independence from Spain than those who do not have Catalan as a mother tongue. As far as I am concerned, I would like to see the Catalan language as a tool for everyone, not just for a few.  I think everyone should be able to use both languages irrespective of their origin or political orientation.

.

L'auteur : Joe Lurie Creative Consulting and Coaching Across Cultures, Communicating across Cultures

PerceptionAndDeception.com  CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform (May 8, 2015)

reviewed by : Donna Scott, Los Angeles

One of the pleasures of reading literature is the discovery of how much alike we humans are in our universal needs, desires and fears; consider the writer's mantra: the more specific you make it, the more universal it is. However, messages from the news and social media, TV and movies seem to belie such shared universality. Citizens of a world tied together in a global economy, across a planet whose borders are disappearing, seem to be locked in a death-grip of cultural identity crises that doesn't seem to be loosening anytime soon.

Arguably, no education is complete without the learning of cross-cultural communication skills. The business of cross-cultural studies does indeed exist, fulfilling the necessity for understanding the niceties of cultural differences as nuanced as the focus of one's eyes during a conversation. Joe Lurie is a cross-cultural trainer who has spent decades studying, training, speaking and observing these intricacies. He serves as Director Emeritus of the University of California, Berkeley's International House, is a former Peace Corps volunteer in Kenya, where he says it all began for him, and has directed programs in France, Kenya, and Ghana for the School for International Training.

He has written an aptly titled book: Perception and Deception, A Mind Opening Journey Across Cultures. A slim book of just six chapters, it is crammed with anecdotes and proverbs to prove his point that "seeing can often be deceiving," and "that by relying on one's experiences and filters, a perception can often be a deception."

In his first chapter, Lurie goes back to his first immersion in the culture of Kenyans during his beginning days as a volunteer of with the Peace Corps. After hosting dinner at his house for three African friends, he was perplexed that not only did they not thank him after an evening of food and lively conversation, but they also didn't reciprocate his hospitality. He later discovered that Kenyans' doors are always open and invitations weren't considered necessary. Joe also learned he was mistaken in asking if they would like something to eat or drink (always declined by the guest), only to discover Kenyan guests never wanted to appear greedy, so food and drink should automatically be served by the host.

A young African would address even a newly introduced female elder as grandma out of respect. If a teenager in this youth obsessed Western culture presumed to call a strange older woman grandma, he would likely be met with indignation for daring such a put-down.

The University of California, Berkeley's International House, a residential and program center for students from around the world, promoting intercultural experiences and leadership skills, is the setting for many of Lurie's anecdotes. Their alumni include ambassadors, political leaders, royal families, Nobel Laureates and UN staff and officials.

For the past 85 years many young people were given their first exposure to people not only outside their own cultures, but also beyond the barrier of their socio-economic classes. A Mexican student whose father swept floors in a shoe factory had never before mingled with people rich enough to discuss ski trips to Switzerland and beach houses; Turkish and Armenian students socialized, a shocked student from Hong Kong had his first encounter with an African-American from Detroit when they were assigned as roommates; Asian students ate together in the brightly lit section of the dining room and not the more softly lit area, not, as it was later discovered, because they didn't want to mix, but because they considered seeing their food as an important part of enjoying a meal.

Food plays a major role in emphasizing cultural differences and biases: A physicist from Shanghai was dismayed that turkey was being served, claiming that it was an animal kept in zoos; two women from Kuwait were upset because there was a dog under the adjoining table in the dining room because for many Muslims dogs are unclean and not welcome inside the house.

The section of the book that Lurie devotes to culture through the prism of language slows down enough so that one can pause and absorb the power of the role it plays. The amount of violence in the US media and the ease of purchasing guns is shocking to many foreigners. "With only 5% of the world's population, US Americans now possess about 50% of the world's guns," he says.

He examines how US history with guns and violence has permeated their everyday language in ways often taken for granted. Most speakers are unaware when they say they value the "straight shooter," are wary of those who "shoot their mouths off," caution colleagues to avoid "shooting themselves in the foot," and counsel not to "shoot the messenger." Friends should "shoot us an email," give it "your best shot," "stick to your guns," and "do a bang up job."

As a contrast, the importance of food in the French culture is reflected in the language: Francois Hollande has been called "fragile strawberry," a "wobbly flan," a "marshmallow" by his opponents. C'est pas la fin des haricots (it's not the end of the string beans) is the French way of saying, "it's not the end of the world." A nice person in French is c'est une crème (it's cream). Lurie's buffet of wide offerings using the full array of fruits, vegetables, meat, dairy drives home how infused a culture's language is with what it values.

If, like me, you find yourself growing impatient for him to address today's far-reaching threats facing cultures slamming up against one another, you will be pleased with Chapter Five's Minefields and Mind-Openers in the News. It begins with common marketplace mistranslations in world-wide products to demonstrate the linguistic challenges that face global products. The launch of a British company's Bundh curry sauce means "ass" in Punjabi; Microsoft's Bing search engine sounds like "illness" in Mandarin Chinese, but can also mean "pancake;" Honda's Fitta car means "female genitalia" in Swedish, while Ford's Pinto translates to "small penis" in Brazilian Portuguese slang.

From there forward, this chapter covers serious diplomatic cultural issues caused by cultural misunderstandings; faux-pas are made by President Obama, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, as well as diplomats around the world, even while those people have at their fingertips, experts to coach them in these areas. Tragically, a few Afghani Army soldiers serving with NATO troops killed more than 50 Western soldiers in 2012, in part due to the lack of cultural knowledge that created distrust; brochures in their language became available to help understand troubling Western behaviors.

The time Lurie devotes to the kinds of cultural differences posing an existential threat to our world is well-spent. Here, Joe Lurie's illustrations are mirrored in today's tragic headlines, and we can only nod with sad recognition. It's only in retrospect that I consider that perhaps it was wise of him to first spend so much time on the micro, often amusing cross-cultural differences, so we can better appreciate how small gradations of ignorance left unattended can mutate into catastrophic proportions.

 

By the same author: Bicycling in the Yogurt: The French Fixation

EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW

In March, Grant Hamilton,  translator, author of Les trucs d'anglais qu'on a oublié de vous enseigner and regular collaborator with Le Mot juste en anglais, spoke with David Crystal, one of the world’s most eminent English-language linguists [*]. Below is a shortened transcript of their conversation.

 

David Crystal The Interviewee

Grant Hamilton The Interviewer

 

As the author, coauthor, or editor of over 120 books, could you tell us how you go about choosing your subjects? 

 

The vast majority come up in a conversation like this, actually. A publisher or someone at a conference will say, is there a book on such or such a topic? And you end up writing one. The big encyclopedias were written precisely because somebody said, have you come across a book in which language is presented with pictures? And once you start thinking about it, it’s a sexy idea, and that’s how the encyclopedia came about. The reason why they are so many things like this waiting to be written is because language is always changing. Whatever English and French were like yesterday, they are different today and they will be different tomorrow. There is always a demand to keep pace.

Very daunting, though, to take a subject like English grammar, as you did in "Making Sense : The Glamorous Story of English Grammar", which I reviewed on this blog,  and write about it. You must be very focused, or very organized, or have a huge team of researchers helping you.

 

Oh no, I never use researchers or assistants. I’m not a good collaborator. I used to, years and years and years ago, but it proved increasingly difficult simply because people’s timetables don’t match easily. Sometimes it’s much quicker just to sit down and write rather than do it jointly.

Like many linguists, I collect things—a usage, a spelling, a punctuation, anything. You keep notes all the times. I always have a drawer full of stuff … Internet headlines, newspaper headlines, articles, blog posts… You try and write something that hasn’t been done before. In the grammar book case, as you noticed, the distinctiveness is bringing together the language acquisition dimension to grammar, as well the descriptive side (what is grammar like?) and the explanatory side (how did the study of grammar develop?). That was the concept: bring together those three domains, which are normally kept separate.

And it made the book all the harder to write because you’re addressing several audiences, really.

 

 

Yes, and then it becomes an interesting literary exercise: how to present the material in such a way that you can keep these different interests separate and yet make the whole topic accessible. Every book, I think, has got to have a literary dimension to it. That’s the difference between being just a scholar and being a writer and a scholar.

  

 What in your opinion is the border between acceptable use of language and unacceptable use of language?

 

 

That’s what linguistics is: it tries to define that borderline between acceptability and unacceptability.

There are cases where something is completely unacceptable. Nobody in the English-speaking world puts the definite article after the noun and says “cat the,” whereas in a language like Romanian that is perfectly acceptable. Then there are cases—never very many, only about two or three percent of usage—where you have a debate over whether something is acceptable. Linguists spend a fair amount of time presenting and discussing these fuzzy cases.

Where the prescriptivists [1] go horribly wrong is that they think the only issues worth talking about are these fuzzy issues. There are far more important issues in relation to grammar, or for that matter pronunciation.

What would you say to a translator about controversial grammatical usage? Should somebody translating French into English use the singular “their” or “they”? Do they start using this at a different point from writers?

The reason why this is an issue is because usage has begun to change. It’s tricky to decide at which point that usage is not going to raise hackles anymore. When I’m writing scripts for the radio, for instance, I make sure not to put in anything that can raise the hackles of slightly older listeners. For instance, I avoid split infinitives. Not because I think they are wrong, but simply because I don’t want to get piles of letters from people saying, “Oh, you used a split infinitive!” and forgetting what I was talking about. The thing about “they” is that we’re in the middle of a process of acceptance, but only about thirty percent into it.

I have said on Twitter that translators should be late adopters of grammatical change.

 

 

That’s very wise. One should be conservative in these matters. Those who are avant-garde will find you slightly old-fashioned, but they’re not going to complain, whereas older people may be upset. I think the point about “they” and “their” is that the same thing happened to English in the Middle Ages with the second person pronoun. Like French, where there was “tu” and “vous,” and “vous” was plural but gradually came to be used as a singular pronoun of respect, English had “thou” and “you,” and “you” began to be used for the singular. In Shakespeare for instance, whenever anybody switches from thou to you, it’s exactly the same as when somebody switches between vous and tu in French. At the time of the change, probably, people worried about it, but nobody would anymore. One day “they” for singular and “they” for plural will be just as normal as “you” for singular and “you” for plural.

Do you have the impression that English is changing faster than before?

 

 

Speed of change is difficult to monitor because the records of the past are not as clear as they might be, and change doesn’t happen in a steady, continuous movement. It has peaks and troughs. But we are now beginning to get a handle on change thanks to the arrival of very big corpora of usage, some of which are now historical in origin. For certain types of grammatical constructions, there is a suggestion of a speeding-up. For example, the use of the present continuous, rather than the present simple, “I’m going” versus “I go.” These days you can say quite happily, “I’m having a meeting next week,” whereas thirty years ago it would have been “I have a meeting next week.” Of course the classic case is the McDonald’s slogan “I’m loving it,” which thirty years ago would have been “I love it.”

Are you familiar with Quebec’s language laws?

 

 

 

Yes I am indeed.

 

 

 

What do you think about trying to redress the power balance between two languages the way this law seeks to do?

 
We’re talking identity now, not intelligibility. When you go around the language world, you’ll find lots of parallel examples. There are two forces driving language: the need for intelligibility and the need for identity. And they can be in conflict. The more a country becomes culturally heterogeneous, the more the language and its dialects become absolutely center stage. It’s very naïve of a country not to grasp this nettle, recognize it, have a minister for languages, or something of that kind. We don’t have one in Britain, and the problems are becoming increasingly noticeable as we become more multicultural.

So language laws are not good or bad, they just exist?

 

 

That’s exactly right. It’s very difficult to extrapolate from one country to another, because situations are so different.

 

 

I have noticed what seems to me an adolescent accent in Quebec French. Do you know of any such cases?

 

 

Adolescent speech is a somewhat neglected area of language acquisition studies. Adolescence is an age when kids are struggling to establish their identity in relation to their peer group and where their accent is therefore going to modulate, quite noticeably and quite fast sometimes, in relation to what they perceive to be the norms of the peer group and what’s desirable and undesirable. This has been clearly noticed in East London, for instance, where adolescents are meeting up and mixing with large numbers of immigrants, and adopting the rhythm of their accents. And at an older level, it might die away a bit, but at adolescent age it’s there.

I have heard you mention how English speakers tend to be monolingual, but that the default around the world is to be multilingual. Do you think this has impoverished the culture of English-speaking people?

 

In a way, although impoverishment is only relevant if lack of ability impinges on your well-being or quality of life. When English speakers travel, they don’t feel impoverished—everybody speaks English, don’t they? So why should they learn another language? And conversely, we don’t have many immigrants in Britain who haven’t learned English. So what’s the point?

But things are changing. The demand for foreign languages is increasing. And after Brexit, it’s probably going to be even greater. So increasingly I hear people saying things like, “I wish I knew more languages.”

 

I was not thinking about material impoverishment, but more the failure to benefit from the cognitive aspects of speaking several languages.

 

When people start saying they should learn a foreign language, they will be motivated initially about earning extra money or having a better quality of life. Eventually issues of identity will arise, and issues of cognitive growth will arise, but they tend to be later rather than earlier in my experience.

We’ve noticed in worldwide surveys with the arrival of Trump that that the reputation and aura of the United States have taken a hit. Do you think this could have an impact on the prestige of the English language?

 

Not anymore. Once upon a time maybe, when the total number of speakers in the world was relatively low and the proportion in America was relatively high. But things have changed. There are now 2.3 billion speakers of English in the world, some 230 million of them in the United States. There are more in India, and will probably soon be more in China. Numbers count in the study of language. Yes, America may have lost some of its shine, but look what’s happening in other parts of the world.

The other point I would make here is that Trump, from a language point of view—nothing to do with politics—has been rather unfairly pilloried for the nature of his oratory. People compare him with Obama and others and say, Trump isn’t an orator. But Trump has a political speaking style that is closer to everyday conversation than any previous politician has ever dared to do. And the result has been to win him votes. So although America might lose out in terms of what he’s saying, I don’t think English is going to lose out in terms of the way he is saying it.

Do you have an opinion about “Globish,” or simplified English for non-native speakers?

 

 

There have always been attempts to simplify English, and Globish is one. But simplification really has gone too far. Imagine a business meeting which tried to restrict itself to a Globish vocabulary. You wouldn’t get very far.

 

English speakers wouldn’t know which words to use and which words to avoid.

 

 

There is an interesting point here: people tend to underestimate the size of their vocabulary. Try having a French speaker who says he has a poor command of English go through a selection of pages from a dictionary and tick the words he knows, then add them up and multiply by the number of pages in the dictionary. You'll be amazed at the total. He could actually know 10,000 words. People know more English than they think.

 

I am interested to hear what you think is the future of Welsh.

 

 

Welsh is the success story of the twentieth century as far as minority and endangered languages are concerned. There was a hugely effective activist movement in the 1960s and 70s. It generated a Welsh television channel, and two Welsh language acts, which helped to protect the language and give it a public presence in a way that it didn’t have before. So there has been a steady increase in the knowledge and use of Welsh. Certainly around here where I live, sixty percent of the population can speak Welsh.

 

Is that success in your view?

 

 

 

Yes, absolutely, compared with a few decades ago.

 

 

 

What is the role of Welsh in daily life? Is it the language that people speak at work?

 

In some domains. You cannot get a job with the local government authority, for example, unless you either speak Welsh or are prepared to learn it. In private business, of course, it’s still optional. And so you will hear it quite routinely spoken, though not enough to satisfy the real keen supporters.

Do you have any advice for someone seeking to learn English?

 

 

The more one can encounter the language in its various forms—online, in mobile form, and so on—the better. The future of a language and the future of a society which finds that language important are in the hands of the younger generation. So I think the more one can use the Internet and all its facilities, the better really.

 

 

[*] Professor Crystal, in addition to being a prolific and prodigious author of books on the English language,  is also extremely active as a  lecturer and broadcaster. He was born in Ireland, grew up in Wales and pursued his academic studies in England. He joined academic life as a lecturer in linguistics, first at Bangor, Wales and then at Reading, England. He has become known chiefly for his research work in English language studies, in such fields as intonation and stylistics, and in the application of linguistics to religious, educational and clinical contexts, notably in the development of a range of linguistic profiling techniques for diagnostic and therapeutic purposes. Many of his books target a wider audience of lay people.Crystal is Honorary Professor of Linguistics at the University of Wales, Bangor.

In addition to the books written in his own name,  he is well known for his two encyclopedias for Cambridge University Press, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language and The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language. Recent books (in addition to Making Sense: the Glamorous Story of English Grammar (2017), reviewed here) include The Story of Be: a Verb's–eye View of the English Language (2017),  The Oxford Dictionary of Original Shakespearean Pronunciation (2016), The Oxford Illustrated Shakespeare Dictionary (2015, with Ben Crystal), The Disappearing Dictionary: a treasury of lost English dialect words (2015), and Making a Point: the Pernickety Story of English Punctuation (2015).  Other co-authored books include Words on Words (2000, a dictionary of language quotations compiled with his wife and business-partner, Hilary), Wordsmiths and Warriors: the English-Language Tourist's Guide to Britain (2013, with Hilary), and Shakespeare’s Words (2002) and The Shakespeare Miscellany (2005), the last two in collaboration with his son Ben. 

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[1] Prescriptivism – Oxford Dictionaries: "(Linguistics) Attempting to impose rules of correct usage on the users of a language, e.g.‘a prescriptive grammar book’. Often contrasted with descriptive.

 

    

 

 

 

We welcome our “Linguist of the Month”, Andrew Leigh, a British translator specializing in legal and commercial translations from Spanish and from French into English. Andrew owns Allegro Legal Translations, based in Sheffield, south Yorkshire. Our faithful correspondent, Cynthia Hazelton, like Andrew, holds a law degree and works as a professional legal translator. Cindy also teaches French-English legal translation at Kent State University. The interview was conducted between Cleveland, Ohio, USA and Sheffield, England.

Andrew Leigh, LL.B.	Cynthia Hazelton, D. Jur.
Sheffield (population 550,000)	Cleveland (population 400,000)

Cynthia Hazelton : Please tell our readers the trajectory of your career as a translator.

Andrew Leigh : I suppose I took a typical path to a translation career.  I was good at languages in secondary school and took my first degree in languages at the University of Salford.  I continued my education at the University of Westminster in London where I earned an M.A. in Translation in 1999. Immediately after graduation, I found a job as an in-house translator at an agency in London.  I worked there for three years.  It was a wonderful way to get started in translation.  I worked on all types of translations, and my senior colleagues edited my work. I learned by actually doing translations in a very supportive atmosphere.  At that time, I wasn’t specializing in any one field.  I did medical, technical, accounting and business translations.  I decided that it would be best to specialize in one field, and I enjoyed the law very much.  That’s when I started to take more legal work.

In 2003 I moved to Sheffield and set myself up as a freelance legal translator.  I soon realized that to be a good legal translator, I needed some background in law.  I translated during the day and went to law school at night for 5 years.  We had two children during this time, so my life was very busy.

When I received my law degree, I established my business as Allegro Legal Translations.

I work for private individuals, corporations, law firms and translation agencies.  I enjoy working for different types of clients.

C.H.: Because you specialize in legal translations (from French to English and from Spanish to English), this puts you in the field of “jurilinguistics."  This means that you have to bridge two languages and two legal systems at the same time. You have to convey in the target text, for example, a concept in French law which may be foreign to your British or American client. How do you prepare yourself to translate between the Civil and Common Law systems?

A.L.: Well, this is what I do every day.  This is where having a law degree comes into play.  Having a solid understanding of both the Civil and Common law systems gives me an appreciation of both systems.  For example, when I have to translate the name of a court, such as the Conseil des Prud’hommes, which has no equivalent in Common Law, I understand how to explain it in English.

C.H.: Can you give us an example of a legal concept that exists in one system but not in the other?

A.L.: The Common Law concept of « trust » doesn’t exist in Civil Law.   And the Civil Law concept of “réserve héreditaire” doesn’t exist in Common Law.   Here you have to ask yourself who is the client.  If this translation is for a private client, I will have to expand on the translation and explain the concept.  If it’s for a lawyer, particularly one who deals with French law, I can leave the term in French or translate it, but without explanation.

C.H.: Much has been written and spoken about Machine Translation. The NY Times and the Economist have recently carried articles about the great progress that Google has made in this field. Have you already felt the effects of MT in your business?

A.L.: No, I haven’t experienced any change in my business.  The volume has not changed and I’m still translating the same kind of documents.  I haven’t been asked to do post-editing of a MT document.

 

C.H.: Do you think human translators will become redundant?

A.L.: The role of human translators will probably change, but I don’t think we will ever become redundant.  There will always be a need for a human translator, somewhere along in the translation process.  As an example, I was translating a document recently and arrived at a word in the source text that made no sense in the context, even though it was a correct word in the source language.  I finally realized that it had been misspelled.  The properly-spelled word made perfect sense.  A machine couldn’t have done that.  It required a human translator to catch the error.

I recently saw a quote about this topic:  “Machine translation will only be a threat to people who translate like machines.“

C.H.: How will Brexit, once it has taken place, affect the tendency of Brits to work and live abroad, and will it have an effect the motivation of the younger generation to study European languages?

A.L.: Translators are generally broad-minded.  A recent survey of British translators showed that around 95% of them favored staying in the EU. I’m sure Brexit will result in a loss of opportunities.  I took part in the Erasmus program, and studied in France and Spain.  Brexit will affect the freedom of movement to live and work in another country.  Translators will have to apply for visas and work permits.   There will be barriers to integration.

In the UK, it’s no longer compulsory to study a foreign language throughout high school.  I’m afraid that Brexit will increase the number of students who never learn another language.

C.H.: Here in the USA, tremendous resources are devoted to providing translating and interpreting services at the local, State and Federal level. For example, the written driving texts are available in some States in a variety of languages.

Do you believe that such a policy serves or harms the immigrants who need to acquire a good command of English in their adopted countries, such as the UK and the USA?

A.L.: In the U.K., many governmental administrative documents are translated into ethnic minority languages, such as Urdu, Pashtun and Arabic, but they are not often translated into the major European languages like French, Spanish, Italian, etc. In Wales, documents like election ballots are printed in both Welsh and English. I believe that all citizens have the right to access public services in a language that they can understand.

Language is just one part of the integration conundrum.  True integration also requires social, cultural, educational and economic equality of opportunity.

C.H.:We live in a world where automation is taking away jobs in many fields. You have done some webinars.  Do you foresee the webinar or the video conference as reducing the staff required by a university to replace conventional lectures or even international conferences?

A.L.: The webinars I’ve given have involved law or the business of translation. Here in the UK, the Institute of Translation and Interpreting runs a very successful online course called  Setting up as a Freelance Translator, which covers 8 modules such as Breaking the No Experience Barrier, Using Social Media, Writing a Business Plan and Invoicing.  My module is Getting Paid on Time.

I have also given webinars for eCPD Webinars. My most recent ones were on the subject of EU law.

Webinars allow people from all over the world to log on and learn new things.  I don’t see webinars replacing universities or international conferences, though.

C.H.: What is your greatest challenge in legal translation?

A.L.: I never know what‘s coming next, what I will be translating from one job to the next.  This makes my job interesting.  To be a good translator, you have to have intellectual curiosity because you’ll be doing a lot of research. Translation requires more than just putting words down on paper.  It requires having a wide breadth of knowledge about the topic.

C.H.: Is there anything else you would like to add?

A.L.: It’s very important to keep working on your core translation skills.  Success in translation comes more from one’s abilities than from having a flashy website or a strong presence on social media. 

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[1] Les Traditions Juridiques du Droit Civil et de la Common Law

 EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW

Dr. Geraldine Brodie – l'interviewer	Dr. David Bellos – l'interviewee
University College London	University of Princeton

 

David Bellos is the Meredith Howland Pyne Professor of French and Comparative Literature  and Director of the Program in Translation and Intercultural Communication at Princeton University. He is the author of Romain Gary: A Tall Story (published by Vintage Digital, 2010), and Georges Perec: A Life in Words (published by David R. Godine, 1993) (Prix Goncourt for biography), amongst other books, and the translator of Chronicle in Stone: A Novel by Ismael Kadare (Arcade Publishing, 2011), amongst other translations.

Geraldine Brodie, our Linguist of the Month of August 2016 and since then a regular contributor to this blog is Senior Lecturer in Translation Theory and Theatre Translation in the Centre for Multidisciplinary and Intercultural Inquiry, where she convenes the MA in Translation Theory and Practice. *

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Your career has progressed from obtaining an Oxford French degree to becoming Professor of French and Comparative Literature and Director of the Program in Translation and Intercultural Communication at Princeton. University, one of the leading universities in the USA.  How has your study of French literature and language informed your interest in translation?

 

In my youth I was a scholar of nineteenth-century French literature, with a special interest in Balzac and in the book market of the Romantic era.  Obviously, as a university teacher of French, I taught translation every week, but I never thought of myself as being a translator—which is just as well, since I now realize how specific the discipline of pedagogic translation really is. But one day, a colleague put in my hand a slightly dog-eared paperback copy of Georges Perec’s La Vie : mode d’emploi, saying, he couldn’t finish this, but I would probably like it. And indeed I did! It was a revelation. It struck me as a novel that happened to have been written in French but could just as well have been in English, or any language. I wanted to share it. More than that: I wanted to write it! By a series of adventures and misadventures, I did eventually get the chance to do just that. It was a lucky turn of events. La Vie mode d’emploi is not quite as difficult as it looks (much of it echoes the English tradition of the comic novel), but it is a pretty tough assignment (and a very long one) all the same. I think I learned to translate by translating that work. I learned a huge amount about writing in English, and also about the nature of French. The two languages are very close and have long borrowed from each other, but the task of creating Life: A User’s Manual really showed me how different they are in structural terms. To move a work successfully from one to the other takes quite a bit of thought, and if the end product makes it look easy, that’s because the process was very hard. That’s how my so-called career as a translator began: serendipitously. And I do not really think of it as a career. I have always had a day-job. But because Life: A User’s Manual attracted considerable attention, I was asked to translate more Perec, and then all sorts of other things too. Which I did, and still do, but limiting myself to one book a year, since the job that pays the rent has to take priority, after all.

For each book, I do my best to conform to the current ideology of translation, which requires the translator to find an English “voice” for each foreign author and to submit his or her own writing to that imagined identity and style. In retrospect, however, I realise that I write the way I write and that irrespective of my effort to find the right tone for Simenon or Berr or Fournel or Kadare, there must be stylistic commonalities between all the books I have written under my own name and all those I have written as translations. Perhaps one day some assiduous analyst will be able to nail down what it is that makes a translation by me more like another translation by me than like a translation of the same author by another hand. I can’t see what those features are, because they are natural to me, but I strongly suspect they exist.

What I like about translating is that it gives me a chance to bring things that I like to an audience beyond the academy. Luck also plays a role—in the titles that are brought to my attention, and in the respectful relations I have with a number of publishers who understand my taste. Also, because I do have that day job, I only translate books I like, and I know that is a rare and in a sense quite outrageous privilege to have as a translator. But I also think that because translating demands scholarship, on the one hand, and creativity, on the other, it is one of the most rewarding things that a language specialist can do.

Your publications list is hugely varied, with a large number of translations to your name. How do you see the mix between academic literature, translations and more publications of more general interest among your work?

 

You say my publications are varied, and I find that flattering, because I would like to believe that, like my hero Georges Perec, I never write the same book twice. Well, I would like to believe it, but it is not entirely true. Three of my books belong to the genre of biography (the lives of Perec, Tati, and Gary) calling on many of the same skills and methods, and they are located in the same cultural, geographic and chronological space—all my subjects are more or less un-French creators working in Paris between 1945 and 1982. 

Three of my other books are books about books (Cousine Bette, Père Goriot, and Les Misérables) and similarly exploit the same broad field of expertise and the same general methods of approach. The outlier is Is That a Fish in Your Ear? —but that’s about translation, something I’ve been doing for thirty years, and that I’ve been teaching for even longer than that. If I had the knowledge and the cheek, I’d like to be much more varied than that!

Translation and the Meaning of Everything	Une histoire fabuleuse de la traduction

Is That A Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything was described by Susan Harris in The Quarterly Conversation (5 December 2011) as ‘that marvelous rarity, a book by a specialist that can be enjoyed by general readers’. What inspired you to write this book?

 

I never intended to write a book about translation. In 2007 I was asked to become the director of a new undergraduate program at Princeton that aimed to educate our students about the nature and stakes of translation (not to train translators—Princeton doesn’t do vocational training of any kind). So I devised a new course that introduced some of the philosophical, linguistic, historical and social issues related to the phenomenon of translation. It was a whole new education for me! In the course of devising and teaching the course I became increasingly irritated by the numerous inherited clichés that many others have railed against before me, and I began to write a few little squibs about the silly things people carry on saying (“translation is no substitute for the original”, les belles infidèles, traduttore traditore, and so on). My son, who is a much more celebrated writer than I am, took a look and told me to carry on. So I did. Especially because on the first day of a semester of study leave I slipped on a patch of ice and broke my ankle, so I had three months stuck indoors in a plaster cast. What else could I do but write a book? I had no idea who might publish such a set of essays, so I contacted a literary agent, and she too urged me to carry on and to turn it into a book, subject to various adjustments she thought necessary. In due course, she found a publisher for me, and my editor at Penguin (and then the American editor at FSG) made all kinds of smart suggestions for re-ordering the material and bringing the work to completion. So although the book is undoubtedly mine, it is also the product of my students, my agent and my brilliant editors. I really enjoyed the back and forth, and the discovery of what the book really had to say through argument and discussion. I know a lot of people grumble about publishers and agents and editors but I must say I have found wisdom and support in those quarters. They are not writers, but they do know what writing is.

 

As a translation expert, what are your thoughts on the translations of Is That A Fish in Your Ear? into various languages. Were you involved in the translation process?

 

Since I argue very strongly that everything can be translated—I have an almost allergic reaction to people who declare things to be untranslatable, even when translating books absurdly entitled “Dictionary of Untranslatables”—I was overjoyed when foreign publishers bought the rights to Is That A Fish in Your Ear?  It’s a book that can only be proved right by its own translation! Flammarion put me in touch with Daniel Loayza, who turned out to be the most perfect French translator imaginable. He’s a learned classicist with long experience in translating for the theatre and a tremendous sense of fun. He translated, I commented, and together we found solutions to the thorniest problems I had created, in correspondence but also in brainstorming sessions in Paris and in Princeton. The title was altered to Le Poisson et le bananier , because the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which inspired the English title, (Is That a Fish in Your Ear?….) is not very well known in France. [1] (It is not a problem in German, since Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, is well known there—in fact, the German title is a direct quotation.) So for France we replaced it with an internal reference to the first translation of the Gospel of Matthew into Malay, where the parable of the fig tree is transformed into a banana in what is perhaps the earliest example of cultural substitution as a translation technique. The word fish remains in Le Poisson et le bananier, but supported by two additional pages explaining the story of the Babel Fish, with a picture to show it too.  The French translation appeared just a few weeks after the English original, so it was available to the Spanish translator as a model of adaptation; he borrowed some of Daniel Loayza’s ideas but also added informational paragraphs about the specific history of Bible translation in Spain, which is different from the English story. The German translation changes, adds and subtracts very little, partly because German is (perhaps surprisingly) quite close to English in translation culture. As for the Asian translations, I’m afraid I don’t have the equipment to get involved. I just look at the Korean on my bookshelf and admire.

What is your next project going to be?

 

 

 

 My next project? I’ll tell you when it’s done! This semester I am teaching a new course on the history and culture of copyright (COM 332, Who Owns This Sentence?), in partnership with an Intellectual Property lawyer. It’s a complicated subject, also fascinating and great fun—and also, I believe, quite fundamental to the world in which we now live. But I don’t yet know if it will grow into a book very soon, or at all. Am I not allowed to take a break?

 

 

 [1] The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is the first of five books in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy comedy science fiction "trilogy" by Douglas Adams. The novel is an adaptation of the first four parts of Adams' radio series of the same name. The novel was first published in London on 12 October 1979.

 

* Geraldine devised and co-convened the Translation in History Lecture Series and the Theatre Translation Forum, and was a co-editor of the online journal New Voices in Translation Studies from 2012 to 2015.

Geraldine's research focuses on theatre translation practices in contemporary London, including the collaborative role of the translator in performance and the intermediality and interlinearity of surtitles.She is a frequent presenter on these topics, in the UK and internationally, and her work has been published in a variety of publications. Geraldine is a member of the Panel of Associates of ARTIS, a new research training initiative in the broad area of translation and interpreting studies.

Geraldine has an MA in Comparative Literature from University College London and read English as an undergraduate at Brasenose College, Oxford where she specialised in Linguistics, Old and Middle English and Old French. She has a Diploma de Español como Lengua Extranjera from the Instituto Cervantes. Geraldine's research interests include the multiple voices of translation; direct, indirect and literal theatre translation; adaptation and version; the intermediality of surtitles; and ethics in translation. She is a Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales and a member of the Chartered Institute of Taxation. Geraldine's first monograph, The Translator on Stage, will be published by Bloomsbury in 2017.

 

Additional reading:

The Novel of the Century: The Extraordinary Adventure of Les Misérables