Word for Word: The Art of Translation

As the Romantic notions of creativity as inspired, original creation have all but given way to more nuanced ideas of creative recombination or collaboration, our appraisals of translation too have changed. For translation is an art. But unlike the writer, who moves ideas from the mind and experience to the page and to the reader, the translator must bring the work of another from one language, culture, mind, and reader, to one quite new. Much theoretical study has sought to address this generous, often selfless art (for translators are often hidden in the author’s shadow) but in doing so, they often lose sight of its artistry in favor of examining its more functional features, as though those two could be so easily separated. Still widely regarded as a relatively mechanical process, simply, if barely adequately performed by computer programs, many translators today are actively exploring and carving out a broad new range of approaches to translation, asserting the artistic and undeniably human enterprise. This panel – composed of editors, theorists, and active translators, Claudia Daventry, Vanni Bianconi, and Sophie Collins – aims to explore these issues, these ever-shifting boundaries, between theory and the varied practices of translation, between the function and the art.