by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village The work of a translator often involves much more than rendering a text from one language to another. Translators can find themselves acting as literary scouts, agents and publicists. Many spend time looking out for new authors and books and ... Read more >
by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village The book “Dancing on ropes. Translators at the balance of history”, written by Anna Aslanyan, is based on the author’s experience as a Russian-English translator and service interpreter. Aslanyan grew up in Moscow and lives in London. She writes for ... Read more >
by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Laura Marris, a well-known American writer and translator, began working on a new English translation of the novel “The Plague”, by Nobel Prize winner Albert Camus, in September 2019, just months before the COVID-19 pandemic exploded. Camus’ book is an ... Read more >
by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village The act of translating a text, of making it available to people who can’t read the original language, is a political statement in many different ways: what works are chosen to translate, or not to translate, who should translate, what ... Read more >
by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Like haikus in Japan, Latvia has its own poetic form, dainas, four-line poems that are either sung or recited. The origin of dainas, which have historically been transmitted orally from generation to generation, is still uncertain. The first dainas were ... Read more >
by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village “One of the more unexpected twists of an unprecedented year is that the little-known business of literary translation has become a source of public controversy”. This is how the Los Angeles Times comments the heated debate around the translation of ... Read more >
by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village The term “exophony”, which is the practice of writing in a language that is not one’s own, is quite recent. It was introduced to cultural and literary circles in 2007 by linguists Prof. Dr. Susan Arndt, Dr. Dirk Naguschewski and ... Read more >
by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Daniel Hahn is a writer, editor and translator, as well as founder, in 2017, of the TA First Translation Prize, awarded annually for a debut literary translation and shared equally between writer and translator. In a recent entry for his ... Read more >
by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village A growing movement of language activists, cultural stakeholders, and scholars across the world is seeking new ways to preserve endangered languages and bring dormant ones back to life, through everything from digital dictionaries and apps, to cultural events such as ... Read more >
by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Jennifer Croft is best known for being one of the English translators of Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk. It is thanks to Croft’s English translation of the novel Flights that Tokarczuk made her international breakthrough, first with the International Man Booker ... Read more >
by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Exophony is the practice of writing in a language that is not one's own. Some exophonic authors are bilingual or multilingual from their childhood years while others write in an acquired language. Although the phenomenon is not new the term ... Read more >
by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Hindu scholar and linguist Jeffrey Armstrong has spent the past 10 years translating and “decolonizing” the Bhagavad Gita, one of India's most famous epic poems, written 5.000 (some say 7.000) years ago. His work was published this month with the ... Read more >