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P.T. Smith on Québec literature
Reviewer P.T. Smith has a great piece on Québec literature in translation this week over at the Three Percent blog. It’s very, very quotable… “The absence of American literature has been replaced by...
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Faithfulness
It’s always something of a test to guess at what someone might come up with if they tried to translate your translation back into the original language. In this case below, as I near the end of...
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Responsibility
Seth Godin wrote this recently : It’s not your fault … but it might be your responsibility. That’s a fork in the road on the way to becoming a professional. This reminds me a lot of words you hear...
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Rephrasing
This week on Québec Reads, I take a close look at what makes Lazer Lederhendler’s translation of The Lake (Malabourg by Perrine Leblanc) tick. Lederhendler says the following: The original sentence...
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Practice
I’ve spent much of this week worrying. Worrying about which books to translate. What they’ll look like. How I’ll go about translating them. Then I came across this: ‘There are no guarantees. Just...
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Word order
The German language comes with a handy guide for word order: Time, manner, place. In other words, you should write, “Yesterday morning (time), I travelled by bus (manner) to school (place).” French and...
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Accountability
As I (inevitably) fall behind on the translation I’m working on, a big help this time around has been to come up with a translation schedule ahead of time. I always do this, scheduling a certain number...
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Careful
Two things this week: I’m currently spending much of my day translating Bestiaire, the book that made me want to become a literary translator. I don’t think I’ve ever been happier to sit in front of my...
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Spelling
Heart-rending. Heart-wrenching. Heart-stopping. Heartwarming. Sigh. Seriously. Heartwarming is the only one not to be hyphenated, in the Oxford Canadian at least. Is it any wonder I look everything up...
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‘Life in the Court of Matane’ by Eric Dupont (Review)
Tony's Reading List While I have read books by a couple of Canadian writers over the course of my reviewing career, it’s not a country that frequently appears on my virtual travel itinerary, and the...
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